This Anthology Is the Black Women’s Book Club You Always Wanted

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Since its inception in 2015, Well-Read Black Girl (WRBG) has become one of the most influential and nourishing spaces for Black female bibliophiles. Founder Glory Edim has been steadfast and consistent in not only her love of books but especially and prominently books by Black women. It seemed a natural course of events that an essay anthology Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves would follow, and thanks to Ballantine Books, it has.

One of Edim’s most identifying characteristics is her affection for both people and books, showcased in the enthusiasm she exudes in person and online. Her passion for discussing all things literary, Black, and female has made her a respected (and necessary) book influencer — she was awarded the LA Times Innovator of the Year award this year — as well as an active literary cheerleader. She celebrates literature and Black woman artists not only with her monthly book club, but through her growing social media accounts and the Well-Read Black Girl Festival (the second annual festival will take place on November 10th in Brooklyn). Through these endeavors Edim has carved a rightful place as an essential voice within our industry. The Well-Read Black Girl anthology serves as the next stepping stone, and then there’s a memoir we all have to look forward to.

Edim and I spoke, editor to editor, about the empathetic nature of Black women as people and readers, her keen eye in curating her anthology to showcase a bevy of voices we do and should know, and her dedicated vision that’s allowed her to learn more about what she wants to see in the industry as well as what she aims to bring to it.

Jennifer Baker: What’s interesting [about the Well-Read Black Girl anthology] is that you approach people and you give them a kind of topic or thesis statement, but you don’t know what you’re getting. This felt like it really worked out in a very keen way and everyone is so specific in what they were saying. It’s not to say that there isn’t overlap or there isn’t a throughline, but it never felt repetitive. Because these are individual pieces that threatens to happen in an anthology.

Glory Edim: I was really nervous that everyone simply would talk about Toni Morrison.

Jennifer: She is the Canon basically.

Glory: She is. And nothing would be wrong with that. But I was worried every essay would be a tribute to Toni Morrison [which] would be a whole different book. I was afraid there’d be a repetitive nature in the tone of it. But that didn’t happen at all. And I think that was because I was very particular about curating the nature of the selection of voices. Most people I had met one-on-one through the book club, everyone from Zinzi Clemmons to Jesmyn Ward. There were two that were cold calls. I didn’t have a relationship with Lynn Nottage prior to this. We follow each other on Twitter and I was constantly loving everything she does. And that’s another thing about the publishing world doesn’t know that I keep to myself, but I’m a huge theatre nerd and that’s kind of my escape, so I’m obsessed with Lynn Nottage. So when she said yes that was such a highlight.

Even Barbara Smith. Similar to Lynn, I did not have a relationship with her. She is the sweetest. I wanted to have her because she essentially is the pinnacle of Black feminist queer theory and her publishing company, Kitchen Table (Women of Color Press), has so many Black women. She being an elder and her experience as an activist is so vital. In her essay she talks about James Baldwin. I just kind of assumed everyone would naturally talk about a Black woman. When she wrote about Baldwin it was so perfect, it makes so much sense. People just really came at it from their own personal experiences.

‘Black Liberation Means the Freedom to Figure Things Out For Ourselves’

Jennifer: Barbara Smith comments on biography and not necessarily searching for the same themes as she would fiction. Lincoln is white, but maybe there are aspects of Lincoln that I can relate to even in his whiteness/his maleness/his elite space. In terms of class and problems and things like that we’re constantly negotiating or recognizing the quality in other people’s work and that’s how I feel as a Black woman and an avid reader. In your anthology it’s not necessarily qualifying but providing that space for recognizing “this is the value for us of our stories.” Do you feel like that’s a conversation we’re constantly forced to have as Black women?

Glory: At the end of the day this book is literally of Black women across the Diaspora that are all seeking meaning and identity. In every work of fiction or every memoir, the core of it is about identity, meaning people are seeking meaning in so many different aspects of their lives. And thankfully there are books you can look at for help, but there’s still that void. And I agree with you, we have the ability to see ourselves in other people. Black women are the most empathetic group of people in the book because we can empathize. That is why the Black Lives Matter hashtag is so powerful and [the] three women who run it are Black, feminist, queer women. So, how much more can you understand identity with those three levels there? The goal is to have people have an understanding of their own identity and their own livelihood, but also reach out and find nourishment in others too, and be able to have parallel stories and exchange ideas, and really find ways to validate one another. I believe as Black women we have given that generosity to so many other people that I would just like it to be reciprocated. There is no reason a person should pick up a book by Jacqueline Woodson and not understand it and not see themselves. The stories lifelines are there, you do not need to be a Black woman to understand what Jacqueline Woodson is saying to the world. I read Little Women. I read Moby Dick. And I saw myself, not in a (literal) seeing myself, but I was able to understand and empathize with it and the importance it. That means that analysis and that generosity in reading should be given to Black women and our stories across the canon, whether it’s Phillis Wheatley or Jacqueline Woodson.

In every work of fiction or every memoir, the core of it is about identity, meaning people are seeking meaning in so many different aspects of their lives.

Jennifer: Getting into the heart of that, what came up was the mirrors and windows — the reflection of self versus looking inside. Which books kind of keyed into us that kind of visibility. And it turned out to be a lot about honesty or the pursuit of honesty. When I was talking to Kiese [Laymon] about his book, he made a good point I think we’re all trying to pursue a form of honesty. So when you were editing this did you see that coming together of “Oh, this honesty is in our stories”?

Glory: That is literally at the essence of what I was trying to capture, all the levels of transparency and vulnerability. Because when you come through the WRBG book club that is what happens. When you’re sitting next to each other and sharing ideas and you’re talking about the protagonist of this book but you’re also talking about your personal experiences and it’s all mashed up together in this one beautiful — I don’t even know how to explain it.

When you’re in these spaces and you’re building them with intentionality and you add a spirit to them, you’re very keen about how you want others to feel. So I’m very concerned about the feel of the room and how people are welcomed in and having a positive, affirming experience. That is what I wanted the anthology to be: a positive, affirming reading experience that simulates what we do in the WRBG book club. By the time you read every book you’re confronted with so many questions and emotions. I wanted the reader to close the book feeling satisfied that they saw a reflection of themselves on the pages. But that they also will be curious to dig deeper and ask questions and look at the facts and the analysis of all these beautiful contributors. Like look beyond just what we see. Like you said, we said about the essays “look beyond the mirror into the substance of the person and the language and the literature of Black women.” I think that’s what everyone, myself as the editor and this beautiful collection of contributors, portrayed.

Is It Possible to Write a Truthful Memoir?

Jennifer: And speaking as a community it is and isn’t an insular project. It really speaks to the Black female community or female-identifying (I don’t want to exclude the nonbinary community).

Glory: Yes, you’re right.

Jennifer: So I’m thinking about those other reads. You didn’t create this for white people. That’s not the reason for its existence. But the presumption, especially by publishers in this industry, is that they will read it.

Glory: I have not been concerned about that, even though — and this is the part where I am very grateful that I do not feel completely in the publishing industry, because I don’t think that way. I understand that that matters to people, but I’m really proud that my work has been created exclusively for Black women, and the community ventures for ourselves. The book is a reflection of that. The book club is a reflection of that. The festival is that same energy. I’m also so thankful that my experience at an HBCU has prepared me for this because so many things that I’m working towards I am not thinking about the white gaze. I am not thinking about how others will respond to it. I’m simply thinking about what is the best I can do for my community? And that has been so affirming, but also it gives me so much room to be innovative and not be tethered to stereotypes or ideas of what we should be.

Not everyone has the idea that of course Blackness should be at the forefront or a priority, because I’m Black and I’m a woman. And of course not to keep it binary, that is my perspective and I hold true to it and the one I always wanna make a priority with someone on the questions on development in my personal relationships, Black women are always the number one thing that I’m focused on. And I think that’s okay and I think more Black women need to move in that space and be less fearful of assimilating or trying to make white folks happy. I think we need to move away from that kind of thinking. Which is hard, it’s just hard especially when you’re in spaces that are predominantly white. But walking in our power and knowing our truth is what needs to happen to make radical change. It’s just a little something I’m confronted with and I’m working towards. There’s like two imprints that I adore and support constantly. 37 INK, I love Dawn Davis. I love Chris Jackson from One World. But after that how many imprints can you really say where the community is fully acknowledged? I’d love an opportunity to have my own imprint. Someone give me funding for that. I’d love to publish books. There’s more work that needs to be changed not only on the writer/reader side but within the hierarchy of publishing itself.

I think more Black women need to move in that space and be less fearful of assimilating or trying to make white folks happy.

Jennifer: Also you’re helping give Black women’s work a larger platform, because the issue has always been the platform. It’s never been the non-existence. It’s been the visibility.

Glory: Right, it’s the visibility. I think of Mary Helen Washington who is still alive but she is fucking amazing and she edited the book Black-Eyed Susans and Midnight Birds and it’s all about fiction writers, stories by and about Black women. So it’s all female writers, passages from Toni Morrison to all the literary greats in one book. And she’s a phenomenal literary scholar and I’m like, “Where is our love Mary Helen Washington who really set the precedent for all these things?” It’s not only the five writers we can constantly name who we love: Maya, Alice, Toni. But looking at Mary Helen Washington’s work, talking more about Paule Marshall really looking at the literary scholars of the work too is so important. When we’re talking about the intensive study of certain literary classics it should not stop at Walt Whitman and Theroux, we have to have more stories by Black women included in the canon.

The Skeletons Tangled Under Our Feet

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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that almost killed you?

Paul Monette’s final resting place is in Forest Lawn, a cemetery in the Hollywood Hills, beside the plot of his longtime partner, Roger. Just above their graves, completing a posthumous love triangle, lay the remains of Roger’s romantic successor Steve, the second companion Monette lost to AIDS in a handful of years.

I’ve never found cemeteries all that spiritual: the forced solemnity and clumpy grass are the opposite of transcendence. But there’s something resonant about Forest Lawn. Every day at a Southern California cemetery is the perfect day to visit, cheery skies and wise old trees to lean up against. It’s why tourists like me come to stargaze.

Photo by Kootenayvolcano

I made the pilgrimage to Monette’s grave in December 2011, a little more than a year after losing Corey, my first real boyfriend, to pneumocystis pneumonia. Corey had lied to me about getting tested for HIV and lied about being negative. At the time of his death, at the age of 25, he had what his little brother described to me over the phone as “full-blown AIDS” and a T-cell count of 22. Corey’s symptoms over the eight months I’d known him — weight loss, a nasty cough, a lesion I’d mistaken for a birthmark — seemed ominous only in retrospect, but according to his brother doctors said Corey’s body was so ravaged by the time his mom drove him to the ER that October morning he’d probably been battling the virus for seven years without treatment.

I made the pilgrimage to Paul Monette’s grave a little more than a year after losing Corey, my first real boyfriend, to pneumocystis pneumonia.

I was blindsided. Two months before his death, Corey, then seemingly happy and healthy, had helped me move from Los Angeles to Austin, where I was starting graduate school on a fellowship thanks to the largesse of the epic historical novelist James Michener. The ongoing joke at the Michener Center that fall, at least according to one especially witty poet, was that we’d each be responsible for completing one of James Michener’s great unfinished works — one per semester, in fact. Michener had completed Hawaii, Alaska and Texas in his lifetime. The other 47 states were up to us. “I’ll take Nebraska!” someone would say around the workshop table. Someone else would reply, “Great, because I’ve got dibs on Oklahoma!” It’s a schtick I still find charming as my first semester in the program, my mom gift-wrapped our family’s hardback copy of the Michener tome Space and mailed it to me for my birthday.

Corey got me settled in this new city with its bats and cockroaches and terrifying frontage roads. We bought a TV at Costco, swam in Barton Springs, made love on a mattress on the floor of my unfurnished living room and watched Dirty Harry and Once Upon a Time in the West. After ten days, I bought him an orange Longhorns baseball cap as a thank you and dropped him off at the airport. We weren’t what you’d call a couple, but we Skyped all the time and were planning on spending New Year’s Eve together. I knew he’d look hot in a tux.

Instead, I passed Christmas break that year in shock in my childhood bedroom in Salt Lake, sobbing over Monette’s Borrowed Time, a harrowing account of Roger’s nineteen-month battle with AIDS.

The white stone and green grass of Forest Lawn are as corporately beautiful as the JW Marriott in Palm Desert where my family used to vacation when I was a kid. The grounds boast fountains and neoclassical architecture and the kinds of winding roads and spectacular views we’ve seen a thousand times in movies, usually set to bagpipe music.

It may be the fact that Forest Lawn is so spectacular, so idyllic, so country club that makes it start to feel haunted. Your eyes get bored. You start to look past the Xanax-ed prettiness of the place, to suspect the prettiness. We’re all a little goth in cemeteries. “Certainly, this can’t be it,” you think. “Can death really be nothing more than a golf course?”

‘Certainly, this can’t be it,’ you think. ‘Can death really be nothing more than a golf course?’

Finding Monette’s grave required GPS coordinates, helpfully available on his Wikipedia page, which my friend Katie pulled up for me on her iPhone. Still, we stumbled upon the final resting places of Walt Disney and a dozen other celebrities trying to find it. It’s just a marker in the ground, not covered in flowers or housed in the grand mausoleum, like Michael Jackson’s remains. Nor is it the gaudy, autographed white marble of Liberace’s tomb, though once you spot it there’s no mistaking it for any other. Under Monette’s name, the grave unapologetically reads “CHAMPION OF HIS PEOPLE.”

The setting is idyllic, dappled in the shade of a California live oak on a hill, though it was the ashes and skeletons underneath that I was thinking about.

In Monette’s final book, an essay collection called Last Watch of the Night, published in 1994, a few months before his death at the age of 49, Monette describes visiting these plots at Forest Lawn to bury Steve. Standing over his own future gravesite, Monette imagines Roger and himself as a pair of skeletons “tangled together like metaphysical lovers out of Donne.” He goes on to picture one of his “bone-white arms reaching above my skull, clawing the dirt with piano-key fingers, trying to get to Steve’s ashes, just out of reach.”

Photo by Greg Marshall

For all its lyricism, dark humor and beauty, Borrowed Time has a fairly traditional riches-to-rags structure: it tells the story of how Paul and Roger met and fell in love, and how they lived a bougie, glamour-adjacent life in Los Angeles: Paul drives with the top down and writes novelizations for blockbusters like Predator; Roger is a successful lawyer. Paul was educated at Yale, Roger at Harvard. In the early ’80s, AIDS starts picking off their friends. Roger falls ill. Then Paul does. The epidemic ends up costing them everything: the sporty car, the easy money, even Roger’s eyesight. Everything, that is, except each other’s devotion.

The New York Times review of Borrowed Time, published in 1988, aptly describes Monette not as an AIDS prophet or an angel of death but as a war correspondent. The first sentence of the book reads, “I don’t know if I will live to finish this.” Three hundred and forty-one pages later, Monette has not only finished his memoir, he has managed to write one of the most moving love stories of his time, and done so on a mortal deadline.

Borrowed Time is a test of writerly endurance, an unsparing account of Roger’s painstaking decline written with such command and grace that in a different world high schoolers would know Paul and Roger as thoroughly as they know Romeo and Juliet.

In a different world high schoolers would know Paul and Roger as thoroughly as they know Romeo and Juliet.

The book is also the story of one of the most gifted writers of his generation finding his voice and subject. It was only after Roger’s death in 1985 that Monette devoted himself exclusively to chronicling the human toll of the epidemic, famously saying that AIDS was the only thing worth writing about.

Normally, I’m attracted to big-hearted, bright voices like Elizabeth McCracken, David Mitchell, and George Saunders, but Monette’s style is epic in another way. It’s almost Homeric: classical, starchy, riddled with allusions to the Greeks, as reportorial and unflinching as anything in The Iliad. Early in Borrowed Time, Monette writes about feeling “confirmed” by the idea of the Ancient Greeks even as he acknowledges that he’s being hopelessly romantic about a civilization that treated women like garbage and enslaved folks to build its palaces. A gay man, he says, “seeks his history in mythic fragments and jigsaws the rest together with his heart.”

I love Paul Monette’s prose in the same way I love a crumbling Greek statue that’s lost an arm, part of a leg, maybe had its nose snapped off, but is somehow still sporting an archaic smile. Monette writes like William F. Buckley’s queer, not-evil twin, not like he’s nibbling a canapé at the Yale Club but like he’s marshaling the full weight of his privilege, intelligence, and pedigree to prosecute the case against the world’s indifference to AIDS.

I didn’t read Monette that Christmas for closure, as a saner 26-year-old might have — one who wasn’t in a writing program, say; one who wasn’t also in search of his voice and subject. Monette offered me not closure but confirmation, confirmation that it was worth risking your heart on every page if that’s what it took to tell your story.

Corey’s funeral announcement that fall had consisted of 39 words on a newspaper website — fewer words, I’d find out later, than the inscription on Paul Monette’s grave. There was no mention of what had killed Corey, just that he was a beloved son, grandson, and brother and that he’d be missed — all of which was true, but come on. After all, it was shame and secrecy that killed him in the first place. I was ready to let in some light.

Monette offered me not closure but confirmation, confirmation that it was worth risking your heart on every page if that’s what it took.

This business of letting in light sounds a little grand, I know. After all, I’m alive to open a window and feel the sun hit my face and Corey isn’t. And I’m not talking about getting tested or keeping in touch with Corey’s little brother over what has, impossibly, become eight years since his death. All of that just sort of happened. I hate to admit it, but what I’m getting at is a little grand: I didn’t want to forget him. I wanted to tell people about Corey and me, and not just his senseless end but the dumb, fun parts of our relationship, too. “You can just be done,” one friend told me, but I knew I wasn’t.

The risk of talking about the dead is that we romanticize them. On the other hand, what’s wrong with a little romance? Let me remember watching a Clint Eastwood movie on a mattress on the floor of my unfurnished living room with the only other person I knew in this entire city lying next to me, his arm going to sleep under the weight of my neck.

Borrowed Time is romantic in the way that Grimms’ Fairy Tales are romantic. The memoir is a love letter as sharp and true as an arrow, one that draws blood. I read it with a pit in my stomach and realized only later why: I was jealous. Monette had not only written about the passion between two men in the face of an epidemic, he and Paul had lived it. Corey and I had every advantage — two decades of medical advances, ACT UP protests, movies, novels, televised fundraisers — and none of it had saved or even prolonged Corey’s life. We weren’t Paul and Roger 2.0. Corey hadn’t even trusted me enough to tell me he was sick. That’s the part that almost killed me.

There’s something scary about reading the exact right book at the exact right moment. I remember feeling about Borrowed Time the same way I’d felt when my dad and I took up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road together the summer after he’d been diagnosed with ALS. When I’d asked Dad if he was liking the book, maybe a dumb question considering it’s about the apocalypse, he’d said matter-of-factly, “This is our life right now.”

The risk of talking about the dead is that we romanticize them. On the other hand, what’s wrong with a little romance?

Dad’s fingers weren’t working anymore and I remember him sitting at the kitchen table, pinning the book down with one curled hand and turning page after page with his knuckles. Dad had been a newspaper publisher. Though his job was more on the business side of things, I knew he valued writing. I’d come across a line or two in a notebook of his when we were packing up his office. I don’t remember what the lines were, only that there were unmistakably the start of a book about his life he was never going to complete. It was already too late. He couldn’t even peck out an email.

I had a journalism degree so new the actual diploma hadn’t yet arrived in the mail and a habit of writing poems under the gazebo at night with my friends, but it was only hanging out with Dad that summer that I had the conscious thought that I wanted to be a writer so when the next bad thing happened, I’d be ready. I didn’t have to be Picasso doodling a masterpiece on a bar napkin. I just wanted to have something to say when shit hit the fan.

About a year after Dad died, a friend of mine who had already lost both her parents said to me, “At least you’ll never run out of material now.” I remember being taken aback, but the statement has turned out to be true time and time again. Another way of saying it might have been, “Your dad is dead and you’ll never get over it. You’ll lose other people, too. You can write or you can die.”

Your dad is dead and you’ll never get over it. You’ll lose other people, too. You can write or you can die.

Monette said writing kept him alive. Indeed, his words feel snatched from the grave. “He kept writing until the end,” the Times noted in his obituary, this in spite of Monette being hooked up to an IV and taking heavy duty meds while completing Last Watch of the Night. Monette’s final years were easily the most prolific of his career. They included the publication of two novels and a second memoir, Becoming a Man: Half A Life Story, which won the National Book Award in 1992. It remains Monette’s most popular work. But it’s Borrowed Time I return to again and again. It’s Borrowed Time that sent me to the cemetery.

I wasn’t sure what to do once we actually found the grave. If I’d thought ahead, I would have brought flowers or even a card. As it was, I just sat in the grass next to Monette and had Katie take a picture of us, and then I got up, brushed off my jeans and went blinking back down the hill. That’s the thing about books that almost kill you. They’re the ones that end up saving your life.

Jeff Jackson on Writing a Novel Structured like a Rock ‘n’ Roll Record

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I first came across Jeff Jackson’s work through his buzzed-about first novel, Mira Corpora, which was published by indie favorite Two Dollar Radio in 2013. A hallucinatory book that is as beautiful as it is violent, I read it compulsively. Even though I finished it quickly, it was the type of book that stuck with me, filled with memorable images and a surprising tenderness. A few months later, I met Jackson at a reading. I was surprised to find out that the author behind the book was not a deranged, nihilistic weirdo, but a mild-mannered, kind man who was excited about all types of art. In 2016, the French indie press Kiddiepunk published his novella Novi Sad, a beautiful and slim volume on blue paper, that is described as a “sister book” to Mira Corpora.

Purchase the book

Jackson’s latest, Destroy All Monsters, is his big press debut. It synthesizes all the best parts of his past works: a dreamy violence, innovative structure, thought and care to how the story is presented on the page, and a narrative that both feeds into and splinters itself.

The book takes place in the fictional town of Arcadia, an industrial wasteland complete with shuttered factories and a creepy forest that serves as a dumping ground for dead bodies and the homeless. It focuses on the city’s music scene, specifically a couple, Xenie and Shaun, who are reeling with grief from a mysterious plague of incidents that involve the massacre of different bands across the country. Like a tape, Destroy All Monsters has an A side and a B side, which can be read in either order. We discussed the process of writing the book, his choices about structure, and some of his favorite art via Gchat.

Juliet Escoria: What part of this book came to you first? Was it the idea of bands getting shot, or a certain character, or something else? With the shooting at concerts, it feels political, but also not at all.

Jeff Jackson: My notes for the book go back over 10 years. It started with the image of a band being shot on stage in a small club. At the time, it was a very surreal image. It germinated into a story about an epidemic of similar killings happening across the country. This was long before the Bataclan shooting [in Paris]. Before Sandy Hook, even. It’s been alarming how current events have caught up to the book. While it’s true that this always has been a violent country, the novel feels more realistic now than I ever intended.

While it’s true that this always has been a violent country, the novel feels more realistic now than I ever intended.

JE: So it took you a long time to go from notes to a manuscript — you said on Twitter that it took 5 years to write. I also know that the path to publication wasn’t the easiest, either, which makes sense because the book breaks a lot of “rules” about what a novel is supposed to look like. Can you talk about both the process of writing it, and the process of publication?

JJ: I had a tortured time writing my first novel Mira Corpora which went through countless drafts and radically different versions. I was determined the next one would be easier, so I worked off a rough outline for Destroy All Monsters, trying to keep the structure in view the entire time. But my grand plans collapsed under me and this novel also underwent many shifts and reorganizations. It was especially difficult to figure out how much of the epidemic I could dramatize without it short-circuiting the manuscript.

Once the book was finished, I became haunted by a vision of the novel as Side A of a cassette or vinyl single. So I started to imagine what the B Side might look like. I wanted it to be something that both fleshed out the main text and also rewrote it, offering a completely different version of events and showcasing the characters in new scenes. Several friends told me that I was crazy — that I was taking a book that was already hard to sell and making it twice as difficult.

And it was a hard book to sell. When my agent read the manuscript, she deeply disliked it. We couldn’t find any common ground on it, so we parted ways. It took quite a while to find the right person to represent the book. As often happens, the reactions from agents echoed many of the later comments from publishers — it’s well written and the story is propulsive, but the structure is too odd, it’s too dark, it’s not commercial enough. I was extremely fortunate to land with FSG and their line of paperback originals which champion adventurous fiction.

FSG acquired the book without having read Side B. Initially, I thought Side B might work as a standalone novella that could be published separately. It wasn’t until I sat with it that I realized the two parts had to be under the same cover and that together they comprised the entire project. It says a lot about FSG that they understood and embraced the Side A / Side B concept. They bought one book and found themselves with something much stranger. But also, I think, much better.

JE: Wow, that’s cool of them. I would have expected push back to that. When you say that you had to figure out how much of the shootings to dramatize, do you mean that you didn’t want this element to overtake the plot?

JJ: Yes, the killings were so charged that they tended to overwhelm everything else and set up false expectations about the rest of the story. It wasn’t until I gave them their own section on Side B that I found a way to corral their energy so they still felt very dramatic without causing readers to become overly numb to the violence. The novel uses a lot of so-called experimental forms, but they’re never there for their own sake. The unusual structure aims to make things more engaging and surprising and immersive for the reader.

I love the idea of a book that works by itself while simultaneously being in conversation with another book — and how that combination creates a third space, something that only exists in the reader’s mind.

JE: I very much felt that. The book seems mostly to be about the individual characters and their expressions of grief, with the shootings being more of a propulsive factor.

Your previous works bear some similarities with this book. In some ways, Novi Sad felt like a B-side to Mira Corpora. One thing I like about reading a writer’s larger body of work is you get to see their obsessions and the way their minds work. Why do you think you like to explore the same stories or worlds from different angles?

JJ: I don’t know exactly. I do love the idea of a book that works by itself while simultaneously being in conversation with another book — and how that combination creates a third space, something that only exists in the reader’s mind.

Maybe that comes from my admiration for Ágota Kristóf’s “Lies” trilogy (The Notebook; The Proof; The Third Lie) where each book in the sequence reimagines and rewrites the previous volume. And maybe from David Lynch, too. Destroy All Monsters was finished when Twin Peaks: The Return aired, but I felt a real kinship with how he explored parallel story worlds throughout that series.

There was already this idea of other possible realities floating through my book, these questions about whether there might be more than the surface nihilism some of the characters embrace. So maybe the impulse was less meta-narrative and more metaphysical. It felt right to blow up that question by creating a flip-side to its reality.

His Life Was Saved by Rock and Roll: an Interview with Jeff Jackson

JE: I also see a kinship to Rashoman/the telling of Jesus’ life in the Bible/the first season of True Detective. I kind of wonder why more people don’t see storytelling in this way.

Another thing I enjoyed is the different colors of the pages, and the different styles of font. One thing I like about poetry that is generally not considered with prose is the way the words look on a page, and this deviation of style in your book felt really effective and fresh for me. Did you always envision it this way, or did you mess around with the visual elements?

JJ: I’m glad that worked for you. The visual elements of the page are very important to me. It’s something I consider in early drafts and the layout becomes baked into the DNA of the book. I’ve sometimes found there’s a visual solution to a narrative problem — how the text is broken out or arranged can make something clear that wasn’t previously. In DAM, I pushed this further than I did in Mira Corpora or Novi Sad, but only because it was necessary for this particular story.

JE: So rather than being heavy-handed with explaining, you can accomplish it more subtly with a change in the way it’s presented on the page?

JJ: Exactly. These are solutions that I stumbled into out of desperation, but they’re part of a writer’s toolkit that don’t get used often enough.

JE: I’ve never really understood why publishers are reluctant to do that kind of thing, other than the practical reasons having to do with production costs.

Your novels so far are about youth on the fringes, all with a very punk rock feel. What were you like when you were Xenie and Shaun’s age?

JJ: Like them, I was obsessed with music. I was lucky to be living in New York City at a time when concerts were relatively cheap and I was constantly going to shows — seeing riot grrrl and punk bands in tiny clubs, avant garde jazz in deconsecrated synagogues, anti-folk troubadours in rundown squats, garage rock festivals in community centers, electronic and noise acts in downtown venues, etc. I wasn’t fully immersed in any one scene, but I was on the outskirts of a number of them. I was also part of a theater company, cutting up Kathy Acker texts with Buster Keaton films, making plays for people who typically hated theater. The company was run like a band and I drew on those rehearsal and performance dynamics when writing some of the musical scenes in DAM.

JE: That sounds like the dream NYC experience that doesn’t exist anymore.

One thing you post on Instagram regularly is photos with the caption Possible Novel Structure. What photo is the possible novel structure for Destroy All Monsters?

JJ: Hmmm. A cassette that’s colored violet, maybe. But that might be too literal since so many of the Possible Novel Structures invite more abstract associations. I’m curious — what would you pick?

JE: Ummmm… maybe like mirrored explosions, with some Escher-type stairs. We can put a purple tape in the middle. That’s tough.

JJ: I like that image.

7 Candidates for the Great American Rock and Roll Novel

JE: I know you read a ton of books, listen to a ton of music, and watch a ton of movies. What are some books, albums, and/or movies that really blew you away recently?

JJ: I’ve gotten behind on newer books, films, and music these days. So here are some older things I’ve been digging lately — B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, a novel of pamphlets in a box you can read in any order; Carmen Laforet’s Nada, a coming-of-age novel written and set during WWII in a debauched Barcelona; Victor Segalen’s Rene Lys, a mix of autofiction and metafiction from the 1920s about life inside Peking’s Forbidden City. I’ve also been taken by a book of painter Jack Whitten’s sculptures which he created over the past 50 years but only recently started showing them.

I’m excited Criterion released Oliver Assayas’ Cold Water on Blu-Ray, one of the my all-time favorite films that’s been held up in music rights limbo for 20+ years. I recently discovered this wonderful batshit film from the 1970s called Femmes Femmes about two aging actresses who perform for each other in their Paris apartment. Two movies from earlier this year that knocked me out were Lucretia Martel’s hallucinatory Zama and Lynne Ramsay’s underappreciated You Were Never Really Here.

Musically, a lot of my listening has been guided by what I’m working on with my band Julian Calendar. It’s been a weird mishmash of Tricky’s Maxinquaye, Dog-Faced Hermans Hum of Life, The Slits Peel Sessions, and The Zombies collected singles.

But one new album that demands a shout-out is Patois Counselors’ Proper Release, an incredible record that sounds a bit like if Pere Ubu were a dance band. But more accurately, it follows Duke Ellington’s definition of great art: “It’s simply beyond category.”

Welcome to Electric Literature’s Reddest, Deadest Party Ever

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After darkness fell on October 25th 2018, New York’s most distinguished literati donned red and black masks for a night of revelry and fright. At Littlefield in Brooklyn beneath the (almost) full moon, novelists, bibliophiles, and editors alike bathed in the sanguine glow of disco lights, sipping themed cocktails and dancing the night away. At the end of the evening, attendees brought home “Read More Women” tote bags bursting at the seams with free books. Here are some of our favorite snapshots from photographer Andrew Janke and the uber-festive photo booth.

A Party to Die For

What do you think writers Scott Cheshire and Jason Porter are so animatedly debating here? A. The merits of new Southern Gothic. B. Which recent Hollywood adaptation of a beloved pop novel reigns supreme (the answer is Netflix’s Haunting of Hill House, but get back to us when Barry Jenkins’ If Beale Street Could Talk comes out) OR C. How many Sloe Death Negronis is too many Sloe Death Negronis.

The specialty cocktail of the evening, a Sloe Death Negroni, courtesy of our beverage partners at Sipsmith London. Verdict? Absolutely to die for.

Our effervescent executive director Halimah Marcus revealing the winners of the raffle! Eight lucky devils took home coveted tote bags brimming with goodies from Alamo Drafthouse, Quirk Books, Catland, GrubStreet, Out of Print Tees, and The Nib. Prizes included movie tickets, enviable Poe accessories, and tarot cards.

Catherine LaSota of the LIC Reading Series and Andrew Lloyd-Jones of Liars’ League NYC flaunt their panache and valor like bona fide superheroes.

While the bartender brews bewitching concoctions behind them, Evan Ratliff of The Atavist and Samantha Henig of New York Times audio say, “Cheese and Die!” a la R.L. Stine. Samantha, please, the people must know, when will the next season of “Still Processing” premiere? We’re on the edge of our tombstones over here.

Helen Rosner of The New Yorker and Tim Willenken dazzled, all smiles and phantasmagoria, in the crepuscular half-light.

Oh, and about the disagreement earlier — do not fear! Scott and Jason seem to have made up after their riveting debate. I imagine they found common ground in the James Baldwin/Barry Jenkins intergenerational collab. Now that’s a creative duo nobody can shudder at.

Best Dressed/Best Deathed

Some guests flashed their A-game attire to ward off evil demons. Here are some of our favorite lewks of the night.

All guests were issued a mask with ticket, but some people brought their own from home or, uh, sometimes from other events. Here, Emma Story rocks a bedazzled Sleep No More mask.

Hannah Tinti slays in a scarlet kimono replete with skulls and roses beside Libby Flores, who floors onlookers in a lacy corset.

Ask Jaya Saxena about the fringe benefits of being an Electric Lit contributor (sorry).

Electric Lit contributor Monique Laban rocks a fierce face veil (that is also an homage to Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer album cover).

We can’t believe Ariana Grande came to our little party! Bunnies get one negroni per ear, sorry, we don’t make the rules.

The dazzling Nina St. Pierre beams beneath this ornate headpiece.

Posthumous Photography

It seems there were equal parts tricks and treats in the photo booth.

Paul W. Morris and Libby Flores find glee amid the spine-chilling solemnity.

A beguiling coven! (From top left: Deirdre Coyle, Michael Seidlinger, Cecilia Corrigan, Megan DelBianco, Rae DelBianco, John Maher, Angeline Rodriguez, and Tiffany Kelly)

Amy Brill, Catherine LaSota, Yorick, and Marie Helene Bertino pucker up with a duo of dapper ravens.

Lit Hub makes an appearance. So does Didion; she always seems to sneak her way into spaces without announcing her presence.

Electric Lit’s resident astrologer Jeanna Kadlec (far right) along with (from left) Lilly Dancyger, EL contributor Deena ElGenaidi, and Nina St. Pierre.

EL movie columnist Manuel Betancourt (top), his husband, and their human son.

Electric Literature interns Frances Yackel and Hannah Seidlitz just really love their job.

The People Who Made It Possible

Thanks to our partners at Knopf and Grove and our friends at FSG and Catapult for stocking our book table with such a wonderful assortment of literary gems. Hope you snagged copies of your favorites from Tommy Orange, Eileen Myles, Ling Ma, and many more.

The whole Electric Literature team (top from left: executive director Halimah Marcus, associate editors Jo Lou and Erin Bartnett, marketing and membership manager Cristina Marcelo; bottom from left, editor-in-chief Jess Zimmerman, social media editor Brittany Allen, contributing editor Jenn Baker) had a ball, and adopted two new feathered friends! Edgar and… Allen.

Thank you to our sponsors and attendees for supporting us in our endeavor to make literature more exciting, relevant, and inclusive. We hope to see you next year!

To see all the photos from the evening, check out the full albums from Andrew Janke and the photo booth.

LaserDiscs Are Dying—Here’s Why That Matters

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The glue used to bind LaserDiscs is breaking down. Years of improper storage and neglect, shuttered away in dark, damp garages — LaserDiscs are falling apart because we forgot about them. DVDs were smaller, cheaper. The quality is poorer but they were new, so we chose them over their bigger, clunkier forefathers. And then we made film so small that we didn’t have to carry it around at all, except for in our iPods and tablets. But the films that exist on LaserDiscs don’t exist anywhere else. The Blockbuster Video in Bend, Oregon is the last of its kind, and the glue used to bind LaserDiscs is breaking down.

What do we lose when we lose these physical media? Well, for starters, we often lose the content itself. This year, an Apple user complained to the company when a digital film they’d purchased suddenly and without warning disappeared from their library. Apple’s response: If the owner of those films (i.e. the distributor) decides to pull those films from digital circulation, you’re screwed. But more than that, we lose a connection to the past. That past isn’t always flattering — many LaserDiscs bear witness to an even less enlightened era of Hollywood — but it shouldn’t be allowed to disappear without even a scar.

What do we lose when we lose these physical media? We lose a connection to the past.

Sometimes physical media comes back from the brink. Remember when vinyl records came back into vogue in the mid-2000s, and suddenly everyone you knew was running out to buy brand-new record players? Crates of discount records popped up on sidewalks, new bands started releasing music on vinyl. And it hasn’t slowed down a bit — there’s National Record Store day, when you can find special edition vinyl from your favorite bands, and kitschy home decor made from records (bowls, coasters, etc.) is all the rage. Vinyl records are relics that made a successful comeback.

LaserDiscs haven’t had the same luck. It’s not surprising: big, heavy, fragile and expensive, this pre-DVD home media format wasn’t the most convenient way to buy and watch movies. They made their debut in 1978 (with Jaws) and stopped production in 2000 (with Bringing Out the Dead); in those 22 years, some of the best films in Western cinema were released on LaserDisc. Criterion Collection, the curated set of Very Important Movies that lines every film buff’s shelves, got its start releasing special editions of classic films on LaserDisc. But aside from some very enthusiastic corners of Reddit and your occasional suburban yard sale, there aren’t many places you can go to find, or even talk about, LaserDiscs. The idea that there are people who dedicate their careers, much less their free time, to preserving LaserDiscs is a surprising one. But film preservationists are a passionate group, and LaserDisc preservation is a small, but vitally important, facet of the larger drive to keep film history alive.

For a year and half of my life, I got to tell people I was a LaserDisc archivist. I spent a few hours every day (and full summer weeks) in my university’s film library, watching hours of film on LaserDisc, taking meticulous notes, and making a passionate plea to the administrators that preserving LaserDiscs was worth our funding. I talked to guys named Phil and Roger on the internet who could tell me literally anything I wanted to know about LaserDiscs: when a version of a film was released on LaserDisc, what type of glue the company used to seal it (which ended up being extremely important), and the precise minute mark where I could find a scene that never made it onto later DVD releases. I worked in a film library throughout grad school, so I spent most of my time prior to working on the special LaserDisc archival project watching movies and thinking about movies; I watched films all day long because it was my job, but the thrill of cracking open the plastic shell case of a LaserDisc, skimming the liner notes, and pushing play on the cartoonishly large remote made me feel like I was experiencing something different from my other library projects. They were the same films I could find streaming or on DVD, but on LaserDisc they felt like unearthed treasures that I had personally rediscovered.

At 25, I became extremely passionate about LaserDiscs. They are, along with my nostalgia for video rental stores and love of libraries, the foundation of my pro-physical media stance. Holding the LaserDisc cases in my hands reminded me how it felt to open a brand new CD and thumb through the booklet, feeling how fragile the disc was in my hands. Sure, I could copy the album to my iTunes library where it would, supposedly, stay forever. But the CD had mortality; the CD would scratch, break and warp. In the digital age these are drawbacks, but to me they’re an odd sort of comfort.

I’m in no way knocking the convenience and, for some, necessity of digital media. Kindles are great! Streaming movies is great! E-readers and streaming services have made books and film more accessible in a variety of ways. Digital media is just as useful as physical media, and I don’t think you have to disavow one to hold up the other.

But when we forsake the physical, we also lose a sense of history. Did you know that there are versions of films that were released on LaserDisc that don’t exist (in an official capacity) on DVD or through any streaming service? For example, The Alamo, with John Wayne, was released as a special edition LaserDisc with an hour of extended scenes, scenes that never made it to DVD. There are other films that had scenes purposefully repressed: Disney was particularly known for doing this. The Toy Story LaserDisc had a short Pixar film included on it that depicted a snowman ogling a very generously proportioned mermaid. The world is not hurting for overly-sexualized mermaids, but for the sake of film history, repression is always worth pushing back against.

The world is not hurting for overly-sexualized mermaids, but for the sake of film history, repression is always worth pushing back against.

Other LaserDiscs that were near and dear to my heart: Greed, an extremely rare, out-of-print silent film from 1924 that depicts the poignant collapse of one family as they grapple with suddenly becoming very poor after winning the lottery. The Magnificent Ambersons, directed and produced by Orson Welles, was released beautifully on LaserDisc by Criterion, and has since only been released on DVD once, with abysmal quality. And the original 1933 King Kong LaserDisc features the first ever film commentary, which was called an “audio essay” at the time. The commentary is slow and literary in a way that film commentary never is anymore, and it’s never been re-released.

Nostalgia has fueled a lot of comebacks. The return of vinyl was a worthwhile one: records produce a better sound, feel better and look great on our shelves. Less worthy comebacks have been made: I hear bands are releasing albums on cassette tape again. I hope that nostalgia uncovers LaserDiscs. I hope you all read my impassioned plea, and start searching garage sales, junk shops and eBay for some of the last remaining functional LaserDisc players. But I’d like to make an argument for a comeback that has nothing to do with nostalgia. After all, I have no nostalgia for LaserDiscs, whose heyday preceded my birth. I’m making a broader argument for saving physical media, spending the money it takes to preserve it. One of my favorite parts of being an archivist was getting to crack open the thick plastic of a LaserDisc case and open the book that always came with them, filled with behind-the-scenes photos, interviews with actors or just a few blurbs about the film’s release. LaserDisc packaging was less commercial than DVD packaging; it always read like a labor of love. There’s a joy in touch, a pleasure in the texture of a physical art object. The LaserDisc didn’t just hold the film, it was created for it; intentional. Designed to bring something to the viewer that they could only experience with that LaserDisc, that commentary, that blurb. It was a total package, a wonder of text, image and sound.

The glue used to bind LaserDiscs is breaking down, but they can’t disappear. Disney and James Bond and whoever else can try to pretend that a movie didn’t feature outrageously large mermaid breasts or outright misogyny, but the LaserDisc is a witness. And I think we lose a lot when we let them collect dust or, worse, fall apart. It’s our responsibility to preserve them, whether that means convincing library powers-who-be to archive them or starting collections of our own. Buying books, going to the library (did you know the books are just, like, free there?), buying movies on DVD instead of paying the (exact same?!) price to rent them digitally whenever you’re able. Physical media is worth our time because it witnesses our history. Preserving it keeps that history alive. I would love to see the day when filmmakers advocate for LaserDisc releases the way that bands have with vinyl. I won’t hold my breath. In the meantime, I spend my weekends hunting down players on eBay, scanning garage sales for discs and hoping I can do my small part.

A Reading List of Books Published Posthumously

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Time is the inevitable foil of literary endeavors — or so it seems. An author’s mortality doesn’t necessarily impede a manuscript’s publication or posthumous literary fame. This reading list celebrates writers who got their best-known or most notable work out in the world once they themselves have passed away, in some cases, decades after their last breath. For various reasons, including infirmity, a hostile government, or straightforward rejection of a previously unpublished writer, these books didn’t make it to print in their author’s lifetimes, but instead achieved success in their afterlives.

Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston referenced Cudjo Lewis/Oluale Kossula, the last living person to be enslaved and trafficked from Africa to America, in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road. But aside from that tantalizing mention, the shattering story — and Hurston’s manuscript based on interviews with Lewis remained locked away. Hurston apparently refused to adapt his dialect — from which the entire brutal story of his theft, and subsequent life and isolation in the New World is told — to standard English. That’s one story of the belated publication. Another is that Hurston may have been less enthusiastic about the project and/or was dodging her white benefactress Charlotte Osgood Mason, according to this theory. Whatever the reality of the book’s 60-plus-year journey to publication, its power as a document of American history is undeniable.

'Barracoon' Went Unpublished for 87 Years Because Zora Neale Hurston Wouldn't Compromise

The Caregiver by Samuel Park

Samuel Park was born in Brazil to Korean immigrant parents and moved to California at age 14. He wrote The Caregiver while undergoing chemotherapy for late-stage stomach cancer and passed away before the novel’s publication. The caregiver in his novel is an undocumented Brazilian immigrant, Mara, who looks after Kathryn, a 40-something white woman who’s lived in Bel Air all her life and is dying of stomach cancer. Shifting between Los Angeles and Copacabana, the book turns over mortality, mothers, and mothering.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Mikhail Bulgakov wrote The Master and Margarita knowing full well it would not be published in his own (Stalinist) times. The novel was finally serialized in a magazine with some censorship 26 years after Bulgakov’s death. For me, The Master and Margarita is the best example of the novel as a full sensory literary flight. We move between Devil, who’s quite the shape-shifting looker (“his green left eye was utterly insane, and his right eye was empty, black, and dead”) arriving with a coterie that includes a hind leg-walking, vodka-loving cat in 1930s Moscow, where God and the Devil do not exist. Subsequently backwards to a headache-ridden Pontius Pilate on the eve of Jesus’ crucifixion in Jerusalem. Both the Devil and Jesus are mind readers. Oh yes, then there is a literary editor who refuses to believe the Devil’s prediction of his imminent decapitation, a frustrated poet called “Homeless,” and the mysterious “Master,” who has written a novel about Pontius Pilate. The novel has a giggle at the expense of the Russian literary scene via its depiction of the official writers’ union but also nods to tradition. Its epigraph comes from Goethe’s Faust. Bulgakov also drops lines from Pushkin’s poetry and has an opera of Eugene Onegin blasting. Plus, there’s an abundance of Tolstoy blouses, and the Oblonskys from Anna Karenina are referenced by one of the Devil’s cohorts. In our era of disbelief, global fake news, and Putin’s Russia, Bulgakov’s satire feels as crisp as ever.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

Perhaps the world’s most read (and especially tragic) posthumous book, The Diary of a Young Girl was published in Dutch in 1947, two years after Anne Frank perished from typhus in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Anne’s letters to her diary’s persona “Kitty” are filled with adorable observations and side-eyes such as “she’s perfectly sweet and perfectly boring” about a love rival. Her diary becomes increasingly somber as they prepare for their lives in the shadow and endure World War II hidden inside for two years. At a time when Nazi blustering is on the rise, we should all be re-reading Frank’s words.

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

It’s never too late for a literary debut. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, the last in a line of Sicilian princes, had his debut novel rejected twice. In 1957, couple of years after his death, The Leopard was published to great acclaim and is now considered an essential work of Italian literature. It’s one of those novels that readers are breathless about for good reason. Set in Sicily during the Risorgimento (the unification period of Kingdom of Italy, 1815–1871), The Leopard charts the crumbling of the provincial aristocracy and is based on Lampedusa’s ancestor. The island pulses decadence while its characters and status quo structures struggle with changing times. An alluring canine character/symbol, Bendicò, a Great Dane, features. The Leopard is an excellent primer on the formation of modern Italy.

A Death in the Family by James Agee

James Agee is most known for his nonfiction work with photographer Walker Evans on lives of Alabama sharecroppers Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In 1958, two years after his passing, Agee won the Pulitzer for A Death in the Family. The novel is based on the death of Agee’s father. It’s impossible not to be reeled in by the its first line: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee, in that time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.” It continues to follow the young Rufus through the untimely death of his father in a car accident, and its aftermath for the family’s members. Agee’s rendition of Rufus’s grasp of the death and how he processes adult conversations filled with words yet to be understood is both heartbreaking and magnificent.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley)

Nine months after he was assassinated in February 1965, Malcolm X’s only book, a collaboration with pre-Roots Alex Haley, was published. According to Manning Marable’s Malcolm X: A Reinvention of a Life, X believed that it would be miracle if he were still alive when the book was published. Haley finished the book after X’s death. Marable’s biography suggests diversions between the intents of the two men — Haley being a liberal republican. Regardless, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is an intense and all-engaging read. The book begins with his mother, with X in utero, answering the door when a gang of KKK members call to threaten the family. The book, which led to Spike Lee’s film starring Denzel Washington and the solidification of X’s global iconography, provokes more after the revelations of Marable’s biography. Incidentally, Marable, a Columbia University historian, died days before the pub date of the biography, which won the 2012 non-fiction Pulitzer.

The Golden Ratio of Sexism in Children’s Literature

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M y fourth-grade fantasy was to have five older brothers and one twin brother; in reality, I had two little sisters. Sometimes in public I would slur my sister Debbie’s name so it sounded like “Danny.” Boys got to have more adventures and therefore more fun; pretending to have a brother was the closest I could get to both.

Having read many books for kids over the years with my now-teenaged daughter and son, I see that a similar belief about the relative potential for girls and boys to have adventures still holds true in children’s literature, regardless of strides made in the nonfictional world. While awareness of gender gaps is nothing new, I want to talk specifically about an issue in children’s chapter books I’ll call “the golden gender ratio.” Hearkening back to the ancient Greeks, the golden ratio is a mathematical relation deemed pleasing in art, architecture, and design. When a line is divided into two parts in the proportions of this ratio, the length of the longer segment divided by the length of the shorter segment is equal to the length of the whole line divided by the length of the longer segment, a ratio of approximately 1.618:1. Classic examples can be found in the layout of the Parthenon and Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

Applying the ratio to middle grade children’s literature, we derive the following formula: For every smart/brave/adventurous fictional heroine, the author must supply 1.618 boys.

Applying the ratio to middle grade children’s literature, we derive the following formula: For every smart/brave/adventurous fictional heroine, the author must supply 1.618 boys. Rounding to the nearest whole number for human purposes, we see that adventurous trios must be 2:1 male: female. Or, to retain our original mathematical precision, novels for children must contain one smart/brave/adventurous girl, one smart/brave/adventurous boy, and one somewhat lacking boy, i.e., 1.618 boys.

While this pronouncement is based on the books brought home for and by my own two kids, an admittedly small and idiosyncratic sample, it was validated by a recent analysis of the hundred most popular children’s picture books of 2017, which revealed gender disparities along similar lines. Reporting on research conducted by the Observer newspaper and Nielsen market research company, Donna Ferguson notes in The Guardian that main characters with speaking parts were twice as likely to be male, and, “on average, there were three male characters present in each story for every two females featured.”

The article goes on to quote a picture book publisher as saying, “If anybody wanted to put a weak girl in one of our books, I’d whack them over the head.” The problem, however, is not that girls are portrayed as weak — in fact, the opposite is often true — but rather that they are not portrayed enough. The example given of “new titles which break with tradition” serves only to underscore this fact: Julia Donaldson’s The Detective Dog, 2017’s bestselling picture book, features “a brave female dog [who] helps out a male sidekick and a male teacher.”

The problem is not that girls are portrayed as weak — in fact, the opposite is often true — but rather that they are not portrayed enough.

Of course, not every recent popular adventure series for kids follows the male to female golden ratio (Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events series and Michael Buckley’s The Sisters Grimm series both feature two girls and a boy) but focusing more on girls is unusual enough that authors who do so, at least male authors, will be asked about it. Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket’s given name) says in his essay, “The Righteous Anger of Girls,” that he writes more often about girls intentionally, because girls face more obstacles, which inherently makes a story more interesting. He writes, “A man walking alone down a road at night may or may not be a good story; turn him into a 12-year-old girl, and it’s already gripping.” Buckley, on the other hand, said in an interview that he is “often called a writer for girls” despite considering himself “a writer for kids — boys and girls.” Even so, he notes that “hands down,” his boy character, the fairy Puck in human form, is “the most popular character in the series. I get more fan mail about him than anyone else.” Let’s hope it’s because of Puck’s retractable wings.

The prime example of a series that embodies the golden gender ratio is, yes, Harry Potter. Though it seems unfair to pin the establishment of the literary gender gap on J.K. Rowling, is it plausible that the overwhelming popularity of the Harry Potter books set the ratio in stone? Or are these books merely emblematic of a larger, preexisting cultural bias?

In the Harry Potter series and subsequent books featuring adventurous trios, if the alpha male is masterful in some traditionally male way — for example, in terms of bravery or skill in battle, as is Harry — then the second boy should be less so, as is Ron. In other words, one of the two main male characters should have qualities traditionally associated with the feminine, perhaps to soften or camouflage the overtly unequal nature of the ratio — and, according to my theory, to make the ratio more approximately approach 1.618:1. For example, in Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, Grover, a sensitive satyr, establishes, of all things, an “empathy link” with the protagonist, Percy Jackson. (What could feminize/reduce someone to .618 of a boy more than that?) Grover also cries and stress eats and is less brave than both Percy and Annabeth, who happens to be the demigod daughter of Athena and thus exceptionally smart and skilled in battle. Likewise, in Nicholas Gannon’s The Doldrums, Adélaïde is the boldest of the three main characters, the most embracing of adventure; Archer, descendant of explorers on his father’s side, is also brave, though limited in what he can actually do by his overprotective mother; and Oliver, Boy Number Two, is simply afraid.

An astute reader might reasonably wonder: What is the role of the smart, brave girls in these books? Often the girl’s strengths are somehow distinct from the boys’ and thus vital for the team to be able to embark on their adventures at all — and ultimately to succeed — but Boy Number One is nevertheless the protagonist, the one for whom the outcome of the trio’s quest matters most. Archer, Adélaïde, and Oliver plan to rescue Archer’s grandparents from an iceberg (though .618 Oliver isn’t so sure). Brave, smart Annabeth nurses Percy back to health both before and after the trio’s quest — that is, Percy’s quest — to retrieve Zeus’s stolen lighting bolt and prevent a war between Zeus and Poseidon, Percy’s father. Before they set off, Annabeth tells Percy, “I’ve been waiting a long time for a quest, seaweed brain… If you’re going to save the world, I’m the best person to keep you from messing up.” Is the girl character merely the strong woman behind the successful man — the child version of putting one’s husband through dental school? Are the girl lead characters mostly there to support the boys in having their personal growth/epiphany so their manly courage can finally be revealed?

Is the girl character merely the strong woman behind the successful man — the child version of putting one’s husband through dental school?

Kate, the female lead character in Trenton Lee Stewart’s The Mysterious Benedict Society, consistently leads the way in all things physical and daring, but toward the end of the book the author points to how well the boys, Reynie and Sticky, are coming along. When Kate is captured by the evil Executives, her physical strength and combat know-how can no longer save her or the team; meanwhile, up in a tower with the main villain, “despite his terror, in the face of the Whisperer’s irresistible power, Sticky had resisted with all his might. He would never have done that if not for Reynie’s urging.”

Here we approach an interesting divide, wherein some female lead characters are both smart and brave (such as Adélaïde and Annabeth), while others are allowed to be smart and brave but not the best at both, in the way that Hermione is smarter than Harry but less skilled in battle, as if to ensure the girl’s magnificence approaches but never surpasses the lead boy’s magnificence. For example, Kate is by far the bravest, strongest, and most physically adept of the main trio of older kids, but she is by no means as brainy as Reynie and Sticky. (A fourth child, a toddler girl, seems mostly extraneous until the end, though she goes on to play a key role in subsequent books.)

And yet, despite his allotted magnificence Boy Number One often has some kind of deep-seated wound he battles internally in addition to the external menace the trio is battling. Most of these characters, girls and boys alike, have been orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise failed by their parents, and though the lead girl has often also endured hardship, the emotional impact of the lead boy’s ongoing struggles tends to trump hers. The aforementioned picture book publisher’s threat to whack creators of weak girls on the head notwithstanding, a de facto ban on weak girls in children’s books has resulted, however unintentionally, in a narrowing of possibilities and emotional development available to girls.

A de facto ban on weak girls in children’s books has resulted in a narrowing of possibilities and emotional development available to girls.

If girl characters must now be smart and brave and skilled, if they must start out strong and remain strong, then they are allowed only the slimmest of margins for personal growth, the traditional raison d’être of character-based literature. M.K., the little sister in S.S. Taylor’s The Expeditioners series, is not only “one of the best inventors of the New Modern Age,” according to the three siblings’ late father, but bold enough to bean two menacing government agents on the head with a wrench, thus instigating the trio’s escape into adventure. How could such a brilliant, badass ten-year-old possibly improve from there? Though boys in real life may have limited opportunities to explore and express emotions, boy characters, on the other hand, regardless of their strengths at the outset, seem to have more opportunities to grow and change than do girl characters.

A difference between books for middle-grade readers and young adult novels is the sex — which translates, as far as the golden gender ratio is concerned, into the two boys having sex and the girl feeling left out. In a non-representative sample of YA novels — ones my daughter liked enough for me to want to read — we see some interesting twists. In Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle, for example, the 2:1 ratio allows the main male protagonist to have sex with both his girlfriend and his male best friend when they’re trying to survive the imminent end of the world. (He does feel bad about this, though not quite bad enough to stop.) In Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You the Sun, a twin sister and brother both secretly like the same boy, their new next-door neighbor. He — spoiler alert — eventually reveals he is gay and therefore, at different stages of the book, appears to be a possible romantic partner for both twins.

So, where are the lesbians? That gay characters for teen readers seem to be predominantly male (my daughter also recommended Bill Konigsberg’s Openly Straight) appears to be another corollary of the golden gender ratio’s tacit notion that teens as well as younger children are more inclined to read about boys. Theories abound as to why teen girls enjoy reading about gay male characters, including that gay boys are seen as more sensitive and less threatening than heterosexual boys — like a boy but also like a girl’s best friend, somewhere between a girl and a boy — perhaps, dare I say, .618 of a boy.

I repeat, a little louder this time, where are the lesbians?

So, I repeat, a little louder this time, where are the lesbians? To find them I turned to the internet, which offered up lists of books with lesbian and bi characters — though obviously the need for such lists highlights the problem — which led me to more questions. Why do so many of the lesbian or bi characters have male-leaning or gender-neutral names (Cameron, Colby, Charlie, Taylor, Alex, Trout, Jamie, Louie)? Is this reflective of real life, or yet another nuance of the golden gender ratio, even in books clearly marketed to girls?

I often think about how we are teaching children to see the world. Back in second grade I remember being shocked when my teacher explained to the class that we must use the pronoun “he” if a group contained even a single boy. (Even when you had one hundred girls and one boy? Yes.) Only recently, in an era in which what pronoun to use is surfacing as a significant identity issue, has the “singular they” been finally ruled a legitimate replacement for yesteryear’s “he.” Even so, apart from biologists and entomologists, well-meaning people routinely refer to insects and amphibians and hermaphroditic sea slugs as “he” — “he” in our culture and language representing the default — particularly when simplifying the world for young children.

The golden gender ratio raises an important question: To what extent do girls count? It’s accepted that girls will read novels about boys but boys won’t read novels about girls. But why is this the case, and why do we think that’s okay? And is it also the case that by the time they reach high school many boys won’t read fiction at all, becoming less willing to enter the realm of the imagination and emotions — and so authors and publishers are merely doing whatever they can to lure them in earlier? A high school English teacher friend tells me most of her classroom sets of books focus on males, such as Lord of the Flies, one of her least favorite books. Maybe the problem, she says, is that adults (publishers, teachers, parents) choose books they think “everyone” will enjoy.

To what extent do girls count? It’s accepted that girls will read novels about boys but boys won’t read novels about girls. Why do we think that’s okay?

Back in second grade I came to recognize that though girls could wear both dresses and pants, the notion that girls had more choices was a hollow one — who wanted to wear dresses? Likewise, I see now that the current crop of over-the-top fearless genius girl characters represents an improvement and yet only partly so; options for girl characters — and the concomitant options that readers see for real girls — need to widen still further. The current choices seem to be either being invincible or not existing at all. While one might wish for the arts to lead the way to a more egalitarian future, that mission has not yet been accomplished for children’s literature. While it’s great that adventure books are now routinely featuring smart, strong, dynamic girls, we’ll know girls have truly achieved parity with boys when they can be not only as strong but as wounded and vulnerable — and more to the point, when they are as numerous, when they abundantly populate books both as leaders and regular kids.

The French Memoir That Convinced Me It Was Okay to Pee on an Angry Bull

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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that almost killed you?

Somehow, Henri Charriere’s memoir Papillon convinced me that it would be a good idea to pee on an angry bull’s nose.

The bull didn’t appreciate it; he knocked me off a fence post, across a deep ditch and onto a gravel road. I don’t think it would have helped if I’d told him that a work of literature made me do it.

Papillon, released in 1970, deals with the author’s 1931 murder conviction and nine subsequent attempts to escape from French colonial prisons. There have been two really popular movie adaptations. The first, featuring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman, appeared soon after the book’s English translation and a second was just released in 2017 with Charlie Hunnam and Rami Malek. I became interested in the story after reading a cartoon satire of the McQueen movie in Mad Magazine.

Charriere’s book is a little like Stephen King’s Shawshank Redemption in that both main characters are wrongfully convicted yet remain philosophical about their brutal punishments. The climactic prison break in each is linked to a calm acceptance of their own anti-social character traits.

The bull didn’t appreciate it. I don’t think it would have helped if I’d told him that a work of literature made me do it.

The French word Papillon means “butterfly” and refers to a large tattoo the narrator has on his chest. In fact, others always refer to him as “Papi” rather than Henri and his character is completely defined by a stubborn desire for freedom (and eventual rebirth — symbolism! — as a responsible citizen.)

Contemporary reviews praised the main character’s spiritual strength, but as a young reader I didn’t care about that. I was entranced by Papi’s physical survival, and adopted the book as an ersatz Boy Scout Manual full of practical advice that could be applied in life-crises that Baden Powell was unlikely to have imagined.

For example, one of the convicts, Julot, avoids transport to the horrible island prison compounds of French Guiana by injuring himself so he will be confined to an infirmary on the mainland. He deeply slashes his knee then pretend-stumbles down the ship’s gangplank. He is happily stretchered away, and later drags a urine-soaked hair through the cut so it will go bad and prolong his stay at the hospital. The anecdote contained just the right amount of grotesque detail to convince me it was true: the hair had to be “dragged” through the wound to ensure a deep-seated infection, you couldn’t just splash warm pee all over the surface of the joint. I was firmly convinced that if ever I found myself in a similar situation I would be well-advised to follow Julot’s recipe exactly.

Similarly, if you are escaping from Devil’s Island on a raft constructed from bags of coconuts, you have to chart the pattern of swells and wait for the seventh wave to carry you safely past the breakers and out to sea. Jumping into the surf too early will just result in being washed back against the rocks. If you are hiding out in the jungle, trying to set the broken leg of one of your fellow escapees, you must pull on his foot until he feels the bones are in the correct place, then apply sticks for splints; you can’t just immediately wrap the injury. If you secrete two metal “chargers” full of money in your rectum, they will always come out deepest first, the opposite order that you might reasonably expect. In a barren cell, you can duplicate the hallucinatory effects of drugs by laying a blanket across your mouth inducing a mild form of oxygen deprivation.

Those little factoids seemed like gold nuggets in the stream bed of the main narrative. The odd, parenthetical inclusions were proof that the memoir was true, because who could make that up? Who would even try?

In retrospect, however, all of the eccentric details in Papillon that I found so convincing could just as easily be interpreted as suspicious embellishments. Julot, in particular, should have been able to count on the filthiness of his environment to infect his knee; artificially introducing germs into the cut with a pee-soaked hair was an unnecessary flirtation with death or clumsy amputation.

At first reading, however, I was simply happy to glean so much practical knowledge.

The odd, parenthetical inclusions were proof that the memoir was true, because who could make that up? Who would even try?

The book also subtly encouraged a cavalier attitude towards one’s own physical well-being that I found strangely appealing. Characters were knocked unconscious by guards without suffering permanent head injuries; they endured years of malnourishment without losing teeth, and wandered through jungles without becoming malarial. Immediately after each failed escape attempt, Papillon shrugged off his additional punishment and started planning the next “cavale.” It wasn’t his unbroken spirit that impressed me, it was his unbroken body.

Papillon reinforces the young-person myth of indestructibility. The philosophy is knitted deeply into every page of the story, but for some reason the incident I chose to mimic was Papillon’s interaction with Brutus the bull.

After several escapes and recaptures, Papillon is transported to a compound on Royale Island. It’s part of the Iles de Salut group that includes Devil’s Island, which was the absolute last stop for incorrigible prisoners. On Royale, the inmates live in barracks rather than conventional barred cells and are allowed work details to break the monotony of incarceration and to contribute to their upkeep. One of Papillon’s jobs is to tend a bull named Brutus, and to get the stubborn animal to haul a thousand-gallon barrel of water up a hill to sluice out the toilets. The animal, he writes, “weighed over four thousand pounds and was a killer.” Papillon has no experience as a herdsman, but he is given the hazardous assignment anyway, and there is no mention of training or even helpful advice. But Papillon forges a successful working relationship with Brutus nevertheless.

It’s still surprising to me that all of Charriere’s bizarre tales of murder, cannibalism and betrayal couldn’t compete for memory space with one off-hand comment about this bull: “I made friends with Brutus at once by pissing on his muzzle: he adored lapping the taste of salt.” I unreservedly accepted the comment as truth. Superficially, it made sense, because I’d already heard about moose and deer being attracted to mineral licks, and even sucking road salt off the margins of highways. And Papillon doesn’t treat the incident like a new discovery; he immediately urinates in the animal’s face with a great deal of confidence, as if the technique is common knowledge. Besides, the incident was inconsequential to the plot of the story and I couldn’t imagine the author lying without an obvious purpose. Thus, I promptly incorporated it into my otherwise meager knowledge about bulls, and was given no reason to doubt it, until the weekend when I attended a friend’s wedding on Vancouver Island.

A group of us was staying for four days on a farm owned by the bride’s parents. It was a beautiful area and invited sight-seeing, so on several occasions I walked down a road that ended with a spectacular view of the ocean. An enormous bull was in a fenced field along this route and the animal followed my progress when I walked by, like a territorial farm dog bounding from one corner of its pasture to the other, snorting and pawing, charging and stopping. I’d never seen a domestic animal like this before. For one thing, he still had his horns, and they were shockingly broad and un-blunted. Secondly, the bull had rippling muscles, as if he had been bench-pressing tractor axles in the exercise yard of a prison farm, not grazing for fourteen hours a day and occasionally inseminating a neighbor’s cow.

The fence containing the beast was solidly built, but really, it was just wire stretched between posts. If the bull really wanted to, he could have pulled the entire contrivance from the ground with a shake of his head. He could have used his horns as needles and knitted a dump truck with the metal threads.

This was a scary animal.

To be honest, I was a little drunk when I experienced the sudden Papillon flashback. But late one night, after a wedding rehearsal party, I decided it would be appropriate to befriend the enormous beast just as Papi had won Brutus over, by peeing on its nose. I wasn’t so inebriated that I considered climbing into the field, but no special effort was necessary to get close to the bull. I just had to stand near the fence and he would appear, howling and vibrating with anger on the other side.

Unfortunately, the animal was as big as a locomotive and there was no chance of hitting my target from ground level. So, I climbed up the network of posts at the very corner of the field. Here, two timbers had been driven into the ground at sharp angles to brace two other uprights and provide solid anchors for the winch that must have mechanically tightened the wire strands.

It was, therefore, a very stable platform.

I levered my drunken body up the fence, using the wires as ladder rungs. I didn’t feel particularly threatened at this point, because the animal’s enormous head-plus-horns simply couldn’t fit into the corner. It doesn’t really make sense, but the beast treated the shiny metal filaments with a lot more respect than they deserved.

I planted my feet on top of the posts, shoulder width apart, and unzipped. The bull was quivering with rage, five or six feet away, with his shoulders at the level of my feet, and his upper lip curled malevolently. I paused for a moment then felt that weird sensation of unleashing a stream of watery beer with uniform mechanical pressure, as if my urinary tract were made of industrial strength valves and conduit rather than scraps of viscera.

I planted my feet on top of the posts and unzipped. The bull was quivering with rage, five or six feet away.

The liquid arced through the moonlight and spattered against the flat oblong expanse of bull-face between eyes and nostrils. It produced the loud, hollow noise of water from a garden hose lashing against a metal garage door.

I sort of expected the bull to tilt his head or extend his tongue, to give some signal that he was savoring the saltiness and confirm the truth of the anecdote in Papillon.

The bull paused, but gave no indication that he was enjoying the cascade. He may have been simply stunned by my foolishness. It was one of those situations where time is oddly distorted, but I imagined a fairly long liquid encounter.

Then the bull charged my fence corner.

His horns raked through the wires as if they were spider webs and his enormous head thumped the timbers right underneath my feet. The impact was stunning and I was thrown backwards a surprising distance, hitting gravel on the other side of a deep ditch. I don’t remember zipping up, or peeing all over myself, but that may be selective.

I do remember being happy that I hadn’t broken any bones, but tremendously disappointed that the book had misled me. For years, I had carried that false scrap of knowledge within me like a time bomb waiting to be detonated by circumstance.

For years, I had carried that false scrap of knowledge within me like a time bomb waiting to be detonated by circumstance.

I was pretty young when I read Papillon, but I knew, deep down, the story shouldn’t be taken literally. Very early in the book, the main character’s impression of Pradel, the prosecutor, is delivered through an imaginary speech: “My hands may not look like talons, but there are claws in my heart that are going to rip you to pieces.” Many of Papillon’s descriptive passages are positively delusional.

But that’s the interesting intersection between literature and young idiots. I let the book influence me, even as I understood that it was untrustworthy.

I now better understand the strong incentive to invent outlandish details like pissing on a bull’s nose and liberally salting them into the narrative. Despite book reviewer’s’ assertions that Papillon’s spirit is indomitable, he often appears disaffected and emotionally flat. Henri Charriere must have sensed it, and overcompensated with a series of those reckless-heroic encounters.

In his first prison escape, Papillon buys a boat from the lepers of Pigeon Island. He meets the leaders of the colony to ask for help and agrees to the three-thousand-franc price tag for a sixteen-foot sloop capable of ocean travel. While they talk, Papillon is given a metal bowl to drink from and happens to notice a finger stuck to it. One of the leaders of the leper colony, La Puce, had lost the digit while passing the container to his visitor.

The threat of infection was terrifying at the time, but Papillon is nonplussed as the body fragment is casually tossed onto the fire. La Puce then announces that he has “dry” leprosy and isn’t contagious, despite his frightening appearance.

Other characters are impressed by Papillon’s calmness. But, to me, his non-response borders on insanity: wouldn’t an emotionally normal person have some reaction to an unexpected severed finger, no matter how non-communicable it was? Offhand comments like the one about peeing on Brutus’s nose are meant to distract attention from that zombie-flatness.

Papillon resonated with me when I was young because of the cartoonish indestructability of the main character: a pretty standard, fragile-male response. Over time, I became fascinated by Papi’s sociopathic disconnect from others — which the publishers mislabeled a triumph of the human spirit.

But I suspect the book’s amazing world-wide popularity is related to the main character’s brand of stoicism. Papi is able to act without agonizing about his choices, and that’s pretty rare in the modern world. He can drink from a cup handed to him by a leper, stab a snitch, or abandon his Columbian wife in the jungle, as if it’s no big deal. Readers, who might struggle with choices on a breakfast menu, can fantasize about a life unburdened with recrimination.

I’ve always had a grudging respect for that species of tough guy — at least until my attempt to experience a bit of their false freedom led me to pee on a bull.

Getting knocked off a fence, however, provided a philosophical adjustment, a reminder that Papillon’s take on the world, while interesting, ultimately isn’t right.

Anne Lamott on How to Hang on to Hope

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If the bleak daily news cycle has you grasping for some comfort, you’re not alone. Google searches for “anxiety symptoms” hit an all-time high in October, according to Google Trends. With the swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and news that climate disaster is closer than we thought, hope may be the farthest idea from our minds.

It’s easy to assume that the only people who possess cheery thoughts like hope are those willfully not paying attention. But as Anne Lamott shows us in her essay collection, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope, faith can exist side-by-side with uncertainty, as humor can with doom.

Purchase the book

Almost Everything, as you might expect from the title, includes a little bit of everything, connected by the central threads of humor and resilience against adversity. The essays in the collection are small morsels, offering tastes of Lamott’s wisdom about enduring themes like faith and family.

The rest of Lamott’s oeuvre spans decades and genres. Her first novel, Hard Laughter, was published in 1980. Since then, Lamott has published 18 books, including novels and essay collections. While her welcoming style often uses wit, she has covered topics, like alcoholism and cancer, that many other writers find difficult to render on the page, much less joke about.

It’s more important than ever to find humor in the darkness. As many of us stand up to resist ingrained systems of oppression, whether in the voting booth or in our daily lives, with each setback, it becomes easier to see the problems of our time as insurmountable. But if we lose hope, we’ll stop fighting, and our struggle will have been for nothing.

Almost Everything offers a dose of levity, but it doesn’t stray from the truth. At a time when many of us, myself included, require that kind of irrepressible wit just to get by, I had the privilege of talking to Lamott about her new book, writing, and staying hopeful in these uncertain times.

Rebecca Renner: Almost Everything is about hope. Recently, with the news about politics and the environment, it has been hard to find many things to be hopeful about. How do you stay hopeful? And how to you keep writing?

Anne Lamott: I get just as freaked out as anyone. I have a 9-year-old grandson who will be 29 at the latest when they say that huge evidence of climate disaster will appear — although it will probably be earlier. And so I grieve. But I also say with confidence that we do what we can. I send people money. I march, I donate, and I try to focus on the solution.

I have a lot of faith in God and in community and in goodness, the incredible goodness of the American people. But I also have a lot of hope in science. People’s response will be profound and astonishing.

I have a lot of faith in God and in community and in goodness, the incredible goodness of the American people. But I also have a lot of hope in science.

RR: Has the grief you mentioned ever stopped you from writing? Have you ever had one of those days where it’s just too much?

AL: Oh sure. Of course. Who hasn’t? But it’s usually because I see the news, and I make up stories that are just catastrophe thinking. I grew up with a lot of anxiety and fear. My parents were unhappy. One of the ways children cope is to do this kind of prophylactic catastrophe thinking, to imagine the worst.

There’s this funny 20 questions, like the 20 questions of alcoholism you’ve probably seen. Now this is the 20 questions of thinking. It says things like: Do you ever think alone? Do you ever lie about your thinking? Has thinking ever kept you from going to work? So I try to separate out what is true, which is to say what is real, what is science, what I can do to help, and what are the stories I’ve just made up that in my childhood seemed to comfort me, paradoxically.

I’m beyond grateful for the huge new energy you see from people in their twenties, which you didn’t see 20 years ago. You know, I felt like women were expecting us old feminists to march for women’s rights and abortion rights, and now people are really involved again. At the marches, it’s half younger people now.

There’s been a generational coming together, and people are pushing up their sleeves and staying informed. That’s all you can do. We stay aware. We do what we can. We show up. You know what? We do what’s possible.

RR: Do you think there is a healing quality to writing? Can writing help us keep moving forward?

AL: Of course it heals the writer to get to take [stories] from their rat exercise wheel of a mind — if they’re anything like me. You get to express it, to take it from terror to creation. If I write something and give it to you today — and it helps you feel less freaked out or impotent — and you give it to five of your friends, and they pass it on. That’s the way truth and hope spread — it’s quantum. Stories are what save us. They always have been.

Stories are what save us.

RR: I’m interested in how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves shape our lives, and I think that is one of the themes of your collection. So let me get really philosophical with you: how much do you think we’re in control of our own narratives/our lives?

AL: In my own case, I began making up stories about myself to explain why my parents were so unhappy with each other. In the story children tell, it must be them. They must be causing some of the unhappiness between their parents, because otherwise you have zero control. And so you start to tell yourself a story about how you’re defective or annoying. And that explains it. That explains that the chill in the air at dining room table, and that gives you control, because then you can try to fix yourself — which is not possible — or you can try to be less annoying and more adorable and charming. So we develop the skills of people pleasing.

If you grew up in an alcoholic or addictive family or a family with mental illness, just about the first thing you agree to is not to see what’s going on. If you see it, it makes them so mad, and they tell you you’re imagining things. So you need to stop seeing what’s there. Part of the great healing of writing is to realize that what you see is going on, and what you see is true, and you’re a reliable narrator.

I think as powerless, really frightened little children — as most of the people I’m close to were, holding your breath and walking on eggshells, hoping dad isn’t drunk or that mom pulls it together and doesn’t have to go back to the doctor — we lose the most essential trust we can have, which is in ourselves. Writing — which takes tremendous trust and faking it, shitty first drafts, and rewrites and asking for way more help than your parents or the culture ever told you you deserved — is the way. Asking for help is the way we develop trust in ourselves. Writing really terrible first drafts is how we develop trust in our writing.

RR: Talk to me about your techniques for writing humor, especially when you’re writing about difficult subjects.

AL: I seem to trust that somehow my voice is helpful or comforting to a number of readers. My first novel was called Hard Laughter. It came out when I was 26. It was about my father’s brain cancer. We knew he wasn’t going to recover from it because it was a metastasized melanoma. I wrote the novel as a kind of love letter to my father, knowing he wasn’t going to live. He actually lived long enough to read it and to know that it was going to be published by Viking, so it was kind of a miracle. It was called Hard Laughter because it’s really, really hard to laugh when you feel that it’s like the end of the world, which it was. I was young. I was 23 when my dad got sick. It’s the same feeling as when we got the climate news on Monday. It just feels like the end of the world, and it’s really hard to laugh.

You can do the fake laugh so that people won’t think you’re a buzzkill, or you can stay in the truth and in the sharing of the bad news, the brain cancer or the climate change, and you and your friends will just start laughing. There’s a lot of laughter in doom. I’ve always said laughter is carbonated holiness, and it really is a spiritual experience when we can laugh. It breaks our shells, and then stuff gets in, breath gets in, light gets in, nourishment gets in.

You discover really by 20 what resonates for you, what you long to come upon, what voice, what material, what tone. You love, say, historical novels, you just get so lost in them. And in reading and in writing, that’s how we get found, by getting lost in the story.

I’ve always said to my writing students: Write what you’d like to come upon.

And that’s what I have always done. When I wrote Hard Laughter in the 70s, there was not a word on a family coming through cancer that wasn’t a tragedy. For our family it was a tragedy, but also we laughed, and we found a lot of comfort in sticking together. And I thought, God, I’d love to come upon something like that, a real family, not a Hallmark family.

So write what you’d like to come upon, because finding what you want to come upon is like finding your soul.

RR: One of the things that strikes me most about your writing is that you can make the intangible tangible. How do you write about abstract concepts we cannot see?

AL: If you showed me a paragraph you love that I’ve written, I can tell you the first draft looked like I was trying too hard, or it was full of clichés.

There’s a lot in Almost Everything about being able to give up identities, like the identity as the family flight attendant or the family diplomat. That’s really hard to write about without it seeming like a self-help book.

I always have a pen. That’s the secret to my writing. I always have a pen with me. All my blue jeans have a little ink stain in the back pocket. If I can’t find paper, I can write on my arms and hands and transcribe it later.

I might say to my partner, Neal, ‘Talk to me about how you’ve jiggled free from some of those early identities.’ He’ll start talking, and all of a sudden, I’ll go, ‘Don’t say anymore!’ Then I’ll scribble that down.

But I write lots and lots of drafts. Anything you like began as a shitty first draft. And the same thing can be said for any other writer you love. I hate criticism, hate it, but I’m so grateful for good feedback. I’m so grateful for editors, copy editors, and friends.

When I was coming up as a writer in the 70s and 80s before we had computers, when Correcto Tape was a huge breakthrough or Liquid Paper, people would talk about putting your work through the typewriter again. That meant you pushed back your sleeves, and you wrote one more draft, and you got really tough with yourself. You went through it paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence. A lot of it you could leave, but some of it you couldn’t — just like real life.

RR: What stories have you been reading and sharing? What is giving you hope?

AL: I loved Dopesick by Beth Macy. It reads like fiction in the sense that she’s such a good writer. It’s about the addicts and the parents and the towns affected by the opioid epidemic. But it’s also about the pharmaceutical companies’ complacency in creating the epidemic and the solutions that are working here and there, which is all we ever have.

I just read a book I really loved, a novel called The Devoted by Blair Hurley. I love books on faith, and this is from a Buddhist perspective. It’s about a very committed young woman going up the ranks at a zendo in Boston. It has everything I like to read about: devastation and finding your way home. It’s about the crumbs that lead us back to the past. She’s the kind of writer — I know you know this feeling — that makes you so jealous that you know you can’t write like that, you can’t think of those images, but you’re so grateful to read them. Because they’re mesmerizing, and they give you hope. Great writing gives you hope.