Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy journeys into the underworld on a rescue mission and girl follows boy back to the world of life, but rules designed to exploit human proclivities for “connection” with idealized loved ones cause complications, so generally this is where a cranky local god would intervene or someone would turn into a tree but it doesn’t happen so girl follows boy, except not quite. Boy sings sad song.
Boy meets girl, except not quite. Boy meets boy and/or girl, and/or girl meets girl and/or boy, except not quite. Boys meet boys and girls, girls meet boys and girls, everybody loses everybody because death is a terrifying inevitability though luckily there’s a happy ending in many forms of highly glossy printed/recorded/filmed entertainment. In a fluffy, white, nominally Christian heaven no one ever sings sad songs, and character actors get their wings.
Boy meets/loses girl he never actually “had,” girl meets both girl and boy and loses both but second girl meets and wins heart of other boy, other boy meets/loses yet another girl and after several weeks of depression-related insomnia and emotional lability decides to “pull a Leonard Cohen,” as he tells friends, and disappear to a Buddhist monastery in the foothills of metro Los Angeles; depressed boy’s current whereabouts are still unknown but a cryptic postcard to a friend from boy reports he has “found love, but it’s not what I had thought” and no one knows what he means or cares much. People seeking closure sing sad songs.
Boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy expects to win girl back, boy fails to do so, girl eventually becomes an acclaimed, award-winning actress in elliptical indie films that boy swears never to watch but watches anyway and then expects himself to feel wounded by but is surprised to find he does not. Successful actor’s high school classmates stuck in unfulfilling jobs and prone to romanticizing the film industry sing sad songs.
Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, both brace for complications but things are okay and everyone lives happily ever after, including neighbors and passersby. Acquaintances of boy and girl who aren’t really buying it sing sad songs and sometimes engage in trolling on social media.
Boy meets and loves girl but girl is in love with other girl so boy embarks on elaborate mission to drive wedge of doubt and distrust between girls, girls lose and then, after hijinks, win each other back while boy is involved in bus accident leading to brain injury rendering him unable to love in the romantic sense of the word but endowed with both supernal empathy and psychic ability he uses to game the stock market and fund humanitarian charities; almost everybody lives happily ever after for a while. People involved in bus accidents (ordinarily) sing sad songs and fend off ambulance-chasers, ambulance-chasers stifle any remaining embers of shame and blame socialism and safety standards for decline in business; hijinks ensue and ambulance-chasers sing sad songs that become unlikely but modest Soundcloud rap hits.
Boy meets girl who meets other boy who meets two girls, those girls meet three other boys plus the aforementioned boys and girls and a plastic replica of a Greek statue of Dionysus that can sometimes talk or seem to talk when certain parties are under the influence of certain pharmaceuticals, statue persuades entire coterie of hesitant and confused romantics to visit mysterious island off the coast of Greece where the statue says all will become “clear” but widespread protests over collapse of financial systems in Greece during coterie’s visit hinders quest because island proves inaccessible so everyone complains about “wasting” a vacation and things go downhill as coterie of itchily lovelorn tourists depart for the south of France, which is deemed lovely but not really magical enough to be worth it and consensus is reached that nobody ever really knows what they want or why they want it. Tourists with maxed-out credit cards, persons working subsistence-wage jobs in the tourism industry, and scapegoated public officials sing sad songs.
Boy meets and loses girl but wins back heart of girl, so to speak, and girl and boy begin to entertain nagging anxieties re: what winning someone’s heart means and at what cost and why it always seems to be effort on culturally-agentic boy’s part while girl is mere object so boy and girl conspire for girl to meet/lose second boy and win his heart, but after girl locates second boy, original couple’s well-intentioned but not-well-thought-out plan to ensure loss of boy involving another boy/girl duo hit snag when girl fails to “lose” boy well/completely enough for subsequent heart-winning to be meaningful, intervention is held in which this is explained to patient, generous-in-love boy whose heart was sociocultural test case but much to the consternation of everyone (esp. original boy losing/winning girl and boy half of hired girl/boy couple, whose heart was (accidentally) won by conspiring original girl and ends up losing hired girl) when experimental and plausibly genderfluid boy (no one asks) is informed of heart-winning experiment he doesn’t really mind because of agreement re: basic premise of test regarding gender agency, boy then gives flowery speech re: how a human heart can be available to more than one person and duality is also a social construct, hired/split boy and girl are hella pissed at original boy and girl, hijinks ensue that cause lingering stress beneath original boy and girl’s otherwise happy life together and girl eventually locates experimental boy after sudden death of original boy who “won” her heart, discovers him living in a country villa in the Mexican countryside, happily involved in complex polyamorous relationship he invites grief-stricken but conflicted girl to join; girl declines more out of wanting to save face than out of being weirded out, etc. People overly invested in the allure they hold for others, the power of individual vs. social agency, and how that power/allure can be manipulated sing sad songs, as do people who suffer aneurysms while feeding Mr. Fluff on a cold Tuesday morning before another long day of work.
Boy and girl meet, fall in love, lose/win each other, live happily ever after for a while despite thankless careers in which boy and girl are trapped in order to provide for their three children, two of whom are perfectly nice, but lead both boy and girl to begin to question not just who or what they are or were in love with but the nature and meaning of love itself relative to the formless void of existence; family relocates to remote village in Wales, mean child is maimed by rogue goat, everyone expects to (re)discover the (restorative) power of love in care for maimed child (who recovers but is still kind of a jerk) but fail to do so, boy and girl both disappear separately and without explanation, leaving two nice kids and a jerk alone in remote village to face ambiguous future of unguided, puberty-complicated maturation and eventually launch a successful online marketing consultancy firm selling harvested data on the side; as adults, they are wary of romance (and goats). Existentialists posing as fishing industry workers in a remote village sing sad songs consisting of sea shanty melodies overlain with text borrowed from the work of Victor Frankl, resulting in a New York Times trend piece on existential sea shanties.
Girl meets/loves suspension bridge, discovers she can marry bridge and, with consent of bridge, does so, everyone lives/exists in contentment for a pretty long time even after girl loses job as Elvira impersonator when Elvira-themed restaurant goes under. People (such as evangelical Christians or comedians looking for cheap jokes) easily rankled by the plausibility of the non-normative sing sad songs and/or make cheap jokes.
Girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, boy and girl give up because love is failure and failure is a magnificent but terrifying storm headed in our direction that will surely destroy all we know and hold dear but leave us alive to carry the burden of our lives’ erasures across dark oceans of lifespans, except not quite, because existence demands a certain amount of pragmatism from all but the most untouchably wealthy, who sing songs they believe to be sad but are mostly more redolent of a kind of theatricalized ennui. We should give up, according to the latest statistics, except we never do, not quite.
About the Author
After a weird, boring detour in the southwest and a weird, boring detour in the sciences, Simon Henry Stein has recently returned to writing and composing and currently lives in the midwest.
Before writing Reservoir 13 and The Reservoir Tapes, most of my fiction had been set in big cities, where the idea of community is somewhat amorphous and the edges of anyone’s territory are blurred and unclear. Starting work on a project set in a small rural town, I realised not only what pleasures this setting offers the writer — a defined network of characters, a knowable landscape, a community of shared knowledge — but also that much of my own best-loved reading has also shared this small-town setting.
American fiction is pretty much obsessed with small towns and gravel roads, of course; but Irish and Scandinavian fiction also seems repeatedly drawn back to the small community. These are places of gossip, neighbourly surveillance, and known family histories, all of which makes for good storytelling.
Small communities are also comprehendable: the anthropologist Robin Dunbar has suggested 150 as the number of people any one human can maintain genuine social connection with (although he was writing before Twitter, so), and the cast of characters in these small town novels — whether named or implied — often seems to hover around that number. These are ‘knowable communities’, as Raymond Williams puts it: knowable for the reader, and knowable for the writer.
Is it still possible to describe Kent Haruf as under-read, or under-appreciated? He still doesn’t seem to be a household name, but he does at least seem to be credited, regularly, as a master craftsperson of this school of writing: not minimal, but plain, and beautiful. In the book, eight disparate characters in the small town of Holt, Colorado experience profound change over the course of one year.
Apparently the story of a city man retreating to a small Norwegian village and trying to fit in, Petterson’s book manages to become as much about the shadow of the second world war and the rupturing of old certainties as it is about a man pretending to know how to chop wood.
The Iron Age by Arja Kajermo, illustrations by Susanna Kajermo Torner
I sometimes suspect I have some Scandinavian genes mixed in with my Scottish and English ones; I can’t get enough of stories about wooden cabins and deep forests and frozen lakes. Arja Kajermo’s novel is memoir-like in its description of a childhood, barely a generation away, where not knowing how to chop wood meant death rather than social shame.
The title of this reading list is ‘small towns where everybody has something to hide’, and although I guess I feel like that applies to all towns and all people and especially all the interesting stories — since without having things to hide, how do we get through life? — Marilynne Robinson’s haunting debut novel about two sisters who are raised by a succession of female relatives in a small town in Idaho probably ticks the ‘hiding things’ box more than most.
Set not so much in a small town as a small family, I’ve included Jesmyn Ward’s searing novel here for all the hidden things it brings to the surface: the brutal history of America, and the broken bodies on which all those charming small towns are built. The concurrence she creates between plantation and prison is devastatingly vivid, as is the way she makes clear that these hidden things have been there in plain sight all along.
This was the novel that made me want to change the way I was writing, much earlier in my career, and the novel that I came back to when I started working on Reservoir 13 and The Reservoir Tapes. It’s a classic of small town Irish literature, and McGahern’s masterpiece: one small community, scattered around a lake, one year, a lifetime of stories told with ringing simplicity.
This, the Grouse County trilogy of novels written by Tom Drury over a twenty year period, is the work I keep coming back to when I want to push myself to write better: to find more nuances for my characters, to trace more carefully their detailed connections, to remember that all lives are full of humour, somewhere. I am in awe of what Drury has achieved in these books, and have been nagging people to read them for years. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.
About the Author
Jon McGregor is the author of four novels and two story collections. He is the winner of the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, and has been long-listed three times for the Man Booker Prize, most recently in 2017 for Reservoir 13. He is professor of creative writing at the University of Nottingham, England, where he edits The Letters Page, a literary journal in letters.
The Brooklyn Letters project is a series of oral histories of literary Brooklyn from 1999 to 2009, presented by Electric Literature with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
This is the third installment of Brooklyn Letters. You can read earlier oral histories here.
In order for history to be recorded it also needs to be preserved: in photos, through oral traditions, in letters, or through a continued existence. Sweeping changes don’t totally eradicate the past, but without records we can easily lose those memories. Gentrification affects marginalized and low-income communities hard, but our communities are also pushing back by preserving the past, or at least its echoes — from archives to events to buildings, like the Midland Malls (erected in 1907) welcoming citizens into Jamaica Estates or the still-standing row houses in BedStuy. The spirit of spaces both commercial and residential are upheld by individuals, new organizations, and volunteers who hold fast to their connection to our lineage and our voices.
The continuation of this portion of Brooklyn Letters focuses on spaces surviving (with your help) in Brooklyn. These spaces include the remnants of the all-Black town of Weeksville, whose mission ties into literacy; the Lesbian History Archives preserving feminist and LGBTQ+ history; PoC-owned eateries with food that instills a real feeling of home for Asian/Pacific Islanders; and the public spaces that have encouraged writers to find their voice. These are the heartening stories and spaces that continue to exist, continue to thrive, and continue to need our support.
Bridgett M. Davis [author of Into the Go-Slow& The World According to Fannie Davis]: Weeksville Heritage Center is located in Crown Heights. Weeksville was the first free African American community in Brooklyn. And one of the first free Black museums in the country like Seneca Gulge. At its height they had 400 or 500 families that lived in this area that we now call Crown Heights, Buffalo Avenue. They were, as you would imagine, free Blacks and recently enslaved runaway Blacks who found freedom, who knew to come to this community and be a part of it. It was founded by a man named James Weeks, that’s how they got their community name Weeksville. And it had a church, it had its own school, and it had its own newspapers that were thriving. They could vote because they had land, that was the law in New York — to have a certain amount of land if you were to vote. So that was the thinking behind pulling together this community and bringing people in, and convincing them to purchase plots, etcetera. Believe it or not gentrification are what ultimately caused the community to dissolve and not be as strong. And eventually sort of became less concentrated with African Americans. So into the early 20th century it became less and less of an established community. Fast forward, 50 years ago, some Pratt [Institute] architectural students actually discovered the four original houses.
Hugh Ryan [author of When Brooklyn Was Queer]: The Lesbian Herstory Archives are super important and they’ve managed to stay open, welcoming, and maintain some of that older Brooklyn vibe even as the years pass. They started in Manhattan and moved to the Slope around… I wanna say the late ’90s but I might be wrong. They were super helpful with a number of things, but particularly they have the papers andephemera of a founding member named Mabel Hampton, along with 20-plus or so hours of interviews done with her by the founders of the LHA. She was a Black lesbian dancer and domestic worker, who got her start on the stage (and as a lesbian) at Coney Island in 1920. The interviews with her are incredible, and they offer really rare insight into the world of queer women, Black and white, in NYC between 1920–1980 or so. They also have a lot of random things that I used: a huge library of books, lots of what they call “subject files,” which are basically clippings on different topics, and they’re all volunteer. They have a live-in archivist, and they give you tea when you come over! It feels welcoming.
Naima Coster [author of Halsey Street]: For me, Brooklyn was the place of my coming of age and really starting to understand myself as a writer while I was a girl and then a young woman. So, I wasn’t plugged in during the time that I lived in Fort Greene to any kind of adult literary scene. The places that were really valuable for my formation were places like the Brooklyn Public Library on Washington Avenue in Clinton Hill. And then also Fort Greene Park, which is a park in the neighborhood I grew up in. Which has a rich literary history of writers that I was aware of as a child. So I knew Richard Wright in Fort Greene Park. I knew Walt Whitman — even though I didn’t know who he was — was a figure important in the founding of the park and who the public housing projects across the park were named after.
(Hunter Fly Houses, courtesy of Weeksville Heritage Center)
Davis: This is the 50th anniversary of the rediscovery of those [Weeksville] houses. Three of them are [still around]. One burned. Three of them are still there and one of the things they do is they offer tours of the regular houses. They sit right along the road that now faces this beautiful new structure. They’re right next to Kingsborough Housing Projects. The headquarters was in one of the houses for years. For many years. For the first executive director in attempting to get these houses preserved and to create a kind of real sort of community effort to help people understand their history, and to build programming around it etc. They are truly the neighborhood. They are truly in Central Brooklyn. So the mission — there are many things that are important for this center to do — but it’s really trying to create a contemporary thrust that’s based on the original principles the community was founded on.
Coster: I also knew that Fort Greene Park has a different visibility culturally in Brooklyn because of film, because of music — thinking about Spike Lee. And so for me, the park, although it was a place where I played as a girl, also felt like an important site of cultural history in Brooklyn and in stages of production. I felt very aware of that as a kid, that the park in Brooklyn was a place that was known and was seen in the culture. I think that kind of created an important sense that if someone is living in the neighborhood, that creative inheritance was mine and open to me.
I felt very aware as a kid that Fort Greene Park was a place that was known and was seen in the culture.
Lisa Ko [author of The Leavers]:Mountain Provence is a sanctuary. I really didn’t need to live in [Williamsburg] with four thousand bars when I didn’t even drink. So Mountain Provence opened maybe early on from when we came here, but my partner found out about it because a friend of his in the Filipino community was doing an event here, a reading or something. It felt really nice to see — since both our families were from the Philippines — to see a Filipino owned cafe. It is, it is really very motherly, and they also use family recipes in their food. I think that for that feeling for me living as Asian-Americans with family in the Philippines in a primarily White neighborhood, it felt really familiar. The owner’s dad would often be here too.
Coster: The Clinton Hill Branch of the Brooklyn Public Library on Washington Avenue, it’s a place I spent a lot of time just around books and borrowing books where I had unlimited access to books. It was just down the street from my elementary school, PS 11 on Waverly Avenue. And it was a big part of my formation as a reader just to have access to those books. And unlimited access because they were free. At that time there was such a strong connection between the school and the library.
Ryan: My go-tos are always the libraries. I use them everywhere as places to work and I do a lot of research in them. [The Brooklyn Public Library] is great. Especially on a hot day where you can’t find wifi, a place to plug in, or a bathroom anywhere. I also use the Brooklyn Historical Society, especially when I’m doing Brooklyn-based research.
Davis: And so Rob [Fields] as executive director is all about figuring out all kinds of ways, mostly through programming and events and also through partnerships and through liaisons and through opening the doors for the community can have resources, etcetera. There’s just a lot of things that are at play. It’s in a way, Brooklyn’s biggest secret because whenever someone enters they go “What? I had no idea.” That’s what everyone says when they arrive. But I like that larger vision of: What does it mean to bring a literary sensibility and presence to a place in a space that’s not traditionally used to it on a consistent basis?
Ko: I love the Greenwood Cemetery. I live near it now. It’s one of my favorite spaces in New York. I jokingly awarded myself a writing residency there one year when I got rejected from everywhere I applied to. I decided I would be the writer in residence at Greenwood Cemetery. They have a lot of benches, and there are these really beautiful mausoleum type things for the very, very wealthy. You can’t go into them, but they have these almost like porches, and some of these have these benches that are meant to sit on, so you can sit there. They have two or three lakes with benches around them. There’s a lot of open space. I feel like in the city open space is really at a premium. It’s really hard to find somewhere to just sit, read, write, and be quiet. It’s a nice spot, especially on the weekdays when you have an afternoon free or have a flexible schedule. I would go there and not see anybody, which is kind of creepy. You would be sitting there, and you’d look up and realize, “I’m surrounded by ten thousand dead people, and I’m the only person alive.”
I love Greenwood Cemetery. I jokingly awarded myself a writing residency there one year when I got rejected from everywhere I applied to.
Coster: Another site that was important me is called Outpost Cafe. It might be called Outpost Cafe & Bar on Fulton Street. I’m not quite sure when it opened, it was around after I finished college and came back to Brooklyn. And it’s a place I did a lot of writing while I was living in BedStuy. And it definitely had the kind of aesthetic of new Brooklyn. Exposed brick and really nice fair trade coffee and a garden in the back. In 2011, they hosted a cool event for me that I think was my first event really as a writer. I was in conversation with community residents who came with a visual artist. It was after I had published a piece on gentrification on Fort Greene in The New York Times called “When Brooklyn Was Mine”and Outpost reached out to me and said, “Hey can we host a conversation with you and with a visual artist and local community leaders?” And I said “yes, let’s do that.” And it was sort of my first event as a writer though I didn’t have a book at the time. I was only 24, 25. But it was great! That the place I had gone and kind of felt ambivalent about but enjoyed the coffee, and enjoyed being there hosted this really conversation that brought different bulks and when you do events you never know who’s gonna show up. But there was this really great range of folks in terms of age and in terms of race and ethnicity. It was great to be a part of that conversation. And I know that they also hosted music, but I’m not sure how many other literary events they did.
Ryan: I use the main BPL branch a lot because of the Brooklyn collection, but I also use my local, which is called the Saratoga Library Branch, I believe. It’s been very helpful in certain ways. They have an incredible library of Brooklyn books, things you can’t find elsewhere. And incredible photos too. But they’re very small and don’t have a lot of staffing. So it can be hard sometimes. But their main library space is a great location to work in. I also think, just being a writer and not having much money, I’m always looking for spaces that are free.
Davis: There were always different efforts over the years to do things around writing. But it was like let’s try to really create something more formal and consistent because Weeksville’s history traditionally given what they were, they were all about literacy. They had people who like I said were runaway slaves, so you can see they still have facsimiles of these things and they’ve blown them up and they’re in the lobby. There’s a page from their original newspaper. Some of it is just the alphabet, printed to help people learn to read. And meanwhile you have one of the most prominent African American journalists who actually lived in the community, we had all kind of people: tradesman, teachers, typical segregated Black people. And in their case self-segregated. So it felt like something we could do for ourselves and protect ourselves. I feel like what we’re doing is a direct sort of temporary model of where Weeksville began.
Brooklyn Lettersis supported by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
“Have you seen that show Gilmore Girls? You should really watch it. You would love it.”
I must have heard variations of this recommendation dozens of times over the years, to the point where I was almost determined not to watch the damn show. It was irritating how many people would say things like “Oh! You’re totally Lorelai!” which I didn’t understand because I hadn’t seen the show, because I didn’t really watch any shows, because I was too busy being a single mom and raising my daughter on my own.
So by the time I finally sat down to watch the show, it was with my daughter, who was 14 now and finally old enough to watch with me. All seven seasons had already aired, but thanks to the miracle of syndication, we started from the beginning. We curled up together on the couch to watch a show that, it turned out, looked achingly familiar. There was Lorelai Gilmore, raised in an upper-middle-class family, throwing her future away by having a baby as a teenager, and yet building a life and a family with her daughter centered on authenticity and humor and love.
Oh. So that’s why people kept trying to get me to watch this show.
I know how important it is to see yourself in narratives. Even as a young girl, I recognized how crucial “mirrors” were in my voracious reading, as I was continually drawn to characters like Jo March, and Harriet the Spy, and other independent, bookish girls. Each time I read a story about a girl compelled to scribble in notebooks or flout social convention, it seemed more and more possible for me to do those things too. And maybe it was, at least in part, my love of rebellious girls in literature and movies that made me think it was possible, when I found myself pregnant at 17, to make the choice I did.
But I didn’t have a roadmap for what my and my daughter’s life could look like after I took that leap. I didn’t have a template for a family that was just one mom and one daughter. I had to create something new out of my own wild imagination, and I can only now see in hindsight how limited that imagination was.
I didn’t have a template for a family that was just one mom and one daughter. I had to create something new out of my imagination, and I can only now see in hindsight how limited that imagination was.
There was only one college narrative of which I was aware, sheltered as I was. You graduate from high school at 18, you go away to college and live in a dorm and stay up late talking about philosophy and go to parties and go to class and eat terrible dining hall food and have exciting hook-ups and maybe do a study-abroad semester or a summer internship (unpaid, of course, but the experience!) and in four years, you’re done.
That wasn’t what college looked like for me. I finished high school at 19 because it took me an extra year because baby, and I went off to college with my one-year-old daughter in tow. We lived off-campus, because you can’t have a baby in the dorms, and my college life was less about parties and philosophy and more about getting my daughter to daycare and taking the bus to campus and rushing back as soon as class and my work-study job were over and fixing terrible meals with the cheapest ingredients possible in our tiny kitchen and pulling all-nighters when she had the croup and staggering to class without the reading done. It didn’t look anything like the brochures, because there were no brochures for my experience; there were no models in my personal canon of narratives for what I was trying to do.
In preschool, when the teacher asked my daughter to draw her family, she drew two identical figures, one taller, one smaller, smiling under a yellow sun. She was happy with her drawing, but when I saw it, I cried. That wasn’t a family; that was an incomplete drawing. A holding pattern. That was a temporary arrangement, a blip along the way to becoming a real family. Determined to give my daughter everything she needed, I was convinced that a “real family” was an essential piece of that.
My inability to see that a two-person family could be full and whole and complete led to some of the worst decisions of my early adulthood. I was fixated on creating a family structure for my daughter that echoed what she saw on television and in her picture books. I was trying to fix her reality so that she would see herself mirrored in those stories. I was single-mindedly husband-searching in order to lend some legitimacy to our little family unit, rather than recognizing how rich our life was already. This obviously put enormous pressure on the relationships I got into during that time, as each person I dated was immediately being put on trial as a potential husband and stepfather. I’m ashamed to admit that, in those relationships, I acted like the worst stereotype of a needy woman, unable to reach any kind of actualization without a man in her life.
I was fixated on creating a family structure for my daughter that echoed what she saw on television and in her picture books.
The irony was, I wasn’t really needy at all. I wasn’t looking for someone with whom to share the load of parenting — I had that shit handled. I didn’t need financial support — I preferred to be financially independent and insisted upon carrying my own weight in any partnership. It was as if I didn’t really want a partner for myself, but just to fill in the picture so we could look like a “normal family.” As if normal was a thing that really existed.
In kindergarten, my daughter drew another family picture. This one had the two of us in the center, but she also drew her grandparents, and her dad, and her aunts and uncles, and my closest friends, the ones who had stepped up to be honorary aunts and uncles in her life. The paper was crowded with figures; they barely fit on the page, all surrounding the little girl at the center of the picture with wide smiles and open arms. My daughter was wiser than me. She didn’t see anything lacking.
But part of me still thought our life was somehow lacking — until I started to find other cultural narratives, new mirrors that reflected our family the way my daughter saw it. In Gilmore Girls, Lorelai and Rory have built a life independent of Rory’s father, independent of Lorelai’s parents, but still emotionally interconnected with the family of choice that surrounds them. They are not lonely, or incomplete. In the sixth episode of the first season, Lorelai throws Rory a birthday party and the whole town comes, and it’s wild and fun, and it’s crystal clear that everyone in attendance adores this kid and has contributed to her upbringing in various loving ways. Of course Lorelai can’t be everything her daughter needs all on her own. But she has set up their life, welcomed others into their world, so that Rory’s life is as rich and warm as Lorelai’s own childhood was lonely and cold.
I didn’t discover the show until later, but I wonder how my life would have been different if it had existed as part of my own internal bibliography of possible narratives when I first took that leap at 17. If I had had Lorelai Gilmore as a model, back when I was first trying to figure out how our life could still be rich and worthy and joyful, with just us two. Knowing how susceptible I am to these narratives, knowing how desperately my younger self in particular hungered for examples and archetypes, would it have made a difference? Would I have been just a little more confident, seeing a prototype of how this had been done before? Could I have been just a little more comfortable, a little more relaxed, if I could have seen a little bit of my own possibility in the fast-talking, entrepreneurial, independent Lorelai Gilmore? I don’t know. But I do know what it meant to my daughter.
I wonder how my life would have been different if I had had Lorelai Gilmore as a model, back when I was first trying to figure out how our life could still be rich and worthy and joyful, with just us two.
When she was in high school, we often watched the show together. Even though our family had expanded by then, with the addition of my husband and two more children, watching Gilmore Girls was something we did together, just the two of us. And I saw how important it was for my daughter to see herself in Rory, to see her experience of having a young mom mirrored on television — and to see an echo of our own unusually-close bond, the product of having grown up together, of living for years as a solo pair, knowing each other more deeply and completely than a parent and child in the midst of the noise of a larger family usually do. It was important for her to see, too, the darker side of that closeness — Rory’s need to break away, to establish an identity separate from the sometimes suffocating love and attention of her mother. My daughter got to reap the benefits of having those experiences modeled for her.
When they released the reboot mini-series, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, of course we watched it together. My daughter — now 23 and out of college, living in her own apartment and leading her own independent life — came over and we camped out on my bed, bingeing as much as we could get through in an afternoon. We grabbed each other’s hands, we cried, we laughed, we threw our arms up in frustration at Rory’s directionlessness. But mostly we just reveled in the nostalgia — not just for characters we’d grown to love over years of watching the show (Lane! Sookie!), but for the feeling of being seen, of being recognized, of having something of the truth of our strange and marvelous life reflected on the flickering screen before us.
This is why we need diverse stories, why the world hungers for a multiplicity of narratives. Not just so we can understand the experiences of others — though I did have several friends over the years who admitted that Gilmore Girls had provided a window through which they could understand my weird life a little better — but so that everyone can have that delicious and uncanny feeling of seeing some aspect of their own truth resonating within someone else’s story. To see a roadmap for their own possibilities. I know that for me and my girl, it meant the world.
No one likes to be told “no.” Whether it’s a child asking for a cookie or a guy handing out fliers on the street, getting turned down hurts. But if you’re a writer, it’s also just part of the job. Getting published is hard, and even successful writers were often rejected dozens or even hundreds of times before something clicked. Too bad you can’t skip the whole query letter part of publishing and do it all yourself.
Except that technically, you can. Self-publishing has existed just as long as traditional publishing, and the current digital age has made the distribution of independent literature more accessible than ever. Of course, some would argue that although self-publishing a work is possible, it won’t land a writer anywhere but in debt. Print-on-demand services demand huge out-of-pocket investments, and online options like Amazon are so flooded with dime a dozen romances that not even the algorithms can sort them out. The results of trying to publish a book on your own are often lackluster at best.
Here is my rebuttal to all the self-publishing naysayers out there: self-publishing may be tough, but as an alternative to traditional publishing it is exactly what we need to give little voices a chance to grow loud. Many of the big names that float around now got their start with self-published literature. They are proof that going the self-publishing route now can lead to greater things down the line.
New York Times best selling novelist and a neuroscientist on top of that, Lisa Genova jump-started her writing career with Still Alice back in 2007. Self-published with iUniverse’s print-on-demand service, Genova sold copies out of the trunk of her car for about two years, along with discussion guides in support of people with Alzheimer’s and their caretakers. This was a huge force in getting conversations moving toward a better understanding of the disease. After getting picked up by Simon & Schuster, Still Alice alone has over 2.6 million copies in print in over 30 languages. Genova’s subsequent works have been no less praiseworthy, earning her several international prizes and an honorary degree.
Amanda Hocking is undoubtedly a star of self-publishing. Her success story started in an all too familiar manner as numerous agents and publisher rejected the manuscript she slaved over for more than a year. It was her first book, and ,unwilling to call it quits, Hocking turned to self-publishing. Switched entered the market at just the right time with a story the New York Times called “The Princess Diaries meets Twilight.” That book that no one wanted became a trilogy selling well over a million digital copies, and it was the high demand for the series that pushed Hocking around to the traditional publishing path with St. Martin’s and Macmillan. It goes to show that the key to surviving solo as an author is to keep tabs on who’s reading what.
No Thanks, E.E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was a weird writer. Best known for his experimental, avant-garde style, his poetry undid the cliches of writing about nature, love, and romantic impulse by distorting language itself. Punctuation went out the window, and spelling and spacing were open to interpretation. As a result, Cummings was dynamic in a way no one had seen before, but either because of his experimental style or because of politics that were seen as anti-left-wing, not many publishers would touch him. While critical review was generally in his favor, even when scandalizing the masses with some of his sexier verses, Cummings was forced to rely on his own resources (and his mother’s) to publish some of his work. Luckily, due in part to his own tenacity, Cummings eventually got the fame he deserved.
The Martian went from a simple side blog to a bestselling novel to a Matt Damon Hollywood blockbuster in a tale that sounds more fictional than the book itself. Weir was a science guy with a devoted following of science people. Chapter by chapter he posted a story that followed a guy stuck on Mars, but it was the extraordinary detail and realism of The Martian that drew attention from sci-fi fans and literature lovers alike. Since people seemed pretty into the story, Weir decided to compile the chapters and sell it on Amazon for just $0.99. The blog had been free, so he didn’t want to overcharge. Little did Weir expect the book to blow up from there. The Martian ended up brushing the top of the New York Times bestseller list for both hardback and paperback, and by 2013 the printing and film rights were sold, leaving Weir one happy blogger.
Speaking of internet-to-film sensations, it would be oversight to leave the infamous Mr. Grey off the self-publishing list. Regardless of the critical reception, literary merit, and social health repercussions of the Fifty Shades trilogy, it is impossible to deny its meteoric rise to fame. But Fifty Shades was not always Fifty Shades. It used to be called Master of the Universe, a well-loved Twilight fan fiction that was later taken down from the Fanfiction website due to sexual content. After getting the boot, James decided to repost the story as an original work on her own site. Edward became Christian Grey, Bella became Anastasia Steele, and without the ties to Twilight the already popular series was free game for publishers to scoop up. Thus a fan fiction became a controversial trilogy as well as a household name synonymous with “mommy porn.”
It took De La Pava 688 pages to explain the hopelessness of the American criminal justice system. As a public defense lawyer in Manhattan, he squeezed his writing time into morning commutes and breaks between court sessions, compiling a massive lament on hypocrisy, injustice, and the destruction of a sense of self. Finally the epic was complete, but when it came time to publish, De La Pava hit a wall. The book was too big. It was too complicated. It was too political.No one wanted to publish. Sergio De La Pava was ready to call it quits there, but Susanna De La Pava took matters into her own hands. Having defeatedly self-published one hundred copies to sell to a few friends, they had a few copies on hand which she sent around for reviews. Eventually they got a bite. The story plays out as you’d expect from there: University of Chicago sent it to the printers, De La Pava racked up reward after reward, and all the publishers who rejected him in the past ate their hats.
Though Kingsnorth did not technically self-publish The Wake, he is an example of how to use new, non-traditional publishing methods as a more flexible alternative for experimental books. The Wake was written in a language that does not exist, and Kingsnorth doubted he could find a publisher willing to look past that. He had spent years creating a halfway point between Old English and the vernacular of today for his historical novel, and he was fully prepared to see the publishing process through himself if he had to. Luckily, he didn’t have to. A crowdfunding publisher by the name of Unbound stepped in. Just like with a Kickstarter, Unbound launched The Wake as a project that allowed hopeful readers to pledge their support for Kingsnorth’s work. The novel surpassed its target with roughly 400 subscribers, more than enough to get published with much acclaim.
Double Persephone by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is now a grand dame of Canadian letters who could probably get a six-figure advance for her shopping list, but let’s rewind the clock to 1961 and a little book of poetry called Double Persephone. Atwood’s first published work and eventually the winner of the E.J. Pratt Medal started out with a mere 220 copies, which Atwood set herself with a flatbed press and a cover she designed with linoblocks. Containing only seven poems, Atwood’s book was an immediate success. With close attention paid to themes of opposites and the suffering of women, her later speculative fiction novels only further solidified her reputation as a feminist figure whose writings are no less accurate today as they were with Double Persephone.
One of the highest-selling English fiction authors in India, Sanghi is best known for his crime thrillers, one of which stole the #1 spot in India, breached the U.K. Sunday Times Top 10, and made it into the New York Times Best Sellers. However, nearly a decade before this fame came The Rozabal Line. Written while working full time and only completed after two years of intensive polishing, The Rozabal Line was supposed to kick off Sanghi’s career as a writer. Instead it was rejected 47 times by agents and publishers. With no other avenues available, Sanghi like those before him turned to self-publishing. In 2007 he sent the book out under the pseudonym Shawn Haigins where it built a reputation for itself. By 2008, Tata-Westland and Indian publisher saw the indie book for what it was: a gem just waiting for the attention it deserved.
This man did not intend to create a Times bestseller; he just wanted a cool story to give his kids for Christmas. The first printing only produced 15 copies, which Young distributed to family and friends. It was those friends who encouraged him to tighten it up and get it published for real. Together they hammered out rewrites of the manuscript and sent it to various publishers, but after 26 rejections they realized the only way to get anything done was to do it themselves. In 2007 Young worked with Wayne Jacobsen, Brad Cummings, and Bobby Downes to establish Windblown Media and publish their sole title, The Shack. With little marketing other than word of mouth, close to no funding, and a dozen maxed out credit cards, their little publishing house supported the book through its climb to the first place spot of the Times bestselling paperback list. Now Young has multiple titles under his name that explore questions of theology and religion.
A homeschooled kid with a fondness for fantasy, Paolini began his Inheritance Cycle series just for fun. He tried his best to live his adventures by learning animal tracking, archery, survival skills, and weapons crafting, and whatever he couldn’t learn hands-on, he studied and threw into his writing. Eragon was born from the head of a fifteen-year-old boy, and after three years of revision Paolini had boxes full of freshly printed books to peddle around libraries and schools. With all the work Paolini put into promoting, also considering the books already positive reception, it was no wonder Knopf Books for Young Readers eagerly stepped in. The sales speak for themselves with over 20 million copies sold by May 2011. Paolini currently holds an unshaken position as Guinness World Records’ “Youngest Author of a Bestselling Book Series.”
The Brooklyn Letters project is a series of oral histories of literary Brooklyn from 1999 to 2009, presented by Electric Literature with support from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
This is the third installment of Brooklyn Letters. You can read earlier oral histories here.
“D o you remember when[insert demolished/renovated landmark] used to be here?” This type of conversation starter is applicable to many cities, not only New York. But it’s especially overwhelming here, thanks to an influx of affluent newcomers, and political and commercial changes intended to cater to them and their money. When it comes to NYC, terms like tumultuous, gritty, and urban are no longer applicable, replaced with up-and-coming, hipster, trendy. These changes extend to the demographics too: the Black population of Fort Greene declined by 30% since 2000, and household income has increased 53%. Gentrification isn’t simply a new form of branding; it’s erasure.
While NYC is known for the arts, being an artist in NYC is a very different story. The Brooklyn literary scene isn’t at a loss for artists: it’s estimated to have the highest population of all the five boroughs, with my hometown of Queens a close second. The numbers for new residents increases each year, as does the turnover of buildings and the cost of rent. This revolving door filters out those who can’t maintain a life here, be it artistic or domestic, thanks to rising costs. The result razes buildings and communities. Artist spaces that provided solace, refuge, and fellowship shift focus or fade away unable to sustain themselves even when they have a steady clientele. As priciest cities go, Brooklyn is right behind Manhattan — but the average weekly wage for Brooklyn inhabitants is actually lower than Manhattan and Queens. Gentrification isn’t solely race specific; it’s also about class.
Gentrification isn’t simply a new form of branding; it’s erasure.
Those of us born and bred in New York City, or who have lived here long enough, are witnesses to the changing landscape. From the erection of high-rise condos to the widespread farm-to-table eatery craze, Brooklyn, like many areas of NYC, is emblematic of change that can come at a cost. For this segment of Brooklyn Letters, I spoke with authors who have experienced (and written about) these ongoing shifts of gentrification in areas like Fort Greene, Williamsburg, and DUMBO. We talked about the spoken word movement, PoC-owned businesses, and lesbian archives: all inherent pieces of not only Brooklyn history but the larger literary canon. Perhaps you heard of these spaces, or maybe you lost out because you arrived too late. Consider this a necessary record.
Ibi Zoboi [author of American Street& Pride]: Local artists used to put their photographs, paintings, or collages on the walls [of the Brooklyn Moon Cafe, a soul food restaurant in Fort Greene that was a haven for spoken-word poets in the 1990s]. It was like a multimedia event. And it was a place to go to meet. You sign up for the Open Mic. There’d be a featured poet and it’d be packed. I was a brand new writer coming across these established writers like Saul Williams, Jessica Care Moore, Sarah Jones who is now an actress was a poet. Liza Jessie Peterson. That strip in Fort Greene was just a hub. To me it was like an Afrocentric Black Arts Movement that I still feel hasn’t really been documented. And it was a second wave of poetry. I don’t know if anything was happening before that, before the ’90s. I think the Black Arts Movement was, what, late ‘60s/early ‘70s?
Hugh Ryan [author of When Brooklyn Was Queer]: A huge number of queer writers have lived/currently live in Brooklyn, and I think that’s part of what has given Brooklyn its cachet starting all the way back with Walt Whitman. Carson McCullers, Richard Wright, John Dos Passos, Hart Crane, Gypsy Rose Lee… Off the top of my head others that come to mind are Marianne Moore, Carson Mccullers, James Purdy, Maurice Kenny.
Zoboi: I know the late ’90s was just huge for spoken word, and I think the Moon, which was Brooklyn Moon Café, had a huge influence on that. After that I used to go to something called the Sunday Tea Party at the YWCA on Third and Atlantic. Like I think it would be every Sunday there was a DJ called Ian Friday who used to play House Music, and before the House Music set there’d be a spoken word open mic performance. This was where Erykah Badu when she was first on the scene would go to the Brooklyn Moon Café. Common, Mos Def, Talib Kweli would frequent this area in Fort Greene. When I started writing it wasn’t books, it wasn’t authors that inspired me. It was the underground spoken word scene of the late ’90s, in this particular area of Brooklyn.
Naima Coster [author of Halsey Street]: Fort Greene continued to be a neighborhood that was home to a lot of prominent contemporary writers like Jhumpa Lahiri, Colson Whitehead, and I think Jennifer Egan. I think Colson Whitehead wrote about being priced out of Fort Greene actually. Which is interesting because this was a few years ago.
Zoboi: People were selling books before Greenlight [Bookstore] started there. People were selling their chapbooks and other poetry books along with the incense and shea butter. This was my entry into publishing. People were self-publishing. Jessica Care Moore had Moore Black Press. Jessica was a Detroiter who came to New York and I think performed at the Apollo. Established poets would publish their own books and start their own poets. Then up-and-coming poets would align themselves with the established poets who would help them publish their own books. Saul Williams is big time now. Carl Haycock Brooks. Asha Bandele. Suheir Hammad. I knew all these people because my last two years of college I went to Hunter College. Hunter College was a creative, political, activist hub. And we’d go from Hunter or City College or wherever other people were coming from and congregate in Brooklyn. And this is the area of Fort Greene, Brooklyn in particular.
Ryan: I would say that over the time I’ve been in Brooklyn I’ve definitely seen queer arts spaces come and go with somewhat depressing regularity. For instance, the first time I ever did anything queer/art related in Brooklyn, it was at this amazing cooperative space called DUMBA, which was in DUMBO. This would have been 1999? They were a collective, anti-capitalist, queer home that was hosting the second annual Queeruption, which was a queer anarchist/political/art convergence that had started in Europe. They threw amazing parties, concerts (L7 and Le Tigre performed there), they acted as a film space (John Cameron Mitchell filmed parts of Shortbus there). Rashaad Newsome lived there! And they had open studio days for the artists living there. And raised money for them. It was an awesome space. But as the years went on, the neighborhood gentrified. HARD.
Zoboi: [Now it’s]gentrified. Greenlight Bookstore is there. It wasn’t there before. The 4W Circle, there was a lot of Black-owned business that sold artwork, that sold handmade jewelry, that supported local artists. 4W Circle was like a Black woman owned shop and you could go there as an artist and sell your stuff, put yourself in the store and get a commission. Moshood is still there, he’s been there from the very beginning. And that was when people on Living Single were wearing Moshood. When Living Single was out it was based on that whole Fort Greene vibe. There was a literary community. Even though there weren’t any bookstores it was very literary. Because you had your poets, your writers. And a lot of the writers from Vibe magazine like Dream Hampton lived in the Fort Greene area and frequented these stores. Biggie Smalls was just down the block. So writers for Vibe, The Source were all living down there in Downtown Brooklyn, especially Fort Greene. And they would buy their clothes there. And to say that there was a café. It’s not like here, nobody was going to a café to focus on their laptops. The laptops weren’t a thing back then. You would go to a spoken word open mic event and lounge.
Nobody was going to a café to focus on their laptops. The laptops weren’t a thing back then. You would go to a spoken word open mic event and lounge.
Ryan: First, rents started going up. Then the [DUMBA] collective decided they wanted to be a specifically QPOC [queer people of color] space, which wasn’t anti-capitalist (they had a really smart critique of the way anti-capitalism was difficult for / made the lives of QPOC folks more difficult, because they often didn’t have the same set of resources to fall back on that white queer folks who were “anti-capitalist” had). I think this was in part (although I don’t know this for 100%, just a guess) an effort to be able to keep the space. Then they had a party to try and raise rent money, and someone was hurt, and the landlords were suddenly like, “What the fuck is going on here?” Then they kicked them all out and jacked up the rents by like a million. I think that was around 2006/beginning of 2007. They were there for about 10 years.
Coster: I think when I really, really noticed [gentrification] is when not so much the neighborhood itself or the face of the neighborhood itself changing. Although certainly the construction of all these high rise, luxury buildings was obvious. It was as I noticed the rhetoric and conversation around Fort Greene changing when I wasn’t there. It was more about how people were talking about it, how people responded to hearing I was from Fort Greene. It really shifted. And it became sort of like I lived in a valued and coveted place and that was never the response that I’d gotten to living in Fort Greene before. People having an awareness of the institutions saying “BAM! [the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a multi-arts institution in Fort Greene] BAM is really great!” And I’d say “Yes, BAM is really great.” It’s been there for a long time and these other ways the community is rich. But that sort of really brought to my awareness the reality of gentrification. It was the way people seemed to respond to me differently and respond to the story of where I was from differently.
Zoboi: ’Cause a lot of these young 20-somethings — because I was that I was just a few years younger than that — coming from Spelman, Morehouse, Howard, Hampton would come up here and start their literary careers. And it was a strong literary community. Even Ta-Nehisi Coates was here in Brooklyn from Harlem. Down the block was Nkiru Books on Flatbush right here across the street at St. Marks. Nkiru Books was owned by Talib Kweli’s mother Brenda M. Greene, who is the head of the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers right now. And they hosted these Black authors.
Ryan: They were one of the last groups of artists that had moved to DUMBO for the cheap rents. I remember meeting a ton of filmmakers and other working artists who had huge spaces in that area, and they were all just kicked out one by one. It became a place where only the super wealthy could live. Which was sad because the old warehouse buildings were incredible for artists.
Zoboi: The thing is, the gentrifiers would come here and insert their organic vegan places. But we had them, and they were started by the Rasta community. Rastafarians were on this whole vegan/vegetarian thing. I’m bringing this up because all of this was tied to the literary community. The literary community were the poets who were health conscious, were the artists who were health conscious. Get your salads and your green juice there. And it was a Rastafarian man with these blue eyes and he was 80-something but looked young. It was a very Black bohemian hub. Before your hipsters you had your Black artists here. I miss it.
The gentrifiers would come here and insert their organic vegan places. But we had them, and they were started by the Rasta community.
Ryan: [Gentrification] echoes this really terrible moment in Brooklyn history actually. All of these amazing artists started a collective in Brooklyn Heights in 1940, only to see it destroyed by Robert Moses in 1945 to make way for the BQE.
And it’s funny because all of those spaces — LIC, DUMBO, Soho — they all have the same great warehouse spaces from just after the turn of the century. They all became filled with artists and public art. And then they all got bought up and turned into condos. I feel like they can’t last. Or maybe ‘can’t’ is the wrong word, but don’t. Even more informal ones. I’ve known a bunch of people who have at various times had big apartments in Brooklyn that they turn into community spaces, but they last for like ten years at most. Usually more like three.
Lisa Ko [author of The Leavers, whomoved to Flatbush from the more-gentrified Williamsburg]: Flatbush is kind of a whole other place where I feel like my footprint as a gentrifier is a lot more obvious. Not obvious but more felt because the neighborhood is one of the fastest gentrifying neighborhoods in all of New York City. Whereas I think [Williamsburg] has already been gentrified. Timing-wise it’s arriving at that point where stuff is going on and they are building. Even though I feel like in some ways we can blend in with people who live there (our building is a mix of Asians, Latinos, and Black people), it’s also like people are being pushed out after 20 years.
Zoboi: I go to Greenlight Bookstore and I come to cafes, but it’s very different from communing with other Black writers. Well-Read Black Girl reminds me so much of what a lot of these spaces were trying to do with the book clubs and everything. There’s the Free Black Women’s Library. They still have their people. Ola Ronke, she goes to different spots and I guess sets up this library basically, where you bring a book, take a book. And she was on several media outlets.
Ryan: For a while there was an organization known as QUORUM that was trying to routinize it a little bit — create events for all the informal queer communal spaces in Brooklyn, but they only lasted a few years as well. It’s always a question of money. Even when it isn’t directly. Some of my friends just stopped throwing events because it was too hard to do that and make the money to live their normal life. They were making decent money, but the hustle to do that burnt them out. [They did] general event planning, but all around building community — some around the arts, some around sex, some around skill sharing, etc.
Some of my friends just stopped throwing events because it was too hard to do that and make the money to live their normal life. They were making decent money, but the hustle to do that burnt them out.
Coster: You know part of the trouble and the violence of gentrification is this kind of erasure, right? Erasure visually, but then also in terms of the kinds of cultural memory. Which is why I think about films and books providing this important record of creative life. One of the ways people talk about gentrification is they say, “First, the artists move in.” The creative class moves in, which suggests that there weren’t people creating before. Which is simply untrue. That there were no artists or creative people living in the neighborhood. But, it’s usually folks associated with a particular kind of scene or movement, and financial class. I don’t know, except the way that people who understand Fort Greene now do or whether they see it as a sort of energized creative life with these waves of gentrification. Since I don’t live there now it’d be difficult for me to say. But I do feel folks who have lived in Fort Greene and have been connected to the creative life there are vocal about that. But I wonder how it’s understood now.
Brooklyn Lettersis supported by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Read More Women is Electric Literature’s series featuring 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. Books by men get plenty of attention in reviews, reporting, and academic syllabi, and have for hundreds of years. It’s time to read more women.
Tayari Jones is the award-winning author of Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and most recently An American Marriage, which was an Oprah book club pick and a New York Times bestseller. An American Marriage has gotten almost too much praise to reprint, but just as a sample, Edwidge Danticat called it “an exquisite, timely, and powerful novel that feels both urgent and indispensable.”
For her five recommended and influential books by non-men, Jones chose five books by and about black women. They range from poetry to young adult novels, from tumultuous coming-of-age stories to quiet books about ordinary lives, but always with an eye towards the crucial and undervalued perspectives of black women and girls.
This coming of age story set in a small Georgia town on the eve of the civil rights movements is as iconic as To Kill A Mocking Bird. Tangy is an unforgettable heroine who must find a place for herself as a girl who is black, poor, and whip-smart. Her mother is a complete nightmare and Jim Crow threatens her health and happiness as every turn. But somehow she rises.
I love slim novels written by poets. This was the first novel I ever read that told the story of a black women who lives as ordinary life. This is not a story that you will see praised as “devastating” or “brutal.” Instead it is a love letter to everyday challenges and triumphs.
This National Book Award winner is sometimes described as Brooks’ “Post 9/11” book, and while many of the poems directly engage that national tragedy, you soon see that it is more a meditation on a single day in our history. Reading these poems you come to see that there are calamities throughout history and even throughout any given day. This is a book about the hard and meaningful work of listening and healing.
When I was a girl, this novel was among my favorites. Set in New York City, it is the story of two black girls — one with American roots, the other from the Caribbean. This is a story about love, friendship, class diaspora. I recently read it again for the first time in 30 years, and I cried as hard as I did the first time.
This is a less-lauded novel by the greatest American novelist. Some read it as a wink at the Tempest, but Morrison is always her own best thing. Set on a small island, this is (among other things) a love story that manages to be very hot while interrogating race, class, and gender. It’s sharp in its wit and its brilliant observations about the way we live now and the way we lived then.
Read More Women is presented in collaboration with MCD Books.
Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book you misunderstood?
Fourth period was just about over, but I left the art room and headed to the bathroom at the end of the hallway. There was never enough time between bells, anyway. I passed blank bulletin boards, closed classroom doors, and at least a dozen maroon lockers before she saw me and walked over, each step strong and deliberate. She twisted my hair into one fist, crashing my head into the nearest locker; the other fist found my side, my stomach, my ribs. I yelled, maybe for a teacher, probably for my mom, who would hurry across town to take me home just a few minutes later.
This wasn’t the first time my mom left work to rush to my high school. She had come to pick me up from the nurse’s office, bruised from suspicious misthrows in gym class, or from the principal’s, if a rumor made its way to the administration. Each time, she would reach for me, offering a hug or a hand on my shoulder, and she would ask what had happened. I had no idea what happened, though. I had moved to this small town just in time to start my freshman year. My arrival prompted a vehement response from my fifty or so peers that grew more vociferous, more violent when I stayed.
Go home, they told me. You’re not wanted.
Much of the abuse at the hands of my new classmates centered on how I looked (greasy, tired, miserable) and who I might be sleeping with (admittedly, no one). The rest was spontaneous, critical dismissals of my clothes, my speech, my actions. Between classes, I might feel a passing shoulder thrust into my back or hear a “slut” slung sotto voce if teachers were present; if they weren’t, there might be a screeching announcement for the shuffling crowd that I was a prostitute or a prude, depending on the day.
Much of the abuse at the hands of my new classmates centered on how I looked (greasy, tired, miserable) and who I might be sleeping with (admittedly, no one).
At home, if I signed online, the messages were inevitable. Some from familiar screen names, some from thinly veiled pseudonyms, all of them cruel.
The insults were constant and conflicting. I had greasy skin that needed covering, or I wore too much cakey makeup. In local parlance, I was a “dirtbag,” despicably poor because I wore Walmart sneakers to gym class, or I was a “rich-bitch,” a snob who liked to read and planned to go to college. My classmates were always consistent on two points, though: no one liked me, and no one wanted me here.
We were all in agreement there: I didn’t want to be there and couldn’t wait to leave.
Through the rumors, the abuse, the bruises, I read and hoped that books and grades would be my way out of that town and into college, where I planned to reinvent myself. I wouldn’t have to be weighed down with insecurities about my appearance, my sexuality, my self worth; I wouldn’t worry about being too ugly to go school, too promiscuous if I talked to a boy, too much of a prude if I didn’t. No one there would know about the lunch table that formed a club dedicated to hating me (membership always open). Not a single person would know about that party where they dumped a bottle of Sprite over my head the moment I arrived. The sweet, acrid bubbles burned my eyes almost as much as the cheers, but that scene, that sting, would be left behind when I moved away.
I just had to make it until then.
In the spring of my senior year, I decided that I’d be going to a small liberal arts college in Schenectady, New York. It was a few hours down the Thruway but worlds away from my small town. Preparations began immediately. I suspected my school — under-funded, under-populated, and largely confined to teaching to the state tests — meant that I would be less prepared than my incoming classmates, and I was determined to catch up, to fit in this time. I scoured lists of standard high school reading assignments.
Through the rumors, the abuse, the bruises, I read and hoped that books and grades would be my way out of that town and into college, where I planned to reinvent myself.
The one I picked up was Henry James’s 1879 novella Daisy Miller. I can’t remember now whether that was because my favorite English teacher lent me a copy, or the single-room library in town happened to hold a slim edition on their limited shelf-space. I do remember that my reaction was immediate. I was enamored, and I was settled: this would be my reinvention.
The title character is captivating. Confident and pretty, Daisy flirts with men when she wants to and tells them when she doesn’t; she sweeps into high society parties in decadent dresses and visits Roman ruins or Swiss castles with the same style, the same vivacity. She flourishes in Switzerland and Italy just as easily as in Schenectady, New York, her hometown. This coincidence confirmed my affinity for Daisy. I decided to be confident, and I was certain Schenectady would become my stepping stone, too.
The only problem with refashioning myself to be more like Daisy was that I had gotten the story all wrong. I wouldn’t realize it for years, but in that first reading, I glossed over the descriptions of Daisy and her character’s interactions with society. I somehow managed to miss the ending of the novella- and, probably worse, the point.
When I was applying to graduate school after finishing my Master’s program, my boyfriend brought me his complete collection of Norton anthologies. The pages were yellowed, and the spines were crinkled or covered in bookstore stickers. The book of literature from the Middle Ages, a comparatively thin volume, had a dark cover besmeared with undetermined stickiness. I used the books to take notes as I studied for the literature exam, sitting on the couch in the apartment I shared with some of my closest friends from college or setting up camp in the English department with classmates from my Master’s program or, if the day was warm and sunny, relaxing on a park bench downtown in the Common.
It was while reading through this stack of borrowed anthologies that I came across Daisy again. My context for reading the novella couldn’t have been more different — I lived in a city I liked, I felt certain of myself and my worth, I felt supported by a network of close friends and a loving relationship. I was so excited to revisit the story after so much time.
Except reading Daisy Miller wasn’t nostalgic or sweet, after all; it was shocking.
At first, the story was familiar. James opens the novella with characteristic long, winding sentences that lead the reader into the world of a distinctly nineteenth-century high class society. But in the introductory description, James makes it clear that Vevey and Geneva are interchangeable with any other European city, perhaps even American destinations like “Newport and Saratoga,” because of the hotels and the travellers, particularly the young, pretty women of means. In all of these cities, James explains, “is a flitting hither and thither of ‘stylish’ young girls, a rustling of muslin flounces, a rattle of dance-music in the mornings, a sound of high-pitched voices at all times.” Here, barely through the first paragraph, I cringed.
The description of young women that precedes the introduction of Daisy is dismissive at best. The use of “girls” is derisive, the description of their “muslin flounces” drips with dismissal of nouveau-riche decadence. The “high-pitched voices” grate. And this, apparently, was universal.
Introduced when the ex-pat Winterbourne notices her dressed in “frills and flounces” from afar, Daisy is undeniably representative of these girls. While she does travel to these great cities, Daisy is only mildly interested in visiting cultural or historical landmarks. Her speech is indicative of her new money, with contractions like “ain’t” sprinkled in, lest the reader forget this character’s station. She does flirt skillfully and recreationally when she chooses and, quite impressfully, tells Winterbourne point-blank when she doesn’t want to flirt with him. But this moment of empowered denial becomes Daisy’s undoing; when she turns down Winterbourne, she chooses the wrong guy and seals her fate.
As the story progresses, Daisy attends society parties, but her new-money status and her disregard for propriety stand out. Other characters try to warn her: “You’re old enough to be more reasonable,” one of her last friends Mrs. Walker warns her when she sees Daisy walking alone with the Italian Giovanelli, undeniably concerned with the man’s social status and race as much as the unchaperoned walk. “You’re old enough, dear Miss Miller, to be talked about.”
After this, that’s mostly how Daisy appears in the novella. She becomes the subject of other characters’ conversations, most of them dismissive or disparaging. By the end of the story, James reduces this title character to a symbol, a fallen young woman who is to be remembered only as a cautionary tale or, for Winterbourne and Giovanelli, the romance that could have been. In one of the final scenes, these two former suitors remember Daisy as beautiful, as charming, and — an emphatic afterthought—as innocent. In their exchange, this final, almost-forgotten description of Daisy is repeated three times. Even as former suitors fondly remember Daisy, the focus ultimately rests on her specious purity. Reading through this scene, I was baffled at how I missed it the first time. My assigned reading in high school might have been insufficiently broad, but I definitely should have known how to recognize irony.
Even as former suitors fondly remember Daisy, the focus ultimately rests on her specious purity.
I started to question how I had skipped over the clear details and failed to pick up unsubtle messages during that first read years before, but it quickly became evident. My misreading itself was telling. I had glossed over these details and missed these messages in order to read the book that I needed to, in order to read Daisy as the confident, capable character I wanted her to be.
Daisy Miller is beautiful, wealthy, and flirtatious. But she is notwell-liked in those society circles. Her proximity to the small communities of rich expat Americans allows her access to these people and their parties, but she’s never really welcome. In fact, it seems like if she had been at my high school, she might have had a lunch table club of her own. If Sprite had existed then, someone might have even dumped a bottle on her, too.
I had completely misread the novella, but maybe my identification with Daisy wasn’t all that off.
After Daisy turns down Winterbourne, he tells her that everyone is talking about how much time she is spending with Giovanelli. Daisy’s response is a matter-of-fact quip, but it’s also an astute observation: “But I don’t believe a word of it. They’re only pretending to be shocked. They don’t really care a straw what I do.” Daisy doesn’t put stock in what these people are saying about her because she recognizes that this disparaging talk, this passing of judgement, is purely recreational for them. She simply doesn’t care.
I had glossed over these details and missed these messages in order to read the book that I needed to.
At 17, after years of enduring insults and rumors, shoulders and softballs, I envied Daisy’s apathy. More than new opportunities, better classes, or bigger cities, I desperately wanted the confidence to not care what my high school classmates had said about me. I needed the assurance that I wouldn’t have to carry that with me forever. Daisy gave that to me.
Sitting in Boston, years removed from those high school hallways, I realized this was more important than than any moral message or societal commentary or even plot point in the novella. Daisy is a character on the fringe of a small circle that rejects her cruelly and consistently. This fictional society — a high-class community of Americans traveling through Europe in lavish hotels and luxe settings — was far removed from my real high school in rural upstate New York. But I still identified with Daisy despite that distance. Even if I didn’t recognize it at the time, by focusing on Daisy’s confidence and glossing over the cruelty she endured, I was misreading James’s story, sure, but I was also using it as a tool for making sense of my own experiences.
Reading the novella now, Daisy’s character is all the more compelling because of her confidence throughout the rejections, the rumors, the cruelty. Maybe I’m noticing this because I’m far enough removed from my experience with high school bullies. Or maybe I’m just seeing myself in Daisy again, but maybe that’s the point of reading, or even misreading, after all.
Everyone was talking about having less — picking up everything you owned and asking, Does this bring me joy? And if it didn’t you had to get rid of it. Everyone was doing this, asking themselves about joy. It felt incredibly dangerous. I was afraid for the world.
I was staring into Adrian’s closet. Pants. Belts. Shirts. So many shirts. More shirts than he ever wore, more shirts than anyone could wear in a life. The brown flannel, striped oxford, baggy cardigans — none of it brought me joy. Nor did the jeans and slacks smushed in the back, old, forgotten. I couldn’t even ask myself about the thousand wool socks, the yellowed undershirts, the boxers, or that one decaying sweater I thought, perhaps, I had given him long ago.
There was one shirt, though, pale blue with tiny green stripes, paper-thin and soft — I almost kept it. Adrian had worn it, I thought I remembered, at a picnic. Someone else’s dog was there. We never had a dog. After the picnic we had talked about getting a dog, but we soon forgot we’d wanted one and by forgetting that desire we realized it hadn’t been so true. So we said. That had been years ago. Now all I had was this faded, worn-out shirt and a memory but the memory had to go and the shirt had to go, just as days and people had also gone, just as so many tangible and intangible things enter and exit a life. Heaps grew; the closet emptied. I felt oddly fine.
My neighborhood is one of those where you can leave all manner of things to be taken, leave things on stoops or flung over shrubs, leave household crap or books stacked on curbs, what have you, what has anyone — and passersby will take these things. So I folded the clothes in stacks and stacked the stacks on the steps, draped the coats on a fire hydrant, lined the shoes at the street, and left a sign: please take. Two days, no rain, everything gone. Piece by piece, then a van came.
But Adrian did not go as slowly. He went all at once. Here, then not. That was weeks earlier, a month even, a month and a half. You know, time passes strangely in times like that. You look up and think, Wasn’t I just married last year? No, that was five years ago. Wasn’t I just walking down Arabella when a bird landed on some crape myrtle, shaking white flowers over my head — no, that was decades ago, a childhood memory you keep close by for no reason. Well, wasn’t I just in Guam? You were never in Guam; perhaps you dreamed it? No. No, I don’t dream anymore. Well, wasn’t it just yesterday, just yesterday, wasn’t it? They call it mourning, I’m told, so people in it remember to get out of bed.
The neighbors, having noticed the clothes, asked me if everything was okay. Well, not all the neighbors, but one neighbor, Corina — she asked. Corina is old, all burned up and tiny, and lives alone in 2F. She often receives heavy, large packages — nearly the size and weight of a human body — and I carry them up to her floor. And when I do something like leave my husband’s clothes strewn across our stoop and sidewalk, she asks me about it, asks me just what the hell might be going on.
I told Corina, I’m moving on. And she said, Is that so? Good for you. And I said, You know, it’s really fine. It’s going to be just fine. I nodded and she nodded. I asked her, It’s fine, isn’t it?
I thought perhaps she would tell me some great wisdom to confirm my decision to move on, to get it over with, to begin again.
It’s not fine, she said. Nothing is just fine about this. Can’t you see? It cannot be undone.
And she said, Kate, you must know that death is not that which gives meaning to life. And I told her, yes, that I believed I had read that somewhere, but Corina, having not heard me, continued on — she said, Life is that which gives meaning to life, so I said, a little louder, Yes, Corina, I read that story many times, everything dies and knowledge is circumstantial — and she, having still not heard me or perhaps just unwilling to listen, she said, The human heart has the capacity to make enormous changes at the last minute, and I said, I know this well, Corina, I’ve heard all this before, I must have read it somewhere.
Just that morning, Corina told me, she had been clearing off her desk. It had been months, perhaps years (Who can tell anymore?), and she had been going through the papers, the letters, receipts, tax forms, old postcards, legal documents, currency from countries she couldn’t remember, a pocketknife, another knife, unsent letters, and eventually, she said, eventually she had forgotten what she’d originally been looking for, and she worried that she had accidentally, perhaps, thrown this thing out years ago and she’d only just now realized she needed it. Only — what was it?
I told her I was so sorry, but that I had to go now and she agreed that she too had to go. She’d just realized that she’d left the buttermilk out, so she went to her buttermilk and I went to the park. It was spring so people had their legs out, and good-looking people had become, it seemed, incredibly good-looking people, and even regular people seemed aided by the light.
Habits were helpful, someone had told me — people were always giving me advice for this newly broken life — so the park was my habit, the way I was structuring my days. Habitual bench, habitual time of day. These little things will make life bearable, they said (Who said? I can’t remember).
On the walk to the park I always saw a man smoking cigarettes behind that restaurant, same man who was always there, and a blackhaired woman reading library books on a bench just outside the park, same woman each afternoon, and that tall, large-nostriled man with a little boy in the playground, same man, same boy. How many of them, I wondered, kept these habits for the same reason I did — like a single nail somehow holding up the whole home? I did not dare look at them too closely, didn’t want to confirm anything, to catch a glance that felt familiar.
Returning from the park I would sometimes miss my building and only realize the mistake once I was several doors away, and sometimes I made it all the way to Lafayette, where I stood at the curb wondering where on earth I was or wondering if perhaps my home had been somehow taken away forever this time, and now I was all that was left. But I always turned and walked back. I went inside. I locked the three doors behind me. Once or twice I left all the doors slightly ajar, wondering if anyone might stop by, let themselves in, make themselves comfortable.
The last time I saw my husband it was nearly four in the morning and he had a plane to catch. We had stayed up late fighting about something, who knows what we were really fighting about (what couple ever really knows what they’re fighting about?) but we had worn ourselves out — me shouting at him from bed, him shouting at me from the bathroom, neither of us even able to hear what the other was saying. Then I gave up, mumbled, and wept into the pillow as he sang in the shower, all low and throaty, some jokey country song. We were the sock and buskin, he and I, always understudying each other but hardly ever called to switch.
He packed a two-month suitcase while I was half-asleep, waking me up to do our goodbyes, cool kiss on my meaty face. It wasn’t clear who should apologize or what for.
But in some wordless corner of us we must have also known or felt — this is the last time. So the apology kiss became urgent and more urgent, and it became more like an early-days kiss, like time had bent our love back on itself, folded it like a sheet with the end meeting the beginning. And the urgency built, became animal, and I heard his belt clang just before he pushed me over, pushed the sheets aside, pushed into me, and even though I don’t usually like it this way, face in pillow, hardly able to move, a startling angle — it seemed just then that this was all I could bear. To be done to.
Afterward he stood there at the door, suitcase in hand, and he looked at me not like a man who was leaving but like a man who had just arrived, as if he had just come home and hadn’t expected to find me here. He smiled, uncertain, in the lamplight, said, Bye.
I heard his band almost canceled the tour but couldn’t for some reason, just took two nights off and hired another bassist. Adrian himself had been a replacement for a replacement, so it seemed they had been ready, all along, to replace him as well.
In the park one day a man, a stranger, sat on the other end of my habitual bench wearing Adrian’s worn-out pale blue shirt, the one I almost kept.
I almost kept that one, I said. I didn’t even have to turn my head to see it. My peripheral has always been strangely strong, though I’m nearsighted for everything else. Before us a half dozen tennis players darted and swung themselves across the courts. I kept my eyes on them, listening to every groan and gasp.
The man said, Sorry? And I said, No, you’re not. And he said, What? And I said, Why would you be?
I think you must have me confused with someone else, he said, and finally I turned to him. Very quickly I could tell that this man was in a sort of life intersection. Not a crossroads, not a time where a decision needed to be made, but something like a junction in an old, unplanned city where ten streets hit each other in a burst and there is nothing but choices and no clear answers and no clear path, just chaos, too many options. Perhaps he had spent years of his life in such a place, wandering from corner to corner, wearing shirts picked up off the street.
No, I said after a considerable pause, I’m not confused. You’re the man wearing the shirt you’re wearing.
I slid down the bench to be closer to him, or to the shirt, or the past — it wasn’t exactly clear. The shirt held this man more snugly than it had fit Adrian. A little gnarled and bursting, this man. He told me his name was Frank but that people called him Frankie. The hairs on Frankie’s arm were raised, alert, so I patted them down only to watch them rise again.
It was my husband’s shirt, and now he’s not around and you’re wearing his shirt. Now it’s your shirt.
You mean he’s . . .
I answered his nonquestion in a glance. We already had a shorthand, Frankie and I. It could’ve had something to do with the shirt, maybe. I reached out to touch the sleeve. It felt the same as ever.
And you gave away all his clothes? Frankie asked, and I said, Yes, that’s right.
After a long silence Frankie said, That’s wild, all slow and reverent. You don’t care or nothing? You don’t want to hold on to them?
I didn’t say anything and he took that as an answer, nodded, looked back up at the matches being won and lost.
I’m forty-three years old, he said, and I’ve never known anyone who died. Puts me on edge, you know? Even my grandparents, all four of them, still alive. Everyone’s still alive. All my stupid friends, even though we’ve done such stupid shit — we should be dead, at least one of us, but — nope. Living.
I didn’t see why this was a problem really but I didn’t say so.
I didn’t know how it might work over there, for those still sipping pulpy juices beside a great pool of life.
We kept silently watching the people hurl themselves around the green courts, and I considered telling Frankie the story that Corina had once told me about that long white scar on her arm. When she was a young wife, she said, there were all these temptations, and she’d never quite managed to sweat out all those years of Catholic school, so she bent one edge of a coat hanger into the shape of a snake, held it over the stove flame till it was nearly molten, and branded herself. She didn’t want to forget, she told me, how much she cared about doing right. Now there’s this smooth white snake on her arm, keeping her out of trouble, perhaps, writhing there for at least a few more years. I didn’t know you were married, I told Corina when she told me this, not knowing what else to say. I still am, she said.
I wanted to tell Frankie this story, I guess, as a long way of saying that a person can force whatever issue they want on themselves, but the more I thought about that idea the less I was sure about it, so I kept quiet. Light was leaving, and tennis players were leaving, and eventually I was leaving too. I got up and said, So long, to Frankie, went home, not missing my door this time, knowing right where I belonged.
A few days later Frankie met me at that park bench again. He was holding the blue shirt folded in a neat square.
I don’t like it anymore, Frankie said. Here. I washed it.
I don’t want it back.
Just take it.
I got up and began walking home and it’s not my fault that Frankie followed me. He kept saying, Just take the shirt, just take it back, and usually I wouldn’t accept a strange man following me home but when I got to my door I somehow invited him in. Wordless, he followed, and though I told him to make himself at home he just stood still and dumb by the door before lowering himself, silently, onto the couch.
I got us two glasses of water, adding slices of lemon though I never do that, had never done that before, and haven’t done that since. We sat in the living room for a moment. He looked around. Nice place, he said, though he would have said that anywhere, Frankie, that’s the sort of man he is, I guess, finding niceness in every glance.
I said, Frankie, put the shirt back on.
Listen, is this some kind of . . . But he seemed unable to finish the question. Just what is it you’re after?
Put the shirt back on.
He drank his water, drank it deeply, finished it. He stood up and unbuttoned his shirt as if it were physically painful, as if he were removing a body part. He put on the blue shirt in a hurry then stood there all still and uncertain and my God, I thought he was going to cry, sweet Frankie.
You must miss him, Frankie said. I can’t imagine. I just — I can’t imagine.
He was covering his eyes. I looked at the carpet. I looked at the ceiling. I looked at the shirt and for a moment everything was perfect. Something had vanished and something had been found. I had found some sort of unfolding that was not yet done unfolding and it was golden hour and the light fell into the room like a gift for which I’d already written the thank-you note and could now just enjoy.
I used to wake in the middle of the night and check to see if my husband was still my husband or if he was actually a sack of flour, I eventually said, hiding my hands behind me like a shy child. You know how in high school they used to give teenagers sacks of flour to make them not want to impregnate each other? It was like that except he was a whole human-size sack of flour that looked and acted like a human being but was really a sack of flour.
Frankie said he understood me completely and I believed him. It didn’t matter if I really thought he understood, just that I believed him.
Did you know your fears become your life?
I told him I had read that somewhere.
No, he said, I am saying it to you now.
It’s true, I said. I agree with you. I see the world the way you do, at least in this one regard.
How nice for us. Frankie picked up and finished my glass of water, fishing the lemon slice out and absently ripping it to bits.
I used to always worry that Adrian would die in a plane crash or from some undetectable illness or that he would be mistaken for someone else and fatally knifed. Then he did die, and now I haven’t stopped wondering if I worried it into being.
Well, it was going to happen one day or another, Frankie said. Not to be a downer, but you know it’s true.
He had a point, I just didn’t like his point. I suppose I wanted to feel that I had known all along how it would end, that I contained some sort of foresight.
How did he die? Frankie asked, hunched over the coffee table, pushing the torn lemon rind into a little pile.
I don’t want to say. Or perhaps I didn’t know or couldn’t remember or perhaps it had never happened. I felt sure that I had never known a single thing for certain, but that couldn’t have been true. I must have known something. I knew nothing’s ever been written that can’t be erased. I knew that every idea negates another. Every page I’ve ever read shuts some doors and opens others. Everything breaks even. And maybe I said some of this to Frankie, or maybe he was the one saying it to me. It’s so hard to remember, to keep anything straight. Anytime I speak or listen to another person I feel there is a hand atop mine on a Ouija board and it’s never clear who is moving and who is being moved and I think I’m always looking for the times that the pair can be moved by a third thing, something outside us, better than us.
Just then the door opened and Adrian was there, dragging his suitcase, looking weary from all the places he’d been. He said, You left it unlocked again.
The room was very still and Frankie stood there like a photograph of himself.
Is that my shirt?
It’s joyless, I said to Adrian. You don’t need it.
Says who?
The window was wide open and Frankie was gone, taking the shirt with him. He must have crawled out onto the ledge and dropped onto the stoop, which was a way I had also escaped, at least once in the past and perhaps again very soon — it isn’t such a difficult thing to do. Still, I admired him for doing it, for doing something so simple as leaving.
Adrian opened his suitcase and all the clothes I’d given away were there, dirty from the afterlife he’d returned from, and already he was laughing, already he was smiling again, fine with being undead, coming home to the same home, staying, somehow, always the same.
I weep athletically almost every day and sometimes I cannot get down a city block without collapsing but Adrian is always upright and smiling and glad, so glad, so glad. It may be we do not live in the same world at all. Some nights I wake up and panic, thinking he’s truly gone, for real this time, and I lie there shaking, all my organs going wild in me for hours until I roll over and see he’s been beside me all along. I keep sleeping in the wrong places, I think, or maybe I’m just waking up not where I am.
O n July 21, Forbes ran an op-ed by economics professor Panos Mourdoukoutas arguing that Amazon should replace libraries. The article has since been deleted, but the backlash from librarians, teachers, writers, and bibliophiles has not quieted. Mourdoukoutas then doubled down on his argument, tweeting that libraries, which are partly funded by taxpayers, are not actually free — a point no one had suggested in the first place.
Those who are pro-library (a phrase so ridiculous I never thought I’d have to type it) are rushing to defend the necessity and importance of libraries. At Vox, Constance Grady detailed Why Public Libraries are Still Essential in 2018, writing that libraries “offer financial literacy training and job search assistance. They serve non-English-speaking immigrants. They serve incarcerated people and homeless people and housebound people.” In sum, libraries help marginalized community members who otherwise wouldn’t have access to life improvement resources and information.
Conservatives hide behind taxes to justify shuttering libraries, but demographic data suggests a more sinister intention. Many of those who benefit from libraries are among the nation’s most vulnerable populations. According to a 2016 report by the Pew Research Center, “Library users who take advantage of libraries’ computers and internet connections are more likely to be young, black, female, and lower income.” In the Pew Center’s 2015 study, researchers found that “lower-income Americans, Hispanics and African Americans are more likely to say that libraries impact their lives and communities than other Americans.”
Conservatives hide behind taxes to justify shuttering libraries, but demographic data suggests a more sinister intention.
In February, the Trump administration released a budget proposal that would effectively eliminate federal funding of libraries, an institution that serves homeless people, addicts, people of color, immigrants, and those living in poverty. The issue isn’t about the cost of libraries; it’s that conservatives believe some people simply aren’t worth the money. Even more insidiously, it’s that conservatives fear what happens when those people get access to information.
I’m evidence that the worst right-wing nightmare about libraries is true: My library gave me the ability to think beyond my small town’s restrictive ideas of sexuality and showed me that happiness and success as a poor, queer, masculine-of-center woman was possible.
As a latchkey kid in Louisiana, the library was my babysitter. My brothers and I walked to the local library after school and waited for our mom to pick us up. We were supposed to stay together and do our homework, but we split up once the automatic doors swooshed open. My brothers hustled to the computer stations, and I, untethered, spent the afternoon exploring. I cozied up on a bean bag chair in the children’s section and thumbed through books and magazines.
My family moved to the next town over in middle school. The Fontenot Memorial Library in Vinton, Louisiana was significantly smaller than the one I roamed as a child, but provided the one thing every teenager in 2006 desired: internet. My family couldn’t afford a home computer so I used one of the two available computers at the library for the allotted two hour time limit to write poetry, print school assignments, and — most importantly — edit my Myspace page. If no one had reserved the computers after my time was up, the librarian gave me more time and I stayed and browsed until closing. My math teacher often occupied the computer next to me and we discussed our shared love of books.
During that time, I was questioning my sexuality. I didn’t wear makeup or straighten my hair and word got around our middle school that another girl and I had kissed. Because I looked the part, I was instantly labeled the school lesbian. The other girl may have participated in the kiss, but in the eyes of the school — I’m the one who liked it. Girls in PE swiped my glasses from my face and put them down their shirts. Reach in and grab them, they taunted. I know you want to. People threatened to jump me after school; a boy threw a bottle at me while I was riding my bike; friends stopped inviting me over.
The only gay person I knew was Marco on the TV show Degrassi. I had never met another queer person in real life. Louisiana had just passed a constitutional amendment banning the state from performing or recognizing same sex unions meaning even if I found someone to love me, our love would be illegal. I didn’t know it at the time, but five students in our class of 60 were queer. They smartly waited until after high school to come out, while I was outed at 13 in a town that didn’t want me and a world that wasn’t ready for me. I sank into a hole of darkness and self hatred that I almost didn’t make it out of.
The only gay person I knew was Marco on the TV show Degrassi. I had never met another queer person in real life.
The library was my place of solace. The rare time kids my age entered the library was to drink from the water fountain after playing at the adjacent park. I could finally breathe without anyone bothering me, judging me, or prodding me with questions. Understanding and accepting myself was a struggle, but having a place to retreat to was invaluable. I secretly and shamefully searched the library’s catalog for books about queerness, but the search returned 0 results out of the 14,000 titles in Fontenot’s collection. The internet, however, was an unlimited trove of information. I found PFLAG, GLAAD, and The Trevor Project. The mere existence of these resources assured me that even though I was isolated, I was not alone.
A capitalist system inherently values profits over people; libraries do the opposite. In “What Exactly Does a Librarian Do? Everything,” fiction writer and essayist Kristen Arnett attempts to synthesize a librarian’s job description. She writes: “the reality of being a librarian is that it’s hardly ever about sitting down and it has absolutely nothing to do with peace and quiet. It’s about assisting others. It’s about community service. Librarianship asks you to do 12 things at once and then when you’re in the middle of those projects wonders if you’ve got any tax forms left or an eclipse viewer.” Had there been an Amazon store in lieu of the Fontenot Memorial Library while I was growing up, I would not have been able to afford books or access. No business wants a dirty unaccompanied kid reading the merchandise and occupying space reserved for paying customers.
A capitalist system inherently values profits over people; libraries do the opposite.
As Cyree Jarelle Johnson argues at Motherboard, Turning Libraries into Amazon Stores is Class Warfare. Johnson’s own library served as an “oasis” for “a black working-class queer latch-key kid with an autism spectrum disorder and an illness…” His library gave him a safe space to escape school and home abuse and exposed him to queer and trans literature which allowed him to see a reflection of himself for the first time. Johnson writes, “Without the library and other benevolent social services, I would have fallen through the cracks that always threatened to consume me like it devoured so many of my peers.” Johnson became a librarian and went on to work at the The AIDS Library in Philadelphia, a place where he could give back to his community and prevent others from falling through the crack he narrowly escaped.
I hope they’re scared, because the revolution will not be privatized.
Alaina Leary, who wrote about reading as a form of travel, “was basically raised in the Malden Public Library.” Due to her family’s limited income and her and her mother’s disabilities, she was unable to go on long distance trips. Her local library was free, accessible, and allowed her to expand her world. Leary is now a queer disability activist and works with We Need Diverse Books, an organization that advocates for inclusive literature.
Stories like mine, Johnson’s, and Leary’s demonstrate that when it comes to libraries, the political is personal. Libraries change lives. We live in a country that puts up barriers to keep the marginalized on the margins. None of us should be where we are today, but libraries offered us a way out, a ladder to climb over the roadblocks. While our stories are inspiring to some, they are no doubt a nightmare for conservatives. And I hope they’re scared, because the revolution will not be privatized.
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