The eleven stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are as acute as fiction can get. They are knife-sharp, almost unbearably precise. Each one bounces from the mundane to the surreal, the satirical to the sincere. Most often, Yukiko Motoya aims her leveling gaze at sexism in contemporary Japanese society, reserving her strangest fates for men who underestimate the women in their lives. In the world of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, there is no greater cosmic crime than devaluing a woman’s intelligence.
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Motoya tends to begin stories with women who devalue their own intelligence. No wonder, when they find themselves “confused, stifled, [and] misunderstood,” as the book’s translator Asa Yoneda put it. To her, the protagonists’ silences are “proposed as sites of failure — moments where they fail to understand the situation, to express themselves, to perform socially, to connect with others.” The collections’ greatest victories are the moments when characters first express themselves fully. Mostly, this takes place inside a relationship or marriage, and each every time, it involves an enormous struggle. Sometimes there’s a physical battle, a chase scene, a metamorphosis. Bodies twist, transform, explode with the need to be seen.
Yukiko Motoya aims her leveling gaze at sexism in contemporary Japanese society, reserving her strangest fates for men who underestimate the women in their lives.
Not all of Motoya’s shape-shifting happens through magic, though. In the title story, the narrator takes up bodybuilding. Her overworked husband fails to notice, though her “chest felt so solid it was as though there was a metal plate under my skin, [and] my arms looked huge enough to snap a log in half.” She’s happy at work, where her co-workers are supportive of her transformation, but the silence in her marriage grows unendurable, as agonizing for the reader as for the bodybuilder herself.
Other transformations, though, are solidly surreal. A saleswoman in a high-end boutique struggles to satisfy a customer who she’s never seen, but who she slowly comes to understand isn’t human. A woman named Tomoko tries to justify her choice to marry a man made of straw — “yes, that straw, stalks of dried rice or wheat, plant matter used as fodder for farm animals, or for their bedding — tied into bundles and rolled into a human shape.” When he gets upset, his straw flies apart, and she has to, quite literally, put her husband back together.
In “An Exotic Marriage,” the collection’s centerpiece, the narrator, Sen, marries a man who refuses to engage with the world. At the story’s beginning, he seems like a garden-variety sexist, informing San that because she’s a housewife, she “can’t understand how men don’t want to have to think about things when we get home.’” Soon, though, San’s problems get far worse. His features begin sliding around on his face, migrating downward, like it’s too much effort for his mouth to stay away from his jawline. Next, he stops going to work, devoting himself instead to cooking fritters for San. Ominously, the more fritters she eats, the more like her husband she becomes. Her features start changing, too. When they have sex, she can’t tell their bodies apart. “You don’t really want to think about anything,” her husband tells her as he force-feeds her, his voice unfamiliar in her ears. “There isn’t really anything you want to talk to me about.” In a scene like that, who cares what the fritters look like?
The translator Asa Yoneda takes a wide view of her art. Yoneda, who specializes in contemporary Japanese fiction and film, has compared translation to sculpture, sight-reading music, and chatting with friends. In a recent email exchange, she likened it to wave physics: “The more firmly I can feel the original [text],” she wrote, “the more amplitude I’m able to transmit through my translation.” More amplitude, in physics, loosely equates to louder sound — and in Yoneda’s translation, the fiction writer and playwright Yukiko Motoya comes through loud and clear.
Yoneda is the first to translate Motoya’s prose into English, which she describes as both “an honor and an adventure.” Motoya is a literary star in Japan: she’s won the Kenzaburo Oe Prize, the Yukio Mishima prize, and, most recently, the Akutagawa Prize, which is Japan’s most prestigious literary award. In awarding Motoya his namesake prize, Oe wrote that she “possesses an acuity in human observation that will be a life’s work, and the prose skill to describe it concisely.”
In the world of The Lonesome Bodybuilder, there is no greater cosmic crime than devaluing a woman’s intelligence.
Pulling off strangeness is a huge challenge, for writer and translator alike. For Yoneda, the straw husbands and alien shoppers meant that the hardest parts of translating The Lonesome Bodybuilder had little to do with “classic translation issues like whether I wanted to translate the meanings of names, what genders to assign to characters, or the exact nature of the ‘fritters’ that play an important and ominous part in ‘An Exotic Marriage.’” Instead, her biggest challenge was to help English-language readers relate to these lost, baffled characters in the way that Yoneda herself did. “Many of the narrators of these stories are extremely self-conscious,” she wrote me, “but perhaps less self-aware than one might expect. I was conscious of treading a line between empathizing with them and wanting to explain what I imagined they were going through.”
That balance is especially tricky because so many readers will come to The Lonesome Bodybuilder without context. Japanese women writers are not translated into English at nearly the rate that men are, a discrepancy Yoneda is doing her part to fix. In addition to Motoya, she’s worked with Banana Yoshimoto, Natsuko Kuroda, and Aoko Matsuda. Still, to most English-language readers, Motoya’s stories will feel unfamiliar — and that’s before the straw husbands show up.
Yoneda thought deeply about that unfamiliarity as she translated. Geographically, linguistically, and culturally, the stories in The Lonesome Bodybuilder are a long way from home. Translating them, Yoneda told me, felt “like starting a conversation, talking into a present and potential silence. That said, fiction translated from English has a much larger presence in Japan than Japanese fiction does in the English-reading world… So in some ways, the conversation has already started.”
When I asked Yoneda how she wants English-language readers to enter the conversation she’s beginning, she replied, “I would love it if readers could relate to these stories with some of whatever awareness they might bring to an encounter with someone who speaks another language. I hope there’s some appreciation for the two of you sharing space and time, respect for mutual differences…and more than anything, a wonder that any of this came to pass at all. Then again, it’s perfectly possible (and sometimes possibly even acceptable) to have a great conversation without even realizing that the person you’re talking to might not have spent their whole life speaking English.”
That could happen with The Lonesome Bodybuilder. A reader could easily be so transported by the dark-fairytale nature of Motoya’s stories, their glimmering weirdness and constant, sly humor, that she forgets to think about the translator. That reader’s conversation with Motoya could be a great one. But anyone who remembers that The Lonesome Bodybuilder is Asa Yoneda’s work as well as Yukiko Motoya’s will have an infinitely more fun reading experience: not only will she be astonished and delighted by the stories themselves, she’ll be delighted that she gets to read them, and grateful to the woman who made it happen. There is wonder in translation, and especially in a translation as thoughtful and skillful as this. The Lonesome Bodybuilder is a rare and absolute treat.
Starting today, Electric Literature is proud to announce Electric Eel, a newsletter about the possibilities of storytelling. Produced and edited by MCD x FSG and powered by Electric Literature, Electric Eel is a weekly look at the work of artists, activists, and organizations through the lens of storytelling. Sign up here to bless your inbox every Tuesday.
The first issue, which highlights Alexandra Bell’s “Counternarratives” project, describes the newsletter:
We’ll examine not what makes a good story — we are inundated with too many opinions about that already — but how a good story is told. Some of the best stories out there are being overlooked because they’re told by voices who have historically been underrepresented, or because we aren’t perceiving them as stories in the first place. We want to know: has anyone written the Great American Novel on Slack? How does a new book festival become an archive for its community? Is a high-concept restaurant in Los Angeles influenced by science fiction novels? What does it mean for an independent film studio to publish a zine?
The 2016 film Moonlight is about Chiron — a black boy gradually becoming a man in America’s ghettos — coming to terms with his sexuality in three chapters. Even two years after its release, there is a scene in it that still reaches me. Young Chiron is dealing with the homophobic bullying of his peers, a mother battling drug addiction, and uncertainty about his sexuality, when Juan, a neighborhood drug dealer, decides to become his mentor. During an outing to the beach Juan recalls a woman in Cuba giving him the nickname, Blue. Chiron then asks Juan if Blue is his truer name.
Juan responds, “At some point, you gotta decide for yourself who you gone be. Can’t let nobody make that decision for you.”
When I saw Moonlight as a gay, black man at the age of 22, I was shaken to realize that this was the first moment in cinema I had seen a black man reassuring a potentially gay, black male that his existence was not only valid, but also worth taking pride in.
With every viewing since then, I see both the glaring differences and similarities between my journey and Chiron’s. As a child, I was considered gifted because of my love for books and conditioned to think that obedience equaled safety in America. Everything that I’d been told about my future as a “good black kid” shattered when I was 15 years old, and came out to my mother; months later my older brother would come out as well. When my mother received the news I watched her cry on the basement floor, begging for God to change us. Ultimately my brother and I not only struggled with the homophobia that was embedded in Jamaican culture, and with the larger culture’s media that failed to empathetically portray our realities — we also struggled simply to love and support each other.
This was the first moment in cinema I had seen a black man reassuring a potentially gay, black male that his existence was worth taking pride in.
For years we retreated away from one another. I once called him during a break in my freshman year of university, to ask him to pick me up from our home, because I’d gotten into an argument with our mother about my sexuality. He arrived and told me, “You just need to grow up and deal with this.” As time passed, our distance widened. I moved across country, went to riots during movements like Nuit Debout in Paris, and wrangled with my queerness at every turn. Even in my writing, I realized that while many of the characters in my stories were queer, they were also white. For a long period of time I stopped writing, and tried to understand why I had erased myself in my own work.
When I think of the time lost between my brother and I, of the emotional mayhem we failed to confide in each other about, a scene in Moonlight provides me with an explanation. It is near the film’s end, when an adult Chiron meets with Kevin, his estranged high school crush. Kevin is surprised by the formerly sensitive Chiron’s new hardened, tough demeanor, and asks, “Who is you, Chiron?”
As viewers we understand that Chiron is no less sensitive, but that he’s built himself “strong” to stop others from getting close or from attempting to hurt him. It is in moments of representation like this that I find myself asking: how much less painful would coming out have been for bodies like mine, my brother’s, and Chiron’s, if we had only seen people like us represented consciously in the mainstream? Who could we have loved if we had been brave enough, if we had been shown and reassured? How much more accepting might our families, neighborhoods, or schools have been?
It is the idea of life’s most necessary experiences — of love, affection, closeness — being indefinitely delayed or completely restricted that haunts Chiron in Moonlight. As a child he struggles to even speak to peers or adults because he is so used to being judged; his teenage years are filled with isolation. The adult Chiron is a far cry from his child and teenage selves, but not in any liberated way. We see this when he teaches one of his young drug dealers a lesson in masculinity, by bullying and mocking him. “You can’t survive if you don’t know when these niggas fucking with you,” he says.
It is once Chiron confronts his mother’s abandonment near the film’s end that he is slowly able to allow his performative mask of masculinity to drop. His mother’s love, which was previously withheld, now — finally — validates him as a person worthy of both affection and intimacy. It’s why Chiron finds the courage to seek out Kevin, and eventually answer Kevin’s question — “Who is you?” — honestly. He admits that he has not been touched intimately by another person since Kevin himself, in their teen years. Chiron and Kevin embracing is one of the film’s last images, and it marks the end of Chiron’s long wait to live.
In my own life, I have wandered through the isolation and the waiting-for-life-to-begin that many gay, black men experience. During high school dances I looked on at the straight couples and their freedom with a feeling of longing. There were no first kisses under the bleachers, no dates or bringing boys back home to meet my parents. In my first year of university I ached so badly to be kissed that I made out with a boy whose father I discovered was a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. I lost my virginity at the age of 22, after a drunken night in the Philippines, and afterward breathed a sigh of relief that I was desirable enough to be wanted.
During high school dances I looked on at the straight couples and their freedom with a feeling of longing.
“Subconsciously, at a certain point, I think we all are not aware that people of color have the same capacity for a full human experience as white people,”said Mahershala Ali, the actor who plays the mentor of young Chiron, in an interview. “That’s what makes this movie so special, because of how these characters are framed so three-dimensionally, how emotionally intelligent [they] are.”
Chiron was fatherless. I myself lost two father figures: my biological father to murder, and my stepfather to the U.S. prison system, and then deportation. I learned to verbally spar with peers, and sometimes adults, who thought my shy nature warranted homophobic remarks. I remember how the moment when teenage Chiron breaks down crying as he says, “You don’t even know,” after a guidance counselor downplays his bullying, buried me under water and made it hard for me to breathe.
The film shows its emotional intelligence even more so in the scene when Chiron’s mother awakens as he returns home, to find him looking at her critically. She laments, “You don’t love me no more. You’re my only, and I’m your only.” As a child, my own mother’s distant demeanor would lift when I earned good grades or if she felt sentimental enough to say, “Prince, you’re the child that taught me to be affectionate.” Just as Chiron’s uniqueness made him difficult for his mother to understand or to love deeply, my sexuality made it difficult for my mother to understand me. It was impossible for me to be both her good child and her gay child.
Chiron’s mother’s words are electrifying because they express the stifled desire and entrapment that Chiron and many others like him feel — the claustrophobia in their lives, families, communities, and from the demands of the larger patriarchal, anti-black world, which urges black men to be both bulletproof and unfazed by trauma.
The road to meaningful three-dimensional representation for gay black men in the media has been nothing short of tumultuous. During the Harlem Renaissance, a revered period of black creativity, key figures like Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman had to step carefully in writing about their attraction to other men. Homosexuality, from a psychological standpoint, was considered a “sexual orientation disturbance” until 1987. Those that were openly gay could be subject to forced conversion therapy, which even included electroshock therapy or replacing the testicles of a homosexual man with that of a heterosexual man. Gay black artists of the 1920s and on were justifiably afraid of publicly outing themselves, because of how easily their skin color and their sexuality could be criminalized.
Claude McKay, a Jamaican writer born in 1889, would go on to publish poems in The Liberator, a monthly socialist magazine. Most critics of McKay were careful to isolate his radical politics from his rumored relationships with men such as Walter Jekyll, in an attempt to sterilize his work from anything that might be taboo. Sections of both McKay’s and Jekyll’s works allude to a knowingness of queer life and a possible attraction to one another, as in the queer friends Jake and Ray in McKay’s novel Home to Harlem, or Jekyll’s 1907 study which compared the beauty of patwa, Jamaican Creole, to the “vocal ejaculations between [Jamaican men].” McKay’s literary achievements were not enough to shield him from homophobic reactions to his work. His poems published in an issue of Crisis came alongside a scathing review from W.E.B. Du Bois, in which the critic described feeling “like taking a bath” after reading the more homoerotic sections of Home to Harlem.
Homosexuality, from a psychological standpoint, was considered a ‘sexual orientation disturbance’ until 1987.
McKay’s work would inevitably influence many black writers, including Langston Hughes, who grew up in the religious Deep South and was also known to have had relationships with men. Wallace Thurman, although married to a woman, was once arrested in New York for agreeing to sexual favors from another man in exchange for cash. Both Hughes and Thurman were part of a group that called themselves “Niggeratti,” along with Zora Neale Hurston. Despite the undercurrent of homophobia and sexism among black intellectuals of the time, the group worked hard to challenge the status quo with their fashion, their writings, and the debates they engaged in amongst each other.
I was grateful to discover this era of artistry and the works it produced when I took an African American Literature course. Until that point, much of my reading and writing involved white authors and white characters. The media I’d consumed had ultimately led me to erase myself from my own creative imagination. Coming of age in an America shaken by the Black Lives Matter Movement helped me to realize the importance of the contextual cultural struggle behind the quiet representation of homoeroticism in Hughes’ poem, “Trumpet Player,” and of the riotous artistry of his Niggerati peers. Most of all, the work of gay and bisexual black writers of the Harlem Renaissance revealed a revolutionary sentiment: that the visibility of gay, black life was worth sacrificing the gag of artistic sterility for.
By the 1940s, America was still challenging the psyche of gay black writers. The explosive rage of the Harlem riots of 1943 could not provide James Baldwin solace for the rage that many black men felt in America. America’s brutality against black bodies had tortured Baldwin from birth, and influenced his decision to become a teenage preacher. He even believed that New York City’s torment of black Americans had led his friend to suicide in 1946. By 1948, at the age of 24 and already sickened, Baldwin decided to flee America for Paris.
In both the literary and the political realms, Baldwin’s sexuality was used to discredit him. Despite having a positive relationship with Martin Luther King, Jr., he was banned from speaking at the March on Washington. Eldridge Cleaver, leading member of the Black Panther Party, wrote in his book Soul On Ice: “The case of James Baldwin aside for a moment, it seems that many Negro homosexuals, acquiescing in this racial death-wish, are outraged and frustrated because in their sickness they are unable to have a baby by a white man.” In private letters to Albert Murray, the author Ralph Ellison claimed that Baldwin did not know the difference “between getting religion and going homo.”
Baldwin’s work helped me up from the rock bottom of my early adulthood. Unemployed and creatively uninspired, I read him and recognized myself in his political turmoil. If Baldwin could be dignified amidst the onslaught of racial violence and homophobia of his time, then I supposed I could be brave as well.
Baldwin’s work helped me up from the rock bottom of my early adulthood.
My admiration for him led me to France in 2016. There, I met a boy named Enzo, with eyes that caused my stomach to stir. Two years later I returned to Paris, where I lived for three months with Enzo, avoided tear gas during riots in the streets, and celebrated my 24th birthday, as an homage of Baldwin’s arrival to the city 70 years before, at the exact same age. During an outing to a park, Enzo held my face in his hands. “Even though there’s a lot about you I don’t understand,” he said, “I still love you very much.”
I smiled back, while thinking of Baldwin’s line in Another Country, about how the face of a lover “is an unknown precisely because it is invested with so much of oneself. It is a mystery, containing, like all mysteries, the possibility of torment.”
For Joseph Beam, a black gay writer and a prominent figure of the Philadelphia gay community, the need for his 1986 anthology, In The Life: A Black Gay Anthology, was clear. Beam was both inspired by the work of black lesbians and feminists, and felt that such a specifically oriented collection was crucial in a time of political and bodily devastation for the gay black community. In the anthology’s forward Beam stated that “Visibility is survival … We ain’t family [the LGBTQIA community]. Very clearly, gay male means: white, middle-class, youthful, naturalized, and probably butch; there is no room for Black gay men within the confines of this gay pentagon.”
Gay male means: white, middle-class, youthful, naturalized, and probably butch; there is no room for Black gay men within the confines of this gay pentagon.
The anthology featured works by activists, scholars, and writers, including Richard Bruce Nugent, a powerhouse writer of the Harlem Renaissance who had been the first African-American writer to center homosexuality in a piece of fiction, and was also a part of the Niggerati. Nugent’s short story, “SMOKE, LILIES, AND JADE,” was published in 1928 in Fire!!, a black-led literary magazine, and featured Alex, a bisexual man, who goes home with a male lover named Beauty. The literary magazine only published one issue, and was met with widespread disapproval from black intellectuals.
By the early 1990s, drag culture, ball culture, and voguing brought the artistic merits of gay, black men to the mainstream, with the release Madonna’s 1990 video for her single “Vogue,” and the release of the 1991 documentary, Paris Is Burning, about house culture in New York City. And yet, Benji Hart, a black, queer, femme artist and educator based in Chicago, interrogated this exposure for ball culture: “our cultural cameos in these (corporate) artists’ work have done nothing — do nothing — to illuminate our histories of struggle, nor to combat the structures that generate our need for resistance in the first place.”
The media landscape for rounded depictions of black, gay men was radically changed with the 1989 releases of two semi-documentary films, Tongues Untied, and Looking for Langston.The director of Tongues Untied, Marlon Riggs, used his own experience as a gay black man as a lens to look at the diverse experiences of others like him. The film featured many luminaries of the gay black artistic scene, including Essex Hemphill, a poet whose work focused on manhood, sexuality, and the effects of HIV/AIDS. Looking For Langston explored famed Harlem Renaissance writer Langston Hughes’ attraction to men as a larger ode to queer, black history. The shots of men dancing together in a bar mixed with the work of other famous gay writers visualizes a history of gay black life during the Harlem Renaissance as no other visual media had done before, and explicitly centered Hughes as a gay icon.
Although the 1990s brought a fresh crop of black representation to television — with series like The Cosby Show, Martin, A Different World, and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air — most of these shows portrayed only a digestible, middle-class version of blackness. And programs like In Living Color often flaunted the homophobia of the black community, using black homosexuality as a punchline. In the “Men On…” skits, two feminized and presumably gay black men review forms of media and entertainment, joking about the joys of homosexual sex in prisons before breaking character to laugh with the audience. Their comedic cracks exemplify a point made by Marlon Riggs in his 1991 essay, “Black Macho Revisited: Reflections of Snap! Queen”: “Black macho movie characters dis’ — or should we say dish? — their antagonists with unkind references to it. Indeed references to, and representations of, Negro Faggotry seem a rite of passage among contemporary Black male rappers and filmmakers.”
As recently as the early 2000s, the media’s manipulation of the representation of gay, black men has continued. In 2004, The Oprah Winfrey Showaired an episode in which a “down low” black man opened up about his sexual exploits. With fear around HIV/AIDS still present, it scapegoated promiscuous black men for the virus’ presence within black communities. And yet, in the culture at large, a shift was clearly taking place. Unlike the Winfrey episode,the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain, about two “down low” white men, was met with critical acclaim, ushering in a new era for gay (white) representation.
In the last decade and a half there has been a greater range in the portrayals of gay black men in the media. On television there was the Logo Network’s series Noah’s Arc, charting the lives of gay black men in Los Angeles, as well as the character of Jamal in Empire, who struggles as a gay man in the hyper-masculine rap industry. Themusic industry itself has given us artists like Frank Ocean, who sings about falling in love with a man for the first time on “Thinkin Bout You,” or Kevin Abstract’s rap album American Boyfriend, all about a gay black man coming of age.
Danez Smith’s presence as a black, queer, HIV-positive person, unapologetically talking about the complexities of the black queer experience has been paramount in the world of poetry. Smith not only takes inspiration from past poets like Essex Hemphill but also prioritizes the politics of being black and queer in America, a nation that has been built on violence committed against the disenfranchised. In their poem “Dear White America,” Smith powerfully describes the rage born into the black experience in the lines, “each night, i count my brothers. & in the morning, when some do not survive to be counted, i count the holes they leave.”
With Moonlight, decades of struggle for a humanizing representation of gay black men in the media’s mainstream has finally culminated in a masterpiece whose importance reaches far beyond its Oscar win. Its success, and the long difficult history preceding its existence, reveal a enduring and painful truth — that black people have always been tasked with loving themselves before any else would. For many, this lesson can only be freeing once it shows itself in the light. It’s then that it can finally be confronted.
For me, it was during a recent trip to San Francisco, to accept an award from GLAAD for my work in media and activism, that this lesson became visible. On a street corner in the Castro at 2am my brother, once so comfortably estranged from me, told me he was proud of the person that I’d become. Despite our individual obstacles as gay black men, it was a work like Moonlight — a work which shows us with a deep and unaccustomed kind of humanity — that finally made us capable of loving each other.
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 Ourselveswould 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Timein 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.
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.
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.
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 YouWere 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.”
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’ IfBeale 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 Margaritais 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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