Is Russia a Terrible Country?

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I n 2009, I went back to Russia for the first time since emigrating to the US when I was three. I went with my grandparents, and the country we were in barely resembled the country they had left. My grandparents and I blundered through an unrecognizable and impossibly expensive Moscow. Their disorientation was sad and funny, and resulted in some misadventures where I could finally see glints of the old world Soviet order underneath the now polished and Western-seeming façade, culminating in our tour bus catching fire and us being unceremoniously deposited on the side of a highway in the outskirts of Moscow and told to march single file along the shoulder until we eventually got to a distant metro stop.

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Keith Gessen captures so well in his second novel, A Terrible Country, the befuddlement of a (mostly) American in Moscow trying to orient himself in a town where things seem to operate by entirely different rules than in the US. Set in 2008, around the same time as my trip, I found so much of the book deeply relatable. The novel is funny, yes, but also quite moving. In it, Andrei Kaplan, a Russian immigrant and struggling academic moves back to Moscow to take care of his grandmother, in the hopes that she will provide him with good material for an article about life under Stalinism — an article that he hopes will help land him a tenure-track job. When Andrei gets to Moscow, however, he finds his grandmother’s memory has deteriorated to the point that she often does not recognize him. His days are filled with the same repetitive conversations with her and trying, not very successfully, to inject himself into the stream of life in Moscow. Gessen’s portrait of living with a person who is losing their memory is tender but also frustrating and funny, as life’s tragedies often are, and takes place against the larger backdrop of Andrei’s political awakening in Moscow.

The book shows so well the personal cost of all the reforms and policies that had transformed Russia into a capitalist country, something Gessen has been covering for some time as a journalist. Russia is a “terrible country,” according to Andrei’s grandma, and she doesn’t understand why he would come back.

Keith Gessen and I talked about Russia’s terribleness, the US’s moral gray areas, the immigrant experience, balancing fatherhood and writing, and the construction of a good book excerpt. Gessen patiently answered my questions as he unloaded the dishwasher.

Katya Apekina: What was the original seed for the novel?

Keith Gessen: Two things. There was frustration at my own inability as a journalist to convey what Russia was like, or what my experience of it was like. I felt like I’d never quite captured how similar Moscow is to New York, on the one hand — the way people live, the pace of life — but also how different. How much poorer it is. The way people live with their parents, for example, or don’t actually own their car. And then because of that the sorts of things people have to go through on a day-to-day basis — just how much more difficult life is than in the United States. That experience is hard to capture in part because so much of it is so mundane. So what if it takes you two hours to find, I don’t know, a place with wifi? This isn’t the stuff of grand historical narratives. But it is out of such searches for wifi that life is made, ultimately.

That was the meta-motivation. And then there was the more immediate experience. I lived in Moscow with my grandmother for a year, during the same timeframe as in the novel, taking care of her and helping her out. At the time, I didn’t think of it as material for a novel, but as soon as I got home, I started thinking about it. It was a very powerful experience. I wanted to describe what it was like to live with someone who was losing her memory and to an extent her personality. That was the original seed. From there, it was a long process of figuring out how to work that into a traditional novel with, you know, a plot.

I lived in Moscow with my grandmother for a year, taking care of her and helping her out. [My novel came from wanting] to describe what it was like to live with someone who was losing her memory and to an extent her personality.

KA: Andrei has this political awakening, but he’s maybe not able to be as transformed by it as he would like. Did you have a similar political awakening when you were in Russia?

KG: The political conversion or realization that Andrei goes through in 6 months, took me about 10 years. I went over to Moscow in the mid-90s, when I was in college; it was at the time when Russia was supposedly transitioning toward capitalism. You would read the papers in the U.S. and it was like, “Russia is going through a wonderful transformation toward capitalism! Though it’s a little bumpy at times!” But anyone who went over there could see that it really wasn’t going well. There was a lot of crime and people like my grandmother had lost just about everything — their jobs, their savings, their sense of themselves. Old people were out on the street selling their socks.

But a lot of people thought, and I have to admit that I was one of these people, that this was just part of the painful process of modernization, and eventually, on the other side, the Russians would emerge from it happy and prosperous, like Germany. I held that view for a while. But that experience of seeing Russian capitalism up close in the 90s planted the seed in my mind that maybe capitalism wasn’t the best solution to all situations and that in certain places it led to a great deal of misery and death, actually. It took me a while to kind of come around to the idea that this wasn’t some kind of aberrant capitalism but actually capitalism itself. So, I do share that with Andrei, though as I say he comes to it a little faster.

KA: The ending blew me away — when Andrei is put to the test. I grew up with this idea that a person’s true decency was something that was hidden away and that in polite American society it went untested, but in extreme situations, like in Soviet life, it was forced to the surface. I remember thinking that I didn’t really know what a person was made of, what I myself was made of, unless it was tested. Is this also an idea you grew up with and do you still believe that?

KG: For me, the difference between here and there is that in the US there is a really wide gray area of moral and political behavior. I guess that’s something that money buys: moral ambiguity. Like, sure, I’m a corporate lawyer or an investment banker, but I also do a lot of pro bono and charity work, and also, you know, I’m a Democrat. There are various shades of that, that are more or less convincing, whereas in Russia if you’re working for Gazprom or Rosneft or United Russia, you have literal blood on your hands. Or even just being a college professor, as I now am, in the U.S. It’s a noble profession, in many ways — I spend a lot of time working with students on their writing and reporting and some of their work is really great. At the same time I’m part of this horrible student debt machine. I’m in a gray area. In Russia things are a little more black and white.

KA: Do you think that’s still true about the U.S.?

KG: Well, certainly less so since 2016, because of the political polarization. But it’s one thing to live in a country that’s split in half, as the U.S. now is, so that you’re part of the good half… that’s different from being anti-Putin in Russia, where you’re more like 10 or 15 percent of the population. And then within that 10 percent, being a person who is willing to put your body and freedom at risk.

I grew up with an admiration for the Soviet dissidents. When I was very little, I actually thought that my parents were also dissidents, in the sense that they had all the samizdat books, Solzhenitsyn and Mandelstam and so on, and, having emigrated in the early 80s, had made a pretty dramatic decision to leave the USSR. It was only later that I found out that the number of people who were actual dissidents, who had actually protested the Soviet regime and had actually gone to prison, was minuscule. And then you had this larger group around them who were sympathetic and never joined the Party and secretly hated the regime but didn’t actually go out and protest. That was the group my parents belonged to. I mean, famously, in 1968 when the Soviet Union sent tanks into Prague, there were eight people who went out into Red Square and were then all arrested. That’s a very small number of people.

The Unbitten Elbow

KA: Andrei, as an immigrant, was pretty rootless. As an immigrant myself I related to that aspect — wanting to be part of a cause, but the cause not really being his own. Do you think there’s a limitation to his commitment since it’s not his country?

KG: I don’t know if I believe that. I think it’s a decision for him to make. My parents, even as they never really assimilated to the US — I don’t think they would ever have thought of themselves as rootless. I think if you’d have asked them, they’d have said: I’m an immigrant. I’m an American who is from the Soviet Union. That is, they knew exactly where they were from and they knew exactly where they had arrived. You can look at that situation and think it’s tragic. From a certain perspective, they never really got to have a home. But they didn’t look at it that way.

In the next generation, I think it’s true, we do feel a little more rootless. Are we from the Soviet Union? Is that our identity? On the one hand, yes, but on the other our actual connection to that place is pretty tenuous. We don’t live there. We don’t know the language that well. We don’t know the names of the sports teams. Whatever.

But that just means we have to decide. Andrei does enter into Russian life enough that he is given a choice about where he belongs and where he wants to take a stand. I think that’s true of anyone. I mean, I’ve lived my life this way to a certain extent, too, not just because I wasn’t born in the States, but because I’ve moved around a certain amount, between college and grad school and just moving between neighborhoods in New York, even, and always or sometimes with the thought that, “Well, I’m not really here for the long term. This isn’t really my home.” But at a certain point I think you get an opportunity, if you want it, to say: “This is my home. These are my people. I’m going to fight here.”

So it’s up to him. I don’t think it’s foreordained that he would make the decision that he makes.

Seeing Russian capitalism up close in the 90s planted the seed in my mind that maybe capitalism wasn’t the best solution to all situations and that in certain places it led to a great deal of misery and death, actually.

KA: I came to your book first through the excerpt that was in the New Yorker. I have never read an excerpt before that felt so stand alone powerful on its own and yet it didn’t really give away anything about the book or rob the book of its emotional power. They felt like two distinct things and I loved them both. I was curious about how that excerpt came about.

KG: A young editor named David Wallace at the New Yorker did that. I wouldn’t have known how. He took the grandmother thread and rearranged the chronology a little to cast it more in the form of a story. It was pretty brilliant. The words were the same but it was a different creature, made out of parts of the larger creature. And it put me in this strange position, since David felt like he could cut things, but not really add anything to suture the narrative together. At first I was like, “Am I authorized to go in there? Am I allowed to go in there and add stuff?” And my initial feeling was, “No! I’ll mess it up.” But eventually I came around to, “I made the larger thing to begin with, so I guess if anyone can do it, it should be me.”

It was pretty strange. If you look at it there’s stuff in there from page 1 to about page 300, in the course of 8 pages.

KA: I felt like the emotional punch of it somehow felt different than the emotional punch of the book. In the book his relationship with his grandmother is central, but it’s about other things as well, and somehow when that storyline is taken in isolation like that it feels very different.

KG: Yeah. When we were editing, I went and looked at other novels that I’ve read that were excerpted in the magazine. And they really fall into two categories: The first is that it’s a discrete chapter — I think the excerpt from Franzen’s Purity was like that. You get a sense of the spirit of the book, but not the story. And then others are more like a compression of the best parts. That’s the danger, of course: that they’re taking the best parts and smooshing them together, so the reader is just automatically going to be disappointed by the book-length version.

I don’t know if that’s what happened, but I do feel like the grandmother stuff is the core of the book. It’s what allows the rest of the book to exist. It’s what allowed me to write a book about Russia.

KA: You work in all these different modes (journalism and translation) do you feel like you’re accessing different parts of yourself when you’re writing fiction? Is your process different?

KG: Something I’ve learned about myself as a journalist is that I tend to gravitate toward a particular kind of character. That’s true of most journalists. You plunk them down in some random place and yet they always seem to manage to find the sort of person that they’re going to find. In my case, it’s a sort of thwarted bitter male character who also likes sports. If that makes sense. And it’s also the kind of character I find interesting as a novelist.

Beyond that, as a novelist, or fiction writer, I’m very nervous about making stuff up. In my first book, I was really worried about time. I thought that any changes in chronology or even just compression of time would distort the truth somehow. Like who was I to mess with time? Like, was I God? And I was worried too about class — like, I didn’t want to create social mobility where it didn’t exist, in either direction.

But as I’ve gotten older, I feel like I’ve seen more things. I’ve seen all sorts of people doing all sorts of things. The range of human experience is quite wide, it turns out. And once you realize that, you start feeling like it’s OK to make stuff up, even to make people up, and to move stuff around. This book still hews pretty closely to my own personal experience, but I gave myself more freedom this time, and I think it worked. People have said to me, about some of the characters in the book who are very much made up, “Oh, you must have meant this person that you and I both know!” The Fishman character especially. But I’m very pleased to say that that is a made-up horrible person.

KA: How is writing your second book different from writing your first book?

KG: A lot. Back when I was in grad school and writing my first book, I thought, “Man, if I can just finish this book it will be so much easier to write a second book.” What a joke. It took me 10 years to write a second novel. Part of it I think is that people have certain expectations of what your book is going to be like based on the first book, and you want to, on the one hand, subvert and go against those expectations, but on the other hand, you also want to meet them. And that turned out to be harder than I expected.

KA: And in writing your second book, you had a son, in the middle of the process. How did that affect your writing process?

KG: It changed two things. First, I really needed to sell the book. We had Raffi, and I didn’t have a job, and Emily, my wife, who is also a writer, also didn’t have a job and had just given birth to a little baby, and at that point, I mean, after six years of fiddling with it, I had to finish something that could be presented to a publisher, or else. That was very real.

And then this other thing happened, which was harder to define. My grandmother had died by this point, and Raffi was a pretty difficult baby, and we were really inexperienced parents and we weren’t getting any sleep. We ended up having this pattern where I would take Raffi from about 1am to about 4am. And for the first 30 minutes of that, he would just scream and I would try to get him to the farthest point in the apartment from Emily, so she could sleep. Eventually he would go back down, but there was still this danger that he would start screaming again, so I would keep him in the living room and stay out there with him. And that was the time that I had to write. That was when I got the first third of the book into presentable shape.

And writing it with him sleeping there, I wouldn’t say it changed the book, exactly, but it did make me more aware that I wasn’t, you know, the last generation anymore. The two tragedies in my grandmother’s life had been that she lost her only child, and that it happened twice — first to immigration and then to breast cancer. I didn’t need to have a kid to know that that was a tragedy, but it certainly made me aware of just how horrible that would be. I guess you could say it embedded me more clearly into the stream of my family.

KA: Do you have any advice you would have given yourself when your first book was coming out? Or your second one?

KG: I have so much! Don’t write in the first person! And also, you know, understand that it’s a book you’re publishing. With the first book I really thought it was going to transform my life. Like I would suddenly have this whole new group of friends, which would include, I don’t know, Harvey Keitel, and of course I would still stay in touch with my old friends, but they would understand that things had changed. Something like that. I definitely thought I couldn’t make any plans past my publication date. And I have actually seen that happen to a couple of people. But for the most part it does not happen, and your life goes on as it did before.

Another mistake I made is that I spent too much time worrying about the people who didn’t like the book and not enough time being grateful for the people who did. I still find myself doing some of that. But the fact is, some people are going to like the book, and some people are not. It’s hard to deal with. You want everybody to like the book. But that’s just not possible — at least in my case I have found that it’s not possible. I think you need to find your readers — the people who really respond to what you’re doing and how you’re doing it — that’s really all you can hope for. And it may be a few hundred people or it may be a few thousand people, but it’s not going to be a million people. Still, you have to find as many of your readers as you can. And sometimes in the process of trying to find your readers you’re going to run into some of your non-readers. That’s the price you pay.

And ultimately, what an amazing thing to publish a book! If you had told my younger self that I would someday get to publish a book, and I would get to read it to people at bookstores, I would be so happy. As a grownup unfortunately it feels a more like a series of failures. So if possible you have to recapture that feeling of what your younger self would have thought of it, instead of worrying — is my book selling and are they going to let me write another one?

How to Decorate Your House Like Victor Frankenstein

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Name: Victor Frankenstein, widower (Elizabeth was great), member of a distinguished family, and mocker of the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world (Genevese by birth)

Location: Ingolstadt, in the Odenwald mountains, Germany

Size: Resembling the imaginative capacity of man

Years lived in: Since a resistless and almost frantic impulse urged him to undertake his home makeover; owned

W e all want to accomplish some great purpose. For seeker-of-knowledge Victor Frankenstein, his home was an excellent place to start. His castle welcomes you with misery and despair, its cold, gray stones suggesting an owner of sometimes violent temper, with passions vehement.

“I am inspired by wonder,” he says. “Homes that are truly marvelous and take an irresistible hold on my imagination. I also like gargoyles. Those crazy little guys.”

The castle was enlarged and modernized in the fifteenth century, but Victor saw the potential for further improvements. He worked for two years to bestow animation on the lifeless matter of his domestic space. As rain pressed dismally against the austere steel windowpanes, he listened to “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and went through fabric swatches and blood-repellent laminate floor options with indefatigable zeal, finally realizing the gratifying consummation of his toils as the moon gazed on his midnight labors.

You might say that his laboratory for the study of alchemy and natural philosophy is “where the magic happens.” Here, in a solitary chamber, or rather cell, at the top of the house and separated from all the other apartments by a gallery and staircase, he undertook his work of inconceivable difficulty and labor, which he prefers not to discuss in detail. He will say that he has found a number of treasures in dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses, as well as in vaults and charnel houses, which he describes as “vivid” in style. He found a number of accessories in the Alexander McQueen for Kohl’s line and invested in some art by Damien Hirst.

“The skulls, not the butterflies,” he says.

You might say that his laboratory for the study of alchemy and natural philosophy is “where the magic happens.”

Whenever he struggled with a space, he thought of the bleak sides of woodless mountains, dreary nights, and beakers.

“Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? What was my destination? These questions are central to both experimental science and personal style,” he says. “I am enchanted by the corpses of executed criminals. The structure of the human frame. All those different parts that make up a whole, like FLOR carpet tiles.”

And he turned to the Container Store’s storage solutions to create an almost clinically organized space.

“Where are my hearts? My eyeballs? My severed hands?” he asks. “I need to be able to find a foot if I need one. Everything has its place.”

He will admit that he had a countenance expressive of a calm, settled grief when he realized that he had to pick up and install the storage system himself — he was outside the delivery zone — but this proved to be a project suited to his meticulous personality.

For Victor, design is a way of creating something beautiful. Or not.

Depending.

“If you don’t have a design plan, you can end up with a startling catastrophe on your hands,” he says. “You want to come out the victor. Oh god, is my name a pun? That is seriously just occurring to me now.”

I need to be able to find a foot if I need one. Everything has its place.

A CHAT WITH VICTOR

HIS STYLE

Textile-wise, I like patterns that gratuitously harass the heart. When I find the right one, a strange multiplicity of sensations seizes me. I love electricity — not light fixtures, you know, but theories of electricity that allow for deformed and abortive creations. I like a majestic aesthetic that recalls the dangerous mysteries of the ocean and snow-capped peaks that are both beautiful and terrifying. Anything that brings to mind the divine glories of heaven and earth. No one can feel more deeply than I the beauties of nature. Except maybe nature. Which I will tame and control like you tame a woman or an unreliable contractor.

HIS INSPIRATION

Certainly ghost stories. I wanted one room that would be perfect for crowding around a blazing wood fire in the evenings and amusing myself with friends, if I decide to make any. I was also inspired by the wildness of Lake Geneva, which is a lovely place to summer, if you know someone with a property there. And if you don’t know someone with a property there, you should do something about that immediately.

IMPORTANT INFLUENCES

I’m influenced by Dante’s sense that everything is the worst. His design scheme for hell is impressive, to say the least! Also Agrippa, Magnus, and Paracelsus. I like a thoughtfully layered home that suggests agony, torment, and isolation. And I knew that I wanted an all-black kitchen — something very Gothic. I put in antique petit granite, which is like normal granite but petit. When using darker shades, you must honor the architecture of the space. Perhaps you want to put in a black concrete apron sink and a matte black faucet. Great. But just be sure to streamline your surfaces and strike a balance: Maybe paint the cabinets a dark black and the walls a darker shade of black. Then you’re ready for accessories — ebony ceramics, black-rimmed baskets, forged steel cutlery, and some good, heavy knives for chopping up the bodies you dig up in the middle of the night.

8 Books that Wouldn’t Exist Without Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’

BIGGEST INDULGENCE

I wanted to re-upholster some old chairs, and when it came to selecting fabrics, I felt as if my soul was grappling with a palpable enemy. But I found consolation for my toils in the form of some nice swatches from Room & Board. I redid the dining room chairs in “Ancient Mariner,” a delicious deep blue with distinct hints of doom, and “Prometheus,” which is a fierier color. I know that some people would have gone with a simple tan neutral, but I don’t want to think of and dilate upon so very hideous an idea.

UNIQUE FEATURE

My bed is incredible. The bed linens are from Godwin Fabrics, and the bed itself is a custom piece by Jacobin Design. I swear, it’s so comfortable that I have the wildest dreams. I had one the other night where I thought that I saw Elizabeth in the bloom of health, and I embraced her and kissed her on the lips, and she changed into the corpse of my dead mother. So, like I said: a really comfortable bed. With curtains.

BIGGEST CHALLENGE

Sometimes you feel that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of decorating, when dull Nothing replies to your anxious invocations. This happened to me when I was thinking about where to put my operating table in my laboratory. Is it best in the middle of the room to create a sense of flow? Or up against a wall to save space? That was tricky. But these are just the enervating effects of the creative process!

WHAT FRIENDS SAY

I shun my fellow creatures as if I have been guilty of a crime, so I don’t know.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE

Maybe take a break? Just walk around on some ice?

BEST ADVICE

The labor of men of decorating genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely can ever fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. I think. I hope.

This piece is excerpted from Decorating a Room of One’s Own: Conversations on Interior Design with Miss Havisham, Jane Eyre, Victor Frankenstein, Elizabeth Bennet, Ishmael, and Other Literary Notables.

What to Read When You’re Going Through A Friend Breakup

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Endings abound in adult life. Some finales — the end of a love affair or the loss of a job — will elicit much tea and sympathy. There’s an established language to talk about such things; friends and family make time to be supportive, and they know what to say. The break-up of a friendship, however, usually doesn’t get quite the same amount of airtime, love, and comfort. When you are little, wailing to your mother about your BFF not wanting to play with you is acceptable, but once you’re grown, you’re supposed to approach this kind of loss with equanimity. Yet the end of a friendship can cleave the heart as much as the splintering of an intimate relationship. There’s no sex, usually, but you do so much else together. Then you grow apart, or perhaps the toxic rot creeps in. Even when it’s a little bit of a relief to reach the end, though, there’s still a lonely gap in your soul.

In my adult life, I’ve had three friend splits. In two of them, I was the one left, bewildered (though I accepted, in time, my role in these demises). The last, I was the one doing the leaving. It was as lacerating as the first two, especially as she gained custody of our friend group. As therapeutic practitioners who use the ancient curative methods of bibliotherapy and all readers since the beginning of time know, fiction can provide salve — and salvation. Although novels have offered much balm for me, I came belatedly to Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend and wished I’d had it earlier as medicine.

I came belatedly to Elena Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” and wished I’d had it earlier as medicine.

In deceptively straightforward prose, Ferrante shapes and reshapes of the energy and internalities of friendship. I suspect many people, women and men, have had these all-consuming attachments in childhood and beyond. Ferrante conjures the beauty of such ties, which amid the friend break-up can be soothing and cathartic in a nostalgic way. Lila and Elena are delightful in their daring (Lila’s mostly) and joint adventuring, which offer vicarious thrills and escapist company, both helpful in the aftermath of a friend loss. Then, there’s the complicated world of post-WWII Italy and the peculiarities of Naples to be absorbed and transformed by. But even more analgesic for your sad, mad heart, I feel, is Ferrante’s rendition of the wretched, simmering contest that this sort of closeness can entail.

The frenemy-ship between the very bad and very smart Lila and the more tentative but also brilliant and wicked Elena begins in childhood and stretches through adulthood in Ferrante’s four epics. In My Brilliant Friend, books and a curiosity about the world tie the girls to each other in their working-class Naples neighborhood. One of their planned childhood joint ventures is the co-writing of a novel. Lila ends up completing it by herself, but it’s Elena who becomes the novelist as an adult. Elena gets to go middle school, but dropout Lila learns Greek on her own and tutors Elena. “Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when I followed her and meanwhile stayed close on my heels in order to pass me by?” Elena laments. But Elena is no uncomplicated darling herself. She steals Lila’s idea for an essay and much more for fictional fodder later on in the series.

Life (via Ferrante’s authorial hand) deals the cards unevenly. Lila is brilliant but suffers the locked, provincial minds of her parents, who refuse to let her continue her education. Elena’s intelligence, which perhaps falls short of Lila’s otherworldly genius, is rewarded but even in her youth, she’s aware of her existential hole. As an adult, she goes on to enjoy a more bourgeois existence and success, but she’s remains naggingly empty. Still, she has the literary fame, of which both dreamt. My Brilliant Friend shifted me between Lila’s and Elena’s shoes — and it was hard to be aligned with either one for too long. They are both equally wretched and mildly evil in their own ways. This was both comforting (people are like that sometimes) and disconcerting (if you can’t even trust your BFF, who can you trust?). While I’ve not had a friendship as lengthy and as convoluted as theirs — which lasts through lovers, literary success, and a lost daughter — the dynamic was familiar.

The quiet awfulness of the girls’ platonic, competitive hate/lust riveted me. I revisited my lost friendships, all of which shared the closeness and flame of Lila and Elena’s bond. I’d long accepted closure on them but Ferrante’s characters made me feel lucky for the travels — actual ones to their childhood homes and mine, and places like Tunisia, New York, and Istanbul, and imaginative journeys in art, literature, and music — that I’d had with these ex-friends. But recalling the tiny bits of dysfunction, which were not unlike Lila and Elena’s minor aggressions towards each other, that grew into mountains of angst, I was thrilled these episodes now belonged to the past. The novel serves as a reminder of the massive energy suck of passive-aggressiveness dodged.

Elena’s narration of the friendship also offers a reflective surface, from which to view your own behavior. You don’t have to take the BS, like the competitive intellectual jousting or thieving that passes as friendship between Lila and Elena. Nor do you have to mete it out. Whether you exercised your agency in your current breakup or not, you’re free to do so going forward. Upon finishing the book, which will be a HBO show this fall, the real peace and solace I savored came from the gratitude for these endings — and for the absence of toxicity in my enduring ride-or-die friendships.

Alternatives

Tangerine by Christine Mangan

Mid-century Tangier, rendered as hazy (and, perhaps inevitably, Orientalist), is the backdrop for the reunion of former Bennington roommates, Lucy and Alice. Both characters narrate unreliably in “she said, she said” alternating chapters. Their suspect past and the claustrophobic present unspool in disquieting fashion. It’s Single White Female but abroad, or The Talented Mr. Ripley but with ladies. George Clooney has optioned it and a celluloid take, starring Scarlett Johansson, is forthcoming.

The Secret History by Donna Tartt

A spectacular and truly obsessive novel about Classics, murder, and a nerdy and mostly privileged friend crew. The murder, revealed on page one, will turn out to be the least of the whole drama. The novel charts the fraying of the sometimes cultish group friendship bond, which can crack your heart several times over since multiple, overlapping bonds are in play.

Sir Vidia’s Shadow: A Friendship Across Five Continents by Paul Theroux

Having not been offended by V.S Naipaul’s off-color ways in their three-decade-long friendship, Paul Theroux airs the laundry in this bitchy memoir of a literary romance. Even after calling some of the Nobel Laureate’s work “silly and unreadable” in print, a reconciliation between the two took place before Naipaul’s recent death. If these two can make it back to each other, never say never about any friend breakup.

Fight Bigotry By Reading Trans People in Their Own Words

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According to a recent article in The New York Times, the Trump administration is hell-bent on flying in the face of science, culture, and vocabulary by attempting to legally deny the very existence of transgender people.

The best way to fight this outrageously cruel proposal is to throw your money and time at every trans-supporting cause you can think of. But the second best way is to listen to trans people talk about their lives in their own voices. While the administration tries to disenfranchise them based on sixth-grade notions of biology, authors who actually know what they’re talking about are writing literature about their transgender experience. Here are eight celebrated novels and memoirs written by and about people that Trump wants to write out of existence. Buy them, share them, and don’t let them be silenced.

Confessions of the Fox by Jordy Rosenberg

Confessions of the Fox, a genre-bending novel about queer love in 18th-century London, has received high praise as one of the first novels by a trans author released by a major publisher. This novel is worth a read for several reasons, among which is the use of language that would make our POTUS blush. In an interview with Electric Literature, Rosenberg said, “Queers and trans and other gender non-conforming people have these very powerful and deep traditions of resignifying words and our bodies in relation to each other. ‘Pussy’ or ‘cock’ can and does mean anything between two (or however many) people in certain erotic exchanges.”

Jordy Rosenberg on Writing a Queer 18th-Century Love Story

George by Alex Gino

Here’s one that’s written to the president’s reading level. George tells the story a 10-year-old transgender girl and her fight for acceptance. Since its release in 2015, it has garnered numerous accolades, including winner of the Lambda Literary Award and Children’s Choice Book Awards Debut Author. But in 2017 it landed itself on the list of the Top Ten Most Challenged Books for reasons similarly insubstantial to the ones behind Trump’s recent claims.

Yemaya’s Daughters by Lady Dane Figuerao Edidi

One of the first novels written by and about a trans woman, Yemaya’s Daughters is a story of family, spirituality, and humanity. Lady Dane Figuerao Edidi is a prolific artist across several mediums, including acting in New York City, singing jazz in Baltimore, and the numerous books of fiction and poetry she has authored.

If I Was Your Girl by Meredith Russo

If I Was Your Girl, a novel by and about a transgender woman, has made a noticeable splash in the literary world as a Stonewall Book Award Winner, a Goodreads Choice Award Finalist and a Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year.

Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen by Jazz Jennings

Jazz Jennings has been a leading voice in the transgender community since 2007 when she came out as transgender at the age of 11. Since then, she’s continued to offer her voice through interviews with high-profile figures such as Oprah Winfrey and a reality television show, I Am Jazz, about her experience as a transgender girl.

Afterglow (a dog memoir) by Eileen Myles

Eileen Myles was quoted in The New Yorker as saying, “I’m happy complicating what being a woman, a dyke, is. I’m the gender of Eileen.” In Afterglow, this trailblazing punk poet and writer composes a humorous, though utterly heartfelt and honest, depiction of a relationship between a person and an animal.

Eileen Myles‘ Memoir Is Much More than Just a Dog Book

At The Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces by Mary Collins and Donald Collins

Co-authored by a mother and son, this collaborative memoir, praised by The Boston Globe and The Bay Area Reporter, offers an exploration into the minds of two family members as they struggle with their differences. The two points of view offer important insight into acceptance and identity.

Since I Moved In by Trace Peterson

Trace Peterson is a pioneer of trans poetry, founding editor of EOAGH, a Lambda Award winning literary magazine, and coeditor of several poetry anthologies. Peterson’s anthology, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, combines the voices of emerging and eminent artists whose identities are being written out of the dictionary by the president. Since I Moved In is her first collection of poems.

Redefining Realness by Janet Mock

As a writer, television personality, and activist, Janet Mock is a leading voice in the movement for transgender rights. Her memoir, Redefining Realness, a New York Times Bestseller and winner of the Stonewall Book Awards, offers her readers insight into an experience as a trans and multiracial person in a largely unwelcoming society.

A 16th-Century Manual on How to Die, and What it Teaches Us About Life

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In his three-volume collection of Essays (1580), the French thinker Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) famously declared that the best way to prepare for death was to think about it constantly. “Let us have nothing so much in minde as death. At the stumbling of a horse, at the fall of a stone, at the least prick with a pinne, let us presently ruminate and say with our selves, what if it were death it selfe?” Montaigne advised that we must contemplate death at every turn and in doing so, we make ourselves ready for it in the most productive way possible. On a more personal note, I managed to achieve this by spending four years writing a Ph.D. thesis on Montaigne’s work, a task which forced me to contemplate death every single day.

Arguably every Ph.D. dissertation carries with it a certain amount of doom and gloom at some point or other, especially during the last few months of writing up. But studying time in Montaigne’s work meant being constantly steeped in his musings and recollections on how ancient philosophers viewed suicide, or the history of funeral practices in Western Europe. By the time I had finished, I was sure Montaigne was wrong, and that in fact I should never think about death again. The stress and anxiety surrounding my submission date meant that the words of a 16th century nobleman concerning the nature of death were low on my list of priorities. And yet on reflection, thanks to Montaigne and his open and honest approach to mortality, thinking about death has actually taught me a lot about how to live.

Thanks to Montaigne and his open and honest approach to mortality, thinking about death has actually taught me a lot about how to live.

Despite what many of us may think in today’s society, talking about death on a regular basis doesn’t have to be scary or morbid. In fact, it can actually make us feel a much deeper connection to the natural world that simultaneously puts the little things into perspective. After all, mortality is a key feature of pretty much everything that exists in Nature, human beings included. The sun, stars, plants and animals — nothing lasts forever, and Montaigne constantly argues in his writing that this is most evident in the mutable physical processes that occur around us: “The world runnes all on wheeles. All things therein moove without intermission.” Winter storms and snows give way to summer sun, flowers wilt and perish. Even the Sun will disappear one day. As humans we fit perfectly into this cycle; we regularly define our lives in terms of birth, aging and death. Montaigne describes his own aging body using seasonal imagery: “I have seene the leaves, the blossomes, and the fruit; and now see the drooping and withering of it [his body].” However, in the natural world, death always gives way to new life. Leaves fall from trees and die before the arrival of new shoots that burst forth in the spring. When human beings die, their bodies decompose and mingle with the Earth, or sail along the breeze as specks of dust, ready to become part of something else.

Thinking about death in this way really helped me to understand that our lives are only one small piece of a much bigger picture — and the bigger picture doesn’t care about how many Twitter followers a person has, or how much money they earn, or where they buy their clothes. It’s easier to put trivial things to one side when we think about how our death actually confirms a meaningful, physical connection to the world around us — we are natural beings who arguably exist for a certain length of time before returning back to the Earth in some form or another. If you’re a fan of The Sopranos, this attitude is perhaps best summed up by the old Ojibwe saying that Tony finds in his hospital room — “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.” The end of our life doesn’t mean the end of Nature’s great cycle. As Montaigne remarks, we can find comfort in the fact that our death is merely one part of a much greater plan: “your death is but a peece of the worlds order, and but a parcell of the worlds life.” His tone is so self-assured in the expression of these ideas that his writing becomes living proof of our ability to master any fear we might have about death. Instead we can allow ourselves to return to Nature.

And yet, talking and writing about death constantly is an approach towards our own mortality that often seems completely alien to modern Western cultures. (Eastern cultures are way ahead and can be looked to as an example.) Nowadays it’s relatively rare to engage in an open conversation with friends or family about how we want to be buried, or what happens to the soul after we die. Often these discussions are relegated to funerals or college philosophy tutorials, or they simply don’t happen at all. But Montaigne states time and again that such avoidance is unhealthy and impractical; instead he declares “let us have nothing so much in minde as death” and regularly draws on ancient philosophy to back up his ideas on confronting death head-on. For example, he uses the Stoic philosophy of the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (26 AD — 180 AD) to argue that we should relish spending our leisure time in contemplating the meaning of death. Like Montaigne, I believe it is possible to gain a huge degree of contentment from life through attempting to understand death. As well as feeling closer to Nature, death encourages a greater awareness and enjoyment of the present moment. In a strange way, acknowledging that death is certain actually allows us to adopt a more practical attitude towards the time that we do have on Earth. In her book Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer, Barbara Ehrenreich encourages us to appreciate life “as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.” Personally, I’ve found myself feeling extremely grateful during times that I have experienced intense happiness, as well as reaching an understanding during periods of sadness that — like everything else — this too shall pass.

By way of contrast, the death-defying attitude of Silicon Valley in recent years provides an interesting case study in 21st-century conversations about mortality. Rather than acknowledging death, a growing number of tech giants are now actively trying to eradicate it. Social commentators argue that modern society is sometimes guilty of believing in its own immutability, as though certain scientific and technological advances give human beings an absolute right to live on forever. Indeed, the cycle of Nature that I described at the beginning of this essay is currently being overturned in order to make way for advances in 3D organ printing, nanobots that can replicate immune systems and even blood injections that supposedly extend our lives. Peter Thiel, one of the co-founders of PayPal, has admitted that he is ‘against’ the idea of death and aims to fight it rather than accept it. The National Academy of Medicine is currently running a “Grand Challenge in Healthy Longevity” which will award $25,000,000 to anyone who can make a major scientific breakthrough in delaying the aging process. Many of the project’s investors want aging to be stopped completely. Meanwhile, Google’s highly secretive Immortality Project was launched in 2014 and aims to treat aging as a disease that can be cured.

There is a distinct air of confidence surrounding these endeavors; for many tech giants it is not a matter of if immortality can be achieved, it is simply a matter of when. Speaking to Tad Friend of The New Yorker, Arram Sabeti of the food tech start-up ZeroCrater once stated, “The proposition that we can live forever is obvious. It doesn’t violate the laws of physics, so we will achieve it.” The “we” in this context is questionable, since many of these projects are being supported by tech giants and celebrities who will undoubtedly be the only people able to afford an immortality cure if it ever becomes available in the future. These advances are being energetically pursued by people who head up large corporations with arguably little thought or respect for death itself, only the right to continue existing. This isn’t accepting death or preparing for it, this is trying to abolish it in the unhealthiest way possible — surrounded by secrecy, with little thought for the long-term effects on society. Such measures do nothing to cure fear of death, they only try to stop it at all costs, which is really just a form of denial.

What would the author of the Essais have made of these developments? Montaigne was famously suspicious of doctors during a time when modern medicine simply didn’t exist. He often complained that doctors were desecrating the natural duration of the human body and interfering with what he considered to be Nature’s work. Even in an age before painkillers or anesthesia, Montaigne (who famously suffered from excruciating kidney stones) was proud of his ability to withstand illnesses and diseases ‘naturally’: “We are subject to grow aged, to become weake and to fall sicke in spight of all medicine.” Therefore it’s very hard to describe the horror Montaigne would have felt upon being confronted with the idea of death-defying technological advancements such as nanobots and 3D organ printing. Not only are these inventions a human attempt to subvert death by artificial means, they also pose other problems too. For millennia, one of the most positive aspects of death originally proposed by Stoic philosophy (and later adopted by thinkers such as Montaigne) was the idea that death comes for everyone. In other words, it doesn’t care about social class — the rich human being dies just like the poor human being and thus reminds us that deep down we are all equals. Will that be true in the future as well or not? Cryogenic preservation is becoming more and more popular, but it currently costs as much as $200,000 to freeze the entire body. We have to imagine that a drug or injection to cure mortality will be ten times as costly. This means that immortality will most likely be for the few, not the many.

Talking about death, studying philosophy, meditating, and even creating or appreciating art around this theme are all excellent ways to prepare for life’s end.

So what can we as human beings do to respond to death in a practical and healthy manner? Alongside the popular take-up of meditation and mindfulness (which psychologists have already noted can greatly improve our attitude towards death), a younger generation of advocates — most notably Caitlin Doughty — are heading up an increasingly popular “death-positive” movement. This trend encourages an enquiring approach towards death and funerary practices that draws on the type of calm, reasoned manner that Montaigne would have been proud of. Doughty’s website, The Order of the Good Death, states that the death-positive movement believes that “the culture of silence surrounding death should be broken through discussion, gathering art, innovation and scholarship.” This mission resounds with the philosophy of Seneca the Younger (4 BC — 65 AD), a thinker Montaigne turned to repeatedly when he wanted to understand fear of death. Seneca believed that approaching death through contemplation, mindfulness and discussion was one of the key virtues of wisdom; pursuing such an open and honest attitude towards death would eventually allow an individual to patiently wait for death, as one of nature’s operations. Therefore talking about death, studying philosophy, meditating, and even creating or appreciating art around this theme are all excellent ways to prepare for life’s end.

We can also make sure to engage in practical preparations surrounding our funeral arrangements, wills and life insurance. Rather than becoming a depressing chore, instead we can appreciate that it brings peace of mind to family and friends, as well as ourselves. If we’re lucky enough to be dying in a bed somewhere, surrounded by loved ones, at least we can rest assured that these same people have been taken care of. In the Essays Montaigne praises the practical act of constructing your own grave — many of his friends prepared elaborate tombs, sometimes with their own death masks attached. Montaigne says that looking on a replica of your own dead face is an excellent way to prepare for the inevitable reality of the future and also shows you have taken the time to leave the world in an organized way. Incidentally, this is just one example which demonstrates that in the past, Europeans were far more attentive to the idea of preparing for death in a practical manner. Admittedly this may have something to do with the fact that death was far more visible in everyday life thanks to mass graves and public executions, not to mention the high rates of mortality, particularly amongst infants. Thankfully all of these things are in the past, but death still lingers in society, it’s just slightly more hidden away than it used to be. Whilst we can’t all afford a good death mask, it would be comforting to see a resurgence in openly discussing or enacting any kind of practical preparation for death, an attitude which has clearly been written out of European society in the last few hundred years.

In the Essays, death is natural. It forces us to realize our humble place in the great cycle of mutability that constitutes the workings of Nature. In the meantime, talking, writing and thinking about death can radically improve our quality of life by helping us to gain a greater enjoyment out of our time as one of the living, as well as helping those people we will eventually leave behind. I don’t want to start investing in cryogenics or constructing my own coffin just yet, but talking about death from time to time? That’s something we can all start doing right now.

Shirley Barrett Recommends Five Horrifying Books That Aren’t By Men

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Shirley Barrett’s The Bus on Thursday starts with breast cancer and only gets more horrifying from there. After cancer and a breakup, her main character Eleanor tries to drop out of her stressful life, running away to a small town in Australia to work as a schoolteacher—but she soon discovers that, like all the best small towns in eerie fiction, Talbingo is not what it seems. It’s part of a grand tradition of weird, dark, kinda creepy fiction—not ghouls-and-gore horror stories, but books that make the hair rise on your neck just the same. A lot of these books are written by women, and for Halloween, Barrett is here to introduce you to the best of them.

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

The Graveyard Apartment by Mariko Koike

Perhaps I have endured too many grim rental experiences in my life, for I regularly have nightmares where I find myself living in a dank and dingy hovel, my circumstances having somehow abruptly changed for the worse. The Graveyard Apartment plays upon our anxieties about accommodation, and in particular, the necessity of providing safe shelter for our small dependents, pets included. After years of renting a dark and poky flat, Teppei Kano and his wife Misao are suddenly able to buy their dream apartment: roomy, light and airy, and surprisingly affordable. Why so cheap? The building is surrounded on three sides by a graveyard, that’s why! “When they got up that first morning, the little white finch was dead.” That’s the first sentence and one pet is dead already! Things get worse rapidly, the unreliable elevator and creepy basement featuring largely; other tenants move out, and soon the Kano family find they are the only ones remaining in the building. Although she doesn’t hold back from conjuring up some lurid, visceral horrors, Koike keeps one foot firmly in reality, the horrible plausibility of our family’s situation (But we just bought this place! We can’t afford to move out!) making it all the more anxiety-inducing. So beautifully drawn is our little family (particularly small daughter Tamao) that one finds oneself caring desperately about their plight. Could you live so close to a graveyard, its crematorium constantly belching out plumes of black smoke? The novel finishes with a real estate ad for the now-vacant building, and yes, it does sound quite tempting.

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

I thought that I had written a very odd book, but this story, written in 1892, is one of the strangest, strangest stories I’ve ever read. “It is very seldom that mere ordinary people like John and myself secure ancestral halls for the summer,” the story begins. “..there is something queer about it. Else why should it be let so cheaply?” Exactly!, this reader wants to scream, especially having just finished The Graveyard Apartment. Get out of there if you know what’s good for you! Our narrator is suffering from an unspecified nervous condition, and her physician husband believes she must rest, installing her in the upstairs nursery where she is immediately struck by the wallpaper: “repellent, almost revolting: a smouldering unclean yellow.” As she spends more and more time confined to her bed, she becomes increasingly obsessed with this wallpaper, describing it in ever-changing detail, spending hours of her days and nights following its weird patterns, only mentioning in passing that she has a baby. “Such a dear baby! And yet I CANNOT be with him, it makes me so nervous.” Soon she begins to detect something beneath the wallpaper, a creeping woman trying to get out. I love this breathless, increasingly unhinged narrator: I love her hysterical use of CAPS, I love this story. It makes you want to read it again and again to try to FIGURE IT OUT, especially the ending.

“The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

I’ll never forget the physical sensation of shock I received when I first read this extraordinary short story in an anthology that gave no hint as to what kind of story it was. Told so simply, without any obvious striving for effect, Jackson lulls you into thinking you are reading about a group of jovial, good-natured villagers gathering together for some kind of annual fete. Children play, couples joke with one another, Mrs. Hutchinson is late because she has been doing the dishes and almost forgot that it was Lottery Day. Then as the villagers’ names are drawn from the box, the tension begins to build. Someone mutters that in the neighboring village, there’s talk of giving up the lottery. Old Man Warner will have none of it. “‘Pack of crazy fools,’ he said. ‘…Used to be a saying about “Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.” First thing you know, we’ll be eating stewed chickweed and acorns.’” Re-reading it a second time recently, I couldn’t remember exactly what the shock was, and thus it packed its wallop all over again. The worst moment? Someone giving little Davy Hutchinson a few pebbles. I’m getting chills down my spine just writing about it. Truly a masterpiece.

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

More a fantastic tale than a scary one, this slow-burning novella nonetheless steadily ratchets up the mounting dread, the sense that this can not possibly end well. How could it? Dorothy has fallen in love with a six-foot-seven-inch sea creature known as Larry, recently escaped from the Jefferson Institute for Oceanographic Research. He suddenly materializes in her kitchen one evening; they find themselves staring at each other. “Her mouth was slightly open — she could feel that — and waves of horripilation fled across her skin. A flash of heat or ice sped up her backbone and neck and over her scalp so that her hair really did seem to lift up.” She offers him celery, he thanks her, a love story ensues. The police are after him; she hides him in the guest bedroom and feeds him bowls of salad and pasta, a secret she keeps from her uncaring husband who only notices enough to complain that she’s buying an awful lot of avocados lately. It’s all preposterous, like a 1950s sci-fi crossed with a Douglas Sirk melodrama! But the story is told so solemnly (and yet with moments of sly comedy), and poor lonely Dorothy so beautifully wrought that the reader accepts it all, turning pages with sinking heart and dry mouth as events build towards the inevitable tragedy. But hang on a minute! you think suddenly, about three days later (I am a little slower than most, admittedly.) What about those strange radio messages that Dorothy kept hearing? Was Larry even real, or has Rachel Ingalls taken me on a wild ride?

Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin

“I call it the ‘rescue distance’: that’s what I’ve named the variable distance separating me from my daughter, and I spend half the day calculating it, though I always risk more than I should.’ The daughter, Nina, is only small: her mother frets continually about this rescue distance as the horrors mount in this truly disturbing, nightmarish book that, yes, feels exactly like a fever dream if our fever dreams were half as imaginative. Told as a two-hander, a dialogue between the unnamed mother now mysteriously marooned in the emergency clinic and a small boy named David, who is urgently interrogating her. He wants to know the exact moment the worms, “something very much like worms,” have come into being. When she deviates from her account of what has happened, he admonishes her sternly: “None of this is important. We’re wasting time.” It’s apparent that she will die soon, but what has become of Nina? Where is she? The story is set in the muddy landscape of rural Argentina, where they have apparently travelled on some ill-advised holiday, only to find that the stream is polluted, the horses are dead and so are the birds. And something terrible is happening to the children. I read the whole book with a ghastly maternal anxiety gripping my heart — stay closer to Nina, I wanted to cry, don’t let that rescue distance slacken! Suspenseful and dread-filled, this book races along to its remorseless conclusion. Of all the books I’ve volunteered in this piece, this one really got under my (goose-bumped) skin. Extraordinary.

Look at the Woman You Fail to See

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“All The Things You’ll Never Do”

by Camille Acker

Bess liked to wear her uniform to Chuck and Billie’s Restaurant and Bar for Long Island Iced Tea Thursdays. She could have changed in those all-automated bathrooms in the airport terminal if she felt like it, so that she wouldn’t have to use the nasty one in the TSA breakroom. She could have just walked in with some tight jeans on and ordered a drink, as if she was just anybody, as if she worked just anywhere.

The lights at C and B’s were turned down so low, people probably could only half see her uniform until somebody opened up the door and let in the early evening light. Nothing like her building at National Airport, with windows that stretched from sidewalk to sun and stone floors shined and buffed to reflect your footsteps.

The woman sitting next to Bess at the bar looked at her badge. “Since 9/11,” Bess told her and leaned in with a smile, “there was almost no more important job.”

“All these attacks now, too? People you wouldn’t believe going out of this city are going through me. And people at the airport can be straight-up nasty. Here they come, complaining about how slow the security line is, wondering why they can’t take their water in with them, asking if they really gotta take off their shoes. And with those full-body scanners? I don’t hear the end of that shit. Go take a bus, I tell them. You know?” New York and Richmond could be reached within four hours. That was far enough.

She signaled to the bartender to set her up another one.

“The other day, I get this bama who can’t find his damn ID. His leg is broken, right, so he’s already taking all his damn time to get to the front of the line. And then, here he is, searching all over, patting down his jacket and shit. Can’t find it though. But, for all that, he’s holding up my line. Inconsiderate, you know? Other people are trying to go places too, see the world and all. He don’t care though.”

Bess took a long sip and set her hand on the scuffed bar. She liked to get her nails done, but she kept them short because no woman who’s going somewhere has nails so long she could scratch somebody just from shaking their damn hand.

“So then I tell him he needs to stand aside, you know, that he’s getting in other people’s way. But he won’t leave. Instead, he starts saying, ‘No, no, I’ve got it, I know I’ve got it.’ Real snooty-like. ‘Just wait,’ he keeps telling me. So, I do, because I’m there to serve people, you know, and he don’t understand that. He thinks I’m there because, you know, it’s like a good time for me on Thursday morning or whatever. But once I decide to go ahead and give him that time, he finally pulls his ID out of you’ll never guess where.”

The woman was still listening, Bess was pretty sure, but she was looking at Bess in the mirror behind the bar. She wasn’t even looking in her face, but this was how people were raised these days, how people thought they could treat you any kind of way. Bess sipped on her drink. She should stop even talking to her, not tell her the punch line. But no, she should hear this story, she should understand just how much life demanded of Bess. This girl probably didn’t know a thing about demands.

“He reaches into his cast, right? His cast. And pulls out this sweaty, bent-up piece of mess. Hands it to me like it ain’t nothing. Proud of himself even. But I got him though, because I wrote on his boarding pass. I got them to search him. I got authority to do that, to make sure people are gonna be safe from sketchiness like that.”

She must not have heard Bess, because she didn’t look as impressed as she should have. Her head did finally start to nod, but real slow, like she couldn’t even understand all the things Bess was talking about, all the things she knew. But then something in her look did change, and Bess sat up straighter in the chair, as straight as she could with those Long Islands starting to weigh her down, and got ready for some respect.

“You go to high school with me?” The woman pushed her bangs to the side and turned toward Bess. She brought her face in close. “Right? Class of ’15?”

And then Bess saw it too: recognition limping into the bar and sitting too damn close, making her uncomfortable.

“Maybe. High school is a long way from the stuff I’m doing now.”

“You was with Rich, right? Didn’t y’all have a baby?” Bess got pregnant their senior year. She didn’t hear the end of her mother’s mouth about it. “Why you go and do that?” she’d asked her over and over.

“Why you working at the airport?” she asked. Now, she wouldn’t stop looking at Bess.

“Where do you work?” Bess asked. She wished for a pen and a boarding pass.

“Human resources for DC government,” she said. Her bangs fell back in her eyes.

“DC government.” Bess let out a laugh.

A lot of the people she graduated high school with were working those same dumb-ass jobs. Just like Rich. Talking about he was going to support them, saying they would get a house. All he was ever going to do was work a DC government job, move up a pay scale, never leave his job, and never have to. No one got fired. Bess didn’t do the exact same shit every day like they did, filling out the same forms, pressing the same damn computer keys in those old-ass buildings. Not her. This girl was hiring other dumb-ass people to work those dumb-ass jobs. Couldn’t waste your life much more than that.

“You get to fly free or something like that?” the girl said. “That’d make working that job worth it. I’d go as many places as I can.”

“I don’t work for the airlines. I work for the federal government. Department of Homeland Security. I don’t just work for some airline.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I guess that’s good.”

“I know it is. I know what I’m doing,” Bess said. She waved for her third Long Island and mean mugged the girl in the mirror behind the bar.

Someone turned the music up and R&B blared out of scratchy-sounding speakers. Bess sang along. She didn’t really know the words, she didn’t even know the name of the song.

She forgot all about her day and all about that girl from high school. Bess didn’t even notice when she left because by then she was slow dragging with the tallest, finest motherfucker in there. She dug the pads of her fingers into the waves he’d probably worn a durag for every chance he got to get them right for the weekend. His back hunched over hers. His slippery smooth words landed on her earlobe. She closed her eyes to catch the tone, not the meaning, and watched the dollar bills suspended from the ceiling sway with the damp heat until the song ended.

Unlike that girl from high school, Bess didn’t work Monday through Friday. But this Friday morning, she wished it was the last day of her week. Her hair was still smoky from cigarettes and her eyes were bleary from all those drinks. Somewhere in the pants pocket of her uniform was her cell phone with the number of the dude she danced with all night. She couldn’t remember his name. She wanted to sleep in and wait for the baby to wake up in another hour. Bess wobbled over to his crib. Her mother said the baby could just sleep in the bed with her, but Bess had wanted to get him something of his own. She hated when people didn’t do right by their kids.

Will was in the Batman pajamas that Bess found in Salvation Army, new with tags still on. He always kicked his blanket off, his dark toes searching for a breeze. It was what his father did, airing just his toes to cool him down. Bess didn’t cover up Rich, he was a man, but she did cover up Will. He, at least, was still her baby. She leaned down and pressed her lips into the pillow of his cheek. The mobile of airplanes suspended from the ceiling turned above him and she gave it an extra push.

One day, she’d have more space: their own apartment, a whole playroom for Will with Batman everything, and a big bedroom so she could keep an ironing board up all the time.

Even on days when she didn’t work, Bess ironed her uniform. She knew to turn the pants inside out because black polyester would get shiny and make you look stupid if you didn’t. She made creases in the legs, spraying the starch on thick and coating not just the pants but the ironing board and her nearby hand. Her mother would buy whatever starch was on sale. Bess didn’t go for that. She bought the expensive starch, one that came in a can with waterfalls and rivers on it. She didn’t know what waterfalls had to do with getting her pants crisp, but that stuff did it every time. Starch went on the shirt too, but she made sure not to put any creases in the sleeves. It made you look corny. Some of the other TSA agents came in looking like that, shirt all crazy with creases and pants halfway wrinkled. They probably didn’t even use the cheap starch. They probably didn’t use starch at all.

You couldn’t be in charge in wrinkled clothes.

“You gonna be late,” her mother said. She leaned on the frame of the doorway. Her hair wrapped and pinned from sleep. She wore the same housedress she had since Bess was a child.

Bess put her finger to her lips and thumbed at the crib. “I’ll be fine,” she said. She went back to ironing the sleeves of her shirt.

“What time you got in?”

“Don’t know, but I needed to relax. When you got authority in a job, you also got stress.”

“Hm.” Her mother pursed her lips like she was about to spit something out. “Been meaning to tell you Rich called, said he could take the baby more, give you time to get used to your new job.”

“He’s not taking Will.”

“Let him be a father.” Time was when her mother hated Rich, said Bess had gotten knocked up by a fool. Now, she acted like Bess was in the wrong.

“He messed that up.” Bess pulled on her pants and zipped them. She put her arms through the still-warm shirtsleeves.

“He got the steadier income. Will could have a room all his own over there.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Bess buttoned her shirt and kissed Will again before she left.

Bess and Vincent got stuck with loading bags in the back for the morning shift. Some people liked being with the checked luggage or behind the scanner, just watching the x-rayed bags roll past. They didn’t want to talk to anyone. Bess wanted to be in the front, checking the boarding passes and IDs. Passengers respected that first person they met more. Some people would look nervous like they were waiting for her to say that they couldn’t go through, or they’d look real close at what she wrote on their boarding pass, worried that she thought they’d done something wrong.

Vincent stopped after picking up the biggest bag so far that morning. He pressed one hand into his over-sized middle-aged belly. He’d been a handler for fifteen years, loading bags, but when the TSA started looking for people willing to take the five-hundred-question government test, he applied. The background checks and running his credit report, they didn’t matter. “An exquisite opportunity,” he told Bess.

She liked that. She hated people who didn’t ever try new shit. Rich never wanted to try anything. Chicken and steak were all he ever ate. He told her he’d had salmon once before, but he’d pronounced it SAL-mon and Bess hadn’t needed much more than that to know she was done. When she left Rich’s place that day, she went to her mother’s house in Northeast. While Will played with his Tonka truck on the kitchen linoleum, Bess took out the TSA information sheet she’d printed at the library and pressed it flat on the table. “I got plans,” she told her mother. “I know it,” her mother said. “But is this plan like the others or is this one going to work?”

Bess wheeled two uprights closer to the large scanning machine and tossed them one by one onto it. Dirty-ass bags. She wiped her hands together, careful to not wipe them on her uniform.

“People just want to complain, talk shit. Like I was telling this know-nothing last night, this lady kept asking me all these questions about the job. You ever get that?” she asked.

“Sure, sometimes. Curiosity is the lust of the mind,” he said.

“Uh-huh. Anyway, I tell this lady last night, bugging me with the questions, if these people trying to fly don’t like it, go take a bus. They don’t check you,” Bess said.

“Buses won’t get you across water,” Vincent said. “And there’s still something about the takeoff of a jet engine, being thirty thousand feet in the air.”

“Yeah?” Bess asked.

“You don’t like flying?”

“Don’t know. Never been on a plane,” Bess said. Vincent got quiet, and Bess felt like she could hear the words like he heard them, and she didn’t think she much liked the sound.

“You want to though? Right?” Vincent stopped loading bags again. “You’ll go to Florida for the new training?”

“Yeah, they paying, I go. And, I mean, I think about flying, you know. I’m not like these people who don’t never want to go anywhere. Went to high school with this girl who hadn’t even been on the Metro. Stayed in her same dumb neighborhood,” Bess said. “That’s not me.” When she’d left Rich and told him his life wasn’t going anywhere, he’d asked where hers was going. And he kept asking while she carried Will and a duffel bag stuffed with their things down five flights of stairs.

“Be careful with those bags,” Vincent said. “Make sure they’re — ”

“I know what I’m doing,” Bess said.

Fridays were the goddamn worst, the business travelers trying to get home for the weekend and the families and couples trying to get away. The afternoons were all the international people, coming for their overnight flights to London and Rome. These women always did it up more than the domestic fliers, more scarves and prettier shoes. Sometimes they wheeled bags Bess had never seen before, not just some plain black roller bags. They had bags in different colors with brand names on them. Or they carried weathered leather bags, big and deep when they reached in for their passports. She knew these women had jobs where someone called them Ms., where someone waited for their approval. Bess marked their papers just like she would mark any of the others. One Ms. stepped up to the stand and gave Bess not one but two pieces of paper. She clicked the pen.

“ID,” Bess said.

“You have it,” she said. Bess thought the accent might be British, or maybe she was supposed to say English. Vincent had given her some history lesson on the difference last week, but he was on break. Bess looked at the papers the woman had. One was the boarding pass and the other was a letter with a crest stamped at the top.

“Ma’am, I need a photo ID. This doesn’t qualify.” Bess held the paper out to Ms.

“My passport was stolen, so I’ve had my embassy declare that I am a citizen and should be allowed on board,” she said. She pulled at the knot in her scarf.

“I don’t think that’s enough to get you on the plane,” Bess said.

“Well, I was told it was.”

Vincent wouldn’t be back from break for another five minutes.

“You can’t just . . . it’s not enough.”

“Do you know that?” she asked. Her nails were short and painted a pale pink. She tapped her fingers on the top of Bess’s stand. Around her wrist was one slim silver bracelet. On her finger was a wedding ring with diamonds all around.

“I know what I’m doing,” Bess said. She gave the woman back her pieces of paper.

“The embassy assured me.”

“I won’t let you through,” Bess said. “You’ll need to move away from the security desk.” She smiled at the next person in line, hoping they would step forward.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” “Ma’am, you need to step aside.” Bess motioned for the man at the front of the line, but he still didn’t step up.

Ms. didn’t reply, only draped her other hand over the stand.

“Ma’am, you’re going to have to step aside,” Bess said.

“Sir, come forward.” The man finally neared the stand.

“You’re very disrespectful.”

Ms. moved in front of the man and directly in front of Bess, but Bess leaned away so she could still focus on the man.

“You should be fired for treating someone this way,” Ms. said, her voice just like Bess’s high school teachers when they were trying to embarrass her, trying to let her know that nobody but them was in charge.

“Ma’am.” She tried to reach around to take the documents from the man, to move things along.

“Where is the head TSA person?” the woman asked. “The head TSA person?” Bess asked. She hated people who couldn’t get their sentences together.

“Your supervisor, dear. You don’t know what you’re doing,” Ms. said.

The man who had been waiting behind Ms. lowered his ID, like he wasn’t going to give it to Bess anymore, like she didn’t know how to check him. The people behind him started moving into the other screener lines. One woman shook her head at Bess like she should be ashamed or something. Another looked away when she looked him in the eye, just like that girl from high school being disrespectful, acting like she knew anything about her. She heard someone in line say something about getting a supervisor, just like Ms. wanted.

Ms.’s dark bob swayed with her movements to find someone behind Bess. She removed her hands from the stand and began walking toward one of the scanning lines. On her way, she bumped into Bess’s arm, the sleeve stitched with the Transportation Security Administration patch.

“I haven’t cleared you. You can’t go through there,” Bess said. But the woman didn’t stop, so Bess grabbed at her shoulder.

“Do not do that,” she said, looking over her shoulder only at Bess’s left hand.

Bess didn’t move her hand and the woman tried to keep walking. Her shirt was silk. Bess could tell because she’d gone into one of the shops at National Airport, one where the male business travelers stopped to get their wives something, and fingered a dress in there and the label said “100% silk.” Bess didn’t know if you ironed that with starch. Maybe Ms. always got it dry-cleaned. Maybe she had someone at her house who did those things for her, someone who made her life better and easier because Ms. had already worked so hard and smiled and shaken so many important people’s hands that at the end of the day she couldn’t think about something as small as clothes. Bess hated people who couldn’t do anything for themselves but thought they could do everything. Bess hated people who didn’t know what they were doing.

She grabbed the woman’s other shoulder and began to pull her back. The woman twisted her body and pulled at Bess’s hands, but she would not let go.

“I haven’t cleared you,” Bess said over and over.

Ms. didn’t have the authority that Bess did. She couldn’t just do whatever she wanted. Bess heard the soft rip of the silk and the woman’s shrill “Get off!” right before the commands of two other TSA agents for her to do the same.

Waiting to see someone took hours, but the final meeting with a supervisor so high up Bess hadn’t even seen him yet took only minutes. The woman was important, not just a citizen of the country with the crest emblazoned on their stationary, but a special assistant to the ambassador. It had been the ambassador’s call that ended it for Bess. The TSA didn’t want more bad publicity. The supervisor used words like charges and outraged and disgrace. She hadn’t known the rules at all. He wasn’t sure she’d listened in her training. She should have accepted the paper, and if she wasn’t sure then she should have called a supervisor. When the woman tried to walk through security, Bess should have motioned to the next closest TSA officer to intercept her. Most certainly, she shouldn’t have restrained her as she did. She shouldn’t have torn at her clothes, called her names. Bess hadn’t called her anything, even if she had wanted to. She hated people who lied.

The guards instructed to escort her out asked for the uniform.

“But it’s all I have,” Bess told the men. Still, she loosened the tie and unbuttoned her shirt, the badge weighed down the starched cotton. They stared at her in her black tank top.

Before she walked out, she looked for Vincent. Any evidence of her scuffle with Ms. was gone. The passengers lined up in irritation once again. Vincent checked and scribbled and smiled. She wanted to tell him good-bye, but she didn’t want to yell. She didn’t want to hear her voice amplified over the marble and three-story-high windows. She hated people who didn’t know their place.

It was still early as she drove home, and if she went directly there, her mother would ask if something had happened. If she went and drank some Long Islands without her uniform on, no one at Chuck and Billie’s would know who she was. So, she got out of the 395 tunnel at the first exit and waited at a red light.

‘Good and Mad’ Helped Me Understand The Woman Who Makes Me Angriest

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My grandmother and I are both angry about a lot of things. She was angry that Barack Obama was our 44th president; I am pissed that Donald Trump is our 45th. She is mad that immigrants are trying to come into the United States; I am furious that they are being kept out. She is enraged about the things they say on CNN; I am livid about the rhetoric on Fox. You get the idea: my grandmother and I are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. And, because of all this, she is often angry with me, and I am often angry with her. “Among the trickiest and most central dynamics between angry women is the degree to which they have often been angry at one another,” writes Rebecca Traister in her new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger.

My grandmother and I have clashed over many things in the 30 years we’ve known each other. Those things have included, but are not limited to: my hair, my career goals, my romantic partners, my future offspring, my clothes, my jewelry, my makeup, and my weight. But, more often than not, our disagreements have been over ideological differences, and lately, it is these fights that make both of us the angriest. Our most recent argument began with my grandmother making several comments over family dinner about everyone coming over the border being on drugs and it ended with me screaming I guess we just fucking disagree. (I would like to note here that it was this same grandmother who first taught me how to use the F word.)

Rebecca Traister and I, however, are on the same end of the spectrum. I may be biased because of this, but I think that she is a masterful writer and, as an editor friend of mine said, “the kind of genius we need right now.” Her new book, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, is yet another example of Traister’s diligent reporting and thorough researching. The connections she makes between contemporary and historic events and figures are both unexpected and exciting, and also completely logical. Even despite the fact she wrote the entire book in four months (“I needed to work swiftly, to capture this rebellion [of female fury] before its sharp, spiky contours got retroactively smoothed and flattened by time,” she writes), her attention to detail and extreme depth of journalistic reporting is mind-blowing. But perhaps the most mind-blowing thing about Good and Mad was that after reading this book, a manifesto by a far-left-leaning writer, I found I better understood my extreme-right-wing grandmother. Traister’s book helped me understand my own anger and figure out how to use it for good, but she also helped me understand the anger of a person who makes me angry.

Perhaps the most mind-blowing thing about “Good and Mad” was that after reading this book, a manifesto by a far-left-leaning writer, I found I better understood my extreme-right-wing grandmother.

In Good and Mad, Traister explores the history of women’s anger thematically, jumping back and forth through time as she seamlessly moves from topic to topic: how women suppress or disguise their anger, how women’s anger is considered unattractive, how women’s anger can lead to their downfall, and how, of course, how women’s anger has the power to be revolutionary. “We must train ourselves to even be able to see and hear anger from women and understand it not only as rational, but as politically weighty,” writes Traister as she shows how female rage has fueled social movements from abolition to women’s suffrage to gun control to reproductive health to civil rights. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the reason that women’s anger is so broadly denigrated — treated as so ugly, so alienating, and so irrational — is because we have known all along that with it came the explosive power to upturn the very systems that have sought to contain it.”

Traister’s book is about women’s political and societal anger — she clearly states in the opening of Good and Mad that she is not going to dive into women’s individual or familial anger, because plenty of other excellent books have been written on the topic. But I couldn’t help but analyze my own and my grandmother’s personal anger, both for ourselves and at one another, while reading Good and Mad. In the case of me and my grandmother, our domestic disagreements are often due to political and societal issues — and isn’t the personal always political, and the political always personal? Your politics reflect your worldview, and that view is shaped by the things that personally happened to you, and sometimes those things can make you very angry. Traister encourages her readers to acknowledge, pay attention to, respect, and not shy away from other women’s anger. “Seek it out, notice it, ask women what makes them angry and then listen to them when they tell you,” writes Traister. “If part of what they’re angry at is you, take it in, acknowledge how their frustrations might mirror your own, even if they are refracted at you.” And so as I read, I found myself better understanding the reasons for my grandmother’s anger. Even though my grandmother and I may look as though we are angry about completely different and opposite things, under the surface, a lot of the anger comes from the same root problems.

Even though my grandmother and I may look as though we are angry about completely opposite things, under the surface, a lot of the anger comes from the same root problems.

My grandmother and I are angry because we have been told we aren’t supposed to be angry. Women are trained to shrink, to laugh off their feelings, to shut up, to leave the room, to make jokes instead of yell. “To full-throatedly express my ire would have been alienating, tactically unsound,” she explains. Traister quotes feminist writer Lindy West: “Not only are women expected to weather sexual violence, intimate partner violence, workplace discrimination, institutional subordination, the expectation of free domestic labor, the blame for our own victimization, and all of the subtler, invisible cuts that undermine us daily… we are not even allowed to be angry about it.” As a girl growing up in the 1930s and 1940s, my grandmother was taught to be quiet and demure — that was how she was told she would find respect and power in society — and as a girl growing up in the 1990s and 2000s, I wasn’t taught all that different. Don’t yell, be quiet, calm down. Phrases thrown at both of us, sixty years apart. We even do it to each other: my grandmother tells me to stop talking back and to be respectful, and I tell her to let it go and to shut up.

My grandmother and I are both angry because we get judged for our appearances. Like all women, my grandmother and I have been told all our lives that our main value as a women is our attractiveness. Even though my grandmother was, for many years, the secretary to one of the most powerful men in academia in Boston, doing much of his work for him behind the scenes, others judged her not by her intellect or attention to detail, but by her weight, her hair, her clothes. My grandmother eventually internalized this critical gaze and turned it on me, often angrily expressing her dislike of my weight, my hair, my clothes. And while these criticisms don’t feel good, and while it hurts to have my own grandmother remind me of all of society’s judgements, I can see now, after reading Good and Mad, that my grandmother is expressing her anger over the fact that this is what the world did to her. In a way, she is trying to protect me. If she is the one who tells me that my eyeliner is too dark or my jewelry too bright or my clothes too weird, if she tries to get me to follow the rules she was forced to follow, then maybe I will be spared that judgment. Through her yelling she is trying to tell me they won’t see your intelligence and your humor, they will only see the pink dye in your hair.

My grandmother and I are angry because our pain has been dismissed and ignored. I mean this in a literal sense — several times in her life, and in the lives of her daughters, my grandmother has expressed concern over physical pain to medical doctors who dismissed her worries, only to realize too late that they had made a mistake by ignoring her. My grandmother wasn’t able to have any more children after my mom and my aunt, due to her doctor’s mishandling of post-partum medical issues. My aunt died at age 49 of a rare type of cancer because doctors didn’t take her health concerns more seriously early on. But I also mean it figuratively: women’s feelings, especially their anger, are seen as shrill and hysterical, as nonexistent and not real. Traister writes about psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, who conducted a study that revealed people believe women are usually angry because of internal factors, while men get angry because of external factors. Barrett summarized: “She’s a bitch, but he’s just having a bad day.” When my grandmother starts yelling, I roll my eyes, sigh, tell her to shut up. Not acknowledging her pain, her feelings, her anger, only makes her more angry. And, when my grandmother does the same thing back to me, when she tells me my feelings are trivial, misguided, reactionary, unwarranted, I feel dismissed and, therefore, angry. We both just want our hurt to be acknowledged.

My grandmother and I are angry because we feel we have no control. Often in her life, my grandmother has felt powerless and victimized. When she was a child, my grandmother’s mother died suddenly, and she was left at an orphanage for several years when her newly widowed father couldn’t take care of her. When she was a stay-at-home mom, my grandmother had to depend entirely on my grandfather financially. When country club suburbanites found out her maiden name was Italian, heard her father’s thick Gaeta accent, and learned he worked in a sausage factory, they thought less of my grandmother. And, after she worked so hard to try to shape herself to fit the system — wearing the right clothes, having the right accent, playing into exactly what the white, wealthy, WASP-y patriarchy wanted — she is angry with people like me who come along and want to blow the whole system up. She followed the rules, but I want to write new rules. She feels she worked to get her piece of the pie, and now I want to take her piece back and recut the pie in a different way. In Good and Mad, Traister writes of the white wealthy women who try to gain power by associating with white wealthy men. My grandmother is one of these women — as long as the system works for her, and it did, that’s all that matters in her mind. I do not agree with this thinking. I am angry because I feel that the groups I am fighting for have no control in our society, that I want to fight for a redistribution of power, that as long as rapists and white supremacists and greedy corporation-owners are in charge, none of the rest of us us have any control. Those scraps of power the patriarchy tosses out are not enough, but my grandmother is angry because she wants to hold onto her scraps. I understand that now. I don’t agree with why she is mad, I don’t condone her way of thinking, but I at least understand where my grandmother’s anger is coming from, and that makes it easier to bear.

Easier to bear, but it doesn’t make it hurt less. One thing Traister doesn’t really cover is what it is like when you are the target of a woman’s anger. Traister does write about how often men react violently to angry women because it reminds them of being reprimanded by the matriarchs of their childhood households. “We’re raised by women,” says Gloria Steinem, “so we experience female power when we’re younger. And men, especially, when they see a powerful woman as an adult, feel regressed to childhood and strike out at her.” When my grandmother directs her anger at me, it does send me back to that childhood version of myself, in part, because I once was that childhood version of myself with her. But what Traister doesn’t say is that having anger directed at you just plain hurts. For me to bear the brunt of my grandmother’s outrage at the world is painful. There is no denying that. But, at least, after reading Good and Mad, at least I can understand better where my grandmother’s anger is coming from, and what to do with my own, now and in the future. If in fifty years, I end up with a granddaughter who is super conservative (who knows what the kids will be into in 2068?), I will know what to do with any anger towards her. Because, as activist and organizer Jessica Morales Rocketto says: “…The other side of anger is hope. We wouldn’t be angry if we didn’t still believe that it could be better.” My anger at my grandmother comes from the fact that, while she thinks things are fine now, or were actually better back when America was great, I have hope for a future that can be even better, for both me and for her. A future where women are allowed to be angry, where women won’t be valued just by their looks, where women’s pain will be acknowledged and considered, and where women will finally have control over their lives.

I have hope for a future that can be even better, for both me and for her. A future where women are allowed to be angry.

I see my grandmother’s anger as directionless, unfocused; there are so many things she is upset about that she doesn’t know where to aim her fury, and so her rage often ends up directed at me, because I am right there. She often focuses on little things, like my too-long hair or my too-bright jewelry, because the big things that make her angry — feeling worthless, invisible, ignored, underappreciated, denied power — are too big to take on. So my grandmother yells at me for believing what I hear on CNN and wearing those “gaudy earrings” she hates. Naturally, this makes me angry in return. I could easily channel this anger back towards my grandmother, and I have; it’s what I’ve done every time we’ve fought over the past 30 years. But instead, now, inspired by Good and Mad, the next time my grandmother gets angry at me, I am going to try to understand what she is really angry about. When she yells at me for not listening to her Fox News talking points, I will see she is really angry that no one listens to women. And when she screams at me for not following conventional fashion standards, I will see that she is actually upset that women are still valued primarily for their appearance. I am going to acknowledge her anger, legitimize it, try to see where it is coming from, and then, and this is important, I am not going to throw my own anger back at her. Instead, I am going to use the anger I feel in those moments to fuel my energy to fight for causes I care about, to try to change the problems that make both me and my grandmother so angry, inspired by the many angry and revolutionary Traister writes about in Good and Mad.

“Women’s anger spurs creativity and drives innovation in politics and social change, and it always has,” writes Traister. “Anger has driven women to develop a million approaches to changing the world.” I want to use my anger to march in Black Lives Matter protests and volunteer for the National Domestic Workers Alliance and donate all the money I can to Planned Parenthood. I want my anger to be fuel for good. “Anger leads me to seek answers, to see change,” says the writer Moira Donegan.

There is something powerful about understanding another woman’s anger, and also about channeling my own anger into a force for revolution. Good and Mad showed me the way. I felt ready, a stirring near my heart.

As Traister writes: “Don’t forget how this feels.”

Édouard Louis on Fictionalizing His Violent Assault

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A t the age of 22, the French writer and intellectual Édouard Louis upended the idealism French readers were used to encountering in bourgeois narratives about the lower class with The End of Eddy, a brutal, unsentimental, and hope-poor autobiographical novel written by a member of the lower class.

Haunting in its clear-sightedness, effective in its leanness, The End of Eddy tells Louis’ story of growing up queer and poor in a working-class village in northern France where an ingrained sense of powerlessness seeds bigotry and violence. An international runaway of a bestseller, The End of Eddy was translated into over twenty languages, was adapted into a play, and is soon to be a feature film with Isabelle Huppert.

Operating at a frequency of the hyper inspired, Louis published his second autobiographical novel, History of Violence, two years later. By turns unceremonious in its candor, then curiously tender, this book takes us through the giddy meeting of Édouard and a potential suitor at a public square near Édouard’s apartment late one Christmas Eve in Paris. Édouard’s reaction to this aborted love affair — which transitions without warning from sensual complicity to a night of rape and violence — is as surprising in this second book as his lack of sentimentality towards his childhood and caretakers was in his first, and it is this surprise, this veering off of the redemption course that many traditional memoirists have followed, that makes Édouard Louis such a thrilling voice to read.

We chatted by telephone about his terrific second novel. Our conversation was in French; the translations here are mine.

Courtney Maum: In History of Violence, the narrative device of our protagonist hearing his story related by his sister, through a door, to her husband, was genius. Did you come up with this idea immediately, or did you try other narrative structures for the book?

Édouard Louis: Thank you. It was something that took time. I started writing the book with the urgency to tell the factual story: I met a guy on Christmas Eve, our connection was beautiful and strong. We made love frequently; we really liked each other. And then he raped me and tried to kill me. My first urgency was to tell this violence, the violence of this story. To talk of anything else would be indecent!

In the beginning, there wasn’t this literary structure where my sister tells the story — an autobiography told by someone else — no, I talked about what happened, this guy, his childhood, what he told me about his father. But it was like I was talking about him as a subject, and that I had just fallen into the story with a clear conscience. I wanted to be closer to the reality. I wanted to show that we were two determined subjects with a past that we didn’t control, and that this meeting is the story of two stories who meet each other, two fragments of shame that slam together. I was this young guy from the countryside ashamed of my family. I hid my social origins, and he was an Algerian carrying his own story, ashamed of his sexual desires. His desire was mixed with the hatred of his desire. I needed to find a way to show that I also had a body that was bringing a story to this story. A way to put both these pasts in front of the mirror. The idea of an autobiography written by someone else, this pleased me a lot.

CM: I’m interested in hearing more about your decision to publish your books as fiction. If I’m not mistaken, regarding History of Violence, you have said that in fictionalizing your work, you can create a story about how one man can attack another, make it easier to accept. Can we talk more about this?

ÉL: For a long time, you have had “novels” on one side and “memoirs” on the other. There are precursors, of course, such as Marguerite Duras, but today there is something changing, a revolution in literature that allows the combination of these two forms. For me, the novel is an ambitious literary endeavor with a formal construction. Much like the sociologists I admire who are interested in the art of making — making diagrams, making concepts, the art of pure construction — the novel is a way to do this. What interested me with autobiographical fiction was the ability to really squeeze reality without running away from it.

Something I talk a lot about because it really touched me is that when I was a child in the little village where I grew up, the writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio won the Nobel Prize. At my house, no one read, but because it was the Nobel Prize everyone was talking about it. I remember an interview of his on the television. He was talking about how he went about making up his characters. I was there with my father, his back totally shot from working in the factory, and my mother, so poor, and I thought, why doesn’t Le Clézio speak of us? We are suffering, and he’s inventing people. Now I realize that this was the question of a child. But this scene was something inaugural to me, an original trauma. I could never get away from it.

Every society, every country, is formed around the question of inclusion/exclusion. To be an insider, an outsider, it’s all rooted in violence.

CM: In many of your interviews, you’ve expressed your desire to “be a writer of violence.” You’ve also cited the French director Mathieu Kassovitz — and specifically his film “Hate” — as an example of a creative work made by a “good artist of violence”. Who are the other artists you consider to be getting violence right?

ÉL: A lot of the people I admire, I admire because they are working on this essential question. Personally, I can’t write without admiration. For me, it’s a burst of energy, admiration. When I see something, read something, when I watch a film, I have this powerful feeling that I must hold myself to this level; I must try to create this much beauty and emotion even if it is violent in its beauty. I think Claudia Rankine is working in this register, and Svetlana Alexievich, and Ocean Vuong. These people are really digging into the material — into this question of violence — and they inspire me very much. Roxane Gay’s Hunger or the film Twelve Years a Slave.

I think at the heart of violence, there is a strong relationship between violence and the reality of our bodies, and what our bodies are. Every society, every country, every place in the world is formed around the question of inclusion/exclusion. There is always a line between inferior, superior. Accepted, not accepted. Loved, hated. If we want to understand the reality of a world, we must look at this pact of violence. It’s like with North America, the violence of slavery, violence against blacks, or in France, with immigrations, what occurs if you don’t have the right papers. To be an insider, an outsider, it’s all rooted in violence.

CM: I’m curious about your opinion on the current political state of France, and specifically the French president, Emmanuel Macron. My husband is French, and we watched the French presidential election from here, in the United States. We were traumatized by Trump’s election, so we were very happy to see someone elected who was young, who seemed sane. I’m generalizing, but I think the common perception of Macron here in America — at least in his first months in office — was that he’s cool, he’s intelligent, he’s a little provocative with his older wife. From what I’ve read, you really dislike Macron — can you tell us why?

ÉL: When I hear that Americans like Macron, I think it’s because Americans are racist. Today, France has a political stance against immigration that is the strongest it has ever been in the Fifth Republic. The boats that are refused entry, the immigrants who are dying in the Mediterranean, or what happened in Calais. There are laws being passed, and passed with force, such as the law that allows immigrant minors to be locked up. Before, this was illegal. People who were escaping misery, great difficulties, war, especially people under eighteen years old, you couldn’t lock them up. Now, laws like these are being enforced by Macron and his ministers with an unheard of force.

You know, Macron is part of a political mood. Trump, Macron, these are extremely violent people, and a lot of their reforms are similar. For example, Macron wants to lower taxes for the very rich and cut welfare for the poor. He made a move to cut back housing benefits for the poor by 5 euros a month, and there was a polemic around it. His ministers responded by saying that 5 euros was nothing. When I was growing up, though, 5 euros was two days of food. But this seems impossible to them. This is a violence against the poor; it’s also the end of shame. These people aren’t ashamed any more to make fun of poor people or of black people. In his team of ministers, Macron took three people who are opposed to gay marriage. One of them said that if he were mayor, he wouldn’t personally preside over a marriage between two women or two men. I think after Reagan and Thatcher there was a little bit of a cooling, of violence I mean, but now we are seeing a return to violence.

When I hear that Americans like Macron, I think it’s because Americans are racist.

CM: You know, I must say, this is really shocking to me. I’ll admit I don’t consume as much media as I used to because it’s…it’s hard to operate as a human being if you read all the news — but I must say, I’m not sure that all this information is getting to us. You know, Americans aren’t great with nuances. We like to structure things along “Good Guy”/”Bad Guy” terms. I personally think that in the French presidential election, Marine Le Pen was portrayed as The Bad Guy, and so for many Americans — or at least those who followed the French presidential election — computed that The Good Guy had won and they assumed France was in good hands. Also, Macron is held up almost as a figure from a glossy fashion magazine, in a lifestyle way. He is “younger” than Trump, less “stupid”, he is “thinner”, he dresses well…

ÉL: You are giving words to something important. In fact, many people have an ingrained bourgeois culture, a class racism, that leads them to believe that if Trump is a misogynist and racist and hates poor people but he does so with a language of the popular classes, than Macron isn’t a problem, because he presents as a member of the bourgeoisie. That if you are racist, but if you use the language of the bourgeois to express your racism, than it’s less of a problem.

You know, I travel to America, I teach sometimes at universities and conferences, and I see Macron appreciated and I think, why isn’t this information getting through?

CM: I’ve read that for your first book, The End of Eddy, one of the publishers you sent the book to said that no reader would ever believe that poverty like that existed in France today. This fascinates and disgusts me: first of all, the novel was submitted as fiction, no? So it’s your right to write about whatever you desire. But more importantly, that poverty does exist. What is going on behind a comment like this? Is this denial? What is this denial about?

ÉL: You can imagine the violence that this represented, someone saying, “What you say about your mother can’t be true.” This is a way to put her back into invisibility and silence, in the shadows. This editor was white, a Parisian bourgeois, and so far removed from the type of life that I describe that he couldn’t believe it could be true.

You know, there has been this trend in French literature for the last ten years or so. Literature recounting the life of the middle class that doesn’t know what to do with itself, computer scientists who are lost, people who convert to Catholicism to give sense to their lives. People are obsessively turned towards these questions. But when you get to the questions of the lower classes, these questions disappear. If people continue saying that the poor don’t exist, there will be a return of the fire. You know, it’s already happening, with Trump, with Brexit, or in Scandinavia where there is this postmodern ideology that classes don’t exist. But there are people who feel in their skin that this isn’t true.

CM: The language in your book is specific, it’s important. What “gueule” means to a French speaker, or the charged power of “cul”…to me this is a very French book, it’s specific to the experience of living in — or being raised in — a certain part of France. Your books are widely translated — to what extent, if any, do you concern yourself with how your work is being translated?

ÉL: The more local something is the more it speaks to the entire world. It’s like William Faulkner, it’s so powerful, it can be read everywhere even though he’s writing about this micro-community of a tiny piece of earth in Mississippi. But he has such an exacting knowledge of this small piece of the world. The truths, the emotions are so precise that they end up touching universal things like racism, the invention of self, fear, hate, violence. If he tried to do something general it wouldn’t have touched any one.

For the trips I’ve done for my books, when someone says in Japan or in Columbia, “I saw my life in your book”, that is living proof that what I believe is true, that it is locality that can make something universal.

CM: I’d like to talk about a phrase you’ve used about yourself: “transfuge de class” (a class defector). It can’t escape anyone’s notice that with your enormous — if deserved — success, you have entered a class that you yourself have said you have no interest in depicting as a writer. Is it challenging, this dichotomy? Is The End Of Édouard possible?

ÉL: The minute we start to write, we are part of the bourgeoisie, even if we don’t have money. Class isn’t just about money, it’s access to culture and to competencies that have to do with culture. Sartre brought this up in the 1950s when he talked about the contradicting heart of the author who both wants to belong to the bourgeoisie and to fight against their incarnate power. The difference between me and Sartre is that Sartre came from the bourgeoisie, and I don’t. I didn’t have — and I don’t have — a love for the class of my youth, not the way that so many of these intellectuals had an interest in the lower classes that they didn’t come from.

In my childhood, people voted for the Front National, my mother couldn’t work because women didn’t work outside the home, and I was spit on because I was “a faggot.” So I didn’t have a fascination for the lower classes. But we can be political without love. I can wish for my brother to have a better life even if I don’t love my brother.

We will have to see: my hate for the bourgeoisie increases day by day. I never troubled myself with this question before: if I hadn’t left my surroundings as a gay child, I would have died. But then I got to an upper class school, and I was treated as a “faggot”, too. My life is a fight to find people to welcome me better, or to welcome me at all. I didn’t find it in the countryside, and in the cultural and literary world, I am welcomed but there is an ugliness. In fact, it is doubly violent — I saw this a lot in New York — people think that because they are on the side of “culture” that they are good people. Editors, writers, journalists, they think that because they wrote a book, they are fighting Trump. But no. I went to so many receptions and people had so much faith in themselves.

CM: I’d love to talk about the object of a book as an instrument of violence. You have written about how when you returned home to Northern France on visits, you used to use a book or a leftist newspaper as a weapon, you’d sit there among your family with this polemic symbol of how different you were from them, how little you shared their values. Now you are an esteemed author of these violent objects. What is that like?

ÉL: I think there is an extreme violence for many of the people in the class I’m writing about. If my mom saw a book, it was a reminder of the life she never had, the possibilities she didn’t have, it was a way of saying “You are not that”, and she was humiliated by it. James Baldwin’s mother, also. In The Devil Finds Work he recounts that when he started getting interested in reading and writing, his family hid books from him, as if they felt that he would move inexorably away from them, forever, if he read.

It’s not just in France. Even Alice Walker talks about how culture removed her from her family. But we beat power with power, strangely, the only way to beat power is with power. That is why I try with my books to use this purely bourgeois object as a way to fight the culture of domination that is the bourgeois. And sometimes I think it works because the right attacks me, and the bourgeois, too!

On a more personal level, my family doesn’t really understand what I do. A book is something so foreign and far away and bizarre, they can’t imagine what my day looks like, what it means to research, to go to a conference or give a talk. We don’t speak the same language. I’m scared to speak to my mother of my life. If I speak about my books or a conference in the USA, it is a way of saying that I travel, when she never got to travel. All these words and phrases are traps. I seize this to write. I can’t fix this problem in my daily life but I can expose it.

Why should society use violence — such as punishment — against violence?

CM: The former Paris Review editor Lorin Stein is the English translator of your second book, History of Violence, and translated a New York Times op-ed of yours, “Why my father votes Le Pen.” While reading History of Violence, I couldn’t ignore the irony that your words about sexual abuse were being translated into English by a high profile white man who he, himself, has been accused of sexual misconduct and abuse of power. To the extent that you are aware of Lorin Stein’s sexual misconduct with women who worked under him, what do you think of him as a translator of your work?

ÉL: I wanted him. Lorin is my friend, and he is an excellent translator. I insisted, because the question was brought up by editors and people at FSG. It’s obviously very complicated. The first thing that is very important, because it’s one of my big subjects: I don’t believe in punishment. I don’t think it’s the best way to fix a problem, a situation. This is at the heart of History of Violence. Why should society use violence — such as punishment — against violence? The example (on a much larger scale) that I often cite is after 9/11. You had extreme violence, fire, blood — people dying — and what does the Bush administration do? They create violence elsewhere and they spill blood elsewhere and for me, there is a major tendency in our society that says: we are going to regulate violence with violence. Of course, you can’t compare a terrorist attack with what we are discussing, but precisely, what is interesting is to see that — at any level — small violences or big violences, the urge for punishment is the same.

What I say in this book is that this isn’t a solution that I find acceptable. I don’t want my story to put more violence in the world. After the sexual assault, the police told me: “We are going to put the guy who did this to you in jail for years. He made you suffer, so we will make him suffer.” Aren’t there other solutions? I’m not saying that we should be passive when someone commits a violent act. You have to ask questions and fix things, but I don’t understand the drive to make someone suffer because they were violent. And historically, if you look closely, you’ll see that it was in the most violent contexts that society found alternative ways of dealing with violence.

I realize that this could sound naïve, and almost puerile — I’m out of sync with the people around me. Sometimes I look around myself at others, I see their urges to punish, and think that people are part of a human kind that I don’t understand. That I’m an extraterrestrial, or something. The guy who assaulted me went to jail before assaulting me. Did it change him? Maybe he became even more violent there, in jail, so maybe, in a society without prison systems, he would not have assaulted me. It’s a question that needs to be addressed. It’s what we need in the very important #MeToo conversation, I think: how can we avoid reproducing violence against violence?

Once again, I’m talking about very different issues here, and I don’t compare what happened in my book and what some people say about Lorin. We must insist that no one talked about rape in his case [Ed. note: Lorin Stein was among those anonymously accused of “serious sexual abuses” in the “Shitty Men in Media List” document that circulated last October.], but it felt to me that some people wanted to punish him, and that the punishment was more important than anything else. He is the one who published my book in the USA. He is the one who made this book — about sexual violence — possible in the USA.

Crystal Hana Kim Thinks Worrying About Publication Kills Creativity

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I n our monthly series “Can Writing Be Taught?” we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This month we’re talking to Crystal Hana Kim, author of If You Leave Me. Kim is both a contributing editor at Apogee and the director of writing instruction at Leadership Enterprise for a Diverse America, so she knows a LOT about evaluating and teaching writing. Her six-week fiction workshop in New York is already sold out, but don’t fret: she’ll also be teaching an online version of the class starting in December. The class is open to writers of all levels who are working on fiction projects of any length, and will help them gain skills they can apply to all future writing.

What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

When I was a graduate student, I took a seminar and workshop with Deborah Eisenberg. (If you haven’t read her yet, please do. She is brilliant.) Deborah taught me that a successful story will trust the reader while also keeping the reader tightly inside the narrative world. In other words, I learned that I didn’t have to hold the reader’s hand, that I could knock out the foundation and delve straight into the characters’ lives. At the same time, it’s important to keep the reader from irrelevant questions. When I teach, I keep these two maxims in mind.

I also loved reading my peers’ drafts. Writing can be a lonely endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be. Being able to help another writer always made me feel better. And reading others’ works, which were often stylistically and thematically different from mine, expanded my understanding of story, language, and power.

Writing can be a lonely endeavor, but it doesn’t have to be.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?

Sometimes, there’s the understandable fear that workshop will flatten one’s style, influencing students to all write in the same tone. However, I think a good workshop leader can prevent this by keeping each writer’s goals in mind. I once took a workshop where the teacher was not interested in this at all — rather, he thought there was only one way to write. As a result, everyone wrote with one reader in mind. That class flattened and tamped down our creativity and vision. It was my least favorite workshop, but it’s since then informed my teaching.

What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?

Create a safe space for your students. Writing is personal. I remember the vulnerability I felt every time I handed a story in. The whole week, as I waited for the next workshop, I felt raw. It’s important for instructors to create a space where students feel comfortable taking risks and flexing new writing muscles. If the instructor believes there is only one way of writing or is unconcerned with the students’ goals, the workshop’s not going to be fruitful for anyone.

Does everyone “have a novel in them”?

Can anyone write string sentences into a novel-length form? Sure. But there’s a difference between “having a novel” in you and having a good or sellable novel in you. And of course, “good” and “sellable” are not the same. But more importantly, the phrase “have a novel in them/you” creates a hierarchy within forms of writing. I believe short stories are just as important as novels, as are essays, poems, hybrid forms, etc. The teacher’s role is to help each student become a better writer on their own grounds.

Why Kanishk Tharoor Draws Plumbing Diagrams in Writing Class

Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?

No, I don’t think so. I firmly believe teachers are here to guide; they’re not here to determine success. I want to help each student grow as a writer, reader, thinker. Everyone is capable of that kind of growth. Unless you’re a seer, I don’t think you should tell anyone else to give up writing. I wish I was a seer, but alas I’m not.

What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?

As a student, I needed both to feel motivated when I turned to revision. If you only receive praise, you won’t know what steps to take to improve your writing. If you only receive criticism, you can easily feel deflated. As a writer, you need to understand what’s working in order to figure out how to fix what isn’t. As a reader, giving praise tends to help you consider the writer’s motivations. And it can teach you what your readerly biases are. It can be easier to criticize, but praise is extremely useful.

Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?

No. Write with a reader in mind so that you are shaping your language, characters, and plot into a coherent world. But don’t write with publication in mind. That will only cloud your writing, paralyze you, or worse. To think about the publishing process (which is all business) is death to creativity.

To think about the publishing process (which is all business) is death to creativity.

In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?

  • Kill your darlings. Do it. Save your darlings in a different file if you have to. Maybe they’ll come in handy later. Or you can read through the document years later and laugh at what you once held so dear. (I do this, and it is equal parts funny/embarrassing/sweet.)
  • Show don’t tell. You need both, of course. But over-telling is boring. I never want to bore my reader.
  • Write what you know. Write what you know. Then imagine, question, and research, in order to write about what you don’t know.
  • Character is plot. Plot is rooted in the tension between what characters want and the obstacles that are preventing them from getting what they want. The two are inextricable from each other. You need both for a good story.

What’s the best hobby for writers?

Any sort of activity that uses your hands. I like pottery — throwing clay on the wheel and forming a physical object that has immediate use is so pleasurable after being stuck in my head all day.

What’s the best workshop snack?

Wine. Donuts. Since I started this Q&A with Deborah Eisenberg, I’ll end with her too. I’d never liked donuts until Deborah brought some from the Doughnut Plant to our workshop. Holy crap, those donuts are delicious.