I began to hear funny noises coming from the addition we had built on our house: some whimpers, groans, some clattering. I did not investigate; in general I tried to avoid the addition. I was never clear on its purpose or what it had added. Then one afternoon an old man in a robe emerged from our laundry room carrying a basket. He nodded courteously, said “Excuse me,” and continued back down the hall to the addition, leaving a trail of white dust behind him.
This all happened while my wife was away. My wife was often away. While she was away I visited a medium. We lived in an area where this practice was not only accepted but popular, and living here I’d gotten the idea I should be more connected. The medium told me with little fanfare and much certainty that a man had once been killed in the very spot where we’d built our addition. The problem, she said, was that he didn’t know he was dead. If I informed him, he would leave, but I was no fan of confrontation and thus not in favor of this course of action.
My wife returned, as she always did, and I informed her of the trouble in our house. I felt she ought to know about trouble in her house. She frowned at me, then told me the man was her father, it was only her parents, did I not remember they were living with us now? In truth I did not. There had been some discussion, perhaps, that at some point in time we might consider… I seemed to recall them arriving at some point, a very long time ago, but only for a visit, though they’d had many bags. In any event, this cleared up why I had not responded to my father-in-law, if that’s who he was, but instead drew back in horror. He had been wondering.
I reported these developments to the medium. They disturbed her. She was a disturbed woman, generally speaking. These new developments suggested only that the murder was more depraved than previously suspected. Quite possibly a woman had also been killed, and in unimaginable fashion. “You cannot imagine it,” the medium said, though I tried.
In truth I was not sure my wife was telling me everything. I had thought maybe we’d built the addition for children we were maybe going to have; now I could not recall. As I said there had been some discussion, perhaps, that at some point in time we might consider… Always we had discussions. This part was certain. Though now it was certain there would be no children, because I did not want our children to live above where a man and possibly a woman had been murdered, and more importantly because my wife did not want to have children with me. This now was settled, and without any discussion.
As for the ghost of my father-in-law, he did not go away, and I hesitated to ask him to. I’d been successful once in asking him a question, the most important question, and I didn’t want to press my luck. I remembered how hopeful his face had been, so scrubbed of doubt, when I requested permission to marry his daughter. How different it looked now when this version of him stumbled past me in the hall. After my wife and I married, we’d moved across the country. Over time her parents grew ill, especially her mother. So my wife said. We hadn’t seen them in so long. I could barely recall where they lived, or had lived. Some snow-buried state where people trudged and hurried all at once. And now, here: Was this the same man? It was but it wasn’t. This ghost spilling laundry detergent on our floor could never have danced at our wedding like her father had. He lacked the same hip power. A haunting indeed. I wondered where his wife was. Supposedly she too lived with us now but I hadn’t seen her; perhaps she stayed in the addition.
I asked my wife: Hadn’t her parents grown ill? Hadn’t they died, hadn’t we flown back across the country to their funerals? Didn’t they know they were already gone? She told me those were the funerals of my own parents. Oh. We’d been to so many funerals, all cut from the same cloth. I hadn’t seen my own parents in so long either. I thought I’d been meaning to call, and perhaps I had been. It was hard to keep track.
I returned to the medium to impress upon her the reality of my situation, how it was better than suspected but also worse. The medium remained certain there’d been a murder under the addition, or, when pressed, a murder under some addition somewhere. “It’s why all the pyramids and monuments are haunted; men were murdered in the making.” Once more she told me to tell the man that he was dead, that he should leave, that he did not belong there.
And at last I did. I returned home and told the man that he was dead and should leave. And he did. So did his wife. So did my wife. They all left together in one car. My wife drove because the dead/elderly shouldn’t drive. My mother-in-law lay down in the back because she would die soon, if she hadn’t already. She looked very ill, as the dead/elderly do. She would not be my mother-in-law for long, for several reasons. This family turned the corner and vanished. I stayed behind. Sometimes I see them still, in the hall, the garden, the addition I ought to rent to some poor grad student. “Excuse me.” Funny noises. I know not to be scared. No one was murdered beneath this house; they are not really ghosts. Then again they are. It is funny how that works.
About the Author
Ben Hoffman’s fiction has won the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award and Zoetrope: All-Story’s Short Fiction Contest. The recipient of a Carol Houck Smith Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, he now lives in Chicago.
Two summers ago, my family and I took a guided tour of the International Civil Rights Museum in Greensboro, NC. It’s located in the original Woolworths where the lunch counter sit-ins began. At one point our group, which included several small black children, stopped at a display showing historic racist depictions of African-Americans: the minstrel characters, the Aunt Jemimas, the golliwogs and the pickaninnies, caricatures with bulging eyes, large lips, crinkly hair, many of them depictions from children’s books. I’m a school librarian; I watched the children staring. I felt horrified; I knew I could only begin to imagine the horror they felt. Yet the woman leading the tour defused the moment. She just leaned down to those children and smiled. “Do you see what they did? That’s how powerful we are, that they had to show these ugly images over and over everywhere to try and keep us down, but we didn’t let them.”
The children nodded their heads and smiled. They laughed to think of how some white people had had to make these ugly images to keep black people down.
Purchase the book
I’ve thought of that incident often since I read LaTanya McQueen’s And It Begins Like This. Her collection of linked essays reminds me of taking that guided tour. In her book, McQueen explores racist stereotypes of African-Americans, particularly black women. She examines the impact of centuries of psychological trauma upon the black community. McQueen seeks to discover the story of Leanna, her great-great grandmother, an enslaved woman who demanded that her children bore the name of their white father after she was set free. McQueen visits the land her ancestor, Leanna, owned in an effort to discover her story. She also visits the Whitney Plantation, the only plantation museum to focus on slavery. With And It Begins Like This, McQueen explores the legacy of America’s racist past in hopes of making sense of the future.
McQueen received her MFA from Emerson College, her PhD from the University of Missouri, and was the Robert P. Dana Emerging Writer Fellow at Cornell College. She currently teaches at Coe College where she is a Visiting Assistant Professor. We met last year in Tampa at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference.
Deirdre Sugiuchi: I recently completed a draft of a book about being sent to a fundamentalist Christian reform school by my parents. I didn’t begin writing it until both of my grandparents, who were huge influences in my life, passed away. In your essay In the Name of the Fathers you talk about how you never spoke about race until your mother died. Do you think this newfound ability to talk about race was due to your somehow being freed by your mother’s death or was it the growing racial backlash of the past decade?
LM: I’m not sure if it’s been freeing, because even thinking about this question I find myself tensing up a bit. At the time I began this book, I really had no intention of writing an essay collection, much less one that dealt with my own issues relating to my identity, so I guess to answer this I have to explain some of the surrounding circumstances leading up to writing it.
The first would be the death of my mother. My mother was always a secretive person. I was in college when she got cancer and she didn’t tell me for a long time after, and when she did she downplayed how serious it was, too afraid that if I knew I would quit school and move back home (she’d done that when she was in school and her father had a stroke). After she died, there were all these questions about who she was that came to the surface. Growing up, my mother was pretty abusive, particularly during the period after my parent’s divorce. It was something I never mentioned to the rest of my family until after she died, but when I did they began to tell me their own stories about some of her behaviors that hadn’t understood, and it became this sort of situation where we were all suddenly realizing here was someone suffering in all these ways we never knew.
I always knew about some of the abuse she went through, but I don’t think I ever really fully grasped the extent of it until after she died. I didn’t know how to deal with that, and I spent a decade afterward trying not to think about it. Then, during my PhD program my grandmother died, and I was left with the realization that the last person who could have really answered some of these lingering questions to what exactly happened to her was gone.
Something else — my mother always talked about this story about one of our ancestors, this woman who’d been a slave to the family of the state senator and who’d had a relationship with a white man from a neighboring farm. During Reconstruction, she took him to court to make sure her children would have his surname.
During my program I read a lot about inherited trauma, and so I felt like if I could understand this story, what this relationship was, that I could also somehow understand my mother. I experienced a lot of shame over my identity, and I knew my mother had and her family had as well. My mother was abusive toward me but she’d also been abused, so in thinking about this story of Leanna — it just seemed important to me to investigate the truth of it.
The first essay, In the Name of the Fathers, is my attempt to do that. I thought I’d write it and be freed of this story and all this other baggage, but after I wrote it, I shared it with a few other friends who told me the story wasn’t done. I ignored them at first, but a bunch of other circumstances cropped up that let me know I wasn’t. A few of the subsequent essays talk about what those were. Eventually, I got to the point where I realized I was also having my own sort of personal reckoning and this book became the arc documenting that self-acceptance.
I was wrestling whether I wanted to commit to this book or not, to write a book about race and the slavery and generational trauma, while also recognizing that that story is often asked of black writers.
DS: I also grew up in an abusive family, by people who were also abused. They were also multi-generational Southerners. I often wonder how much the dependence on corporal punishment and control of one’s offspring ties back to the South’s history. I think it is also reflected in the subjugation of women nationwide.
You have these horrific yet beautiful paragraphs, paragraphs that are almost prose poems, which detail the abuse of enslaved Africans. Later on you go on to say “I wonder if it is even possible for us to have new stories and burdened by history of slavery.… We are all staying with his past… All the actions of our ancestors are entangled in the shaping of this country, in who we are and what we’ve come to believe and understand about ourselves.” Can you discuss this?
LM: I’ve heard the prose poem comparisons before and I find that really interesting. I’m a huge fan of spoken word artists, people like Aziza Barnes or Porsha O. for example, and whenever I do read a poetry book I try to find readings with them to see the comparisons between how I hear their work and how they speak it, so maybe that is having some sort of effect on my own work without my realizing it.
I’ve also always been fascinated by the different rhetorical strategies used in sermons — the inclusion especially, as well as the use of anaphora. When I’ve read from the essays I’ve told that they are pretty concentric, which makes sense since linguistically, structurally, and thematically I seem to be circling back again and again over the same sort of issues.
The quote you’re referencing is in the essay where I visited the Oak Alley and Whitney Plantations in Louisiana. At the time, I was still wrestling whether I wanted to commit to this book or not, to write a book about race and the slavery and generational trauma, while also recognizing that that story is often asked of black writers. When I went to the Whitney I was struck by how here was this black tour guide telling all of these traumatic experiences to a mainly white audience, and they were responding in a way that felt not dissimilar to this white fetishization of black trauma narratives. I remember people being moved by the tour, some even wept, but when we think about say, the prison-industrial complex, how much can we say has changed? As a country we need to try and understand the history of how we got here, not revise or erase it, while also understanding the present-day connections.
DS: How much of your silence do you think stems from being in academia, studying in predominantly white institutions? How could Predominantly White Institutes or individuals themselves be more welcoming and inclusive?
LM: Being in these white spaces is part of it, yes, but also on some level you want to be accepted, or at least I did. I’ve never been the sort of person to rock the boat, so to speak, so when situations happened where someone said or did something racist, I didn’t comment on it because what could I do? At the same time, there were people who did speak up, time and time again, especially when things escalated with the protests on the campus, and seeing them do it, as well as the fallback from it, made me begin to examine my own silence.
One thing I think people can do, and I see this happen often — in the classroom, in online groups, in conversations, is that when someone does brings up an instance where they feel another person has done something offensive, to not double down in the defensiveness and disregard what is being said. The fear of being labeled a racist sometimes clouds the ability to actually listen to what’s being said.
DS: You speak of your godmother, Vanessa Siddle Walker, often in the book. She is the one who first outlined for you the cyclical backlash that follows whenever African Americans achieve racial progress. Can you discuss who she is and the importance of having her as a mentor, not just as a writer, but in your personal life?
LM: My godmother was my mother’s cousin. They grew up together and worked with their families on two neighboring farms situated on inherited land. She has excelled in her field, recently becoming the President-Elect of the American Educational Research Association. She has a new book, [The Lost Education of Horace Tate: Uncovering the Hidden Heroes Who Fought for Justice in Schools], that took her close to two decades to write. She has been a model and a mentor for me in terms of working in academia, and that has been especially important to me.
DS: You write about colorism in the black community, both in your own family and in the culture at large. You talk about the shame you felt as a child about having an identifiably black name and how even though you are light-skinned, how as a child you would rub your skin raw, “ashamed, even then” of your blackness. You speak of the Clark doll experiments of the 40s, of how Kiri Davis recreated them in 2006 to find that black girls still preferred the white doll. Later in the book you dissect how black women are other-ized into mammies or jezebels, Sapphires or tragic mulattas. Do you think that writing this book has helped you process the shame? What can we do as a culture right now to help counteract this racism, internalized and externalized, especially in children?
LM: Writing the book has helped make me see more of how the iterations of these stereotypes are ingrained in our society, and it’s helped to make me recognize my own behaviors in response to these depictions.
Another example of this is my name. I often informally go by “Tanya”. My mother used to call me that, but sometime over the years I started going by that in more formal interactions, and I realized I was doing that in response to how, quite often, people constantly misspelled my name and by doing this I was circumventing the awkwardness of having to deal with correcting others. I shouldn’t be attempting to accommodate others lack of effort to correctly get my name right, and yet here I was doing it anyway.
Also, I think I recognized that my full name was “black sounding” and was trying in some way to erase that. Maybe that was why my mother called me “Tanya” too, I don’t know.
A couple years ago someone wrote me to say they were looking at the notable entries in the Best American series and found my name, my full name, and had gone to find out who I was because it surprised them to see a black name in this anthology, surprised them that black work could be recognized in such a way, and he had to know who I was. I have thought a lot about that since, about how powerful representation can be to see.
For me, things began to change when I found other contemporary black writers, particularly black women writers, who were writing about varied experiences of their identity. Twitter, for all its problems, has been invaluable in this way for me. When I saw these writers, it really opened me up to not just writing this book but writing it in the way I wanted. I thanked a lot of them in the acknowledgements.
As a country we need to try and understand the history of how we got here, not revise or erase it, while also understanding the present-day connections.
DS: Who are some of your favorite black writers? I’m originally from Mississippi and am thankful for Jesmyn Ward’s work every day of my life.
LM: A writer I’ve been excited about recently is Dantiel W. Moniz. I read her story “Milk Blood Heat” in Ploughshares that I loved, and she has some others in Pleiades and Apogee Journal. I’m really grateful for writers like Leesa Cross Smith and Tiana Clark (who also write about the South), as well as Morgan Jerkins and Ashley Ford. One of my favorite novels is Oreo by Fran Ross, a book I’ve read multiple times and am always blown away by. Lastly, the writer who has had the biggest influence is Roxane Gay.
DS: In one of the final essays you say, “To be black in this world and not be filled with hate means at times having an unlimited amount of grace, because still so many of us continue to forgive…. Later on you go onto say, “It is these stories of survival I hold onto, these moments in which these women reclaim their agency. They are a reminder to me of the strength of women, the same strength, I hope, that runs through me.”
Can you discuss the importance of holding onto survival? How did it help you while writing this book? How do you hold on?
LM: Part of your question seems to be one about forgiveness — how do you forgive others who have and continue to do you harm? How do you forgive people who don’t even want your forgiveness? It’s difficult, and it can seem easier to hold on to hate instead, but the thing about forgiveness is it’s not about the other person, it’s about you and being able to move on. There are a million ways in which this world and the people in it can break you, but you have to find a way to focus on the work that needs to be done and let go of what will hold you back. Forgiveness, for me, is about that.
At the time I started this book my godmother was finishing one of her own, a book that took her close to twenty years to write. Throughout those years she would often say how she wasn’t sure if she was doing the subject matter justice, she was very worried about it, but she told herself she would do the best she could and hoped it would be enough. I knew that this story about Leanna would disappear if I didn’t write about it. I felt like I had to at least try, and so I began it with the same sentiment as my godmother. I would do the best I could with what I had and hoped in the end it would be enough.
What kept me going in writing this book, what has always kept me going, is the work of other writers. This book is why representation matters because I wouldn’t have written it if not for these black women who made me feel seen, who made me feel as if my own story could ever matter. Finding them has opened me up, made me feel braver, more honest.
I remember I went to AWP the spring after Trump was elected. At the time I was about to graduate from my program, on the job market, and facing what felt like the very real possibility of unemployment. AWP can sometimes seem as if everyone everywhere is celebrating something, and here I was terrified about my future, feeling as if I’d wasted my life and was this failure. So I left the conference and on a whim managed to get in to the African American Museum of History and Culture. There’s this huge space inside where you have to wait to take an elevator down to the history section of the museum, and the room quickly filled up with rows and rows of people waiting to get in.
I looked around the room and saw it was filled with mostly black people who were filled with such joy to be there. We were cloistered together waiting to experience this museum, to see the history of how this country has enslaved and subjugated us, while also facing a future that would further inflict damage, and yet they still managed to find joy, hope even, and that’s when I remembered — black people survive. Despite everything, time and time again, we find a way to keep going in the hope of something larger than ourselves.
I do not know what the world has in store for you, for me, for any of us, I don’t know. I know at times it can all look bleak. My own life has had some bleak moments, but you keep going anyway. You have to keep going in the hope of what could be.
During the spookier parts of the year/election season, when the light leaves the sky and shadows get longer and the updates on your phone make you feel like you’re being watched, you may be inclined to embrace the goth. We are here to tell you you are not alone.
The “gothic novel” as we know it according to literary scholars, came about in the late 18th century. The parameters for defining the gothic novel are contestable, but it’s generally understood to be a novel peopled by damsels in distress and mysterious heroes who reveal themselves to be royalty. There are labyrinthine passages and portraits with roving eyes and lots of creepy shadows. Think about Scooby Doo and you’re not totally in the wrong. Big in Europe — particularly Britain, Italy, and Germany — the gothic novel was not long for this world after it was mortally wounded by the parody. After Jane Austen’s (aka the original Roast Queen) Northanger Abbey, her famous takedown of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho, was published in 1817, the classic gothic novel struggled to stay alive. Luckily, the strongest gothic elements adapted and survived to tackle more complicated questions, like the plight of the human condition in goth-esque novels like Frankenstein.
Here we offer a list of 7 goth-esque novels published in the last ten years that play with the tropes of the gothic novel to new effect. These are novels that challenge the whole damsel in distress formation, and deliver on creepy spaces and mysterious strangers and enchanted mystery. Because sometimes it’s okay to displace some of that dread induced by the news cycle into stories with a tangible end in sight.
In Shelley Jackson’s most recent genre-bender, we encounter a vocational school for children with a stutter. Stuttering children, it turns out, are the best spirit mediums for the world for those who have sloughed off the mortal coil. The school is an ideal gothic hellscape — once a Cheesehill School for Wayward Girls, the cavernous castle/mansion has been modified, so as to be more conducive for the Headmistress’s shrouded mission: “a hallway is adjusted with dropped ceilings and wainscoting to the exact proportions of the trachea, larynx, or oral cavity.”The novel is an archive — constructed from transcripts between the living and the dead, archival material collected by an avid contemporary scholar, and texts like the Principles of Necrophysics.
Inspired by the 1820 gothic novel Melmoth the Wanderer, this book quickly earns its place on the list. In the original telling, Melmoth is a Faustian fool who exchanges his soul for another 150 years on Earth. Perry’s twist on the gothic novel oft-retold is that Melmoth is now a woman sentenced to wander the Earth as witness to all the violence and atrocities we call “history.” Our central character, 40-year-old Helen Phillips is a translator working in Prague. When her friend Karel encounters a mysterious letter in the library detailing an encounter with Melmoth, the damned soul who tricks people into wandering the Earth forever alone. He brings it to Helen. Helen doesn’t believe in any of it, until Karel disappears.
We don’t have many castles in contemporary literature, but we do have plenty of nightmarish stories about homes that turn into money pits. What if the money pit became the haunted money pit? The first villain we meet is the real estate agent. When Julie and James tour the home they are about to buy, they hear an unfamiliar sound. The agent tells them it’s just the house “settling.” Julie and James decide to buy the house — it’s a great retreat nestled between a lake and a forest. How quaint! But the house is a buyer’s worst nightmare — there are rooms within rooms that seem to appear out of nowhere, and stains on the walls that map themselves into bruises on Julie’s body. I’m calling this 21st century incarnation of the genre the “suburban gothic novel.”
The marriage plot, or the death plot. Was the gothic novel one problematic way women characters in novels entered a coming-of-age story? If growing up means learning how to deal with fear, then maybe so. Oyeyemi’s novel plays with this idea in White is for Witches. Miranda, who suffers from pica, lives with her twin brother and their widowed father in a haunted house across the street from a cemetery stacked with nameless graves. Lily, their mother, has been killed while on assignment as a photojournalist in Haiti. The Silver family mourns her, including the house they live in, which is filled with secret passages and craterly holes. The house is haunted by the women who lived there before them, and speaks its secrets to Miranda. She feels closer to the house than anyone else in her life until one night, she seems to disappear, too.
Another 21st century twist on the labyrinthine gothic castle? An apartment lease you can’t get out of. When an aspiring writer moves into her new apartment, she discovers a tad too late that her landlady has murdered her husband. In another story, a surgeon becomes smitten with a corrupted cabaret singer who threatens to destroy him. The stories are interwoven in ways that mirror the detective aspects of an old-fashioned gothic novel — clues and connective tissue that the reader delights in finding on the way to a horrifying and twisting finish.
Ordinary People explores middle-class, middle-aged ennui for two couples living in and around London. Evans portrays what this anxiety looks like for two black and mixed-race couples who descend into despair over broken pieces of furniture and fitted sheets and domestic sacrifice and sexless nights. Melissa and Michael are two beautiful people living in London with their beautiful children. Damian and Stephanie live outside London with their three children in the suburb of Dorking. While devoted to realism in many ways, Ordinary People takes a gothic turn when Melissa, after leaving her career in magazine journalism to stay at home with the kids, comments that “Motherhood is an obliteration of the self.” She quickly becomes convinced the house is haunted. This one gets bonus points for having a soundtrack. Evans wrote about the marriage between the book and the soundtrack this way: “This is a book to be read and heard at the same time, then listened to again in pure sound, bringing the characters and their world back to you on the replay.”
To the untrained eye, Iris Vegan is the perfect “damsel.” A blond-haired blue-eyed darling from the Midwest who has recently arrived in New York City. She’s become reliant on a cast of mysterious “mostly-men.” The first is a writer who collects objects discarded by other women, and then records Iris’s reactions to these items. The second is a photographer whose portrait of Iris vanishes only to appear in new spaces in the city. She goes through a stay at a mental hospital, encounters an older woman roommate who falls in love with her. After co-translating a German novella with her professor/lover, Iris takes on the appearance of one of the characters in the novella. She wanders the city in drag until her professor catches her. Once damsel, Iris transforms into the hero and the villain.
The older I get, the more I find myself pulled to the past. Every day that I cross out another calendar box, I feel more nostalgic for the books of my childhood, even the ones that might seem too naive and whimsical for our shrewd modernity. In fact, especially those.
That’s why my latest book, Marilla of Green Gables, revisits one of those classic books that means so much to me, imagining Prince Edward Island before L.M. Montgomery’s heroine arrived. And that literary nostalgia also motivated Anne Boyd Rioux, critically-acclaimed author and editor of six books about 19th century American women writers, to write her latest work Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy: The Story of Little Women and Why It Still Matters.
I sat down with Anne to discuss the iconic novels that inspired us, Anne of Green Gables and Little Women, and why they can still inspire women today, more than 100 years after they were written.
ABR: Nice to meet you too, Sarah — with an H. It is exciting to be able to talk with you about our favorite books — Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. I think of both of us relate to these books on a personal level but also realize how important they have been in so many women’s lives and therefore how transformational they have been on a larger scale.
I think that there is something powerful (perhaps spiritual) about the connection we and so many readers have to these authors. They live on for us in their books and give us the courage and strength we need at times. Their books are old friends we can always turn to. I noticed in my research on Little Women, though, that girls aren’t reading the novel as much today as they used it. It was ubiquitous, as was Anne of Green of Gables. Do you think that the March sisters and Anne still have something to say to young girls today, when they have so many iconoclastic, adventurous heroines to choose from?
SM: Absolutely. You know, I’ve been fanatically watching “The Great American Read” on PBS. It’s become something of a stress-reducer in the middle of preparing for Marilla of Green Gables’ launch tour. When I start to feel my gut tightening with anxiety, I pop over to PBS online and listen to Meredith Vieira sing the praises of another classic book friend. It’s instant comfort. I highly recommend the virtual serotonin hit.
Point: Little Women and Anne of Green Gables are two of the top-voted books in that contemporary program. This is proof that given the choice of all the adventurous heroines on bookshelves, we are still choosing Alcott and Montgomery.
That’s not to say that there aren’t many incredible heroines of modern times. We need to stop thinking of it as a this or that, one or the other, winner or loser. Like all things, we ought to embrace each powerful female (characters and authors) as sisters of the force — one that benefits all with exponential development. Old to new, it’s imperative for us as female writers to be each other’s strongest advocates. If we don’t, who will?
And that’s why I believe these books thrive across generations. They are about young women overcoming adversity and fearlessly sharing the message: “You can, too.” That message may or may not be heard amid the onslaught of daily news sound bites. But between the reader and the page, the message has a chance to seed itself in a woman’s heart. I know its capacity. I experienced it the first time I read both Anne of Green Gables and Little Women. These books influenced who I grew to be as an adult and a feminist.
What was your goal when you started writing your book — when you ended — now?
ABR: I decided to write Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy in 2015 when I was finishing up my last book, Constance Fenimore Woolson: Portrait of a Lady Novelist, which was my first trade book for a general audience. I’m a literature professor, and I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with academic writing and communicating with only a small, select readership. I had been reading some books about books (like Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, which I reviewed for Electric Literature, and Maureen Corrigan’s So We Read On about the Great Gatsby) and thought what a great way to write about literature for a wider audience. I wondered what book I could write about and immediately thought of Little Women. Then I checked to see when exactly it was first published and realized that its 150th birthday was coming up in September 2018. So I had to get to work! I knew that the book had been important to me and that I would enjoy spending some time with it and exploring the various ways it had influenced our culture, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found. The depth of readers’ attachment to the book surprised me — from one woman telling me, “I am Jo,” to another reciting Beth’s death scene from memory — as well as the breadth of its world-wide impact. I didn’t realize that it had been translated into over 50 languages and made into television series all over the world — from Japan to Turkey to India. I came to realize that I wanted to both honor the book and its many fans and also challenge some of the nostalgic pieties about the book, to show that Little Women is more complex than it has been given credit for. My goal became for readers to take the novel seriously and not dismiss it as simply a sweet book for girls.
What about you? Why did you want to write your novel based on Anne of Green Gables? Do you think of it as an homage to the original?
SM: It was absolutely a passion project. My mother introduced me to Anne of Green Gables when I was very young. She read the novel to me. As soon as I learned to read on my own, one of my aunts gave me the three-books-in-one volume series as a gift. I’ve been a Green Gables devotee since my earliest recollections. The scenes from it are as salient in my memory as the scenes of my own childhood. But I never ever imagine writing Marilla of Green Gables until just last year.
I’ve been a Green Gables devotee since my earliest recollections. The scenes from it are as salient in my memory as the scenes of my own childhood.
I had published five other historical novels and was chatting with a handful of publishers to see what my next book might be. At HarperCollins, I met an extraordinary editor who asked me to write three, fresh book ideas — just a couple sentences each. I believe her exact words were, “Tell me what book would make your heart sing to write.” In all my years of writing and publishing, I had never had anyone open up the doors like that for me. She didn’t ask for the first 100 pages or how long I’d been journaling on a topic. She didn’t ask if I had one research document or one snippet of archive fact to present, never mind a chapter-by-chapter synopsis or a full manuscript, as is common protocol in publishing. She just said, show me your visions. I have to tell that part of Marilla’s story because it was unlike anything I’d ever experience. So very… kindred spirited. I’m forever grateful for having found her — a lion-hearted champion of my writing and a lifelong friend.
So one of those “dream big” ideas was Marilla Cuthbert’s story. In particular, I had always been fascinated by the cryptic un-telling of Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 37:
“What a nice-looking fellow he is,” said Marilla absently. “I saw him in church last Sunday and he seemed so tall and manly. He looks a lot like his father did at the same age. John Blythe was a nice boy. We used to be real good friends, he and I. People called him my beau.”
Anne looked up with swift interest.
“Oh, Marilla — and what happened?”
Oh, Marilla, what happened? That question never left me and many other readers. This novel is my answer to that. It’s the story of Green Gables’ foundation and what led us to the start of Anne’s legacy there. There’s so much story ground that has yet to be nurtured and harvest. Even what I’ve written here in Marilla of Green Gables feels like the tip of the iceberg.
This novel is an homage to the original series, absolutely. But I’m not Lucy Maud Montgomery. She outdid herself in providing a bounty of esteemed and inspired literature. This is a novel by me, Sarah McCoy. I wrote from a place of grateful reverence to a fictional landscape that has given me much scope for imagination. I wrote praying each hour that I would honor that world and add to it in a way that would make its creator proud. I hope that readers will understand Marilla for who she is as a woman unto herself… as each of us are unto ourselves and yet, are part of a greater united sisterhood.
Do you feel that the female literary models of our youths shape our adulthood — as much as the real women in our lives?
ABR: I absolutely believe that female literary models help shape us, sometimes more than the women around us. That is certainly what so many have said about Little Women. It became clear to me during my research that for many women, particularly of earlier generations, Jo March in particular represented a path in life that girls weren’t seeing in their actual lives. Her ambitions to become a writer made her unique not only in 1868 but also in 1948 or 1978. Reading about her gave so many girls the idea that they could one day become writers too, and that they could shut the doors to their bedrooms and immerse themselves in fictional worlds — that they could demand rooms of their own and the right to express themselves on the page. Little Women has never gotten the credit it deserves for helping to create much of women’s literature, simply by showing girls that they have something important to say and could grow up to become authors. Ursula K. LeGuin said about Jo’s ambitions, “I don’t know where else I or many other girls like me, in my generation or my mother’s or my daughter’s, were to find this model, this validation.”
SM: I love what you said about girls shutting their bedroom doors and demanding a room of their own. That’s exactly what Little Women and the Anne series did for me. I saw that there were other creative women out there who didn’t kowtow to the social convention that a woman’s primary role was to be hostess to the men in her life. As an introvert, I found that unbearably difficult and also, terrifying! I needed the “door shut to a room of my own” to feel balanced and whole. I needed to quietly commune with authors and literary characters to understand myself, come to my own opinions, and find my own voice.
Reading about Jo March gave so many girls the idea that they could one day become writers too, and that they could shut the doors to their bedrooms and immerse themselves in fictional worlds.
I often wonder if the emphasis our modern society has placed on the projected image (Facebook, Instagram) and clever captions (Twitter) has stolen girls’ ability to escape to creative spaces where they can express themselves like Montgomery and Alcott did — like we did. Perhaps because of the all-too-public nature of reality, these books and their fictional narratives, people, settings, and scenes are actually a last bastion of intimate, solitary discovery. When we’re in a book and reading a chapter, there are no Twitter pings. No place on the page to click a Like button. No commenting to the author for instant reply. It’s the reader and his/her imagination left to interpret, decipher, and decide. For those precious hours of reading, the reader is removed from the public reality and allowed to be part of the inner thoughts, emotions, and truth of the novel’s world.
I still remember the scene in Anne of Green Gables when Marilla tells Anne Shirley that Green Gables is to be her home. It’s Chapter VIII. The scene is mostly all dialogue. Nothing extraordinary happens. No slates broken over a schoolboy’s head. No red current wine drunk by the bottle. No green hair or mouse puddings. It’s Marilla and Anne in the kitchen. They’ve just finished washing the dinner dishes.
“Matthew and I have decided to keep you…”
“I’m crying,” said Anne in a tone of bewilderment. “I can’t think why. I’m glad as glad can be. Oh, glad doesn’t seem the right word at all. I was glad about the White Way and the cherry blossoms — but this! Oh, it’s something more than glad…”
She goes on to express how very lonely, sad, and ostracized she felt all her life but being able to stay with the Cuthberts gave her roots, a place to call home, family and soon, bosom friends. It’s as if her life was beginning from a new seed and all because somebody planted her at Green Gables and added some love.
As a young girl, that scene made something rise up in my chest and nearly burst. I was a military child. We moved across cities, states, and even countries every few years. I had never been able to put into words or speak about the lonely, sad, excluded feeling I carried with me at each new place. It wasn’t something military children discussed and even if it was, I wasn’t at an age (7 years old) to properly psychoanalyze why I felt what I felt. I just knew that I never seem to fit… anywhere. Reading this scene for the first time by myself was an ‘ah ha’ moment. These characters understood what I was feeling — understood me. I wasn’t alone! And through that mutual acceptance, I was empowered. I had faith that like Anne, I could find a sanctuary in my family. And like her too, I would one day find that kindred spirits were not so scarce as I used to think.
It’s not the most glamorous or revolutionary scene. In fact, may readers rush by it as they’re cartwheeling through Anne Shirley’s madcap adventures. That’s what makes it such a gem. It’s quiet, intimate, and spoke entirely to my insecure childhood self. Who am I kidding? It still speaks to me. Is there a scene in Little Women that stood out to you as a girl and still resonates?
ABR: I have always regretted that I didn’t have Jo to inspire me when I was young. I really could have used her example when I was struggling through the awkward teenage years. I didn’t read Little Women until I was in my early twenties (confession!). I was in graduate school, but that turned out to be a pretty important time for me to read the book as well. I was still trying to figure out how I was going to forge my own path in life — how I might teach and write and have a family. The ambition was there, but so was the worry about how to achieve it. The part of Little Women that really resonated with me came at the end, when Jo is married, has a couple of kids, and is running the Plumfield School with Professor Bhaer. She says, “the life I wanted then seems selfish, lonely, and cold to me now. I haven’t given up the hope that I may write a good book yet, but I can wait, and I’m sure it will be all the better for such experiences and illustrations as these,” and she points to her family. The very idea that her book could be better one day for the life she has with her family blew me away and was heartening. From all that I was hearing and reading, women basically had to give up their ambitions once they had a family. I came to believe with Jo (and Alcott) as well that the fuller my life, the better my work would be, and I absolutely believe that has been the case. It certainly has with this book, because my daughter (whom I gave the middle name Josephine) inspired a good deal of it.
SM: Your daughter is named Josephine? That speaks volumes to how a fictional woman could influence you as much, if not more, than a real one. It sounds like both of us came to these literary icons searching for kinship and a place to “fit in” when reality didn’t show us the selves we knew we were deep down — the selves we knew we could become if given the creative freedom to express ourselves.
About the Authors
Learn about more Sarah McCoy at www.sarahmccoy.com or on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @sarahmmccoy.
Learn more about Anne Boyd Rioux at www.anneboydrioux.com or on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @anneboydrioux.
There is no shortage of terriblebook covers for the classics, and scrolling through these abominations on the internet is always good for a laugh. Titles by Austen, Shakespeare, and Dickens that have crossed into the public domain are part of a never-ending assembly line of cheap reprints saddled with bafflingly ugly covers. Amateur Photoshopping and corny stock images abound. More often than not, the cover art is misleadingly sexy for the purpose of driving sales. Women with heaving bosoms and hunky men and stare out at the reader, sometimes even dressed in contemporary clothing that suggests the events take place in this century.
They all have the same black background with white text, under which lies some of the least aesthetically pleasing artwork you’ve ever seen.
Among the endless, nameless print-on-demand publishers producing this crap, one name stands out: Wordsworth Classics. These budget editions are easy to spot: they all have the same black background with white text, under which lies some of the least aesthetically pleasing artwork you’ve ever seen on a book.
Wordsworth Classics came into this world in 1992, the product of UK-based publisher Wordsworth Editions. They’re known for their cheap price: one of these paperbacks costs a mere £2.50 (they’re available in the U.S. for a comparable sum). They’re a great option if you love the classics but live on a tight budget, but there are sacrifices. The paper quality isn’t great. The introductions and supplemental essays don’t exactly pass muster. But worst of all are the covers, which are so offensively terrible that it makes you question whether the cheap price is worth it.
Gaze in horror at some of these truly appalling covers:
Crime and Punishment is a CBS sitcom and Raskolnikov just exclaimed “Uh ohhhhh!” and paused for laughter from the studio audience.
Ah, a more innocent age, when everyone rushed out in their wedding dresses and bathrobes to smell a fart.
Dracula’s life is pretty stressful, I don’t blame him for smoking some pot for a little relief. As for that underbite: do they make braces for vampires?
These pants look like they’re from the costume closet of a middle school’s underfunded theater program and get trotted out any time they do a show set vaguely in “olden times.” The twerp on the left clearly does not know what to do with his hand.
This is just a picture of Nina Dobrev in The Vampire Diaries with another face pasted on it, so someone should probably sue.
She and everyone else on this cover look especially weird because their bodies and clothing are photorealistic but their faces are illustrations that have been airbrushed into oblivion.
Side note: this Alice in Wonderland cover similarly stole an image of Mia Wasikowska from the 2010 movie and slapped someone else’s face on her.
Here’s what they did for this cover: they found a photo of two girls to serve as Jo and Meg, stuck that in the front, and then took Beth from separate image and Amy from a third image and pasted them in the background. They’re all a slightly different style and size and it’s driving me insane. Also, they’re stupidly staring off in different directions, all looking at nothing.
The portrait the title refers to is not only supposed to age in Dorian Gray’s place, it’s also supposed to change to reflect his evil nature. The only thing sinful about this portrait is that terrible beard. I love how he’s glaring out at the reader with one eyebrow raised, like he’s just sick of the real Dorian Gray’s bullshit. Also, Dorian Gray has decided to hang this portrait prominently in his study instead of hiding it in the attic. Don’t you try to shame him, he is not here for it!
A beloved children’s classic in which a child model wearing a Halloween costume from Party City sits for her glamor shots, blissfully unaware that a house cat with a horrible physical deformity and Brain from Pinky and the Brain lurk behind her.
Moll Flanders, the story of a woman whose great tragedy is that she never learned how to sit.
The underbite (is that Dracula in there?), the anime eyes, the expression like he just got kneed in the balls… it’s all too much.
Uncle Tom looks like someone just showed him this cover.
That woman is not sitting on the fence. She is floating behind it in midair. And her suitor is staring at her boobs. It just goes to show you: behind all the high society manners, 19th century people were just as thirsty as we are now!
So, who are the artists responsible for these monstrosities? Thankfully, there are credits on the back covers, which you can view on Amazon. The “Cover Design” seems to always be by the same guy, but I’ve seen two different “Contemporary Artists” credited for the “Cover Illustration”: a Mr. Clair, who is behind Wives and Daughters, and a Ms. Surridge, who is credited for Middlemarch.These are real people that you can hire. I’ve Googled them. They have websites and LinkedIn profiles. According to his LinkedIn, Mr. Clair has done 250 Wordsworth covers. His other work samples on his website seem perfectly normal. Perhaps the illustrators aren’t being paid well and so they do the bare minimum. And yet, these covers look like time and effort was put into making them so intricately ugly.
Clearly they know how to manufacture a normal-looking book and just sometimes choose not to.
What’s crazy is that apparently, Wordsworth Classics covers used to be fine. Reddit has plenty of threads full of people who are angry and incredulous about these literary abominations, and some commenters have pointed out that there was a time when the covers were blue and had perfectly innocuous old paintings as the artwork, which is a route that Penguin and many other publishers take when designing the classics. This cover for The Waves is perfectly fine! So is this one for The Count of Monte Cristo! Even now, if you scroll through their U.S. website, there are some completely fine current editions like The Aeneid and Adam Bede nestled amongst the eyesores. So clearly they know how to manufacture a normal-looking book without spending a ton of money and just sometimes choose not to. Or they just don’t care. Perhaps they know that no matter how bad the covers are, broke book lovers will always buy them because of them unbeatable price. But you would think that a plain black cover with just the title and no art would be cheaper and better than paying artists to make stuff that looks like this.
Then again, I wouldn’t be writing about plain black covers with just the title and no art. Wordsworth Classics, if your plan all along was to create these covers as a publicity stunt so that I would feel compelled to write about them on the internet, congrats, you succeeded!
Check out more for yourself on their U.K. and U.S. websites or Amazon for hours of grim fascination. They make a perfect gift for your enemies!
The Indian Americans in Neel Patel’s If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi possess serious real estate square footage and all the trappings of upper bourgeois America. Yet, they’re still saddled with discontented dreams.
Buy the book
Patel’s characters veer from the ambitions of their parents, who came to America for the advertised skyward course of the American Dream. They are straight, queer, single, twice-married, troubled, and unrepentant. Even the ones who become doctors zigzag and transgress the model minority cardboard version of Indians in America.
I spoke to Patel about Midwestern Indian Americana, revenge, and a short story collection as a middle finger to societal expectations.
J.R. Ramakrishnan: Being first-generation Indian-American takes up prime space in your biography. I also read that your parents are from East Africa.
Neel Patel: Yeah, my father is from Kenya and my mom is from Tanzania.
JRR: I grew up in London and know many South Asians there who had families who came from Uganda. That particular trajectory seems like diaspora times two.
NP: Yes. At 16, my mom relocated to London so her family is there. The culture of my household was very different. When you are part of a community that you don’t feel like you really and fully belong to, you have an interesting perspective on it.
I grew up in a small Midwestern town with a tiny Indian community. We were very different. Most of the families there are from India. I know my mom didn’t always fit in. She went to a convent school. She lived in London as a teenager. She went rock concerts. She had a lot of freedom. My parents are pretty progressive. They drink alcohol. My mother is Gujarati and there was a time when she really enjoyed a good steak dinner. The other women in our town would have been horrified that she was eating beef.
Being culturally different from the other Indians certainly informed my writing. As did being othered by white people and feeling like you didn’t have a choice.
JRR: I was in Milwaukee recently visiting a friend, who could be a character out of your collection. What struck me the most was how much of space there is in those suburban houses. You can move without getting close to anyone ever. In your story, “Just A Friend,” the narrator makes a similar observation. And in “The Taj Mahal,” Sabrina says, “you knew you were rich when people wanted a tour of your house.”
NP: I grew up in a house like that. In the Midwest, it’s just cheaper. Indian communities who settled there did so because they knew they could do very well. There is this subculture of Indian doctors in the Midwest. They are in these small towns, where they know everyone, and have these five or six-thousand-square-foot mansions. It’s amazing how you can live with people for 18 years and not fully know them. Our immigrant parents had no idea what our day-to-day lives were like. Their major concerns were: Are you doing well at school? Are you thinking about your future? Are you going to become a doctor, engineer, etc.? Are you going to get married? They didn’t understand that for us happiness was more complicated than checking things off a list.
Being culturally different from the other Indians certainly informed my writing. As did being othered by white people and feeling like you didn’t have a choice.
JRR: In the collection, parental expectations are very linear and your characters stray off the path in all kinds of ways. Was that you in real life?
NP: Yes, it was very much my experience. I grew up feeling like there were so many things that were expected of me. I was not able to meet my parents’ expectations and that was really hard as a kid. I am terrible at math. I was always an artistic kid. I’m gay. I was different from everyone else’s children. I was an A, B, and C student. I got Cs frequently and that was unacceptable. So yeah, I wanted to write about characters who don’t always please their parents or society. Society is like a prison. It can be cruel.
JRR: Your Indians are no model minorities but they are exquisitely human. For example, the feisty Sabrina from “The Taj Mahal,” with whom I fell in love, is not your average young Indian doctor.
NP: What I was trying to say was more complex. The thing I love about short stories is that you can really experiment with different styles and perspectives. I felt Sabrina’s voice was in me somewhere so that’s where I started. That story and “These Things Happen” were the first two I wrote. The last three stories I wrote were the title story and then the two linked ones. Those are more of the traditional narrative that one would expect of this community. I started at an atypical point (“The Taj Mahal” and “These Things Happen”) and brought it back to something more familiar. Sabrina is unlikable. I really like unlikable characters.
JRR: I thought the women in your book are very subversive and aren’t depicted as stereotypes.
NP: Oh, thank you! I think that women, particularly women in our community and Asian communities in general, are expected to be submissive, soft-spoken, and malleable. I wanted to write women who were unapologetic.
JRR: The fixation with material goods is overwhelming. I am thinking of Anjali’s mom in “Radha, Krishna” needing photos of Anjali’s new Jeep and shrimp risotto meals to show off.
NP: It all goes back to expectation. People come to this country expecting certain things — success being the biggest. And I do think that people, especially my parents’ generation, are very obsessed with wealth and status. I remember being at a dinner party where someone was talking about how much money somebody else made. They started arguing about it and then somebody said, “Who’s the richest person in the room?” I thought, my god, this is a sickness.
There is this need to prove oneself. My father always told me as child, “In this country as a brown person if you want respect, you need money.” That’s a very powerful statement to tell a child. That told me that being brown wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t be average. I couldn’t just be me. I had to be successful to be accepted. It’s especially true with the preoccupation with medicine in the Indian community. My friends’ parents who were in the motel industry all encouraged their kids to become doctors, no matter how successful they themselves were. I was aware of the way they regarded my father who is a doctor. I wanted this to be in the stories.
I wanted to write about characters who don’t always please their parents or society. Society is like a prison. It can be cruel.
JRR: How did the two linked stories “World Famous” and “Radha, Krishna” come to you?
NP: I wrote “World Famous” about seven years ago when my friends were graduating medical school. I had heard a story about a med student who didn’t match (for a residency) and had to go back home for a year. I started thinking about what that would be like. When my editor asked me for another two stories, I revisited it and made it a love story. I wanted Ankur to meet someone like him: an outcast. So I came up with Anjali. The story twists and turns and there’s only unreliability in the narrative. Anjali was the tragic figure in that story and I wanted to keep going so I wrote “Radha, Krishna.” We saw Anjali through his eyes and I wanted to see him through hers — and what it would be like to be her in this community.
JRR: The straight relationship dysfunction in “Radha, Krishna” feels so spot-on.
NP: I like writing about straight relationships. Most of my friends are straight. I think especially at college, I was the person who witnessed everything and was completely neutral about it all. Young love is interesting. It’s very insecure and so influenced by outside forces. This is what I was thinking about when I wrote their relationship. Social class is a big part of it. He’s from an upper middle class family and she’s the daughter of a motel owner. They have all these ideas about each other. And then there’s the fact that he ultimately believes his mother when she is actually wrong about Anjali.
JRR: Revenge appears to be quite a force. Sabrina gets back at her friend who stole a boy from her at high school. In the title story, Premal has the satisfaction of seeing a girl who snubbed him at school working at the gas station, while he has become a surgeon. A lot of fuck yous here.
NP: Yeah, I really never felt like I was good enough. I felt scrutinized and having the book published in many ways is a fuck you to society. I was a troubled kid and I made plenty of trouble for my parents. In one of the many lectures my father gave me, he said, “We live in a society.” In my head, I thought, I don’t want to live in a society. My characters are fighting against this society and trying to find themselves in spaces to be comfortable in.
William Golding’s 1954 novel about a group of schoolboys marooned on an island is a masterful fictional take on how societies are built and broken—if you happen to look like the people in charge of society already. What would happen if not everyone on that island was a prep-school white boy? What would happen if nobody was?
Supposedly there’s an all-girls adaptation of Lord of the Flies in the works, an idea that was roundly pilloried on social media but actually has some merit. In the meantime, though, is there a book high school students should be reading that addresses the same issues in a slightly less rarified way?
Fire the Canon is Electric Lit’s limited series on making the standard high school syllabus more inclusive. In this edition, our panel of writers and educators — high school English teacher Larissa Pahomov; National Book Award finalist Carmen Maria Machado; writer Jaya Saxena, who among other things wrote a series about classic children’s literature on The Toast; and writer and professor Kiese Laymon — suggest alternatives and supplements to Lord of the Flies.
This is the most impactful book of fiction I’ve ever read. And somehow, she masterfully creates a collection of characters who all get space, all get interiority and all get hefty amounts of subtext. And when they talk, they talk. And we do more than listen; we move. We run. We get squeamish. We cover our eyes. We bring the book to our literal hearts. It’s a different kind of survival book. And it is everything to me.
Larissa Pahomov suggests: The Power by Naomi Alderman
I teach Lord of the Flies to high school sophomores. Every year they agree that boys can get violent — and every year they disagree about whether the story would have been different if girls had been present on the island. Would a female presence have turned the boys towards care and cooperation? Or would the girls have been crushed by the male desire to kill? In these discussions, my students automatically assume that female behavior is kind and conciliatory. We assume that the boys have the upper hand because they have the male privilege of larger bodies. Naomi Alderman’s much-heralded book blows this assumption out of the water by giving women the physical power to dominate. The experiment that William Golding ran in isolation now happens all over the world — what happens when the rules can no longer be enforced?
When I first read The Master and Margarita a few years back, I had two thoughts: This is one of the best novels I have ever read. And: Why did no one make me read it in high school? A razor-sharp Soviet satire, this book is metal as fuck: The devil comes to Moscow, wrecks havoc, and holds a ball where most of the guests are murderers who ended up in hell. Also, the titular Margarita covers her naked body in magical lotion, becomes a witch, turns another woman into a witch, and flies into the night. Also, there’s lots of dark humor, a talking cat, a bunch of demons, a story-within-a-story about Pontius Pilate, tons of weird slapstick, and a love story. And Margarita is a feminist heroine for the ages.
It’s weirdly accessible for a book with so many moving parts, and students would respond beautifully to its chaotic beauty, fabulist impulses, and sharp societal criticism.
Lord of the Flies is, if anything, a fable — these were never supposed to be real boys, this is an elaborate metaphor about the dark heart of the human psyche. So what better to replace it with than dark fairy tales? The Merry Spinster is full of stories of people, and animals, and mermaids, vying for power and pressuring each other into doing their bidding under the guise of peaceful civilization. Ortberg also swaps out typically pairings of pronouns and gendered words, so that sisters are “he” and princes are “she,” forcing the reader to reconsider their own assumptions of power and privilege. And if the allegory still isn’t clear, you can always show students that one Simpsons episode where they all get stuck on an island.
Electric Literature staff suggests: Severance by Ling Ma
Listen, are we just suggesting Severance to everyone, because everyone in the office read and loved it? Yes, sure. But also, post-apocalyptic novels are perfect crucibles for imagining what happens when the rules we operate under break down. What this particular novel of post-plague America has over Lord of the Flies is that it envisions how we might relate to the destruction of society (and especially postcapitalist society) not only as a group, but also as individuals. What happens to a person’s thoughts, routines, and priorities when they’re abandoned by the systems they relied on?
Kiese Laymon begins his latest book Heavy: An American Memoir with an earnest declaration: “I wanted to write a lie.” When writing memoir authors not only tackle their fear but expound on it, even dissect it when one may not be ready or able to. They must consider what it means to write a perceived truth versus the truth versus an experienced truth. All this is pertinent to the craft conversation, especially when it comes to nonfiction and memoir. This also came up as a point of reflection and interrogation in Laymon’s memoir.
When I spoke to Laymon about Heavy we discussed not only the creation of art but the fact that our work is up for consumption. How do we read and process art in order to recognize its inherent vulnerability? How do we reconcile what we portray versus what actually happened, at least to us or the folks we’re documenting? Is truth something that can actually be achieved in writing?
Heavy left me with more to think on as a writer, editor, and person, as did my conversation with Laymon. The strength and potency of his writing lies in his projection of a moment so real it hits the reader in the gut. But also the revelation of such truths through his writing encourages the reader (aka consumer) to not only do better as a scribe but in who we are as participants and observers. To me, the best prose doesn’t just reflect, it acknowledges and attempts to reconcile. Heavy may not be a book meant to provide answers or a clear path to reconciliation with family, Blackness, weight, or class among other things. But it sheds light to a truth that many of us know quite intimately and personally, and were able to grasp on to tightly, thankful for its existence.
Jennifer Baker: I do think everything is generational, passed down, so to speak. From a personal a level you mentioned you wanted to write a lie. So, when it comes to approaching nonfiction, I say the word “honesty” and “truth” but then when I heard you [at Tin House] it made me think “Well, dang. Are we getting at honesty or truth” or just an honesty and truth that works for us? I feel like art is trying to help us get to that answer, but I also feel like Heavy has no resolution. This isn’t the Disney-fied version of a Black boy’s life.
Kiese Laymon: Nah. And I understand why people want those endings. What I was saying at the beginning of that book is my mama wants that ending. And whether or not she really wants that ending in real life, she wants to read that ending. And then she also wants to read her son creating a narrative that has that ending.
So the lies that my mama wants me to create a narrative about our family that ends with everything being great. And everybody valuing where we been, but not too much just looking forward. And I want to write that shit too. I just think that’s bullshit though. I don’t know what truth actually is, but I know what honest attempts at reckoning are. I’m not saying I’m writing honesty, I think I’m attempting to honestly reckon, which is the difference. At the end of that honest reckoning, maybe some people might call it truth. I wouldn’t call it truth but I would call it an attempt. I think sometimes we know when we’re honestly attempting to reckon, honestly attempting to remember, honestly attempting to render. As opposed to when we’re attempting to manipulate. And even in those honest attempts it can be full of lies.
I’m not saying I’m writing honesty, I think I’m attempting to honestly reckon, which is the difference.
When I first started this book it was just gonna be about my mom and grandmama, about their experiences with sexual violence and food and all of that. I was really interested in the words they used to evade what I thought was honesty, or honest reckoning. At some point I asked my grandmama, “You just said something that you and I both know is not true. Why’d you say that?” And she said, “Because you’re writing it in a book, Kie. What you want me to do, tell you the truth?” And at that point I thought, I probably need to write back to y’all. Because I’m not trying to burden you with these white folk and telling all these other people who might read this book and tell all these black folks in different communities your business. But after listening to y’all for like a year and a half let me write back to you and tell you what I experienced. And that doesn’t mean it’s gonna be honest, but it was an honest attempt, you know?
JB: I was on a panel about trauma [writing] at Slice. And in talking, people really wanted to get an idea of how much trauma is too much? How do I approach trauma? There’s no really finite way to say, well this is how to expertly and wisely and considerately express your trauma on the page. But then I think that’s what separates the art from commerce. Art can be commercial, but I feel like there’s a very clear difference between commerce and art. Maybe it’s in the intention, maybe more than the product itself? But I worry about it because this is traumatic. Reading brings out the concern of: Is the writer okay, along with am I consuming this in a way that is ethical myself as a reader?
KL: That’s the question, right? I sort of think people talk about ethical creation, ethical writing a lot. But what does ethical readership look like? Of course I realize at some point that people are gonna talk a lot about trauma in the book. I don’t know if I use that word in the book, I definitely try not to use that word…
JB: Not really, no.
KL: Because I wanted to write a book that didn’t rely on specific words like that. Even though specific words are the basis for it. But yeah, my point is fam is that I don’t know how in this nation how anybody can be okay? I just don’t. That doesn’t mean there’s not joy, that doesn’t mean there’s not radical liberatory community and bonding. But the idea that we’re always even searching for an okay, and searching for a deliverance, and searching for this kind of progress narrative is part of why we’re not okay. And part of why people have to say they’re okay when they’re not.
The idea that we’re always even searching for an okay, and searching for a deliverance, and searching for this kind of progress narrative is part of why we’re not okay.
I think people are right to worry about the writer on something like this. But I’m right too to worry about every reader for something like this. And I think the two have to meet. But to go back to your question, the scary part is that the two meet at this part of commerce. I’m talking about this shit now as if it’s art that is free of slick marketing and all of that, but it’s a product. In my heart I think that the monetization is necessary because of the communities we come from. Because I’m gonna use the money I get from this to take care of myself and take care of my family and take care of other vulnerable people I know. But at the same time something is lost, I think, when it’s sort of transactional. And then not only is it transactional but I created a Black-ass piece of art. And I love my editor and I love my agent. I really do love them like they family and they’re white. And the people that they work for are white people. I don’t delude myself, I don’t think that in any way this shit is pure. Just because I’m creating Black art from a Black place for Black people. But what does it mean that there are so many white hands involved in the actual packaging and delivery of it? I don’t have the answers, but I think about what it means a lot.
JB: Going back to writing. We seek out how to write and I really try to reconcile how I was taught to read. But it was more Dickensian, Huck Finn, Moby Dick. I don’t know that even today if people know how to [really] read. And do people know how to read us? By “us” I mean marginalized people.
KL: For sure. I don’t think even we know how to read us.
JB: Yeah.
KL: Maybe we do. I’ve taught classes where my Black students, amazing Black students, were like “I don’t feel comfortable reading this in this class.” Really what they’re saying is: I don’t feel comfortable being watched reading this. And having white people interpret this art that wasn’t meant for them. I’m torn because pushing through some kind of uncomfortability is what all artists have to do. And again I’m gonna argue that there’s an art to learning how to rigorously read. Sometimes I think we do this thing where we think people who read a lot are better or more moral or less fucked up. We know that the architects of this empire read a lot of books, which tells you that reading books in and of itself isn’t like some moral deliverance. You can’t convince me that people who read a lot of books are better than people who don’t. But I think there’s a kind of liberatory kind of reading and watching that we can hone and that we can encourage.
Beyond all the family stuff, beyond what people call trauma, my book is about reading and writing. I wrote that book because my mama made my ass read and write all the time. But the stuff she made me read and write was not stuff that was going to encourage me to push beyond a particular surface. She wanted me to read and write to protect myself from white folks. I always say the first really dope Black book I read was a biography on Langston Hughes. Then the first real real Black book that my mama did not even encourage me to read was her favorite book, Their Eyes Were Watching God. And I remember reading that reminded me of the first time I saw Michael Jackson moonwalk. And I was like “Damn, you can do this right here on a page?” It’s sort of antiquated to talk about Zora Neale Hurston but I still think people don’t appreciate what she did. I definitely think liberatory reading practices are something we need to get better at. And I think you do that by creating radical, dope, liberatory art. And I think Black art.
You can’t convince me that people who read a lot of books are better than people who don’t. But I think there’s a kind of liberatory kind of reading and watching that we can hone and that we can encourage.
JB: When I first read Their Eyes Were Watching God in high school I didn’t like it. But I think it was because I was taught this is what “proper” English is. Then when you plunk down Zora Neale Hurston amongst John Steinbeck, she stands out. And it may stand out in a way that is: I really am tethered to this, or it may stand out in a way that is oppositional to what I was made to believe. I read it again and that I wasn’t even my favorite Hurston book — I really enjoy her short stories and Dust Tracks on the Road. Then I read more and more and I thought, “Oh, I really like what she’s doing here.” But it goes back to no one taught me how to do that. If I didn’t go back to [Hurston] I don’t think I would’ve appreciated her as much.
KL: Oh, absolutely! That’s what I’m saying about that re-reading. I wrote this book to my mama because she taught me how to read. And I wrote the book the way I wrote it because I was trying not to become her or my father. But it’s the re-reading and the rewriting that I’m most grateful for more than anything else my mama ever gave me. She did teach me early that you haven’t read anything if you’ve only read it once. And you probably haven’t written anything that’s worth being read if you’ve only written it once. I think on a basic level that’s not the fantasy, that’s not gonna make everything better for us. But that is necessary. And I think about how love works. You revisit things you love. People say you love people, they want to see them again. They want to talk to them, like over and over and over again. I’m always interested when people say “Oh I love this book and they only read that shit one time.” Or you love a painting but you only saw it one time. It just can’t work that way, you know. You might really like something in it, but you don’t even know what’s going on if you see it one time, I don’t think.
JB: You said in Heavy specifically that “revision is practice.”
KL: Yeah, I think so. But everything that I was taught about art was from my school. It wasn’t about practice, it was about product. It was about writing that 5-paragraph essay to get that A.
KL: Yeah. And I appreciate my teachers and think they’re underpaid and think they were tremendously undervalued. AndI guess they were trying to get at discovery when they would call it free-writing. But the idea that you can use words to discover what you forget, or discover what you imagine was just something that I never had a teacher tell me that in high school or even in college. Like you gotta write to discover what actually happened. And you don’t have to because a lot of people can’t write and don’t write. They have different recovery practices, different ways to remember, different ways to imagine that don’t entail the writing. But for me, I can’t understand anything I’ve experienced unless I write it a few times. And then that’s the thing about honesty and truth, in the rewriting of it you’re changing it every time you write it. Which means, Is it true? I don’t know. But I know that I’m attempting to honestly reckon and remember. I don’t know if it’s truth. But I can just try to tell you that the attempt has a lot of integrity, hopefully.
I would never have imagined reading this book with Nate, but he came home one night and I was sitting at the dining room table, sobbing. No, I’d already stopped sobbing — I was just looking at the wall. Or, not at the wall really, but in that direction — you know how you can look right at something, but you don’t see it.
I was thinking about when I first heard about AIDS, maybe I was twelve and it was Rock Hudson in the Enquirer and I didn’t even know who that was, a famous actor my mother said and the headline told me he died of AIDS.
Liberace too — pictures of him really scared me, I didn’t know what to do with those pictures. I just knew that I was going to die, if anyone knew, knew about me, and they did know, so I knew I was going to die.
In The Gifts of the Body, the narrator is a home care worker for people dying of AIDS, and when I opened it up the first time I got scared because the writing was so simple and I wondered if all these deaths had changed Rebecca Brown’s writing. When Nate asked what was wrong, I handed him the book and he said we should read it together.
So now I’m already crying again on page 2, which is numbered 4 — the narrator’s talking about leaving little surprises under the pillow of the person she’s taking care of. Or rearranging his toys so the toys are kissing. “Rick loved surprises,” Rebecca Brown writes.
And then, on the next page, Rick is on the floor, or no, I guess it’s not the floor it’s the futon in the living room where he’s curled up in fetal position, writhing in pain. The narrator says to Rick: “I’m sorry you hurt so much,” and I’m thinking about how much I hurt. How much everyone I’ve ever known hurts, or everyone I’ve ever known who’s meant something to me, and what about the ones who act like they don’t hurt, like nothing’s affecting them at all, like Joey, look what happened to Joey.
And then the narrator does something that I can hardly believe. She gets on the futon with Rick. She gets on the futon and lies on her side and puts her arms around him as he’s sweating and in pain.
I’m kind of relieved that I can still cry like this, in spite of the coke cure. I’m only on page 7, and this book already means so much to me. The home care worker is cleaning the apartment while Rick is in the hospital — she wants Rick to come home to a place that’s soothing. She avoids the kitchen table, there’s something she saw there and when we find out what it is, when I find out what it is, that’s where I’m crying again.
Rick had gone out to get cinnamon rolls like he used to, after his lover died but before he’d also gotten sick. He’d gone out to choose the softest rolls, one for himself and one for the home care worker. And now he’s in the hospital. The narrator closes her eyes and lowers her head toward the table and I’m thinking of tears, tears at this table with Nate and how he’s still not looking up, which helps me not try to change anything and I wonder if he knows that.
“There’s something about no one else knowing someone is taking care of you,” Rebecca Brown writes — if Mrs. Lindstrom pretends the attendant is just there on a visit, on a visit saying hi, maybe if she just pretends, all this can become pretend. I look at Nate again, and I wonder what we’re pretending. Ever since I told him about Joey, he says he’s not in the mood for sex so I cook dinner because Nate says he’s trying to get healthy, though I’m sure he’s eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, and a hamburger for lunch, but it’s almost cute how he asks all these questions about my cooking and forgets everything I say. We sit down and talk like husband and wife or father and son or maybe just friends, that’s the best part, when it actually feels like we’re friends. Every now and then, Nate wants me to give him a massage, and then when I get hard he says oh, let me see that, and then he jerks me off until I come on his chest. And then I hate him again.
I should be reading this book with Avery, but he doesn’t like reading, and anyway he said he didn’t want to read a book about AIDS. But what about Joey, I asked, don’t you want to think about Joey?
Joey’s gone, Avery said — Joey’s gone, and he’s not coming back — what’s there to think about now?
It’s so surprising, when you cry and when you don’t. The narrator tells Ed that he can check into the hospice and then leave if he wants to, even though she’s never seen anyone leave. Is this an act of kindness? The narrator is so caring and detached, she feels so deeply for these people she only knows through their illness, and I wonder if this is what community means.
Ed turns down the hospice. He’s enraged, making contradictory demands. He’s a child, and an adult. He wants to have a garage sale. He wants the option to leave his house again on his own. The chapter is called “The Gift of Tears.”
I’m getting used to the light of this chandelier. Nate is behind me, placing another cocktail to my right, thank you. I wonder if I want him to touch my shoulder, but then he doesn’t.
I’m thinking about the way death brings you closer to childhood, does that mean into or away from pain? The way the narrator washes Carlos’s hands, arms, armpits, feet. His innocence at experiencing touch, with and without its implications. And then the fear — that’s the childhood I remember. Can there ever be innocence with so much fear?
Mrs. Lindstrom, who asks the attendant to call her Connie — she seroconverted from a blood transfusion when she had a mastectomy. Before blood was tested for HIV. She has a gay son, Joe, who feels guilty because he thinks he should be the one dying — his mother never did anything wrong.
I’m thinking about this shame we all carry, the shame that means we deserve to die.
Connie, holding onto her routine and hoping that if she doesn’t mention she can’t eat, maybe she’ll be able to. Ed says: “There won’t be anyone left to remember us when we all die.” And I wonder if that’s already true. How Avery has taken Joey’s place at the clubs with all the different-sized vials, and no one even asks, no one even asks about Joey. We sit in his apartment, and it’s like we’re ghosts.
These people want so much. This attendant, she tries to provide what she can. Maybe more. “When the epidemic started there was a shorter time between when people got sick and when they died.” That’s a line that really gets me, because this isn’t the beginning of the epidemic anymore, but one minute Joey was telling us — and I didn’t believe her, I really didn’t believe her, I thought it was some cruel joke. It’s all frozen in my head now, like we’re still standing on the Esplanade in the snow and Joey says: I’m dying. I’m dying. And the next day she went home to her parents’ house in Brandywine, Delaware.
I thought we were going to visit. She told us we could visit. She told us there were castles there. I thought we were going to visit the castles.
I remember that queen who came to our house in San Francisco to look at a room, and she wanted to do touch healing on everyone. I was appalled. I saw her around a few times, and she always acted like we were really close, and at first I was annoyed but then I started to like seeing her. Then the next time I heard about her it was for her memorial.
Or Thomas who arranged all these candles on the bathtub before we had sex in the bath, and I was like what are you doing, we don’t need candles. But he wanted it to be romantic. It was romantic. In six months he was dead.
I had one friend who went to every memorial he heard about, even for people he didn’t know. But I didn’t want to steal other people’s grief. As if there was a limited amount. Now I wonder if I should have gone to all those memorials. Maybe reading this book with Nate at the dining room table is some kind of memorial, but what are we going to say when we’re done?
“Like a bunch of ninety-five-year-olds watching their generation end.” I close the book for a moment and drink the rest of my cocktail, and I notice Nate’s shifted his body to the left, and I’ve shifted to the right, so we’re not directly across from one another anymore.
What is a lie, and what isn’t? Like when the narrator tells a new client that his former attendant misses him, even though she’s never actually met that attendant. And when the new client says: I miss him too. That place between your heart and the fabric on your chest, the fabric on your chest and the world beyond.
The narrator learns that her supervisor is leaving. She’s leaving because she’s sick. Another of these moments that feels like a shock — a shock to the narrator, a shock to me at this table with Nate where I keep crying and he doesn’t look up, except this time he does, just briefly, and then he reaches over for my hand and I reach for his, this gesture that happens so often in the book and maybe it feels nice here too. Although it’s hard to reach that far across the table, I mean reach that far and keep reading at the same time. So I pull my hand back, softly, and I smile — Nate smiles too, and then we both go back to reading.
It’s not that this book doesn’t have flaws, it’s just that there are so few of them. I’m getting to the end of my third cocktail, and there’s that feeling in my head that must be chemical, the perfect combination of liquor and coke, invulnerability on ice. It’s what I need to channel in order to fuck Nate — right now I could easily bend him over that white sofa. He would laugh in that drunk old guy way and say let’s go upstairs.
Maybe I’ll never have to do that again.
The book ends with Connie’s death. The ending is nothing but sobs until I have to put the book down and go upstairs to piss, I’ve been holding it for too long. I study my face in the mirror — under my eyes there’s a rash, and my lips are pressed up into a child’s frown.
I can’t decide whether I need a bump of coke, but I do one anyway, and then I wonder whether closing the book with the death of an old straight woman is dishonest. I go up to my room and lie on top of the velvet comforter and stare at the chandelier, floating in a way but also sinking. Eventually Nate comes upstairs and stands in my doorway. He looks like he’s in shock. I sit up, and he sits down next to me on the bed. For a moment it feels like we’re in the same place.
A month shy of my high school graduation, I was nearly cast out of the National Honor Society. My AP English teacher had accused me of plagiarizing sections of my senior thesis on Tolstoy’s masterpiece, Anna Karenina. This wasn’t my first assignment demanding an engagement with the work of other scholars to analyze literature. At my élite high school I had submitted countless essays following the strict rules of a thesis, leaning on textual examples for support. I usually received A’s or A-minuses and heaping praise. But writing this essay, I teetered at the edge of self-doubt.
My teacher Ms. K. confronted me privately, asking whether all the words in this paper were mine. I didn’t understand the question — words didn’t belong to any of us. Ms. K. probed me to admit whether I’d failed to put passages of text in inverted commas, had failed to attribute ideas to various sources. I politely explained that what she’d read was entirely original, that all the words were mine. I suspect Ms. K. remained unconvinced and would have fed my paper into a software program to detect evidence of plagiarism, if one had been available to her.
My copy of Anna Karenina, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, still sits on my bookshelf in my childhood home. Anna’s story enthralled me. I was all too excited to see how she refused to admit her unconscious desires to herself. The novel’s pages bear my marginalia in perfect, penciled handwriting, along with the index cards of quotes, citations, notes, and themes I’d traced while reading the novel and secondary sources. I’m too haunted, however, to revisit the paper, too afraid to remember whether I’d lifted entire sentences and ideas and arguments out of scholarly works, along the lines of: “Anna Karenina is beset with foreshadowing; we learn that the protagonist is doomed early in Tolstoy’s story; Anna’s passion makes her a fated character.”
I’d followed each assignment leading up to the final paper: compose a thesis statement; assemble an annotated bibliography; organize notes on index cards; produce an outline; submit a rough draft; revise; resubmit. But we hadn’t read Anna Karenina as a class. How would I know whether my thinking was accurate, other than to consult what had been previously thought? I spent time in the public library’s stacks. I grabbed Harold Bloom and others on Anna Karenina. I quickly found myself overwhelmed by the brilliance of some of their ideas. I was too paralyzed to write something as intelligent and stylish and sparkling about Anna Karenina, which Edmund White considers “the greatest novel in all literature.” After all, what more could be said about the pathos of his protagonist’s life?
More than the guilt that I’d been suspected of cheating was the shame I wasn’t credibly attached to good scholarship. What was so unconvincing about those words, that I couldn’t have written them myself? Couldn’t they have been mine? Or was that entirely beyond the realm of possibility? Put another way, was I stupid for getting caught, or just plain stupid, lacking intelligence?
The novelist André Gide writes that “everything that needs to be said has already been said.” It’s even possible that nothing new can be said of plagiarism. In 2007, Jonathan Lethem wrote an essay titled “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” making a case, through carefully researched examples, for the “generative power of appropriation across artforms [sic] and throughout history” (a line I borrowed from Lincoln Michel’s essay on plagiarism, in which he also cites Lethem). The key to the essay, however, is expertly withheld until the very end, where Lethem, as he writes, “names the source of every line I stole, warped, and cobbled together as I ‘wrote’ (except, alas, those sources I forgot along the way).” Once one’s bitterness dissipates, the reader begins to enjoy the subtle pleasure of being toyed with. We see the history of artistic and literary production as nothing but a history of imitating, copying, lifting, and stealing. Lethem’s sleight of hand shouldn’t surprise us: the very illusion of an original, albeit heavily referenced, essay is exposed in the essay’s subtitle: “A Plagiarism” (not “On Plagiarism”).
My high school thesis reflected a crisis of voice. The heterogeneous amalgamation of scholars, some of whom I’d left unnamed in places, inserted into the fabric of my essay, became awkward interruptions into my argument, anonymous influences speaking in strange keys, pastiched screeches that created little tears in the text I was trying to stitch together.
My high school thesis reflected a crisis of voice. The heterogeneous amalgamation of scholars, inserted into the fabric of my essay, became awkward interruptions into my argument.
I felt the pressure to offer insights at the level of experienced scholars because I imagined myself as already at such a plane. My teachers’ estimation of my precocious intellectualism, which I came to know of myself, set me up to resist doing the difficult work of writing. If I was good at writing, as I was said to be, I must not be seen struggling. And thus we arrive at the question of discipline. Plagiarism demonstrates intellectual laziness. I had yet to learn that the sustained activity and dedication necessary to creating good work — be it scholarship, literature, or criticism — is a measure of one’s own capacity for self-discipline. To this day, I wonder whether I have what it takes.
“Original” has come to mean “authentic” (that is, distinct from a copy). But according to Raymond Williams, “original” separated from its root, “origin,” coming to mean “a kind of work distinguished by genius, growing not made and therefore not mechanical [that is, an imitation].” The irony is that no one can claim to create work out of thin air. Modern scholarship acknowledges this more explicitly, having set in place a formal system to cite and attribute sources to their original author. Art, on the other hand, alludes to earlier works, but it is precisely that: a playful reference suggesting possible connections between compositions and traditions. Allusions, if done well, almost never inspire censure of a work’s unoriginality. Rather, they bring pleasure, find openings in texts, and allow space for readers to create new meanings.
Anxiety abounds when considering whether anything we create is ever truly original. In an age choking on staggering volumes of information, combined with unprecedented access to said information, the potential for infinite reproductions proliferates and the potential for plagiarism troubles us. With a few keystrokes, one can trace an idea through libraries, through sources over time. Added to this anxiety is a deeper paroxysm: in a cultural marketplace that aggressively polices ownership, and in which stories are property rather than shared amongst a commons, plagiarism and piracy are to be vigilantly avoided, and even dreaded at all costs.
In an age choking on staggering volumes of information, the potential for infinite reproductions proliferates and the potential for plagiarism troubles us.
Despite my best efforts, variations (even misreadings) of ideas have become lodged in my mind over time. The terrifying thought that I may utter something I thought I was the first to think, without being accused of plagiarism, speaks to an even more frightening one: the human mind is fallible. Unable to sufficiently organize and regulate which ideas a mind created and which it lifted from another’s, the mind leans on the technology of citation. It follows standards, practices, norms, or rules to avoid the possibility of doubt, or to acknowledge the presence of secondhand ideas. Footnotes and bibliographies alleviate the reader of doubt, while also lending a scientific air of traceability and reproducibility to scholarly work. If citations are roadmaps, I turned in a thesis that covered my tracks, and ignored the adage we heard in math but never in English: “Show your work.”
“Do we need all this stuff from Orwell?”
A professor of creative writing and I were sifting through a draft of a personal essay I had workshopped earlier that week. I’d been clinging to a passage I’d attributed to George Orwell, in which he recounts the days and lonely nights he spent at a boarding school in his youth. I held onto Orwell’s memories in his essay “Such, Such Were the Joys” to strengthen my own experiences adjusting to a new school in seventh grade. I’d sat for an entrance exam (as Orwell had), wrestled with the certainty of my own childhood memories (as Orwell had), and questioned the class disparities I saw around me (as Orwell had). I’d held onto his words to historicize my own experiences, to show that they weren’t particularly unique to me, to resist the trap of solipsism.
“I want to show that I’m well-read,” I told my professor. “That I’ve read what’s come before me, what I’m in conversation with. I don’t presume to be the only person in the world who’s felt isolated in a new school.”
“Your language proves you’re well read,” she replied.
There were joys, it seemed, in the suggestive registers of writing. Still, I held onto Orwell’s words for another round of feedback, subjecting a subsequent draft to my cohort at a summer workshop. One of them mentioned I’d gotten the point of Orwell’s essay wrong. Out of embarrassment, I excised the allusions all together in the next draft. But it was another student’s comment that truly freed me the obligation to defer to those who had come before me.
“You may not think so, but your story has so much heart,” she said to me, outside the classroom as I reviewed everyone’s feedback. “It’s not only that your particular story is only yours to tell, which makes it original,” she continued. “It’s how you tell it.”
In this moment, I began to understand that I didn’t trust my own memories and experiences as legitimate. And while a critical essay and a personal one have different aims, what I’m struggling to tell in this essay comes down to the “how,” or what others might call style.
I knew I had an ulterior, more ambitious motive by invoking Orwell: I sought to connect myself to him, adopt him as a creative mentor, form an intellectual lineage. I’d renounced my senior-year English teacher Ms. K. after I’d disappointed her, and I was since searching for someone to learn from. Why do writers cite the greats at all, if not to choose their parents?
It was so beautiful, that I have never seen many shades of orange, yellow, red, and blue. I also noticed that each and every color was similar to the color upon it, or beneath it. In my opinion, the way the colors blend into eachother [sic], makes me think, “Nothing can come between those colors.”
Tristes Tropiques, first published in 1955, is the only ethnography written by French structuralist Claude Lévi-Strauss, based on fieldwork he conducted in the Amazon fifteen years earlier. A striking passage early in the masterpiece, while Lévi-Strauss’ ship is crossing the Atlantic, eases the discomfort I have with the sentences I quoted above, taken from a story I wrote when I was nine; we were to describe a sensational experience that happened to us. I’d recounted the moment I saw a sunset in 1990 at Myrtle Beach, with the distinct memory of my teacher’s own description of a sunset lingering in my mind. I remember my teacher articulating a sunset while I struggled to find a memory of my own. I wrote about a sunset I’d seen because my teacher’s example of her experience confirmed to me its worth.
Encountering an enchanting sunset of his own, Lévi-Strauss is moved to record the nearly ineffable scene, a vivid display of “fire first golden, then vermilion, then cerise.” We see the same sun differently. With granular precision and patience, Lévi-Strauss traces the geometric, atmospheric, and chromatic changes unfolding before him. Despite these incremental transformations, he realizes, as I did, how “in the end it was difficult to distinguish one color from the next.”
I’ve taken great pains, as early as fourth grade, to present myself as ordered, precise, and in control of my own self-expression. Writing on the page has allowed me to enact this persona more convincingly. Each letter I wrote by hand, in my sunset storybook, was perfectly formed, each letter set on a delicate lean. And the cover’s illustration was stylized, almost desperately so. A child frustrated with his inability to describe his own experiences found solace in embellishment and excess: gratuitous swirls in a range of colors circled the page, as if that’s how a sunset appeared. I didn’t trust my writing to hold weight, and so relied on style to do the work.
I didn’t trust my writing to hold weight, and so relied on style to do the work.
Where the rest of my story can be forgotten, a sentence from my author’s bio bears quoting: “When he grows up, he wants to be an artist, a brain surgeon, an author or an entomologist.” This self, anticipating a future self, intrigues me. Hidden among these words seems to be the origin of a self, the kernel of an author or artist, germinating, eager to bloom.
I learned in my youth not to throw anything away. I’ve recently begun lifting schoolwork from my childhood home to assemble an archive of my own: a photocopied lab notebook from a summer internship at Harvard Public Health; English papers on Lady Macbeth; graceless translations of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Devoted to the written word and obsessed with my own scholastic prowess, I imagine these files track my own intellectual development, each paper a record of what I thought I knew and how elegantly I strove to say it. As deeply as these papers disappoint me, they record, in addition to what I thought, who I was: a student, who, if not all that insightful or original, was at least docile enough to be pushed, and insecure to the point of impressing those in power.
Still, a voice amidst these essays strains to be heard. Unable to edit my word count, I used to ignore the double-spacing rule and I reduced my font size. I was both verbose and vain. Surely I wasn’t fooling my teachers: the page looked cramped, as if my words were struggling to breathe. I wonder, however, whether hovering in the lessened space between minimized text was a shadow of the writer I might become. What if I’d been honest about what I didn’t know, and about what I sought to know? I simply wasn’t taught, or I had yet to realize, that the shadowy space of uncertainty would always yield originality.
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
