I love my husband, but if this whole thing falls apart it’s because of two words: I see. A few text conversations we’ve had recently:
Me: I’ll be home in 20.
Him: I see.
Me: I’m gonna ask J and K if they want to come by later.
Him: I see.
Me: Picking up spaghetti squash for dinner.
Him: I see.
He insists that this text response is entirely neutral. Akin to “Got it.” Not sure what planet he’s spent the last 30 years on, but I’m left with no choice but to try, every time I receive an “I see,” to believe that he isn’t passive aggressively attacking me from the other end of our mobile plan.
Purchase the book
I’m a sucker for fiction delivered in unconventional formats in general, but epistolary novels — novels told through letters, or these days, emails — are a favorite for the same reason that my husband’s texting makes me crazy: I love reading between the lines. They waited so long to reply — 10 whole minutes! What does it mean? Or, oh no, he didn’t use an exclamation point…he must be furious.
Milking the trivialities of digital communication — the time stamps, subject lines, sign-offs, and signatures — was one of my favorite parts of writing my novel When You Read This, a story told entirely in online dispatches.
Here, I’ve collected a list of my favorite epistolary novels (and one short story) in recent years — all with subtextual storytelling that I found compelling, clever and powerful.
At the beginning of the book Anders and Tina have never met. Will they? One desperately hopes so. This is the story of a friendship forged in the present day through the lost art of handwritten letters (sometimes sent as email attachments) — two strangers writing gorgeous sentences about the changing seasons of their lives. Both grandparents by the novel’s end, they have amassed heaps of wisdom, which they swap with humility and humor. Beautiful and haunting, with anecdotes of mermen and ghosts and ancient humans, this is a tale of two people who are not of the digital era finding a surprise connection within it.
Unlike Tina and Anders, at the novel’s start Frances and Bernard have met, once, at a writers colony, prior to the beginning of their literary correspondence, a slow-burning slide from heady discourse into romance. Deeply intellectual pen pals whose hunger to impress one another is present on every page, charging it with sexual tension, these characters inspired by Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell are self-conscious, clever, reflective, and questioning in grand, metaphysical ways. While Bernard’s 1950s high-brow misogyny was so on the nose it put me off at times, their conversations kept my interest, perhaps because they talk about all the stuff writers care about: the writing process itself, reading that inspires writing, other writers they know (the fun, gossipy part), and life’s Big Mysteries.
You know him from The Tenth of December, but my friend Emily Wulwick and I have been hosting two-person book release parties for him with since 2004. We sit across from each other sipping happy hour whiskey while reading his latest in silence. It’s introvert-socializing at its best. Fox 8, his 2013 short story published in solo hardback with funny and moving illustrations by Chelsea Cardinal, is vintage Saunders: playful, as violent as it is tender, and full of heart. A fox pens a slang-filled, phonetically-spelled appeal to humans asking us to please explain our species’ brutality. His letter includes the story of his loss of innocence, the moment of his disenchantment with the “yuman.” It’s a quick-read, an allegory for the vigor of the human spirit and drive to be kinder that will make you want to ban fox hunting.
On a vacation to Costa Rica, I took this book with me to my lounge chair. By the time I stood up, my thighs were lined red from the plastic strips and my cheeks hurt from laughing. Back in my room, where my laptop had begun translating all web pages into Spanish, I immediately ordered copies for everyone I know who reads fiction — at least I hoped I did, since I don’t speak Spanish (update: it worked). Julie Schumacher, thank you for the sunburn and belly aches. If you’ve ever asked for, written, or received an academic letter of reference, you will delight in this series of masterful, wry recommendations written by a disillusioned creative writing professor determined to find success for his star pupil.
Also about a writer and professor, Swimming Lessons is composed of one of my favorites kinds of letters — letters left behind, in this case, by the writer’s missing wife. Her letters have been placed in books belonging to him, breadcrumbs that also tell the story of their courtship and marriage. Will they lead to the discovery of her fate? The novel shifts between past and present, also telling the story of the couple’s now grown daughters struggling to understand what happened to their mother. Bonus — the books in which the letters have been placed bring unexplained literary meaning to the text, offering up a whole extra layer of meta literary sleuthing for super curious readers.
From the introduction I began second-guessing my presumption that I was reading an entirely fictional book — which is precisely what Rick Moody wanted me to do. I wondered if perhaps the novel was composed, in part, of nonfiction writing by a hotelier and an online reviewer of hotels. (I was pretty sure it was fiction — just with an itch of doubt.) It wasn’t until the last section of the book that I fully appreciated the purpose of this confusion and how it serves to further embody Moody’s — and his character Morse’s — experience that “the fraudulent can sometimes feel closer to the truth.”
This book broke my heart, then broke it again and again. When Celestial and Roy, newlyweds, are yanked apart by Roy’s wrongful conviction in rural Louisiana, they are forced to attempt to sustain their marriage via letter: Roy, writing from prison, and Celestial, writing from their Atlanta home. Their letters will leave you unable to turn off the light to stop reading, even after his incarceration is overturned. Because what has it made of their marriage? And then there are lines like this: “The vast generosity of women is a mysterious tunnel, and nobody knows where it leads.” My copy is bulky in the bottom corner where I earmarked all the pages containing writing like this sentence to re-read later. It’s too good to read just once.
The miracles of creation are scant comfort when you’re rushing your kids to daycare and boarding a sluggish and sweaty BART, as Lydia Kiesling did a few Thursdays ago. She swept into Bica Coffeehouse in Oakland, and if this were a women’s magazine, I’d tell you what she was wearing. Let’s just say she was smiling, that she radiated warmth, that she looked glad to be out in the sunshine, glad to have arrived, glad to sit down with a cup of coffee.
Though I’d never met Kiesling, I knew her work as editor of The Millions, and had been following the reviews of The Golden State, her debut novel about Daphne Nilson, a young mother in San Francisco whose Turkish husband is stuck abroad, trapped in an immigration nightmare. Fed up with the petty wranglings of her academic workplace, Daphne packs her car and her 18-month-old, Honey, and heads back her family’s home in the rural, forgotten reaches of northeastern California. What follows are days of disoriented single motherhood, as Daphne realizes that the classic road trip, the great American escape, isn’t quite the same with a toddler in tow.
I spoke with Lydia Kiesling about juggling writing and motherhood, the difference being an editor and a writer, and the danger of nostalgia.
Shanthi Sekaran: As editor of The Millions, you’ve been very engaged with the literary world, but this is your first novel. How is being a novelist new for you?
Lydia Kiesling: It feels very new and strange. The encouraging thing is that pretty much anyone writing a first novel is unprepared. There was that element of I don’t really know how this done and then — because I’d been writing about books and doing things like book reviews — I was like where do I get off doing this, after so long reading other books and being very picky about whether I liked them or not? Now I’m like wow, I was such an asshole. Writing a book is so hard.
SS: So how did this novel come into being? How was it born?
LK: I wrote other things for years. I started writing in 2009 and I’d say probably around like 2014, I let myself fantasize that writing a book would be possible. What had been daunting about it was one, just the finances. How do you just not work and write a book? And the second thing was, I think for any writer, especially if you don’t go to an MFA program — well actually I know a lot of writers who go to MFA programs who don’t receive a lot of guidance on the career stuff, on how to become a writer, how to build a career. It’s astonishing to me that that is not something that is provided. So the mechanics of how you would be a novelist seemed very opaque.
I think what really spurred the novel was when I had my first daughter, I started wanting to write things for that experience that I didn’t necessarily have a vessel for. All the book reviews I’ve written are very personal, and they’re almost in some way an excuse for writing about some of the things I wanted to write about. So I first started writing these vignettes — it was a universe that I recognized, but I had taken some liberties with it. And then I was like, Okay, well I think this could be a book. What would this as a book look like?
What had been daunting about writing a book was the finances. How do you just not work and write a book?
SS: I thought it was an interesting choice, and brave in some ways, to center motherhood in the way this book does, because it’s not just about the emotional journey of motherhood — that’s what most motherhood novels are about — but the endless, on-the-ground minutiae of motherhood. Can you talk about deciding to center motherhood in this way?
LK: Part of it is a form of narcissism, if you think you’re the star of your own movie that is your life. You know, those things, they can seem like such big struggles, and you can talk about them because you know that they’re just the most mundane things that people are dealing with, with small children, at all times, and it’s not that big of a deal. But it’s also, like, why does it fill you with such rage, or futility? And there’s something funny to me about having these epic dramas happen all the time, and there’s no descriptions of them out there, or place to put them. So in one sense, I was honoring that struggle, but then also, one thing that really strikes me, when I talk to women and men who have children, is the specificity of knowledge you have about your children, and how to make the day work. It’s this wealth of knowledge, but it’ll just go away. It’s this expertise that parents have in that moment of parenthood, and then it goes away. So I was describing that, putting it on the page and showing, for better or worse, what it really is. And I knew it was going to be sort of tedious to read about some of those things, but it’s also a tedium that people are living every single day, and why do we not have a little taste of that in fiction? Especially now that people are talking about auto-fiction and writing personal experiences. That’s a very personal experience, and I wanted to document that.
SS: So you saw the parenting material as possibly tedious, but decided to put it in there anyway. Can you talk a little about what we, as writers, ask of our readers? How do you, as writer, make the decision to include material that a hypothetical reader might find “tedious”?
LK: I think books have hugely important jobs to do in societies — both contemporary and future societies — as a means for communicating ideas and information about places and cultures and aesthetic fashions and modes of being. But as a reader I still count on them, in my heart of hearts, for providing joy and escape. And it was hard to reconcile a lot of what I found myself putting in my book, things that felt like important information about a particular person’s experience of motherhood at a particular moment in time, with my sense that books should be fun and enjoyable for readers. I was constantly living in that tension. So I thought about books I love that have sort of long languorous bits that feel necessary and important, even though I personally find those parts slightly boring. I don’t think I solved the problem so much as learned how to ignore it to a certain extent while I was writing!
SS: Going the opposite way, you wrote about stuff that wasn’t in your experience, like being married to a Turkish man, as Daphne is; having an international marriage, a cross-cultural marriage. You said you were a little hesitant about trying to do that. I had to do that, big time, in Lucky Boy, so I’m always interested in hearing about how other writers take on stories outside of their own experiences.
LK: There are so many conversations about what is and is not allowed. Things are allowed constantly. If you’re a writer who cares about doing a good job, it should be okay — with some trepidation — to really just write about anything that you haven’t done. And it’s not to say that you can’t find it within yourself to imagine it, but you know, writing about a place that you haven’t been, it’s weird to do that. And it should feel weird. So first I tried to avoid the problem almost by saying, He’ll be just like my husband I have now, except he’ll be from Denmark! And that was just really silly.
Then I started thinking, Well why not write about someplace you did live, and — at one time, at least — spoke the language?Why not just do that? And I’m still not settled that it’s correct, but I can say that I honestly used what I had experienced and seen (in Turkey) to the best of my ability, and that in the world I made in the book, it checked out. I had a friend who was Turkish read some parts, especially things with class. Like, in America, if someone told you what college they went to, you could immediately make some assumption about what their background is. And those are the types of things where you could live somewhere for decades and never necessarily know. And so initially, Engin went to a university and I asked her, “Do you think this university makes sense?” And she was like, “No, from what you described, I think it would make more sense if he went to this school.” It was such a small detail in the book, but it meant a lot to me. I used what I had and tried to be very conscientious in asking Is this something I saw? When I described what a family was like, Is this a family I might have met? And then I found someone whose opinion and judgement I trusted to read over some stuff to, you know, make sure my (Turkish) grammar wasn’t messed up.
And then in terms of the marriage stuff, I think marriages that are based on love and affection have a sort of through line. My husband was like, “I noticed that you wrote me out of this,” and I was like, “No I didn’t! Where do you think the ideas I have about the culture of family and how you feel about someone come from? I get those from you.” So, he’s in there. Just sublimated.
Books have hugely important jobs to do in societies — both contemporary and future societies — as a means for communicating ideas.
SS: The memories that Daphne has about Turkey are so beautiful and so beautifully told. Did those come from your own nostalgia?
LK: Definitely. Turkey invites so much “East meets West” romanticizing and Orientalizing, so on the one hand, I’d be writing about the Bosphorous and thinking, “Ugh, this sucks,” but actually, the Turks I know feel the same way — especially about Istanbul. I’ve never met a person who’s been there who isn’t like, This is such a special place, and I think it’s okay to say that some places are special. So that’s one thing I sort of struggled with. There weren’t that many times when I had to tone down the romanticizing but there’s something wistful about the book, I think, because even though Daphne’s life just seems so difficult to me, I admire her, because she made a choice, whether she thought of it as a choice or not, that was different from what I would have done.
When I was in Turkey, I came back to California because I needed to be closer to my mom and my grandparents. I didn’t have the courage to live somewhere completely different from where my family and friends lived. I mean, there are lots of terrible people who expatriate all the time, and there’s no need to admire them, but there is something very brave and interesting about someone who says, Oh I’m just going to marry someone whom I have no cultural affinity at all with. Those couples are always interesting to me. And I think a lot of people in those couples would laugh at this idea that there’s curiosity or romance about it, because they’re like Oh, I love this guy, and we now live together.
SS: Going back to the chapters with Honey, I laughed out loud many times. The church scene, for example, was hilarious. There were sections where you’d run through everything Daphne does in the morning — it was this endless, breathless list, more things than most people do in an entire day, and then Daphne says, “It’s 8:15 a.m.” I was like Oh my god, those endless days with a toddler. Can you talk about the book’s humor?
LK: Humor is very much a part of my sensibility. It’s a coping mechanism and also a defense. And so I wanted to have a little bit of slapstick in there, but I worried at the same time that It would be a Trainwreck thing of quirky white woman being funny about their own foibles and there is something revolutionary about that in some small instances, but it can be too much. So at some point, I was like, Am I being too ‘funny’ about this? But it’s part of my parental coping. I can get very wrapped up and in despair about a power struggle with a toddler, but when I’m being my best parenting self is when I feel like I can see the humor as it’s happening. And so, even though, you know, the child is barfing, you’re just like This is funny, you’re little, you don’t know what you’re doing, and I’m beside myself. Let’s laugh. I’m already asking the reader to do a lot in the book, and so some humor — assuming the reader shares my sense of humor — felt kind of necessary, to bring some levity.
I knew that our immigration system was messed up, but I was not expecting that we would have just the pure violence that is still happening now.
SS: Who was your favorite character to write?
LK: Daphne’s obviously the closest to me, and I actually got sick of her. I was already in my own head, and she was just the worse, more stressed version of myself.
I actually had a huge amount of anxiety about Alice [an elderly woman who befriends Honey and Daphne], because Alice is based on a real person. The book is dedicated to Phyllis Hodgson and she was this woman married to a scholar of Islamic Studies named Marshall Hodgson, who wrote The Venture of Islam. He died in 1968 and is very famous in this very limited Islamic Studies context in America, and so I wrote my MA thesis about him. And so I got kind of obsessed with him. He also had a very tragic personal life. He had three children and all of them died young, and two of them were born with a terrible neurological illness. So I kept thinking as I was reading all this, What about his wife? I would ask all these academics, “What happened to his wife?” and they’d be like “Hmmm, I don’t know.” And then I found out that she was alive, and I met her, and she lived in Wisconsin. She was in a facility, a lovely place in rural Wisconsin, but it wasn’t her family who was caring for her. It was friends and neighbors who had known her for years and loved her, and so I met with them, and met her, and somehow she just got into the book. But I was like, This person is alive, she never did any of these things [that Alice does]. It’s not her, but clearly anyone who knows her would be like, This is her. So for a while, I was thrashing around about that and was really asking myself, Well what is fiction, what’s okay and what’s not okay?
She passed away — not conveniently — but it did make some things slightly less anxious, because she’s with the universe now. I initially had more of her, a first person from her perspective, but because I had this anxiety, I didn’t commit and I didn’t go hard enough. I was hedging about it, which was very weird and impersonal, and so Claudia, my agent was like “Everything’s working for me except that. Take those parts out.” And it was so easy to do it, that it was so obvious (the Alice sections) didn’t belong. They were like a weird tumor hanging off the book. It got snipped.
SS: Poor Alice.
LK: Yeah, and you’re not supposed to read your Goodreads reviews, but I did read a Goodreads review that referred to her in a way I just love. It was like “You get a glimpse of her that reveals a whole other picture, like the moon, when you see just a sliver of the moon.” So I was like, I can be satisfied with that. And then actually, I got an email from someone who had cared for her, and they were like, “You really got her.” That’s the email that’s meant the most to me. So, I was the most fascinated with her, but there was a lot hesitation mixed up in it.
SS: So they knew Alice was Phyllis Hodgson without you telling them? They could just see it?
LK: Yeah, and I think people were generally confused, because I was doing this almost investigatory work to track her down and speak with people who’d known her, because I was doing this simultaneously to starting the book, and I wasn’t sure they were going to be the same project, but it was important for me to know as much about her as I could know about her husband. So people go the sense that I’d be working on some article about her. One professor I talked to was like, “So, you didn’t write the book about the Hodgsons?” I was like, Well, it’s in a different — I made a U-turn. But she’s still very much there. And some of the things Alice says — I can’t really overstate how difficult this woman’s life was, and there are a lot of people who have terrible things that they’re just living with, and just walking around among us, and it’s amazing that they’re able to do anything. It really stuck with me. One of the things she said when I met her was “I had babies and it railroaded my life.”
SS: I mean, that’s kind of what this book is about. Being railroaded by babies. What is it like for you being a mother and a writer. How have you negotiated that?
LK: Well I’m really glad you asked that, because with the writing thing, the questions seems critical, because writing is so non-remunerative, so what do you do about the finances? And it turns into sort of a Marxist view of parenting. I mean, I do believe that I owe this book entirely to having my first child. Part of it is coincidence. Just like with any other job, years where you’re advancing in your career coincide with the years you’re having kids, if you’re having them. But, I think there’s an urgency (my first child) gave me, a sense that I’m feeling so many different things. My tolerance for everything has changed. How do I need to rearrange my life to make it more tolerable to me?
I do know there are people who write like, during nap times, and they don’t have dedicated childcare.
You always hear about people just really making it work with ridiculously difficult situations, “On Monday I have half an hour, On Tuesday I have two hours.” People are really making it work. I think that is wonderful. I think I am not able to do that. I need writing to be a job the same way another job would be.
SS: The playwright Andrea Dunbar used to lock her children in their bedroom so she could write.
LK: I think having two children has made it slightly complicated, but I have no regrets. I’m going to make it work. I might just have to adjust my expectations of what is realistic in terms of output and time and how long it might take me to write another book.
SS: Speaking of which, you wrote this book during the Obama administration. I feel like every book, when it comes out into the world, starts a conversation with the world it’s in. Can you talk about the conversation The Golden State is having with our country now?
LK: Well, the sort of obvious way is through immigration. The green card fuckery that happens in the book is based on real fuckery that I have known, that people I know have experienced, but then once you talk to anyone about it, it’s just like story after story after story and the people I end up talking to are, like myself, educated, and they have all the resources and wherewithal to navigate the system, and still it is absolutely opaque and difficult. So that’s the main thing. I knew that our immigration system was messed up, but I was not expecting, when I wrote this book, that we would have just the pure violence that is still happening.
I think of the Islamophobia aspect of the book, which took place in the summer of 2015. That was before San Bernardino and Bataclan, so it’s only going to get ramped up in the world of the book. In terms of the world stage, the book is not hopeful. I think there is individual hope that happens, but it’s also before the attempted coup in Turkey. So the conversation it’s having with the world right now is like Well, things don’t seem great.
Sometimes when I was writing I was like this is how a person on the left would describe, disdainfully, people in small towns who have conservative politics. But just like with everything else in the book, I did a lot of fact checking and reading of letters to editors of newspapers. I’m on a mailing list for the State of Jefferson, so I read those things, and that’s reflected in the book. Since it came out, people have written me who live in the country where the is based, and they’re like “I run a progressive place.” There’s a lot happening. I think it’ll continue to change. There are other kinds of stories that can be told about rural California that are not just like We’re mad. But We’re mad is definitely part of the equation.
SS: We’re mad, but also there are individuals who move through those spaces the way Daphne does. The world isn’t great, but here’s a woman and her baby, down on ground-level.
LK: Yeah, and I wish there was a way we could separate the decline paradigm that wasn’t just they’re mad and they’re Republicans. When my mom goes up to her hometown, it’s sad for her, because it’s not the same place. You can acknowledge that and be sad about it and be careful not to just fall into nostalgia for this imagined, great time that existed in the 50s when everyone was happy, because we know that’s not true. But there are people who justifiably feel like things have changed for the worse.
There’s a lot of romance wrapped up in this nostalgia, but a lot of that is violent, harmful romance.
SS: I see a parallel between that small town nostalgia and the nostalgia Daphne feels for Turkey. And yet she’s stuck in the small-town nostalgia.
LK: White people love to be like Here’s my ancestry, in a really stupid way, where it’s just like no, no one cares about your German great-great grandfather. That’s not a thing. But there is this feeling: People like to have roots somewhere, and feel like this is my place. Like Daphne. There’s a lot of romance wrapped up in this nostalgia, but a lot of that is violent, harmful romance, like with any place. It’s about the subjugation and murder of indigenous people. The cowboy myth. That’s what [the West is] built on. So there’s the moral underpinnings of that. But there’s also the I like to have nice restaurants near me and many conveniences open late, and I don’t want to live in a very small town. So it’s kind of like, Okay, you want roots? Here they are.
“To Make Men Free” and “Off to the Movies”, an Excerpt from The Cassandra
by Sharma Shields
“To Make Men Free”
I was at the mercy of the man behind the desk. I needed him to see my future as clearly as I saw it. He held four pink digits aloft, ring finger belted by a fat gold band, and listed off the qualities of the ideal working woman.
“Chaste. Willing. Smart. Silent.”
I swallowed his words, coaxed them into my bloodstream, my bones. I crossed my ankles and pinned my knees together, morphing into the exemplary she.
The man eyed me with prideful ownership. “Frankly, Miss Groves, you’re the finest typist we’ve interviewed. Your speed and efficiency are commendable.”
I opened up my shoulders, smiling. “They named me Star Pupil at Omak Secretarial.”
“You’re not a bad-looking girl, you know that?”
“Thank you. How kind of you.”
“A little large. Plumper than some. But a nice enough face.” The man smoothed open the file on his desk. “Good husband stock at Hanford, Miss Groves. Plenty of men to choose from.”
In my lap my hands shook like tender newborn mice. Such sweet, dumb hands. Calm down, you wild darlings. I focused on the man’s sunburnt face. It reminded me of a worm’s face, sleek, thin-lipped, blunt. He was handsome in a wormish way, or wormish in a handsome way. If I squinted just a little, his head melted into a pink oval smudge.
We spoke in a simple recruiting office in my hometown of Omak, Washington. All of Okanogan County was abuzz with the news of job openings at Hanford. It was like this, too, when they started construction at the Grand Coulee Dam. We were patriots. We wanted to throw ourselves into the enterprise. Men and Women, Help Us Win! Work at Hanford Now, the Omak-Okanogan Chronicle urged. I’d snipped out the newspaper article and folded it into my pocketbook, away from Mother’s prying eyes. I was here in secret, and the secrecy delighted me. Goose pimples bubbled up on my forearms and I tapped my fingers across them, tickled by how they transformed my girl flesh into snakeskin.
The room we sat in was crisp and clean, beige-paneled walls, pine floors, plain blue drapes. A war poster hanging behind the recruiter’s worm-head featured a young, attractive woman in uniform, crimson lips, chin nobly lifted, blue eyes snapping and firm, their color enhanced by the stars and stripes rippling behind her.
Her proud expression spoke to me. I’m here, Mildred. I can help you.
I smiled at her. I’m here, too. For you. For all of us.
Aren’t we lucky, her eyes said. If anyone can save them, it’s you.
Above her strong profile it read,
TO MAKE MEN FREE
Enlist in the WAVES Today
“You will share the gratitude of a nation when victory is ours.”
I, myself, wasn’t joining the WAVES, I was joining the civilian force, the Women’s Army Corp — the WACs — but the work at Hanford was just as crucial for the war effort. With the woman in the illustration I shared a gallant dutifulness. I mimicked her then, holding my chin at the same noble angle, lifting my eyebrows with what I imagined was an arcing grace. I wanted to show the recruiter that I was just as earnest and eager as she was to join the fray.
“You’re squirming,” the man said. He smiled with concern, “Are you uncomfortable?”
I assured him I was fine, just excited, and I lowered my gaze. I wore my only good blouse, cornflower blue, and an old wool skirt, brown. The shoes were Mother’s and pinched my feet. One day I planned to buy my very own pair of wedged heels. I’d circled a black pair in the Sears Christmas catalog that I very much liked. They looked just like the famous movie star Susan Peters’s shoes. When Mother had found the page in the catalog, she scolded me for marking it up with ink.
Once, in downtown Spokane, just after we’d visited our cousins, I saw her — Susan Peters! — walking in a similar pair. She was graceful, athletic. I waved at her and she waved back as though we were dear friends. I wanted to speak to her but Martha, my older sister, pulled me away, telling me I was acting like a starstruck silly boob, and I had better stop it before I did something we’d both regret.
Don’t embarrass me, Martha had hissed. Act normal for once, please.
The recruiter cleared his throat, shuffled the papers on the desk, and continued his summary of the Hanford site. I chided myself for my woolgathering. I fought the urge to slap myself and leaned forward clutching my elbows. I hoped I looked alert and intelligent.
“Hanford is a marvel,” the man said, “nearly seven hundred square miles in size, smack dab on the Columbia River. We started construction last year and we’re darn well near finished, which is a miracle in itself. You’ll see what I mean when you see the size of the units. These are giant concrete buildings. They make your Okanogan County courthouse look like a shoe box. We’ve brought in more than forty thousand workers to live at the Hanford Camp, so believe me when I say you’ll have plenty of men to choose from.” He winked here, and I gave a small nod of appreciation. “The work being done is top secret. Frankly, I’m not sure what it’s all about — mum’s the word — but everyone says it will win us the war. I do know that a top United States general is involved, and some of the world’s finest scientists. Construction is being overseen by DuPont. But even these details you must keep top secret, Miss Groves.”
He handed me an informational sheet, and I read it self-consciously, keeping my back straight and my head slightly lifted so that I didn’t give myself, as my sister liked to tease me, too many chins.
To accommodate nearly 50,000 workers, the Hanford Camp is now the third- largest city in Washington State:
8 Mess Halls
110 barracks for men ( for 190 persons each) 57 barracks for women
21 barracks for Negroes
7 barracks for Negro women Plus family huts and trailers
Overall: 1,175 buildings in total for housing and services
There’s a lot of us, so remember: Loose talk helps our enemy, so let’s keep our traps shut!
“What a bold undertaking,” I told him. “What an honor it would be to work there.”
His face crinkled cheerfully. “Regarding your application, I don’t have many reservations, Miss Groves. Your background check is clean. You’ve signed the secrecy documents. The only concern raised was about your questionnaire. A few of your answers were — how shall I put it? Unique.”
For a moment my future darkened. I had agonized over my application. I couldn’t imagine anything amiss.
“For example,” he said, lifting a sheet of paper up to his nose, “your response to the request for relevant job experience, if any, was, ‘I have imagined myself in a giant number of jobs, some of them impossible, some of them quite easy, and in my imaginings I’ve always done well by them, impossible or no.’ This statement struck some of the committee members as a wayward answer, Miss Groves. Would have been better to just state ‘No relevant job experience.’ Most of the women answering the charge are lacking in it, you realize.”
“Yes, I understand.” My eyelid violently twitched.
“And then there was your response to the question about your weaknesses. You wrote, and I quote, ‘I have made a big mistake in my life and it haunts me. Sometimes when I make a mistake this large it stays with me for a long time. I wish I got over things quickly.’”
I waited for him to continue, holding my breath. I thought of Mother, of the splash and crunch of bone when I pushed her down the bank into the river. I wondered if he could see her shadow flicker across my face, hear faintly the sound of her muffled scream.
“Lastly, when you were asked if there was anything you wished to add, you wrote, ‘I only wish to say how confident I am that I will be the best fit for this position. I have seen myself there as clear as day. I dream about it. I know for a fact that you will hire me. I will not let you down.’” He looked up at me with his smooth worm’s face, his graying eyebrows raised slightly. He seemed more amused than troubled.
“I don’t need to tell you,” he continued, “that we need workers with very sound minds for this position, Miss Groves. We need reliability and obedience. Your confidence struck some of our committee as arrogance. And one or two of the men wondered about your rationality.”
“Omak Secretarial told us to be forthright and self-assured in our applications, sir. If I overdid it, I apologize.”
The recruiter cocked his head. “Personally, I found it refreshing. You should see some of the anxious girls we get in here. A bit of confidence is a good thing.”
I stayed silent, balancing the line of my mouth on a tightrope of strength and humility. I knew better than to tell him the truth, that I had dreamed about Hanford, that I had seen myself there. I had, in fact, sleepwalked into Eastside Park, awaking with a start beside a grove of black cottonwoods, the trees shedding puffs of starlight all around me, the wind whispering through the branches of my fate. He would hire me because I had envisioned it, and my visions always came true in one form or another.
As if sensing my memory, the recruiter’s face tightened. “You can no doubt imagine the outcome if secrets were shared with the feeble-minded.”
I leaned forward gravely. “Our very nation would be destroyed, sir.”
The recruiter’s visage softened into an approving pink mud. I’d made a good impression. He sat back in his chair and smiled.
“The truth is,” he said, “when I read your comments I thought, now here’s someone who really gets it. The confidence might bother some of my colleagues, but these times call for backbone. For attack! We should bomb those Germans to smithereens, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “most certainly. Bombs away.”
“You’re an exceptional sort of girl, Miss Groves, a skilled typist and a clear patriot. You won’t meet a more outstanding judge of character than myself, and given your excellent response in person, I’m happy to stamp my approval on your form.” He grinned at me, the grin of a generous benefactor. “I’m hiring you as a typist for Hanford. Welcome to the Women’s Army Corps.”
I closed my eyes for a moment and took a deep breath. My limbs buzzed with elation. “Oh, sir,” I said, opening my eyes. “I’m so grateful.” I’d never stepped foot outside of Omak, but now I’d be a sophisticated, working woman at Hanford, joining the fight with the Allies and making the world a better place. I teared up, not sure if I should lean across the desk and shake his hand or if I should just stay rooted to my seat, trembling with destiny.
“I’m thrilled. You have no idea.”
“I tell every young person who comes through here, ‘Stand tall. You’re a hero.’”
He lifted gracefully from his chair as though showing me how to do it. I rose, too, more clumsily.
“Stand tall, Miss Groves. Shoulders back, chest forward. There you are. Well, almost. Good enough, anyway. Of course I can’t tell you the particulars of the work, but let me just say, you’ve chosen a lofty vocation. Selfless girls like you are one of the many reasons we’ll win this war.”
At the word selfless, I heard in the stunned silence of my mind Mother’s dark laughter.
He offered me a sheaf of introductory papers and a voucher for a bus ticket. I accepted these, allowing his warm hand to grasp my elbow. He guided me toward the door and then released me.
“You’ll make some young man very happy one day, Miss Groves. Patriotic girls always do. Whatever you do, hold on to that innocence.” Imagining Mother and Martha overhearing this description of me was almost more than I could bear. They would fall upon the recruiter and tear him apart for his mistake.
“I’ll hold on to it,” I said. “I promise.” “Good girl. And good luck.”
I left his office a new woman, a WAC, a worker, a patriot, a selfless innocent — a warrior ready for battle.
“Off to the Movies”
I stopped at the drugstore on the way home and bought myself a cola and a tube of red lipstick. Mother gave me a small allowance once a month. I’d used almost all of it on these two items, but I wouldn’t need her money now, I’d soon be making my own. Old Mrs. Brown, who ran the shop, peered at the lipstick tube and grimaced.
“A whore’s color,” she said. “Tell me this isn’t for you, Mildred, dear.”
I tucked my chin. “It’s a gift for a friend.”
She handed it back to me. “You shouldn’t spend your money on such things during wartime. God prefers a pale mouth. You don’t want men to get ideas.”
I opened my pocketbook and counted out the change. “Thank you, Mrs. Brown.”
“Take care of yourself, dear girl. Send your mother my regards.”
I drank my cola on the way home, accidentally smashing the bottle into my front teeth so that my whole head buzzed.
I forgot to tell Mrs. Brown good-bye.
She would scold me for leaving, but what if I never saw her again?
Silly Mildred! You’ll see her again. Of course you will.
I quickened my pace, half-walking, half-skipping. It was pleasantly hot and dry and the cola was cold and fizzy in my throat. I opened up my arms and spun about, just once. Another spin and I would lift off of the sidewalk and corkscrew into the fat diamond-bright sky.
Omak was a small town nestled in the foothills of the Okanogan Highlands. Four a couple of short months in the spring, it was a very pretty place, verdant and alive with birdsong, but the winters were harsh and the summers harsher, so dry that you inhaled the heat like a knife. Canada was a short drive to the north. Hanford, I’d learned, was three hours south, in a similarly arid place. This would give me an advantage, accustomed as I already was to the ungracious environment of Central Washington State.
The sum total of the neighborhoods in Omak were modest, and our street was no different. We lived in a white house on the busy main road, surrounded by other small, simple houses. What set our home apart was the large garden bordering the yard, which Father, before his death, tended obsessively. Throughout my childhood it teemed with perennials, allium, aster, lupine, and coneflower, and the north-facing plot grew heavy and green in the summer, laden with vegetables and fruits. On the weekends, he would sell bulbs from his abundant perennials, putting out a handwritten sign, bulbs, ten cents a dozen, and cars would pull up all day long to purchase them. I liked to sit in the lawn in my bare feet and watch people unfold from their vehicles, usually with exclamations of awe or envy at my father’s green thumb.
Our town bordered the westernmost edge of the Colville Reservation, made up of various tribes like the Nespelem, Sanpoil, and Nez Percé. Our region was most famous for the Omak Stampede and the Suicide Race, where men would urge horses down the perilous banks of Suicide Hill, plunging into the Okanogan River and crossing in a dead sprint to the finish line on the other side. Our neighbor, Claire Pentz, was the rodeo publicist, and she started the race in 1935 as a way to drum up excitement for the stampede. She said it was inspired by the Indian endurance races, and she called it a cultural event. It was a thrill to watch the wet horses gallop with their riders the last five hundred yards into the rodeo arena, but the year before my father died was also the year the race killed two horses, one from a broken neck and another from a gunshot to the head after she broke her leg, and then Mother refused to attend.
After that, some of our neighbors muttered, “The barbarity of the savages,” but Father argued with them about it.
“Blame Claire,” he would say. “She’s the one who made this, all for rodeo money. And she’s not Indian.”
But I knew he secretly looked forward to watching the races, and he was proud of the toughness of the men here, even though he would never willingly ride a horse down Suicide Hill, or even canter on a horse bareback, being constructed of what he once described to me as “sensitive bird bones.”
No one who saw me would accuse me of having bird bones, but I was sure my whole self was cluttered with them, my brain and my heart each their own nest of delicate ivory rattles that jostled and clicked together when I moved too quickly. As a young girl, I ached over paper cuts and whined when I lifted anything too cumbersome. A casual insult — eager beaver, fathead, fuddy-duddy — pained me like a toothache for days. My mother was made of tough bear meat: solid-fleshed, big-backed, firm as she was certain. Her shoulder-length hair was so dark brown it was nearly black, and she wore it styled closely to her face, without any of the rolls or curls that were popular at the time. Despite her complaining, I always had the impression that little bothered her — insults, mistakes, the stupidity of other people — she took nothing personally. Life, I assumed, would be easier to navigate with an unforgiving nature.
It doesn’t matter now, I told myself, returning to this ordinary street in Omak on this hot summer day. I’m going away from all of this. I’m snaking out of my old skin to become a bigger, better self.
I reached our front lawn. The neighbor boy had mown it yesterday It looked neat and comfortable and I thought about sprawling out on the green, uniform blades and enjoying my afternoon here in peace, but there was Mother, sitting very still on the porch, wrapped in a thick blanket.
“Oh, Mother,” I said. “Are you unwell?”
She coughed and drew the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “I have the sweats.”
“Mother, darling, it’s ninety degrees and you’re wrapped in a quilt.”
Mother scowled. “Mrs. Brown just phoned. She said you bought a whore’s lipstick. She said I ought to know. The whole town heard about it on the party line.”
“It was a gift for a friend. I already gave it to her on my way here. It’s her birthday.”
“You have no friends,” Mother said.
This was true: My classmates in school had been impatient with me if not exactly unkind. And now that I was older and more confident, maybe even worthy of a friend or two, I was alone with Mother.
“Allison,” I told her, recalling a girl from high school with lustrous hair. “Allison Granger, who lives a block south from here, and who I saw at the church picnic. She has three men asking for her hand — three! — and she says it’s all because of her dark red tubes of lipstick.”
The uneven plate of Mother’s face splintered into a sneer. “You have the devil’s imagination, Mildred. Allison Granger lives in Airway Heights now. I saw her mother just the other day. She told me that Allison’s married a lieutenant colonel. Imagine how proud her mother must be.”
I listened to this quietly, without comment.
“Forget it.” Mother shifted in the old blanket, grimacing. “I’m unwell. I have the sweats. Help me inside, Mildred, before I faint.”
“You need a glass of cold water. Let’s get you out of that quilt.”
“I’ve never been so sick. I’m dizzy.”
“Here, Mother, take my arm.”
“Mildred, you’re the most ungrateful daughter who has ever lived.”
“That’s it, Mother, take my arm. Come inside now.
“What are you crying for? You’re upsetting me.”
I wasn’t crying, not really, I was simply emoting, and that emotion ran like water down my cheeks. Next week I would leave, without saying good-bye to Mother, which I felt horrible about, but it was no use divulging my departure; she controlled me like a marionette. She would lift a finger and yank the string attached to my chest and I would pivot. I would stay, hatefully.
No, I had a plan: The morning before my departure I would post a letter to my sister, Martha. She would receive it the following day and learn that I was gone. It would be too late for her to stop me. She would come and check on Mother, begrudgingly, I knew, but I’d been caretaker long enough. It was time to live my own life. They didn’t think I was capable of it. They thought I was better off locked away with Mother, away from any true experiences of my own. For a long time — riddled with guilt after I’d harmed her — I trusted them, and I served Mother dutifully. I cooked and cleaned and cared for her, answering her every need even when her requests became ridiculous.
I had done enough.
I would continue to serve her now, but in a different way. I would send money from every paycheck to them, more money than they’d ever seen in their entire lives. And when I met my husband and had my children, we would return to visit, and then I would apologize to Mrs. Brown for never saying good-bye, and she would apologize to me for being such a grumpy tattletale, and everyone would be very pleased with me and all would be well. Mother would be beside herself with the beauty of our children — her grandchildren! — and she would thank me for growing into such a responsible and independent young lady. And my sister would say, jealously, Why is your husband not old and bald, like my husband, and why are your children so kind and generous, unlike my children? and I would shrug and embrace her and tell her no matter, that I loved her and her old bald husband and her wretched children, and she would say, Oh, Mildred, I love you, too,and I admire you so.
“I need to go to the toilet,” Mother said, loudly.
I had just settled her on the couch with her blanket and her pillows and a glass of cold water.
“Right now?” I asked her.
“No, next week, Einstein.”
“Okay, Mother. Come on. Take my arm again.”
“Are you still crying? Your moods today! You’re making me nervous. What’s going on in that ferret brain of yours?”
Good-bye, Mother!
I waited outside the door for her to wipe herself, for her to flush, so that I could help her back to the couch and make her a healthy lunch. I brought my hands to my mouth and tried to shove my happiness back down my throat. The tears were gone. Now I was brimming with laughter.
Good-bye and good-bye and good-bye!
“Mildred,” Mother said sharply. “Are you giggling? Get in here and help me clean up. Jumping Jehoshaphat, I’ve gone and made an absolute mess.”
I forced myself to remain solemn. I squared my shoulders and lifted my chin. I went in to help poor Mother.
A few mornings later I pinned my handkerchief around my head and put on, again, my good blue blouse and wool skirt. I went downstairs to check on Mother one last time.
“Are you feeling all right?” I asked her.
She lay on the davenport, a wet washcloth over her eyes. Her graying hair hung in tangles around her big face, and I reminded myself to give it a good combing before I left.
“I’m at death’s door,” she said. “But otherwise I’m fine.”
“Is it a headache?”
“No, it’s a splinter in my foot.” She tore the washcloth off from her forehead and glared at me with moist eyes. “Yes, it’s a headache, Mildred. If you were a good girl, you’d fetch me an aspirin.”
I fetched her one. I was wearing my black driving gloves and worried what she’d say when she saw them, but she accepted the aspirin without comment.
“Let me get you a glass of water,” I said.
“I’ve already swallowed it.”
“I’ll get you one. For later, if you need it.”
“Mildred, you know I hate it when you do unnecessary things for me.”
“For later, Mother.” I shouldn’t have said what I said next. It was some sort of mischief rising in me. “I might be gone a long time.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, and she looked at me with a mixture of panic and derision. “Don’t tell me you’re going to spend all day at the movies again, watching the same film half a dozen times? You’ll bring on another one of my heart attacks. I hate how you envy those silly starlets.”
“No, I’m not doing that, Mother. I promise.”
I didn’t point out that she’d never had a heart attack.
I went to the kitchen and drew a glass of water for her and returned to set it on the coffee table. Good-bye, old table! This was where I had once cut out paper dolls with my older sister. At that age Martha had gushed over my precision. She had asked me to help her and I was glad to do it. Good-bye, kind memories!
I placed the water close enough to Mother so that she could reach it easily without having to sit up.
Well, there, I thought. Maybe I should give her a little food, too?
I went to the pantry and found some saltines and spread a handful across a plate and brought that to her. She watched all of this silently, sulking.
The phone rang. Mother reapplied the washcloth to her face, waving at the noise dismissively.
I went to the phone and brought the receiver to my ear.
“Mildred,” my sister said. “I’m livid. You stay right there. Walter’s getting the car. We’re coming straight over.
“Oh, hello, Martha,” I said. I inwardly cursed the postal service’s promptness. I hadn’t expected them to deliver the mail so early. “So good to hear your voice. How are the children?”
From the couch Mother groaned.
“Don’t act like the Innocent Nancy here, Mildred,” Martha said. “I’ve read your horrible letter. You can’t, you simply can’t upset Mother like this. She’s an old woman and she’s alone in the world. And to expect me to uproot my life in this way, when I have children, Mildred, when I have a husband! It’s just extraordinary! It’s like I always say, if only you had children, if only you had a husband, you would understand, you would know implicitly what I mean.”
Mother rose up on one elbow, turning her head toward me with the washcloth still smashed over her face. “Tell your sister I can hear her squawking from across the room. It hurts my sensitive ears. Tell her she sounds like a drunk banshee.”
“Marthie,” I said, interrupting my sister gently, “Mother says you sound like a drunk banshee.”
“Hand the phone to Mother. Have you told her yet? No, of course not. It’s just like you, to run away from things like a coward. You’re the most cowardly person I know, Mildred. Put Mother on the phone. She’ll scream some sense into you. And Walter and I will get in the car right now, with the kids, we’ll be there in twenty minutes flat — ”
“Mother,” I said, “Martha wants to speak with you.”
“No. Absolutely not. You deal with her, Mildred. As if I don’t have enough on my hands. Tell her I have a terrible headache.”
“She won’t come to the phone, Martha. She has a terrible headache. I’m sorry. And now I really must be going.” I glanced at Mother, who was relaxed again, lying flat on the couch and nibbling on a saltine. “I’m going to the movies. I’m going to the movies for a very long time. Good- bye, darling.”
“You won’t go through with it. You’ve never gone through with anything in your whole entire life.”
I hung up, trembling with relief.
I kissed Mother. “Good-bye.” I tried not to sound too meaningful.
She refused to remove the washcloth, but she accepted the kiss graciously enough.
“You’ll rot your ferret’s brain with those movies, Mildred.”
Her voice was not unkind. It was not such a bad way to leave her.
And then I went out the front door, leaving it unlocked for Martha and Walter, even though they had their own key, and I went down the cement stairs and retrieved my little suitcase, which I’d hidden earlier that morning beneath the forsythia. My father had died pruning this bush — felled on the instant by a massive stroke — but it remained my favorite plant here, so brilliant in spring and so brilliant now, again, in the early fall. Beneath the bright leaves, the limbs looked like Father’s thin arms, reaching skyward, surrendering. When I was very little, he’d called me whip-smart, but Mother had demurred. She can see the future, this girl, he’d said. He was right. I could. But Mother had told him that there was no place in the world for knowledgeable women; he should be wary of encouraging such nonsense. Foresight won’t do a woman any good, she’d said. It will only double her pain. The forsythia shook in the breeze, as if to deny this memory. I backed away from it with a respectful nod of my head.
The luggage handle felt good in my palm, hard and solid like a well-executed plan. I’d packed very lightly, with only a few clothes, an old pair of winter boots, my papers, my red tube of lipstick, and my pocketbook. Within was my bus voucher. I hurried across the street, toward the station. Only a few minutes remained. I couldn’t be late.
Martha was wrong: I’d never been so committed to anything in my entire life.
The first time I realized black woman poets exist in the present tense was in a packed audience at Bluestockings Bookstore listening to Morgan Parker read “99 Problems” in the fall of 2014. I had been exposed to very few poets during my K-12, undergraduate, and graduate studies. Out of the few poets I read in class, one of them was black. All of the poets were dead. Morgan Parker is a black woman and alive and is writing poems that exude the full range of emotion and experience — from joy, triumph, and humor, to horror, regret, and grief. The complex worlds inside myself, my grandmother, my mother, and my sister are rendered visible when Morgan reads her poems. Her latest book of poems, Magical Negro, is a running archive that documents, honors, complicates, and interrogates black womanhood.
Purchase the book
Morgan Parker is the author of the poetry collections There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé,Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, and Magical Negro. Her debut young adult novel Who Put This Song On? is forthcoming in late 2019 and her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow.
I was beyond excited to talk to Morgan Parker about blackness, magic, social media, and how “Matt” is doing these days.
Candace Williams: You’ve been away but I still see you as a New York poet. I am thinking of your poem “Magical Negro #80: Brooklyn”. Do you still consider yourself to be a New York or Brooklyn poet?
Morgan Parker: I spent all of my adult years until now in New York so it really kind of got under my skin. So, it’s still very much in the way that I think about poems and I love Brooklyn, like I love it. I still believe there’s no other place like it. There isn’t a neighborhood to match it anywhere.
Something I struggle with in my work is wanting to represent collective but not the collective. I can’t represent everybody.
I felt very connected to the folks in my neighborhood and was certainly a person who liked to stay in my neighborhood and talk to my neighbors and sit out on the porch, go to the block parties and all that stuff. I was able to pay more for my rent than if I had lived there my whole life. Then, I was coming to it from, you know, a different state altogether, and then an Ivy League school. You know what I mean? I had the feeling with my own status as a gentrifier.
Something I struggle with in my work is wanting to represent collective but not the collective. You know. I can’t represent everybody. We’re writing our own kind of history and document. I would hate for this era to be only documented by articles about millennials and shit like that. This is something I’ve been thinking about lately, I never thought I would say something like this, but even like the kind of journalistic and some of I think the best thinkers of our time, but if they’re tied to a particular media outlet I feel that things are being skewed a little bit. And that’s where art comes in right?
I really have a feeling that some of our homies that are working in these places have to kind of compromise a little bit. I know that’s how journalism works right now and so I think it’s important for artists to fill in the blanks. I’m not in a corporate position so I can do that. It’s becoming increasingly important for us to document ourselves.
I think this idea of representation has slowed us down a little bit. We’re reflected in these major ways but it’s still never enough. It’s still never specific enough. It’s still not always exactly in our words.
CW: It would also be totally absurd if we didn’t talk about magical negroes and the title of your book. The concept of a Magical Negro is when a white production team creates this magical stock character who is black. That black character is there to interact with white people in a certain way and teach a white audience something.
I think the beauty of this book is that you’ve turned that concept on its head in some ways and you’ve reframed it in ways that are pretty complicated. I’d love to hear your thoughts about magic, the Magical Negro, and how magic operates within blackness in this collection, and in your work in general.
MP: I think I have a way more complicated relationship with it. That’s one reason I like your book. You’re coming at magic from this totally candid very nerdy scientific way and I feel like it is a different view than just saying “black women are magic.” You know what I mean? I always like a little nuance and little bit more rigor. I was in the Black Girl Magic Anthology and support it but I also think that there’s more. We can’t just say, “Oh yeah, these people are magic.” And I think there’s a danger to that, obviously, when we have someone like Michael Brown turned into this devil with superhuman strength. That is the negative connotation of magic.
I do feel that we have, that we wield a particular magic that’s the only way we could have gotten out of where we’ve been and still be standing. You know? That is just what it is. It’s insane what we go through and what we internalize and what we carry. There’s no way we could do so without a kind of magic that is strength, that is ancestral, and that is rooted in history and legacy.
I do feel that we wield a particular magic that’s the only way we could have gotten out of where we’ve been and still be standing.
I also think that it’s often an excuse to see a magical being and not a person. I can’t tell you how many times, I’m still trying to write over and over this, that feeling of not being a person. Knowing that you know, white people are looking at you and not seeing the whole of your humanity. Just seeing you know, almost this kind of mirage of reflections from their own mind.
I think it’s way more complicated than we allow ourselves to think about. Yeah, I think that’s something I wanted to explore. The idea of who I think is magic, who they think is magic, and for what reasons and all of that.
CW: You just used the term “writing over” and I wrote that down because I read another interview that you felt frustrated about “reading over.” When I read your writing, I think you’re talking very clearly about black people. I think you were saying that when you write you are frustrated because you’re writing, and other people are writing, but white people just aren’t hearing it, and they’re not seeing it.
That’s a big struggle. I remember I had a sestina published that is clearly about black trauma at the hands of scientific and medical racism. Multiple white women messaged me and were like, “Oh, I like how you’re writing about the medical industrial complex…women are given all these pills,” and I remember thinking that all of that is true but my poem is about black people too. If we let people who aren’t black use tag lines like “Oh, well, #blackgirlmagic,” it actually misses the point.
MP: Yes. It’s like, get to the black woman. Can I have some space?
CW: In order for them to listen to us, they actually have to let us speak. Not give us money but the wealth to create our own institutions and media outlets and pathways. I feel like sometimes people latch on to these taglines and these very basic ideas, and it actually makes people unable to read what we’re actually saying. So they’re just going to read the parts that are easy, and be like, “Oh, yeah, I’m against medical racism, and I’m sad about Mike Brown.” Yeah, but I’m just like, “Did you also realize I write about white women and white men, and what happens to me in these social interactions? That’s something you should also be taking away from this,” but I feel like they’re just reading over it, and that is very frustrating.
MP: It really is. I’m very afraid to release this book and it’s because I put so much into it, to the point where afterwards I was like, “I maybe went a little too far.” I hurt myself in doing it. Not because I think I said too much but just because it was extremely challenging and emotional for me. I can’t stand the idea that I will have done that and still be read over. That’s that fear. With Beyoncé, I definitely felt like I wanted to make something that was incredibly impactful for my people, but also that a lot of other people would feel they could read, and then maybe somehow be brought in that way, through the black culture.
There is black culture in here. I wrote it. I felt I was less focused on a wide audience, and making white people comfortable in it, I guess. I did that on purpose, because it’s just like … All right, I said all this stuff, and you … Like I wrote a poem that says, “What if I said, ‘I’m tired,’ and they heard me wrong, said, ‘Sing it.’” Literally, people, when I say, “God, I really just don’t want to be alive today,” people are like, “Same.” I’m like, “You don’t understand!” Like what in the fuck? “What more can I say to you?”
Like, can I live, or what? That’s the thing. There’s something in this particular era of people tweeting things out, and performing grief, and performing theater, that it all feels fake. It all feels ephemeral. It’s scary for me, because I do want to believe that literature and art can be effective in the real world, but it won’t if we’re only seeing this art that’s made in the world for the world, and not by a person who’s suffering.
I think of the ease with which we forget that art is a thing made by people. It’s not just processed and delivered like a politician’s statement. This is coming from an emotional place, and I think it’s easy for us to retweet and not sit with something and say, “This is a major problem. How can I look in my life, in the world, when I go outside, away from my computer, and make sure that I’m not making someone feel this way?” But no one does that.
CW: No, they really don’t.
There’s something in this era of people tweeting, and performing grief, and performing theater, that it all feels fake.
MP: It’s to the point where I’ll go and do a reading and it’s only white women at the venue for the most part. Meanwhile, on my way over, a white girl bumps into me, and is like, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you.” That’s just like … I can’t … I don’t know. I don’t even know. I don’t know what to say. Actually, I was at a thrift store with my mom recently and there were really loud white girls pushing past us, and one of the white girls bumped into me, and was just like, “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you.” And I looked, and she had an Audre Lorde tote bag. I was just like, “What is happening?” I was like, “Mom, see? See? That’s my book.”
I just don’t even…There’s no words. There’s no words. You can’t even write it. That dissonance is really scary to me.
CW: It seems like of the precursors, one of the drivers of our current situation, is the amount of dissonance that we let people live with, for different reasons. We don’t “let them live with it.” We have to or else we don’t survive. If I go to work, and I start pointing out dissonance (and I usually do), I’ll probably get in trouble, right? If you say, “Why did you say that? How come these rules say this, but then I do this, and I get in trouble? How come that person is doing this?” When you start to hold people accountable for dissonance, you’re on your way out. You don’t make it to year two in that job.
MP: We get so stuck in, especially these days, on what is true and what is false, what someone said, and what the actual words were, and blah, blah, blah. There is no conception of what those words do, and what those actions do, in terms of emotions. So it’s like, “Okay, maybe you didn’t mean it in this way. So what? I acknowledge that you didn’t mean it that way, but what I’m telling you is when you said this, I felt this.” I think that we’re getting really far away from that. There’s a kind of ego that people are not willing to let go.
I’m going to take this space in this book that I’m writing to force you into my perspective.
If you could just say, “Yeah, damn. I understand what you’re saying. That was shitty. I definitely didn’t mean it that way, but now I know,” instead of holding your party line, and saying, “Well, I didn’t mean it, so there’s no reason you should be upset.” That’s absurd, but I feel like that’s a little bit where we are. So I guess that’s why I feel so compelled to just witness and be very raw about, “This is what I feel, and this is what has happened to me.” Actually, I’m going to take this space in this book that I’m writing to force you into my perspective.
CW: Yeah, definitely. That feeling of just being out in the world and dealing with institutions that are not made for me. I don’t think people realize how much navigation it takes just to survive, to even think my thoughts are real, because people gaslight. For example, if I were to tell, most white people I know, that on a daily basis, I’m bumped into because people don’t see me, their first response would be, “Oh, well, that happens to me. That’s just a NYC thing. That’s not race.”
MP: Yeah. Then, even if they see it, they think it’s the first time it ever happened, because it’s the first time they’re seeing it. They still just say everything’s a one-off. But what, are we going to go running to them every single time it happens? No.
Also, why can’t you even take our word for it? You don’t have to see a YouTube clip of it happening over and over, in order to understand what we’re saying. That’s not humanity. That’s not humanity. That’s not fellowship and that’s not caring for another human being.
CW: You’re definitely one of my favorite people on Twitter. Is it still doing a lot for you? Does it still impact your world a lot? I mean, you’ve talked about how people kind of just read over your pain, and even use social media to kind of disassociate with it in a strange way.
MP: Oh, totally. Everyone thinks it’s like a Twitter personality. I’m like, “No, you guys. I just tweeted this because I couldn’t decide who to text it to.” Straight up, it’s not a persona. The expectation of an artist is to have this split public and private personality. Obviously, I’m a real person in real life. When I’m tweeting, I’m not just saying “I’m depressed” just to say it. I just am. I think it’s easy for people to say, “Amen.” and retweet but not call me. It’s weird. I like Twitter just because I like making jokes. I like the short commentary. I like having a documentation of everyday-ness mixed with political stuff. I like seeing the news in that way, rather than in a New York Times notification.
The expectation of an artist is to have this split public and private personality. Obviously, I’m a real person in real life.
I like seeing my friends’ views on things in a collected way but I don’t like the pressure. The pressure to say something, or to yell about something, and participate in this collective panic. That doesn’t work for me because I don’t feel safe doing that. Some people can do it. I can’t. I live alone. When everyone goes offline, I’m still just there panicking. I have to take care of myself in a lot of ways. Certain days, I’m not on Twitter. Certain days I’m on but I won’t comment. I can’t read every article and I think that part of it. The fact that you have to know every single thing that’s happening before you go on there. That’s the part I can’t hang with anymore.
I do like the collective tapestry of feelings in a moment. Mine are usually just like, “I’m very tired.” That’s what it is. But I think I’m very attracted to allowing for the mundane to enter the philosophical, and vice versa. That’s just how I talk and how I live. So that’s one thing that I do like about Twitter. Those two things can exist in the same space. That’s a comfort zone for me.
CW: I’m also thinking about your humor. I’m thinking about the poem “Preface to a Twenty Volume Joke Book.” I feel like I see humor in your poetry and that you’re humorous when I see you in-person. I was talking to Michelle Tea awhile ago, and she and I talked about queer humor, and how it’s incredibly important to queer culture and survival. How does humor fit into your work? How does it relate to blackness and black culture for you?
MP: Well, it’s about pain, right? That’s the blackest thing ever. To make a joke about something that is so incredibly painful. I really identify with comedians in that way. I feel like a lot of questions about what I’m up to would just be so much easier if I just called myself a comedian. I do what comedians do all the time. When I stand up on a stage, I’m talking about something unfortunate that happened to me, and it’s kind of funny, and it makes me think. I think that’s basically it.
Someone was like, “Have you ever thought of doing standup?” And I was like, “I haven’t been doing that?” That’s what it feels like. There are poems in between, but you know … some days, there aren’t that many poems that I read, and most of the time is just ringing my bells. I think that is something that … Performance is really empowering in that way, and I think that’s why comedians have the ability to stand in front of a group of white people, and make fun of them, really. That’s something that I do, and there is a coping in that, and just the performance of it.
All the kind of echoes in just that situation, of a black person standing in front of a group of white people, and being entertainment. The kind of … It’s all very complicated, and humor is always talked about in this healing way. I think it’s kind of true, but often what happens when an audience and a performer are involved, is that it’s kind of like who’s healing who? I think that thinking about that, and how a joke works, has really shaped the way that I write poems. It always has.
When I first started writing poems, it really was for the jokes. I was like, “Poems are dumb, and I don’t like poetry, and it’s all boring. But what a funny way to pick on …” I honestly started writing poems, and I was like, “I’m just going to write this poem about my college roommate,” who I didn’t like, and I just wrote some funny jabs, and would read that at parties. I still crack up that that was how I started. Finding a creative way to air a grievance, and a funny way of doing that. Poetry kind of fit that box for me.
It’s something that I carry with me, even when I’m writing about some of the hardest shit. And partly, they’re for me. If I’m not sitting and kind of chuckling at what I’ve said, then what the fuck are we doing? Then I’m just pulling it apart for no reason.
CW: That’s why I was so happy to see “Matt” in this book. I think “Matt” is one of my favorite poems of all time. Wendy Xu introduced it to me during a poetry workshop, and I read it on the subway, and was just blown away. I just feel like it just starts off as this roast of white men and how they behave toward black women, and then it just gets so deep so quickly. I remember reading it and laughing, and then I got emotional. I cried.
It’s been a while since you’ve written “Matt.” Has your relationship to that poem changed?
MP: My God. It is such its own thing, at this point. It’s just got its own little following. Even a few months after I’d written it, I was at a reading. I hadn’t even read that poem, I don’t think. I was just standing outside having a cigarette between sets, and some guy comes up to me and was like, “I just want to say I like your poems.” “Okay, whatever.” I’m walking away. I was like, “Hey, you can introduce yourself. I’m Morgan.” He was like, “Oh, my name’s Matt.” I was like, “Ha! I have a poem for you.” He was like, “That’s you?” He was like, “Fuck that poem. My ex sent it to me,” and I just started cracking up.
To make a joke about something that is so incredibly painful. That’s the blackest thing ever.
But I hear that a lot now. Women come up to me, and they’re like, “Listen. I sent this to all my people,” and there was one time a black girl came up to me, and she was like, “I have a Matt. I’m here with him.” Then she came back later, and was like, “This is my Matt. It’s a white guy.” He was like, “I’m Matt.” It’s like, this is amazing.
The poem interacts with audiences and changes depending on the audience. It really does have its own life now. I feel very happy when women come up to me, and are like, “I’ve emailed this to like five people.” That’s dope. That’s what poems should be doing. Straight up, my therapist was like, “I’m going to give this to a client.”
CW: Wow. That’s wild.
MP: I know, and it’s interesting, right, because it seems like such a simple poem. In some ways, it is. When I wrote that poem, I wrote it, and I never do this, I wrote it in maybe one draft. That was maybe the first time I’ve ever done that. But I think it was because I was living with it for so long. And it was something that I didn’t want to get wrong. So when I did write it, I woke up at 2 a.m. and started typing.
I think a poem like that is really hard to do because of the pulling in and because of the going deep part. You don’t want it to come too fast. It’s a very tough thing. What I wanted to talk about, was that feeling that happens. I could be in love with this person, but if it’s a white man, I will always have a split second flash of slave and slave master. Even if that’s not present in the dynamics of the relationship itself, that is always going to be flickering in the back of my mind and not in a negative way.
I remember trying to tell this to a white man and he just didn’t understand. I wanted to make space for that. I wanted to be poking fun at Matt, but also tender. I wanted the speaker to have this complicated relationship, but insist at the end that like, no, this is not, we’re not the first people. Morgan and Matt are not the first, this is not the first situation. You are a type, and I am a type to you. It goes back infinitely in history. We know white people have trouble with being a type. They can’t stand it.
Even these guys who are like, “that’s obviously me.” I’ve known so many guys in my life. It had to be exact. It had to be Vonnegut. I think there is a pleasure in saying “No, no, no. We see you exactly. We see you exactly. You’re so easy for me to pin down.” It makes them embarrassed. But, I think it makes them interrogate themselves in a way that no one else will force them to do. I think of Matt as the type of guy that gets a lot of passes, because he’s just so confused and he means well and blah, blah, blah. But, if we’re gonna have a revolution, we can’t have people who are just kind of passing into the next grade with no interrogation of themselves.
CW: Right. The problem is that dissonance we were talking about earlier. So just thinking of a lot of Bernie Sanders supporters and the things they were telling me. I’m pretty socialist myself, and they would just kind of assume that they were educating me about politics. And then I would go deeper, and I would be like, this is deeper than even policy stuff. This is about you and how you see the world and how you operate. And it’s just so limited, because it’s limited for all of us, yet your perspective has so much power over mine. And you think you’re right. And we’re going to give you a pass no matter what, because you hold the keys. You have the right family. You have the right degree.
MP: And, out of all the white guys, you’re nice. It’s easy to write an anti-Jeff Sessions essay but Matt never hurt anyone. I think it’s true to an extent but that doesn’t mean that the rock goes unturned. I think the same thing about a Rachel or a Becky. The “meaning well” is not enough in a time like this. Actually, I prefer to write these poems where these people, the Matts, will listen. They really do. They’re like, “Oh shit. Is that me? Damn.” I’m wearing a flannel right now. I see myself in this person. I see that. Reading at colleges is really excellent because I can see the guys kind of thinking, “Oh shit. Am I just like this? Is that all I am?” They’re interrogating their behavior. The women are kind of looking around like, “oh shit.”
I always read at colleges because this is the era of the Matt. These women need to know. And men need to know to be better.
I always read at colleges because this is the era of the Matt. These women need to know. White and black alike, beware. And men need to know to be better. Think more about who you’re being and the kind of attention that you’re paying to the world around you. College is a very important time to be doing that. College is where the Matts are fertilized in a way. I think that we can point that out while they still think it’s harmless. That’s really important. We actually do need allies but only if they’ll really listen to the way that we see the world. I think that happens, and like you’re saying, the problem is when everyone thinks we’re all seeing the same world. That’s ridiculous. And our perspective of the world is the last to be heard, obviously.
CW: I want to talk for a moment just about the physical object of the book. The first time I got it in the mail and held it, it felt like like when you go to a record store and you pick up this vinyl and you know this is going to as black as hell and awesome. You just know that you’re going to take this home and listen to it, it’s going to be awesome and black as fuck and great, right? That’s kind of how I felt when I first saw the book cover, and when I hold the book. The understated pattern in the background, the colors, the fonts. I would love to hear you talk a bit about the book as a physical object.
MP: Yeah, I’m notoriously involved in cover and design.
CW: Oh wow, I didn’t know that.
MP: Not every writer cares and not every writer really knows how to do that stuff. It’s not that I don’t trust others. I love collaborating with designers. This is my second time working with this designer. He read the book at the same time the editors were reading it. Early on, he had thoughts about colors, title treatments, and fonts. I told him my aesthetic and and let him go for it. I sent him the font.
We don’t have room right now to be afraid in the art that we’re making.
I love it. It feels very black. It has the right colors. I wanted it to some little patterns happening but not be too busy. For whatever reason, I didn’t want an image. I just wanted to think about the words “Magical Negro.” Those words felt like enough for this cover. It’s such a wild book where I feel like even the table of contents matters. I feel that about the vinyl. I recently bought an Isaac Hayes vinyl just because I like the cover. I looked at the song titles on the back and thought “I must have it.” I think about those sorts of things. Preparing the reader for an experience.
CW: I was just thinking about your work as an editor. You’ve worked in different modes of publishing. I was just wondering, let’s say that tomorrow you got this 20 million dollar grant to start a new publishing house in L.A., N.Y.C. or both. How would you approach that and what would your publishing and editing practice be? How might your institution be different than what we typically see in our current system of things?
MP: I would want to make a space for the writing and the publishing. I think the problem with publishing is that it thinks about only that aspect of making a book, and making a book is painstaking. It’s long. There’s a lot of thinking that goes into it before the marketing folks come in. I enjoy working with other writers. I’m not employed as an editor right now, but last week a friend came over to hand out candy to trick-or-treaters, and I was like, “Well, time to reorder your poetry book, come here. I don’t care. We’re doing this right now.” I aggressively laid out all the poems on the ground. That’s my joy. That’s fun for me. I think that’s what I miss about editing. Yes, there is such pleasure and satisfaction of putting a book in the world, and seeing it in bookstores. I miss the nitty-gritty of working with a writer and thinking about what the book is doing and what the writer wants the book to do. And how to help them do that. So, I guess if I were opening my own publishing business, which I love how you’re saying what if, but like I’m definitely going to do this.
My life is going to be long. I would be interested in working with writers from the very beginning—when they don’t have even the book yet. Or maybe they have some poems. And just like being involved in their kind of journey toward publication. I would also like to see a lot more archiving done and a lot more physical objects being made and a lot more artists working with artists.
We don’t have room right now to mess up because publishing is in this kind of capitalist space. I sympathize with that. I sympathize with the editors and the non-profit folks who are really struggling and for them to get the money for even those grants. They have to write these grants for poetry or painting or whatever. I think it’s intimidating for people. It’s scary to look into new ways of working. But, shouldn’t art be that? I think we don’t have room right now to be afraid in the art that we’re making.
In early December 2017, Saturday Night Live aired a song titled “Welcome to Hell.” As it opens, four women, clad in bubblegum pink and lavender, perch on a pink stage; they are surrounded by oversized ice cream cones and lollipops. “Hey there, boys,” one of them purrs, “We know the last couple of months have been friggin’ insane.” A second picks it up: “All these big, cool powerful guys are turning out to be — what’s the word? — habitual predators.” “Cat’s out of the bag!” says the third. “Women get harassed ALL THE TIME.” The fourth ventriloquizes an imagined listener, asking, “It’s like… is this the world now?” The answer comes swiftly: “This BEEN the damn world.”
“Welcome to Hell” aired two months after The New York Times ran an explosive story on Harvey Weinstein’s history of abusing actresses, assistants, and others, and six weeks after Alyssa Milano invited survivors of harassment and assault to share their stories on Twitter with the hashtag #metoo — a movement first started by Tarana Burke in 2006, which in late 2017 gathered new energy as a call to action, a means of claiming ownership over individual and shared experience, and a snowballing reminder that behaviors like Weinstein’s are both extremely common and commonly unacknowledged.
Shakespeare’s portrayals of women’s anger render entire structures of power and exchange visible.
In this particular moment, when these disclosures felt electrifying and new, it made perfect sense that “Welcome to Hell” mounted its critique of harassment in terms of discovery. The conceit of the song is that the listener-viewer does not already know about women’s day-to-day experiences, and is being inaugurated, verse by verse, into a grotesque world that looks like candy and teems with dangers. “This is our hometown, we’ll show you around,” the women sing together, before launching into the song’s chorus: “Welcome to hell; now we’re all in here.” To someone who reads and teaches early modern literature — someone like me — the line unmistakably echoes Christopher Marlowe’s, “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.” This is what Mephistopheles tells Faustus in their first meeting, when the doctor asks the devil how he can be “out of hell,” in Wittenberg. The song’s point, though, isn’t really Marlovian. This hell is less a portable existential state than a recurring set of ordinary situations, involving things like (in the song’s words) “parking and walking and Uber and ponytails, bathrobes and nighttime and drinking and hotels.” The song juxtaposes a rhetoric of epiphanic discovery — oh my god, this is hell — with the objects of that discovery: mundane, non-novel, utterly unsurprising. “Welcome to Hell” very efficiently makes a sophisticated point: women’s anger lights up the world anew; women’s anger reveals that it was ever thus.
The theorist Sarah Ahmed describes coming to feminism as a cognitive “click”: things fall into place, systems of power and oppression become visible, everyday experiences become animated by new knowledge. “Becoming feminist,” Ahmed writes, “is how we redescribe the world we are in.” To put the theory in terms of the song: feminist criticism welcomes you to hell, and it shows you around. Another term Ahmed employs for this “clicking” structure — for coming into sudden knowledge of social systems through accreted individual experience — is “snapping.” To snap is to be “unable to take it,” to “lose it.” To snap is to become angry suddenly and completely: to experience anger at something specific, and, through that, at the whole system that has brought enormous pressures to bear so that a particular moment in a particular life becomes a breaking point. For Ahmed, situational anger that leads to an emotional snap is a gateway to cognitive awakening: anger lets us see the world in a new light; anger lets us see what that world has always been.
The past few years have felt like one snap after another. Breaking bones, light-bulb flares: a weird mixture of awful pain and exhilaration. And all these snaps, these moments of boiled-over rage crystallizing into recognition, point to other, earlier snaps: past moments of women’s anger that have since receded, faded, lost their urgency (but never really disappeared). I work on the past — in the past, it feels like sometimes — and in the last couple of years, the past has shifted under me. I’m not alone in this: academic friends and colleagues tell me they also see women’s anger and pain and outrage everywhere in the texts they teach and write about, and this anger makes everything else look different. For me, Shakespeare’s portrayals of women’s anger, in particular, have clicked into focus: they render entire structures of power and exchange visible, even as they expose the effects of those structures on individual people (or characters). That’s why, I think, there’s been an uptick of productions of Measure for Measure, a play in which a woman gets so angry at male desires and male behaviors that she tells her brother she will “pray a thousand prayers” for his death. For a long time, for a lot of people, this play felt unruly, unpleasant, somehow icky: a problem play. Right now, though, we understand it. And it, in turn, seems to understand us.
Shakespeare’s Angry Women
When Shakespeare stages a snap, the world he lights up may look at first a bit different from ours. On the Shakespearean stage women’s anger articulates a tension inherent in the patriarchal structure of English society — a society in which the transfer of land, wealth, and titles; the formation of alliances among households; and the perpetuation of family lines all depended on the exchange of women. Within this structure, women were both persons and tokens of exchange. Within families, daughters could be simultaneously loved for their own traits, qualities, histories, and esteemed for their exchange value on the marriage market. Shakespeare repeatedly returns to this double nature of daughters: in play after play, otherwise loving fathers like Egeus, Brabantio, Capulet, and Leonato explode into rage when their female children make or seem to make (or even seem to maybe want to make) independent marital or sexual choices. Female-driven ruptures within the marriage market produce angry men.
And at least some angry women. The fact that plays contain speaking female characters means that playwrights offered their audiences imagined, ventriloquized accounts of what it feels like to be both a person, and a thing.
In Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, for example, Katherine Minola’s first line crackles with anger. After Baptista declares that he is resolved not to let his younger daughter, Bianca, marry before Katherine and invites the gathered company to “court” her — an invitation that immediately invites a cruel joke at Katherine’s expense — she asks her father “I pray you, sir, is it your will / To make a stale of me amongst these mates?” A “stale” is a prostitute; “mates” means variously low fellows, or marriage partners, or sexual partners. “Are you selling me?” would be a reasonable paraphrase; “Are you selling me for sex?” a fuller one. Katherine collapses the elite marriage market into the market relations of prostitution, stripping away the symbolic distinctions between these economies and laying bare what’s at stake in both: men profiting — financially and socially, directly and indirectly — from the exchange of women’s bodies. As Lisa Jardine puts it: “The Taming of the Shrew is centrally concerned with the marketing of daughters for cash.”
Daughters could be simultaneously loved for their own traits and esteemed for their exchange value on the marriage market.
This marketing is everywhere, from Petruchio’s intention “to wive and thrive in Padua” to the contest Baptista sets up between Bianca’s suitors: “[H]e… That can assure my daughter greatest dower/ Shall have my Bianca’s love” (2.1.362–4). Baptista does acknowledge his daughters’ capacity for emotion and desire — he tells Petruchio he must obtain Katherine’s love — but this turns out to be mere lip service. He never asks Katherine what she thinks of Petruchio, and the decision about Bianca is made while she’s offstage.
Katherine’s first lines do not change anything in the world of the play — neither her anger nor her words are taken seriously — yet her shrewish protest is feminist, by Ahmed’s definition, because it describes reality as it is lived in by women (a reality both perpetuated and denied by her father and the gathered suitors). Her last lines, though, famously advocate patriarchal norms of wifely submission. Shakespeare stages the fading (or the strategic suppression) of Katherine’s anger, but not its origins, not her snap. In Measure for Measure, by contrast, he gives us a clear breaking point. We see Isabella lose it first at Angelo and then, more fully, at her brother, Claudio, who has been absurdly sentenced to death for getting his girlfriend pregnant. When Angelo, Vienna’s acting Duke, proposes that she sleep with him to save her brother’s life, Isabella rounds on him with the threat: “Sign me a present pardon for my brother / Or with an outstretched throat I’ll tell the world aloud / What man thou art.” The powerful cultural logic that underpins Angelo’s calm response — “Who will believe thee, Isabel?” — prevents her from translating anger into action. But when her brother later reiterates Angelo’s request — “Sweet sister, let me live,” he begs — she explodes: “O, you beast! / O faithless coward, O dishonest wretch… Die, perish.” “Might but my bending down / Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed,” she tells him.
Katherine is angry at her father and, through him, the logic of the marriage market. Isabella is angry at her brother and, through him, something even more fundamental to patriarchal social relations: the fact that women’s status as people is always more or less under threat, because of their status (to quote from Luce Irigaray) as both “utilitarian objects and bearers of value” with respect to men. Sibling relations complicated the tensions and contradictions of patriarchy. In his Dutiful Defense of the Lawful Regiment of Women, for instance, Henry Howard writes that wives must obey husbands and daughters must obey fathers, but that they are not subordinate to other men — including brothers. Brother-sister bonds were highly variable and individualized, and it is their individualization that makes them a rich site for onstage explorations of the double status of women in patriarchy (as persons and as tokens of exchange) and within families (as people male relatives loved and held particular intimate bonds with, and as means by which those same relatives purchased connection, prestige, wealth, or, in Claudio’s case, survival).
What makes Isabella angry at Claudio is not, I think, simply his plea, but rather the structures behind it, whose constant pressures makes his request into a breaking point. Angelo reminds Isabella that power and credibility are unequally distributed among men and women: his word, the word of a well-placed, well-reputed man, will outweigh hers. Claudio then reminds her that a woman may become, at any moment, a thing, a token, an instrument — that her personhood can and in this moment does matter less than her usefulness to men: for sexual pleasure, or to buy safety. Many critics (and theater practitioners) have expressed unease at Isabella’s vehement response to her brother. Unlike her righteous desire to expose Angelo’s “seeming,” her furious declaration that she would not so much as bend down if that would save Claudio’s life, seems excessive, vindictive, even villainous. Yet I think her anger at Claudio is in a very real sense the same as her anger at Angelo. The two cannot be separated. It is the anger of a woman who recognizes that men evaluate her in ways that have little or no reference to her intrinsic qualities, and who understands that their evaluations — Angelo’s sexual desire, Claudio’s desperate instrumentalizing — potentially have more weight, more reality, than her own sense of self.
Isabella is angry at her brother and, through him, the fact that women’s status as people is always more or less under threat.
Like the marriage market that Katherine compares to prostitution, the more short-term transaction facing Isabella is monumentally indifferent to her personhood, on which she might reasonably assume her brother’s love for her is staked. The question, then, isn’t really whether she’s morally right or wrong to say what she says to Claudio, but why she snaps, and what knowledge — what recalibrated perception of reality — her snap brings into view.
Passing Presents
“Women’s anger,” feminist writer Kate Harding wrote after the Kavanaugh hearings, “is having a moment.” Not coincidentally, Measure for Measure is also having a moment. High-profile productions have appeared in London and New York; a collaboration between London’s Cheek-by-Jowl and Moscow’s Pushkin Theater, in Russian with English subtitles, has been touring Europe and the US to critical acclaim; it appeared in Boston, D.C., and Brooklyn in the second half of 2018. Reviews have called these productions “timely,” “unexpectedly modern,” “tailor-made for the #MeToo era.” In the media, op-eds not pegged to any particular production have noted the play’s relevance. On vox.com Tara Isabella Burton writes that it is “one of the most relevant plays ever written about sexual harassment and abuse against women”; in the Times of San Diego, Peter Herman notes that Measure for Measure, “not only predicts contemporary events, but helps us understand them.”
Literary scholars often hear about dangers of presentism: we are warned against looking at the past for confirmation of our own progress — the distance between us and them — and against collapsing that distance, and seeing, Narcissus-like, our own reflections in long-ago lives and letters. But of course, the present always shapes our encounters with earlier texts, whether we’re reading them, writing about them or, in the case of Shakespeare, staging them. Not only do we inevitably view the past through the lens of our present, but our present also renders the past visible — or invisible — in shifting ways. Walter Benjamin tells us that history is “filled with the presence of the now.” And, as the now changes, so does the history.
The “moment” that women’s anger is currently “having” lights up the past, but it does so in unexpected, sometimes uneven ways. It offers more of a flare or a sparkle than a steady illumination. That’s because this moment is itself volatile, marked by reversals and shifts in direction.
In the summer of 2017 I wrote a review of a very good and very funny production of Measure for Measure at Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn. I ended with a reflection on the character of Mariana, who chooses to marry Angelo in full knowledge of his past behavior. “The frankness of her love,” I wrote, “feels like a kind of grace. Even the least deserving — even Angelo — may be forgiven.” Academic publishing schedules being what they are, the review had yet to appear in print when #metoo surged that fall. I asked my editor if I could make some changes. The new ending reads: “Watching the play this past summer, I thought Angelo’s ending looked like the workings of grace: unearned forgiveness for the worst of sinners. Revising this review in the wake of the avalanche of women’s stories in the news, I can’t recapture that sense of things. Angelo’s ending still seems unearned. But instead of grace, it now looks like injustice.”
In December of 2017, in other words, the play seemed so clearly to be about the ways in which the world, our world, was opening up — because of women’s anger. Some people could say what they hadn’t before; some people could see what they hadn’t before. Something big had snapped, and Measure for Measure was part of it.
In December of 2017, ‘Measure for Measure’ seemed so clearly to be about the ways in which the world was opening up because of women’s anger.
A few months later, in the fall of 2018, I taught the play for the first time. Discussion of the middle acts fell one a year after the Weinstein story broke, one week after Christine Blasey Ford testified before Congress. My students’ reaction to Angelo — and to Claudio, in fact — was by and large an echo of Isabella’s: immediate, powerful rage. The fit was eerily exact: Kavanaugh the supposed “choirboy” was another Angelo, with his reputation for extreme sexual purity (other characters conjecture that his blood is “snow-broth” and his urine “congealed ice”). The confluence of the play and the hearings made my students angry. It made me angry too, and this anger involved different kind of knowledge than what I had come to just a year before. Instead of the cat’s-out-of-the-bag epiphany that “women get harassed all the time,” the play now imparted the darker knowledge that powerful men remain powerful, even when accused, as Isabella puts it, “with outstretched throat.”
When I mentioned I had never taught Measure for Measure previously, the students asked why. The truth is, the last time I’d written a Shakespeare syllabus — in the late summer of 2016, a moment both recent and distant — a woman was about to be elected president. Insofar as I considered Measure for Measure for that 2016 class (which wasn’t really very far) I thought that it would seem irrelevant, maybe even inaccessible, certainly a hard sell compared to Hamlet and Twelfth Night. This all now seems impossible, feels impossible, and yet I remember it was so.
Shakespeare’s plays stay still, but we move, and they move with us — and our shifting reactions (critical, theatrical, journalistic, pedagogical) are worth attending to. The plays have facets, and when the lighting changes, so do they. But what that lighting reveals is also what was always there. Click, snap—this been the damn world.
Each “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes to find the real story.
O n a 1962 calendar, now archived in the Smith College Library’s Special Collections, the poet Sylvia Plath kept careful track of the routine details of her daily life. She jotted grocery lists, planned the meals she’d cook, and noted when her husband, poet Ted Hughes, was going to be out of town. She noted how many bouquets of flowers from their garden sold each week, and when new rubber nipples would be needed for her infant son Nicholas. Each Wednesday she left herself the same one-word reminder: “Ashcans.”
Then, on August 10th, she left herself a single writing-related note: “Start Int. Loaf!!!” From her journals, we know this note refers to a novel she planned to write, titled The Interminable Loaf.
Plath had recently finished The Bell Jar and was separating from Hughes after discovering his affair with a woman named Assia Wevill. Plath would soon move, with Nicholas and their older daughter Frieda, into a room in a London house where the poet William Butler Yeats had once lived.
In a letter that November, Plath described her desire to return to fiction to a friend, Olive Prouty. “My dream is selling a novel to the movies and (eventually) buying the house from the present owner,” she wrote. She described how she would then rent the rooms out, and “slowly furnish it, poem by poem.” In parentheses, she added, “(I have novels in me, one after the other, just crying out to be written.)”
In parentheses, she added, “(I have novels in me, one after the other, just crying out to be written.)”
This would begin with The Interminable Loaf, already underway, though under a new name.
“I hope to really get into my second novel this winter and finish it as soon as I get to London and can count on mother’s help,” Plath wrote to Prouty. “It is to be called ‘Doubletake,’ meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning. This is what was going to be the ‘Interminable Loaf’ — it is semiautobiographical about a woman whose husband turns out the be a deserter and a philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect.”
Friends who read excerpts of Double Take described it as a kind of dark comedy. “I think I’ll be a pretty good novelist,” Plath wrote to her brother Warren, “very funny — my stuff makes me laugh & laugh, & if I can laugh now it must be hellishly funny stuff.”
In the novel Plath aimed to skewer her husband, and Wevill. “She’d given herself permission to hate Hughes,” remarked Ronald Hayman, in his biography, The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath, “and the hatred apparently helped to fuel the fiction.”
Hayman also claimed that Plath rated the novel more highly than The Bell Jar and that scholar Judith Kroll had seen a complete outline of Double Exposure (the next, and last, title for the novel) on a series of index cards. Plath wrote to her mother that, “far from wanting to forget what she’d had to suffer, she intended to ‘commemorate’ it in her next novel.”
But with Hughes gone, two children to care for, and limited financial resources, Plath struggled to find the time to work on Double Exposure. “I write at my novel now from about 5 a.m. when my sleeping pill wears off, till they wake up, and hope to finish it by mid-winter” she told Prouty.
Several letters during these months referenced an epic search for a nanny for the children so she could finish the book. Plath estimated that it would take just “six weeks of daylong work” to reach the end. But without the money she hoped to get from the novel, it was hard to find a nanny; without the nanny, she could not finish the novel.
Double Exposure was almost surely never completed. December of the 1962 calendar is jammed with more and household chores and duties, including repeated notes on painting and repainting the floors and furniture in the new apartment, and appointments to get a phone installed. By January, Plath was suffering severe depression and insomnia.
On the 22nd of that month, Plath wrote to Olive Prouty again, mentioning that she’d been prescribed “sleeping pills & tonics to help me eat.” She had, finally, found someone to watch the children six mornings and one evening a week. Still, she wrote, there was the novel, which she had “not dared to touch […] until I saw ahead I could sit to it every morning and fear no interruption.”
She repeated her plan to write a novel that would help her buy a house so she could earn income from renting out the rooms.
“I must just resolutely write mornings for the next years, through cyclones, water freezeups, children’s illnesses & the aloneness. Having been so deeply and spiritually and physically happy with my dear, beautiful husband makes this harder than if I had never known love at all.”
Three weeks later, on February 11th, Sylvia Plath killed herself at the age of 30.
After her death, Ted Hughes became the heir to Plath’s estate, including all her papers. He sent out two more batches of Plath’s poems to quarterlies the following month and marked these down by hand on her meticulous submission log.
But what happened to the novel she was writing at the same time as these poems? Was Double Exposure/Doubletake/The Interminable Loaf there on her desk as well? The novel that Plath hoped might save her financially has never been published, and nor, as far as we know, has it been seen since her death by anyone other than Ted Hughes.
Its fate remained a mystery until 1977, when Hughes published a collection of Plath’s short fiction and journals in a volume titled Johnny Panic and The Bible of Dreams. In his introduction of these previously uncollected works, Hughes remarked on that Plath had “typed some 130 pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970.”
The novel that Plath hoped might save her financially has never been published, and nor, as far as we know, has it been seen since her death by anyone other than Ted Hughes.
Of course, Plath’s readers wanted to know how exactly a manuscript could “disappear” (seven years later). Given the purported subject matter of the novel, some were wary of Hughes’s claims. These suspicions were amplified when, in the forward to a 1982 collection of Plath’s Journals, Hughes admitted to interfering with some of her other notebooks.
“Two more notebooks survived for a while,” he wrote. “The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it… The other disappeared.” Hughes would later add that this first notebook “disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up).”
The notebook that “disappeared” is likely not Double Exposure, but an earlier journal that scholars have sought, describing Plath’s and Hughes’s return to England. Notably, Hughes distinguished between this journal and the other, which he specifically claimed to have “destroyed.”
That notebook would likely be another journal, the one she kept after their separation and before her suicide. But if he destroyed the journals from those “several months,” he may well have destroyed the novel she was writing at the same time about his being a “deserter and a philanderer.”
By 1995, in an interview in The Paris Review, Hughes would revise his story a third time. “Her mother said she saw a whole novel, but I never knew about it. What I was aware of was sixty, seventy pages which disappeared. And to tell you the truth, I always assumed her mother took them all.”
Was it 130 pages, a whole novel, or sixty, seventy pages? Did he destroy it, or did it disappear? Why would her mother have taken them? And if she had, wouldn’t she have given them to Smith College, along with the many other letters and childhood notebooks and possessions that she later donated to them?
We still have few answers to these questions, but there are a few new pieces to the puzzle — many stemming from discoveries of pieces of another novel entirely.
In the Smith College Library’s Special Collections, there is a copy of the November 20th, 1962 letter to Olive Prouty, typed by Sylvia Plath, with some notations in the margins by her mother Aurelia, made when she gave the letters to Smith.
There is a circle around the place where Plath wrote, “I hope to really get into my second novel this winter” and a note scribbled in the left margin from Aurelia: “It would be her third novel, counting the burned ms as #2.”
The “burned ms” she mentions here, as Plath’s actual second novel, was called Falcon Yard.
Plath had begun writing it many years earlier, even before The Bell Jar. In some sense it could be considered her “first” novel; some scholars even consider it a lost “prequel.”
And in a doubling of sorts, Falcon Yard also dealt with Sylvia Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes — not its grisly demise, but rather its passionate beginnings.
In 1956, the 23-year-old poet Sylvia Plath attended a party at Falcon Yard, near Cambridge University, where she was studying, to celebrate the launch of The St. Botolph’s Review. The first (and only) issue contained four poems by one of the founders, Ted Hughes.
Prior to the party, Plath had taken care to memorize one of his poems, “Fallgrief’s Girl-Friends” and when she met Hughes, she recited the poem back to him.
The following day, in her journal, Plath recounted this leading to their first kiss in a side room, and then to him tearing off her red headband. She, in turn, bit him on the cheek and she wrote that when they returned to the party, Hughes still had blood on his face.
He was, she wrote in her journal, a “big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me. […] as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders.”
Soon they began writing poems to one another. Less than four months later, they were married, on Bloomsday, June 16th.
Plath and Hughes worked intimately together at first, sharing a writing desk, and editing and guiding one another. Hughes would jot down lists of ideas for poems and Plath would dot the ones she thought were most interesting. They routinely wrote on the backs of each other’s scrap paper.
Hughes would jot down lists of ideas for poems and Plath would dot the ones she thought were most interesting. They routinely wrote on the backs of each other’s scrap paper.
The following year, while living together in Massachusetts and teaching at Smith College, Plath began working on a novel based on her romance with Hughes. She planned to call it Falcon Yard, in reference to the place where they’d met.
In her journal, Plath described it as being autobiographical, “American girl comes to Cambridge to find herself. To be herself.” The central character, at times in the third person as either Jessica, or “Jess,” or Jill, or Sadie Peregrine. She was to be, “kinetic, a voyager, no Penelope.”
On a pink sheet of Smith College memorandum paper, Plath kept a long list of character names to use in the novel, with one column, “Real People” that included several former boyfriends. She marked “Leonard,” the character based on Hughes, as the “hero.” In her notebooks she described him as being a “Pan-like, spermy, Dionysiac, God-man.” Later she wrote, “his voice. UnBritish. Refugee Pole rather, mixed with something of Dylan Thomas: rich and mellow-noted: half sung.”
Plath wrote of the overall plot in her journal. “She runs through several men — a femme fatale in her way: types: little thin exotic wealthy Richard; combine Gary and Gordon; Richard and Lou Healy. Safe versus not safe. And of course: the big, blasting dangerous love.” The character would go “through great depression in winter,” which would be then erased by her marriage to Leonard.
The central dilemma of the novel would be, she wrote, “How to lead Pan into world of toast and nappies?”
Her hope was that this “slick bestseller,” might sell for enough money to allow her and Hughes to resume a life of writing poetry without also needing to teach.
Ultimately, Plath set the Falcon Yard project aside, convinced by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton that she should instead focus on her poetry and try to write a more serious novel about her experiences with depression before Cambridge, which had led to her first suicide attempt. She soon assembled Colossus, her first collection of poetry, and began to work tirelessly on that new novel, which would become The Bell Jar.
Here, too, she hoped that the novel might bring in the money she needed to support their growing family — but publishers were not sold. Despite receiving a fellowship from Harper & Row to help her write the book, they rejected it as “disappointing, juvenile and overwrought.”
She would end up publishing it in the U.K. with Heinemann under a pseudonym, “Victoria Lucas,” originally the name of the novel’s protagonist before it was changed to “Esther Greenwood.”
But U.S. editors were not interested. One, at Knopf, remarked on its “youthful American female brashness” but added “there certainly isn’t enough genuine talent for us to take notice.” They hoped, “maybe now that this book is out of her system, she will use her talent more effectively next time.”
Of course, The Bell Jar would, many years after her death, indeed become a “bestseller” and an enduring classic — far from the “potboiler” she sometimes referred to it as. Today, fifty years later, the novel thrives on high school and college reading lists and has sold over three million copies. But during the final months of Plath’s life, this success remained elusive.
By the time The Bell Jar was finished in 1962, Plath and Hughes were living in England again and searching for more stable income. They did paid appearances on BBC programs. Sylvia sold bouquets of flowers from their garden. They moved to Devon and rented out their London apartment to a young couple — David and Assia Wevill.
Rubber nipples for Nicholas. Grocery lists. Ashcans, Wednesday. Keeping house and caring for the children.
Frustrated by the lack of movement on The Bell Jar, Plath soon decided to revisit her abandoned Falcon Yard manuscript. She set a goal to finish the novel by August 17th, Hughes’s birthday, as a present to him.
But when she learned of the affair in July of that year, everything changed. It is hard to imagine how she could have finished the semi-autobiographical “romantic comedy” after Hughes’s infidelity came to light. Distraught and angry, she confronted Hughes, who refused to end the affair.
A few weeks later, Plath built a bonfire in her backyard. Then, while her mother watched, Plath burned the only known draft of Falcon Yard, a few pages at a time.
In two subsequent bonfires, Plath would destroy nearly a thousand of her own letters and several boxes of Hughes’s papers, acts which she went on to describe in a poem called “Burning the Letters.”
By October of that year, she had thrown Hughes out of their house and begun work on the new second novel, The Interminable Loaf.
For decades it was believed that none of Falcon Yard had survived the bonfire. But in the 1990s, scholars at Smith College found something surprising in the collection of Plath’s papers they’d been accumulating from her mother, and from Hughes. On the back of a page listing corrections to The Bell Jar was a single page, # 25, from something called “Venus in the Seventh” — a chapter of Falcon Yard.
The page describes a young woman on a train ride to Munich with a man named Winthrop (likely based on former boyfriend Gordon Lameyer) — “sky darkening, black shapes looming, speckled with lights.” Though the prose is quite beautiful, and the later dialogue sparkling, it was probably an early draft. At one point the narration shifts from the third person, “Jess held herself in,” to the first, “I shut up for a change” as if Plath had not yet decided which point of view she’d use.
Subsequently, similar discoveries were made at the Ted Hughes archives at Emory University. Because Hughes and Plath had reused each other’s scrap paper, a page of a chapter called Hill of Leopards was found on the reverse of some of Hughes’s notes. Then, thirteen more pages from “Venus in the Seventh” resurfaced at Emory, continuing the story of Jess’s European tour, though incompletely, going from page 35, to 42 & 43, then from 64 and 65 to 68, and so on.
For decades it was believed that none of Falcon Yard had survived the bonfire. But in the 1990s, scholars at Smith College found something surprising in the collection of Plath’s papers.
In these pages, Jess travels to Venice and then St. Mark’s Basilica in Rome. Ultimately, she leaves Winthrop to fly home to England. After the flight, on the bus ride to London, she meets a man named Michael Butcher, who convinces her to join him for dinner. (At one point she recalls a resolution she’s made to stay sober after the St. Botolph’s Party, suggesting these scenes would take place sometime after that event.)
While then leaving dinner in a rush, she refers to herself as “Cinderella Greenwood,” a suggestion that the character’s name was, at one point, Jess Greenwood, perhaps some early incarnation of the name she’d eventually use for the heroine in The Bell Jar.
By pages 73, 76, and 79, Jess returns to campus and the arms of a man named Ian, described as reminiscent of Dylan Thomas. (According to later notes, “Ian” was changed to “Leonard,” the character based on Ted Hughes.) The surviving fragments of “Venus in the Seventh” leave off with Jess and Ian in conversation about poetry.
According to Plath’s mother, the novel (as Sylvia had described it to her) would continue from this blossoming romance and into the first years of their marriage, ending with the birth of a daughter — with “Pan” having been successfully led into the world of “toast and nappies” after all.
If Plath got that far before she burned Falcon Yard on the lawn, we may never know. Unless more missing draft pages resurface, this is all we have to go on. Still it is something, and it gives some hope that fragments of Double Exposure — if not all of it—may similarly resurface.
Could Ted Hughes have destroyed his wife’s unfinished novel about the affair that ended their marriage? His claim that he destroyed her final journal, so that her children wouldn’t read it, seems to make it plausible. But in fact, we don’t know that he did destroy the journal.
In 2005, an exhibition on Hughes and Plath was presented at the Grolier Club by Karen Kukil, Associate Curator of Special Collections at Smith College and Stephen Enniss, then Director of Special Collections and Archives at Emory University (and now Director of the Harry Ransom Center in Texas). Alongside many invaluable artifacts of the Hughes-Plath marriage was a draft of a letter Hughes wrote to biographer Jacqueline Rose after Plath’s death.
“First you must believe me when I tell you — I have never told this to anyone — I hid the last journal, about two months of entries, to protect — possibly to my utter foolishness — somebody else,” Hughes had written. Hid, not destroyed. “Somebody else,” not “the children.” He crossed these lines out. They were not included in the finished letter.
Who is referred to by “somebody else”? Where might it have been hidden? And if it was never destroyed, are there other “disappeared” and “destroyed” things which might also come to light?
If it was never destroyed, are there other “disappeared” and “destroyed” things which might also come to light?
Fortunately, in the world of Plath scholarship, new discoveries do keep emerging. Several journals that Hughes gave to Smith College were originally meant to be sealed until 2013 (50 years after her death) but they were unsealed early by Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, and subsequently edited with Karen Kukil and published with the rest as The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath in October of 2000.
Then, in April of 2017, the Guardian published a story describing a trove of never-before-seen letters, sent by Sylvia Plath to her former therapist, Dr. Ruth Barnhouse, between 1960 and 1963. Dr. Barnhouse was likely the model for the Dr. Nolan character in The Bell Jar, the therapist who helps Esther recover from her depression. Plath and Barnhouse remained in touch through letters after Plath returned to England.
In these letters, Plath described how she felt upon first discovering Hughes’s infidelity. She reflected as well on a miscarriage, before becoming pregnant with Nicholas, which occurred just days after Hughes had physically abused her. She wrote that she felt “Hughes wanted her dead.” These letters are now included in the new Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, co-edited by Karen Kukil and Peter Steinberg, and published in late 2018. In these letters, Plath also alleges that Hughes felt threatened by having a son, Nicholas, a “usurper” and that during their separation, he goaded Plath to kill herself.
Carol Hughes, the widow of Ted Hughes, has commented that these accusations are “as absurd as they are shocking to anyone who knew Ted well.” Frieda Hughes also expressed her doubts, writing in the forward to the new volume, “My father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.” She noted that in earlier letters, her mother had mentioned the miscarriage, saying it had happened for “no apparent reason.” During this period of betrayal and separation, she asked, “what woman would want to paint her exiting husband in anything other than the darkest colours?”
If Plath’s missing journals, or the manuscript of Double Exposure, similarly painted Hughes in “the darkest colours” then it is no wonder why he might have resisted their publication. If Plath’s descriptions of physical and emotional abuse in the letters to Barnhouse are echoed in her journals, and in her novel, then this would only reinforce those charges.
If Plath’s missing journals, or the manuscript of Double Exposure, painted Hughes in “the darkest colours” then it is no wonder why he might have resisted their publication.
Did Double Exposure disappear? Was it destroyed? Or was it hidden? Or could it remain under seal in one of the Plath collections, until some future date?
Kukil said that this renewed interest is a good sign that people are still excited for new work by Plath, and that she’s hopeful that the missing journals, and the novel-in-progress, Double Exposure, will indeed resurface in the coming years.
If she is right, the novel could be a chance for Plath’s readers to see if the power of those final Ariel poems found its way into her prose as well. We may get a clearer picture of Plath’s last, difficult, but still hopeful months. The “hellishly funny” novel that made herself laugh and laugh, despite everything. The words that she thought might still furnish those apartments, one at a time, until everything was right again.
It’s tempting to say that Marlon James’s brand is violence: operatic, almost mystical, always exacting. It’s also tempting to say his brand is sprawl. Even the Jamaican novelist’s shortest book — John Crow’s Devil, at 206 pages — manages to turn a turf war between two local ministers into cosmic combat. It’s tempting, then, to say that the Marlon James brand is a uniquely postcolonial mélange of the terrestrial and the empyrean. Human frailty, human violence, human hope, all of these things are lent, in his work, a cosmogonal weight. Nowhere is this more evident than in his latest outing, Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the opening salvo in a mind-bending fantasy trilogy about a band of misfits hired to find and retrieve a mysterious young boy.
The fantasy takes place in Iron Age Africa seen through a mirror darkly. Phantasm is the order of the day; or, rather, the night. The dramatis personae includes a necromancer, a shape-shifting leopard who is sometimes animal and sometimes man, bush fairies, a girl made entirely of smoke, a giant who hates being called a giant, a very smart buffalo, trolls from the Blood Swamp, a vampire lightning bird and, well, the list goes on. A boy named Tracker is the book’s protagonist, gifted (or cursed) with the ability to find anything and anyone by simply inhaling their scent. As part of this group of mercenaries, he provides a window into a world at once hallucinatory and terrifyingly real.
James and I spoke over coffee and tea (as he had been nursing a cold) at Oslo Coffee Roasters in Brooklyn. We had first met at the Brooklyn Book Festival some years prior, I as a fanboy and he as a pre-Booker winner, and had the pleasure of appearing on a panel together at New York Comic Con a few years after, as colleagues and contemporaries. Our conversation ranged from the centrality of oral storytelling in non-Western cultures to Ninja Scroll, from Toni Morrison to narcocorridos, and, near the heart of it, to the obligations one had to navigate as a storyteller in the spotlight.
Tochi Onyebuchi: So, what did your editor say when you handed in the first draft of this?
Marlon James: He thought it was great! This is the thing: I was surprised at how open people are, because I expected a fight. And I expected a fight every step of the way. God bless Wakanda. Black Panther is a gift that keeps on giving. I remember, the same editor said to me, “you know, my sales team is so excited about this book.” I was like, “what did you tell them?” They said, “oh, I just mentioned Black Panther every five minutes.” So, to my pleasant surprise, they were super excited. And even when they were excited about the Africanness and the blackness, I thought they would stumble on the queerness. And they didn’t! Probably because it’s Riverhead; now I’m not trying to blow up Riverhead more than they need to be blown up, but they do behave quite like an indie publisher. They got people to read Brief History, shit! So, yeah, they were super excited about it.
TO: I think anybody familiar with your work — particularly Brief History — will notice the operatic violence and the really aggressive queerness. So, there’s not really any surprise there.
MJ: Which is why this doesn’t feel like a leap for me. For all sorts of reasons. One, it’s no secret how much I love scifi, fantasy and crime — so-called genre fiction. I’ve never been shy about that. That’s the stuff I grew up with. But if you’re gonna write with the Caribbean and the African — and you’re gonna subtract the Western worldview — then the stuff that they keep calling “magical realism” is real. And, even with all of that, I had to do some serious mental housecleaning. Because even when people write about mythology and witchcraft and so on, they still write from this Judeo-Christian point of view. That it’s not really real.
If you’re gonna write with the Caribbean and the African, then the stuff that they keep calling ‘magical realism’ is real.
TO: Sort of Orientalist.
MJ: Right. “It’s not gonna be real; it’s never gonna prevail.” And I was like, “oh, this is some serious shit. A hex is a hex.” Magic is real. These creatures are real. Ninki-Nanka was real until white preachers told them it wasn’t. It’s what you wanna accept as truth. People who believe in a magic baby born in a stable got no place attacking dragons.
TO: There’s a lot there that I want to unpack. But one of the things that really struck me about Black Leopard, Red Wolf was precisely that lack of a gulf between reality and dream, or, I guess, what we would call dream. Going back to the African epics, it’s all part of the world. It made me think of how different societies view mental illness. In the West, it seems very much a biochemical thing that emerges from a person, influenced by the environment. Whereas, in a lot of African cultures, particularly where my mom came from in Nigeria, it’s very much an externality. Demon possession. Or it’s a part of the world that’s dueling with the person.
MJ: But even that is pretty new. Because if you go to places that are way more connected to pre-Christian and Muslim Africa, like Uganda, schizophrenia “sufferers” (and I put that in quotes) have voices, but the voices are all affirmative.
TO: Like cheerleaders.
MJ: And they can be annoying. A bunch of people saying “you won; yes, you won; honey, you won” can be annoying too. The dilemma is: if you have your own personal cheerleading squad, why would you want to be cured? If you hear a voice, it’s the ancestors. In a lot of Hindu culture, if you hear a voice, it’s one of the millions of gods. Spirits. Judeo-Christianity comes in and says a voice is a demon. Science comes in and says the voice is a condition. So even the whole idea that they’re demons is still new. Scientists were baffled. “How do we treat this?” I don’t wanna lose my own damn cheerleading squad.
TO: In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, there’s a mystery that needs to be solved, there are crime elements but also epic fantasy elements — not necessarily a quest narrative, but there is the journey. And the motley crew that’s put together. Could you talk a little bit about how those influences came to bear, particularly on this work?
MJ: There are some obvious influences like Tolkien. The funny thing is, writing a book that is totally pulling from African mythology and history and religion and so on, but still being influenced by people like Tolkien and people even like Robert E. Howard, who wasn’t very keen on black people. To put it mildly.
TO: That’s very diplomatic.
MJ: Well, I stopped reading H.P. Lovecraft, because you gotta draw the line somewhere. But the quest narrative is not just Lord of the Rings. It’s Journey to the West. It’s the oldest plot in the book: people go on a journey. And you might learn something. At the same time, I wanted to poke holes in it. At one point, Sogolon goes “well, how goes your fellowship now?” Which might seem like a dig at Lord of the Rings — it’s really not. But it is a dig at this sort of “we’ll band together in a unified purpose, all for one and one for all.” No, humans aren’t like that.
TO: Nobody in this book is like that.
MJ: This fellowship breaks up from the moment they set out! Only one person in the entire group has a sense of mission about where they’re going and it’s Sogolon. Everybody else is either for the money or along for the ride. I was very interested in, knowing all of that, what would make people work together anyway. Or what would make people band together. What could sustain a narrative if it’s not everybody going for this magic child thing? And part of that too is remembering that when you’re writing the quest narrative, the destination is the least important thing. To come back to Europeans, that’s why The Odyssey was very helpful. I went back to all of it: The Odyssey, The Iliad. It’s how the actual journey profoundly changes you that, to me, was a more important story than what they’re on the road for. They lose sight of that or they get disillusioned by that. Or they’re plotting against each other. Or some people are more sold on the idea than others. And then, of course, people start betraying people. People start being human.
In the quest narrative, the destination is the least important thing.
TO: Even the shapeshifters.
MJ: Even the shapeshifters. Even the giant (who doesn’t want to be called a giant). Most journeys are anticlimax. Deliberately. Whatever you’re gonna learn about humanity through this land of monsters and creatures and mermaids and demons and so on — I actually think these might be the most humane characters I’ve ever written. And they’re all shapeshifters.
TO: Or people with no limbs who have to roll around everywhere.
MJ: I love that kid.
TO: With regards to the horrific creatures that you’ve injected into this narrative, it seemed to me very reminiscent of Dhalgren by Samuel Delany where you never really know how next the world is going to betray you. It’s like everything is out to kill you. This was the first time in a very long time that I felt actual fear, reading a book. So, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about horror versus gore in your work.
MJ: Oh, God. That’s a good question. Because the way I plot this trilogy: this one is more picaresque, adventure, odyssey. The second one is probably more historical, magical realist. And the third one is gonna be mostly horror.
TO: Oh boy.
MJ: Well, let’s talk about horror. One of the things about horror, as opposed to gore, is that horror is a seduction. Dracula has to lure you first. The wolfman is seductive. He’s gonna rip you to shreds. But maybe he’s not.
TO: He’s a looker.
MJ: It’s the wild thing. And horror is a seduction. And I think if you’re gonna write horror — and I like using horror elements — you can’t forget the seductive part. I will lure you in and I will make you regret it within an inch of your life. But the important part is the lure. And that’s what I think the torture porn people never understand. How is it you’re gonna get to the old house? You’re not gonna go to the blasted house on the hill! You gotta have the lure to the haunted house. At the same time, I quite like gore. I like explicitness. I like pushing on the boundaries. For lots of reasons. Let’s talk about violence, for example. My violent scenes are very violent. But this is how you know it’s not pornography — at least, I hope it’s not pornography, in that you don’t get numb. If the violence hits you every time, that means it’s intense, but it’s not pornography. If you’re reaching the point where you just glaze over, then it has gone into pornography. And it’s no longer violent.
TO: There’s a lot of sexual violence too, and that, I think, makes me think of the queerness aspect and masculinity and male aggression and all these things that are sort of working together.
MJ: And that’s tricky because this is something I wrestle with, and I have my students wrestle with, all the time. When you’re dealing with things like sex, violence, rape, and the attitudes behind it, did you write a book with misogynists or did you write a misogynist book? Did you write a book with homophobes or did you write a homophobic book? Did you write a book that doesn’t flinch from violence against women or did you write an anti-women book? There is violence in it, there’s also sexism in it. I mean, Tracker is a prick. But is the behavior being called out? Somebody says to Tracker very early on, “are all women witches to you?”
When you’re dealing with things like sexual violence, did you write a book with misogynists or did you write a misogynist book?
TO: And Sogolon gives as well as she takes.
MJ: Precisely. To me, the solution is not to turn away from all of that horrible violence. It’s to make sure that you establish context. These women exist in a capacity other than victim. But at the same time, there’s nothing sinful about the status of it. It’s something that was done to you. There’s sometimes these weird kinds of books and films that are super violent but victim-blaming. And I wasn’t gonna do that at all. I remember, with first book I ever wrote, John Crow’s Devil, years, years before it came out, also a brutal book, a person read it and said the writing is okay, but I don’t have a clue about women. And I said “what are you talkin about? I have a mother, I have a sister.”
TO: The Matt Damon defense.
MJ: And she said, “I bet you don’t read any women” and that was true at the time, certainly no living one. And she put me on a diet of Toni Morrison. And the thing about the Toni Morrison books that struck me — particularly The Bluest Eye and Beloved — is there’s a lot of cruelty in those books. Because I thought the solution was “don’t be cruel.” Don’t put cruelty in the book. And don’t have your female characters do irrational things. And she said, “no, you’re missing the point. That’s not the point, they can do irrational things.” In Beloved, you have to come to terms with the fact of murder being an act of love. The thing is, are you giving these people humanity, are you giving these people agency, the capability of change? And I think if you do that, then yeah, they can do cruel, horrendous, brutal, terrible shit. Because in the absence of that, I’d have just gone from the ignoble savage problem to the noble savage problem. Yeah, everybody’s virtuous, they’re still cartoons.
TO: That reminds me of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, this mother-daughter epic, wherein they both have the power to essentially break the world, and they both do, over the course of the trilogy, really horrific things. At the same time, it’s not just that you’re rooting for them, it’s that they exist as full characters with agency. There’s cruelty in this world, and cruel things are happening to them, but it doesn’t feel like pornography.
MJ: As the reader, you never get the opt-out clause. You’re gonna have complicated feelings about these characters. Which is how it should be. I learned that writing Book of Night Women, my second novel. Where my protagonist makes a lot of bad choices, which cost a lot of lives. But you still kinda have to root for her. And I like when a book takes me through the ringer. And I feel exhausted in a good way at the end of it.
TO: Have there been any recently that have done that for you?
MJ: Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt. Which is a historical novel. It’s been years since I’ve seen a book go so far out on a limb with a character — the character does some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. And I remember thinking “wow, wow, you’re going there, you’re going there, I don’t know if I can do this, I don’t know if I can do this, I don’t know if I can hold on.” There’s a scene where this guy just got married but the king’s army has caught up with them and they’re gonna be hung. He escapes with his brother, and his brother ends up seriously injured. And they have to get away, but he’s so upset that his wedding was violated. At the very least, he’s gonna consummate his marriage. So, he basically, in the presence of his battered and bruised, near-dead brother, on the run, stops to rape his wife. And I’m like “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t think I can do this, I don’t think I can do this.” And I can’t believe she wrote this. And yet, I stuck with it. And, somehow, she makes me fall for him again. It was the first character in years that I would lose sleep over because I’m frettin’ over this guy. And when he reverts — total spoiler, for whoever’s gonna read it — when he reverts back to what he was before, I felt personally betrayed. I was like I can’t believe you disappointed me like this. I’ve been here, stuck through all this shit with you.
TO: We were all rooting for you.
MJ: “I forgave you, dammit.” I don’t think any of my characters do things you can’t come back from, ever. That was a risky thing she did with that book. But a book should leave you changed. A book should leave you a little knackered. It should leave you a little messed up.
TO: It’s often said you announced your intention to write this African Game of Thrones. If Wars of the Roses was George R.R. Martin’s analog for Game of Thrones, what’s the analog for Black Leopard, Red Wolf? Is there a specific when and where?
MJ: I was trying the hardest to follow the rise of the Iron Age. A lot of African societies didn’t have a Bronze. They went from stone straight to iron. But I was also hugely inspired by imperial-era Ethiopia. And the palace intrigue. To the point where I think I might still write a historical novel based on it. I mean, it was like reading Henry VIII. I don’t know if there’s any one text or one period. I was also reading a lot of Plantagenet when I was writing this book. Largely because I think if you’re gonna write war or the rumor of war, it should be plausible. I was reading, not just the Odyssey, but all the Scandinavian sagas, Njáls saga and all of that. A lot of African epics that have been translated, a lot of Sonjara and Askia Mohammed. Ultimately, I had to go my own way. Because, one, one of the things about all these ancient stories is they’re all about kings. They’re all about the kings, they’re all about the fall of a royal house. It’s fine. But my book starts in the streets. Hell, it starts in prison. And for that, there’s less precedent. Why would there be? All the great dramas, the ancient stories, have always been about important people: kings, princes, princesses, queens, gods. If there’s a Greek epic about a barber, it hasn’t survived. So, a lot of Ovid, The Metamorphoses. But also, a lot of comics. Whether it’s Hellboy or B.P.R.D., the whole idea of misfits brought together is something I’d have gotten from comics, I’d have gotten from X-Men or New Mutants or Alpha Flight. Or all the supporting characters in Hellblazer.
TO: One of my favorite storylines in any medium is X-Cutioner’s Song. It collects, Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, vol. 2, X-Force, and X-Factor. It was back in the day when they did these cross-book storylines (that’s why trade paperback was always an absolute godsend). Cable comes back in time to assassinate Professor X, and Apocalypse is involved somehow, and it’s all about the Summers-Grey bloodline. And it has all the epic feeling of these 700-page fantasy books.
MJ: See the 700-page thing to me was also Sandman. Cause that’s how I read them. Trade paperbacks. To me, I was reading novels. “Dream Country,” “The Kindly Ones.” I read that as a huge volume put together. I have said to anybody who would listen to me: the best American novel of the past 30 years is Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez. And Death of Speedy [Ortiz] is pretty close.
If you don’t get that [epic feeling], it’s a failure. It’s a failure of fiction, it’s a failure of speculative fiction. In that sense, I’m as inspired by film as I am by novels. You know, it’s like the first time you saw the Death Star. Or the sort of nightmare-scapes in Alien, which all seem like an insect turned inside-out. As a writer, I’m as inspired by Rick Baker as I am by any novelist. I nearly missed my own book signing line to go line up for Mike Mignola.
Everybody assumed I came out of some ghetto and survived gunshots; no, I came out of the suburbs and survived boredom.
TO: That is definitely relatable.
MJ: I wonder sometimes if it’s a response to growing up in suburbia. It never stopped being funny: when Brief History came out, everybody assumed I came out of some ghetto and survived gunshots; no, I came out of the suburbs and survived boredom. One way in which you survive that is just to vanish into any world you could. And I was always in some other space. To the point where I’d have a fully-realized story all in my head because I would rehearse it so much. Some of these characters in Black Leopard, Red Wolf existed for years. I just couldn’t figure out what their story was. And the worlds themselves. I just love the idea of imagining something that is so foreign. Here’s what I wanted to resist: I think we do this kind of “yeah we’re gonna imagine, but we’re still gonna keep it tethered to the conventions of reality or the conventions within scifi.” And I didn’t want to do that, because that would then just be regular scifi with dark-skinned people.
TO: You’re just race-swapping.
MJ: You’re writing Tarzan in brownface. And I didn’t want that. What I think, for me, made sure didn’t happen was while I’m reading all these African epics, I also have to read their value systems and I have to read their ideas of right and wrong. Circumcision, including female circumcision, becomes confronted in the book. The idea of the world being round, but we’re living inside it. But they still got the whole idea of the world being round way early. Vampires who are perfectly fine killing you in the daylight.
TO: Yeah, there’s just a lot of cool shit in the book.
MJ: (Laughter) There’s a lot of cool shit. I kept thinking, “God, the childhood I would have had if some of these were out.” I don’t have plans to write YA or for children, but we need new myths, man. We need new old myths. They’re not new, I just didn’t know them. Some of this I grew up with, like Anansi, but it says something that most of the creatures in my book are part of the African mythology, history, but I had to go learn them at flipping 40. A lot of the research I was doing was source material. Original research papers. I read a lot of the African epics. And people reading them will read them with a very Orientalist eye. And the people who translate them also translate them with the Orientalist eye. But if you apply that eye to any text, then even the Iliad is not gonna sound great. So, what we have is a lot of scientists and anthropologists doing really good work, but most of those epics haven’t been translated by a poet yet. And a poet who understands griot verse. We’re still waiting for an accurate English-language Lion King. It’s not quite there yet.
TO: I think this speaks to the larger oral tradition, the importance of griots. Tracker even says to a character towards the end “You know no griot” as though that’s a curse. And characters throughout the novel want to know the How of things, not even necessarily the Why. Break this down for me, tell me the story.
MJ: One thing that I had to be very mindful of and very careful of is, again, not allowing any place for Westernism or Orientalism to slip through. One easy area it could have slipped through is the idea that oral cultures are primitive. So, when he says “you know no griot,” it’s a sign we’re an oral culture, and I’m important enough that somebody’s gonna recite my story in verse. Because I think it’s very hard for people on this side of the world to let go of the idea that an oral culture isn’t just as sophisticated. They just have different systems. “Oh, I got that person who’s gonna record it for me, and he better learn it by heart.” Which is why “you know no griot” is actually a pretty devastating diss. It’d be like me telling you “you know what? History’s gonna judge you a minor person.” As soon as you die, you’re forgotten.
One thing that I had to be very mindful of is not allowing any place for Westernism or Orientalism to slip through.
TO: I just finished watching Narcos: Mexico, and towards the end, one of the characters, you start to hear a narcocorrido of them. This song lionizing famous drug traffickers. A recording of history that shined a spotlight on particular people. And I see the same thing here with the emphasis on the oral. I mean the whole book is essentially: “here’s what happened.”
MJ: The one thing the ancient epics — and I include the Bible in this — have in common is great orality. Robert Alter translated the Torah, and he made a change. In the Bible, it said from the dust came Adam. Okay, fine. He changed it to from the humus came the human. It completely changes it. Because the thing Alter remembered is that these books were written to be read aloud. And that was very important to me. It was really interesting hearing the guy doing the audiobook for this. He was very happy. I wrote it to be read aloud. The problem is, he read it too damn good. The griot parts, he sings it. Dude, you can’t do this.
TO: So, the audiobook is, like, a qualitatively different experience.
MJ: Goddammit, dude, you’ve turned the audiobook into the definitive version of the fucking book. ’Cause I am not singing no shit on the book tour.
TO: It’s almost this circularity, right? This story that’s modeled as an oral history gets written down, and then is — it’s interesting to see other, non-Western storytelling traditions interact with Western modes of production.
MJ: Yeah, I’m still a child of West. I was born in Jamaica. I live in America. I love rock and roll. Rock and roll’s black, but still. What I had to get rid of was the value system. I know everything about the Celts and the Druids and so on. But knowing about griots and fetish priests and the orishas.
TO: The Igbo pantheon as well.
MJ: The Dogon pantheon is fantastic. Nobody had to tell them that there’s a sun and all these planets are swirling around it. They have this dance where this person holds a ball with a string, and the guy’s spinning, and after a while, you realize, holy shit, that’s the atom. Hold on, that’s the solar system. He knows exactly what he’s doing.
TO: I encountered some of this when I was doing research for my second book. I learned where the word algebra came from. It’s Arabic, al-Jabr. Which means “the reunion of broken parts.”
MJ: That makes me want to do math, and nothing makes me wanna do math.
TO: There’s this interesting intersection of mathematics and, more largely, science, and the divine. Rather than being competing ways of organizing the universe, they are complimentary. You can’t have one without the other. It’s not just prayer. It’s that numbers are a language through which God speaks to us.
MJ: Religion is practice, and algebra is practice. But I also think being non-Judeo-Christian has a lot to do with it. The thing about us on this side of the world is that even if we’re not religious, we’re all Calvinists. We still believe hard work plus reward is a sign of a meaningful life. One child shall lead us, or one hero or man is man and woman is woman and blah blah blah. Somebody asked me, they thought the queerness was the way in which I’m trying to punk or subvert the narrative. I was like “dude, those are the oldest elements in the book.” Non-binary, gender fluidity, shapeshifting, queer, gay, bisexual. Some African tribes, there’re 15 genders. My friend, Lola Shoneyin, on Facebook once, somebody asked her “do you think Africa will ever be ready to accept things like homosexuality and blah blah blah?” She said, “Africa was born ready.” Until a bunch of TV preachers from America told them they weren’t. None of those elements are new. Shoga is not new.
TO: It reminds me of Freshwater, actually. There’s this blend of the animist and the religious or divine elements with the very corporeal question of how we occupy our bodies. That seems very much in line with what we’re talking about with regards to these other ways of being in the world. So, you started researching this after having turned in Brief History, so before the Booker stuff and before it took off — did you ever feel that you had to walk this line between the book you should write and the book you wanted to write?
MJ: Oh, absolutely. Especially post-winning that Booker. The very first research on this book, I think I did in August 2015. As soon as I finish one book, I’m on to the next. Cause I have no life.
TO: (Laughter) Nature abhors a vacuum.
MJ: But I knew there’s a certain kind of book people expect a Booker winning or a literary establishment favoriting book writer to write. There’s nothing wrong with all of those books. And I remember talking with my agent about this. I have two ideas. I have this idea, which is a quite practical idea of what I should write next. It was lowkey, it was gonna be short, it was gonna be this quietly devastating indie book. And there’s this thing I really wanna write. And I remember she’s saying, “well, the other one seems like a more logical choice.” But she could pick up that I really wanted to write this book. I still believe this, you should write the books you’ve always wanted to read. Even then I thought, I don’t know how this book would happen. One thing my books have in common is they start from a place of impossibility. They all start from “I don’t know how the hell I’m gonna write this.” This one was worse! There was all this research, all this stuff I loved. That was still not a book. There are so many trial and error versions of this book, including quite a few written in third person. I just didn’t know whose story it was.
TO: So, you split the difference. The trilogy style is Rashomon.
MJ: That happened because I was having an off-hand discussion with somebody about the TV show The Affair.
TO: In keeping with this theme of unreliable narrators, which has much higher stakes given the centrality of oral culture.
MJ: Truth is your job [as the reader]. It’s not my job to convince you that I’m telling the truth. It’s your job to decide whether you’re gonna believe it or not. There’s an ownership of truth, but there’s also an accountability where you are a part of whether this truth endures. Which I found profound when I was reading a lot of the African stories. Some of that got translated to this side of the world. They couldn’t kill it off the slave ships. The idea that the trickster tells the story. In Jamaica, we have a saying. Nobody understands what it means now. At the end of a story, the storyteller says, “Jack Mandora.” And the audience says, “me no choose none.” Which, translated, means “I’m done with my story, do you believe it?” And I go, “no. Tell me another one tomorrow.” You’re gonna have to choose. I’m not telling the reader which of these three versions you should believe. You can believe all three or you can pick. There’s no secret Book 4 coming. No “authentic” version. You’re gonna have to choose. Or maybe you think all three people are lying.
Truth is your job as the reader.
TO: The reader is implicated.
MJ: The reader is absolutely implicated because you may choose the liar.
TO: One thing that I was wondering about — some of this is drawing on current and acute identity crisis — but I was wondering if you thought at all of the idea of diasporic African writers drawing from the Continent in this very particular way. Writing AfrArcana?
MJ: Well, as someone who just did it [laughter] I think there’s a lot of things at work here. It’s a reach for connection. I think as children of the diaspora we have a right to that thing. I remember reading a very stupid article years ago saying that black people can culturally appropriate. And I was like “Sweetie.” It’s one thing if I step into my father’s closet and try on his shoes, even if I don’t know the purpose of shoes. There is difference between that and me going to my next-door neighbor’s house and stealing their shoes. There’s a difference. I have a right to my mother’s house. I have a right to my father’s closet. We’re in the diaspora for a reason!
TO: That’s a whole other interview.
MJ: In the same way I would never stop an Irish-American from writing a book about Irish mythology or anyone from Minnesota writing a Viking novel. It’s legacy, it’s family. I have a right to those myths. Any person in the African diaspora has a right to those myths. Because of our background and because of what we know, we can interpret them differently. That’s the great thing about this kind of storytelling. The story changes depending the teller. That’s why there’s already like five or six versions of the Sundiata Lion King story. The whole idea of Authentic Version or Director’s Cut or ‘This is the true version’ makes no sense. It does not apply. So African storytelling has already made the space for our kind of voice. It’s already made the space for it. I do have a right to claim it. But I also think we all bring something else. That’s the great thing about speculative fiction and scifi. Ultimately, we’re all pulling from the myths and the myths are for everybody. How else are we gonna learn about themselves?
I think there’s a certain Westernness we can sometimes bring to that kind of story. For example, the whole idea of will and agency. The idea that not everything is fated by the gods and that the human will plays a huge role. I’m not saying it’s something the Western people came up with — you can find it in African storytelling — but I know it’s my western upbringing that taught me that. To me, all of this information was just this huge reservoir that I got to pull from in much the same way Tolkien would have pulled from the Celtic and Scandinavian or George RR Martin pulling from Wars of the Roses or whatever he knows about Asgard. That’s how old myths turn into new myths.
Any person in the African diaspora has a right to African myths.
TO: So, I was reading this. I got to the end. And one of the very first thoughts in my head was “I cannot wait to see how the fuck this is going to blow peoples’ minds.” I’ve never seen anything like it. The structural conceit, the elements of African mythology, the inversion of the quest narrative, all these different things coming together like lightning captured in a bottle. And I was imagining to myself, “how on earth is some poor reviewer from the Guardian going to handle this?”
MJ: I don’t know. I’m already thinking, “wow, this is gonna get some interesting reviews.” I don’t remember who, said it was “equal parts enthralling and enervating.” I was like “enervating? Sweetie, get some stamina. This is gonna be a rough ride.”
TO: You got two more after this.
MJ: The next story’s gonna be told by some 315-year-old witch, and she’s got a lot of shit on her chest.
In 2013, a short story competition for young writers was established in Greenland. Niviaq Korneliussen, then 22 years old, entered with an ethereal story of a woman hitchhiking across the US to San Francisco, where she meets her idol, the musician Pink, in a tattoo shop. She won. Shortly thereafter, one of her country’s only publishers asked her for a novel.
Korneliussen had always written — in high school her friends found it strange that she actually enjoyed essay assignments — but she didn’t consider herself a writer. It would never have seemed a possibility in a country with only one bookstore. Milik, the largest Greenlandic publisher, has a staff of two people.
Milik published Korneliussen’s Homo Sapienne the following year, first in Greenlandic and then in the larger Danish market, translated by Korneliussen herself. The cover is amazing: a grainy photo of a woman sitting naked and unconcerned, eating a banana. Korneliussen had written the novel in three weeks, often through the night, after receiving a three-month grant from the Greenlandic government and procrastinating until nearly the last minute. The characters had been living inside her for so long, she says, that when she finally sat down to write, she couldn’t stop.
Sometimes you can feel how furiously a novel poured out of someone. I’ve felt it in Chloe Caldwell’s Women, André Acimán’s Call Me By Your Name, Violette LeDuc’s Thérèse and Isabelle. I suppose, as I write out these titles, that it’s not just the speed at which they were written: it’s the propulsion and drama of young, queer sexuality that compels one — or, at least, me — to read them feverishly, straight through in one sitting. Korneliussen’s novel is short and sizzling, narrated in stream-of-consciousness from the perspectives of five queer early-twenty-somethings in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital (population 17,500).
Korneliussen’s novel is short and sizzling, narrated in from the perspectives of five queer early-twenty-somethings in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital.
Fia is “turning old,” “dying,” three years into a straight relationship — “dry kisses stiffening like desiccated fish” — and by page 10, she has wriggled free (though first she’s forced to read her ex’s “own fucking version of how to understand the five fucking stages of loss, in endless text messages.”) Over weekends, the characters rage around, drinking, sleeping with friends and strangers, chastising themselves, waking up puking, communicating and miscommunicating in person and over text. To read this novel is to keenly remember what it feels like to be 22: in one scene, the character Sara lies in her bedroom under a “black cloud,” switching furiously between tracks on her speakers — Foo Fighters, Pink, Rihanna, Joan Jett — as each manages to only darken her foul mood.
Homo Sapienne touched a nerve. The novel was written with young readers in mind — “I wanted to write the kind of book that I would have wanted to read as a teenager,” Korneliussen tells me over Skype — but it has not been marketed as YA, and clearly is resonating with readers of all ages. It quickly sold over 2,000 copies in Greenland, a country where 1,000 copies makes a book a best-seller, and many thousand more in Danish. Translations were released in French, German, Czech, Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, and Icelandic. Virago published an English-language edition in the UK in November with the (very British) title Crimson, and Black Cat, an imprint of Grove, Atlantic, released the American edition as Last Night in Nuuk in January. This makes Korneliussen perhaps the first Greenlander ever to reach an audience far beyond her island. She has found herself, over the past four years, traveling the globe.
I was surprised to hear that Korneliussen’s candid evocations of sex and sexuality did not especially scandalize readers in Greenland. Gay marriage was legalized by unanimous vote in Greenland in 2015 (the same year it passed in our Supreme Court, though less unanimously). “It’s a Christian country,” Korneliussen explains, “but we can’t really compare it to the States where Christian people are extremely Christian.” Greenland was colonized by Lutheran and Moravian missionaries sponsored by Denmark, but today, “people don’t really go to church or anything like that.” And before colonization, the Inuit people had a much more open understanding of sexuality — though, as a hunting society, gender roles were strict. Korneliussen reflects that gay men have it harder than gay women today, as the ideal of the masculine hunter still prevails. But things are changing. “I give it ten years,” Korneliussen says, “until [being gay] is completely normal.”
What did scandalize Greenlandic readers was Korneliussen’s often critical portrayal of Greenland, particularly in a chapter from the perspective of Fia’s brother Inuk. Inuk escapes to Denmark after a friend at a house party drunkenly lets slip the secret of his relationship with a male politician. The rumor quickly becomes front-page news. (In a capital of 17,500 people, one can imagine, word spreads like small town gossip.) To Inuk, Greenland feels like a “prison,” walled in by mountains: “an island that will never change,” that “has run out of oxygen.” The inmates are “so institutionalized that they stare at one another until they start to lose their minds.” In a letter to Arnaq, the friend who betrayed him, who blames her recklessness on the neglect and abuse she suffered as a child, he writes, “Stop feeling so sorry for yourself because there’s no reason that you should be pitied. Enough of this post-colonial shit.”
Greenland is an autonomous Danish territory, relying on Denmark for two-thirds of their budget (the last third comes mostly from commercial fishing). Home Rule was established only in 1979, at which point all place names were changed from Danish back to Greenlandic. The capital, Godthaab, became Nuuk. Speaking Greenlandic became a political statement of national pride, whereas before to speak Danish was to be educated and employable. One can imagine the feeling of whiplash, the fragile project of national identity, the sensitivity to narratives of victimization and to persistent Danish stereotypes, which paint indigenous Greenlanders as primitive, lazy, alcoholics and child-abusers.
Korneliussen’s candid evocations of sex and sexuality did not especially scandalize Greenlandic readers. What did scandalize them was Korneliussen’s often critical portrayal of Greenland.
“I think Greenlandic people are so used to getting criticism from Denmark that it was hard to get the criticism from a young Greenlander,” Korneliussen tells me. “You have to be proud to be a Greenlander. That has been the mentality for many years. So people asked me if I had identity issues with being a Greenlander or if I had problems when I was growing up because it’s not normal for a Greenlander to criticize.” But, she insists, a writer has to be able to criticize her own country. Greenland has “a lot of work to do.” Setting aside the precarious economy and the existential threat that global warming presents to the nation, child abuse, alcoholism, and suicide rates are alarmingly high on the island. Better for the criticism to come from someone who knows what it’s like than from “a Danish dude who has been in the country for two months.”
The character Inuk’s rage at Greenland must also be read in context; he is raging just as hard against himself, refusing to accept his own sexuality. Many young Greenlanders and, as Korneliussen explains it, Greenlanders of any age who have not yet found peace with themselves, feel trapped, and those who can afford it (travel is prohibitively expensive for many) often spend a year or two in Denmark. She herself went to Denmark for university but ultimately felt homesick and returned, which is typically how it goes, she says. You have to leave before you can decide to stay. That’s not to mention the common experience of racism in Denmark, where bars frequently refuse entry to Greenlanders. Inuk feels alienated among the blonde and fair-skinned Danes (whose conversations he also finds “boring”), and finally, after coming out to his sister, he returns home.
The population of Greenland is so small and physically isolated that it does feel cut off from the rest of the world. Travel even within the country is often made impossible by snow, and there is only one international flight out of Nuuk, to Reykjavik. At least young people today have the internet, Korneliussen notes, but language can still be a barrier. In the novel, Sara finds herself desperately googling to figure out why her girlfriend — a butch woman who ultimately finds that she identifies more as a man — doesn’t want to be touched during sex. “Why doesn’t Ivinnguaq want me to touch her”? she searches in Greenlandic. Zero results. In the English-speaking world, young people increasingly have access to literature that reifies the nuances of gender and sexuality. Though Greenlanders seem to be broadly tolerant, there is no history of queer literature or culture in Greenland; growing up in the tiny town of Nanortalik in the far south, Korneliussen did not even know that it was possible to be gay outside the very distant world of her television. Young Greenlanders today can turn to Homo Sapienne. But Sara, stuck within the novel, has no reference points. She tries googling her question in Danish. The search turns up only “hetero bullshit.”
I had a similarly fruitless internet search when I sat down at my laptop to google “history of Greenlandic literature,” and even just “Greenlandic literature,” hoping to understand Last Night in Nuuk in context. Everything that came up was about Korneliussen. After much angst and several trips to the library, I found my guide in the former school director for Greenland, Christian Berthelsen, who appears to be the only author of books on the history of Greenlandic literature in any language. Berthelsen was a great advocate for his nation’s writing; he served as chairman for several years of the Greenlandic Publishing House in Nuuk, established in 1957. But let’s turn the clock back a bit.
The Inuit people of Greenland have a rich history of oral storytelling dating centuries before colonization. Legends of heroism against the destructive forces of nature and against unseen spiritual forces, ghost stories, animal fables, and tales of everyday life were passed down through generations. As late as the 1930’s and 40’s, storytellers were busy visiting the families of their communities on winter nights. Berthelsen remembers these scenes, set in the feeble light of a small house, the steady voice of the storyteller against the howling wind outside. In a story’s scariest moments, children dove under the covers and everyone picked up their feet to sit cross-legged, for fear of what might lurk among the skins and supplies under the bed. For the most part, though, the intention and actual effect of the storyteller’s monotonous voice was to put everyone to sleep.
The Inuit people of Greenland have a rich history of oral storytelling dating centuries before colonization.
Greenlandic first became a written language with the arrival of colonialism. In 1721, the Norwegian priest Hans Egede, funded by the Danish monarchy, first set foot on the world’s largest island, learned some rudimentary Greenlandic, and began teaching people to read the Bible in their language. The first Greenlandic writers therefore were hymn writers. Handwritten Danish fables were also passed from house to house at the time, until they became too worn to be legible.
A printing house finally opened in Godthaab in the 1850’s, and the Greenlandic newspaper Atuagagdliutit (“Something to Read”), which still exists today, began printing in 1861. In its columns, for the first time, ordinary Greenlanders could speak to their countrymen in writing. South Greenlandic seal hunters described their settlements and reported on hunting accidents and weather. Danish legends and classics of international literature — Robin Hood, The 1001 Nights — were published in translation in the earliest issues. Twelve issues were printed each year, but because of the extreme difficulty of travel, they were distributed only once annually, so that both local and foreign news reached the people of Greenland a year late. “But that did not matter,” Berthelsen tells us. “They were not used to anything better.”
Thanks in large part to a period of milder weather, the turn of the 20th century brought a period of great modernization, including the advent of occupations outside of seal hunting: principally fishing and sheep breeding. It was in this period that Greenland saw its first recognized poets — the priest Henrik Lund and the organist and college teacher Jonathan Petersen — whose writing praised the beauty of the Greenlandic landscape, expressed gratitude for Danish rule, and took part in the first major debates around Greenlandic identity: should the people remain faithful to the traditional ways of life or embrace modern influences?
The first two Greenlandic novels, published in 1914 and 1931 respectively, reflect the optimism of this period and argue for the modern: both imagined Greenlands of the future — an “enlightened” population, flight routes to China and Japan over the North Pole, high rises in the capital. The first novel imagined freedom from Denmark, while the second, set 200 years in the future in 2105, still foresaw Danish rule, though with equal rights for Danes and Greenlanders.
The first novel by a Greenlandic woman was not published until 1981 (!!!). Bussimi naapinneq (The Meeting on the Bus) by Maaliaaraq Vebaek chronicles the struggles of a Greenlandic woman in Copenhagen, at a time when all Greenlanders who wanted to pursue a college degree had to travel to the universities in Denmark, and often faced racism and disorientation in the new country and culture. “Shattered illusions can lead to human tragedies,” Berthelsen writes elusively, referring, I think, to suicide. But I haven’t read this book. If you speak Danish or Greenlandic, do read it and tell me.
I kept asking Niviaq Korneliussen, as I spoke with her, how her writing reflects and defies “the tradition of Greenlandic literature,” until she had to stop and gently correct me. There simply has not been enough published to call it a “tradition of Greenlandic literature” yet. Berthelsen too notes, after all his work in chronicling it, that Greenlandic literature “is of quite modest scope to date.” A population of 56,000 — and 23,000 as recently as 1950 — simply “is not large enough to support an independent Greenlandic literature. But, that created so far is of special significance when measured with a cultural-historical yardstick.” I could not find out whether or not Berthelsen is alive today to watch Niviaq Korneliussen take the world by storm. If he is, I bet he’s ecstatic.
Korneliussen is writing against tradition, both literary and cultural. The hostility and majesty of nature is inescapably central to Greenlandic writing and storytelling, and to the Greenlandic psyche. It is what pulled Korneliussen back from her time abroad in Denmark: the calm of feeling the ocean, a mountain, and usually a fjord too within reach. And yet nature is intentionally absent from Last Night in Nuuk. So is small town life and seal hunting. Korneliussen’s characters move from apartments to bars to house parties in buses and taxis, and the reader is trapped in the hermetic feeling of any city in the winter. The characters speak, not in official Greenlandic, but in the language of young people in the capital — a mix of colloquial Greenlandic, Danish, and English (unfortunately we miss this in the English translation), peppered with text messages and, yes, hashtags.
Korneliussen’s characters speak, not in official Greenlandic, but in the language of young people in the capital — a mix of colloquial Greenlandic, Danish, and English, peppered with text messages and, yes, hashtags.
Often the characters are pulled towards self-destruction, pinned within relationships, identities, an island nation where they feel trapped. Sometimes they break free. Sometimes they find escape in their own recklessness. In one glorious scene towards the end of the novel, Sara bikes down a hill so fast that she loses control of the handlebars, and nearly mows down a couple on foot. She rounds a curve in the middle of the road; if a car comes, she realizes, she will probably die. But no car comes. She keeps on at top speed, laughing aloud, tears streaming from the wind. For a moment, she finds, “the heaviness in me is blown away.”
“I really wanted the young Greenlander to feel like she is able to live her life as she wants,” Korneliussen reflects. It isn’t easy to be different in a small place. She thinks about all the young misfits in her very young country, still wrestling with its own identity as they wrestle with theirs. “Yeah,” she says. “It was important to me to give hope.”
I n recent years, suicide rates across America have considerably risen and continue to rise in almost every state. For this reason, there is a need for a guide on reporting suicides. The CDC, in this guide, warns that there are many reasons a person might kill themselves, “Researchers found that more than half of people who died by suicide did not have a known diagnosed mental health condition at the time of death. Relationship problems or loss, substance misuse; physical health problems; and job, money, legal or housing stress often contributed to risk for suicide.” The implication here is that a “known mental health condition” is materially different from a known traumatic life event, addiction, or physical health problem.
It’s a popular Western notion that mental illness is a disease of the brain — one that arises from chemical imbalances, not from life events, and that will go away if treated with medication. But as suicide rates continue to rise, perhaps we need to widen the scope of what mental illness is, how it is caused, and what we can do to help those who are suffering. I believe that losing a job, not having enough money to live, substance abuse, and something like physical health are mental health issues, and our mental health is inextricable from our physical health, our economy, and our culture. This is a belief based on my own experiences with mental health and diagnosis — but I’m not alone. Four new books on mental illness offer a similar perspective, portraying the complexity of mental health and how it is inextricably tied to every aspect of our lives and the cultural framework in which we live.
Our mental health is inextricable from our physical health, our economy, and our culture.
When I was thirteen, I attempted suicide, and was subsequently diagnosed with bipolar disorder, at the time called manic depression. Doctors told me I’d be taking Lithium for the rest of my life, and the illness would never go away. My parents thought I’d never graduate college, get married, or have children. When I was 28, the palms of my hands exploded with a thousand liquid-filled blisters, a form of eczema. A doctor told me to get used to it, because it would never go away either. I thought I’d never be able to write again.
In both cases, the doctors were right: eczema and mental illness are diseases of the body that never go away. But I learned that diseases inside the body are very often triggered by our environments. There wasn’t anything inherently wrong with me. More often than not, there was something very, very wrong with my surroundings, my culture, and the outside world. I learned to understand my body and mind, and the way I respond to the world around me. My skin issues and mental issues became manageable, and sometimes seem to disappear, though I know they never will. What I mean to say is, it’s all much more complicated than taking a pill.
Mental illness has always been a source of inspiration for books, television, and movies. Recently, because of a larger awareness of the dangers of stigmatization, popular shows and movies have made it a priority to portray mental illness in more complex, nuanced, closer to real life ways. Maniac on Netflix worked hard to get mental illness right. Sharp Objects portrayed the full range of mental illness and pathology of a mother and her daughters. But there’s a limit to how much nuance can be portrayed onscreen, and mental illness still gets flattened into a trope; Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why, for instance, though hugely popular, was criticized for glamorizing suicide and not offering hope. Books, though, are in the unique position to offer the space necessary to really dive into the causes and effects of mental illness, and recent releases have been using that space to portray how a mental illness develops in tandem within the dynamics of a family, a culture, or a country. In their own way, these books offer a more complete and complex view of mental illness than the one we might be used to.
In Katya Apekina’s The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish, Edith and Mae are raised in Louisiana by their mother, Marianne. Marianne never gets a formal diagnosis, but she is sometimes manic, sometimes depressed, sometimes disappears for days or weeks, eventually attempts suicide, and is hospitalized. Her daughters, one of whom she shares an almost psychic bond with, are sent to New York to live with their father, Dennis, an acclaimed and successful novelist, who is either an eccentric artist, a narcissist, a psychopath, a pedophile, or some combination of which. Dennis and Marianne met when she was a child and he was an adult. He married her when she was a teenager and he was in his 30s. In an old letter from Dennis to Marianne he writes, “I don’t know how to be with you without wanting to kill you and devour you and then bring you back to life, and then write about you and do it all again. Isn’t that love?”
The book is told in short bursts from multiple perspectives, not only Dennis and Marianne but their friends and acquaintances. It contains letters, therapist’s notes, New York Times book reviews, and transcripts of phone conversations, and moves back and forth in time as the mystery of this family and its psychology unfolds. It’s a structure that encourages the reader to wonder: when did Marianne’s mental decline begin? Did her mental illness begin with Dennis? Was she born this way? Was her deterioration willful and selfish, a product of her disease, or upbringing, or a combination of all three? Can the actions or inactions of someone close to us trigger a psychotic episode? The book made me think of mental illness as lying on an ever-shifting spectrum, not just lodged inside the body, but dependent on the culture and environment in which an individual was raised. Because of course we are inextricable from the world and the people who surround us, but this very idea of a lack of a definitive boundary between our bodies and the rest of the world is a sign of mental illness. As Marianne says, “it’s terrible to always have to keep track of the edges of things.”
The book made me think of mental illness as lying on an ever-shifting spectrum, not just lodged inside the body, but dependent on the culture and environment in which an individual was raised.
In Anne-Marie Kinney’s Coldwater Canyon, Shep is a Gulf War Veteran, with Gulf War Syndrome and PTSD, on permanent disability. He follows a young woman who he believes to be his daughter from Nebraska to Los Angeles. He watches as she works in a café and goes on auditions. He hangs out at the local strip mall convenience store, where he is a trusted friend of the family that owns the store, and where he bears witness to the dramas of the neighboring Armenian mafia. Coldwater Canyon is a story of man who is, for a myriad of reasons, is unable to face his traumas and instead avoids them, hoping for the fantasy life he has lived alongside of for years, to come true.
Shep’s behavior can be seen as criminal, creepy, abusive, sad, or any combination thereof. The reader is never asked to pass judgment on Shep, or to provide excuses for him; he is portrayed in an open and honest light, and his delusion about his daughter is not presented as a mitigating factor. But it’s still a delusion, one around which he has shaped his entire adult life. He even believes he had a hand in helping her single mother to raise her, by spying on the mother and daughter throughout her childhood. He believes the mother, a woman with whom he had a brief affair before the war, was bolstered by his presence, by his energy. It’s impossible to extract Shep’s behavior from this delusion, and it’s impossible to extract his delusion from his experiences: his father was never around, his mother died when he was young, and he was raised by a cold and unloving grandmother. He grew up knowing he was a burden. His neurosis was shaped by poverty, loneliness, grief, and then war, and then PTSD, and then the mysterious symptoms of Gulf War Syndrome. I found myself wondering: Is his stalking a crime, or mental illness? Can behavior be both, and can a criminal behavior be met with empathy and understanding?
As I read Coldwater Canyon, I thought about how our culture’s tendency to vilify men, without also vilifying it all; the culture, the country, the weight of the actions of generations, the lack of social structure that should be in place to protect us from all the things that break us, sometimes beyond repair: poverty, racism, sexism, power structures, dysfunctional families, violence, capitalism, that a few rich white men need to ceaselessly become richer at the expense of all of us, while we tear each other apart, unwilling to take the mental health of our citizens into account for their actions.
Esme Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias and Rheea Mukherjee’s The Body Myth are about illnesses that are seemingly on opposite ends of the mental health spectrum. While both conditions are extremely complex and not readily understood, schizophrenia is viewed as an illness over which a person has little control, while the fictitious health conditions that the Munchausen’s patient comes up with are perceived as an attempt to willfully exert control over other people. But of course it’s not so simple. In both books, there is a woman at its center who finds it almost impossible to live inside of the world as it is.
The Body Myth takes place in India and there is much pondering of the American way of labeling illness in order to medicate and fuel the pharmaceutical industry. The narrator, Mira, becomes enamored with a woman afflicted by mysterious ailments — headaches, pain, seizures. She knows the woman is faking but finds her so alluring that she doesn’t care. We are pulled alongside the narrator because we want the answers to these questions: If she is faking her illness — Why? Does her husband know? Does her doctor? If so, do they care? If they are encouraging a false narrative she has for herself, what is wrong with them? Do they have an illness as well? Are those around her complicit in perpetuating her mental illness?
Mira turns to Western philosophy to help her understand this woman she yearns for. She studies Simone de Beauvoir, who says the body is not a thing; it is a situation; it is our grasp on the world. Mira paraphrases Foucault: “there was a time society regarded the insane as wise souls on a higher level of consciousness…that respond to the world asymmetrically.” Whereas in modern days, psychiatry “suppresses their tendencies and coos them back to the reality we’ve semi-agreed to all agree upon.”
Mira presents the possibility that mental illness may be an enhanced, unadulterated peek at the true world, one that takes us away from the shared world that we know as our reality. In this view, a mental illness is not inside of the body at all, and the biochemistry of the physical body is perhaps just a byproduct. In other words, we won’t know anything about mental illness if we only look at the physical body and not the divine. It’s fascinating to think about the faking of a mental illness as a mental illness in itself, and to view mental illness as a window to the divine. It’s a valuable addition to the myriad ways to think about mental illness.
In this view, a mental illness is not inside of the body at all, and the biochemistry of the physical body is perhaps just a byproduct.
Esme Wang, in The Collected Schizophrenias, also discusses this association of mental illness with the divine. The Collected Schizophrenias is a collection of essays that tell the non-linear and ever-shifting story of the author’s various diagnoses. Wang writes about the term that often accompanies a schizophrenic diagnosis — “loosening of associations.” These are associations that are socially agreed upon — our culture’s understanding of reality. Mira from The Body Myth would say a loosening of associations is likely closer to any kind of universal truth, but that’s not a place where we can live. As Wang writes, “No one ever came out of a conversation with the gods for the better.”
Part of the pleasure of reading these essays is in discovering how much I related to the narrator. I think about when my daughter was a baby, peacefully sleeping in her bed, and I lay awake, terrified and frozen, sure I was hearing people quietly moving through the house, moving towards my baby’s room to steal her. I heard a shoe stepping on a toy, I heard a sharp intake of breath. I heard the door open. I knew none of these things were actually happening but I had to get up and check on my daughter, and check every inch of the apartment, behind the shower curtain, inside every closet. Most nights I never made it back to sleep.
Wang’s essay “The Slender Man, the Nothing, and Me” is about the powerful imagination of young girls. In it, Wang posits that we might be part of a larger story without fully knowing how. When she was twelve, she and her friends believed they were in a book, a book that was being written about them. I had an eerily similar experience of shared stories with a friend when I was twelve. Are we mentally ill when we are twelve, or are we just twelve-year-olds? The essay explores a 2014 attempted murder perpetrated by two young girls (since diagnosed with two different types of schizophrenia) who believed they were killing to win the favor of the Slender Man, a creation of online horror fans. Wang ends the essay by saying that she believes very much that your surroundings and who, or what you may come into contact with shape who you are, and shape the development, the severity, and the existence of your mental illness.
Wang craves a correct a diagnosis, because it makes it easier to live with herself. Especially interesting is Wang’s resistance to the recent politically correct way we are to refer to mental illness these days — by positioning mental illness as something that happens to you, not something you are. For example, we are not to say “he is depressed” and certainly not “he is a depressive.” Instead, we are to say “he suffers from depression.” Wang prefers to refer to herself as schizophrenic, because, “Isn’t it cruel to insist on a self without illness?” This was a refreshing and wondering reminder that mental illness is personal, and an individual gets to define themselves, and that the way we understand ourselves inside of our world can, will, and should never-endingly shift.
When I think about myself when I was thirteen, I don’t think I was bipolar. I don’t really know what I was, except that I was a sensitive child living in an unpredictable and volatile home, and my life at school was not all that different. I felt big feelings, and was extremely sensitive to hormonal changes. I was also a writer with a flair for the dramatic and a tendency to prefer fantasy to reality. Aside from the violence that surrounded me when I was young, I am still the same girl, but I’ve spent a long time learning how to understand myself, and one of the best and most fun ways of doing that is by reading thought-provoking, risk-taking, dangerous and heartbreaking books.
I think what I needed to hear from doctors when I was thirteen and suicidal, and when I was 28 and exploding in rashes, was this: Here is a possible diagnosis, but really, we don’t know. Let’s see what we can do to help alleviate your suffering. There are many options, let’s try until we find something that works. You might have this now, but you won’t suffer forever. We will figure out how to manage it, and nothing is static. Nothing in this Universe stays the same, and that includes you. The world around you will shift, and the people, and your perceptions. In order for all of this to exist, there has to be both creation and destruction, and with that, beauty and violence, good and bad, justice and inequality. Our world and ourselves exist on the full spectrum of emotion and possibility. We just need to learn to be able to handle the contradictions, and harness the positive to use to fight the negative. We just need to learn how to get by, and we will. There was nobody to tell me this when I was thirteen, but now, we have books that open up new, healthier ways of thinking about mental illness.
Her first novel since 2002, Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway is an epic generational story that doesn’t feel epic at all — instead, reading it is familiar, funny, alive. At the turn of the twentieth century, enigmatic Bertha Truitt appears in the town of Salford, MA, lying unconscious in a cemetery. When she comes to, Truitt by turns charms and astonishes the residents, insists she invented the game of candlepin bowling, and builds an alley in the center of town which — scandal of scandals — allows women to bowl. When Truitt dies in Boston’s Great Molasses Flood (which is real, and took place almost exactly a hundred years before Bowlaway publishes), she leaves behind the bowling alley, relatives with mysterious connections to her, and a town she changed forever.
McCracken pulled names from her own family’s genealogy, so in a way, the characters in the book are the author’s family, rooted both in fiction and in real life. And that’s how the novel feels — more fantastical than history, more workaday than a fairytale — with all the humble business of daily life: work, motherhood, military service, family duties. Truitt’s influence seems otherworldly and she belongs in concert with the best storybook mentors, like Mary Poppins or Willy Wonka. McCracken has the unique ability to be simultaneously delightful and heartbreaking, and Bowlaway leads us to examine the physical and emotional artifacts people leave behind, whether or not they touched them directly — bowling alleys, families, memories. She and I recently talked by phone about marrying the ridiculous with the tragic, how women carve out space for themselves, and the inherent humor of bowling.
Katy Hershberger: So, seventeen years since your last novel. How does it feel to come back to that form after short stories and a memoir?
Elizabeth McCracken: I think it feels alright? It has terrified me a little bit more somehow as the book comes out, I’m not sure why. And I’ve written novels in there, they just haven’t been any good. I just haven’t published them.
KH: Does it feel different from the last books you’ve published, even if they weren’t novels?
EM: Yeah, I think so. I think with the short stories, short stories are quieter publications, generally speaking. And the stories had mostly been published other places, so it didn’t feel like the first time they were being read. I guess part of it is this time I have more of that sort of panicked writer’s feeling of “what if everybody hates it? What if people really really hate it?” With the short stories I felt like plenty of people had read them. “Plenty,” that’s a ridiculous expression for short stories published in literary magazines. [laughs] I mean, plenty for me, I should say, but that’s not to say a lot. It felt like it had already been out in the world a little bit, and not so much with this. So I’m feeling a bit nervous.
KH: The book is set in New England, where, you write that “even the violence is cunning and subtle.” I’d love to know about your background in New England and why you decided to set this story there.
EM: I’m a New Englander. Though it’s interesting, I’ve got an older brother who spent the same amount of time in New England as I did, but thinks of himself as a west coaster because we spent part of our childhood in Portland, Oregon. But I was born in Boston and moved back there when I was about seven and a half. And then in 2010 I moved to Texas and it feels like a different country to me. And whenever I go back to Boston, sometimes people are rude to me and I think “Oh my gosh, people are really mean here” and other times people are rude to me and I think “It’s home. I love it. People are so mean.” I saw a woman be spectacularly rude to a pair of men who were trying to buy admission to the Pilgrim Monument in Provincetown a couple of weeks ago. She was — appropriately — monumentally rude to them. My husband, who is English, was horrified and I just went “No, she’s quite right. They’re too late and it does my heart good to see her deny them admission.” And she was awful. They said, “Can we possibly?” and she went “No!” She took a really long time to explain the monument was closed. She just took great pleasure in saying no to them, which I do feel can sometimes be a New England-y trait.
KH: So it’s a far cry from Texas.
EM: It’s a far cry from Texas where people are usually really nice and helpful. I wanted to write about a place that felt like home because Texas, which I enjoy, I don’t think will ever feel like home. And I don’t think Texans will ever consider me as being a Texan in any way. That is my experience of Texans. Texas is the only state where I’ve heard people say, “I’m a sixth generation Texan.” Maybe they do that in California too. You might slightly brag about your family coming over on the Mayflower in Massachusetts, but certainly I’ve never heard anybody say “I’m a sixth-generation Massachusetts-ite,” person, whatever. We don’t even have a noun for it, that’s the thing, there’s not even a noun for somebody who comes from Massachusetts. But yes, I was missing New England.
KH: It feels like such a New England story, between candlepin bowling and the Molasses Flood, and that it has to be really rooted there.
EM: I can’t quite remember when I landed on candlepin bowling, but pretty early. And then I was delighted when I suddenly realized that the math would work to put in the Molasses Flood.
KH: The flood feels especially perfect because it’s a sort of slightly humorous and ridiculous married with the tragic. It feels like it fits in so well with these themes throughout the book.
EM: If I had a sweet spot that would be what I’m attempting to achieve in my work, it would be that. Slightly ridiculous but also tragic.
If I had a sweet spot, slightly ridiculous but also tragic would be what I’m attempting to achieve in my work.
KH: Bertha to me feels very much like a timeless, mythical character like Mary Poppins or Willy Wonka. This sort of storied mentor who doesn’t quite belong in ordinary life. I’m curious if she was based on anyone in real life or in fiction, and how you came to write her.
EM: She’s not based on anybody who I know in real life. It’s interesting because I only realized this recently. She’s a cousin to a character in a novel that I really love by Susan Stinson called Martha Moody. And I realized that Bertha Truitt is a name from the grandfather’s genealogies. I think she naturally came to be a cousin to this character from this novel, which is out of print and it shouldn’t be, it’s so beautiful. It’s about a woman who founds a town called Moody.
KH: So it seems that there’s both real life genealogy and fictional genealogy throughout the book, is that right?
EM: Yes. Yeah.
KH: I read that the names of the characters were inspired by your grandfather’s genealogies. How did that come to be? How are you inspired by the work that your grandfather had done with your own family?
EM: I essentially just went through this genealogy that he had written in the sixties. It’s quite big and thorough. He was a professional genealogist and editor of a magazine called the American Genealogist for quite awhile, and I just took names out. I just popped them right out. I don’t think any of them are close relatives, but they were so evocative to me that I just, I had a giant list of names that I looked at for awhile and then started to put them into fiction. The first two I had were Bertha Truitt and Dr. Leviticus Sprague. I can’t tell you who those people are, who those people were in real life anymore. And actually l think sort of instantly I couldn’t. I just wanted to think about the names suggested. But overwhelmingly the names in the book are names from the genealogy and only begin to break down when people got married and began to have children and I was like, oh I can’t do that anymore. But somebody named Betty Graham who was known as Cracker is from my grandfather’s genealogies. The names Luetta Mood, Hazel Forest, Leviticus Sprague, Joe Wear, Jeptha Arrison, those are all from the genealogy.
KH: So in some ways every character in the book is a part of your family.
EM: Yeah, I guess. Yeah, I suppose.
KH: Genealogy and legacy seem to be themes that you come back to in your fiction. How do those themes inspire you and what did you want to say about genealogy and legacy here?
EM: That’s interesting. Part of it is because of my grandfather is something that I was really aware of, especially on that side of my family, the McCracken side. In one of the genealogies he actually talks about how he’d intended to do my mother’s genealogy, I don’t know if that’s really true, but because my mother’s side of the family is Jewish it’s much more difficult to do a thorough genealogy. And certainly when I was growing up, that side of the family told a lot of stories about family and they also told a lot of stories about people they couldn’t quite figure out who they were.
There was a photograph of two children who my cousin Elizabeth, who is my grandfather’s first cousin, often was talked about with a great deal of mystery. She thought that they were a brother and sister who had died in Europe before the family had come to Iowa in the 19th century. And so I think I was always really interested, as I tend to be in any topic, in how it was true that genealogy was interesting but the opposite of that is also true. That it’s both important and not important. That blood relation actually doesn’t mean that much except for it often does to people. And I think I’ve always found that interesting.
KH: It’s more about the meaning you put onto the idea of family than the actual blood connections.
EM: Exactly. And those questions of what difference does it make, what difference could it possibly make if you were related by blood to somebody. My brother has actually gotten extremely into genealogy in the past couple of years and has actually found out an enormous amount of stuff about my mother’s side of the family that we never knew through his research.
KH: I think it’s so interesting that a lot of the book is about the duty of being part of a family, whether or not you’re related by blood. From the flawed but devoted mothers and the difficulty of motherhood to sometimes being stuck in the family business. Could you talk a bit about your take on those sort of expectations that can be bound up in family?
EM: I wrote another book in which having to go into the family business is a big deal though in that case the person didn’t, and I have no idea why, since certainly that wasn’t any kind of obligation I ever had. Even though I say that from my campus office at a university and my parents were both university employees all their lives. I’m not sure. The question of duty is one that I’m always really interested in. I write about it and I don’t know why! Sometimes I have an automatic answer to that question. The answer might have to do with always being interested in the family stories on both sides of my family, to think about the people whose lives are changed by being dutiful. By staying at home, serving another relative, whether it was a sibling or a parent or a child.
KH: There’s so much in the book about the role of women throughout history and having to carve out a space for oneself. Given what’s going on in American culture right now, was it a goal to write a feminist novel?
EM: I almost never have a goal in my writing but anything that I’m thinking about in my daily life goes into the back of my brain and hopefully comes out through my writing. And I, like everybody, I’ve been thinking about these questions. About how women have adjusted themselves through history to make space. And the ways in which they’ve been quietly and automatically ignored. And ignored by people who don’t even realize that they’re doing it, including other women. It’s something that’s been very much on my mind.
You know, I teach with undergraduate and graduate students and with the graduate students I’m interested in the way the women writers are taught to think about themselves and the importance of their work versus the way the men are. If I’m giving advice to a woman who’s trying to figure out what to ask for or how to approach an agent or how to approach a job, and women are often afraid to ask for things, and I always tell them, well think about being a man, and if a man would ask for that thing then you should ask for it. And you should know that what that means is that you should ask for it, it’s not that men are being outrageous in asking for it, it’s something you should ask for.
If I’m giving advice to a woman who’s trying to figure out what to ask for or how to approach an agent or how to approach a job (and women are often afraid to ask for things), I always tell them, well think about being a man, and if a man would ask for that thing then you should ask for it.
KH: I of course have to ask about bowling. I love the way that you describe bowling and say “our subject is love because our subject is bowling,” and that “it’s possible to bowl away trouble.” I wanted to ask about your connection to bowling and why you equate it with love and solace.
EM: I was a childhood candlepin bowler. And also I now have kids, and if you’ve got kids in America you will end up in a bowling alley eventually a couple of times a year. In Texas it’s tenpin bowling and I think when bowling re-entered my life when I was a parent it made me really miss candlepin bowling because it’s less brutal. Narly anybody can pick up a candlepin ball and roll it. And I really loved that and it’s also a regional variation and I was missing home, so I missed candlepin bowling.
I also just think everybody knows that bowling is an inherently funny sport, I don’t know why that is. I don’t know if it’s cause it’s an indoor sport, you don’t necessarily have to be fabulously fit to do it or to be really good at it. I discovered as I was researching the book it’s kind of mesmerizing to watch bowling even though there’s a really limited number of outcomes to bowling, especially candlepin bowling. There’s never the threat that somebody’s going to bowl a perfect game. And because bowling is inherently funny I love the idea of writing about it as being a romantic thing to do. And I do find it kind of strangely beautiful.
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