The Token Black Mother in the Chuck E. Cheese Commercial

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“Prime Time”

In one commercial, the token black mother
sitting with a table of friends at Chuck E. Cheese’s
doesn’t care if the mushrooms in the alfredo
are fresh, and she doesn’t need Chef Tony’s recipe.
She just wants to know if he’s married — for a friend.

In another, the lone black girl at the party
has forgotten the relationship between nut allergies
and peanut butter — she just knows her brownies are on hit.
With her stringy weave and badly mimed surprise,
maybe she thought her homegirl’s skin too porcelain,
so she fed her something that would stipple it with welts.

[Revenge is always and never a black woman yelling,
flailing and helpless in a room of shuffling feet.]

At a conference, I sip vodka straight and slip
into a green jumpsuit that looks — almost —
like January Jones’s at the Emmys.
Donika says: jewel tones are good for blondes.
In the lobby, a white man from my cohort holds me
aloft by my elbows, exclaiming: but you look great!
as if he’d opened a menu and found
a gluten-free version of desire: me,
wrong-colored and splayed like blood-speckled currency.
My breasts: two overripe apples in a food desert.
My pussy: convenient as an Epi-Pen — if you keep one around.

Bummer — for my friend, says the mother
when the waitress confirms Chef Tony is, in fact, married.
The choking girl says nothing; neither do I,
but I steady my gaze to meet the man’s
benevolent shock, each almost-word
a pollen-flecked stinger hiving my throat:
Trust me, motherfucker. I always know how it looks.

“Her”

I love the way I did as a little girl:
best in empty rooms. Babble filling my mouth
and dribbling, my tongue roseate
with the breath of my own name. A caboodle
on the bed — each chamber beating
with tiny glass bottles. Beside it, two
grinning dolls talk of their husbands,
both magicians. One sprouts daisies
from his hands on Fridays, makes Kool-Aid
and cupcakes for dinner, stirring
into them the sweet of the air
with arms pre-crooked for his wife’s embrace.
This one is a doctor, a lawyer, a model,
lies rigid on top, never makes demands
and cannot remove her clothes. They shiver loose
after one knock of his polyvinyl lips
and a pair of gigantic hands. I dreamed then:
perfectly-sized to fit any room I could
get my fingers into. Everything
in the future looked like Malibu:
palm-treed and sunned — even I was tan,
with spindly legs and conical breasts,
prancing my permanently arched feet
across a bedspread. I see that girl-self
now, holding every object close
enough for her bifocals to transform it
into a life beyond the bounds of Pines Road.
If I could step into that room to show her
what I’ve become, prove that nothing
would end her, not drive-bys nor
the horned puppet who hisses
at scripture in Sunday School, I’d wait
outside the door, letting her peel
her hot pink dreams open like
Now-and-Laters. I’m not sure she’d need
anything more than an adult’s
undistracted gaze, a tending ear.
And what I want most to tell her — that she was right
in her utter belief she could build a world
and live in it alone; or that she will one day greet
the sag of her imperfect breasts with a murmur
of indulgence, the way she dissolves
a boll of cotton candy into syrup laced
with her DNA, or sips the remains
of rainbow-speckled milk from pilfered
cups of cereal — I cannot say.
It is a singular, decadent life, a truth I know
would kill her, or make her
murderous in its knowing.

Netflix’s “Sex Education” Knows That Boners Are Serious Business

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A boner is a funny thing. Funny-ha-ha, yes, as many raunchy comedies remind us every now and then. But also funny-weird, in that it’s still treated as some kind of mysterious and monstrous apparition that both their observers and owners — especially their owners — don’t always know what to do with. Both arrow and target, a boner (especially of the inadvertent kind) is ripe for comedy and horror alike.

Netflix’s aptly-titled show Sex Education is keenly aware of this, so much so that it anchors its first episode on precisely what’s so funny and so disquieting about an erection. In so doing, this series about nominally British high schoolers takes well-worn tropes of its genre (Does he like me? Am I inadequate? Why am I ashamed of what I’m feeling?) and situates them squarely within the hormonal urges of teenagers. Sex is no mere subplot; it is the gravitational force at the heart of the show’s storytelling. It is also, not coincidentally, the gravitational force at the heart of high school. But Netflix gave the show a TV-MA rating, as in “may be unsuitable for children under 17,” despite the fact that it’s dealing with teenage-specific concerns. It’s a stark reminder that stories about young adults that skirt around the pleasures and perils of sex do a disservice both to its characters and their intended audience.

Here’s where Sex Education breaks ground. It takes young male sexuality seriously; it knows boners aren’t mere punchlines. They’re sometimes questions, other times answers; sometimes confessions, other times announcements. By diving into how young men make sense of their bodies as they come into their own, the series wades into conversations about toxic masculinity and homosocial socialization without ever sounding that pedantic about it. These young men may be more than their boners, but their boners end up being the perfect way to understand them.

These young men may be more than their boners, but their boners end up being the perfect way to understand them.

The first episode of Sex Education does provide the promised education, but the opening scene is all sex. A young naked woman is straddling an inordinately bored young man. They’re in his bedroom, and it’s clear this has happened before. “Do you want to cum on my tits?” she asks him, while riding him. He’s indifferent but agrees, only to have her retract her invitation; she got a rash last time. Better he finish from behind. But while her orgasmic moans cap off their athletic encounter, the young man barely musters any enthusiasm. He chooses to fake it and be done with. Alas, he’s not convincing enough: she asks to see the condom, which, as we can see ourselves, is empty. These various details (the close-up of a used condom, the wide-frame that does little to cover the girl’s nakedness, the near-laughable sex talk) do a lot to set this hyper-raunchy John Hughes-ian take on contemporary teens apart from its more prudish compatriots.

Sex Education makes the likes of Riverdale, with its cruising storylines and Abercrombie & Fitch aesthetic, look like an after-school special. And it does so, in that very first episode, by making boners its central concern. We first meet Otis (Asa Butterfield) as he gets up from his bed and does what’s become his daily routine. He takes out a porn magazine, some tissues, and a bottle of moisturizer, some dollops of which he leaves on the now crumpled up tissues. “I’ve noticed you’re pretending to masturbate,” his mom tells him later, “and I was wondering if you wanted to talk about it.” He most definitely does not. For Otis’s mom is a local sex and relationship therapist (played by Gillian Anderson), whose gleeful disregard of all prudishness — she asks her patients things like “tell me your earliest memory of your scrotum?” and “how are you getting along with your penis?” — has, perhaps, left Otis quite unable to healthily indulge in self-pleasure. In short: he can’t masturbate and he’d hoped his mom wouldn’t notice. Yes, he can get boners, but as he tells his (gay) best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), he just waits for them to go away. Eric’s response? “That’s super weird.”

No one-time gag or mere punchline, Otis’s sexual phobias drive much of his story through the show’s eight episodes. Moreover, his sexual inexperience doesn’t handicap the budding sex therapist business he ends up running at school with his crush Maeve (Emma Mackey). His first patient? Adam, the young man from that first scene, who ends up asking for Otis’ help during a Viagra-induced emergency in the middle of the day. Here’s where the show’s fascination with boners breaks new ground. It’d be enough for the show to use Adam’s giant boner (“Sorry, it’s like a third leg!” Maeve quips) as a funny joke. It’d put Sex Education alongside the likes of American Pie and There’s Something About Mary, raunchy comedies that ask you to laugh at men and their ill-advised penis decisions. Here, though, both Otis’s phobias and Adam’s cluelessness are used instead to illuminate conversations about what’s expected of young men. At opposite ends of the male teenage spectrum (Otis is kind, Adam is gruff), the issues these two have with their own bodies and boners are treated with equal care. Adam may be a school bully who relishes shoving Eric in the hallway and calling him “Tromboner” (a nickname that’s stuck years after he was caught with a semi while playing the french horn), but the show still goes out of its way to frame his toxic masculinity in ways more interesting than merely getting us to laugh at his “two coke cans”-dick (the show’s words and, er, visual, not mine).

Adam’s girlfriend tells Maeve that he can be really sweet in private. (In public, during this scene, he’s mock-fucking his male friend out on the lawn.) But the pressures of being the headmaster’s kid, and not a bright one at that, have stunted him. The only way to assert his space in the world is to bully his way around, even if he knows there are snickers about his big package. “I wish I could be a normal kid with a normal dick,” he tells Otis, “and a normal dad.” Otis can relate. Having a sex guru as a mom and another sex therapist as a dad has made hi. too self-aware of his body, to the point where jacking off is a painful experience that triggers family trauma memories. Adam’s aggressiveness has numbed him, and Otis’s restraint has made him hypersensitive. But they’re both examples of how the expectations of masculinity — not only, but especially, in matters of sex — can take its toll.

The recurring focus on boners in that first episode is indicative of a welcome approach to sex. While seemingly self-explanatory and quite blunt, in ways both figurative and literal, boners, the show tells us, demand to be taken seriously. The reason they’re funny and disquieting is because we’ve been told they’re embarrassing (visible proof of urges we may otherwise want to keep secret, for example). There’s a stigma about them; this despite the fact that more often than not they’re involuntary. Moreover, the show acknowledges that we need not shy away from talking about (and seeing!) dicks on screen. If Otis and Maeve’s therapy sessions depend on anything, it is the conceit that the more open you are about sex, the healthier your life can be. It’s no surprise to find the show returning to said unwelcome boners in its final climactic moments.

While seemingly self-explanatory and quite blunt, in ways both figurative and literal, boners, the show tells us, demand to be taken seriously.

Watching Sex Education is a joy precisely because it mines boners for all their worth — be they low-hanging puns or complex insights into crippling self-doubt — but there is more to the show than its refreshing take on dicks and male sexuality. Over the course of its first season we’re treated to stories about unwanted pregnancies, female self-pleasure, consent, and hate crimes with such insightful ease that it all but deserves to be shown in high schools everywhere in lieu of whatever Sex Ed they’re teaching these days. Who we fuck, how we fuck, and why we fuck, Sex Education reminds us, aren’t merely questions for the bedroom — or for adults. We may like to think of them as “private” concerns that need not be brought out into public spaces, as conversations that need to be euphemistically discussed lest we encourage teenagers to think of their own sexuality in non-shameful ways. But much like boners tugging at one’s waistband, sometimes you have to let them out and tackle them head-on.

7 Books by Women about 1950s Gender Dynamics

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There are some things that stay with us, sights and sounds from our childhood, places and moods. They may be nothing, but often return in our writing. Be it a color we often use that’s the same as our bedroom curtains, or a character mannerism like one of our babysitters, our lives are revealed in our work even when it’s someone else we’re writing about. One thing I come back to is the fifties, an anomaly since I grew up in the 80’s. Before I could read, some of my formative memories are of watching 50’s movies on rainy afternoons. I loved the women in those films, their floating dresses and pristine gloves seemed a world away from life in a northern town.

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Decades later, when I started writing my novel, Something Like Breathing, I was surprised to find it had to be set in the 50s. The story is about two girls who live on an island and struggle with the sexual double standards of the time. The story needed to be set in what is often called “a more innocent time,” but there was more to it. The more I wrote, the more I became aware of a tension between social expectation and the daily lives of women. I saw I could never be a woman from the 50s. I had seen too many protests, too many women fighting for change. Considering the decade as an age of innocence suddenly seemed a mistake. Writing about women and girls in a close-knit community, I saw to be a woman in the 50s was a complicated matter, a juggling act of appearances, domestic duties and our own desires. Literature by women is filled with such conflict.

Here’s a selection of work by some of my favorite women authors writing about the 1950s.

Behind the Scenes at the Museum by Kate Atkinson

Kate Atkinson’s debut is narrated by Ruby Lennox, a working-class girl living in York. Interspersed with flashbacks from the lives of the women in her family including both world wars, the sexual attitudes of the day are painfully evident from the first page when the narrator describes her conception, an event that takes place while her mother is pretending to be asleep. “1951- I exist. I am conceived to the chimes of midnight by the clock on the mantlepiece in the room across the hall. The clock once belonged to my great grandmother, a woman called Alice, and its tired chime counts me into the world. I am begun on the first stroke and finished on the last when my father rolls off my mother and is plunged into a dreamless sleep.”

A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

“Women never have young minds. They are born three thousand years old.” Shelagh Delaney was just 19 when she wrote these lines in A Taste of Honey. Though initially conceived as a novel, the work became a play to confront pressing social issues. Class, discrimination, racism and sexual orientation all feature in the story of Jo, a seventeen-year-old girl in Salford who finds herself kicked out by her mother in favor of a new man in her life. “I don’t want to be a mother, I don’t want to be a woman,” a pregnant Jo says. The kitchen sink drama became a hit, sweeping through the theaters of the nation to question the attitudes of post-war Britain.

Blonde by Joyce Carol Oates

Chronicling the life of Norma Jean Baker, the Blonde in the title is truly born in the 1948 when Hollywood makes the actress change her name. Gone is the girl with dishwater blonde hair, a wholesome morale booster pictured working in a factory by a U.S. military photographer. She’s re-christened Marilyn Monroe, a platinum figurehead launched into the 50s. This is the birth of the star. Oates wrestles with constructions of femininity within the era, a lethal concoction of sweetness, desirability and idealization where to be beautiful, a woman, and have artistic ambitions is to be equally desired and loathed. Love it hate it, the work is always visceral. It reads like a struggle between the female body, the heart, the male eye, power, innocence and ambition. Blonde remains a powerful fable of the age.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950- 1962 edited by Karen V. Kukil

If we can forget her poetic legacy and death, for a second, one often overlooked aspect of the journals of Sylvia Plath is her portrait of the decade. In luminous prose, we catch glimpses daily life and a sense of a woman caught between her own creative drive and an awareness of the simpler values of the time: “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream. Now I know how people can live without books, without college.”

Between My Father & the King by Janet Frame

Reading Janet Frame is to enter another world. Though most of these stories were written in the 1950’s, they are a world away to the 50s of the movies or American novels like Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Frame’s New Zealand is a fusion of fairy tales and harsh realities. In the wild landscape of Frame’s imagination, we find households gripped by poverty, wives who don’t question their husbands, and girls who aren’t allowed to go dancing but occasionally find themselves in institutions. The story “Gorse is Not People” is one of the strongest in the collection. Rejected for publication in 1956 for being “sad”, it offers an insight into social expectations. “I have my life to live you know,” the story’s protagonist says, though picturing life beyond her 21st birthday, she can see nothing but getting married.

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

Written in 1955, O’Connor’s spectacular collection is rooted in its Southern surroundings, yet her characters wrestle with their surroundings. “Nothing is like it used to be, the world is rotten,” says Tom Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May be Your Own”. “People are not nice the way used to be,” claims the grandmother in the titular story. People reflect on crumbling morality so frequently it seems the age itself is what will kill them, they are so unaware of anything outside of their blinkered lives, so unprepared for change. Clinging to the notion of being “a lady” and not from “common blood”, as if this should save her from a gunman, O’Connor takes shots at the bourgeoise itself. The future appears godless in the work, but one thing is certain. Witnessing the social snobbery and casual racism of the characters, the reader is never convinced the past they cling to is worth saving.

The Little Disturbances of Man by Grace Paley

The subtitle of The Little Disturbances of Man “stories of men and women at love” makes it clear love is anything but a passive state. Rather, the characters in the collection engage in relationships like going to work, and at times, war. The stories are a long way from a simplistic model of happy families, they ask why people get married and whether adultery is wrong. Married women sleep with their ex’s, mothers raise their children alone and ultimately acknowledge expecting to find fulfillment through the men in their lives was a mistake. In “An Interest in Life” Mrs Rafferty is torn between sexual beliefs we can almost imagine her hearing from her mother and an acknowledgement of her own desire. “A man can’t help himself, but I could have behaved better,” she says, when discussing her sex life, going on to admit how she was so happy in bed with her husband. Never judgmental, but handled with humor, the disturbance in Paley’s collection of 1959 is a sense that the dynamic between men and women is changing.

Karen Thompson Walker Turns Sleep Into an Infectious Illness

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Over the course of two books, Karen Thompson Walker has thrown readers into a reality where horrific events take place. First, the Earth’s rotation stopped spinning in The Age of Miracles. In The Dreamers, she returns with a different, but just as frightening epidemic. Instead of the impending doom of the entire world like her last book, she narrows her scope to a mysterious sleeping sickness where people never wake up.

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Walker explores a small college town where people begin to fall asleep and have lucid dreams that feel left up to the reader’s interpretation. Are they of the past, mistakes that haunt the dreamer? Or are they of the future’s possibilities? It’s an unsolvable mystery that begins to raise questions of what our reality is. Is our life only lived when we’re awake or do we live it when we’re asleep as well?

Throughout reading The Dreamers, I couldn’t help think about what I feared, the nightmares that followed me from adolescence to adulthood, and how I’d face the unknown. While it would be easy to run away with unrealistic fantasies, Walker kept her horrors grounded. The reality of these people’s lives made me shudder at what would happen if the creeping ideas in the back of my brain were actually real.

Karen Thompson Walker and I spoke on the phone about how fear motivates storytelling and what this moment in time has shown us about human nature.

Adam Vitcavage: Both of your books deal with an unknown horror of sorts. What draws you to such frightening events?

Karen Thompson Walker: I’m not sure these horrors preoccupy my thoughts, but I do think what interests me as a writer if I am able to write about what happens to ordinary people in such extreme situations.

AV: In your 2012 TED Talk, just after Age of Miracles was published, you discuss how fear can teach us storytelling.

KTW: Right. I don’t write exactly directly about things I’m fearful about. It’s habit for us to think about the worst things that can happen to us. In fiction, that becomes useful to be able to intricately imagine stories with a frightening premise. This book has an extra layer where you can get out of the more ordinary fears we have in this 2019 reality. The sleeping sickness brings an extra sense of wonder to the frightening possibilities.

AV: For Age of Miracles, you have talked about how you spent a lot of time thinking about the actual effects of what would happen if Earth’s rotation would slow. What was it like talking this fear of falling asleep and never waking up?

KTW: It was about five years of thinking about it. I did a lot of research about sleep. What fascinates me most is that we haven’t figured out why we sleep and dream. There’s a question of what exactly goes on in our minds.

AV: What sort of things did you learn about sleep and dreams?

KTW: One fascinating thing is that people solve real problems they’ve been working on in their dreams. A famous example is August Kekulé, the scientist who figured out the chemical structure of benzene. It came to him in a dream as a snake eating his own tail. He woke up and it solved his research. I think a lot of us are dismissive of dreams, but sometimes they can hold real insight.

I also read about how our brains operate during dreams. The part of our brain that is most involved is emotions. It’s turned up in a way, which makes sense because our dreams can be so intense.

Like I said before, what I find so fascinating is scientists haven’t figured out why we dream. There are theories but it’s not totally clear.

Our fears are based in the real world. If you start with the fantastical and then make the world as real as possible, it lets the readers believe it’s realistic or has the illusion of reality.

AV: Both of your books balance a grounded reality, but allow us to become immersed in a colossal horror we hope never happens.

KTW: Starting with a practical premise. Our fears are based in the real world. If you start with the fantastical and then make the world as real as possible, it lets the readers believe it’s realistic or has the illusion of reality. There is a great quote from Jose Saramago; he’s said that his books are about the possibility of the impossible. If the premise along logical lines then readers can accept the rest.

AV: It’s novels like Saramago’s or yours that can blur the line between literary and genre. Is that something you ever think about while writing?

KTW: What I love about literary fiction are the characters, beautiful sentences, and the language. And what I love about sci-fi and disaster movies are the big premises. Being able to marry the two is very satisfying. I don’t think that much of genre as I am writing. There are sci-fi readers who will think there isn’t enough science and there are literary readers who won’t enjoy the premise. I just hope readers will read it if it sounds interesting regardless of taste.

AV: Earlier you mentioned the ordinary fears we have in 2019. Obviously, you wrote this before the current landscape of political turmoil and whatnot. Does your writing about these types of events help as a way to escape or a way to confront our reality?

KTW: I feel like I am always learning, for better or worse, how governments work and how bad human beings are at dealing with certain kinds of problems like climate. Then also how great humans can be in other kinds of moments like the California fires. There were so many stories of generosity and heroism but then we’re failing on a larger level. There’s just something about this moment in time about what it has shown us about human nature. Thinking about that was at the background of my work. Every time something happens helps inform me about how my characters would react. In The Dreamers there are a few quick sections from people who don’t live in the are and are these conspiracy types. That’s something right out of our reality. There are stories like that happening now where people don’t believe real things.

There’s just something about this moment in time about what it has shown us about human nature.

AV: Are fears and horrors something you see yourself pursuing a lot more of?

KTW: Age of Miracles grew from that question about how our lives would be affected by the Earth stop spinning. Part of that was how sleep would be affected. In a way, The Dreamers grew out of that first book. There’s that connection in a literal sense. In terms of revisiting fears and what happens to a community is a preoccupation of mine.

Queer Young Adult Books Help Me Reimagine My Past

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I spent my childhood hiding. The only way to be safe was to lie about what I really was: gay. But even though I was so careful to cover up everything about myself, I was never safe. Not from my classmates. Not from my family. Not from the Christian church.

Now, like any other traumatized person, I am left to reckon with all the time I lost. It’s overwhelming trying to figure out how I might do this because I did not just lose a few weeks, I lost years of the most pivotal developmental period in a human’s life. One of the only ways I have found to combat this loss is reading novels about young queer people. These novels let me feel like I’m doing adolescence over in a world that is controlled and safer.

I am 21 years old and a junior in college, yet I am only now experiencing things straight people experienced years ago: going on casual dates, holding hands with someone in public, hooking up with people at parties, dressing in a way that actually feels like me. The freedom I feel is dizzying, intoxicating even. I am drunk on the way these details about my life feel so normal they’re almost boring.

These novels let me feel like I’m doing adolescence over in a world that is controlled and safer.

However, underneath all that is anger and anxiety.

Anger at all the people who were able to experience the kind of teenage milestones I’ll never have, like a date to the prom. The kind who brings you a corsage and maybe gets a hotel room for the night so you can awkwardly try to figure out how to have sex. Awkwardness is one of those things I wish I could experience without feeling like I’m too old for it. Surely I would still dislike feeling awkward if I was fifteen, but at least it would feel age-appropriate.

Anxiety because no matter what I do, I feel like I’m still behind. And maybe I am. Most of my peers are either in or have had serious relationships, yet the most significant relationship I’ve ever had was someone who used me for sex for a few months. So much of my life feels like I’m chasing after a clock set to a different time zone.

This story is not one that is exclusive to me. It is a shared experience between most of the queer people in my life.

High school is a frequent topic of conversation between me and my queer friends in university. The ways it shaped us. How we worked ourselves to exhaustion every day because we knew if we ever wanted to have a semblance of a life, we had to leave our hometowns. What we did to find small bright lights in all the hurt.

We are all, in way or another, still trying to recover. One of the ways we do this is by reclaiming lost time through external experiences: whether this be our dating or social lives. And we aren’t alone in the instinct to find a way to live out experiences we weren’t afforded. Pride proms — an event that allows LGBTQ+ people to relive their high school prom — are especially popular on college campuses and are just one example of how queer adults can safely and joyfully relive their youths.

I found a lot of happiness and peace in recreating as many external experiences for myself as possible, but I was still left questioning how I could reclaim the interior experiences of my youth.

Because how could someone ever possibly recover the moments where everyone else grew up?

I found the solution in reimagining my youth.

Reimagining my past is one of the healthiest ways I have found to mourn the time that I lost and a part of me still feels like I’m missing. It allows me to learn about queer relationships and queer joy, along with allowing me to think through and process my past trauma.

Reimagining my past is one of the healthiest ways I have found to mourn the time that I lost and a part of me still feels like I’m missing.

The most effective way to do this, I’ve discovered, is reading young adult literature centered on queer narrators and experiences. Reaching for these books is something I’ve instinctually done for so long that it was only recently I realized why.

I was sitting on the couch of a woman who I went on a few dates with even though I almost immediately knew it wasn’t going to work out. It’s not my place to speculate, but if I was going to I would guess she had recently figured out she was queer. I’m partially placing these speculations in the way it seemed she didn’t really know what she wanted from me and the way she treated our dates almost like a novelty. Mostly, it was the way she softly said, “I’ve been reading a lot of gay YA recently.”

The way she said it, it almost sounded like she was telling me a secret.

In that moment, I saw in her the thing in me that felt angry and anxious. She was confused, maybe a little lost, and had no idea who to turn for. She, like me, was trying desperately to grow up. Which is maybe also the reason why she even asked me back to her place.

She sounded like she was saying something extremely personal because she was. She had reimagined really vulnerable parts of herself in the pages that she now confessed to me just by letting me know she’d been reading queer YA. Maybe she wouldn’t have even said it if we hadn’t been smoking weed for a few minutes.

But, also maybe she wasn’t saying any of those things. Maybe I was unfairly projecting on someone I barely knew.

Either way I came to a realization: reading queer YA has changed my adult life.

Reading Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz was one of the most hopeful things I have ever done. In Aristotle and Dante, I saw every gay relationship I almost had as a teenager. The one difference being that Aristotle and Dante were brave enough to do the thing I wasn’t: tell the other how they feel. When I read this book, I saw my Latinx community and I saw how I, as a gay person, could fit into it. I was finally able to see my past through a new lens, one of possibility.

Reading Carry On by Rainbow Rowell was one of the most joyful things I have ever done. It is a story full of quips, dragons, magic, friendship, and love. But, more than that, it is a story about gay teenagers who are happy and who choose to be open about who they are. Happiness is not something I would ever be able to have when I was sixteen. I thought I was going to carry my secret for the rest of my life. I had this recurring dream where I would die and years later someone would discover my journal, and only then would people know. Just consuming media about children who were able to experience joy in the years I experienced deep isolation and depression was revolutionary.

Just consuming media about children who were able to experience joy in the years I experienced deep isolation and depression was revolutionary.

Reading The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth was one of the hardest things I have ever done. Cameron’s white suburban/rural life is far from anything I have ever known, but her experience at God’s Promise (a gay conversion camp) hit directly on very traumatic experiences of my own that left me with heaviness and hatred I am still working every day to unlearn. Watching Cameron navigate the same feelings I have felt — feelings I still struggle to talk about — not only gave me framework to understand the way my trauma has affected me, but the belief that I can emerge on the other side alive and hopeful.

I am 21 years old and I don’t have to hide anymore, but the years that I hid will stay with me forever. I have spent an uncountable number of hours wondering why I can’t just move. Why I feel stuck at the age of fifteen. Why I still have nightmares about conversion therapy or about everyone in my life abandoning me.

When I read YA I don’t have to wonder. Instead, I can finally close the chapter on mourning and move onto a happy and healthy adulthood.

7 Novels About Envy

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Envy thrives in our screen-saturated age. Images of celebrities and others who seem to have it all are just a finger-swipe away. But envy is nothing new, of course. While movies and TV shows like Ingrid Goes West and Black Mirror have recently been exploring the digital realm for manifestations of envy, writers have been focusing on this singular disease for centuries. The mix of contemporary and classic books below, for instance, all provide potent examples of how envy can corrode and corrupt human happiness, often causing significant destruction and sometimes even loss of life.

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The narrator of my own envy-centered novel, Looker, lives a few houses down from a famous actress and her family, and as her life falls into ruin, she begins to look increasingly toward this woman with a seemingly picture-perfect existence. My troubled narrator’s looking sparks what becomes an all-consuming and terrible obsession. In the midst of her downward spiral, she longs for ancient times, “when what mattered was shielding our tribe from saber-toothed tigers. Giant Bears. There were actual dangers then.” This longing, though, is part of her delusional state of mind; wouldn’t one young warrior have envied another’s skill with the spear? Or his giant bear body count? Envy is as ancient as the world she describes.

Envy by Yuri Olesha

The fictional primer on envy, Soviet-style. While most envy-focused books tend toward darkness and despair, Olesha’s showcases this particular human weakness with biting satire, absurdity, and wit. Envy pits two characters at opposite ends of the social spectrum against one another: Andrei, a successful Soviet citizen with big plans for mass-producing sausage, and Nikolai, a down-and-out reject who resents Andrei for literally lifting him out of the gutter and giving him gainful employment. As Nikolai plots to ruin Andrei’s sausage-based success, the two tangle in ways that are both hilarious and heartbreakingly real.

Passing by Nella Larsen

The fraught bond between a pair of childhood friends animates this gripping novel by Nella Larsen, set in 1920s New York City. One of the friends, Irene, can pass for white when necessity dictates, but her life is in Harlem with her visibly black husband and sons. Clare, on the other hand, is married to a white man who doesn’t know the truth about her identity. The trouble begins when Clare returns to Irene’s life and begins to covet what she has, making an ill-conceived return to Harlem society. Before long, Clare’s reckless covetousness leads to irrevocable tragedy.

In Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing,’ Whiteness Isn’t Just About Race

The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson

Sometimes envy can be a quiet, slow-burning, and even practical thing. This is the case in The True Deceiver, which focuses on the drama between two women in a small snowbound village: Anna, a wealthy, reclusive artist who lives alone in a sprawling home, and Katri, a village oddball who needs a home for herself and her dependent adult brother. Katri sets her sights on Anna’s house and insinuates herself into the artist’s life, refusing to employ social niceties to achieve her goal; she looks down on “the whole sloppy, disgusting machinery that people engage in with impunity all the time everywhere to help them get what they want.” Anna is her exact opposite in that regard, being utterly subservient to social niceties. The two women collide in this fascinating study of character and its consequences.

Mina by Kim Sagwa

Kim Sagwa’s Mina is many things: a twisted love story; a story of obsession, envy, and rage; a portrait of madness and murder; and a scathing look at contemporary urban life in Korea — its demands and pressures, as well as their consequences. Crystal, a teen who struggles endlessly to earn the grades she’ll need to succeed, envies Mina for her effortless excellence, and eventually turns on the girl who has been her best friend. The ending, which comes as a bright splash of violence, is the natural result of the societal forces that have made Crystal what she is: a scary, solipsistic denizen of the current and future Western-influenced world, where money, “success,” and surface appearances reign supreme.

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

It feels reductive to call the intricately layered, nearly symbiotic, lifelong friendship between Lila and Elena of Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, simply “envious.” But envy is certainly part of what drives them alternately closer and apart. The two circle each other all their lives, desiring what the other has and indulging, at times, in subtle sabotage. Lila, for instance, tries to ruin Elena’s chance for the further education she herself has been denied; when the girls skip school (at her urging), she seems disappointed when Elena’s parents don’t pull her from middle school as punishment. “’All they did was beat you?’” she asks. Ferrante captures the knotted complexities of female friendship with grace, skill, and absorbingly stark realism.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

The best possible outcome of envying someone may be learning they are utterly unworthy of your envy. Rebecca gives that particular gift to the unnamed narrator, who steps uneasily into her role as the second wife of wealthy Maxim de Winter. At first, she fixates on what she hears of her predecessor: beautiful, elegant, beloved and seemingly perfect Rebecca. She’s troubled when people tell her: “You see…you are so very different from Rebecca.” But as the melodrama unwinds, our narrator learns that might in fact be a very good thing.

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Emma Bovary: perhaps the most famous of all literary enviers. She desires a life rich in glamour and excitement, one that could have leapt from the pages of the romance novels she devours. Her real life, with husband Charles, is something to barely tolerate…until she tolerates it no more. “It was above all at mealtimes that she could bear it no longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the smoking stove, the creaking door, the oozing walls, the damp floor-tiles; all the bitterness of life seemed to be served to her on her plate.” In Flaubert’s masterpiece, Emma’s journey from ardently longing for a different life to acting on her imagined passions secures her a dark, cruelly banal fate.

Recommended Reading Seeks Volunteer Readers

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Calling all fiction lovers! Electric Literature is looking for new manuscript readers to join our editorial team. Recommended Reading is the weekly fiction magazine of Electric Literature, an organization dedicated to making literature more relevant, exciting, and inclusive. Recommended Reading publishes one story per week: a mix of original work, forgotten classics, and forthcoming excerpts, each with a personal foreword by today’s best writers.

Because Recommended Reading receives a large volume of submissions, a committed corps of volunteer readers is essential to helping the editors find new, unknown, and/or overlooked talent.

Responsibilities include:

  • Reading ten manuscripts per week, ranging from 2,000 to 8,000 words each.
  • Providing concise but thorough responses (one to two paragraphs) to these manuscripts, with a clear YES or NO recommendation for each.
  • Meeting weekly reading deadlines, and clearly communicating with editorial staff when scheduling conflicts arise.

The ideal applicant is:

  • An avid and attentive reader.
  • Self-motivated and able to meet deadlines.
  • Able to express herself clearly in writing.
  • A regular reader of Recommended Reading who is familiar with its back catalogue.
  • An educational background in literature and/or professional experience in literary criticism, editing, and fiction writing is a plus, but not required.
  • An active participant in their local literary scene, and an avid reader of contemporary literature.

This is a volunteer position that requires a commitment of approximately six hours per week. Readers will work remotely and on their own schedules (as long as they meet the weekly deadline).

Current readers are not allowed to submit their own fiction for consideration in Recommended Reading. Discussion of submissions outside of Recommended Reading is strictly prohibited, and will result in immediate termination.

For a sense of the kind of stories you’ll be reading, visit the Recommended Reading homepage here.

To apply please email a cover letter and a two paragraph critique of a short story published in Recommended Reading to Submittable by Monday, February 4th. If your resume is selected, the application process will also include a reading test and interview (in-person or video call.)

Electric Literature – READER APPLICATION

The Light In This Apartment is Better Without You In It

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Territory of Light, excerpt

by Yūko Tsushima

The apartment had windows on all sides.

I spent a year there, with my little daughter, on the top floor of an old four-story office building. We had the whole fourth floor to ourselves, plus the rooftop terrace. At street level there was a camera store; the second and third floors were both divided into two rented offices. A couple whose small business made custom gold family crests, framed or turned into trophy shields, occupied half a floor, as did an accountant and a branch of a knitting school, but the rooms on the third floor facing the main street happened to remain vacant all the time I lived above them. I used to slip in there some nights after my daughter had finally gone to sleep. I would open the windows a fraction and enjoy a different take on the view, or walk up and down in the empty space. I felt as if I were in a secret chamber, unknown to anyone.

I was told that until I rented the fourth-floor apartment, the building’s previous owner had lived there, and while this certainly had its perks — sole access to the rooftop and the spacious bathroom that had been built up there — it also meant that by default I was left in charge of the rooftop water tower and TV antenna, and that I had to go down late at night and lower the rolling security shutter at the stairwell entrance after the office tenants had all gone home, a task which naturally had been the owner’s.

The whole building had gone up for sale and been bought by a locally famous businesswoman by the name of Fujino. I was to become the first resident of the newly christened Fujino Building №3. The owner herself was apparently new to the residential end of things, having specialized in commercial property till now, and, unsure about an apartment with an unusual layout in a dilapidated office building, she had tentatively proposed a low rent to see if there would be any takers. This happenstance was a lucky break for me. Also quite by chance, the man who at the time was still my husband had the same name as the building. As a result, I was constantly being mistaken for the proprietor.

At the top of the steep, narrow, straight stairs there was an aluminum door and, opposite that, a door to the fire escape. The landing was so small that you had to take a step down the stairs or up on to the threshold of the fire exit before being able to open the apartment door. The fire escape was actually an iron ladder, perpendicular to the ground. In an emergency, it looked like we might stand a better chance if I bolted down the main stairs with my daughter in my arms.

But once you got the door open, the apartment was filled with light at any hour of the day. The kitchen and dining area immediately inside had a red floor, which made the aura all the brighter. Entering from the dimness of the stairwell, you practically had to squint.

‘Ooh, it’s warm! It’s pretty!’ My daughter, who was about to turn three, gave a shout the first time she was bathed in the room’s light.

‘Isn’t it cosy? The sun’s great, isn’t it?’

She ran around the dining-kitchen as she answered with a touch of pride, ‘Yes! Didn’t you know that, Mommy?’

I felt like giving myself a pat on the head for having managed to protect my daughter from the upheaval around her with the quantity of light.

The one window that caught the morning sun was in a cubbyhole beside the entrance, a kind of storage room less than two tatami mats in area. I decided to make that our bedroom. Its east-facing window overlooked platforms hung with laundry on top of the crowded neighboring houses, and the roofs of office buildings smaller than Fujino №3. Because we were in a shopping district around a station on the main loop line, not one of the houses had a garden; instead, the neighbors lined up on the platforms and rooftops all the potted plants they could lay their hands on and even set out deckchairs, so that the view from above had a very homey feeling, and I often saw elderly people out there in their bathrobe yukata.

There were south-facing windows in every one of the straight line of rooms — the two-mat, the dining-kitchen, and the six-mat. These looked over the roof of an old low house and on to a lane of bars and eateries. For a narrow lane it saw a lot of traffic, with horns constantly blaring.

To the west, at the far end of the long, thin apartment, a big window gave on to the main road; here the late sun and the street noise poured in without mercy. Directly below, one could see the black heads of pedestrians who streamed along the pavement towards the station in the morning and back again in the evening. On the sidewalk opposite, in front of a florist’s, people stood still at a bus stop. Every time a bus or truck passed by the whole fourth floor shook and the crockery rattled on the shelves. The building where I’d set up house with my daughter was on a three-way intersection — four-way counting the lane to the south. Nevertheless, several times a day, a certain conjunction of red lights and traffic flow would produce about ten seconds’ silence. I always noticed it a split second before the signals changed and the waiting cars all revved impatiently at once.

To the left of this western window were just visible the trees of a wood that belonged to a large traditional garden, the site of a former daimyo’s manor. That glimpse of greenery was precious to me. It was the centerpiece of the view from the window.

‘That? Why, that’s the Bois de Boulogne,’ I answered whenever a visitor asked. The name of the wood on the outskirts of Paris had stuck in my mind, like Bremen or Flanders, some place named in a fairy tale, and it was kind of fun just to let it trip off my tongue.

Along the northern wall of the dining-kitchen were a closet, the toilet, and the stairs to the roof. The toilet had its own window, with a view of the station and the trains. That little window was my daughter’s favorite.

‘We can see the station and the trains! And the house shakes!’ she proudly reported to her daycare teacher and friends at the start.

But she quickly came down with a fever brought on by the move and spent nearly a week in bed. While I was at work I left her with my mother, who lived alone not far away. My job, at a library attached to a radio station, was to archive broadcast-related documents and tapes, and issue them on loan. At the end of the day I stopped by my mother’s and stayed with my daughter till past nine, then returned alone to the building. My husband would no doubt have helped out if I’d contacted him, but I didn’t want to rely on my husband, even if it meant putting my mother to extra trouble. In fact, I didn’t want him ever to set foot in my new life. I was afraid of any renewed contact, so afraid it left me surprised at myself. The frightening thing was how accustomed I had become to his being there.

Before he left, he had been urging me to move back to my mother’s. ‘She must be lonesome, and besides, how are you going to manage with the little one on your own? With you two at your mom’s, I could leave you without worrying.’

He had already chosen an apartment for himself along a suburban commuter line. He was due to move there in a month, when the place became vacant.

As for me, at that time I hadn’t been able to get as far as thinking about where to go. His decision had yet to fully sink in. Wasn’t there still a chance I’d hear him laugh it all off as a joke tomorrow? Then why should I worry about where I was going to live?

I told him I didn’t want to go back to my mother’s. ‘Anything but that. That would just be trying to disguise the fact that you’ve left us.’

He then offered to come with me to look for an apartment. ‘If you go by yourself you’ll just get ripped off. I won’t be able to sleep at night knowing you’re in some dump. Come on, now, leave it to me.’ It was late January, and every day was bright and clear. I began doing the rounds of real estate agents with my husband. All I had to do was tag along without a word. I would meet him in my lunch hour at a café near my work and we’d go to the local agencies, one after the other.

He specified a 2DK (two rooms plus dining-kitchen), sunny, with bath, for around thirty thousand to forty thousand yen a month. The first place we tried, he was laughed at: ‘These days you won’t find anything like that for under sixty to seventy thousand.’ ‘It’s actually for her and our child,’ he said, looking back at me. ‘Any old thing would do for me, but I want them to have the best possible . . . Are you sure you don’t have something?’

The next day, exactly the same conversation took place at another agency. Unable to contain myself, I whispered, ‘The bath doesn’t matter, really. And I’d be happy with one room.’ Then I spoke up to the realtor: ‘There are studios at thirty to forty thousand, aren’t there?’

‘Studios, yes . . .’ He reached to open a ledger.

At this point my husband said sternly, as if scolding a child, ‘You’re too quick to give up. You’re going about it the wrong way. Once you’ve settled in you’ll find you can afford the rent, even if it seems a stretch right now. But you can’t fix up a cheap apartment with the cash you save, the landlords don’t allow alterations . . . So, what have you got in the fifty to sixty thousand range?’

The realtor assured us that he could show us several possibilities in the fifty thousand or, better still, the sixty thousand yen range. ‘We’d like to see them,’ said my husband. Considering he was so hard up he’d had to borrow from me to pay for the lease and security deposit on his own apartment, I could hardly expect him to provide financial support after the separation. He had been insisting that living apart was the only way out of the impasse in which he found himself — a clean sweep, a fresh start on his own. In that case, I wanted to pay my own way too and not cadge any more from my mother. The maximum rent I could afford was therefore fifty thousand yen, which was what the place where we’d been living together cost. I calculated that without my husband’s living expenses to cover, I should be able to get by without borrowing. But it was a calculation made with gritted teeth. Fifty thousand yen was more than half my monthly pay.

That day, we were shown a sixty-thousand-yen rental condominium. There was nothing not to like and it was handy for the office, but I didn’t take it.

Almost every day, we toured a variety of vacancies. We looked at a seventy-thousand-yen condominium with a garden. And a policy of no children. My husband appealed to the landlord that it was just the one child, a girl, and she’d be away all day at daycare, but I could have told him it would do no good.

The viewings were creeping steadily upmarket. I was now able to shrug off hearing a rent that amounted to my entire pay. I felt neither uneasy nor conscious of the absurdity. We were enthusiastically inspecting apartments I couldn’t possibly rent, and we were apparently dead serious. But neither my husband nor I saw ourselves as the one doing the renting. He was accompanying me, and I was accompanying him.

‘Are we going again today?’

This question had become part of our morning routine. Weather permitting, most of my lunch hours were taken up by a busy whirl. And from January into early February every day was as fine as could be.

There was a house with a Japanese cypress beside its front entrance. At the top of five stone steps, a light-blue door beckoned. The door was barely three feet from the steps; the tree had just enough room to grow. Its branches hid a bay window whose frame had been painted the same color as the front door.

‘This is quite something.’ My husband sounded excited.

‘But I don’t care for that tree. I’d rather have a magnolia, say, or a cherry . . .’

‘A cypress has way more class.’

It was a two-story house. Downstairs were a room with a wooden floor and bay windows, a six-tatami room that didn’t get much light, and a dining-kitchen; upstairs were two well-lit tatami rooms and even a place to hang out laundry. By the time we checked out the laundry deck, both my husband and I were very nearly euphoric. Aware of the agent within earshot, we said to each other, all smiles:

‘I bet your friends would be happy to come over.’

‘And there’s plenty of room for them to stay . . .’

‘It’d be a great place to bring up a child. Easy for me to drop in too . . . I’m starting to envy you, I’d like to rent it myself. I’d have my desk by that window . . .’

‘The bookshelves can go along that wall.’

‘Right . . . Hey, I know, let me be your lodger. I’ll pay room and board on the dot.’

‘Sure. But you’re not getting a discount.’

As our laughter echoed in the empty rooms, it brought a weak smile to the realtor’s lips.

I couldn’t help thinking, once again, that I was never going to have to live alone with our daughter. If I could live with my husband I didn’t care where, and without him everywhere was equally daunting.

Back at the library that day, for a while I pictured life in the two-story house. My husband had enthused, ‘Take it, don’t worry about the rent, just get your family to help you,’ and then disappeared. I would put the stereo in the room with the bay windows and use that space for meals and for relaxing. I’d make the dark six-mat room downstairs our bedroom and keep the upstairs for guests until my daughter was older. No, on second thoughts, the sunny, spacious upper floor was obviously more comfortable. I wondered who would visit, apart from my husband. Since it was close to the office, would my colleagues come if I invited them?

As I was immersed in these thoughts, a high-school teacher from out of town asked to borrow some tapes of poetry readings for classroom use. My mind still far away, I inserted the series one by one in a tape recorder. We always had borrowers listen to a part of the tapes we issued to ensure they were the right ones.

For some reason, the words on the tape suddenly registered with me.

‘Quick now, give up this idle pondering!

And let’s be off into the great wide world!

I tell you: the fool who speculates on things

is like some animal on a dry heath,

led by an evil fiend in endless circles,

while fine green pastures lie on every side.’

Startled, I asked the teacher standing there, ‘What was that?’ Could that be poetry, I was wondering. He glanced at the window, evidently thinking I’d heard something outside, then cocked his head to one side with a puzzled smile.

My husband didn’t come home that night, nor the next. He was probably convinced that my new location had been decided.

I began to go around the agencies by myself. It was the first time I’d entered a realtor’s all alone.

The voice on the tape had reminded me of my last move, four years ago. The memory had caught me by surprise.

My husband was still a grad student and I hadn’t been working long at the library. Though we each had our own apartment, half the time he spent the night at mine. I had a call from him one day at the library: ‘We have an apartment. It’s new, and quiet, and sunny. It’s fantastic. I said we’d move in on Sunday. OK?’

It had been only the night before that we’d raised the subject of needing to look for a place for the two of us.

‘That was fast. You said we’d take it?’ Though astonished, I was also delighted by the effortlessness of the decision. I was not annoyed at having had no say in where I was to live. I was enjoying the feeling of being swept along by a man. I’d left home to be free to have him stay over and he’d found the place for me that time too, a room in a student boarding house used by his friends. But it had taken him a while to make up his mind that I was the one.

All I had to do was follow his instructions. I packed on Saturday night and was ready in the morning when the truck came around after stopping at his apartment. I had so little to load, it was the work of a moment. I joined him riding in the back and we set off, me with a stack of LPs on my lap, him with a shopping bag full of laundry in his arms.

In about thirty minutes we arrived. The new place was down a cul-de-sac in a residential area.

‘Is this it?’ I exclaimed happily. It was my first sight of my own apartment.

We lived there for a year and a half, until I became pregnant. Which meant I had never even found myself a place to live before now, I realized. Bizarre though it seemed, I had to admit it was true.

I made the rounds on my own, meticulously, in the vicinity of my daughter’s daycare. Before I knew it we were into March. Inevitably, the low-rent properties I was asking to see were a far cry from those I’d toured with my husband, and I often felt like retreating in dismay. However, the more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal’s eyes. There was something there glaring back at me. Although it scared me, I wanted to approach it.

Once, offered a real bargain, a very nice 2dk unit in a condominium building for thirty thousand yen, I went dubiously to look at it. Everything about it was normal, as far as I could see.

‘But this doesn’t make sense. Why is it so cheap?’

The realtor reluctantly confessed the truth, since I was bound to find out anyhow. ‘There was a family suicide. Gas, so it’s not as if it left traces. It was said to be a murder-suicide after a divorce battle. It was in the papers. And as if that weren’t bad enough, when a couple moved in next, the wife went and hanged herself . . . Yes, hanged herself. It beats me, it really does. The place has been empty ever since. It’s been a year now.’

‘I see . . . Then it was a sort of chain reaction? She must have thought she could stay untouched by the deaths,’ I said, fighting down an urgent desire to get out of there.

‘I expect you’re right. They’ve changed the tatami and repainted the walls, but of course the gas valve is still in the same position. That’s it there.’

The realtor pointed to a corner of the smaller room. A heap of corpses met my eyes on the tatami, toppled around the outlet.

‘She couldn’t help seeing the bodies, I guess . . .’

‘She seems to have had a breakdown. She’d only just arrived from her hometown . . .’

I said I’d think about it and made my escape. ‘There’s no hurry, it won’t be snapped up,’ the agent counseled. But though I wasn’t superstitious, I wasn’t sure I could stay unaffected, either.

A few evenings later, a different realtor escorted me to a tall, thin building. From below my first reaction had been a sigh at the sight of the formidable stairs, but the minute he opened the place up and I took one step inside, I crowed to myself that this was the apartment for me. The red floor blazed in the setting sun. The long-closed, empty rooms pulsed with light.

The first cherry blossoms were coming out by the time my daughter, made ill by exhaustion after the move, was well enough to start back at daycare. I taught her ‘Sakura, Sakura’ along with ‘The Little Bleating Goat’ and the song about the crow. Our voices boomed inside the bathroom, but it felt even better to belt the songs out on the rooftop. I was impressed, I admit, to discover I had such a fine voice. I bought a supply of nursery rhyme books and sang my way through them between bursts of applause from my daughter. In the back of my mind I was listening to the words I’d heard on the tape: Give up this idle pondering.

In tears of excitement, my daughter showered me with ‘Encores’ and ‘Bravos’ she’d picked up from a picture book.

I didn’t know my husband’s new address. All I’d been given was the phone number of the restaurant where he was now working part-time. Someone had told me that his new woman friend was the owner, and that she was old enough to be his mother. She might be just what he needed, I thought, after he’d led a group of his friends in trying to start a small theatre company and ended with nothing to show for it but debts.

He hadn’t been pleased at my deciding on a new place by myself, and had moved out before me, still aggrieved. I no longer had any intention of letting him into my apartment.

He would come, though. While afraid of that moment, at the same time I was beginning to be aware that I couldn’t turn his way once again. And this after I’d been so unwilling to break up in the first place. I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back.

Quick now, give up this idle pondering. And let’s be off!

So I told myself. My daughter had yet to notice her father’s disappearance.

‘. . . In the summer, let’s have a paddling pool on the roof. There’s room for a big one,’ I said as I put her to bed. ‘And let’s have a couple of sun-loungers as well. I could go for a beer too. Shall we string up fairy lights like the rooftop beer gardens do? Won’t they be pretty? And let’s plant lots of flowers. Sunflowers and dahlias and cannas. Shall we keep a rabbit? A guinea pig would be nice. But actually we could keep an even bigger animal. A goat — why not? And how about chickens? That’s it, we’ll have a farm. Won’t the neighbors be surprised when the cow goes moo . . .’

My daughter was watching my mouth with wide eyes. I stroked her head.

The two-mat bedroom was as small as a closet, and I felt at home.

What It Takes to Write, and Translate, Some of China’s Most Famous Stories

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In 1984, a Chinese dentist named Yu Hua decided he was sick of looking at teeth all day. He wanted more variety, and more freedom. Maybe he wanted to become a writer. By 1994, he was among the most celebrated novelists in China.

Yu Hua’s early work sprang from his desire for freedom and exploration, and from reading modern and postmodern writers like Borges, Faulkner, and Kafka. The characters in his early stories, seven of which are collected in his most recently released book The April 3rd Incident, are trapped in their own subjectivity, the world around them a baffling fog. The teenage protagonist of the title story, who convinces himself his family and friends are plotting against him, bears more than a passing relationship to Juan Dahlmann, the delusional librarian in Borges’ masterwork “The South.” In another, “In Memory of Miss Willow Yang,” Yu Hua numbers and then rearranges the story’s sections, presenting the narrative outside chronological order. And in “Summer Typhoon,” the collection’s longest and most lyrical story, he describes a weeks-long earthquake panic through the eyes of an entire community.

Image result for april 3rd incident

In more recent years, Yu Hua has turned from metafiction to character-driven fiction and political criticism. He’s an op-ed contributor to the New York Times and the first Chinese winner of the James Joyce Award, and his work has been translated into 35 languages, from Catalan to Tamil. In the United States, he’s perhaps best known for his novels Brothers and To Live, or his essay collection China in Ten Words. Anyone who has read those books is in for both a surprise and a treat with The April 3rd Incident, and anyone new to Yu Hua’s work could find no better place to start.

I interviewed Yu Hua via email about the experience of returning to stories from decades ago. His translator, Allan H. Barr, translated my questions and Yu Hua’s replies; he and I then corresponded about his experience translating The April 3rd Incident. Both interviews are below.

Yu Hua

Lily Meyer: How did it feel to revisit these stories decades after writing them? Were you able to approach them as a reader, or only as a writer? Were you tempted to make changes?

Yu Hua: Revisiting these stories now, what strikes me most forcibly is that I no longer have the talent I had when I was young — though, of course, when I was young I didn’t have the talent I have now: they’re different kinds of talent. Changes in my society have made me into an author not so very much like the one I used to be: these days my writing is much more direct in addressing social realities. When I reread these stories, I sometimes feel an impulse to change the odd line here or there, but I haven’t done that, because those were lines that the younger me wrote, not the current me. That being so, I don’t feel I have the right to make revisions.

LM: Your writing since The April 3rd Incident has become much more character-driven, where these stories tend toward the conceptual. Are you still attracted to this abstract mode of writing? What can you achieve through the abstract that’s harder, or not possible, through the concrete?

YH: These stories were written before I began to write full-length novels, and you’re right, they’re a little abstract — certainly in terms of the characters, which to a large extent are symbols, symbols that emerged when I was trying to give expression to things. Once I started writing novels, I suddenly discovered that characters would often speak in their own voices, in words that were better — more apt and more natural — than the ones I originally had in mind, and so later my writing, as you say, became much more character-driven.

Revisiting these stories now, what strikes me most forcibly is that I no longer have the talent I had when I was young — though, of course, when I was young I didn’t have the talent I have now.

LM: You’ve spoken often about your influences over the years, and Borges seems to me to be a particularly clear influence in The April 3rd Incident. What did you take from his style, and how did you transform it so completely into your own?

YH: Borges had an impact on me, certainly, and you can see that in this book. Some of the stories, however, were written before I came into contact with Borges’ work. I wrote the title story, for example, in 1987, before ever reading Borges. At that point I was under Kafka’s spell. The sensation I got from reading Kafka was a compulsive feeling of dread, a dread that I felt as my own. And so what I received from Kafka was not an influence in terms of form or technique, but rather an emotional influence. Kafka activated a sense of dread that had been lurking deep in my heart, and then I gave it expression in my own way.

LM: “The April 3rd Incident” is one of the funniest and saddest articulations of adolescence I’ve ever read — its protagonist felt very much like Holden Caulfield — and yet it skates constantly on the edge of true darkness. How did you keep it on that edge?

YH: Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was all the rage in China in the late 1980s and still is popular today, I think because you can find lots of Holden Caulfields, in any country and any era. The “he” in “The April 3rd Incident” is very different from Holden, but in one respect they are alike — both are excluded from the crowd, or they exclude themselves, because they don’t want to be part of it. That description of yours — “Skating constantly on the edge of true darkness” — is spot on, for that was precisely my state of mind as a 27-year-old writing this story. And it’s true that I needed to get the balance right; my method was to not let the protagonist ever get too excited, for that would fatally disturb the story’s equilibrium.

Kafka activated a sense of dread that had been lurking deep in my heart, and then I gave it expression in my own way.

LM: In “Summer Typhoon,” you write in the voice of a community, though never in the first or third person plural. How did you get the balance of characters and voices right?

YH: It would have been impossible to tell this entire story from the viewpoint of a single character — it needed multiple perspectives, but each character is independent, with a distinct voice that is his or hers alone. It’s not that easy to write a story from multiple angles: first you need to think about an order in which to introduce the various viewpoints, and then work out the transitions from one to the next. As for balance, I felt that the never-ending rain and the characters’ shared fear of an earthquake could help me there, for these things create an atmosphere that envelops both them and the reader. Just so long as I didn’t disrupt that atmosphere, the narrative could remain secure and keep its balance.

LM: In “In Miss Willow Yang,” the characters often find their knowledge of the world coming into direct conflict with their experience — take, for example, the narrator walking into his kitchen, which he knows doesn’t exist. What attracted, or attracts, you to that particular paradox? Does it have political echoes?

YH: By the time I wrote “Miss Willow Yang,” almost two years had passed since I wrote “The April 3rd Incident,” and by then I was a reader of Borges; I’m sure that Borges must have left his mark on this story. It is a slippery or, as you say, paradoxical narrative: as it progresses, it constantly contradicts itself. Its paradoxes probably do have political implications, for when I wrote the story I had still not fully emerged from the shadows of the Cultural Revolution. The Communist faith that had been inculcated in me from childhood to adolescence had all at once been discredited, and things that later I’d begun to believe in I very soon stopped believing in, so I was myself living in a paradox. That, too, was the political reality in China in those days: Deng Xiaoping wanted to repudiate the Cultural Revolution, but he refused to repudiate Mao Zedong, and that was the biggest paradox of all.

LM: When the outlander in “Miss Willow Yang” starts losing his sight, you write, “From that day on, he no longer took responsibility for his own body.” That seems true for a lot of the characters in The April 3rd Incident. Did you feel that way at the time? What’s the source of these character’s lack or loss of control?

YH: That loss of control seems to have been a keynote of the stories I wrote 30 years ago: the characters have no command of their own destiny, and sometimes they even lack a command of their own sensations. I’m not sure what caused me to create such situations, but one thing I can say with certainty: I encouraged myself to keep on writing such stories, because this sense of a loss of agency was something that I myself often felt, and I needed to get it off my chest. It was when I had unburdened myself of this feeling that I began to write novels, and then my writing moved in a new direction.

Allan H. Barr

LM: How did you come to work with Yu Hua, and in what ways did you collaborate or use him as a resource?

AHB: In my early academic career, I focused largely on the literature of late imperial China, but I always had an interest in current developments, and in time I thought I’d try my hand at translating a living author. It’s not that common for scholars of pre-modern China to get involved in contemporary literature, and when Yu Hua and I met for the first time in Beijing in 2001, he was rather tickled that someone with a background in Ming and Qing fiction would want to translate his work. We soon found we enjoyed working together, and by now I have now translated five of his books — two novels, two short-story collections, and a volume of essays.

In this case, Yu Hua personally selected seven stories that he thought would make a representative collection of his early work, and I suggested an order in which to arrange them. We also conferred about the title. As I was translating the stories, I emailed Yu Hua regularly with questions about particular words or passages that I wasn’t sure I fully understood. In some cases, I was relieved to find, the problem was not with my reading comprehension but with the text itself: the 1995 edition of Yu Hua’s collected works on which I basing my translation turned out to include a number of typos that his Chinese copy editors had failed to detect.

In some cases, I was relieved to find, the problem was not with my reading comprehension but with the text itself: the 1995 edition on which I basing my translation turned out to include a number of typos.

LM: The stories in The April 3rd Incident are simultaneously vague and detail-driven, and their humor, especially, lives in detail. Were there details you had to change to make the English version work?

Allan H. Barr: It’s true that a combination of vagueness and detail is a hallmark of Yu Hua’s narrative style. Precisely because details are relatively sparse, I am always keen to know just how Yu Hua visualizes the things that do make an appearance in his work. For example, in a couple of his novels we encounter the simple word yáng羊. Potentially this could mean “sheep,” or maybe “lamb,” or possibly “goat.” Which is it? Sometimes you can’t be sure about this kind of thing unless you ask Yu Hua himself. In “Love Story,” Yu mentions an item of clothing that translates literally as a “student dress.” What exactly is a “student dress”? His answer, when I asked him, was that at the time this story is set a student dress was a prized item in a young woman’s wardrobe; made with Dacron, it was deemed more fashionable than dresses made with cotton fiber. So I adjusted my translation accordingly and called it a “Dacron dress.”

LM: With stories like “Miss Willow Yang” and “The April 3rd Incident,” the reader has to be confused and uncertain for the story to work. How did you make sure not to give too much away as you translated?

AHB: You’re quite right that confusion and uncertainty are critical to the success of these two stories. A good deal of the confusion is actually hard-wired into their design, and there’s little I could have done to alter it. “The April 3rd Incident,” for example, is divided into 22 sections, numbered sequentially from 1 to 22, but the sections are not presented in the chronological order of the events that take place. Rather, they are arranged according to another scheme of Yu Hua’s devising, so that section 9, say, follows section 7 in terms of conventional narrative time. “Miss Willow Yang” is also divided into numbered sections, 13 in all, but in four sequences (numbered 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3, 4; 1, 2, 3; and 1, 2), each sequence relating much the same story, but with significant — and perplexing — variations. So any translation that follows the original plan of these two stories is bound to throw the reader off balance to some degree.

One concern I had when translating “The April 3rd Incident” and “Summer Typhoon” was that they might actually sow a little too much confusion. In the original Chinese text of these two stories, the internal musings of characters are not visibly demarcated from the actual events, and Yu Hua and I agreed it would make sense to put internal imaginings in italics, Faulkner-style, to help the reader navigate what might otherwise be a rather too bewildering landscape. But plenty of confusion and uncertainty remains.

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LM: Which story in this collection was the hardest to translate? Which was the most fun?

AHB: The hardest would have to be “Summer Typhoon.” Of the pieces in this book, its narrative arc is the least clear; it evokes an atmosphere more than it tells a story. Reading it, more than once I was unsure just what was happening, and several times I sought advice from Yu Hua as I considered how to present a scene or wondered whether to clarify something or leave it a bit mysterious. The most fun was definitely “The April 3rd Incident,” with its offbeat humor and its exasperating but oddly endearing hero.

LM: There are some moments of amazing lyricism in these stories — I’m thinking particularly of “Summer Typhoon.” How do you match your own lyrical language to Yu Hua’s?

AHB: The lyrical passages certainly stand out in “Summer Typhoon,” contrasting starkly with the scenes of discomfort and anxiety that form so much of the story. I suspect that these lyrical passages recall scenes that Yu Hua himself may have observed on his travels in China, but they describe places that are unfamiliar to me, and so I had only his words to go on as I thought about how to render these passages in English. Fortunately, having known Yu Hua a long time, I think I have a sense of what words will be a good match for his.

LM: How much do you want readers to think about your presence as a translator, or the fact that these stories are translated?

AHB: I take it as given that most readers are not going to think about the fact that the stories are translated, and I don’t have a problem with that. But I certainly appreciate it when — as here in this interview — a reader takes the trouble to think about the work involved in translating into English such a different language as Chinese.

Why Do I Have to Choose Between Being a Writer and Being a Mother?

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I was standing at a housewarming party with a random group of friends-of-friends when the subject of motherhood came up. The women I was with were all around the same age — in our early twenties — and full of the bravado that comes with a few too many drinks.

“I don’t understand,” one announced, “women who have always wanted to be mothers. It’s 2017. Don’t they want to be something else?”

The pronouncement, made with enough swagger to deserve a place in a novel, was followed by a long sip of a beer as the rest of us turned to look, from person to person, to determine what the other women in the circle had to say to that.

“I’ve always wanted to be a mother,” I said finally, feeling as I did that it was the wrong thing to say, but also knowing it was true.

“Oh,” the young woman said, suddenly chagrined. “But you said you wanted to be a writer.”

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I am not surprised that the woman with the beer thought that being a writer and a mother were mutually exclusive. My whole life, I have been inundated with stories of women who have to give up their creativity to be mothers, or who lose their ability to create in the fog of having children. That’s what happened to the vivacious and then exhausted main characters in The Awakening and The Dept. of Speculation, while the heroines of Getting a Life by Helen Simpson either abandon careers for parenthood or barely see their children in order to maintain their careers. The life stories of the authors whose works I read in my early English classes, too, back up Doris Lessing’s belief that “no one can write with a child around” and Rachel Cusk’s that “to succeed in being one means to fail at being the other,” since most of them were women known for not having children (Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson), or for having been brilliant writers and abusive or completely absent mothers (Anne Sexton and Doris Lessing). I know that this division is not true for all women writers, since modern novelists — Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, and Lauren Groff, among them — have managed amazing careers with children, but fiction around the issue, and the canonized works I was given in high school and college, all seem to say that to create a life is to abandon the creative pursuits I’ve always seen as my life’s work.

At the time of that housewarming, I was dating a man who has since become my fiancé. We were in the dreamy phase just after we first said, “I love you.” But our dreams were complicated by the circumstances that led to our declaration of love. We’d said it after he finally opened up to me about his two battles with cancer, when he was ten and when he was eighteen. He had walked me through the questions he thought I was likely to have — the type of cancer, the chances of recurrence, the genetic likelihood of the disease — and then I had asked a question he didn’t know the answer to: “Can you have kids?”

My whole life, I have been inundated with stories of women who have to give up their creativity to be mothers, or who lose their ability to create in the fog of having children.

The question was there, out in the open, but the answer was a complete unknown. We looked at it as long as either of us could stand and then quickly, hurriedly, looked away. Both of us knew we wanted to be parents. We just didn’t know what it meant, really, if conceiving turned out to be a complicated process.

“We’ll still have kids,” my fiancé said confidently in subsequent discussions. We both agreed, since the science of conception had come a long way and adoption was always a possibility. Anyway, the reality of having children or not seemed far away.

When we got engaged, but before we shared the news with anyone we knew, I told my fiancé we needed to go into marriage with our eyes open about whether he could genetically have children.

“It’s not going to be a big deal,” I must’ve said a hundred times. I really believed exactly that. I just wanted to know.

And so, as an engagement present of sorts, my fiancé made an appointment for a fertility test. He made it with his hands literally shaking, the reluctance visible on his face. When he hung up the phone, he turned and asked if I’d marry him even if he couldn’t procreate the traditional way.

“We’ll make it work,” I promised.

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I believed that, in my core. But an interesting thing happened when the appointment was made, and then when the test took place, and when a lab mistake delayed the results for three long weeks. Both of us became terrified of the sacrifices involved. My fiancé was scared of the expense, the stress, and the burden of adoption or IVF. And I was scared of the stress, the sacrifice, and the time-sink of being a mother.

During the year and a half since that rooftop party, I had attended writing festivals and workshops, worked my way into a job as an assistant editor at a publishing company, and completed and then begun revising a novel. My life rested completely on having the time and freedom of mind that, I had read, would vanish when I became a mother. I did not want to be the unnamed narrator in Dept. of Speculation, or most of the protagonists in Getting a Life. But everywhere I turned during the wait for the fertility test results, I bumped into stories of women for whom motherhood sapped the time or mental energy to be anything else.

And the more I pushed on it, the more I read, the more my fear of being a mother and a writer grew: Was I giving up my writing by choosing to have kids? Was I completely tossing aside my identity as anything other than a mother? And what did it say about me that I cared so much about having kids? Was I less dedicated to being a writer than my peers? Less independent than the woman on the roof with the beer?

What did it say about me that I cared so much about having kids? Was I less dedicated to being a writer than my peers?

I had no answers that seemed large enough. All I knew was that I wanted to raise a child as innately as I wanted to read and edit and write.

“Exactly,” my fiancé said when I told him this. “Isn’t that enough?”

And for him, wanting a child was enough: He believed he was meant to be a father, and he intended to become one. For him, there was no great sacrifice involved and no need to agonize. No one would stand on a rooftop and say to him, “Oh, I thought you wanted to be a musician,” or a music executive, or any of the other roles he’s hoping to fill. For him the scary part, the unexpectedly expensive part, the part that was going to require deeper, undue sacrifice, was the acquisition of the child. What followed, according to all the books he’d read and movies he’d seen, could still be late nights at the office and business trips and open mic nights with the band of guys from work. What followed for him was all of these things, plus a family to come home to and a child to raise.

When the results came back, when we found out that my fiancé’s semen was viable, his fear lifted. But mine, to my great surprise, has continued. There is an anxiety in me over whether the woman on the roof was right, and whether the voice in the back of my mind that whispers I cannot be both a writer and a mother might be the most honest part of myself. And the stories I want to assuage this fear do not seem to be available: I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers — stories in which women are both, without their struggle to be more than a mother overwhelming them.

I am having such trouble finding narratives of women who are mothers and artists, or mothers and musicians, or mothers and writers.

But I know that it is possible. I know that it is possible because I read stories about men being fathers and artists, fathers and musicians, fathers and writers. I know that it is possible because no one ever turns to my fiancé when he says he wants kids and replied, “But I thought you wanted something more.”

I am many years from having a child, and I am grateful for that time. I am glad to have a chance to go to writing conferences and publishing events and to have the mental energy and creative inspiration to write regularly. I am grateful, too, because I hope I have time to find a new narrative of creative mothers.

Since the fertility test, I have been studying the lives of real-life writer-mothers, and I have been searching for fictional examples of the same. I am not denying how difficult raising a child is, nor how exhausting and time consuming, and I know that when I’m an early mother, I will be grateful to find other women who have expressed their exhaustion and that there’s room in the canon for stories about the real challenges of domestic life. But I am also looking for a narrative in which creative women do not have to choose between abandoning their work or their children. I hope to find a story of women who live as men do: loving and ambitious, child-raisers and artists. And if I don’t find that story in the lives of others, then I hope there is room for me to tell it from my own experience, because I believe deeply in my future as parent and writer both.