Page 408 – Electric Literature

What Happened to the “Female Byron”?

Posted on March 7, 2019March 25, 2019 by 007595

L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” by Lucasta Miller is a sirenic, ultramodern biography. Miller’s sleuth-scholar storytelling engages an inventive tone to unravel hidden, seismic-secrets of the nineteenth-century London literary landscape. The finessed feat accomplished by Miller is a restoration of Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s prolific oeuvre.

Confession: Fearful of immersing myself into a stodgy classic read written by a London literary critic, I considered passing on this interview. Drained by the holidays and having just published a personal essay, my mind was processing thoughts on the literary marketplace and its thorniness towards trauma’s complexity and content currency. Miller’s response as to why L.E.L.’s story remains relevant changed my mind:

“The commodification of the private self is endemic in our Instagram culture, having been democratized at a cost. The idea that you have to market yourself to survive is something Letitia Landon — who thought “society is a marketplace” — would have recognized. What makes her special is the way in which her work surreptitiously registers the conflicts and traumas that entailed, especially for a woman.”

L.E.L. broke ground for ambitious women writers. Her mastery of linguistic and narrative ambiguity popularized her work and opened it up to interpretation while also turning her into a transatlantic celebrity. Landon wrote in many genres: poetry, novels, reviews, annuals and, had she lived in the 21st century, would have gathered to gab with Lady Gaga, George Saunders and Saeed Jones.

The author and I attempted to talk over the phone but our bad connection prompted Miller to remark in a pristine British accent, “You sound as if you’re talking through a wet towel.” We spoke over email about slut shaming, the risk of female ambition, and the parallels between Taylor Swift and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

Yvonne Conza: Is there a particular conversation that you hope emerges from your book?

Lucasta Miller: I hope that the book will contribute to the conversation about the complex cultural and gendered reasons why women writers have so often disappeared and failed to make it into the canon.

I desire readers to come away with a clearer picture of the “strange pause” between the Romantics and the Victorians, that odd, underexplored gap in the history of English literature that L.E.L. inhabits. In her story you can see before your eyes how the world of Regency rakes and Romantic rebels transitioned into that of Victorian values.

I would also love for readers to see L.E.L. as a contemporary figure in some respects: the woman who wrote “I lived only in others’ breath” and would have understood the social media era. Her story resonates with the #MeToo generation, not just in terms of the sexual politics of workplace affairs or the so-called “casting couch”, but in terms of the slut-shaming to which she was subjected by male peers in the industry. L.E.L.’s story speaks to the ambiguities as much as to the clarities of that debate as she was not a simple victim but a woman trying to pursue her ambition who found that the system she tried to game was more powerful than she was. Above all, I want readers to come away understanding that L.E.L. is an irreducibly ambiguous and slippery figure and to be OK with that.

I hope that the book will contribute to the conversation about the complex cultural and gendered reasons why women writers have so often disappeared and failed to make it into the canon.

YC: Did it concern you that L.E.L. might be seen only as a victim or as ambitious seductress?

LM: Actually, when I first started working on L.E.L., #MeToo had not yet taken off, but I was always aware that her story was going to foreground issues to do with gender, not just in terms of social and economic equality but in terms of the cultural construction of “femininity”. I was always concerned to keep in play her complexity and not to reduce her to a single paradigm, though she herself brilliantly manipulated all her culture’s clichés of femininity, from tragic victim to sassy seductress.

YC: What does your book tell us about the double standards between men and women writers?

LM: There are so many issues here: what women/men write, what women/men read, how gender is treated in the media. Is ambition the desire for success or the fear of failure? When the latter becomes too dominant it can be self-defeating.

There’s certainly less of a double standard in many respects, especially sexually. Gone are the days when a man can sire as many illegitimate offspring as he likes but single mothers are pariahs. (Contextual note: William Jerdan, editor of the Literary Gazette was not only L.E.L.’s mentor, publisher and promoter, but he sired three illegitimate children with her, leaving her vulnerable to press exposure and scandal.)

But as for the literary industry, when I was working as deputy literary editor at a British national newspaper in the 1990s, I used to have to make a conscious effort to make sure we had at least one or two women reviewers on our pages every week (my boss, the literary editor, was a man). In terms of the literary marketplace, it would be interesting to do some research into whether there’s a gender pay gap today — not at the apex in what has increasingly become a winner takes all marketplace (I’m not talking about J.K. Rowling) but at the ordinary level of people making their livings in journalism and publishing both online and in print.

YC: Taylor Swift’s genius as an artist and a savvy marketer shares a platform that reminded me of L.E.L. — in today’s world and back then, talent is not enough. In her desire to achieve success, is an ambitious woman more likely to risk her reputation?

LM: Yes, you can see the parallels quite easily. However, the difference with L.E.L. is that the split between what we now call “high” and “popular” culture had not yet happened so she regarded Keats, Shelley and Byron, who are today enshrined as canonical greats, as her male avatars — with all the complexities that brought for her as a woman, given that the male Romantics, though politically liberal, were far from feminist.

For L.E.L., ambition was a minefield. The constant vein of self-destruction found in her work, symbolized by Sappho’s story, reflects the paradox of her situation: to assert herself in public was to risk her own destruction.

L.E.L.’s subjective experience at the hands of the printed and oral gossip of her day was probably not dissimilar. Because of the nature of culture then and now, a woman’s desire to be noticed and succeeded remains more problematic than it is for men.

YC: How do you explain L.E.L.’s ability to understand, and succeed in, the literary market place of the 19th century?

LM: She was educated in the Regency culture of feminine accomplishments which emphasized people-pleasing, though at the same time she was also a childhood rebel who identified with lone wolf male protagonists such as Robinson Crusoe. In the competitive literary market of the 1820s, in which marketing and audience manipulation were at a premium, feminine wiles arguably worked better than simple male assertions of authority.

L.E.L’s story resonates with the #MeToo generation, not just in terms of the sexual politics of workplace affairs or the so-called “casting couch”, but in terms of the slut-shaming to which she was subjected by male peers in the industry

YC: Is there a writer today that you see as comparable to Letitia Elizabeth Landon? Anne Sexton?

LM: Your comparison with Anne Sexton is interesting. I think ambiguity has often been the space available to women writers who have felt their voices compromised in a male-dominated culture. L.E.L.’s confessionalism is rather different because she is always playing a public role and often speaking through a fictionalized double. When one thinks of L.E.L. one mustn’t just think of her as a poet but as a sort of performer. For her the role of poetess was not dissimilar to that of the actress or diva. Perhaps we should look to modern examples of performers rather than poets to find a comparison. The famous singer dying of a drug overdose — Judy Garland for example — is a feature of modern celebrity culture.

YC: Who are the writers that benefited most from the groundwork laid down by L.E.L. with respect to first person female voice?

LM: Elizabeth Barrett Browning was always fascinated by L.E.L. Her Aurora Leigh (1856) is a narrative poem — a sort of novel in verse — written in the first person voice of a fictionalized female writer. As such it picks up on L.E.L.’s works, for example Erinna, but it also tangentially references aspects of L.E.L.’s life, such as the attic “room of one’s own” and the demands of writing for the market. However, it completely desexualizes the heroine and saves her from the need to write commercially by marrying her off at the end.

On the whole, the female first person voice was not the chosen mode for the best Victorian women writers who came after L.E.L., from Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot to Mary Braddon. When Charlotte Brontë used it in Jane Eyre (1847), in combination with a passionate love story, her morals were called into question.

YC: Did you need to become completely obsessed with L.E.L. to understand her? And, did that ever become an obstacle as you were developing the book? Or, was it the fuel that drove the story?

LM: During the project, I often felt trapped in a hall of mirrors or entangled in a web. The fact that her first biographer slit his throat in 1845 was not a very consoling thought! I was determined to keep going because I wanted to make sense of the so-called “ mystery of L.E.L.” in a way that would satisfy me. So much was covered up after she died — especially to do with her affair with William Jerdan and her secret illegitimate children. The problems, from a research viewpoint, were manifold, including the sheer volume of material. Reading the sources, it often turned out that the absences spoke more loudly than the words. There was almost no line in L.E.L.’s work or her contemporaries’ accounts, which could be fully made sense of “straight” i.e. in a vacuum. Everything required contextualization, because she was so completely of her moment and so embraced being “modern” in Baudelaire’s sense of “the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent”.

All the sources had to be collated and cross-referenced. But even once the basic facts have been established, L.E.L. will always remain slippery. She is so labile that you have to let go of the traditional biographer’s unspoken assumption that the subject has a fixed and consistent core to their personality. Having worked on The Brontë Myth, which charts the sisters’ biographical image through time, I was geared up to take a questioning attitude to the art of biography, and to listen to Virginia Woolf who said “a biography is considered complete if it merely accounts for six or seven selves, when a person may have as many thousand”. When that person — L.E.L. — staked her career on role-play and masquerade you have to question all the more searchingly.

YC: Is there anything comparable today to the Literary Gazette where L.E.L. first published and became a major contributor via her reviews and work as an editor?

LM: The magazine market was different in the 1820s, so there isn’t a direct comparison, partly because the market was not yet segmented into “high” and “popular”/ “commercial” culture in the same way as today. However, in some respects, the boom in print culture of L.E.L.’s era, fueled by technological advances in printing and by a growing consumer base of literate people with disposable income but little experience of being literary consumers, prompted some of the same worries as are now hitting the Facebook generation. In the “puffery” era of the 1820s, publishing was in some respects a cowboy culture, and readers were implicitly regarded by some in the industry as a gullible source of revenue. Today, the issue is data-harvesting for sophisticated “invisible” target marketing. But the notion of the reader/consumer manipulation is nothing new.

L.E.L brilliantly manipulated all her culture’s clichés of femininity, from tragic victim to sassy seductress.

YC: What went into your decision to go to Cape Coast Castle in Ghana where she died? As you mentioned to me: “I couldn’t let L.E.L. go without seeing the place where she died.

LM: I think I went there to find some feeling of closure. I’d been entangled in L.E.L.’s web for so long. The extraordinary thing about her is that her story touches on so many wider historical currents such as the history of the slave trade and colonialism. At every level she’s like a person without boundaries, open to every current, a live wire through whom all the complexities of her era flow.

YC: In the book you wrote about visiting Cape Coast Castle: “Only when the guide takes us into the slave dungeons below ground level is its traumatic history made visible.” Then you continue:

In none of her letters home does Letitia mention the dungeons or the castle’s history as a slave fort. The perpetual swoosh of the ocean waves — pleasant enough for the hour or two I spend there, but inescapable — seems to echo the constant low-level interference of the suppressed. Letitia lived her entire adult life with the stress of the unspoken: “none among us dares to say/What none will choose to hear.

Would you clarify the meaning or symbolism of: “none among us dares to say/What none will choose to hear.”

LM: L.E.L. made damn sure her readers could never fully clarify her meaning! That’s how she tried to hook them and kept them reading. There’s something almost postmodern about her writing in her refusal to ‘own’ her own authorial intention, though it also reflects her lack of agency within the literary marketplace and as a woman and a mistress. She’s a skeptic and a relativist (“No one sees things exactly as they are, but as varied and modified by their own method of viewing”) but there’s also a deep vein of nihilism in her work which, I believe, is related to her life experiences and the culture she inhabited.

That said, these particular lines clearly refer to the human need for denial and, more specifically, to the endemic hypocrisy of the society in which she lived. Their private significance could only have been guessed at by the cognoscenti at the time who were apprised of the rumors about her private life. The biographical point to make is that the lines were written in the year she gave birth to her third and last baby Laura, who, like the other two, was given up and could not be openly acknowledged. As a “fallen woman”, she was to some extent “hiding in plain sight”, which is what this quotation is about. The same could be said of the shady businessman Matthew Forster, who introduced her to her husband, in his contraventions of the slave trade laws.

YC: Are there any projects that you are working on now?

LM: At the moment I’m teaching creative writing to women refugees. I’m also doing a short book on Keats and have plans to put together the libretto for a song cycle based on Wuthering Heights for my singer husband to perform. (It suddenly occurs to me that being married to a performer might have unconsciously helped me in my efforts to understand L.E.L…)

YC: Labels attached to you have included: “literary critic,” “biographical deconstructionist,” and “scholar” — what descriptive words would you assign to yourself for this book?

LM: I would love to think I could be all those things and at the same time be a storyteller.

About the Author

Lucasta Miller is a British literary critic who has worked for The Independent and The Guardian, and contributed to The Economist, The Times (London), The New Statesman, and the BBC. She was the founding editorial director of Notting Hill Editions and has been a visiting scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford, and a visiting fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She lives in London with her husband, the tenor Ian Bostridge, and their two children.

If You Don’t Have a Novel In You, Maybe You Have a Memoir

Posted on March 7, 2019March 20, 2019 by 007595

I n our series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time, we’re talking to Ryan Britt, who’s teaching an online class about writing essays geared towards literary magazines and digital publications (like Electric Lit!). His essay collection Luke Skywalker Can’t Read is a work of pop cultural criticism ranging from Dracula to Doctor Who. The current run of Ryan’s class is sold out, but you can sign up to be notified when it returns this summer.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

In a workshop called Sirenland, Dani Shapiro directly told me that certain turns of phrase simply did not belong with the kind of writing I was doing. The idea that my voice on the page needed to be focused — and not a hodgepodge of tones — was an important moment for me. I think before that, I really thought I could get away with all sorts of different voices at once.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

I once had someone recommend that I give a person in a nonfiction essay an accent they did not have. It was a sure sign the person did not understand the ethics of writing nonfiction, nor did they understand why employing various accents or dialects for no reason is inherently offensive.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

The idea that writing is re-writing is perhaps the most important thing anyone can ever learn. It’s very hard to accept when you’re first starting out, and sometimes just as hard when you’ve been writing for years and years.

The idea that writing is re-writing is perhaps the most important thing anyone can ever learn.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

No! Sometimes someone has an essay collection! Or a memoir!

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

Probably not. But, I have encouraged people to take a break. Sometimes with nonfiction, I see students who are too close to tender material they’re writing about. In those cases, I’ve encouraged them to take a break and write about something else.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

Neither. A workshop should be a place where a writer can be given a new strategy for dealing with a problem they suspect they already have. The most valuable thing a writer can get in a workshop is a kind of map or tactic for tackling a difficult edit.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

Sometimes. When it comes to writing essays, limitations can be useful. So, word counts, thematic suggestions, and other guidelines set by an existing publication can help a writer focus. The piece might not end up in that publication, but having a professional goal for the piece in mind isn’t always a bad thing. Would you want to read this piece in a magazine or on a website you love? Answering that questions honestly can help writers work thru hard revisions, and sometimes let go of biases they have about their own work.

Crystal Hana Kim Thinks Worrying About Publication Kills Creativity

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

Kill your darlings: This is creepy. I think it should be rewritten as “Don’t be so proud of yourself all the time.”
Show don’t tell: In non-fiction, you often have to tell quite a lot. I like to tell my classes “Show AND Tell.”
Write what you know: If you know very little, this is a bummer. If you know about a lot, or are curious to know new things, then this is great.
Character is plot: Sherlock Holmes exists in 56 short stories and four novels. All of those plots are very different. I mean, I suppose saying “character is story” is fine. A story is not a plot. Then again, George Lucas supposedly borrowed all sorts of archetypal characters from antiquity, but I’d argue the story he made with those characters is pretty different from the source material. I think intent matters more than anything.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Reading. Anything but bad TV. I don’t know. I dislike the word “hobby,” to be honest. I’ve never had a hobby. I’ve had a lot of interests, though.

What’s the best workshop snack?

Something that doesn’t make noise and that no one even knows you’ve eaten.

What’s a Book That Changed Your Mind?

Posted on March 7, 2019March 20, 2019 by 007595

One of the things I’m proudest of, as a writer, is that I have personally broken up at least two marriages.

Not on purpose! I barely knew these people at the time. But I wrote an essay about my own divorce, and apparently it has tipped a few people over the line from “I’m not happy” to “I’m not happy and it’s okay to treat that as significant.” I have nothing against marriage, but I do want people to feel empowered to change—and beyond that, I take some pride in being able to help them change, just through words on a screen. It feels like a testament to the idea that writing is important, that reading the right thing at the right time can shift your whole story.

It’s hard for writers to feel they’re making a material difference in people’s lives. It’s hard for anyone to feel that way. The experience of consuming and engaging with media at our particular time in history can often feel like a lot of pointless yelling—yelling at imaginary opponents, getting yelled at by people who you know are wrong, yelling to people who already agree with you about how stupid people who don’t agree with you are. Everyone is very loud and opinionated and nobody is ever convinced. But every so often, something—a book, a movie, a song—gets through, and something clicks, and everything is different.

For this round of Novel Gazing, Electric Lit’s personal essay series about the way stories shape our lives, tell us about a book (or movie, or show, or other narrative media) that shifted your opinion. This could be a huge change—the book that convinced you God existed, or didn’t; the play that altered your political perspective; the movie that convinced you to have kids—or a small one. Tell us about the stories that revolutionized your outlook on your family, on your career, on your own creative output. Tell us about the opinions you thought were unshakeable, until you encountered the story that turned everything upside down.

You may want to read some earlier Novel Gazing essays to get a feel for the series. Some recent favorites include essays about moving on from grief with the help of an AIDS memoir, about learning the wrong lessons from 200-year-old erotica, and about realizing that the romances of young adult literature aren’t written for you.

Essays should not be longer than 4,000 words or shorter than 800, and payment is $100 per piece. Submissions will remain open until 11:59 p.m. on March 24.

“Scenes of Passion and Despair” by Joyce Carol Oates

Posted on March 6, 2019March 18, 2020 by 007595

“Scenes of Passion and Despair”

by Joyce Carol Oates

Walking quickly. The path become mud. She walked in the weeds at the edge of the path — then, her good luck, some planks had been put down in the mud, for cattle to walk on. She walked on the planks.

A hill leading down to the river, bumpy and desolate. Ragged weeds, bushes, piles of debris. No DUMPING ALLOWED. The Hudson River: she stared at the wild gray water and its shapelessness. Familiar sight. She’d been seeing it from this path, hurrying along this path, for weeks. Weeks? It was only the end of June and it seemed to her the summer had lasted years already. How to survive the summer?

The planks wobbled in the mud. Her legs straining to go faster, faster. Down on the river bank were old bedsprings and mattresses, broken chairs, washing machines. . . If one of these planks slipped she might tumble down there herself.

Her hands up to her face, warding off the stinging branches. Almost running. Sometimes she slipped off the cow plank and into the mud, her shoes splattered, damp; she felt with disgust her wet toes inside the gauze of her stockings. Heart thudding impatiently. The eerie light of this June morning, still half an hour before dawn: would it turn into an ordinary day later on? Could this gray still air turn into ordinary air, riddled with sunlight and the songs of June birds? Up at so early an hour, alone on the river bank, alone hurrying along the path, she felt her cunning and yet could not keep down a rising sense of panic — was this visit going to be a mistake? Did he want her? Why this particular June morning, before dawn? Why this particular dress of hers, a blue and white flowered dress, cotton, with a dipping white collar with machine-made lace, why this, why its looseness as if she’d lost weight, why the light splattering of mud and dew across her thighs? And why did she take the cowpath, why not dare the road?

Now she cut up from the path, up through a meager clump of trees. Legs aching from the climb. The house came into view suddenly: an old farmhouse, fixed up a little, the chimney restored. A car in the driveway, mud puddles stretching out long, narrow, glimmering around it, the water crystalline at this hour and at this distance, as if it meant something. Rehearsing her words: I had to come — I had to see you — Panting. Brushing strands of hair out of her face. Tried to imagine the exact appearance of her face — her face was very important — her face — her face and his face, confronting each other again —

She ran to the front door, up on the rickety porch. Uncut grass. A real farmhouse in the country. Near the Hudson. She did not knock, but opened the door, which was unlocked — You don’t even have to lock your doors — went inside. Heart pounding desperately. She called his name, ran to his bedroom at the back of the house — in the air the smell of his tobacco, the smell of food from last night — the slight staleness of a body in these close, cluttered rooms — he was waking up, his hair matted from sleep — staring at her in amazement —

She ran to him. I had to see you — He interrupted her, they embraced, a feverish embrace. The blank startled love in his face: she saw it and could not speak. Had to see you —

Wonder. His voice, his surprise. Hips jammed together, bodies cool and yet slippery as if with the predawn dew, the start of the birds singing outside, ordinary singing for June, the rocky tumult of the run along the path, the planks, the mud puddles, the banks of the river, her mind flitting back to the house she had run from, running out in her blue and white cotton dress, no scarf on her head, shivering, reckless, calculating the amount of time she had before her husband — who had left for the airport at 5:30 — might get to New York, might telephone her to check on her loneliness —

So long, you bastard.

Hips jammed together in languid violence. A need. A demand. Do the leaves glisten outside in the lead-gray air? Are they strong enough to last all summer? Only June, the flesh of her face is not firm enough to last. Her lover’s hands, chest, stomach, his face, his soft kindly mouth, sucking at her mouth, the force of him jerking the bed out inches from the wall, the heaving of covers — she sees how grimy the khaki-colored blanket has become — her lover’s parts are firm enough to last all summer, to last forever, even if she wears out.

How many times had they loved like this, exactly?

Lost count.

He is saying something: “. . . is he like now?”

“What is he like? . . .”

“With this, with us . . . doesn’t he know, doesn’t he sense it . . . what is he like now with you? Can’t he guess?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think about it.”

“Does he drink a lot?”

“No more than before.”

“Can he sleep?”

“No more than before. He’s always had insomnia. . . .

“Do you sleep beside him, then, can you fall asleep while he’s awake? .. .”

Wants to know if that other man, my husband, still makes love to me.

“I don’t know. I don’t know him at all.”

The cow planks sigh in the oozing mud, she runs holding her side, panting, her bowels feel like rocks this morning, poison, poisoned; she hates the man she is running from — eleven years invested in him — and she hates the man she is running toward, asleep in that room with the bedraggled wallpaper, and no telephone in his authentic rented farmhouse on the Hudson River, so he brags to his friends; she must run to him shivering, her face splotched from the slaps of branches, saliva gathering sourly in her mouth as if forcing her to spit — Can’t stop running. Her heart pounds. Can’t look down at the river because it is so brutal, a mass that would not support her weight if she suddenly slipped down the bank; imagine the shrieking, the lonely complexities of thought, the electric shocks of terror as she drowns, having a lot of time to reconsider her life — And then they would fish her body out of the river a hundred miles downstream. So long, my love.

The cow planks sigh and bounce. She runs up the hill to the farm he has rented, her flesh aches to be embraced, she scrambles up the hill in her muddy ruined shoes, panting, and she dreams suddenly of an ice pick — wide-awake, she dreams of an ice pick — remembers her mother with an ice pick twenty years ago, raising it to jam it down into a piece of ice — dreams of an ice pick raised in her two trembling hands and brought down hard into whose chest? — his chest? — but what about the wispy light-brown hairs of his chest, which she supposedly loves?

Hips grinding, jammed together. You might imagine music in the background, the grinding is so fierce. An ancient bed: brass bedstead. It came with the house. A semi-furnished old farmhouse with a restored chimney! The one time her lover ventured into her own home, her husband’s handsome white Cape Cod, he clowned around and peeked into drawers nervously, joking about hidden tape recorders and other ingenious spying devices he’d just read about in a national newsmagazine, and then, serious with a sudden manly frown, he told her he had to leave, he couldn’t make love to her there, in her husband’s bed, that magical marriage bed with the satin bedspread.

Why not?

A manly code, a masculine code she couldn’t appreciate, maybe?

Now she lies with him in his own rented bed, an old farmhouse bed with a brass headboard, and she sees at the back of his skull a shadowy area like a fatal shadow in an x-ray. Secret from her. Their toes tickle one another. Twenty toes together at the foot of the bed, under the khaki cover! Such loving toes! But the shadow inside his head isn’t loving; she fears it growing bigger, darker; she shuts her eyes hard to keep it from oozing into her own skull, because she has always tried to be optimistic about life.

Ducks on the river. Mallards. Male and female in pairs and in loose busy groups, Canadian geese bouncing on the waves, going one way in a large confederation of birds, then turning unaccountably and going the other way, back and forth across the choppy waves, back and forth, their calls strident and dismal as she runs, her brow furrowed with some strange stray memory of her mother and an ice pick —

He, the husband, took the Volkswagen to the airport and left her the Buick. I’ll call you from New York, he said. Darkness at the back of his skull. If his drinking got too bad and he really got sick, she would abandon her lover and nurse him. If he killed himself she would abandon her lover and wear black. Years of mourning. Guilt. Sin. If he found out about her lover and ran over and killed him, shot him right in that bed, she would wear black, she would not give evidence against him, she would come haggard to court, a faithful wife once again.

The husband will not get sick, will not kill himself, will not kill the lover or even find out about him; he will only grow old.

She will not need to wear black or to be faithful. She will grow old.

The lover will not even grow old: he will explode into molecules as into a mythology.

I don’t know him at all.

A stormy river, small cataclysms. Quakes, spouts, whirlpools a few yards deep. She doesn’t dare to look at the water because her mind might suddenly go into a spin.

You take things too seriously before dawn.

Climbs up the path to his house, up the back way to his meager one-acre farm, Feet already wet from a lifetime of puddles that must be glimpsed far ahead of time in order to be avoided, and suddenly there is a blow against the back of her neck, she pitches forward, a man’s feet stumble with her feet, she cries out at the sight of large muddy boots — The blow is so hard that her teeth seem shaken loose. She is thrown forward and would fall except he has caught hold of her.

Jerks her around to face him.

Small panicked screams. She hears someone screaming feebly — hears the sounds of toil, struggle — the man, whose face she can’t see, trips her neatly with one ankle behind hers, she falls on her right side, on her hip and thigh and shoulder, already she is scrambling to get away — trying to slide sideways, backward in the mud — but the man has gripped her by the shoulders and lifts her and slams her back against the ground again, up, and then down again, as if trying to break her into pieces, and she sees a swirl of eyes, yellow-rimmed, the small hard dots of black at the center of each eye somehow familiar and eternal, even the dried mucus at the inside corner of each eye absolutely familiar, eternal —

A body jammed against hers. A bent knee, the strain of his thigh muscles communicated to her body, his wheezing, panting, his small cries overpowering hers, his grasping, nudging, glowering face, his leathery skin jammed against her skin; I don’t know him at all, the bridge of his nose suddenly very important, lowered to her face again and again. Tufts of pale hair in his ears, swollen veins in his throat, his eager grunts, his groveling above her, the stale fury of his breath, his hands, his straining bent knees, the cold mud, the lead-gray patch of sky overhead; inch by inch she is being driven up the hill by his love for her, his thudding against her in a rapid series of blows that jar her entire body and seem to have loosened the teeth in her head —

Once by chance but not really by chance she had met her lover in the general store in town, where he had a post-office box to insure his anonymity (exaggerating the world’s interest in him, he imagined a crowd of curious friends sailing up the Hudson to claim him). That rushed exchange of hellos, that eager snatching of eyes, smiles, The anxiety: Am I still loved? Adultery makes people nervous. She saw that he hadn’t shaved and was disappointed. They whispered between shelves of soup cans and cereal boxes and jars of instant coffee, the brand names and their heraldic colors and designs so familiar that she felt uneasy, as if spied upon by old friends. Her husband was at the lumberyard to buy a few things and would only be a few minutes, she had no time to waste; backing away, she put out her hands prettily as if to ward off her eager lover, and he, unshaven, dressed in a red-and-black checked wool jacket, took a step toward her, grinning, Why are you so skittish? Between the towering shelves of fading, souring food he lunged at her with his face, kissed her lips, more of a joke than a true kiss, and she felt a drop of his saliva on her lips and, involuntarily, she licked it off, and the drop was swept along by the powerful tiny muscles of her tongue, to the back of her throat, and down in a sudden pulsation of secret muscles to her insides, where it entered her bloodstream before she had even laughed nervously and backed away, paid for her jar of Maxwell House instant coffee and a leaky carton of milk, hurried outside without glancing back, walked over to the lumberyard where her husband was standing in a brightly lit little office made of concrete blocks talking with a fat man in a red-and-black checked wool jacket; by now the drop of saliva was soaring along her bloodstream, minute and bright and stable as a tiny balloon, rushing through the veins to the right ventricle — I don’t know you at all — and faster and faster into the pulmonary artery, and into the secret left side of the heart, where it inflated itself suddenly, proudly, and caused her heart to pound —

Did you get the things you wanted? her husband asked.

Late winter. Freezing air. A car parked on the river bank, by the edge of the big park — barbecue fireplaces with tiny soiled drifts of snow on their grills, you have to imagine people at the picnic tables, you have to imagine a transistor radio squealing, and the smell of burning charcoal; but you can still see the re- mains of Sunday comics blown into the bushes.

She turns, twists herself eagerly in his arms. His mouth rubs against hers damply, the lips seem soft but they are also hard, or maybe it is the hardness of his youthful teeth behind them. Desperation. Struggle. The toiling of their breaths. On the radio is wxs1’s “Sunday Scene,” a thumping tumult of voices and their echoes, yes, everything is wonderful — everything is desperate — he begins his frantic nudging, they are both eighteen, she discovers herself lying in the same position again, making the same writhing sharp twists with her body, as if fending him off and inviting him closer, she moves in time with the music, and then they are sitting up again and he is smoking a cigarette like someone in a movie. Small fixed uneasy smiles. They will marry, obviously.

Early spring. Freezing air. The heater in his car won’t work right. State Police find lovers dead in an embrace. They kiss each other wetly, hotly, eagerly on the lips, they slide their bodies out of their clothes, snakelike, eager and urgent, the man’s breath is like a hiss, the woman’s breath is shallow and seems to go no farther than the back of her throat, he lifts her legs up onto the front seat again, onto the scratchy plastic seat cover; such a difficult trick; after all, they are a lot older than eighteen.

A woman in a long blue dress. Her stockings white cotton; her shoes handmade. The man in a waistcoat, holding her hand, slipping down the incline to the river bank, They turn to each other eagerly and embrace. So friendly! So helpful! They kneel in the grass, whispering words that can’t be heard by the children who are hiding in the bushes. The lovers undress each other. The woman is shy and efficient, the man keeps laughing in small nervous embarrassed delighted spurts, and the children in the bushes have to stand up to see more clearly what is happening —

In his bed, before dawn, she notices the grimy blanket that she will think about with shame, hours later, and as he kneels above her she senses something fraudulent about him, no, yes, but it is too late; she grips his back and his legs though she is exhausted, and her constricted throat gives out small, gentle, fading, souring sounds of love, but she feels the toughness of his skin, like hide, and the leathery cracks of his skin, and down at his buttocks the cold little grainy pimples, like coarse sandpaper, and one hand darts in terror to his head as if she wanted to grip the hair and pull his head away from hers, and she feels his loosening hair — Ah, clumps of his thick brown hair come away in her hand! I love you, he is muttering, but she seems to recognize the pitch and rhythm of his voice, she has heard this before, in a movie perhaps, and now, as they kiss so urgently, she tries not to notice the way his facial structure sags, dear God, the entire face can be moved from one side to the other, should she mention it? And he didn’t bother shaving again. He could have shaved before going to bed, guessing, hoping she might come this morning, before dawn. . . The eyeballs can be pushed backward . . . and then they move slowly forward again, springing slowly forward, in slow motion, not the way you would expect eyeballs to spring forward. . .

God, her body aches. There is an itchiness too, probably an infection. That tiny bubble in the blood, exploding into splashes of excited colorless water, probably infected. His swarming germs, seed. The stain on her clothes.

At home, upstairs in the white Cape Cod, she cleans herself of him outside and inside.

No, she is not cleaning herself of him, but preparing herself for him: a shower the night before, the glimpse of her flushed face in the steamy mirror, the sorrow of those little pinched lines about her breasts, the urgent, slightly protruding bone of her forehead, wanting to push ahead to the next morning and through the impending sleepless night beside her husband. She has caught insomnia from him during the eleven years of their marriage.

No, she is not preparing herself for anyone. She is simply standing in the bathroom staring at herself. The bathtub with the bluebells on the shower curtain. Put the shower curtain on the outside of the tub when you take a bath, on the inside when you take a shower, her mother has explained for the hundredth time. Why are you always in a daze? What are you daydreaming about, may I ask? No, not daydreaming. She is just staring in the mirror at her small hard breasts, at the disappointing pallor of her chest, at her stomach where the faint brown hairs seem to grow in a circle, in a pale circle around her belly button. She is fourteen years old. She is just staring in the mirror, reluctant to leave the bathroom; she is not preparing herself for anyone, she is just standing on the fluffy blue rug from Woolworth’s, she is not thinking about anything at all, she is reluctant to think.

Eight years old, the man finds himself again at a kitchen table, he glances up in surprise to see that it is the kitchen of his parents’ house, and he is reduced in size — no more than eight years old! It’s a rainy day and from the sound of the house (his father in the cellar) it must be a Saturday. He’s fooling around with his clay kit. He has made four snakes by rolling clay between his hands; now he twists the snakes into circles, heads mashed against tails, and makes a pot, but it doesn’t look right — too small. The clock is whirring above the stove: a yellow-backed General Electric clock. He is alone in the kitchen. His father is sawing something in the cellar and his mother is probably out shopping. He mashes all the clay together again and makes a column, about six inches high, and he molds the column into a body. With a pencil he pricks holes for the eyes and fashions a smiling mouth, pinches a little nose out, on the chest he pinches out two breasts, makes them very large and pointed, and between the legs he pokes a hole, Sits staring at this for a few minutes, He is aware of his father in the cellar, aware of the clock whirring, the rain outside, and suddenly a raw, sick sensation begins in him, in his bowels, and he is transfixed with dread. . . . He picks up a tiny piece of clay and makes a small wormlike thing and tries to press it against the figure, between her legs. It falls off. Perspiring, he presses it into place again and manages to make it stick. It is a small grub-sized thing but it makes sense. He stares at it and his panic subsides, slowly. He feels slightly sick the rest of the day.

He crouches above her, she notices his narrowed, squinting eyes, the hard dark iris, the tension of his mouth, and he buries his face against her shoulder and throat as if to hide himself from her, oh, she loves him, oh, she is dying for him, no one but him. Their stomachs rub and twist hotly together and she feels herself gathered up in his arms, is surprised at how small her body is, how good it is to be small, gathered in a man’s strong arms, and she thinks that the two of them might be lying anywhere, making love anywhere, the walls of this farmhouse might fall away to show them on a river bank, in the sunshine, or in a car, at the edge of a large state park with Dixie cups blowing hollowly about them as they love, and small white plastic spoons in the grass. . . .

Suddenly exhausted, her hands stop their caressing of his back as if a thought had occurred to them, she instructs herself to caress him again but her fingers seem to have lost interest, grown stiff as if with arthritis, what is wrong? At the back of her throat she feels a ticklish sensation as if she is going to cough, but instead of coughing she whispers I love you, involuntarily, and they are toiling upstream on the cold river, ducks and geese around them sadly, morosely; the lead-gray sky and the lead-gray water are enough to convince them that this act is utterly useless, but who can stop? On the grass a few feet away is her wide-brimmed straw hat, a hat for Sunday in the country, and he has not had time to take off his waistcoat, and his whiskers scratch her soft skin; but when he whispers Am I hurting you? she answers at once No, no, you never hurt me. Someone calls out to them, A mocking scream. A shout. They freeze together, wondering if they heard correctly — what was that? Someone is shouting.

It isn’t in their imaginations, it isn’t the cry of geese on the river, no, someone is really shouting at them — has her husband followed her here after all? — but no, it is a stranger who seems to know them. He stomps right over to them and they fall apart, dazed and embarrassed, they are so awkward together, being strangers themselves. The glaring lights make them squint. This stranger eyes them cynically. He squats, a more experienced lover, and arranges and rearranges arms, legs, the proper bending of the knee; with the palm of his practiced hand he urges the man’s head down, down, just a few inches more, yes, hold it like that; he spreads the woman’s hair in a fan around her head, a shimmering chestnut-brown fan, newly washed, and with his thumb he flecks something off her painted forehead — a drop of saliva, or a small leaf, or sweat from her lover’s toiling face — yes, all right, hold this — now he backs away and the glare of the lights surrounds them again. Behind the lights is a crowd, in fact crowds of people, an audience, jostling one another and standing on tiptoe, elbowing one another aside, muttering and impatient. Bring that camera in close! In close! The itching raw reddened flesh between the woman’s thighs, the moisture and the patch of hair, so forlorn with dampness, a monotonous detail; the camera itself slows with exhaustion and lingers too long upon this close-up, lacking the wit to draw back swiftly and dramatically. The woman with the hair fanned out around her head wonders if her make-up is smeared again, or if that slimy sensation is her skin coming loose. Someday, she knows, her skin must come loose and detach itself from her skull. So tired! She must not yawn. Must not. Must not even. swallow her yawn because the tendons of her throat will move and her lover will notice and be hurt. Or angered. His whiskers rub against her face, her mouth and nose. She hates his whiskers. It is sickening how hair grows out of men’s faces, constantly, pushing itself out… . There are tiny bits of hair on her lips. Here is marriage. Permanent marriage, she thinks. And he is whispering to her — Am I hurting you? and her pain fades as she realizes that she does love him and that though he hurts her, constantly and permanently, she must always whisper no, numb and smiling into his face, their bodies now comradely, soldierly in this grappling, their mouths hardened so that they are mainly teeth — the flesh seems to have rotted away — and she whispers no, you’re not hurting me, no, you have never hurt me.

Celebrating Brooklyn’s Queer History

Posted on March 6, 2019March 24, 2019 by 007595

For many years I wrote with a black and white photo taped above my desk. The picture was a photocopy from Lillian Faderman’s Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, and the caption of which shared that it was a “private lesbian party” somewhere in San Francisco circa 1944. The reason I loved the picture and had it on my wall for so long, was the spark of excitement I felt to see photos of queer people existing, thriving, before I was born. I ached to know more about these queer women, their stories, their heartache, their triumphs. When we talk about queer representation, we often focus on representation in current examples of art & culture. I didn’t know how much I craved to see myself represented in history until I came upon this photo, these women, and the idea that queer lives were lead for decades and centuries before my own.

Hugh Ryan’s carefully researched and beautifully rendered study of Brooklyn’s queer history, When Brooklyn Was Queer, is an absolute gift. For those of us who love Brooklyn, Ryan unveils a cast of unforgettable queer lives from Brooklyn Heights to Coney Island, through the lens of intersectionality and the nuance Brooklyn’s complex story requires. There’s E. Trundell, a transgender man whose arrest in Brooklyn made national headlines. There’s Florence Hines, a successful Black drag king who performed widely. There’s Loop-the-Loop, a young white trans woman who named herself after a roller coaster on Coney Island. And there’s Mabel Hampton, a Black lesbian who worked as a dancer on Coney Island in the 1920s. When Hampton’s photo appears in the pages of Ryan’s book, it’s a breathtaking moment, to see her as she lived, her chin tilted upward, her hat on an angle, an expression of smoldering confidence on her face. Ryan creates a layered story that shows, against a backdrop of rapid change, how queer Brooklyn became a “canary in the coal mine,” as white flight, the loss of the waterfront economy, and other factors would influence these queer enclaves.

Ryan began writing this book as a labor of love, with no training as a historian, and has thus written something that is imbued with heart, curiosity, responsibility and wit. I want to shout from the rooftops about this queer Brooklyn history we are all entitled to love and know. It makes the great and complicated borough all the greater.

Courtney Gillette: When Brooklyn Was Queer is such an incredible book. There was so much in here that I didn’t know. My partner also wants to read it, but was joking that she’s basically read it because I kept being like, “Listen to this!” Can you talk about the moment you knew you wanted to delve into Brooklyn’s queer history?

HR: It’s actually kind of funny. I was living in Brooklyn and I started this organization called the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History. We did these locally sourced, community art exhibitions about queer history in different places. The first one we did was in Brooklyn, in my apartment, actually right over by the Myrtle stop. And it was wonderful and fantastic and 300 people showed up and we got shut down by the cops at midnight.

So all of that happened, and we were doing other ones, and one day I was like, we should do another one in Brooklyn but feature it around Brooklyn. A lot of people don’t know about Brooklyn’s history, so the first thing [we decided] was I’ll go get a book. And there was no book.

It had never occurred to me that there wouldn’t be something [recorded]. I thought there would at least be like one book, an academic book, something Alyson [Books] put out in 1996. I thought it would exist. There was Gay New York, there was The Gay Metropolis — great books. There was Joan Nestle. But none of them were a specific look at Brooklyn and Brooklyn’s queer history. Let me look for websites, let me look for a documentary, and I realized like there was literally nothing.

There was Gay New York, there was The Gay Metropolis — great books. But none of them were a specific look at Brooklyn and Brooklyn’s queer history.

I was like working as a freelance writer, and I was like, well, anytime I interview someone — I was writing a lot of gay shit — I’ll just ask. So I was doing that for a couple years. And somewhere around 2015/2014, I realized there really was quite a bit of information, and there was an arc to it, and it had to do with the waterfront. I got a grant from the New York Public Library, and the first thing they said to me was “When this grant period is over, you should have your book proposal done.” And I was like, “Oh! I am writing a book, then.”

CG: So thinking about structure and going back to this narrative arc. I think a lot of people, when they think of queer history, they think of Stonewall. And what’s beautiful is that this is everything that happened before Stonewall. Can you talk about the choice to end this book before Stonewall even occurred?

HR: It actually wasn’t originally a choice. When I started off, I didn’t know what I was getting into. What I very quickly realized was there’s this moment in the 1950s when everything just sort of truncates. Everything disappears. And by the time you get to Stonewall, what’s left is this scattered remnant of something.

As I figured out that the something was very large and had kind of a cohesive structure — once I could see the arc of it — it started to make sense: Stonewall and everything that happened in the Village is in part happening because all of these other spaces, in Brooklyn where things were more diffuse, had to contract inward.

One of the things I really talk a lot about is the racial dynamics of Brooklyn and the changing history and so the way that it worked out — I was really shocked. I had no idea Brooklyn was so white in its history. When I discovered that, I was just gobsmacked. When I realized that the arc of this story really ends with white flight and the suburbs and the disillusion, it took me a long moment to process that and think: Is this a moment I feel comfortable ending a story?

CG: You can’t really write or talk about Brooklyn without talking about gentrification. So I’m wondering if you can explain how the displacement of communities of color influenced queer history?

HR: It starts as far back as you can go. The first neighborhood of color that I could historically find in Brooklyn was Weeksville. The fact that there is so much that we know that we’ve lost about Weeksville — the newspapers, the history, [some of] the houses were moved. But finding that history, and being able to connect that to Alice Dunbar Nelson, who I knew had a queer history, working in institutions like this, it opened up a lot of space for suggestion.

But then when I found out quickly Weeksville, after the LIRR opened up in the neighborhood — I think within ten years, the neighborhood becomes 50% White, mostly Scandinavian, and it gentrifies. It becomes this suburban neighborhood of Crown Heights and the history is erased. It’s just knocked out. And it’s not until the 1960s that people really rediscovered Weeksville.

I saw that cycle of gentrification over and over again. When I understood that the waterfront was what made queer lives really possible in Brooklyn in a certain way, or at least the growth and explosion of them, then when I started tracking what happened at the waterfront, it became so clear. As soon as the waterfront falls apart, the bottom goes out on everything. Robert Moses rips Brooklyn in two.

CG: That was the most heartbreaking chapter, because I knew about his destruction, but I’d never stopped to think of it and how it would affect queer communities.

HR: It wasn’t until I was doing the end chapters on Coney Island, that I was like, what happened? Coney Island changes so quickly. It was Robert Moses again and again. When I looked at the highways and saw that they cut off the entire coastline in Brooklyn, that’s it. And it was all to gentrify the suburbs.

CG: I think the most delightful and refreshing part of the book was how intersectional it is. There’s been a lot of times when I read something that’s marked as LGBTQ or queer and it focuses on white, gay, cis men. This book has the stories of so many lesbians, trans people, people of color, and bisexuals. Was it harder to find those narratives?

HR: Some of them. Absolutely. I spent a long time looking into the allusion of transmasculine identities and, it wasn’t just that they were hard to find, but the concepts of gender around people who were assigned female at birth — they’re just so radically different over time. Fitting those in a sort of way that showed how people had a very different concept of gender. And people who did have a concept of gender that’s much closer to our current ideas of transmasculine gender identity.

Trundell was a real breakthrough. Finding that story [of Trundell’s arrest], was exactly what I was looking for. It showed me this moment where everything was changing. Often that’s what I spent my time looking for. I wanted to find the examples that sort of showed something in transition.

CG: So what was rewarding in this process?

HR: When I followed the story of Josiah Marvel [co-founder of the Civil Rehabilitation Committee of the Quaker Emergency Service, for servicemen discharged for homosexuality] — I thought, this dude’s gay. I just knew it. Maybe not gay, but he couldn’t have been doing all this work for no reason. And that’s one of thing that drove me crazy, when it’s closeted celebrities who do great things for gay causes, but then never come out?

The concepts of gender around people who were assigned female at birth — they’re just so radically different over time.

CG: Yes!

HR: So this guy, Josiah Marvel, I thought, No, no, he’s gay. He’s not just doing this. But there was nothing I could prove. And then I was in the Library of Congress, looking at Frederick Wortham’s papers. There was a little scrap that was Joe Marvel’s arrest. Frederick getting the phone call and writing down that Joe Marvel was arrested for soliciting in a toilet in Manhattan, and then the letter he wrote to the judge: This is a good man. Everything gets retracted, but within three or four weeks, the whole Quaker Emergency Service closes.

I knew it closed suddenly and I couldn’t figure out why, but finding that tiny scrap of paper… I almost didn’t go to Frederick Wortham’s archives because he’s not gay and not the most important person, but I was going to DC anyway, and then it was like, Yes!

CG: Going back to that one image of Florence Hines,I know some of my queer history has come from Instagram accounts like H_e_r_s_t_o_r_y or LGBT History. Can you talk about how it felt to come across photos in your research? When you actually found images of these stories you were discovering?

HR: That was super exciting. There were a couple moments where that happened really unexpectedly. I was working on the project and I went to have lunch with this older gay man who was very nice, and was very helpful. And he said, have you looked at this book called GI Hustlers of World War II?

It was a small press, not even a small press. It was one of those places where you send a PDF and they print it. And it was this guy in New York. He had images in there that I’ve never seen anywhere else, and they’re a little confusing. And he said, I was just kind of grabbing them off the internet, but one collection is actually a guy I knew. And they’re photos of all these gay men at beaches in New York City in the ’50s, but I don’t know if any of them are at Coney island.

So the Center had them, but they didn’t know who had made them. I was able to tell them, and identify them: “These ones are Coney Island, these are Riis Beach, these are Central Park.” I found photos from one of the gay bath houses, with guys on the roof! It’s in the book. I never thought I’d be able to find photos of those bath houses.

CG: There’s so much affirmation in this book. I’ve heard of things, but sometimes it felt like that’s all I’m entitled to, with queer history? I’ll go on hearsay, I’ll never actually see documentation. So that was really affirming to read that all these people were real.

HR: And particularly for me — I sent a lot of emails that don’t get answered, for years. Before I started researching Florence Hines, I was researching this woman Alberta Williams. And one of the researchers I had contacted reached out to me a year later and sent me this angry email, like, how dare I say these women lead such complicated lives and that I would put my modern categories upon them.

I wrote her back that I was just doing the research to find out. I did not include her in my book, because, as you say, she was not queer in any way that I can find. But then, finding that newspaper article about Florence Hines and Marie Roberts was one of those moments where I was like, yes!

CG: What is your greatest hope for readers of this book?

HR: I tried to make really clear that I started from a place of ignorance and to show as much as my process as I could because I don’t have a history degree. This was a labor of love. But it was also just a matter of asking questions over and over again, sometimes for years on end.

I really want people to look around and say, “Hey, I don’t need to wait for someone else. I can do some of this work on my own.”

I think it’s important because this is this weird moment for queer history where we’re entering the school system, we’re becoming a canon in a way that we haven’t before. So what is available now will determine what becomes this thread to everyone is expected to know.

Entering the national consciousness isn’t necessarily a paring down. I think that is excruciating, especially for those of us who lived through the pre-period, but I at least want the most options. I don’t want a situation where queer history is Walt Whitman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Stonewall, and then…Buffy. That’s problematic within itself but it kind of has to happen.

This was a labor of love. But it was also just a matter of asking questions over and over again, sometimes for years on end.

CG: Another thing I really loved was reading about the accounts of early queer lives where they were living without shame, because straight institutions hadn’t yet discovered or named queerness. What was it like to realize there were queer lives being lived before shame could be introduced?

HR: One of the things I think about all the time is homosociality. It wasn’t until I was writing the book that you can’t understand the emergence of homosexuality without understanding the death of homosociality that existed in the Victorian era.

For a long time it was expected that men spent a lot of time with men and women spent a lot of time with women — maybe they even sleep in the same bed, maybe they spend their whole lives together. And that that is a kind of love and a kind of queerness that we can’t recognize, that we don’t have the lens to view it, or to talk about it, because there is no shame, because we don’t know if they were having sex. It’s like, I don’t care if they were having sex . They lived their entire lives together — it’s pretty queer.

7 Multigenerational Novels that Cross Countries and Span Centuries

Posted on March 6, 2019December 8, 2020 by 007595

Family stories are key ways for communities to stake a claim of their history and culture. In my multigenerational novel, A Woman Is No Man, I am attempting to give voice to an Arab American family, which has been historically underrepresented in literature, and to bring the family to life by making visible their untold stories.

Isra, one of the novel’s main characters, packs only one book with her when she moves from Palestine to the New York: One Thousand and One Nights, which is perhaps the greatest Arabic, Middle Eastern, and Islamic contributions to literature and an unparalleled example of the power of story-telling. In an attempt to delay her ordered beheading, Scheherazade, a well-read young woman, tells stories to the king who has both married and sentenced her. For 1,001 nights Scheherazade tells one tale after another, keeping herself alive by using stories to entertain, intrigue and soften the king’s heart, showing us what we’ve known for centuries since: the power of storytelling to shape and reclaim our own narrative. In some ways, Isra, and then her eldest daughter, Deya, are also using stories to fight for their lives.

A Woman Is No Man was written to give a voice to the people of my community who are often misunderstood and rarely heard from directly. In doing so, I am attempting to address injustices both within my community and in the way my community is ignored and stereotyped in both the world of literature and the world at large. The primary characters of A Woman Is No Man are women who have been excluded from telling their own stories due to gender roles, their ethnicity, and strict cultural norms; it was crucial to me that these same characters shape the narrative. As Deya, in contemporary Brooklyn, approaches both her high school graduation and an arranged marriage, she struggles to figure out a future for herself worth fighting for. Though well meaning, Deya’s grandmother Fareeda has been shaped by her own traumatic past, and Fareeda tries desperately to conceal family secrets from Deya, both fearing Deya will follow in her mother Isra’s footsteps and fearing that she will not.

Like any writer, I have been inspired by so many books that came before mine, and A Woman Is No Man owes a debt of gratitude to the many other multigenerational sagas that also use storytelling as a way to bring new and diverse voices to the literary world. Here are a few of the ones that have mattered the most to me:

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex spans three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family, who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit. The novel is narrated by Calliope Stephanides, an intersex person trying to make sense of gender in the world.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. The novel centers on a Bengali couple, Ashoke and Ashima, who move to the U.S. in the 1960s, and their son, Gogol, who wrestles with his identity as the Indian American bearer of a Russian name and must come to terms with his place in the world.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

Korean American author Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko begins in 1920s Korea with Sunja who gets pregnant out of wedlock, marries a minister and moves to Japan to save her family honor. Spanning four generations, the novel explores the situation of Koreans living in a hostile Japan.

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic weaves together a collective story by following a group of Japanese picture brides across the Pacific to California, where they discover that their husbands are not at all what they were told.

And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Khaled Hosseini’s third novel, And The Mountains Echoed, spans several generations and alternates between Afghanistan and the West, grappling with many of the same themes of his earlier works: parent-children relationships, the many ways in which the past can come back to haunt us, and Afghanistan’s cycle of trauma and sadness.

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Salt Houses is a powerful and poetic multigenerational story about displacement. The novel starts in Nablus, Palestine in 1963 and branches into Jordan, Kuwait, Beirut, Paris and Boston. A compelling and emotional read that showcases the art of storytelling with precise prose.

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Homegoing explores the damaging effect of the slave trade on a family split between the U.S. and the Gold Coast of Ghana across 200 years. The novel follows two sisters who grow up in different 17th-century Ghanaian villages, tracing the two women’s families for the next few centuries as they navigate both sides of the Atlantic.

Becoming an Actor Taught Me to Write

Posted on March 5, 2019January 16, 2024 by 007595

When I was a 10 year-old boy soprano, a choirmaster proclaimed, “Music is a picture painted on a background of silence.” It was an abstraction that stuck, as first lessons of craft tend to do. Others I’ve heard:

Show, don’t tell
A cliché is a cliché because it’s true
Always hold something back
Avoid passivity in your attack
The music lies in the second step
Lyrics are the sound of words
Having a good idea isn’t enough, unless you make the most of it.

That these now feel interchangeable reminds of something a writing workshop instructor once said: “What can other crafts teach you about your own?” His was a rallying cry to apply conscious method, to give yourself permission to steal from as many places as imagination allows.

Since the age of eighteen I’d been an actor who believed he’d always be one, convinced I’d breathe my last breath playing someone’s grandpa. It was my calling, or so I believed, from the moment I’d first stepped in front of an audience. What followed were years of training, hours logged in rehearsal halls and audition lines, all for the privilege of playing roles in regional, off and off-off Broadway houses — all subsidized with support jobs to pay the rent.

Something turned once I hit my 40s. Maybe it was a desire to see if there was more to me than this actor-for-life definition I’d hewn to before I’d taken the time to explore. I sensed the guy who processed my exit from Actors’ Equity, the stage actor’s union — younger, bookish — saw my situation as a tragedy. “Nothing is permanent,” he said. You can always come back.” I appreciated his compassion but he didn’t know that I’d already taken steps: by then I’d gone back to school and completed an MFA with the intention of picking up where I’d left off before the acting bug bit. In my return to writing, I’d published an essay and even had a freelance gig as an arts critic for a trade magazine. As I filled out the necessary forms, though, I worried whether it was a mistake to simply stop doing what I’d done my entire adult life. Was it possible to begin again?

I feared I might be starting from scratch, but it was actually the opposite. Writers who have never acted will balk when I say that, while the two are definitely not the same, the lessons learned as a performer resonate often when I write. I doubt that’s a surprise to Tony Bennett, a singer who also paints. In the last ten years, actor John Malkovich has spent more time designing couture men’s clothing than playing roles on the big screen. The “multitudes” are evident in the work of Joni Mitchell, who also paints when she isn’t composing songs that devastate with their emotional honesty. The Sistine Chapel may be a work of art, but so are Michelangelo’s poems and letters. And recently, Daniel Day-Lewis announced his retirement from the screen to pursue dressmaking — to add to his other skills as a cobbler and stonemason. From Victor Hugo to contemporary polymaths like Boots Riley, Solange, Janelle Monae, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and Lady Gaga, artists have funneled their creative juices through multiple mediums for eons. For them, doing “one thing” has never been enough.

While the two are definitely not the same, the lessons learned as a performer resonate often when I write.

When the acting bug bit I was a funny-looking college freshman with low self-esteem. The craft freed me from the face I saw in the mirror, once I realized how mutable that face was. My skin could be darkened, lightened, or painted to resemble a mask. I could gray my hair, or cover it with a wig. Everything from my walk to my voice could be changed: “I” could disappear. The externals, though, turned out to be beside the point. Acting well requires you to bring all of who you are to the table. You must bring the full complement of personality and life experience to bear on a character. The “truth” of it comes not from what you disguise, but what you reveal. As one of my first teachers repeated over and over, you strive to “do what you would do as the character — no more, no less.” The only difference between that and writing is that the “you” gets explored on the page instead of through makeup and poses.

Whether you write, paint or perform, what’s universal is the practice. For singers, musical scales are woven into your daily routine. Difficult passages need to be attacked over and over; lyrics must be memorized. An actor rehearses — emphasis on the “re.” It’s not just the lines you repeat over again and again. You need to master the physical actions, which, depending on the piece, can mean the way you enter a room; the manner in which you might deliver, or receive, a slap to the face; the timing of tiny movements that can make an audience laugh or move them to tears. Repetition — mastery — enables that spontaneity, allows the performer to be fully in the here and now.

By the time I’m done with the piece you’re reading, it will feel as if I’ve rewritten it a hundred times. It’s what you do to pin down an idea that keeps evolving the more you write. When each turn reveals another country of perspective, it’s often hard to see which piece is useful or what to discard. We’ve all had a momentary spark, what I call those instances where what spills onto the page is exactly the thing you had in your head. But such moments are rare: I find myself revisiting ideas again and again, or what one of my writing teachers called combing it back through your brain. Sometimes it’s a matter of retyping. Words get moved; better ones are found. Paragraphs are rearranged or redrafted sentence by sentence. Sometimes nothing happens at all as you sit in front of an open document; there’s only the valuable repetition of keeping the appointment, of showing up day after day, if only for an afternoon, an hour or even fifteen minutes. The blank page becomes my rehearsal room. Each revision clears away the fog until something true emerges. Just as in the rehearsal hall, I give myself permission to fail; often I chip and chip, but never get to the end, just as in acting I might fail to find the character you’re playing.

Actors revise too, often in collaboration with other actors, and a director whose job it is to keep an eye on the big picture. Maybe it’s a question of tempo; a joke may get a bigger laugh if you speed up the line. If it’s true that 90% of successful casting is visual, then it may be a question of adding a toupee, or changing a wig, a walk or the color of a character’s dress from blue to red. From the day of first rehearsal to the night the show closes, every member of a production will chase perfection; sometimes the result is thrilling, but you resign yourself to those days when the performance is off, and the magic doesn’t happen.

Writing memoir, I’ve had to reckon with the idea of self sans a filter. Oddly, it’s been more painful in terms of what it unearths than any “role” I’d ever played. I remember bursting into tears after recounting an event, or the memory of certain relationships. Trying to get at something true, you often discover how much you’ve actually suppressed, or simply forgotten, until you attempt to recreate it on the page. There, you’re forced to engage a dual perspective: who you were in that past moment vs. yourself in the present — wiser, maybe, or simply more honest as you examine things through the prism of time and experience. Ironically it’s the performative aspect of writing (keeping your “audience” in mind) that I find most inhibiting, a problem I never had as an actor. Maybe that’s because actors are trained to be private in public: we construct, based on the playwright’s world, a world in which we convince ourselves that no one is watching. In a non-musical play especially, everything you do on stage is for the benefit of whoever you’re acting with. A character might actually be addressing the audience, but the audience is “endowed.” That means we imagine them as a sympathetic, or antagonistic, listener; in the doing, the audience becomes as much a character as the people on stage. For me as a writer, it’s best I don’t think about who I’m writing for. I need to focus on what it is I’ve come to the page to say, rather than what a reader may or may not think of it.

Ironically it’s the performative aspect of writing (keeping your ‘audience’ in mind) that I find most inhibiting.

Being a memoirist, I’m still surprised by the role research plays in my writing. It isn’t as simple as what you remember of certain events, or a time that’s no longer the present. The perspective you gain from examining the past can also be a liability; distance makes recollection of details hazy. Excavation sometimes requires research. I’ve had to check my facts with friends who’ve shared my past, only to discover that an event, or something someone said, wasn’t exactly the way I recalled it. A look at an old journal might reveal that instead of winter, it was actually the end of spring. I can think of times when examinations of an old photo or letter will not only correct an errant memory; an image can yield new information. I have a family portrait that hangs in my apartment. Despite the hole in my shirt and my worn cut-off jeans I’m smiling the smile of a kid who won the lollipop lottery. Such obvious delight refutes the present-day notion I have of me as an unhappy, out of place middle child who felt lost in a sea of siblings.

If you’re a modern actor taking on O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, knowing the lines won’t help unless you know the culture of saloons in turn-of-the-century New York. The work you do to take apart dramatic text (again, repetition, re-reading) to clarify its themes is the same method you employ to get to the crux of your own writing. Actors examine place, the better to locate the character in time and space. The five senses writing teachers encourage you to bring to life on the page? An actor has to incorporate them into whatever person he inhabits. In Romeo and Juliet, every character must locate the steamy, claustrophobia of Verona where the play is set. That atmosphere is an irritant that fuels the romance at the story’s center, and the series of tragedies surrounding it. If you’re working on Of Mice and Men, a mere glance at a photo by Walker Evans or Dorothea Lange will tell an actor everything they need to inhabit the emotional and physical world of the play; the paintings of Jacob Lawrence are blueprints for the early 20th-century Black lives rendered vividly by August Wilson.

The work you do to take apart dramatic text to clarify its themes is the same method you employ to get to the crux of your own writing.

My evolution from obsessed fan of entertainment to someone determined to live a show business life wasn’t swift. Growing up I was a passive audience with no real awareness that knowledge was imprinting, accumulating. Those early downloads of stuff other performers did were my first lessons in performance possibilities; later, in my teens, came those moments when I’d stand in front of a mirror, mimicking someone I’d seen on TV or in a movie. Theater training taught me how to build characters from scratch, rather than copy someone else. It also taught how to observe intentionally such things as timing, subtlety and honesty. My development as a writer feels parallel: I was an idiot at diagramming sentences but I was a voracious reader who could recognize a misspelled word, an incorrect tense or an off-the-mark subject-verb agreement. Most of us absorb our literary DNA that way; the rigorous examination of what other writers make of such matter happened for me only in graduate school. Learning how much models matter made me realize I’d been imbibing standards and practices for years. I acquired a new vocabulary, and the knowledge that if I was floundering, I could actually go to the masters for guidance. Not to necessarily copy, but to deepen my understanding of what I was attempting by learning how others had wrestled with the same issues. Everything’s been done before; we all yearn to be pioneers of our craft, but that won’t happen until you learn the rules you’ve set out to break.

One of the lessons models teach is the importance of choices. It could be a question of more or less: Why give a character a shopping bag of physical tics when a simple limp will give an audience room to fill in the blanks of that person’s history? A shout may show anger, but a whispered threat radiates power and control. Your job as an actor is to surprise, to bring the unexpected, which is why one actor’s Hamlet will be different from another’s. A writer also struggles with what to leave in or take out. A sex scene can be a challenge — yet some of the most effective scenes of intimacy describe not one sexual act. Maybe it’s the look in a lover’s eyes, or the way they exhale, the texture of someone’s skin or a rustle of clothing. Subtlety, saying more with less, could mean the difference between salaciousness and originality.

“The body is an instrument” is a hoary cliché that’s actually true. As an actor I rarely went out: one, because it was expensive and two, because every stage actor knows they have to take care of themselves to do the job well. You submit to a kind of cloistering. Late nights and negligible sleep wreck the body; loud clubs are good only for losing your voice. Actors need to be in peak condition both physically and mentally. The synapses need to be firing on all cylinders because in performances you must be ready for anything that happens, yet try to persuade an audience that what they’re seeing is unfolding as if for the first time.

So I nodded when, in a graduate writing seminar, I heard the writer/editor Susan Bell utter these words: “You need to be in good shape to write well.” Lightning in a bottle is what every writer strives to capture on the page. The mental energy needed to harness it, or withstand the slog of multiple drafts, may elude someone prone to a few too many the night before, or a bout of insomnia (hopefully about whatever it is you’re working on). It isn’t always practical to be at your best. We get sick, or have an argument on the train. Full-time jobs, relationships, all those things conspire to drain our physical capacities and color the circumstances under which we try to make work. Often the circumstances under which you write are not ideal — a lack of time may find you jotting things down on Post-its, or the back of a newspaper on your commute, all so you don’t lose what may turn out to be something you can use later, when things calm down.

When he launched his clothing line, Malkovich mused that “sometimes when you’re known for one thing, then it’s hard for people to suppose.” It’s true for the artist as well. As someone raised by parents who didn’t have the luxury to imagine, yet alone pursue more than one vocation in their lifetimes, I marvel at my audacity in shifting gears, even as I worry whether my acting knowledge is enough to feed the writer I want to be. And then I remember what Susan Cheever once said in a writing workshop: “We inhabit our words.” The only way for me to do that fully is to acknowledge all the places, and people, I’ve been. More than all the bits of wisdom I’ve been handed over the years, embracing, and believing in, the sum total of my experience may be the most important lesson I’ll learn.

Amber Tamblyn Wants You to Call Her Out

Posted on March 5, 2019March 24, 2019 by 007595

Amber Tamblyn was going through a rough patch. The night before her wedding to comedian David Cross, her agency called and dropped her as a client. She responded by throwing her most expensive shoes into the East River and pissing on a statue in a Brooklyn park. Two months later, sitting next to Cross at a bar, “I gulped down my bourbon and proceeded to tell my husband that I was pregnant but was planning to terminate the pregnancy,” she writes on the first page of her book, Era of Ignition.

The book continues thus: painful, surprising, funny, honest, incendiary. As Tamblyn’s personal life was flatlining, the country, too, was in a time of crisis and rebirth — the 2016 election, the #MeToo movement, and the recognition of centuries of inequality. Era of Ignition: Coming Of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution is a personal examination of what she considers a fourth wave of feminism in the US. The actress/director/activist explores workplace discrimination, the expectations of motherhood, sexual assault, male allies (and their shortcomings), white feminism (and its shortcomings), and how to show up in solidarity for women of color.

Tamblyn and I talked about reckoning with men in our lives, consuming problematic media, how social media can eliminate essential dialogues, and more.

Katy Hershberger: I so enjoyed the book and once I started I couldn’t stop reading. I loved how, in a lot of ways, it’s so funny and it sort of stands against this idea that feminism is humorless. Do you get that a lot, people being surprised that you’re funny?

Amber Tamblyn: No. I mean, maybe they do to a certain degree, especially because I think I’ve sort of not had such a sense of humor since Trump has been elected. I feel like many people feel that way.

KH: I feel that way.

AT: Yeah, I feel like all of my ability to laugh things off has gone out the window a little bit. But I do sense that that’s returning and I think in the writing process of this book, of returning to some of the old stories, especially pertaining to my experience in the entertainment business, they’re so morbid or dark that you can’t help but laugh at them, so the retelling of the story is framed sometimes in a humorous way.

I don’t think it’s that we should be erasing the art of problematic people but I do think it’s really important to be conscious of what we’re consuming.

KH: As someone in the entertainment industry, how do you think we should look at art that is problematic? I mean, pretty much everything in the last fifty to 100 years is at least a little bit problematic. It’s sort of easy to reject Woody Allen movies but for example, I’ve been re-watching Cheers and the Sam and Diane relationship doesn’t seem quite as sweet now. How do you, as someone within the industry and also a viewer, reconcile some of those things?

AT: For me it’s very complex but I think the power is in the awakening, is in the knowledge of the artist behind the work. And the very fact that you would see that show in a different light suddenly, I think is in and of itself very powerful. I don’t think it’s that we should be erasing the art of problematic people but I do think it’s really important to be conscious of it and be conscious of what we’re consuming, and sometimes consuming to a degree that is taking away from the stories and the narratives of other people who would never get a chance to be seen with a large machine behind them, like someone like a Woody Allen for instance. So again, I think everything is just in the acknowledgement of it and just being aware.

Honestly, I feel this large cultural pivot in a really important way towards not talking so much about problematic work or problematic people. I think we’ve had that for the last two years pretty prominently and to me, when people ask about that, this happened at an Emily’s List panel in Los Angeles that I did recently, a reporter asked that and I just felt like, I don’t want to talk about them or their problematic work. I want to talk about the show Pose or the work that Ava Duvernay is doing. I want to talk about the important artists of our time who are changing and re-sculpting the way stories are told, but also the way stories are valued. To me that is what’s most important. So sure, let the film Manhattan continue to be the classic that it always has been, but I’m not gonna sit around wasting time talking about it or talking about the man behind it. I know how I feel about him, most everyone I know knows how they feel about him, and there’s too many great — powerful and not powerful too — women who are trying to have that power. There are too many amazing artists that are on the rise right now and they deserve all of our attention.

KH: In the book you really thoughtfully discuss having these conversations with your husband directly too. And I think a lot of women now are trying to figure out how to talk about this with the men in our lives, especially if they’re well-meaning but perhaps misguided sometimes. How do you think we do that? How do we reckon with that, how do we teach them and forgive them for these mistakes they might have made?

AT: To me the work is in the conversation. I think that all real systemic change begins with a dialogue, not a monologue on either side, which means it’s not enough to just feel the way that you feel and believe what you believe and then say “why aren’t people just getting it.” And it’s also not enough for men to feel the way they feel and know “this is just what I believe and I don’t need to change.” Women too, it’s not just men that are a part of that larger problem, it’s a problem of power and it’s a problem of the way that power is dispersed. So to me the monologue happens when it’s just me standing over here going, “I’m a smart feminist, why can’t other people just figure it out, why can’t men just be better, why can’t certain women just be better.” Or when a man or somebody else is also doing that on the other side. Saying, “I’m over here and I know what I know and I believe what I believe, this is who I am and why can’t these people just figure it out and meet me halfway.” And instead I think it comes with really complicated, more difficult dialogues that should happen in person.

We’re a culture that fights a lot over the internet and has a lot of point of views on social media, and that’s fair and really valid and has certainly given a lot of people voices that didn’t have it before that deserve to be part of the cultural narrative, but at the same time I think when we’re having personal conversations with people that we love, with partners, with parents, with sometimes our own children, whether we are being taught or whether we’re doing the teaching, that has to happen at a dialogical level. It has to happen as an interaction where two people are being heard and two people’s thoughts and opinions and emotions can be valued at the same level and that’s almost impossible to do on social media, in any other place than in a real dialogue. I wrote those chapters because I’ve spent years now talking with women, especially women who voted for Hillary Clinton and felt like very fierce advocates of hers, who felt like they were not only not being heard about why her physical embodiment was so important, but also just not seen, they just didn’t value their opinions on the matter and so I wanted people to really think about when they get tired, when women get tired of having these conversations you’ve gotta remember that there are also other people who are tired of having those conversation with us as well. And so that means we have to keep having them. We just have to keep doing it. It’s hard, but that’s how change happens.

I get this sense like the greatest fear of white women is to be accused of being racist, or doing a racist thing.

KH: You mention one way in particular that we need to have these conversations, and you write about owning the title of white feminist so that it won’t own you. I was hoping you could talk a little more about what you mean by that.

AT: Yeah, I think this a really tough, again something that’s deserved of a dialogue, people sitting together and having those conversations. But I get this sense like the greatest fear of white women is to be accused of not being feminist, not being allies, being racist, or doing a racist thing. I think the most important thing that any person can do whether you’re white woman or a white man, whatever you are, is to put down the defense before you make a decision. And because your emotions immediately take over and you immediately want to defend yourself, which I understand, that’s a natural human instinct, anybody wants to do that, but the truth is that in the examination is where you will find growth. Personal growth. So pausing before you have that defensiveness and thinking “ok somebody has made this accusation or somebody has told me that I’ve hurt them, it is now my responsibility to take that seriously and to examine it and to think about the way my actions are not defined by my own morals and my own beliefs but defined by the experience of the other people who are not like me.” That is the most important thing that you can do. So by owning that word and talking about it not having an onus back is just by saying “I own the worst parts of me and I’m not afraid to be called out on them and in fact I appreciate being called out on them, I appreciate being told when I’m harming someone.” That is not a joy that anyone likes doing, whether it’s black women, whether it’s us, women as a whole having to constantly talk about things that men are doing wrong. I think the larger culture thinks we find some joy in that, but it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting for anyone. So the important thing to do is start to take some of that responsibility on ourselves, each of us individually, no matter who we are no matter where we come from.

I own the worst parts of me and I’m not afraid to be called out on them and in fact I appreciate being called out on them.

KH: Tell me a little bit about the decision to include an essay from Airea D. Matthews and an interview with Meredith Talusan.

AT: First of all they’re both dear friends of mine and I did feel [that] to write an essay about censoring marginalized voices or non-white voices would be slightly hypocritical unless I actually walked that walk instead of just talked that talk. And so it occurred to me that a large body of my readership is white and feminist and it would be really nice for them to not only hear a piece written by someone whose work I really admire like Airea D. Matthews, but also the experience of somebody like Meredith and to really see how the most important thing, as bell hooks would say, is that feminism should be for everybody. That to me is the ultimate gold standard. If we can say, look, there’s nonbinary people, there’s cis white men, there’s feminists of all kinds, all of these different types of people believe in feminism and call themselves feminists. It’s not enough just for women to do it, it just isn’t. It should truly be for everybody. So for me adding their voices in the body of the work was both making sure that it did feel like a fully rounded-out thought, that essay, it didn’t just feel partially finished. Also I think a really great way, within the body of the book when you’re having such a difficult conversation within an essay which actually isn’t even an essay, it is a monologue, to follow it up with a dialogue between two people like me and Meredith to show a literal dialogue happening about things that are difficult.

KH: It’s so interesting to be able to do that in print.

AT: Yeah, it was fun. We went and had a couple glasses of wine and put a tape recorder out and just talked.

KH: That sounds like the perfect way to do it.

AT: Yeah. Meredith’s perspective… I’ve known her for a while now and I’d never even thought about it that way. The privilege of having both experiences, so you’re really able to say what is and isn’t sexism, what is and isn’t misogyny from a literal perspective. Not just a feeling, but saying “this is the fact because I’ve been on both sides of those genders and I know how that feels.” That blew my mind when she said that.

KH: When Meredith said “I’ve watched this happen presenting as a male and now my voice is so much less heard.”

AT: Yeah exactly. And to also be able to then see the problems within any attempt to lift up voices that are not, again, white and female or white and cis, and you really get a different perspective that way. That’s what it’s all about. What I love, what I love about the world, what I love about this country in particular is that, despite the graveyard this country is built on, we still can rise to the occasion and harness these difficult conversations amongst us and really appreciate and learn to value our differences, the differences that are equal in importance and equal in power.

Despite the graveyard this country is built on, we still can harness these difficult conversations amongst us.

KH: It’s difficult for any survivors to talk about their #MeToo stories, but I’d image that for you as a public figure, knowing that so many people will hear it, both in your op-eds and your talk about James Woods in the past, as well as your stories in the book, what does it feel like to come out with yours knowing that it’s so public?

AT: Sickening. It made me feel sort of sick. Just because it’s difficult subject matter for me and it’s things I’ve never really talked about. But it’s really interesting too, even when I was writing the book, Random House’s legal department had to vet those stories. They had to make sure that they were true, and even in that felt like, you can’t just take me at my word. And you realize that it’s not just about being taken at your word, it’s about protecting all of us because we live in a litigious society where if men get accused of sexual assault or sexual violence, a lot of the time the result is that they sue. There’s intimidation practices, I’ve learned so much through my work with Time’s Up from a legal and legislative policy standpoint, it’s crazy. And so I get it, I at least have a different experience and a different understanding of why those things need to happen. But it was tough. Tough to write about, tough to go back to.

7 Novels About Being Broke

Posted on March 5, 2019February 11, 2021 by 007595

When I was young I used to play the Bank Game. I don’t remember the rules, only that whenever my parents took my sister and me to the house of certain family friends for dinner, us kids would run upstairs and form two competing banks. At some point during the game, the boys’ bank would become indebted to the girls’ bank, or vice versa, and a winner was declared.

In retrospect, the notion of four suburban Jewish kids play-acting as bankers while their parents eat dessert downstairs strikes me as a little on the nose. Nonetheless, I’ve always been fascinated with money — who has it, who doesn’t, and what people do when they get it. It’s a fascination that animates my novel, The Altruists, in which a father invites his estranged children home in an effort to recapture the inheritance left them by their late mother.

The Altruists belongs to a tradition of novels in which money, or its absence, is not only a plot point but a central theme. In Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens took readers inside Marshalsea, the London debtors’ prison where his own father had done time. Fred Vincy’s debt in Middlemarch threatens his relationship with Mary Garth, while Rosamond Vincy’s spending forces her husband, Dr. Lydgate, to take on debt of his own. But the Victorians don’t have a monopoly on debt. Here, right on time for tax season, are seven works of fiction that all explore what happens when the bill comes due.

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Gambling debts lie at the center of this slapdash work by the Russian master. But Dostoevsky’s novella is not just about debt; it was written in order to pay one off. In 1865, pursued by creditors, Dostoevsky sold the rights to his collected works to an editor. The contract stipulated that he would produce a new novel for the editor by November 1, 1866, or else the editor would acquire, for nothing, exclusive rights on all future work for the next nine years. Dostoevsky hired a twenty-year-old stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, and dictated The Gambler to her over the course of twenty-six days. (The two were later married.) The resulting work, which engages a subject with which the author was intimately familiar — roulette addiction — is messy, but remains memorable for its depiction of the gambler’s psychology. “At that point I should have walked away,” our narrator explains, “but within me was born a strange sort of sensation, a sort of challenge to fate, a sort of desire to give it a flick, to poke my tongue out at it. I bet the highest stake permitted, four thousand guilders, and lost.”

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Lily Bart also has gambling debts — and that’s not counting the money she owes Gus Trenor, the “red and massive” husband of her best friend Judy. For Lily, playing bridge “was one of the taxes she had to pay for [her hostesses’] prolonged hospitality.” She soon finds herself in the unusual position of being a broke socialite, desperate to maintain her lifestyle by marrying rich. Her friend and potential suitor Lawrence Selden sums up the situation: Lily is “so evidently the victim of the civilization which had produced her, that the links of her bracelet seemed like manacles chaining her to her fate.” Wharton’s breakout novel brilliantly, ruthlessly depicts Lily’s attempts not to succumb to that most unspeakably humiliating fate: downward mobility.

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

After being turned down for a number of jobs, including debt collector, the nameless protagonist of Hunger sets out wandering the streets. His clothes are shabby, he’s pawned his possessions, and he owes the landlady rent. He longs to write an article “about the crimes of the future or the freedom of the will, anything whatever, something worth reading, something I would get at least ten kroner for.” Eventually he sells an article, but the money spends fast, and soon he’s hungry again. Notable for its psychological acuity and its break with social-realist tradition, Hunger remains a compulsively readable novel, by turns humorous and harrowing, about the trials of a starving artist.

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Tommy Wilhelm is a failed actor, a failed salesman, a college dropout, and has recently separated from his wife, to whom he owes child support. “In the old days,” Wilhelm thinks, “a man was put in prison for debt, but there were subtler things now. They made it a shame not to have money and set everybody to work.” Wilhelm’s father refuses to support his son financially — “Why didn’t he? What a selfish old man he was! He saw his son’s hardships; he could so easily help him. How little it would mean to him, and how much to Wilhelm! Where was the old man’s heart?” — leading Wilhelm to hand over the last of his savings to Dr. Tamkin, a psychologist who plays the commodities market. But when Wilhelm takes a loss, Tamkin disappears, and Wilhelm finds himself in the midst of a great crowd on Broadway, seeing “in every face the refinement of one particular motive or essence — I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want.”

Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis

In a time of runaway inequality, subprime mortgages, and student loan debts so massive they can only be thought of as fictitious, it’s a wonder more contemporary American literature doesn’t engage directly with the question of money. One writer working to correct this oversight is Rebecca Curtis, whose excellent collection Twenty Grand (subtitled And Other Tales of Love and Money) is full of clear-eyed, unsentimental stories of bankrupt theme parks and bad waitressing gigs, told with biting humor and occasional forays into the fantastical. In the title story, the narrator’s mother spends an old Armenian coin, a family heirloom, when she can’t find any other change with which to clear a tollbooth. The coin, it turns out, is worth $20,000. The story’s brilliance lies in its fusion of a 19th century plot — the twist is like something out of Guy de Maupassant — with closely-observed depictions of contemporary middle-class life.

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

In 2008, as the country undergoes a financial meltdown, Lelah Turner finds herself evicted. Stuffing underwear into trash bags, she takes a quick inventory of her life. “Furniture was too bulky, food from the fridge would expire in her car, and the smaller things — a blender, boxes full of costume jewelry, a toaster — felt ridiculous to take along. . . . Where do the homeless make toast?” She moves into her mother’s empty house, which is worth one tenth of the $40,000 her family owes on the mortgage. Her siblings are torn on what to do with it: hold onto the property in case the market rebounds? Stop making payments and walk away? Flournoy’s National Book Award-nominated novel follows the Turners as they navigate a city in decline, from their house on Yarrow Street to the unemployment department’s “Problem Resolution Office” to a pawn shop called CHAINS-R-US where Lelah sells her childhood flute. The house itself functions as setting, character, and metaphor — for the Turners, Detroit, and the haunted American Dream.

Refund by Karen E. Bender

Bender’s collection, a National Book Awards nominee, tackles financial precarity in all its forms, but debt takes center stage in the standout title story, in which a couple sublets their subsidized Tribeca apartment for far more than it costs them to live there. When the Twin Towers fall, the couple’s traumatized tenant demands a refund. The negotiations soon get out of hand. “I am requesting $3,000 plus $1,000 for every nightmare I have had since the attack,” she writes. “You owe me U.S. $27,000, payable now.” The story’s startling climax ponders the debt of survival. “What did one owe for being alive?”

7 Unstable Narrators in Fiction

Posted on March 4, 2019March 21, 2019 by 007595

When I’m deep inside a writing project I have no time to read for pleasure. All my reading is about shoveling in fuel to power the work in progress. With Insomnia I decided to let my gut lead the way, which is how I came to end up feeding (at first, largely unconsciously) a psychic itch that expressed itself in an attraction to unstable narrators. Time and again, I’d find myself drawn to books where the narrative “I” qualified not so much as unreliable as deformed, handicapped from the start, or squished out of shape at some significant originary moment in the story. I was intrigued by the various ways in which a narrator’s reasoning got derailed or was uncomfortably pinched, or strayed down strange pathways, or was painfully present one moment, before dissolving. In such books, the author’s interest, whether primarily formal or made to subserve some other end, lies in manipulating the reader’s sense of what is real and what hallucinated. Although I’m generally not fond of being manipulated, when the stage-managing is achieved on the quiet and the effect is more like a seduction, I’m game.

Of the works I read while writing Insomnia, I loved the extreme and increasingly deluded subjectivity that was overlord in Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island, and the commitment to collage-as-method in Charles Simic’s fractured and poetic Dime-Store Alchemist. Mostly, though, I was interested in the perceptual spaces that narrative instability opens up (and plays havoc with), not least because that echoed what was taking place in my insomniac head. Demented with exhaustion at the time, my life had become unwieldy, day and night turned upside down, sense and non-sense intermingling; and there was a fault line of anxiety running through everything. I wanted to write a book that stayed — really stayed — with this unstable state, with difficulty and uncertainty and ambiguity, even if I wasn’t sure I’d last the duration. Plus I didn’t yet know if, whether amid all the instability, it would be possible to remain a trustworthy narrator.

Insomnia eventually emerged as a journey into darkness. It seeks to peer into the abyss — the dark night of the soul, forcing us into a reckoning with our shadow selves, yet it also trips lightly through the lucid experiences of being sleepless, from its edgy, often distorted highs, to the lighting glimpses insomnia gives us into the complexities, and contrariness, of our longings and our urge towards creativity.

Some of the books listed here I read while writing and I think their mark is visible in my book. But I read some of them later, because my head remained in that febrile, slightly fevered mode once I’d finished and I wanted my instability mirrored back at me.

A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

Leaving aside the cloying conceit around which the novel is structured (a fire lit every dawn until the last match in the box has been struck), Baker is the laureate of banality. His character’s night-thoughts chunter along like trains (rolling, visceral, mundane: we hear about the Cheerios he eats, the book he’s reading or program that’s on TV), and then they evaporate like steam. Baker evokes the unremitting ordinariness of insomnia through his middle-aged father of two’s pre-dawn mental meanderings. Life, for this character, is small-town good: there is friendship, activity, community. But it’s not good enough. He feels life is passing him by, that all is motion. Baker conjures this mild dissatisfaction very well, but at the same time he seems to be saying that the business of trundling through the everyday, enriching it with hope and memory, is what life is.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

This intense novel asks what wellness might look like if viewed in a morbidly literal light. Its 20-something narrator, blonde, pretty and bored, ducks out of the world in into herself, aspiring through medication, to achieve round-the-clock sleep. Moshfegh has effectively re-invented neurasthenic confinement for the 21st century, with a narrator who refuses to follow cultural prescription (except when she has blackouts and gets a bikini wax, or goes clubbing), and who is broken by impossible gender expectations, while contemptuous of friends who keep striving to meet them (like Reva, stuck in a joyless affair with a married man, and sucking it up working as an insurance-broker). Yet the best she herself seems able to do is shop online. Because she’s medicated, her grasp of things is often fuzzy. An inner grief is hinted at but never developed, smothered by a talent for acid observation. No one does dark like Moshfegh.

Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Ferrante is a genius — and in this novel her particular genius is for atmosphere. In charting a wronged woman’s descent into despair and loss of self, she generates so stifling a feeling of urgent, claustrophobic, raging madness that I found myself desperate for her to let me go, even as I was addictively turning pages. The book is darkly comic. In one unforgettable scene, the woman accidentally-deliberately feeds her cheating husband ground glass in his pasta; in another she attempts angry revenge sex with her hapless neighbor, straddling him in his apartment, but then limply wailing about her wretched husband. Ferrante is wonderful at women falling apart, painting the inside of their heads as crazed thoughts whirr, and almost convincing you with their bizarre rationalizations. Taut, tense, and full of very human pathos, Days of Abandonment is a superb study in altered states of being.

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

McCarthy’s novel follows a corporate anthropologist, known only as U, as he tries to map the way the world is trending for a super-secret mega-project designed to give an anonymous corporation a stranglehold over its competitors. “The Company” pays U handsomely for his consulting work without ever disclosing exactly what his report will be used for; while readers are given no more bearings than U, for whom, without guidelines, anything and everything feels relevant. Cue fascinating digressions on how memes work, on oil spills, parachuting accidents, the pros and cons of remote sex, museology, and much more. There is no plot building here, but McCarthy does build tension and hints vaguely at impending doom – and so while U becomes increasingly convinced he’s close to finding some grand unifying theory of everything, the reader is simultaneously convinced he’s losing his grip. It’s a very smart trick to pull off.

Compass by Mathias Énard

This weighty novel from the internationally-feted author of Zone, is set over the course of a single night, as its sleepless narrator revisits scenes from his academic career while pining for the unrequited love of his life — a protégé who overtook him. The novel consists entirely in reporting past events: their encounters with quirky scholars at European conferences, their late night tête-à-têtes in brasseries, their mutual love for the literature and music of the East, yet at the same time it offers a critique of Orientalism — the collective hallucination of an ‘other’ to set against our understanding of ourselves. Subtextually, Énard intimates, both in language and plot, that insomnia is all about bridge-building: between East and West, day and night, consciousness and the unconscious, and finally, with its persistent regurgitation of painful memories, past and present.

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

Brilliant as it is, the movie (which I came to first) doesn’t dampen the kooky, brazen feel of this book. It still feels fresh to me. Plus the prose drips sleep-deprived mania: “Three weeks without sleep, and everything becomes an out-of-body experience” says the unnamed narrator. In this insomniac phantasmagoria of a book, the reader is kept unsure who is who, and who is real, and whether is happening is or isn’t being dreamed up in the narrator’s hyped-up brain. I prefer Palahniuk’s bleakly comic depictions of support groups for the terminally ill (the narrator, who is not sick, attends them in order to feel something) to the anarchic goings-on around the novel’s eponymous club, where white-collar pen-pushers get beaten to pulp so they don’t walk through life numb, but where the dialogue can lapse into action-movie machismo.

The Tenant by Roland Torpor

A man known only as Trelkovsky rents a top-floor room in a Parisian tenement and is convinced his neighbors — knocking on walls, leaving shit on his doorstep — are out to get him. Waking in torment every night, he wonders at “the fragility of his existence.” Under the covers, he stares wildly at his body, cowering in the gloom, looking massive in its (hypnagogic) proportions. He thinks the room is shrinking: objects move, taps drip, heads thrust themselves through walls and sneer. One morning he wakes up dressed and made up as a woman. A parable of alienation and persecution (as though Torpor were re-working into fiction his real-life experience of Nazi oppression), this chilling tale slips seamlessly beyond the world of nightmare into horrifying supernaturalism.

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7 Unstable Narrators in Fiction

A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Compass by Mathias Énard

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Tenant by Roland Torpor

About the Author

“Scenes of Passion and Despair”

by Joyce Carol Oates

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

The Buddha in the Attic by Julie Otsuka

And The Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini

Salt Houses by Hala Alyan

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoevsky

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton

Hunger by Knut Hamsun

Seize the Day by Saul Bellow

Twenty Grand by Rebecca Curtis

The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

Refund by Karen E. Bender

A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

Compass by Mathias Énard

Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk

The Tenant by Roland Torpor

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