7 Books on the Joys of Doing Nothing

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Sometimes, the world gets to be too much and you just want to check out—but reader types often have trouble shutting off our brains. Thankfully, we can always look to literature for solace in the stories of idlers, sleepers, and ponderers. In these books, you’ll find inspiration from characters who prefer sleep or idleness over action, and essays on how to use the act of doing nothing in order to find comfort or relief from the inundation of bad news in the headlines.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

In her most recent novel, Moshfegh depicts the story of a woman who believes sleep to be an antidote to the physiological effects of current affairs and personal misery. Though set in the unsettling years leading up to September 11, Moshfegh uses the intensely observational style that she’s become known for in her previous books, such as Homesick for Another World and Eileen, to encapsulate a feeling that many people may share today; the desire to sleep. Or, more specifically, the desire to go right back to sleep after waking up in the morning to an onslaught of notifications from various news outlets about the natural, and not-so-natural, disasters happening around the world. In My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Moshfegh protagonist turns to sleep-inducing prescription medication in order to fulfill her aspiration to do nothing.

A Novel About Sleeping Through the '90s, Designed to Wake You Up in 2018

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

If sleeping isn’t the right antidote for you, another one you could try is to get lost. As in her other essay collections, such as Men Explain Things to Me and Call Them by Their True Names, Solnit brings her skill for expert and persuasive writing to discuss the topic of getting lost. In this collection, Solnit explores the question: “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is unknown to you?” Disguised as essays about doing nothing, this field guide brings the reader through seemingly unrelated thoughts and anecdotes, arriving at answers that are be obscure to the person that seeks them out with intent.

Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin

20th century poets and authors popularized the term flâneuse when writing about the modern urban experience — for men. It denotes a man who takes to wandering the streets aimlessly; a man taking advantage of his privilege by walking around, doing nothing, in metropolitan locations without the worry of being harrassed. Lauren Elkin’s memoir takes the same concept — of aimless wandering — and applies it to the female experience. Drawing on her own practice of meandering the streets of modern cities, Elkin writes about the history of the female flâneuse.

Visiting Sephora with Walter Benjamin

The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet by Myrlin Hermes

In the Shakespeare canon, Hamlet is the archetype of a non-doer. His uncle kills his father, his mother marries his uncle, his love life goes up in flames, and yet, rather than exacting revenge on the man that incited it all, he chooses to read books and speak in soliloquy. Myrlin Hermes’ novel takes the form of a prequel to the play, offering the reader a look into Hamlet’s university life before the notorious tragedy strikes. Using the same characters that live and suffer in Shakespeare’s world, Hermes reimagines that world in a modern novel imbued with Shakespearean references and plot devices — such as mistaken identities and love-triangles.

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

Bennet’s debut novel suggests a life of contemplation in lieu of action. The narrator lives by herself and shares her inner monologue with the reader about the daily routine of living in solitude, and the ordinary events that surround her cottage on the west coast of Ireland. With a perceptive focus on atmosphere instead of plot, Bennett’s style pushes the boundaries of what we consider short stories, prose poetry or even essays. In doing nothing much but contemplating, the narrator of Pond brings us outside our own egocentric world to consider the world around us.

Morning, 1908

Persuasion by Jane Austen

Persuasion, Austen’s final work, explores the typical themes in her canon — culture, society and marriage in 19th century England. Whether or not the characters in her books are doing anything actually productive, at the very least they’re doing something. However, this particular novel showcases a character with an expertise for doing nothing; Mary Musgrove. Repeatedly, she feigns illness in order to get out of responsibilities and, rather than taking full advantage of the free time, she does nothing instead. Then again, maybe that is exactly how one should be spending their free time.

The Importance of Living by Lin Yutang

Lin Yutang uses philosophy and wit to enlighten his readers about the way to lead a simple life; valuing idleness over wearing oneself out. He draws from Eastern ethics, such as Taoism, which entails letting go of impossible expectations and unattainable goals in order to live a life akin to a river — going along with the unplanned and unstructured way life takes you. Though written in the mid-1900s, this book of guidelines for a peaceful life is as timely as ever in navigating this chaotic modern world.

That Guy in Your MFA’s 10 Rules for Novelists

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I f you’ve ever taken a creative writing class, then you know who I am: I’m the guy who showed up 10 minutes late, with a chiseled jawline covered in half a week of stubble, unwashed hair under a beanie. When ever anyone makes a point, I roll my eyes and offer a contrarian opinion. I mean, if you read David Foster Wallace, you’d realize that the point you’re trying to make is completely obtuse. I’m working on the next Great American Novel in my Moleskine notebook, gazing contemplatively out the window every few lines so everyone looking at me knows how deep I am. That’s who I am. Jonathan Franzen is the guy who thinks winning one National Book Award a 15 years ago means he’s entitled to making rules for writers. Well, Jon, I read The Corrections. And let’s just say I would have made a few.

Course Catalog from the Jonathan Franzen Night School

I, on the other hand, have placed a short story in a very prominent literary journal that may or may not actually exist. And so, as a public service, here are my rules for writers.

1: Anyone who ever rejects your work is wrong. The same goes for anyone who gives you notes. They just don’t understand you. I mean, really: punctuation? It’s like they’ve never even read Cormac McCarthy.

2: If you write for money, you’re a capitalist sell-out hack. Real writing is done in one’s notebook and read only after one’s death, probably from starvation. Or just do what I do and live off your trust fund.

3: Writing in the first person is played out. Same with writing in the third person. If you really want to be an original voice in the foction landscape, try writing in the second person plural future tense. “The group of you all will go in the crumbling Victorian manor.”

4: If you introduce a female character, be sure to describe (in detail) the size and shape of her breasts.

If You’re Not Sure How a Male Author Would Describe You, Use Our Handy Chart

5: Real writers don’t need headboards. The mattress on your floor is a perfect conduit for creative expression.

6: You have to have darlings before you kill them. That’s a quote from Faulkner. I’ve read Faulkner

7: Female characters are hard for readers to relate to. Try making your protagonist a man.

8: Trains are a metaphor for: (1) time (2) escape (3) fascism (4) the unstoppable speed of technological advancement (5) trains

9: If The New Yorker still hasn’t responded to the unsolicited fiction submission you sent them in the mail, follow up for the eighth time.

10: Write drunk, edit never.

Alexander Chee Recommends 5 Books that Aren’t By Men

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You already know that women writers love Alexander Chee—earlier this year, we published a conversation among four Asian American writers, three of them women, about how inspiring they’ve found him. What you may not yet know is that the feeling is mutual. Here, the award-winning and bestselling author of The Queen of the Night and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel introduces some of the five books by non-men that he finds most inspiring.

Chee is involved in the writing world as an editor and an educator—he’s a contributing editor at The New Republic, an editor at large at VQR, and a professor of English and creative writing at Dartmouth—which means he gets a chance to be influential in promoting women and non-binary writers. And he is, of course, a celebrated author in his own right; his essays and stories have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, T Magazine, Tin House, Slate, Guernica, and Best American Essays 2016, and he is winner of a 2003 Whiting Award, a 2004 NEA Fellowship in prose and a 2010 MCCA Fellowship.

Read More Women is Electric Literature’s series, presented in collaboration with MCD Books, in which we feature prominent authors, of any gender, recommending their favorite books by women and non-binary writers. Twice a month, you’ll hear about the five non-male authors who most delight your favorite writers.

City of Angels, or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf

This was one of the most consummate aesthetic and political experiences I’ve had while reading in years. Wolf’s last novel is based on a character like her, arriving to the U.S. from Germany after the fall of the Wall, on her way to a residency in California. There’s a Weimar Under the Palms feeling to it, as the East German writer wanders the California landscape in conversations with her fellow fellows, and herself, and engaging in a project based on the correspondence she’s found between two women during the East German regime. Highlights include being astonished at the homeless problem, amazement at a former CIA Director winning the presidency, and listening to a young Californian explain to her, an East German, the idea of Basic Income. The novel seems to be the way she undertook writing about the scandal that rocked her career — the discovery that she had been an informant after the release of her Stasi files. It is an investigation of self deception, at the personal and the national level, and with time I love it more and more.

An Autobiography by Janet Frame

Only the wonderful bright spirit that was the late Janet Frame would choose the simple title, An Autobiography, for this three volume wonder, collecting To the Is-Land, Angel At My Table, and The Envoy From Mirror City. It is an arresting, experimental journey into the life of New Zealand’s greatest writer, beginning with her working class family upbringing, her false diagnosis with schizophrenia, her struggle to be treated with respect as a woman writer, and how she made her way in this world. You may know of this from the masterpiece of a film made by Jane Campion, adapted from this book, but the book itself has so much wise and insightful writing advice that did not make it onto the screen.

Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones

Jones has a piece of writing advice I love — “When there’s two sides to the story and both sides are right, you have a novel.” This novel embodies this, powerfully, in the story of two sisters, each sharing their side of growing up in 1980s Atlanta with a shared father, a bigamist, and how they were each shaped in part by how and when they learned of each other, and became, for a time, something like antagonists. I came to love them both and root for them both, which is part of the novel’s magic trick. For readers new to her looking for more of what they loved in her current bestselling novel, An American Marriage, they should easily turn here next — I also think this is a great place to begin reading her.

Tayari Jones’s Favorite Books By Women

I’ll Be Right There by Kyung-Sook Shin

A young woman receives a phone call from an ex-boyfriend eight years after they last saw each other, telling her that their former professor is near death though he is not receiving visitors. She is drawn into memories of how he kept her and their friends inspired as they navigated the tumultuous period of student protests and state violence in South Korea during the 1980s authoritarian rule of South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan, in part through the study of European literature. It is both a portrait of their friendships and relationships, their desire to escape the world they are in, and their desire to transform it. “Literature and art are not simply what will carry you; they are also what you must lay down your life for,” the professor tells his students, and the novel is the story of how they try.

Saint Joan of Arc by Vita Sackville-West

A biography by the woman writer who inspired Woolf’s Orlando, about the famous French Saint. It has been accused of being a little fictionalized, but you may not care. I didn’t. The result is a drama about gender, power, the church, French culture, and the question of whether it is a heresy punishable by being burned at the stake to say a saint can console you in jail by holding you. It is also a powerful and poignant meditation on patriotism, heroism, and martyrdom — and a myth that is a tentpole of Western culture.

7 International Novels for Food Lovers

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With the holidays upon us, tables across America and the world will be heaving with delights. Your Thanksgiving banquet and company might hit the commercially-sanctioned “happy” mark. However, if you’re less than enthusiastic about the season of forced gratitude and have all kinds of feelings about its settler colonialism origins, we have suggest (naturally!) literary escape. Here’s a list of yummy prose with generous sides of dysfunction and lavish sprinklings of hilarity to get you through the season. With zero sugar, gluten, cholesterol, and no animals hurt in its making (we hope), this reading list should easily and seriously indulge your literary appetite.

Gourmet Rhapsody by Muriel Barbery

“I am the greatest food critic. It is I who has taken this minor art and raised it to a rank of utmost prestige,” claims Gourmet Rhapsody’s dying protagonist. In his final hours, he is trying to recall a taste that is the “final and ultimate truth of my entire life and that holds the key to the heart that I have since silenced.” Barbery’s novel explores the food critic’s quest through his upper bourgeoisie Parisian eyes and via those with the less savory perspectives of him, in some seriously delectable prose. Of his first memory of Japanese food, he writes: “Yes, it is like a fabric: sashimi is velvet dust, verging on silk, or a bit of both, and the extraordinary alchemy of its gossamer essence allows it to preserve a milky density unknown even by clouds.” His take on a side is something you might find at your holiday dinner table: “A few green asparagus stems, plum and tender enough to make you swoon.”

The Birdwoman’s Palate by Laksmi Pamuntjak

A dreamy — each chapter begins with the main character’s sleep time adventures — offering from Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak, this novel trails an epidemiologist Aruna who’s tackling bird flu. Of the original outbreak, Pamuntjak writes: “It is worth noting that there was at this time a conspicuous upsurge in the production of homemade abon ayam — dry-fried shredded chicken. Simply to die for when sprinkled over rice or toast.” Pamuntjak charms with Aruna’s chattiness and the unlikely pairing of a bird flu investigation and a foodie road trip across the Indonesian archipelago. The Birdwoman’s Palate is a buffet of diverse delicacies with some regional politics thrown in the wok.

Umami by Laia Jufresa

In the Mexico City of Umami, a building layout mimics the map of the human tongue — Bitter, Sour, Sweet, Salty, and Umami — while its residents grapple with grief and loss. No major banquets here but instead, there’s an urban milpa (the varied, cultivated fields of the Mesoamericans), the pseudo-cereal amaranth, MSG, and meditations on tastes via Alf, the building’s owner who’s written a book on Umami, the fifth undefinable sensation of deliciousness. A taster of Alf’s thoughts on the matter: “Umami starts in the mouth, in the middle of the tongue, activating salivation. Your molars wake up and feel the urge to bite, beg to move. Not that different in fact, albeit less powerful, from the instinct that drives your hips to move almost of their own accord during sex. In that moment, you only know how to obey your body.” And then: “If we delve back to the beginning, perhaps umami doesn’t start in the mouth at all, but rather as a craving, at first sight.”

Pow! by Mo Yan

Meat, the pumped-up industrial animal kind and the fleshy, desirous human sort, are fixations of Nobel Laureate Mo Yan’s 2010 novel, Pow! Lustful and lavish, the narrative charts the changing times in an archetypal Chinese village through a tale told by a young novice to an older monk. Depending on your persuasion, the book will either cause indigestion or remedy it with its hilarious and ever-hallucinatory turns. Vegetarians and the squeamish, however, might want to pass.

Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange

Poet, playwright, and novelist, Ntozake Shange was most known for her choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. In this novel, Shange follows three eponymous South Carolina sisters as they navigate womanhood and make their way in their worlds as artists. Interspersed are darling letters written to them from their mother. Beginning with the baby Indigo and “a moon falling from her mouth,” Shange in her delectable, incantatory prose peppers the novel with recipes such as “Cypress’ Sweetbread: The Goodness” and “My Mama & Her Mama ‘Fore Her: Codfish Cakes,” plus an epic Christmas breakfast menu. For later reading, pick up Shange’s culinary memoir of African diaspora food traditions, If I Can Cook/You Know God Can, which features recipes from her travels in Cuba, Nicaragua, and elsewhere.

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

Monique Truong’s tale of Linda, a Vietnamese adoptee’s life in North Carolina, is stuffed with traditional American fare, as well as its attendant 1980s fusion attempts. She writes of her white mother’s cooking ventures: “when DeAnne was experimenting with ‘exotic’ flavors, her weekly menu also included a three-layer taco casserole (one of the layers was the contents of a small bag of corn chips) and a chow mein surprise casserole (the surprise was several hot dogs cut up into matchstick-size strips, which when cooked, would curl up into little pink rubber bands). No matter the recipe, a can of condensed cream of mushroom soup, the All-American binding agent of disparate foodstuff, was mixed in. The Great Assimilator, as I call it now, was responsible for the uniform taste of all of DeAnne’s casserole.” Throughout the novel, Truong serves up sensorially-layered turns of prose, stirring Linda’s word-tasting synesthesia quirk, such as “Nograpejelly desert for selfishcornonthecob.”

The Passionate Epicure by Marcel Rouff

The chef of exacting gastronome Dodin-Bouffant dies and he has to find a replacement. Since he’s a very thorough gourmand, this is no easy task but he succeeds — only to gain a rival for his chef Adèle’s culinary charms. Also, Dodin-Bouffant prefers to eat alone to properly enjoy the epic gastronomy. Whether you wish you were alone this holidays or are alone but wish you weren’t, this slender novel should satisfy, and will certainly, educate with its erotica of French cuisine, including the humble (but apparently elevated in Adèle’s pan) pot-au-feu, or beef stew.

Alexandra Kleeman recommends “The Lonesome Bodybuilder” by Yukiko Motoya

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“The Lonesome Bodybuilder”

by Yukiko Motoya, Translated by Asa Yoneda

When I got home from the supermarket, my husband was watching a boxing match on TV.

“I didn’t know you watched this kind of thing. I never would have guessed,” I said, putting down the bags of groceries on the living room table.

He made a noncommittal noise from the sofa. He seemed to be really engrossed.

“Who’s winning? The big one or the little one?”

I sat on the sofa next to him and took off my scarf. I’d planned on starting dinner right away, but the gears on my bicycle hadn’t been working, and I was a little tired. Just a short break. Fifteen minutes.

Eyes still glued to the TV, my husband explained that the little one was looking stronger so far. They seemed to have reached the end of a round, and the gong was clanging loudly. Both fighters were covered in blood, I guessed from getting cuts on their faces from their opponent’s punches, and as soon as they sat down on the chairs in their corners, their seconds threw water over their heads.

“It’s like animals bathing. So wild.”

I’d tried to make sure the “wild” didn’t sound too reproachful, but my husband picked up on it.

“That’s the kind of man you really want, isn’t it?”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t pretend. I know. I know you secretly want a brute to have his way with you.”

“You know I prefer intellectual men. I don’t want an insensitive jock.”

He put the remote he’d been clutching back on the table, then pulled up his sweater sleeve and wrapped his fingers around his wrist, as if taking his own pulse. His wrist was far thinner than the boxers’, it was true.

“It’s like you might be some kind of artist,” I teased. He hated being pitied more than anything, so I was careful to make it sound like a joke.

“Are you saying you wouldn’t go along with it, if a guy like that came on to you?”

Say something, anything, to build his confidence back up, I thought, but my attention had been stolen again by the men on the TV. My blood pumped, and I could feel my body getting hot. “Of course I wouldn’t go along with it! Anyway, it’s not like that would ever happen.” Fighters are so beautiful. Incredible bodies, both of them. Taut bone and flesh, nothing wasted.

My husband spoke again. “What do you think of my body?”

“I like it. Your skin’s so fair, and soft.” Why had I never watched this kind of thing before? Boxing, pro wrestling, mixed martial arts — I’d assumed they weren’t for me. How wrong I was. I always do that. I decide who I am, and never consider other possibilities. I’ve been like that since middle school. The time I went to the amusement park with my friends and decided that a quiet girl like me wouldn’t like roller coasters, I was the only one who didn’t get on the ride. Someone like me would obviously sign up for one of the cultural activities at school. Would feel at home in the crafts club. Would find a job locally. But what really would have happened if I’d gotten on the roller coaster that day? I have the feeling I would have met a version of myself I don’t know now. Lived a completely different life.

The gong sounded, and the men stood up. I’d assumed that throwing out punches was all there was to it, but the boxers guarded against every blow, observing each other’s movements with eagle eyes. That must be what they call dynamic vision. If only I had some dynamic vision too, I might not have missed out on so many things. The match was over, and they sounded the biggest gong yet.

The very next day, I started training to become a bodybuilder. I thought at first that I could aim to be a pro boxer, but I realized that I didn’t have a trace of fighting spirit in me. No desire to beat anyone up. It was the bodies of the two boxers I’d seen on TV the previous night that seemed to be seared into my brain, even while I was at my job, working the register at a natural health and beauty shop.

They turned in all directions, showing off their bodies to me. Even while I described various products to customers. This is a moisturizing cream with pomegranate traditionally used in herbal medicine. How do firm limbs feel? This hair oil is made from rare organic concentrated plant extracts. What is it like when a strong body throbs?

Was I looking for an affair? Of course not. I loved my husband. He could be bumbling and juvenile, but he was just working too hard, that was all. I only needed to hang on until he was done with this busy period, and then he’d start initiating again. It wasn’t that I wanted to touch any other man. I just wanted to luxuriate in some taut muscle. I hadn’t felt so giddy in a long time. I’d swing by the pharmacy on my way home from work and get some protein powder.

I liked the taste of the protein powder when I tried it, and decided to join a gym. I felt a little worried about fitting it into the household budget, but I found a small, independent fitness club two train stops away, whose website advertised “100 Free Sessions Until You See the Results You Want!” Having never done any serious exercise before, I had no idea what kind of progress I’d be able to make in a hundred sessions.

On the first day of my private sessions, I confided to the trainer — a boy in his early twenties — that I wanted to become a bodybuilder. He stopped writing on his clipboard and looked at me with surprise.

“Bodybuilding? Not weight loss.”

“Yes. Your website said you have a training program.”

“We do, but this is pretty unusual. Women in their thirties usually come looking to lose weight, so I assumed . . .”

“Is it very difficult?”

“Not really. But with bodybuilding, you won’t get anywhere with weight training alone. Nutrition is key. Could you handle consuming, say, four thousand calories a day? That’s double the daily amount for an average adult male.”

“I can spread it out over the day.” “What about protein powder?” “I’ve already started.”

“Do you have a specific goal in mind? Do you want to compete?”

“No. I don’t need to show anyone. Just some muscles for myself.”

“That’s pretty unusual,” said the polo-shirted youngster again, and then tapped the tip of his ballpoint pen on his clipboard a few times. I started to worry that he would turn me down, but then he surprised me by saying, “Okay. Let’s see about coming up with a training program for you.”

I found out that he’d been an athlete since childhood. He’d played rugby at university, and seriously considered becoming a dolphin trainer, but thanks to some connections he had, he ended up joining this gym as an instructor. He was a cute kid, with a boyish face. A snaggletooth. Twelve years younger than I was. He probably dressed a little dorkily when he wasn’t in sportswear. That’s the impression I got from his haircut. Makes sense, if he’d spent all his time playing rugby. He looked like he’d be into young women around his own age. My husband and I were the same age. We’d met in college.

The trainer, in his bright red polo shirt, looked at me soberly as these frivolous thoughts ran through my head. He said, “You need to be aware that public acceptance for bodybuilding is extremely limited. Be prepared. Also, you’ll definitely need your family members to be on board.”

In spite of this advice, I never did tell my husband. We’d been married seven years, and this was the first time I’d kept a big secret from him. Lately, though, he’d been spending all his time at home either buried in his work files or on his computer, and only ever talked to me when he needed me to reinflate his confidence. Marital affection was pretty much nonexistent.

I explained the change in my eating habits by saying I’d started a protein powder diet on the recommendation of one of the customers at the store. I’d tried out a lot of fad diets before, so my husband seemed not to find anything amiss. I religiously followed the training plan that I’d developed with my young coach. Hidden from my husband, who’d be holed up in the study, I did push-ups, sit-ups, squats. My basic strength began to improve, so I started to go to the gym four times a week, where I did pull-ups, dumbbell presses, narrow-grip bench presses. Reverse crunches, to add muscle definition. Ball crunches. T-bar rows. Rack pulls. Plus protein powder every few hours, and double the daily calorie intake of the average adult male.

Sculpting beautiful bundles of muscle took a lot more commitment than I’d thought. You had to reach what felt like your absolute limit, and then keep going — another two, three steps. Alone, I might have given up, but I had my coach for a hundred free sessions. Bodybuilding workouts required a partner: if you overreached on lifting a dumbbell and dropped it on your neck, you could end up dead. Coach was always by my side, making sure that didn’t happen. “One last rep! You’re doing great. Yes!”

By the end of a workout, I was always foaming at the mouth from breathing hard through clenched jaws. But even that felt like an exciting new discovery. When I had first gotten married, I had a hard time managing the housekeeping accounts. My husband, who brought work home even on Sundays, saw the way I let receipts pile up without dealing with them, and said, “You just have no willpower.” He often berated me: “Have you ever in your life actually accomplished anything?”

The thickness of my neck was unmistakable. At the store, we demonstrate the moisturizing soaps to customers by lathering up a sample onto the backs of our hands, like whipped cream. But now all the customers were riveted by how my wrist was double the size of theirs, with well-defined tendons and veins. They pretended to pay attention to my description of jojoba oil while they looked at my neck, which was nearly as wide as my face. I could see in their eyes that they were trying to picture what they would find under my apron. It was like being stark naked.

Eventually, I got summoned by the owner of the store. “You seem a little different lately,” she said. “Is something going on, dear?”

“Yes, well.”

“I mean, haven’t you gotten bigger, a lot bigger, than you used to be? At first I thought you might be pregnant, but . . . perhaps you’re taking some kind of medication that doesn’t agree with you? Something for the menopause. Are you experiencing side effects?”

“I’m not.”

“But it’s clear your hormones are completely out of kilter!”

I confided in the owner about my training. At first she only nodded, looking doubtful, but when I told her that I’d never felt this committed to anything before, she looked at me and said she could see it in my eyes. She was a very self-assured woman who’d raised three children on her own and managed a chain of stores. She became wholeheartedly supportive, and — knowing the old, unremarkable, unassertive me — said she much preferred the way I was now.

My coworkers at the store said that they’d help me with my fresh start too. The next day, someone brought in a yoga mat they didn’t use anymore so that I could train as much as I liked behind the hair care products shelf while there were no customers around. No one batted an eyelid at me drinking raw eggs from a beer glass during breaks. Occasionally some kids would graffiti things like WARNING smiling muscle woman will strangle you to death on the wall of the parking lot, but almost all the customers responded positively, once they got used to it. A lot of single mothers, and women busy with careers or raising children, said they felt encouraged by my progress. I made sure I never let my smile slip, no matter how hard things got, because as a bodybuilder, I was cultivating muscle in pursuit of an ideal of beauty.

Only my husband seemed not to notice anything, even though my chest felt so solid it was as though there was a metal plate under my skin, my arms looked huge enough to snap a log in half, my waist sported a six-pack, and from a distance I looked like a big inverted triangle on legs. When I asked my coworkers for advice, they commiserated: “That’s just what men are like,” and “Mine doesn’t even notice when I get my hair cut.”

My hair was the one thing I hadn’t touched, because my husband preferred it long. I tanned as dark as I could and got my teeth whitened inexpensively by a dentist a customer had introduced me to, but my hair was the same as it had been before I became a bodybuilder.

Around the time that we’d completed eighty of my four-a-week sessions, my coach encouraged me to start doing some posing. “I know it feels good to be getting bigger, but you should compete and get some people to see you. It’ll be something to aim for,” he said.

The first few times he suggested it, I politely refused, saying big occasions like that weren’t my style, but my coach kept at it. “I really think we need to do something about your deep-seated lack of self-belief.”

“Lack of self-belief? Mine?”

“Yes. Maybe you don’t see it, but you’re always mumbling ‘anyway’ after everything you say, or talking about ‘the kind of person you are.’ I don’t know where that comes from, but I think you need to get your confidence back.”

I knew the reason. Living with my perfectionist husband had made me think that I was a person with no redeeming qualities. It hadn’t been like that before we were married, but gradually, as I constantly tried to compensate for his lack of confidence by listing all my own faults, I’d acquired the habit of dismissing myself.

“I can’t promise that I’ll compete,” I said, striking a pose for the first time in my life in front of the gym’s mirror. This was what being a bodybuilder was all about. Nervously I brought my arms up beside my face and held myself at the angle that made them look the most impressive.

“Make it look easy!” said my coach, so I lifted up the corners of my mouth and kept trying my best to flaunt my muscles.

My smile was still a little unsure. I dropped the pose without having been able to look my mirror self in the eye.

“There’s no rush. We’ll work on it together,” my coach said, and draped a towel over my shoulders.

One day, while I was giving out samples of jojoba oil near the store entrance, a fight broke out just outside between two of our customers’ dogs. The Yorkie’s collar broke off from its leash, and the little dog approached the much bigger dog, yapping loudly, which made the big dog pick him up by the neck. The big dog was a timid dog, the kind that would normally look around at a loss rather than get angry when another dog approached it sniffing and growling. The Yorkie’s owner tried to rescue her pet and, in desperation, hit the big dog with the Yorkie’s leash, which made the big dog even more confused and agitated, and it shook its head from side to side, still holding the little dog in its jaws. The York- ie’s yapping got quieter and quieter, and by the time the big dog opened its jaws and unhooked its fangs, the unfortunate puppy had already breathed its last breath.

No one said a thing, but I knew what they were thinking: Why hadn’t I — who’d been the nearest to the scene — pulled the two dogs apart, using my log-like arms? Why should they continue to lend support to muscles that were useless when they were really needed?

A bodybuilder’s muscles are different from an athlete’s. They exist purely for aesthetic value. A proud bodybuilder never puts their power to practical use. Because I’d bought into these beliefs, it hadn’t even crossed my mind to stop the dogs from fighting. None of this needed to have happened if I’d stepped in and broken them up. The Yorkie had been a friendly, energetic puppy, popular at the store, and I’d held him in my arms a few times too.

“I’ll stop training at the store from now on.” I told the owner this before I headed home for the day, and she nodded, saying maybe that was for the best. In the staff room, no one spoke to me. The atmosphere was strained. I said, “See you tomorrow,” and everyone replied, “Take care,” but as I passed the back of the store, I saw the yoga mat thrown out in the trash.

After dinner, just as my husband was about to go back to the study, I said to him, “There was an incident at work today.” Witnessing the death of that Yorkie had shaken me more than I’d realized. I told him my worries, wondering whether I’d be able to keep working at the store, but he responded as usual with “Hmm” and “Right,” and then stood up to go.

I noticed myself feeling incredibly angry. Picking the bread- crumbs off the table and gathering the dishes, I said, “I went to the salon today.” Before I knew it, I was holding up a strand of hair and saying, “I got it cut pretty short.” I hadn’t been to the salon in months.

My husband paused in the middle of pushing his chair back to the table, and looked me over. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at me like that. He had a few more wrinkles on his face, but other than that, he’d hardly changed since college. Just the same as when we met at nineteen. After a moment, he said, “Looks good.”

“Really? I thought you liked my hair long.”

“This isn’t bad either.”

“How much do you think I got cut?”

“Hmm. Around eight inches?” He scratched the side of his nose. Then, perhaps noticing my strained expression, he smiled, as though to placate me. This was the smile I’d once found so appealing that I’d given in to his earnest invitations to go out with him, despite having been interested in someone else at the time. Surprised at the tears that fell one after the other down my cheeks, my husband said, “What’s wrong?”

I went to wipe my eyes, but because of the tanning oil I’d slathered on earlier, the tears traveled smoothly down my arm.

“It’s nothing.”

“But you’re crying. Did you have a bad day at work?”

He’d completely forgotten that I’d been telling him all about it until just a minute ago. When I shook my head, he moved around the table to my side and awkwardly stroked my shoulder. But my deltoid muscles were beautifully filled in from doing rack pulls, and it felt less like him comforting me and more like me letting him touch my physique. No. I couldn’t do this anymore.

I took his little hand and said, “You only care about yourself. The longer I’m with you, the more unsure I become of myself. Am I really that uninteresting?”

My husband didn’t seem to understand why I was so upset. I pursed my lips to stop the flow of tears, and took off my knit top and skirt, right in front of his eyes. Seeing the micro bikini I’d worn for practicing my posing, my husband said tentatively, “What’s that? Lingerie?”

I left the house. There was still time before the gym closed.

Coach. Coach, Coach!

Even though I arrived breathless and in my bikini, Coach let me into the gym with a smile.

“I want to train.”

“But overtraining has real risks. You’ve got to rest up on your rest days.”

“Just three sets of bench presses. They make me feel relaxed.”

I kept pleading with him, so Coach said, “Very well,” and let me get on the bench.

As I lifted and lowered the barbell in the deserted gym, the tears spilled from my eyes. “He just doesn’t understand.”

“Your partner?”

“Yes. He doesn’t understand anything.”

“Have you tried talking to him?”

“I can’t. My husband’s not interested in me.”

“You still have to talk. Bodybuilding’s lonely at the best of times.”

Lonely. Coach’s word caught in my chest. “I don’t know how to get through to him.”

I let go of the barbell, covered my face with my hands, and let slip something that should never have been said. “I wish you were my partner, Coach.”

Coach took my comment in silence. I knew he valued me as a client, so I didn’t say anything more. But how many times had I thought, while training, that he was much more of a partner to me than my husband? He helped me achieve things beyond my own limits, and was even more passionate than I was about my progress.

After a while, Coach said, “Better now?”

Thanks to him tactfully implying I hadn’t really meant what I said, I was able to nod and take hold of the barbell again.

“Of all athletes, I most respect bodybuilders, because there’s no one more solitary. They hide their deep loneliness, and give everyone a smile. Showing their teeth, all the time, as if they have no other feelings. It’s an expression of how hard life is, and their determination to keep going anyway.”

“But,” I said, to Coach’s quiet words, “if you’re always smiling like that, don’t you lose sight of your true feelings? Is it right to smile when really you’re so lonely you could cry? I . . . I wish now I could have shown my husband all my different faces. There’s so much inside me he doesn’t know.”

I guess I won’t come here to train anymore, I thought. I’ll divorce my husband, go back to being an average, boring woman, and spend an eternity slowly dying while I wonder whether things would have been different if I’d gotten on that roller coaster when I was in middle school.

Thump thump thump. At the dull noise, Coach went toward the big glass window. I sat up on the bench too. My husband was on the other side of the glass, striking it desperately with his fists.

“Is that your husband?” Coach asked, and I said, “Yes,” in a slight daze.

How had he gotten here? He didn’t know about my gym. I’d never seen him so visibly upset before.

Coach said, “I’ll let him in by the back entrance,” and left the training room, and once he was gone I didn’t know what to do. My husband had caught me alone with my young personal trainer. He was so worked up. Was he going to shout at me? But part of me was ready for it. When I understood that this was the moment everything would finally become clear, the waiting seemed to take forever. My husband was still hitting the glass.

I stood up and went to the window, and nervously struck a pose at him. Both arms up and bent by my head, chest out, emphasizing my V-taper. My husband looked incredulous as I posed in my bikini. When I put my fists by my hips, striking another pose, he shook his head, looking pained, as if to say, Please, no more. I knew he’d never wanted to see his wife like this. But this was the real me. Still holding my pose, I showed him all the expressions I’d never shown him before. My lonely face, my sad face, my indifferent face. My face when I thought his technique was lacking. This is me, I tried to tell him. I’m not a boring housewife. I’m not the kind of wife her husband would ignore.

Coach must have called to him, because my husband went off toward the back door. My strength evaporated, and I sat down. I couldn’t think about anything until Coach knocked on the training room door.

“I’ve brought your husband. The two of you need to talk. You’re so much alike . . .”

As I wondered what Coach meant by that, my husband appeared from behind him. Instinctively, I was on my guard, but he wasn’t angry. He wasn’t crying either. He looked at me with a worried, uncertain expression and walked toward me until he was by my side.

“I didn’t notice, until I found your gym membership card . . . that you’d gotten so big.”

He held me tight and stroked my hair, over and over.

I still work out, and on sunny days I sometimes put on some tanning lotion and head to the park with my husband. We gaze at the dog park and eat chicken sandwiches, and even sometimes hold hands as we walk over fallen leaves. His hands are still as slender as an artist’s, and my arms are chunky like a wild beast’s, thanks to my training. Passersby always do a double take at the contrast between our physiques, but we don’t give it a second thought.

Coach says my posing has really improved. “I get the sense you’ve had some kind of breakthrough.”

The store owner has smoothed over my relationship with my coworkers too. They say I should enter a bodybuilding competition, but I don’t know yet whether I will or not. They say that if I do, they’ll form a fan club and get me a fancy banner. At lunch break today, someone said, “I guess we should take your wishes into account. What would you like for it to say?”

I said, “How about: You can now fling any roller coaster with your bare hands! ”

I want to increase my barbell lifts by another thirty pounds before spring. And I want to get a dog, an adorable Yorkie.

Junot Díaz Is Back on the Pulitzer Board Because We Can’t Quit Powerful Men

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This past May, award-winning author Junot Díaz stepped down as chairman of the Pulitzer Prize Board after facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Author Zinzi Clemmons confronted Díaz at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and then on Twitter, describing an incident in which she claims he cornered and forcibly kissed her while she was a graduate student. Shortly afterwards, multiple other women, including the writer Carmen Maria Machado, came forward about experiences in which Díaz was verbally aggressive, misogynistic, or demeaning. The Pulitzer Prize Board hired the Washington D.C. law firm Williams & Connolly to carry out an independent investigation into Díaz’s conduct, promising to “follow the facts, wherever they may lead.” On Friday, the Board announced that they “did not find evidence warranting” Díaz’s removal, and they are “welcoming” Díaz to fulfill his term, which expires in April.

Seeing this news I am disappointed, but not surprised. As we’ve seen demonstrated again and again recently, we are loath to unseat the powerful, even if they’re known abusers. In America, as in much of the world, the harder a job is to get, the harder it is to lose.

There was no recorded evidence to back up Clemmons’ story—all we have is her word to go on—and institutions often refuse to stand up for victims under the guise of lack of evidence, even though victims hardly ever have anything to gain from speaking out (though they risk much; ask Christine Ford, who has moved four times and is still receiving death threats). The statistics — only 2–10% of rape accusations are false, and the accusers usually fit a profile, specifically teenage girls or their parents lying to get out of trouble) — speak for themselves, but many people choose not to hear them.

Díaz’s behavior matters because the Pulitzer Prize matters.

Even if the Pulitzer Board is comfortable dismissing Clemmons’ story, there are corroborations of Díaz’s verbally aggressive and dismissive behavior from other women. Though he now says he wishes he could take it back, Díaz himself acknowledged his poor behavior in the New York Times, saying, “I take responsibility for my past. That is the reason I made the decision to tell the truth of my rape and its damaging aftermath. This conversation is important and must continue. I am listening to and learning from women’s stories in this essential and overdue cultural movement. We must continue to teach all men about consent and boundaries.” So, unwanted advances aside, we’re left with a man who, by his own admission, has a dysfunctional relationship with women.

The fact is that Díaz’s behavior matters because the Pulitzer Prize matters. It’s hard for even the most talented authors to make a living from writing books, and winning prizes sells copies; as Emma Straub, author and co-owner of the Cobble Hill bookstore Books Are Magic, told Vulture at this year’s National Book Award, “Whoever wins, we’ll sell twice as many as we would have. Ten times as many.” Other money-making opportunities, such as teaching and speaking engagements, follow prizes, helping to make a writer’s career sustainable. Winning a major literary prize is a distinction that anyone, except maybe Bob Dylan, would treasure immensely. Given his behavior towards women, can we trust Díaz to fairly understand, access, and judge female writers’ work? If we can’t, we risk both overlooking worthy authors as well as the cultural cachet of the Pulitzer itself.

When Bad Men Define Good Art

The allegations against Díaz came during the initial unfolding of the #metoo movement and have mostly been discussed within a larger conversation we’re having about sexual assault and harassment, how to define them and how to deal with known perpetrators. Díaz’s own history as a victim of sexual assault and his talent as an author have also been considered. Yet the question of his appointment to the Pulitzer Board should be considered separately from any discussion of his work and how we might interact with his texts going forward—because his place on the board has the power to determine how we interact with other people’s texts, too. It comes down to a simple question that’s been hounding me ever since the news was announced: is it so much to ask that a public face and influential member of the Pulitzer Prize Board not be one who is unfriendly to women? American literature is exploding with great work; we’re not suffering from a lack of talent. Why not make the Chairman of the Board of one of our greatest literary honors a writer who hasn’t yelled “rape!” repeatedly in the face of their female dinner companion?

Is it so much to ask that a public face and influential member of the Pulitzer Prize Board not be one who is unfriendly to women?

The answer lies in a crisis that is greater than Junot Díaz and the Pulitzer Prize Board. America is stuck in a cult of personality. We mythologize people in positions of power, transforming regular employees into genius CEOs who can do no wrong, metamorphosing struggling actors into celebrities whose every movement and haircut captivates us. When I see this unsettling pattern of men being exposed for harassment, apologizing, and then continuing on with their careers, I know it comes from the story we’ve created about powerful men, one that imagines bad behavior is some kind of ancillary to talent. I’ve had bosses do and say things for which I would have been fired on the spot when I worked the cash register at a food store. We regularly hold people with the least power to much higher standards than those with the most. It’s not just men — female leaders are also so immune to punishment that they can do things like tank a company and walk away with 236 million dollars. In general, the more powerful your position, the harder people will work to convince themselves that you deserve it, and the harder they’ll work to make sure it’s never taken away.

But having been on the Pulitzer Prize board is not sufficient reason to deserve being on the Pulitzer Prize board. Nor is being a great writer sufficient reason to deserve control over whose writing is recognized. Junot Díaz may be a great writer, but a great writer is only entitled to write great books. He is not entitled to keep a position solely because he won it in the first place.

My Gender Is Nick Cave

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My first memory of Nick Cave comes from the climactic scene of the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire. In it, angels dwell in the skies over Berlin, witnessing the thoughts of the humans below. The angels live in a world of crisp monochromes, while the humans live out their brief, agonizing, joyful lives in color. The angels are uniform, symbolically sexless, and cloaked in identical trench coats. The humans represent all of life’s variety, from a suicidal man who jumps off a ledge to children thinking about milk.

In the story, the angel Damiel, tired of being an ever-compassionate watcher, falls in love with a trapeze artist. To be with her, he decides to become human. After he descends to earth, Damiel goes to meet his trapeze artist at a bar where Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds are playing.

Right away you realize this is not the angel-world anymore: nothing about it is still or cool-toned or lilting. Nick is sitting on a barstool in the middle of the smoky room, lit by hazy lights of orange and blue, brooding as he croons out a slow cacophony: and a murder of crows did circle round / first one, then the others flapping blackly down…

My reluctance to join the world of the humans was because I knew very well the price of admission. To be embodied meant to become gendered.

The angels can hear thoughts, and Damiel’s friend Cassiel is close by. When Nick’s done, he walks up to a mike to sing his last song, thinking, I’m not going to tell you about a girl I’m not going to tell you about a girl

And then, of course, he says: “I’m going to tell you about a girl.”

And he does: he tells a story about stalking the girl who lives in the apartment above his. It’s a story about obsession and about crying and throwing fits in his room: it’s a story about separation, but instead of watching the girl through a pane of sanctifying glass like an angel would, Nick feels her move above him, hears her crying, steals up like a thief and takes her diary. There is no calm, sad repose in this separation as the piano keeps percussing out violence, violence, violence. The story is called “From Her to Eternity.”

Meanwhile the angel-turned-human meets his lover at last, and they have an exquisitely tender moment at the bar as Nick, their shaman, thrashes and yells about his passion for the girl’s footsteps as they pace up and down the floorboards of his ceiling.

It was evening and my roommates weren’t home and I was sitting on the couch with my headphones on as the house darkened down to no light except the light from my laptop. I’d spent the summer watching movies for a research project on emotion in film. Previous to that, I’d spent my adolescence in a suburban tower of isolation; I was homeschooled and had no car, was awkward and agnostic and queer in endless, evangelical Christian suburbia. But I was beginning, after two years of college, to emerge.

Wings of Desire was the apex of that time. Shuttling through so many movies, taking stills, matching them to Paul Eckman’s “six universal emotions,” pondering questions like how narrative implication could be juxtaposed against facial neutrality, I felt I knew what it was to be an angel, to watch and love thousands of lives, to listen to their innermost thoughts.

I brought to the film an obsession with the androgyny of angel iconography and an interest in tracking the use of the angel symbol down through history. The idea of lofty, benevolent watchers appealed to me, but just as appealing was the idea of beautiful sexlessness. Part of my reluctance to join the world of the humans was because I knew very well what society would demand as the price of admission. To be embodied meant to become gendered.

The idea of lofty, benevolent watchers appealed to me, but just as appealing was the idea of beautiful sexlessness.

So needless to say, something in me thrashed along with Nick.

Something thrashed along with Damiel, newly a man.

In the end of the song, Nick decides, as he often does, that there’s nothing for it but to murder her.

“The girl will just have to go,” Nick sings. “Go. Go. Go. Go.”

In the big theater of living, society makes the sets and runs the casting calls: it dictates the boundaries of what’s possible. Most importantly, society typecasts us into roles based on sex, race, class, and appearance. We push back against those roles, we capitulate to them, or we use them to our advantage. If we want to actually be someone, to participate in the theater of living, to be more than a mere audience member or witness, we must negotiate with these typecasts one way or another.

There isn’t a single one among us, I believe, who has not in some precise and intentional way had to negotiate with the demands of gender.

In the years after I first saw Wings of Desire, in my early twenties, the role I found to play was startlingly similar to my life as a watcher. I learned that the lessons of angelhood applied well to learning how to become (as Simone de Beauvoir says) a woman — a fact acknowledged in the movie by the angel-like calm and detachment of Damiel’s beloved trapeze artist, who wears a winged costume as she swings above the circus crowd. The construct of gender I found easiest to assume rewarded aloofness, mysteriousness, remote benevolence. Like Damiel, I fell in love a few times, with men and women — but although I relate to Damiel, my experience was of being found by Damiel. People — men and women — liked to think of themselves as discovering me. They liked to tell me how they watched me at first, scattered and wildly absentminded, listening to music as I walked to class or reading on the campus lawn or spaced-out in the middle of a dorm room party, and wondered what I was thinking about.

The construct of gender I found easiest to assume rewarded aloofness, mysteriousness, remote benevolence.

There are other ways of being a woman, but this was the one that came most naturally to someone with my temperament, my socialization, my history. And this woman-self was not a false self. It was a persona, and like all personas, it both revealed and restricted. Deep down I was a much more tumultuous person than I appeared, and I longed to act on the world, not just watch the action happen, or be acted upon. Particularly when it came to desire, which I felt in mortifying, unruly, damning surges, and was constantly repressing to maintain the persona. I tried to be the desirer a few times, to initiate desire, but the minute I tried to seize the spotlight on the stage of living with my thoughts and feelings, I was ignored. People simply preferred to imply them. I found, as much as women are allowed to have feelings, they aren’t allowed to have the sort of feelings that ricochet through an entire bar, or an entire movie, like loose bullet fire. The way Nick Cave’s do.

How can I convey to you, if you haven’t seen it, what it is like to watch this movie — with its gentle, cantatory atmosphere — explode into Nick Cave? Watch it. See how jarring it is to see that gangly, almost-grotesque figure, this thundercloud of a person, in contrast to the movie: the exact opposite of compassionate, the exact opposite of a watcher, the exact opposite of heavenly. Brutal, performative, daemonic.

A number of years after seeing Wings of Desire, throughout my mid-twenties, I found a community of sympathetic people, gays and straights both (no one cared) who thought gender should be razed. We threw decadent, safe, warm house parties where crossdressing was the norm. “The place where sexual orientation goes to die,” one person christened these parties. This is living, really living, I thought, and developed a mania for throwing parties not only to make up for lost time in the suburban tower, but because it felt as close as I would get to setting the stage of life myself. Through a well-chosen theme and liberal intoxication, you could experiment with various modes of self-expression, and see others self-express. You could broaden your theatrical range, so to speak.

We threw bacchanals (I was Ariadne), masquerades (I was Puck), a starship party (I was a space elf), New Years’ affairs (I was a magician in a top hat). I flipped gender every time. I widened my repertoire of femininity from what came most naturally to me, the angel-like watcher, to maenads and femmes fatales. And I explored male personas, too — sprightly, boyish tricksters, for the most part, androgynous and agile, within grabbing distance from the vantage of my femme typecast. Once we decided to throw a party themed Angels & Demons.

The theme was one of our best: it proved to be so popular that a friend overheard people across the city talking about it at some college coffee shop. We planned out the house: the indoors would be Inferno and decorated with idols and gold bandoleers and The Garden of Earthly Delights; there would be a sequestered room for chilling out and smoking with big pillows and a hookah, called Purgatorio; and the backyard, garlanded with fairy lights, would be Paradiso. Thrilled with the cosmology of the layout, I set to the matter of my costume.

The first question was: angel or demon? I’d done a few angelic costumes, sort of elegant little cherubic pageboys, which I’d been pleased with, but I wanted to be a demon this time. I was torn between two Stars of the Morning: I loved the idea of being the pagan-goddess-gone-demon Inanna, the rash Queen of Heaven who descends down into the underworld. But the more I thought about it the more I wanted to try for a Lucifer. Like Nick Cave, I was a Milton fan, and I listened to “Red Right Hand” as I made sketches, pondering it over.

Even within my genderfucked parties, I had begun to notice that presentation mattered. When the more androgynous people crossdressed, the girls with butch haircuts or the boys with trim waists, they were more lauded. You had to pull it off. A cherubic pageboy was one thing. Lucifer was serious business.

I took the silver-brocade vest I was thinking about using and dressed up in it and assessed myself in front of the mirror. When I compared this girl to the images of Lucifer I had in my head, images from William Blake’s illustrations and statues by Joseph Geefs and Ricardo Bellver, I looked to myself pathetically small and slight and blonde and bookish. I thought about sleek black velvet pants, a playfully disdainful expression, about going glam-rock with it all so that my very femme features would fit a little better. I thought about standing in the middle of the party, ranting about the theological problem of evil, declaring (Milton sounded so delicious in my head) the mind is its own place and can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.

But I couldn’t picture it at all. I simply could not impose any of my ideas on the girl-frame of my body.

I simply could not impose any of my ideas on the girl-frame of my body.

I asked a friend about it. “Of course you can be Lucifer,” she said, as though it were obvious. “You can do anything if you rock it.”

I did not think I could rock it. I did not even know how to picture it. Cherubic pageboy was in my repertoire, was close enough to femme to fit my typecast, but not demon prince.

I dressed up as Inanna, in a long purple skirt and mesh bodysuit and headdress, not too far from the dark-haired lunar women Nick sings about so often, and my most feminine costume in a long time. People told me they loved it.

Any passing acquaintance with Nick Cave’s work will suffice to paint a picture of his particular, idiosyncratic performance of masculinity. He’s not a subtle person. He is the sort of person who stands up in front of crowds and proclaims himself, over and over, to be the Black Crow King, to be the bad motherfucker named Stagger Lee, to be weak with evil and broken by the world. But I will provide a Nick Cave that is meaningful to me.

He’s in a bar. He’s in from stumbling around some biblical wilderness where the horizon is burning. There’s the piquant aroma of tobacco, of desert climes, mixed with stale booze and starching powder. He’s dressed in a black suit with hemlines that have the perfect clip of a good tailor but are frayed at the edges. Depending on where he is on his long gradient of “about to be dumped” or “dumped” — “The Ship Song” to “Lament” to “Brother, My Cup is Empty” — he’s either tipsy and depressed or drunk and raving about those lunar woman to some poor barfly seated next to him who can’t get a word in edgewise: Nick is just too intense, too much bigger than life, too sad and longing and vicious. He alludes to a crime of some sort: he’s committed fratricide (“The Good Son”) or abandoned his child (“Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”) or stabbed someone at a wedding (“John Finn’s Wife”) or, well, god knows what, I mean Nick is a good Byronic hero and actually rarely gets specific about the crimes he commits, it’s just an excuse for him to act like a maniac with an infernal destiny (“The Hammer Song,” “Your Funeral, My Trial,” etc.). I love this sense of fatalism he has. I relate to it. And I admire the possessed-bull way he bucks against it, even when it’s melodramatic, even when it’s dysfunctional, even when it falls into the male clichés of violence-as-agency, violence-as-desire. I am the captain of my pain, he spits — one of his most satisfying lines to sing alone at night, when you’re on a binge.

Later in the night, when the poor barfly has finally escaped and they’re about to kick him out, he’s just fucking sad and bent over a piano and bawling. The thing about Nick Cave is that he is always, always harping on about love — “love, love, love, that’s all I sing about,” he says in one interview, self-disgusted. The poignancy here, the vulnerability, would weaken his masculine posturing if there weren’t so much power in the expression of vulnerability itself, and to see such a powerful figure so debased and pleading. I don’t believe in an interventionist god, he tells the woman in “Into My Arms,” but I believe in love. In truth, he’s a fatalist about love as he is about everything else. But he finds his most transcendent moments as an artist in his pure, fatalistic expression of love.

The vulnerability would weaken his masculine posturing if there weren’t so much power in the expression of vulnerability itself.

And that’s the crux of it. He may sing as a cursed man, but in the singing, he finds his art.

As eccentric as it is, Nick Cave fits this role. What I mean is, he looks the part. He is tall, long-limbed, strange looking: his black-dyed hair is the only physical artifice he needs to fit the persona he has crafted because his voice, too, is such a dark black hole of a baritone. And of course he is straight. The reason he can say all of these wonderfully and magisterially bombastic things is because he was born, in the physical sense, in the embodied sense, to sing them.

Now, let’s dispense with a brief picture of myself.

In that suburban tower of isolation, surrounded by cloned houses for miles, my only social access dominated by evangelical Christians, I revolted against all of the expectations upon me: the expectation that I should believe in one god, the expectation of heteronormativity, the expectation that I should do as I was told. “I’m not a Christian,” I told my parents, in a fit of temper: I was an impetuous kid, obsessive and intense, and I remember the joy I felt in that declaration, the aftershocks in my poor parents’ heartbroken expressions, the feeling of having done something fucking momentous.

But dispensing with these expectations left me with no options. I was a teenager. I had no resources and no agency of my own, and, in my state of revolt, I had no idea how to act. The society I was in had no scripts for it. So I retreated into the usual routes of escape: books and movies and music, which became more real than real. I devoted myself, like some pillar of passivity, to the lives I saw unfold in art.

When I finally found my script and accepted the demands of gender, I learned that there is a potent agency to be found in expressing yourself as fully as you can even within a confined, feminine role — you can interpret the role, you can subvert it, and given time and the patience to learn a part, you can even assume new ones. It isn’t the same sort of something momentous as upending all the unjust laws of a patriarchal god, but at least you aren’t thrown into the formless void at the end. At least you can act.

There is more to me, though. Just like there is more to all of us. And as much meaning as I’ve found in the story I’ve created, it will never quite be enough to satisfy that part of me that sits in the dark with headphones on and mouths along when Nick sings, I am the fiend hid in her skirt / and it’s as hot as hell in here.

Nick Cave has given a couple of notable answers to the question of Nick, what is it with you and women. And, Nick, what is behind the mystery of your posturing (that is, what is behind all of the decadent, violent masculinity that is not so much “toxic” as “quite nearly radioactive”). One disappointed me. “I’m not a misogynist, so you can dispense with that,” he snapped at an interviewer in 2012, during the Push the Sky Away days, when asked if he was a feminist. He declared that “as far as I’m concerned I’m actually standing up and having a look at what goes in in the minds of men, and I have the authority to talk about it because I’m a man.” He goes on to say that his work is character-driven, and further to say that the characters are “talking about the way men and women are.” So, fair enough: your standard outlet-for-masculinity essentialist claptrap.

That disappointment was tempered later by another interview. Discussing the enduring appeal of his work to women, he says even the “most forceful sexually,” is actually “riddled with anxiety.” And then, remarkably given his previous answer: “If my songs came off as just a male thing, I wouldn’t have any interest in it whatsoever.”

What a curious thing for the Black Crow King to say: that all of his songs, his songs which are full of “male things,” open up some door to universality.

I don’t know how other people who are observed to be female by society relate to Nick Cave’s work, but I do know that at the beginning of a crush on a woman who I only knew in routine passing, the first words that came to mind were from “From Her to Eternity”: You know she lives in room twenty-nine. She worked on the same floor as me, in the bland beige blur of a skyscraper’s hallways; I saw her in passing as we crossed paths in the halls. She edited my work and we didn’t interact otherwise. Like the song, she was melancholic, she seemed agonized for some reason she couldn’t express, and I was made insane by it.

The intensity of it was impossible for me to contain within myself and there were no outlets for it, none, that did not make me feel weird or creepy. Eye contact while passing by her felt humiliating. As though I were wafting some kind of pestilence. I have never felt comfortable with the way I felt desire, even beyond bisexuality, and the gratuitous voyeurism of this crazymaking crush symbolized why. More than desiring the wrong sex, I felt that I desired the wrong way. Something sort of morbid lurked in the holding-fast of my fixation. I found it difficult to justify the depth of the crush. So I did nothing.

More than desiring the wrong sex, I felt that I desired the wrong way.

Much analysis given to the idea that men are not allowed to freely express their emotions, and I feel this is absolutely and damningly true. But artistically, men’s emotions are given much more gravitas than women’s. Female intensity is something different. For instance, in my favorite Nick Cave cover, Chelsea Wolfe’s version of “I Let Love In,” deep-sea currents of distortion make the song more of drowning woman’s lament than the prisoner’s anthem of the original. Even my beloved PJ Harvey — who, I must tell you now, I love every bit as much as Nick Cave, and who is his equal as an artist — can’t express desire in the same reliably straightforward way. The closest I’ve seen to his claustrophobic intensity is in her “Dancer,” but even then, she’s not singing to the person she desires. She’s singing to the fates to bring him back. She still has to beg to be heard.

You would think, since he fits his own typecast so well, that Nick Cave would be full of confidence. But here is what I love about him most. As much power as he is able to thunder down, Nick Cave’s masculine persona ruptures at the points of its most glorious and intense expression. It’s cracked through. The anxiety seeps out of the easy rhymes, the dark and deep voice darkened and deepened further into the paradox of self-caricature and self-seriousness, and is undercut by the lyrics, which always double down on themselves. The mind-breaking wordplay and paradoxical lies in “The Mercy Seat” is the genius example, but it can be found elsewhere, and in explicitly “queer” ways. “The Curse of Milhaven,” for instance, is one of his longest epics, in which our hero goes on and on about the serial rampages of a 15-year-old girl. It’s probably best suited to fans, but I promise you, as a fan, there is nothing quite like hearing Nick — not making one facsimile of an attempt to make his masculine voice less masculine — sing if you think you’ve seen a pair of eyes more green, well you sure haven’t seen ’em around here. The song has more deaths per capita than any other Nick Cave ballad. There is “Henry Lee,” one of his finest songs, where the narrator and his “lilywhite hands” are chucked into a deep well for jilting PJ Harvey. There’s the glorious line in “Stagger Lee” that goes I’m a bad motherfucker, don’t you know? / I’ll crawl over fifty good pussies just to get one fat boy’s asshole: the whole song a postmodern breakdown of toxic masculine one-upsmanship that ends with homoeroticism. And the last, my favorite, are a few stage performances of “Where the Wild Roses” grow where guitarist Blixa Bargeld sings the part of Eliza, and Nick kisses him ardently in the end.

The mask on Nick Cave, the masculine mask, is invisible, but he is deliberately putting it on in every song. The mask causes an anxiety: it’s a show. They (the audience) know it’s a show. How do you convince them of the show? Because no matter how well-suited you look to the role, even if you’re born six foot two and dye your hair black and look like the devil’s scarecrow, the mask of the persona is still a mask.

No matter how well-suited you look to the role, the mask of the persona is still a mask.

Here’s the thing about the mask: the persona watches itself. It’s a different angle from the lofty and compassionate observer, the audience: it’s a narrower view, through the corridor of the mask’s eyeholes. Within that tunnel-vision, the persona feels the weight of the mask resting against the face. The persona knows a mask is a mask.

But the mask gives you a role to play upon the stage, a story to make your own, and, if you’re lucky, the means by which to make a real, beating human life, a story, out of what you’ve been given.

And if the life you’ve been given isn’t enough to express your whole self — well, there is always art.

I was driving into the city at midnight. I was cresting up a highway and staring straight at a supermoon hung full and low in a sulphuric haze among the dim stars. I was listening to “Do You Love Me?” and singing along, as I do when I listen to Nick Cave alone. “I found her on a night of fire and noise,” I sang, and as I did I suddenly caught a snatch of what my voice sounded like: thin and high and airy, absurd against the absurdly gothic, pompous lyrics. For a moment I shut up, silenced by the notion of what it must sound like to someone listening.

But no one was listening. As the song swelled on, I couldn’t resist singing more.

When the chorus kicked in — all of the Bad Seeds singing “do you love me?” with Nick echoing the line — I sang it. And when I listened again, this time not listening as someone else but as myself, to the voice as I hear it in the darkening chambers of my mind, Nick’s baritone overlaid my words and gave them resonance and fire.

The Chilling Worlds of Booker Finalist Daisy Johnson

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I n Daisy Johnson’s fiction language and nature come alive, humans experience uncanny metamorphoses, and our biggest fears may take the shape of creatures living in the water.

Johnson proved to be a fearless writer in her collection of feminist tales, Fen. These stories are as daring and unsettling as her writing, which features innovative uses of diction and sentence structure, in addition to sensuous description. Her novel, Everything Under, is equally — if not more — ambitious. In Everything Under, Gretel — a lexicographer — has devoted her life to words. She grew up on the canals of Oxfordshire with her mother, Sarah, and the two lived a wild, reckless life, inventing a language of their own. Abandoned in foster care as a teen, she has neither seen nor heard from her mother in sixteen years, calling hospitals and mortuaries for any sign of her existence. A cryptic phone call sets Gretel on a hunt for Sarah; to find her, she will need to recover long buried memories of their final winter on the river. She recalls their private vocabulary, a runaway boy who lived with them for that brief time and the water creature they had spent years watching out for: the Bonak. In this extraordinary debut, Johnson explodes the myth of Oedipus and, from the remains, creates a singular and powerful story that burrows in the psyche and refuses to leave.

Discovering Johnson’s writing felt like meeting a literary kin. Considering the bounty of material, I was eager to I speak to Johnson about language, nightmares, the horror genre, and the role of animals in her fiction.

Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada: One of the reasons I fell in love with your stories is the poetic texture of the language you use. Have you always written in multiple genres?

Daisy Johnson: When I first started studying writing I wrote poetry and loved its sparseness. I think poetry is a good thing for any writer to try their hand at because it really teaches you how to edit, how to make every single word work as hard as it can. Sadly, once I started living off my writing I found it hard to go back to poetry. Writing is not simply the process of sitting down and producing words it also calls for an immersion in the craft, for reading everything related to your work that you possibly can. Though I still read poetry I do not feel the immersion that I think I would need to feel to write some.

This sounds like both fear and an excuse. At the moment my brain and my hands feel so filled with fiction there is almost not the space for anything else. Perhaps this is something about the type of person I am. I hope to one day go back to all of these things but it would be a wrench to do so because I think it would mean taking a break from fiction.

I think poetry is a good thing for any writer to try their hand at because it really teaches you how to edit, how to make every single word work as hard as it can.

RRE: Language is as thematically significant to your writing as it is stylistically. There are certain phrases that caused my heart to leap or that crept beneath my skin and stayed there. Somehow, there’s a balance of innovative word-choice and syntax, and fantastic storytelling. When drafting and revising your stories, do you tend to follow the story on its course, returning later to edit for style? Or is the story, for you, inextricable from the way it’s told, all of it unfolding at once?

DJ: The language comes first for me. The way a character might speak — or think — the way a landscape might describe itself to someone. The story is only the way it is because of the language used to tell it and the language — the syntax and sentence structure — is only laid out in such a way because of the story it is telling. If I used language in a different way the stories I tell would be different, of that I have no doubt. And with each new story — each new project — there is the slow exploration of how the language should be, of how this story needs to be told.

But also, interestingly, the language and sentence structure is often there from the beginning and what needs to be edited in later drafts is the plot and character. I am not a tidy writer. My first drafts are enormously messy. So there is also something in the process of editing which is entirely necessary both to find the language — although the language is there sooner — and to find what the language is trying to tell. And it is only through endless drafts that this becomes clear. The idea which is there at the beginning needs time to compost and clarify.

RRE: In your story “A Bruise the Shape and Size of a Door Handle,” you bring the character of the house to life, endowing it with the ability to love. It does not, however, love how a human would, and it grows a sort of menacing jealousy from the beginning. How do you build tension on a sentence level?

DJ: I think writers can learn so much from horror fiction but not least the elements of structure and tension.

Stephen King does something very interesting in his fiction using brackets and italics to suggest the thoughts of the character which, I think, make the reader feel almost as if there is an intruder in the fiction. Helen Oyeyemi’s White is for Witching does something similar with the layout on the page wherein the word from an above line will link to a new sentence; this suggests to the reader that they are not in control of what they are reading. Again this is done to great effect in You Should Have Left by Daniel Khelmann where the first person narrative begins to be infiltrated by another voice.

I think horror calls for small moments which build and build, almost unnoticeably, to a great fear. This can be done in a sentence by using unexpected words which can flag to the reader that there is something ahead. Horror is often about past trauma and here there is the question of how we can make our sentences feel as if they are both present and slowly swiveling to regard the past. Perhaps through use of tense or the changing of the tense? I think also use of punctuation is important. Horror is about postponing for as long as possible until the postponing becomes unbearable to a reader. If we postpone the full stop then the reader may feel this sense of an end (and with it the relief of an ending) being held away from them. However, if we use short sentences with little punctuation besides the full stop then there is a suddenness to the reading, a sense of dread which comes with lots of endings flooding around us.

Horror Lives in the Body

RRE: Wow, this is incredibly insightful! I think there is so much, too, to glean from film: sound and music, like rhythm and tone in horror fiction, both play an incredibly significant task in every horror film I can think of. Especially Hereditary (2018), which uses sound so powerfully to ratchet up the tension. What are some of your favorite horror films?

DJ: I am a huge horror film fan. When other people watch rubbish television to relax I watch scary films. I feel very happy to be living in a time when I think the horror genre is really stretching its muscles and trying exciting new things. I am particularly enjoying the feminist horrors that started emerging. Films like It Follows, The Babadook, Under the Shadow, and Girl Walks Home Alone are really superb in the way they use the genre to talk about things that are happening in our society. I’ve had an incredibly busy few weeks and have spent any down time I could watching the Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House which really scared me and made me very excited to write some horror. I also love the classics. I grew up on The Exorcist, Don’t Look Now, The Shining and The Omen and they will always have a place in my heart.

RRE: I recently had a terrifying dream that was so similar to Everything Under; it was just before I got my copy of it, actually, but I somehow dreamt of living on a boat with one of my uncles and a group of men I don’t at all know. We were at the sea, and they kept talking about a creature that lived out there, in the water. At some point, I vividly recall the walls turning into scales, the boat being part-creature all along, its mouth gaping over the roof. What are some of the myths or folktales or stories that continue to haunt your dreams?

DJ: I love that you dreamt Everything Under before it came to you. I’m not sure a writer can ask more than that.

My night terrors are always about there being something horribly wrong. These are often instinctual feelings rather than a certainty about what the wrongness is but sometimes it is that the walls are moving or that the person in my bed (my poor partner) is not who they should be. Thinking about it now this sense of wrongness (whether in the wrong place or at the wrong time) is something that often runs through fairy tales and folktales. I was thinking about Hansel and Gretel as I was writing Everything Under and certainly that idea of leaving breadcrumbs for yourself which you then can’t find it always the way it feels when I wake up and I know something is wrong but not what. Myth and fairytales are always somehow at a tilt. They are our world but at an angle. The grandma is not a grandma, she is a wolf. The swan is not a swan, it is a god. I think this, at least for me, is the way my bad dreams feel; they are the world I live in but at a strange slant.

Myth and fairytales are always somehow at a tilt. They are our world but at an angle.

RRE: The characters in Everything Under return time and again to certain ideas that, for many, are dubious. The character of Margot is certain of the idea of fate, that “life is a straight line.” As for Gretel, she ponders repeatedly on the idea that “our thoughts and actions are determined by the language that lives in our minds.” To what extent do you believe these ideas yourself? Or are they convictions specific to your characters?

DJ: I am not my characters, thank goodness. I don’t believe in fate because I am not Margot. She believes strongly — partly because of who she is and partly because of the ideas she is introduced to as a child — that life is laid out ahead of us. My parents are quite determined atheists, as I suppose am I; I have never believed in fate. But I am interested in characters who do and what that belief does to the way a person lives their life.

I am really interested by the idea that language determines our lives. Interested and a little alarmed, of course. At times I find myself looking at my weird, ungrammatical language and trying to work out what it has done to me. I have a bad memory; has that come from being awful at spelling? I am easily angered; is that a product of the first words my parents taught me? I am early to everything, have a great fear of being late; is this something you could read in the way I speak and write?

The idea that language determines our nature is an old one and rather out of fashion but it is compelling to me.

I have never believed in fate. But I am interested in characters who do and what that belief does to the way a person lives their life.

RRE: Everything Under updates the Oedipus myth, a story that served as a sort of backbone for modern psychology. The title itself acknowledges what lies buried within the psyche: those traumatic memories our minds — or at least in Gretel’s case — trick us into forgetting. When did you first encounter the myth and what motivated you to revisit such a disturbing tale?

DJ: I recently found my school drama copy of Oedipus Rex which was covered in notes a teenage me had made. At university we looked at Freud — mostly dismissively — in Literary Theory and Oedipus was, as you say, there again. So the myth had been there for a while and I like to think that it had been waiting for the right moment to come out and offer itself up to me for literary salvage.

I came back to it, I think, because of its darkness, its weirdness and animalistic nature. Children are left on the mountainside for wolves, prophecy is believed to devastating effect; there is blinding. I love the momentum the myth has, the sense that we are rolling and rolling towards an inevitable — and awful event — and the lure of trying to do something similar in fiction was exciting.

I think undertaking a retelling is a challenge a writer sets themselves and I certainly felt this way when I started writing. I wanted to know if I could do it, how I might go about it.

‘Circe’ Shows Us How Storytelling Is Power—And How That Power Can Be Seized

RRE: I’m glad you mention the animalistic. Animals show up everywhere in your stories. Especially in places where they shouldn’t. In Fen, a girl falls in love with a fish, and another girl becomes one. There’s a particular line in Everything Under that made my heart miss a beat, which was when — explaining her transgender identity to Margot — Fiona says: “like a fish still alive in the belly of a heron.” What draws you to writing so inventively about animals? Where do you think our anxieties towards the animalistic come from?

DJ: I think what draws me to writing about them is the idea of nature in some way answering back in my fiction. The animals I write about are often somehow strange in the stories, turned nasty or clever. There is an ecological slant, I think, which I never expected to come up but which has. The animals in the work are never quite what they seem.

The animalistic is in us, I suppose that is where the anxiety comes from. We are animals but we hold civilization, decorum and politeness up as important and the animalistic goes against all of this. Perhaps this is another reason why I write about animals. They are both foils and metaphors to place against the humans who, in the end, act like animals themselves.

7 British Books that Celebrate Weird Women

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Originally, weird came from the Old English wyrd, meaning fate. Wyrd went out of use in English until Shakespeare brought it back to describe his weird sister witches in Macbeth, perhaps also referencing the three mythological goddesses, the fates, who control destiny. Thus, we arrive at the five W’s — Weird — Witch — Women — Writing that’s Wrong. In Joanna Russ’ satiric guide to How to Suppress Women’s Writing, number eight is “anomalousness: assert that the woman in question is eccentric or atypical.”

I think it’s time to embrace the anomalousness, insist on its strength. I like the idea of a weird sisterhood with powers to see beyond the ordinary. Weird sisters stirring a pot of who knows what. Weird books are my favorite kind of books, anyway: books that are unclassifiable, books that value surprise, the tangent, books about women and girls who refuse to conform to societal norms. I’m talking about weirding gender roles and the domestic space. Books that are non-judgmental, irreverent, about women and girls who are a little amoral; a book where laughter sits so close to grief and horror that it makes them uncomfortable. A book that exposes the essential weirdness of existence.

I know the U.K. has lately gotten all Brexit-y with the rise of populism, but the U.K. in my head is populated by witchy women in unravelling sweaters, putting kettles on to boil and spreading marmite on toast, mumbling wyrd prophecies. (This could be because my father is a retired British butler with long white hair who likes to stroll around his property wrapped in a bear skin, his overfed pug by his side. He is definitely a weird sister.)

Here are a list of British authors that celebrate weird women. As Shakespeare’s witches said, “Come sisters…show the best of our delights.”

Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner

Published in 1926, Lolly Willowes starts out with a classic Jane Austen Sense and Sensibility-like set up — a single young lady is kicked off the family estate when her father dies and must move in with her brother’s family, where she’s treated as a drudge. At first, Lolly does not seem weird at all. The novel clips along in a realistic vein until one day, the now middle-aged Lolly is in a shop and, without warning, she has an ecstatic vision,“she felt as if she had woken unchanged from a twenty-year slumber.” Suddenly, Lolly becomes completely unmanageable. The novel goes off its realistic rails. Magic happens. Witches. After escaping her domestic captivity, Lolly decides, “it is best as one grows older to strip oneself of possessions, to shed oneself downward like a tree, to be almost wholly earth before one dies.” Sylvia Townsend Warner, who was also a painter, refused to stay in her genre lane: she also wrote, amongst others, The Corner that Held Them, a novel about a twelfth century convent and a series of interlocking tales about fairies, Kingdoms of Elfin.

The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West

Andrea Barrett writes in her introduction to The Fountain Overflows, first published in 1956, “I have loved this novel for over a decade without being able to explain exactly why.” That is the definition of the weird. The Fountain Overflows is about an artistic family of women dependent on an undependable father. The book has a smooth surface, but all the women, especially the mother, Mrs. Aubrey, say the oddest and most profound things. Perhaps because, as it turns out, they can read minds. Of Mrs. Aubrey we learn, “she understood children, and knew that they were adults handicapped by a humiliating disguise and had their adult qualities within them.” Cousin Rosamund is tormented by a poltergeist. There is something about the tension between the intimacy and alienation in this family of unexpected women that undoes me, that reveals the great longing to be together along with the great longing to escape at the strange heart of every family.

Gertrude’s Child by Richard Hughes

I first encountered the Welsh writer Richard Hughes when I read Gertrude’s Child as a kid. Gertrude is an exasperated wooden doll who marches stiffly away from her owner, buys herself a little girl, and then leaves her out in the rain while she takes tea with some random stuffed animals. It’s the height of weird, the gloriously hard heart of the independent doll, the pathetic child without enough sense to come in out of the rain. I adored it.

A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes

In A High Wind in Jamaica, published in 1929, some rich kids are captured by pirates, but in a similar inversion to Gertrude’s Child, the kids turn out to be more terrifying than the pirates, especially murderous little Emily. A High Wind in Jamaica pretends to be a child’s adventure story, but it’s really a book for adults about the nature of little girls, or perhaps all our natures, in the vein of Lord of The Flies, but more charming, funnier, and, of course, weirder.

Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead by Barbara Comyns

The fabulously quirky Dorothy Project republished this 1956 novel about a quaint English village ravaged by flood and a mysterious disease. It begins the morning after the flood: Eben Willoweed jauntily “rowed his daughters around the submerged garden” amongst drowned animals. Comyns continually creates odd juxtapositions and undercuts her characters at every turn. “Grandmother Willoweed had raved and moaned and torn her hair, although she was already rather short of it.” When one of the characters finally escapes the disaster-ridden village and her absurd family to become “completely civilized,” I felt relieved for her but also regretful that she’d become an ordinary woman. Barbara Comyns was a true eccentric herself, an artist who bred poodles and fixed pianos for a living, and who had relationships with first an artist, then a criminal and finally a civil servant. Spoiler alert: her novel The Vet’s Daughter involves revenge by levitation.

Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun by Sarah Ladipo Manyika

Sarah Ladipo Manyika created an unconventional heroine and gave her book the weirdest title ever. Her novel, first published by Cassava Republic Press in London and Nigeria, was shortlisted for the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize for fiction that “breaks the mould.” The book is about a seventy-five-year old Nigerian American woman in San Francisco, “a city where people take their kids to school in their pajamas.” Dr. Morayo Da Silva, lover of books, the kind of woman who spontaneously buys two bouquets of tulips instead of one, flirtatious, wise, indomitable, is at the heart of this surprising, pleasure-driven novel that quietly subverts literary conventions about whose lives are worthy of literature.

The Queen of Whale Cay by Kate Summerscale

Summerscale is best known for her book The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, an addictive mixture of true crime and social history that was made into a BBC series. The Queen of Whale Cay is a biography of the truly extraordinarily eccentric life of Marion “Joe” Carstairs. Cartstairs raced speed boats in the 20’s, cross-dressed, smoked cigars, had affairs with Marlene Deitrich and Oscar Wilde’s niece, and then in the ‘30s bought an island in the Bahamas and became its mostly benevolent “Queen.” Oh, and she also spent her life obsessed with a leather doll she named Lord Todd Wadley. Summerscale is a brilliant researcher and writer, with an eye for the weird and telling detail. I won’t soon forget the image of Queen Joe riding around her island on her motorcycle with her doll strapped behind her.

Leif Enger Thinks We’re All Unreliable Narrators

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Virgil Wander is the sort of novel you read to remember why you love reading. It’s populated by playful sentences of startling wisdom and unabashed joy. The word “merry” appears multiple times. The cast of characters is expansive and memorable. Visiting and revisiting the fictional northern Minnesota town of Greenstone, I felt like a tourist in some Tim Burtonesque town, part Big Fish, part Scissorhands, a playland for grown-ups where the town clerk, who moonlights as a film projectionist and carries a driftwood staff, screens Old Hollywood classics for locals after hours. Where an elderly stranger with twinkling eyes flies kites of his own outrageous design. Where a scrappy boy fisherman is determined to enact revenge on a massive killer sturgeon. Where the romantic lead is a beautiful neon sign-maker whose irreverent ballplayer husband long ago tragically disappeared.

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But if all that sounds too twee for your taste, there is also darkness here. Not all the characters are Burtonesque sweethearts. The washed up bad boy filmmaker Adam Leer and his wildeyed handyman Jerry Fandeen might have wandered in from another genre altogether.

Our hero, such that he is, has recently suffered some significant brain damage after driving his car into Lake Superior, and he’s having trouble remembering things: adjectives; tasks; why he drove off the cliff in the first place; how he used to be. Virgil is haunted by post-traumatic underwater memories, by visions of himself as a dead man, and by a strange figure he sees now and then standing on the water, seemingly waiting for him to return to the lake.

Rachel Lyon: One of the turns of phrase I love best in this book is the way Virgil refers to himself, pre-accident, as “the previous tenant.” He is confounded, when he returns from the hospital, by relics of his former life — for instance, his shoes. Then there is Jerry Fandeen, who, you write several times, “forgot himself.” While Virgil seems baffled but relatively unconcerned by the changes in his own personality, Jerry’s “forgetting” is the beginning of his undoing.

It seems to me that part of what you are getting at, in this novel, is the slipperiness of selfhood, maybe particularly for a certain type of man (emotionally isolated, Midwestern, middle-aged). Was that part of the project here? Could you talk a bit about it?

Leif Enger: Well, the culture asks men to be a certain way. Out on the cartoon fringe idealized in the in-flight magazines, we’re to be self-made, triumphant, abiding in a place beyond self-doubt, joyfully hammering our professional adversaries by day and enjoying nightly groundbreaking sex while maintaining our abs into our seventies. It’s hilarious. It’s as if the concept of humility has been discarded without a thought.

What made Virgil so engaging to me was that his mind — his actual mind — abruptly changes. It’s a literal shakeup after which he can’t think of himself as he once did. The pieces are scrambled or missing. The interesting question to me is whether — if indeed he’s lost himself — whether the loss is necessarily for the worse. For example, Virgil’s brain injury leaves him less verbally capable, which frustrates him and yet makes him pay a kind of attention to people he hadn’t been paying before. It makes him a careful listener, less apt to judge others, and therefore strangely effective in ways not previously imagined. He’s less polite, but more honest; less prone to defend himself, and therefore less needy of defense. To your question, the big themes of selfhood didn’t occur to me while writing — I was just staying with the flow of the story, trying to go where it went. But those questions (what am I holding onto, exactly? what am I trying to maintain?) definitely inform Virgil’s personality as he rebuilds his life, and bleed into those in his orbit as well.

RL: There are multiple stories at work in these pages. Adam Leer, prodigal son, returns to Greenstone after his career on the outskirts of Hollywood fizzles. Rune Eliassen comes to Greenstone to search for his long-lost son. Those are just two of the main character arcs, however. As a novelist myself I was delighted to find that no character, however minor, appears in this book without going through some major development. My favorite is Ellen Tripp, a fifteen-year-old tertiary character who doesn’t do much, plot-wise, but appears on the page complete with a whirlwind of backstory, front story, and everything in between:

Just a kid of fifteen… got pregnant last year and had an abortion, lost all her friends and her folks kicked her out, although she was back with them now. Ellen was working things through. One week she’d show up plain as a hymnal, eyes cast down and her hair yanked back; the next she arrived in glitter and paint, short and bright as a puffin. Regardless of dress her most piercing weapon was a smile that burst out when least expected, as though too much to contain. Inside of five minutes we all adored her.

I’m curious about the form you chose for this novel, given the fact that there are so many characters, each with his or her own arc. Were you ever tempted to write a novel-in-stories? Or a collection of tales about the town of Greenstone?

LE: Recently when reading the wonderful Olive Kitteridge [by Elizabeth Strout] it struck me that Greenstone’s story could’ve been told in a similar way. In fact I did write an early draft using third-person and shifting viewpoints, but the story didn’t hold together that way, it left me restless and annoyed, there was no satisfaction in it and I had to pitch the book and start again in first-person. Once locked into Virgil’s voice I wanted to simply stay with it and see where it went. John Gardner used to describe the successful novel as a “vivid, continuous dream,” and for me that continuity came through a firsthand narrative and ongoing threads of recovery and engagement. As for Greenstone, it turned out to have such a rich vein of characters I may not be done with it yet. Many of those characters feel to me as though their lives continue beyond the pages, and I’m playing around with ways to use some of them in another project.

Culture asks men to be a certain way: we’re to be self-made, triumphant, abiding in a place beyond self-doubt, joyfully hammering our professional adversaries by day and enjoying nightly groundbreaking sex while maintaining our abs into our seventies.

RL: Given that you did end up writing a standalone novel, I’m curious about your choice of hero. In some ways Virgil makes an unlikely protagonist. He is aphasic. As he recuperates, he is necessarily passive. He describes himself as “foolish” several times. He is not particularly ambitious. He’s unreliable. He sees things that might not be there. In other ways, however, he’s the perfect hub for the rest of the characters to revolve around. He’s the proprietor of The Empress, a tumbledown cinema that still shows reel-to-reel films, where the rest of the characters congregate for the odd illegal screening of a pilfered classic. And he’s nosy. He’s curious about the lives of his neighbors. So tell me about the process of choosing a character to be the reader’s guide — beyond the guide-appropriate name, I mean. What was the process of crafting him like?

LE: A foolish or unreliable narrator is a lovely old tradition and lets a story go where it likes. Memory itself is so mutable that most of us are probably unreliable narrators, no matter how certain we are of our facts.

Virgil only came to life when, in my second attempt at the book, he suffered a brain injury and could no longer trust his eyes, language, or judgment. Then he got interesting. Then I could invest. The aphasia was especially delightful to work with because it allowed for a little presentation whenever Virgil remembered an appropriate word at the proper time. It put me squarely on his side. I’m the kind of selfish writer who wants to love and root for his characters, which means they are underdogs. They’re acquainted with failure and disappointment. World beaters make terrible protagonists except when they lose everything; the same holds for narrators who are smarter than everyone around them and so become contemptuous of their neighbors. For me to write Virgil fairly he had to be in a state of vulnerability — uncertain of himself but trusting enough to tell you his story, like someone you’d listen to in a bus depot, and maybe find yourself confiding in as well.

Memory itself is so mutable that most of us are probably unreliable narrators, no matter how certain we are of our facts.

RL: Speaking of names, this is a novel where words matter. Virgil’s aphasia plays a fun role in the narrative: as language slips in and out of his grasp, so does his sense of himself. And his own “audacious surname” becomes a sort of fortune. As we read, the title of the book becomes not just a name but a challenge, even a command: Virgil, Wander! As another character puts it:

“Wander — what a name. It’s almost a calling. You’ve had some adventures, with a name like that.”

“Not yet really,” I confessed.

“No? Well, watch out then,” she said, looking lightly up and around, as though a whole sky full of escapades were imminent and would soon gush down in a cloudburst of destiny….

The essence of the novel, as an art form, is a version of reality constructed only with words. To an extent, for full immersion in the novel, the reader has to see through the words on the page, and experience only their meaning. But you don’t let us do that. The surface here is just as important as the depths. What are you saying about the relationship between our experience of language and our experience of life?

LE: What an interesting question! Maybe it connects to the old idea that to name something — an enemy, a fear, a resource, gives you power over it. You can enjoy breakfast without applying any language to it, but that slice of toast is so much richer if you also describe the butter melting into its surface, the shingle of white sharp cheddar, the slab of heavy dark tomato on top with its speckling of pepper, and maybe also how your grandfather used ever increasing black pepper on his tomatoes as his age increased and his sense of taste diminished. Language is an opportunity for delight, or for whatever else you want to magnify or intensify in the story you’re telling. As a reader I’m happiest when the writer uses language transparently but also with a sense of play. Maybe all our best work is done for pleasure.

RL: It struck me as I read this that at least some of your language seems to be written in poetic meter. The last four sentences in particular stuck in my mind like a song. Are you a musical person? Do you hear what you write as you write it?

LE: Dad was a lifelong musician, and Mom read to us aloud — both stories and poetry — so I grew up around meter and rhyme. Many books also feel like songs, they have a lyrical quality, a comforting tempo. In all my stories there are times when rhythm comes forward and wants to be part of what’s happening, help set a mood. Remember the old Stevenson poem?

Whenever the moon and stars are set, whenever the wind is high,
All night long in the dark and wet, a man goes riding by –
Late in the night when the fires are out, why does he gallop and gallop about?

This still raises the hair on my arms. So rhythm — and more rarely rhyme, as in the last four sentences you mention — is something I pay attention to.