Despite a number of back-asswards decisions that were eventually redressed in slightly more enlightened times (Dred Scott, Plessy v. Ferguson, Korematsu), the Supreme Court has on many occasions been an engine for civil rights and freedoms. But recently, for no reason at all, we found ourselves wondering: what might happen if some of those decisions were reversed? What if we had to learn to live without the rights and freedoms the Supreme Court has, however grudgingly, handed out over the years: the right to desegregated education, to birth control access, to legal abortion? Well, as with all good “what if” questions, we can find some possible (though not always plausible) answers in the world of speculative fiction. Here are seven books that imagine the rollback or non-existence of certain key rights granted by the court. Sometimes there are also zombies.
The Supreme Court has determined that laws can’t be intended to promote (or inhibit) religion, but Jordan’s dystopia has thrown that ruling away. In this faith-directed America, protagonist Hannah has her skin “chromed” red as a marker that she’s been convicted of having an abortion. It’s an updated Scarlet Letter that relies on some fanciful science (if we had the technology to change people’s skin color I can think of some very serious pranks I’d like to pull), but is otherwise not as far-fetched as we might want to think.
Brown v. Board of Education: Dread Nation, Justina Ireland
Ireland’s alt-history actually takes place before the case in which the Supreme Court ruled against segregated education, in a Civil War–era America in which the course of the war was altered by the sudden appearance of zombies. Protagonist Jane has constrained access to education: black and Native young people can study only how to fight and how to serve. Oh, and how to put the dead back in their graves.
In McCafferty’s young adult novel, contraception is illegal, and teenage girls can be coerced or bribed into providing children for wealthy couples. What an inventive science fiction novel that is definitely not based on things that are extremely plausible or already happening! (What makes it speculative is that in this case a virus has made everyone over 18 infertile. The contraception part is barely speculative at all.)
This case ruled that children in school still have rights to free speech, which they don’t give up once they enter the classroom. But that was 1969 in Iowa; this is a near-future fascist Japan, and the students of Shiroiwa Junior High have no rights to free speech, the pursuit of happiness, liberty, or life. They’ve been transported to a remote island, where their positions and conversations are monitored as they’re forced to murder each other for sport. It’s a harrowing read that is also, to be fair, not a likely outcome in any country, regardless of the makeup of the highest court in the land.
If you’re a straight person struggling with envisioning what it might be like if the Supreme Court rolls back cases protecting LGBTQ populations from discrimination, try this switcheroo: a world in which heterosexual sex is discouraged by the government and discriminated against by society. Sound dystopian? YEAH, IT IS.
Plessy v. Ferguson, which ruled that segregation is constitutional, has already been overturned. But Beatty’s satirical novel asks: what if it were re-un-overturned, again? This Man Booker Prize winner actually involves a (fictional) Supreme Court case: the narrator, whose sociologist father subjected him to all sorts of probably-not-IRB-approved race-related psychological experiments when he was a child, sets his sights on the high court with the goal of reinstating segregation and slavery. (The character is black; the layers of satire are deep.)
By far the least speculative speculative novel on this list, Red Clocks is a chillingly realistic account of what would happen if abortion were outlawed (right down to the fact that abortions, of course, still happen — they’re just more likely to be deadly). The novel follows the intertwining histories of a pregnant teenager, an herbalist hermit providing natural remedies, a depressed mother, and a childless woman trying desperately to get IVF before that’s outlawed too. Red Clocks is speculative fiction now, but it could easily be the literary fiction of 2019.
You know people don’t eat any more, right? They cure. They juice. They fast. They are pescaterians. Pollotarians. They are flexitarians, but only if they have looked the meat in question in its eyeballs, first.
Deciding what to eat and sourcing it takes a certain class of Americans hours every day. And then they need to spend additional hours working the food off. Enter areo-yoga, paddleboard yoga, yoga for your dog. Skin tautness and follicle integrity are also very important. There’s facial yoga, cold sculpting, dermaplaning, microneedling, prejuvention, injectable nose jobs. We are told by glossy bloggers to wash our hair reverently, and we are told by the same bloggers not to wash our hair at all.
Once you’re looking good and eating right, you have to invest substantial effort into the maintenance of your social life, as well. It is not enough to quietly enjoy the company of your companions any longer, you must broadcast the proof of friendship to the digital rooftops — I am re-taking this selfie with this person because I like them very much!
What a time to be alive, even our procrastination necessitates panache! It takes hard work to think of the tweet that will telegraph our boredom while also making it evident that we are very BUSY. It takes artistry to snap just the right photo to communicate your “mood.”
I am exhausted writing this diatribe, and I’m exhausted living alongside it — the unrelenting march to the place (or follower count) where we’ll be livin’ our best lives. And yet, the world feels so hopeless, the sense of right and wrong so conjoined, that perhaps the only thing that feels controllable is our social media posts and our digestive tracts. Is this how the valid message that self-care is not just permissible, but necessary, mushroomed into an excuse to put self first, self second, and hell, also on third?
Enter into this age of self, a nervy mike-drop of a novel from beloved author Ottessa Moshfegh that throws scatological-level shade at our culture’s quest for betterment. The unnamed heroine of Moshfegh’s latest, My Year of Rest and Relaxation has but one goal: to sleep the year away. To achieve this, she will enrage her best friend Reva by letting her bikini body soften, consume VHS cassettes instead of solids, and enlist a magnificently incompetent psychiatrist, Dr. Tuttle, to play pill pusher to her sleeping beauty for twelve inactive months.
In these times of #silenceiscomplicity when concerned citizens are donating, marching, cold-calling, and campaigning, all the while visibly incorporating these efforts into their larger “brand”, Moshfegh’s profile of a privileged, beautiful white urbanite’s decision to hibernate feels especially provocative, catapulting My Year Of into a new and darker category of guilty pleasure reads.
A committed Moshfegh admirer, I will follow her cutting intelligence and sardonic humor wherever she puts it to work, so I was especially pleased to have the opportunity to speak with her by phone about her delectable fourth book.
Ottessa Moshfegh: That’s pretty apt, I definitely felt like it was existential. I wonder if other people will see it that way? It is a grappling with an existential question of consciousness and being and the trap of being. From the outside, the book is about a pretty woman who has everything but is miserable, who decides to sleep her troubles away. Which I guess in a mundane sense is exactly what she’s doing, but as a writer I think it’s a little more profound than that. What exactly is uncomfortable about this, what are the reasons for human misery? Loss, purposelessness, difficulty with human relationships, alienation from human society, loneliness. The usual. These questions are essential questions that interest me, inherent in everything I write.
CM: I read in The White Review that Newton — your hometown, right? — has the highest number of psychiatrists. Is that true, and if it is true, do you have an idea why that is so?
What are the reasons for human misery? Loss, purposelessness, alienation, loneliness. This essential question is inherent in everything I write.
OM: I don’t know if it’s still true now, but it makes perfect sense. Newtown is a very wealthy suburb of Boston, a hub of education in the northeast. The values in that culture have a lot to do with achievement and a higher echelon of human interest: academia, science, philosophy, art… It isn’t a place that really embraces human nature in its more spiritual component. There’s a lot of pressure. Kids do SAT prep when they are twelve, they’re working on their resumés, their extracurricular shit. Most families in Newtown have two high achieving parents, so how much time do you actually get to spend with your kid when he’s not with the tutor, at a cello lesson…I think the lack of human connection is exactly why people develop mental illness. Psychiatry works perfectly in a culture like Newton’s because it’s a substitute for love and care. It makes me think: what is an education actually getting us? It’s not giving us tools to actually deal with our humanity. It gives us tools to use our brain in ways that allow us to be more productive and make us more alienated with each other.
CM: Your writing is revered by many people, including me, because it’s blunt and dirty and smart and it doesn’t seem to give a fuck, which isn’t to say that it comes off as careless, but that your writing seems to fly in the face of what it means to be a good citizen, a clean person, a useful person, and perhaps even a “good” woman in our culture. What is it like to be in promotion mode for My Year of Rest and Relaxation? You kind of have to be in “good girl” mode to promote books, but you’re sometimes seen as writing “bad girl” literature.
OM: I don’t see it as good girl/bad girl. I’ve given a lot to my work and I want it to have a life outside of my apartment, so I have to share more of myself more than is comfortable with the public and journalists. It can seem degrading when I’m misunderstood or reduced or put in a box, or when my work is used to speak to some kind of political idea that I don’t stand for or feel divorced from, or disinterested in. Sometimes, it’s a negotiation — promotion — but mostly it feels like a job. I try to be honest, and in the course of trying to be honest I might feel like I reveal too much, and I feel invaded, and I need to do what I need to do to regain my sense of privacy. But you know, I’m not like…Jennifer Lawrence. I’m a writer that many people will not read. They’re not going to read whatever I say on the Internet, so the stakes aren’t really that high.
CM: I wasn’t going to get into this, but I feel compelled to. You’re completely off of social media. What’s that like?
OM: I don’t have the energy for self-promotion, I have an amazing publicist for that. Liz Calamari. I completely trust her. Social media for me as a living person is toxic, and it’s exactly the opposite of how I want to live as a writer. The internet in general feels like a very toxic place to me for the past couple of years. I don’t want people to see pictures of me with my nieces or my partners. You have to protect yourself psychically from other people. There are probably a lot of people who don’t like me, and I don’t want to have that juju. You give them an inch and they make a hundred million assumptions. I’m not interested in connecting with people over the Internet. I write books to connect with people. For me, social media is a mind fuck, time suck. If you don’t look at it, you won’t have to think about it.
CM: You said in another interview that you think sports would have been good for you. Why is that? Weirdly, I often think that myself — I feel like I’d be a less selfish person if I’d grown up playing more team sports. But I convinced my high school to consider “the piano” as a sport…
OM: I was a pianist, too. I devoted many hours of each day to practicing — I had two two-hour lessons a week; I was very serious. My mom is a violist, and she felt sports were dangerous because I could hurt my hands. Moving your body is such an essential part of being alive. When I was nine, I got in put in a back brace called the “The Boston Brace.” It was supposed to inhibit the development of my scoliosis. It was very difficult and very, very painful and restricted my movement in a lot of ways. Having to wear that brace for two or three years, I developed chronic back pain. I wish that I grew up with a better relationship to strength and to agility, a better relationship to my body and to flexibility.
CM: You’ve also said that writing “My Year of” made you insane. How so?
It seems really sad that we have to make up ourselves to look like inhuman beings who don’t shit and piss and fart and wake up looking like anime porn stars.
OM: I think there’s a necessary level of insanity when you are writing a novel. I don’t know anyone who can write a novel casually. You know, have a cup of tea and sit and look out the window and type. It was a very difficult book for me. Every project you take on is in a karmic sense exactly what you need. The lessons I learned from this book were very difficult and hard won. I wrote it without a home, I was leaving one place, going from this residency to that residency. It was a difficult time. After finishing it, I knew I needed a year off from writing a novel because I felt like that was really fucking intense. But now I’ve forgotten the treachery and the suffering! I’m excited about a new novel. Like it’s an adventure I’m going to go on and discover all these things.
CM: Let’s talk about the very specific year that this book is sent in. The year 2000 — about what, 9 months before Sept. 11th? Did you try the book out in any other time period first?
OM: If I had written the book in 2018, it wouldn’t have made sense. Some of my stories happen in contemporary culture, but writing about past, it just feels like there is so much more room. The book I’m hoping to write takes place in Victorian San Francisco. I like that distance, the hindsight, the separation between my consciousness and the consciousness of my characters.
When I started the first ten pages, I didn’t know what time it was, but once the story actually began, it was obvious to me. The book had to be set in the age before digital news because it infiltrates everything. You can’t ever be away from it. My narrator needed to be isolated, but also, I was thinking how misinformed we are. I was thinking about 9/11 and in the course of writing the book I was learning things that were really upsetting. We spend all this time tweeting distractions from what is actually the truth, and the truth is extremely horrifying.
CM: Whoopi Goldberg has a pretty big inspirational role to play in this book. Can you talk about her role?
OM: The admiration of Whoopi Goldberg in the book is my admiration for her. She has always stood out as the real person in the fake scene. She is always Whoopi Goldberg. I think she’s a fucking genius. Her karmic role is to break through the fog of delusion and she very rightly chose the medium of on-screen entertainment, which is a machine of delusion, a delusion-making machine. I think she’s been important culturally, and an important figure for me. She’s black, she’s a woman, she’s not a sex symbol. She’s opinionated and totally, totally singular and I grew up watching her movies on VHS in the 80s. She resonates with me. I love her.
CM: All of your characters, perhaps without exception, have pretty sketchy hygiene. What’s your feeling on hygiene, specifically American hygiene?
OM: I take a shower once a day, I wash my hair every day, wash my face 5 times a day, brush my teeth 4–5 times daily, I’m insanely hygienic. I can never feel clean enough. It gives me pleasure to feel clean — the world is so dirty.
I spent a lot of time in my protagonist’s Upper West Side apartment, having her break down her old habits. In the exposition, I get into it: she’s done colonics, highlights, facials and all that shit. All of the money that women are paying through the nose so they look attractive for a man who probably doesn’t brush his teeth in the morning. The discrepancy is so insane. Especially now, women are turning into an ideal of femininity for the patriarchy that looks like an avatar of a woman. The Kardashian thing with the make-up, what’s it called?
CM: Contouring.
OM: Right, contouring. Don’t we have fucking contours in our face? All of that, it’s such a fucking waste of time, and it seems really sad. People are wasting so much time on their vanity which makes them less of a person, what’s the pay-off? What do you actually want? It seems really sad that we have to make up ourselves to look like inhuman beings who don’t shit and piss and fart and wake up looking like anime porn stars. I think it’s really poisoning us. We live in such a pornographic culture, that look has become so mainstream. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel beautiful and loved, but the level of artifice seems really ridiculous.
CM: Your main character is considered “beautiful” in that she’s tall, thin, stylish, blond. Was it important to you that she be beautiful in this way?
OM: Making her beautiful was partly a “fuck you” to all the people who came up and asked how I could write a female character as disgusting as Eileen. So I thought, if she was blond and tall and wore fashionable clothing, would you still call her that?
CM: We’ve spoken a little off the record about my own struggles with insomnia. While I was reading your book, I was actually in a bad situation because I was out of sleeping pills and my regular Doc was being sued and couldn’t prescribe any more for me. He was someone who was frankly pretty terrible, someone I found on the Internet, the contemporary equivalent of the Yellow Pages, where your narrator finds her psychiatrist. My doctor was so incredibly incompetent that I actually felt bad for him, so I just kept going, I felt like someone had to. Accordingly, I feel worlds of affection for Dr. Tuttle who is operating in her own passionate world of glorious medical blundering. Can you tell me a little bit about her origin?
OM: How did she come into being? I can’t say too much about it exactly. She seems to embody psychiatry — psychiatry is an evil industry. It saves a lot of people but I think at the heart of it, it is an evil industry. It pathologizes people’s struggles and creates these labels that they can make money off of by selling people drugs. And it’s so fucking dark, the book. There had to be levity. It couldn’t all be dark. Dr. Tuttle was so fun to write. Whenever I would be like, it’s time for me to see Dr. Tuttle! It was like she was waiting for me with some ridiculous new thing. She was the joy.
CM: Your cover is spectacular. Were you the genius behind it — did you have any involvement?
OM: I have to say I will take credit for the image and the hot pink font. Working with Penguin Press is always great, it really feels collaborative. The pink type face is important!
CM: Is there anything that you think no one else might ask you about that you would like to add?
OM: I would want to say that by having given an interview about what I think and what I did, that I also hope people that people enjoy the book if they want to, and get what they can out of it. I don’t matter.
I ’m obsessed with people who are so magnetic, you don’t even notice they’re awful. And in America, I’m hardly alone. It’s not just the current “Summer of the Scam”, wherein the likes of Anna Delvey and the Portofino Pirate are grabbing headlines and everyone’s money. We Americans have always adored the charismatic trickster. Our history is brimming with people who gained fame (or infamy) with little to offer but the ability to make others love and trust them. Maybe it’s because we like knowing that there are at least a few among us who are dodging taxes and responsibility in favor of yachts and first-class travel. Charisma feels more egalitarian than intelligence or beauty or humor: you can’t work for it or be born into it. You simply have it or you don’t.
In my novel The Parking Lot Attendant, I wanted to explore how encountering this quality when you’re young makes it that much more potent, and thus, dangerous. Many readers have told me how much they hate Ayale, how monstrous he is. I see what they mean. But I must admit that much like my narrator, I am at times dazzled by his charm; I too have almost been taken in. And here’s the thing: Ayale uses the skills exhibited by America’s most beloved con men (and women) to make money, get land, and pull a fast one on everyone around him. What could be more blessedly American than that?
Here are 8 books whose protagonists embody this deeply discomfiting relationship between the hypnotic and the horrifying as they lead those around them. (I tried to choose books whose problematic potentates had the potential to fool not only the other characters but we, the readers, as well.)
Aimee, the one-name pop star sensation, begins as a mystery. On the one hand, she’s a startling voice of truth for the narrator, a force capable of shocking her out of her lifelong passivity. On the other, she’s condescending, blissfully unaware of her privilege, racist, and oblivious as to how her whiteness and wealth are predatory, destructive and completely at odds with the ideals she claims to uphold. Her manner of dealing with what she perceives to be the narrator’s betrayal reveals what was hidden at the start: Aimee is just as petty and immature as her assistant.
No one has broken my heart like Jay Gatsby. Much like the narrator, Nick Carraway, we’re tempted to see him as a gleaming example of the American Dream gone great, before we understand that he’s terribly lost and desperate enough to use anyone and everyone to get what he wants. His money is dirty but what takes Jay Gatsby down is his erroneous belief that the amount of money you earn can equal the amount of love you receive.
The Marquise de Merteuil is one of my favorite characters of all time. Objectively, she’s a horrible person but my God, has anyone else been this vile with such wit and humor? She despises the weak, the stupid, the religious and the lowbred and, what is perhaps most unforgivable in 1782, she’s a woman who knows what she wants when it comes to sex and can’t think of a single reason why she should be deprived. You can’t help but cheer her on, no matter how duplicitous her tactics, if only because it’s such a joy to see her banter and battle with the best of them.
The character of Bob Marley is a host of contradictions: a symbol of freedom; a proponent of lasting change; a contender against the growing western presence in Jamaica; a greedy capitalist; a predator who uses women. Each character has a different impression of and vision for the Singer, whose actions (right or wrong) and thrilling words transform their lives as well as the legacy of their country.
Miss Havisham is not the most pleasant of jilted brides: she raises her ward Estella to be incapable of love and encourages Pip in his passion for Estella and his dreams of wealth, all while knowing that his hopes are for naught. Despite driving much of the plot with her conniving and vengeful schemes, the truth of her tragic love story and the sources of her deep sadness, while not enough to redeem her, make us feel a certain pity for the molting wreck of a woman she has become.
The writer Bill Gray seems like the kind of author we can get behind (at least in fiction): reclusive, eccentric, well-spoken, resolute in his isolation. However, as events take Bill out of self-imposed solitude to a leading role in international diplomacy, reality gets hazy: is Bill a flawed man who happens to be a great artist? Is he a good writer or simply lucky when it comes to optics? Is he just as astute an opportunist as the Master of the Unification Church or the head of the terrorist cell, whose latest hostage Bill is (kind of) trying to save?
When Richard Papen ends up at Hampden College, he falls in with a small group of classicists, led by the inscrutable Henry Winter. Initially, as the shocking events of the story unfold, it seems like Henry is the only selfless and clear thinker of the bunch. Gradually however, as the facts contradict each other and the questions pile up, we’re forced to wonder, is Henry the key to their salvation or the engine of their destruction?
Elena Greco and Lina Cerrulo’s friendship is stupendous, cruel, heartbreaking and ultimately, inexplicable. On many occasions, it reads more like a fight to the death than an alliance, and we’re never entirely sure who is manipulating whom, especially since it’s difficult to confirm the accuracy of Elena’s narration. We soon realize that for both, the other woman is the only really worthy opponent they’ve ever met. That wrenching sense of stifled action and dazzling violence, which fuels so much of the books, emerges from observing these two extraordinary people simultaneously attempt to pull each other up and shove each other into the ground.
In honor of Jonathan Franzen’s retirement, here’s a humor piece I wrote about him three years ago that nobody would publish because, I assume, it was too mean. Luckily the world has gotten much meaner since then and also my man has at least like 5 million dollars and can handle some ribbing. (Donate $500K to RAICES and I’ll take it down!) If it’s too mean for you, just substitute the name of any other highly-rated writer who once proposed to ameliorate his sense of distance from young people’s cynicism by adopting an Iraqi orphan.
“One of the things that had put me in mind of [adopting an Iraqi orphan] was a sense of alienation from the younger generation. They seemed politically not the way they should be as young people. I thought people were supposed to be idealistic and angry. And they seemed kind of cynical and not very angry. At least not in any way that was accessible to me.”
Here at Jonathan Franzen Night School, we respect that your intellectual approach is distinctive, maybe even avant garde. Others might learn about youth culture and activism by talking to young people, but not you — you’re too perspicacious, too heteroclite. Not for you the dry academic consideration of the thing itself. You learn about young people by getting yourself an orphan.
Our fall curriculum is designed to nurture that lateral thinking approach, while also providing flexible class times that fit into your schedule of reinventing the novel and caring for whatever young life-lessons you have at home.
Introduction to Ornithology: This is a required course at Jonathan Franzen Night School. There is no field component, and neither binoculars nor outdoor gear will be required. Instead, we will focus on understanding birds by contemplating the benthic abyss of social media. We will understand the habits and life cycles of birds in the negative space of Facebook’s slick insincerity or the shriek of the Twitter harridan. Once we arrive at the conclusion that birds are real, the internet is fake, and truth manifests only in pain and risk, we will meticulously apply ticks to our legs in order to achieve genuine emotion.
Accelerated German: We will approach the German language not through the deceitful portals of grammar and vocabulary, but through bodily immersion in the Teutonic animus, via eating schnitzel while listening to a recording of my translation of Karl Kraus. Conversational fluency will be achieved through intimate analysis of the psyche of a German woman who once declined to sleep with me.
Home Economics: Students will learn what it’s like to care for a bag of flour by carrying around a human baby for one week.
Students will learn what it’s like to care for a bag of flour by carrying around a human baby for one week.
International Relations: For the lab section of this course, we will hire people from immigrant backgrounds for assistance with childcare, home cleaning, landscaping, personal grooming, and/or vehicle maintenance. For the lecture section, we will explain to our families and colleagues how well we pay these employees and how much we respect their culture.
Women’s Studies 101: For a thorough, intersectional understanding of the challenges women have faced under patriarchy and the complex social and political factors that perpetuate this oppression, we will spend some time deeply contemplating me, Jonathan Franzen. We will stare into my eyes, palms, and navel as I lounge semi-nude on a Le Corbusier chaise longue. Once we have achieved a state of personal oneness with me, Jonathan Franzen, my assistant will ring a single clear bell, and we will experience the profound relief of floating within privilege, both buoyed by it and powerless to combat it. To celebrate our shared unity we will find some women who are engaging critically with my public persona and yell at them.
Special Topics in Creative Writing: In this class, we will explore ways to amplify the honesty, purity, and freedom of our expression of the human condition by slagging off other writers, and/or adopting them.
Please hand-write your application on expensive stationery and deliver it via 8-year-old chimney sweep. DO NOT EMAIL.
We were driving through Turners Falls when I saw the flash of success on the side of the road and I told my wife to stop the car. “Why?” she said. “I just saw some success on the side of the road!” I hollered. My wife made a face. “Pull over!” I shouted.
She stopped the car and I got out and ran — limped — as fast as I could back to the spot where I’d seen the success. Sure enough, there it was: a shiny success half-buried in the leaves. I picked it up and brushed it off. I’ll admit that it was a bit outdated — made mostly of earning a lot of money, buying a big gaudy house, that sort of thing — but still, I thought it might be worth something.
“Oh Kevin,” my wife said, stepping up behind me. “It’s ancient!”
“Even so,” I said.
“Look,” she said, “it’s covered with bugs.” And just as she said that, I noticed the tiny somethings crawling out from a hole in the wet successful wood. “Ack,” I said, and flung the thing to the ground. Then I limped back to the car and we drove away. I never saw that success again — or any success for that matter. I continued to fail — to fail better, and better still. Soon I was one of the best failers in western Massachusetts. Then I began failing strongly at the state level, and eventually in national competitions. By the fall of 2013 I was ranked number one. I even appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show! “Let me give you a test,” said Kimmel. “OK,” I said. “What is the capital of California?” I peed myself. “Wow,” said Kimmel, and he stood up and clapped.
The following spring, though, I started hearing rumors about a woman in Vancouver named Laura DeNox who was failing in new ways that no one had ever seen before. I saw videos of her on YouTube — one of her failing to eat, another of her not even able to get up in the morning — and her name was all over Twitter: “She might seriously be the best failure in the history of trying,” tweeted @socoool. Someone named @buley responded “No way! Kevin Nace is the best failure since Rhonda O’Dial.” “Nace’s a has-been,” @socoool responded.
I’ll be honest — I was scared of DeNox. Try as I might to avoid a fail-off with her, though, I could not. I trained with world-renowned failer Corduroy Oll for six months before the event. Corduroy had me failing around the clock: failing to tie my shoes, even, and to brush my teeth. Maybe you tuned into ESPN for the competition and saw how I looked when I arrived in Houston: fat, unshaven, wearing two different shoes. That was all Corduroy’s influence.
Like all fail-offs, the challenges were broken down into categories. For the Workplace challenge, they drove us to an office building filled with cameras and broadcast the results live. DeNox found a faux supply closet on set and managed to mistakenly lock herself inside it: a pretty good fuckup, all told. I countered, though, by sending an incredibly personal and embarrassing email to the whole office instead of to the one person I’d written it for, which resulted in immediate termination and the loss of a good friend.
Then we had to fail at Street Smarts. They drove us out to a dangerous street and a man approached me and asked me for money. I didn’t have any, so I offered him my wedding ring.
“All I need is a dollar, hombre,” he said.
“Take it, take it,” I said, dropping the ring into his open palm. “It belonged to my father.”
The crowd, assembled behind a railing across the street, oohed and clapped.
But DeNox one-upped me. When the same actor asked her for money, she kissed him on the mouth and gave him her social security card, which he immediately sold to some hackers who stole her identity. The crowd went wild.
The third and final leg of the fail-off was Marital. Our spouses took the stage in front of an audience and we stood opposite them. DeNox squared her shoulders towards her husband, shrugged, and said, “I’m sorry honey. But I just don’t find you very interesting anymore.”
In retrospect, this was DeNox’s critical error. See, you can’t just not try — that’s not a fail. The secret to failing is trying your ass off. I’d been trying and failing to tell my wife how I felt for years — I could do it again no problem. I walked up to her where she stood and said, “Honey? I am the spoon and you are the fork.”
My wife’s face contorted. “What does that even mean?”
The crowd began to chant: “Fail! Fail!”
“I,” I said. “I am a tree and you are a cloud.”
“What are you saying?” said my wife. “That I’m fat?”
“Fail! Fail! Fail!”
“You are a virus and I am the same virus!” I shouted.
“Gross, Kevin!” my wife said. “What is the matter with you?” Then she stormed off the stage; that was the last time I saw her. The crowd cheered for me and the host ushered DeNox into the wings. Then he placed a glass trophy in my hands and I tried to lift it over my head. It was too heavy, though; I fumbled it and it fell to the floor and shattered. When I bent down to gather the shards, I sliced my finger on a piece of glass. I held up my bloody hand, and the crowd erupted and sprang to their feet.
About the Author
Christopher Boucher is the author of the novels How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (2011) and Golden Delicious (2016), both out from Melville House. “Success Story” appears in Big Giant Floating Head, a collection forthcoming from Melville House. Christopher teaches writing and literature at Boston College.
Modern book titles tend to be quite literal. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins is about a set of games called the Hunger Games where the contestants go hungry. And no prizes for guessing who’s at the center of The Missing Girl by Jenny Quintana.
But back in the early– to mid–20th century, authors often alluded to other existing works when it came to naming their manuscripts. Whether an intricate metaphor or an intentional sidestep, many book titles from this period only make sense once you’ve read the whole thing. Engaging us in a kind of cyclical journey, they encouraged readers to reassess their outlook on the story before, during, and after they have read it. Or, to put it in another way, these books had some pretty cryptic titles.
In this post, we will look at some literary classics whose titles would never make the cut today. What might they be titled if they were published in today’s ultra-literal book market?
A coming of age bildungsroman about a teenager trying to be true to himself. What it isn’t: literally a story about someone running around in a field of wheat. There are myriad scholarly interpretations of the title — including influence from a Robert Burns poem and metaphors for the fall from innocence into adulthood — but it’s certainly not immediately representative of the book’s content. Still, this title undoubtedly intrigues readers from the off, and keeps them thinking after they’ve put it down. Its power lies in its capacity to grasp, hold, and play with the reader’s imagination and way of thinking. The 2018 version would be less artistic but also lead to fewer generations of confused schoolchildren.
The Man in the Madhouse, Ken Kesey
Original title: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Sometimes titles are so familiar that it’s easy to forget their strangeness, like with One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — a book absent of any birds, in flight or otherwise. Here, a seemingly innocuous title is what makes the end of the novel so affecting and moving. It is only in the last few chapters that the meaning of the title becomes clearer to us, almost like a resolved grace note, when the nursery rhyme that the title is taken from appears. Thus, the cryptic title pays off, allowing the reader to apply or alter their interpretation of the novel accordingly. Rich in ambiguity, it also lends itself towards a reading of ‘cuckoo’ as slang for mad or crazy. And, of course, “flying over the nest” — in other words, escaping from the asylum — is something that (spoiler!) McMurphy doesn’t end up doing. The title provides readers with an instant misdirect, making the story’s end that much more heart-wrenching. But you’d never know that it was about patients in an asylum, so it could never get published today.
A curious title will stick in your mind to make you read it and remember it. There are multiple literary interpretations of the idea of the mockingbird: since they do “nothing but sing their hearts out for us,” they could symbolize many of the selfless and morally steadfast characters like Tom Robinson and Atticus, or even Scout. Another option would be Boo Radley, the elusive figure who Scout compares to a mockingbird at the end of the novel.
The title draws attention to the novel’s central motif right from the start, and we then spend the novel wondering why, what, and when this will be explained. The “ah-ha” comes at the end of the novel, when Scout underscores the story’s theme by explaining just why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. That’s too long to wait for a payoff in 2018, so our updated version makes use of the “girl” trend in book titles.
This title may be intriguing or misleading to readers, depending on their knowledge of Scots poetry (or popular idioms). Indeed, this is the second title on this list to borrows a line from Robert Burns: “The best-laid schemes of mice and men often go awry.”
While it might draw some modern readers in with its opacity and intrigue, one has to wonder if Steinbeck’s contemporary readers would know what the title alludes to. But if they did, the title certainly adds an air of inevitable tragedy to the story — as they wait for Lenny and George’s plans to own a farm and “live off the fat of the land” to go, well, awry. Still, we’re busy people: why not get to the tragedy first?
Far from a culinary or domestic handbook, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a moving, intricately written account of the nuances and challenges of a religious childhood. The novel is semi-autobiographical fiction, adding perhaps another air of confusion around the abstruse title. The threads of the title’s implications run through the book — restrictions, alternatives, exploration, and adolescence — so that the more you read, the clearer the title becomes. Esoteric and ambiguous, it proves the power a book title has to intrigue a reader and shape our understanding of a text, just as much as it reflects and describes the words behind it. But people are more likely to pick up a book about teen lesbians than oranges, so if you have teen lesbians in your book in 2018 you’d better say so right up front!
Obscure and allusive book titles can do a good deal. They intrigue us to read their contents (and to write about them!). They demonstrate the wit and humor of an author — once the book is finished and the significance of the title is made clear, we are often left with the feeling that the title was a sort of wink from the author, urging us to read on and discover something new. We think it’s very fortunate that these books were published at a time when titles could be more alluring and less obvious. Maybe that time will come around again.
About the Author
Emmanuel Nataf is the CEO of Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers and marketers. Over 5,000 books have been produced via Reedsy since 2015.
Curtis Sittenfeld is best known for writing American Wife, a fictionalized memoir inspired by Laura Bush. Some might call her the First Lady of writing about First Ladies but her short story collection, You Think It, I’ll Say It, showcases how wide her talents reach and brings to mind a different type of title: the chronicler-in-chief of the mind of a certain type of American woman.
Sittenfeld acknowledges that she can only speak for a specific strata of society, but her command of that voice and thought is all-encompassing. Reading her work is like eavesdropping on the most observant women you know having a conversation about people you’ve never met, and having that conversation somehow become thrilling beyond comprehension.
If you read the book, you’ll doubtlessly find a thread that resonates deeply with an aspect of your interpersonal life. For me it was the way Sittenfeld grasps the miscommunications of early intimacy, but for you it might be her stark look at the awkwardness of couples who cannot understand their partners’ psyche, or identifying with characters who reveal their meanest inner impulses. In a world where judgment is often seen as solely harsh, Sittenfeld reminds us that the ability to discern and judge others can be a useful tool in both survival and the creation of empathy.
Sittenfeld and I spoke on the phone about social performance, representations of the Midwest in media, and ambiguity in fiction.
Rebecca Schuh: In the first story in the book, “Gender Studies,” Nell seems more resigned than sad about her divorce. Why is that?
Curtis Sittenfeld: I write fiction pretty intuitively. I try to not go in the most predictable direction. Writing about someone who’s really devastated about their breakup, there are ways to do it that are interesting, but it does seem predictable. It’s weirder but plausible that she would almost think, well, maybe I should have broken up with him, or maybe I should have known, instead of being destroyed by it.
RS: Yeah that definitely makes sense, it was really refreshing to read someone like that. In that story as well, there’s these notes of her casual elitism but she kind of also acknowledges that her and her ex had this kind of insufferable lifestyle. How does that relates to your fiction as a whole of characters working to overcome their immediate notions of privilege?
CS: I’m not always sure that they’re working to overcome it. I do think that I write about characters who tend to be educated and relatively privileged. We live in such complex interesting times, one thing I’m sort of curious about is if I can do justice to a character and justice to a story, I can write about any topic if I can pull it off. If I wrote about someone who came from a very impoverished socioeconomic background, in some ways I think I would be opening myself up to more criticism or a different kind of criticism from the kind I open myself up to by consistently writing about privileged white women.
I think that the Midwest feels a bit underrepresented to me in fiction, and I think sometimes if there’s a Midwestern character, they’re supposed to be someone who is naive. I like staking out as my territory the sophisticated although also flawed Midwesterners. I really think that a lot of the people who live on the coasts don’t think that emotionally sophisticated Midwesterners exist.
The Midwest feels underrepresented in fiction, and if there’s a Midwestern character, they’re supposed to be naive. My territory is the sophisticated but also flawed Midwesterners.
RS: Lately it seems like when newspapers are going to the Midwest, they’re finding the sympathetic profile of the Trump supporter. And that’s not all that the Midwest is. I’m from Madison, Wisconsin so obviously I have kind of a skewed perspective, but it’s a strange thing to watch in the media.
CS: I agree 100%. There are a lot of those articles where a journalist from a coast comes in like a foreign exchange student and spends 2 or 3 days in the Midwest and a lot of those pieces read to me like the person came in with an agenda and essentially knew how the piece would be written before it was written. It’s really not at all difficult to find people who supported Hillary Clinton all over the Midwest.
Politically I don’t think that there is a coastal versus central divide, it’s an urban versus rural divide. I live in Missouri, the politics of St. Louis and Kansas City are different from the politics elsewhere in Missouri, or for you in Wisconsin, even though you’re visiting.
RS: I was struck by the universality of the miscommunication in “The World Has Many Butterflies.” It’s so common to have these interactions where it seems like there’s a mutual attraction but it’s actually one sided. Did you perceive Graham as leading Julie on, or Julie being more delusional, or neither of those, or both?
CS: I definitely want it to be open to interpretation. I want the reader to choose which version is real. I like ambiguity in fiction because I think ambiguity is so common in real life, and people’s motives can be very unclear. Even to the people themselves. In some ways all stories are more interesting if you can’t tell who’s clearly right or wrong.
All stories are more interesting if you can’t tell who’s clearly right or wrong.
RS: That idea came up again, but in a less romantic context, in “Vox Clamantis in Deserto.” The narrator says, “I’d invented my original idea of Rae,” I thought that was kind of a similar thing in terms of characters seeing in other people what they wanted to see. I was wondering about the connection you found between that happening both romantically and in a friendship in this story.
CS: As a side note, do you know what Vox Clamantis in Deserto means?
RS: No.
CS: It’s the motto of Dartmouth, and it means a voice crying out in the wilderness. I think that it’s very natural to interact with people and whether it’s conscious or subconscious, to kind of create a narrative about them or to explain their behavior to yourself and their motives. Depending upon the people involved, maybe that initial narrative is correct or maybe it’s completely wrong. There are times in my life when I’ve had a first impression that later turned out to be totally contradicted, and there’s times when I’ve had first impressions that turned out to be confirmed over the course of time.
It’s really confusing to be a person. I feel more this way now than I did even ten or twenty years ago. It’s really hard to understand the reasons that other people act the way they do. Somebody might be grouchy because they’re fundamentally an asshole, they might be grouchy because they’re going through some kind of incredibly challenging personal situation, they might be grouchy because they’re hungry. Other people’s behavior is very hard to read and to put into context even though essentially reading other people’s behavior is almost professionally what I’m supposed to do.
RS: This miscommunication of behavior is such a common theme throughout the book especially in the stories where people misunderstanding each other were married. I was so astonished at that. I’m not married and I’ve assumed oh once you get to that point, you for sure understand the other person. But it seems like what you’re reflecting in the stories is that it’s actually very common for married people to not understand each other.
CS: One of my motives for writing some of these stories is that I think that any marriage is very difficult to really understand from the outside, only the two people have a clear idea of what’s going on. I’m almost imagining scenarios for different marriages by writing fiction.
RS: Throughout the collection it seems as if the characters were often enacting social performances. In some of the stories we see that veil fall away. How do you relate the idea of social performance in everyday life to fiction?
CS: I think about this in terms of real life and also in terms of social media. We all have two fake selves now, we have our social media fake self and our flesh and blood fake self. Being fake some of the time is not inherently bad. I think it’s actually a form of good manners. I write from a point of confusion rather than a point of clarity and I don’t know where the sort of cut off is for the ideal amount of fake public behavior. And when does it go from being appropriate to being excessive to being unhealthy to being pathological. I’m trying to explore that issue.
We all have two fake selves now, we have our social media fake self and our flesh and blood fake self. Being fake some of the time is not inherently bad, but when does it go from being appropriate to being excessive to being unhealthy to being pathological?
RS: I hadn’t thought about it that way before. That’s such a great way to think of it because there’s a lot in the stories about this idea of suburban fakery and then also intellectual fakery, and then there’s the online aspect. What is the point at which it becomes too absurd and at what point is it that it’s how you survive in the world.
CS: You could say brushing your hair is a form of fakeness, or an artifice. But I’m okay with brushing my hair.
RS: Everything to a certain extent is an artifice but yeah it’s just like getting through the day and going to a job. In both “Plausible Deniability” and “The World Has Many Butterflies,” there’s a male character who sees no romance in a situation where the woman is thinking like this is a budding intimate connection. And I was torn between, oh is this men who are actually able to divorce emotion from intimacy or if it was notes of repressing that intimacy.
CS: In both the stories, what the dynamic is between a man and a woman is open to interpretation. And so I’m fine with different readers interpreting it differently, and if somebody said ‘well which character is right’, I wouldn’t really say either one of them is right or wrong.
RS: You were traveling between characters who were very overcritical of other people, such as in “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” and characters who were being overly critical of themselves.
CS: Why choose! You can be both! The New York Times review of this book ran a week ago and asked the question: is a judgmental character redeemed by sort of recognizing that she herself is judgmental? And that depends on the reader.
RS: I found myself having sympathy for all of the characters and thinking wow, these are all just very messy personal interactions. Seeing both sides of that is such a valuable thing, it helped me to think about all of these situations that I’ve been worrying about in my own life and realizing that we’re all just kind of floundering around.
I n case you haven’t heard the Beatles-level shrieks of joy on the internet — Greta Gerwig just might be in talks to adapt Little Women to the big screen. Gerwig’s bringing some of the Ladybird cast back together to make everyone’s dreams come true— Saoirse Ronan as Jo, Timothée Chalamet as Laurie. It’s like Ladybird went back in time and her dad is a transcendentalist veteran and her mom isn’t afraid to hug her and her first boyfriend is actually an adoring but problematic dude who is kind of obsessed with her family.
The news got me thinking. Keira Knightley, Tom Hanks, Emma Thompson, Oprah Winfrey, and Meryl Streep have all made it into quite a few book-to-film adaptations over the years (Meryl Streep is even slotted for the role of Aunt March in Gerwig’s Little Women). But in the past ten years, has anyone rivaled Saoirse Ronan for bringing books to the big screen? I say no. To prove my point, here is the definitive ranking of all of Saoirse Ronan’s best book-to-film moments, just in case you needed another ten reasons to love her.
#1 —Young Briony Tallis in Atonement by Ian McEwan, 2007
Ronan was twelve years old when she delivered the Academy Award-nominated performance for Best Supporting Actress of young Briony Tallis in the earth-shatteringly beautiful adaptation of Atonement. At the time she was one of the youngest actresses to be nominated for the award. Atonement makes it to the top of our list because both Ronan’s performance and the film hold up exceptionally well to the novel’s own greatness.
The film, adapted to screen by Colm Tóibín and another novelist, Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy) follows the young Irish immigrant Eilis to Brooklyn in the 1950s. She falls in love with a young Italian American man, learns how to twirl her pasta and forges on as the only woman in her accounting class. But when she learns of trouble back home in Ireland, she has to choose between who she once was and who she’s become.
Susie Salmon tells the story of her own murder, which occurred on December 6, 1973. Susie, now in heaven, is narrating the events she witnesses down on earth as her family navigates the tragedy, her murderer buries his tracks, and the world goes on. And she was only thirteen years old when she starred in the role. Ronan’s delivery is piercing — and pushes Lovely Bones up high on our list.
#4 — Nina Mikhailovna Zarechnaya in The Seagull by Anton Chekhov, 2018
Okay, so this one is kind of a stretch because it’s an adaptation of a play, but it’s too great not to include. One of Chekhov’s most significant plays, The Seagull follows four characters — the young Nina, the middling writer Boris Trigorin, the aging actress Irina, and her son the playwright Konstantin.
After 10 years, the all-grown-up Ronan and McEwan teamed up again for the adaption of his 2008 novel. In this one, a young couple negotiates societal pressures and sexual desires in 1962 England. McEwan, who also wrote the screenplay, told EW: “Movies do suffer from not being able to give you the inside of someone’s head — Saoirse just turning away, saying nothing with a look, can do all that for you…I was very happy to cut lines because we didn’t need them because we were in the hands of someone with [the] supreme ability of conveying the inside of a character’s thoughts.”
#6 — Melanie Stryder/Wanda in The Host by Stephenie Meyer, 2013
As McEwan so rightfully pointed out, Ronan is queen of the inner monologue made visible, which is maybe why she is the queen of book-to-film adaptations. What if you could use a love triangle to save your life? In The Host, written by the author of the Twilight series, an invisible enemy is invading people’s bodies and scooping out their memories. When Melanie Stryder’s body is invaded by the “soul” of Wanda, Melanie refuses to disappear, and the two struggle internally to inhabit the same body. Melanie makes Wanda an ally by filling her head with images of Jared — whom Melanie loves. And pretty soon Wanda does, too. The two take off in search of the man they both love. What could possibly go wrong?
In this adaptation of a dystopian YA novel, Ronan plays Daisy — the scrubby Manhattan teen sent to live in the English countryside to visit her aunt and cousins during a fictional third world war. Her aunt leaves on business, and in short order Daisy and her cousins are left to fend for themselves on the farm as London is bombed by an unknown enemy and the war gets closer to home.
#8— Lina Mayfleet in City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau, 2008
Right after proving she could take on the heaviest of real-life tragedies of death and war in Atonement, young Ronan showed us how to make the science fiction novel work on screen, too. City of Ember is a trilogy which follows two friends — Lina Mayfleet and Doon Harrow — as they try to save their city from total darkness. City of Ember, built 200 years ago, was meant to be the last refuge for the human race. Once a city of shimmering light, Ember is now starting to dim and flicker. Lina discovers an ancient message that might be the key to saving the city.
It’s crazy to imagine Ronan starred in Atonement the same year as this one. Originally a children’s book, this film follows three lost souls: a broken-hearted boy mourning the loss of his father, the boy’s mother, and the carpenter she hires to rebuild the boy’s lost nativity set in time for Christmas. The stodgy carpenter has his own reasons to be sour and mournful, which come to light as the Christmas holiday approaches.
This one is only at the bottom of the list because it hasn’t come out yet. But if you’ve been keeping track, this will be Ronan’s third book-to-film adaption to in 2018 alone. The film is an interpretation of the biography My Heart is My Own: The Life of Mary Queen of Scots by John Guy, which retells the story of Queen Mary as a shrewd and charismatic ruler at an unruly time. The film comes out in December, and I will be counting down the days until we get to see Ronan play the tough-as-nails queen who ruled with vigor from the time she was nine-months old and battled for power against Queen Elizabeth I before being executed.
Honorable Mentions
For those films in which books play a supporting role:
Really this one deserves to be in the top ten, but only gets bumped to the “honorables” list because the film was “inspired” by Zweig’s writing, but is also 100% Wes Anderson. Zero Moustafa becomes the entrusted apprentice and confidante of Gustave H, the illustrious concierge of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the Republic of Zubrowka. Zero falls in love with Agatha (Ronan), the badass pastry chef with a birthmark that looks like Mexico, who can whip up a prison break with little more than a palette knife, flour and sugar.
Arrietty in The Secret World of Arrietty (based on the novel The Borrowers by Mary Norton), 2010
A Japanese animated adaptation of the The Borrowers, Arrietty follows the Clock family, the tiny folks living in another family’s home, “borrowing” the small, simple things they need to get by. All is well and good for the Clocks until their daughter, Arrietty (Ronan) is discovered by the family the Clocks are borrowing home from.
Irena in The Way Back (inspired by the memoir The Long Walk by Sławomir Rawicz), 2010
The year is 1941 when three men escaping communist Russia meet four other escapees and a young teenage girl (Ronan) as they trek 4,000 miles on foot to freedom in India. The movie was inspired by The Long Walk, a memoir about Sławomir Rawicz’s personal experience as a Polish prisoner of war who escaped communist Russia in the ‘40s.
It’s been one year since Jon Bois’s visceral and unparalleled 17776 was posted on SB Nation, and trying to define it is still a half-impossible endeavor. Wikipedia calls it a “serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative” — the story unfolds as a transcription of untagged, color-coded dialogue, images, and gifs. Its alternate title — What Football Will Look Like in the Future — is technically an accurate depiction of its subject matter, but it might be better described as “three sentient satellites pass the time watching America’s now-immortal population try to pass the time.” I could say it’s a hilarious and heartbreaking meditation on what it means to be human, even when you have been stripped of the hallmarks and drawbacks of the human body. But the best way to experience 17776 is to just click the link and read — and watch — it for yourself.
Pioneer 9
Three satellites have been roaming space for thousands of years: Pioneer 9 (Nine), Pioneer 10 (Ten), and the Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice). Nine is the last of the three satellites to gain consciousness, and they serve as our window into this new world, our questioning tether. Ten is their encouraging, self-appointed sister, Nine’s guide (and ours) to understanding America in 17776; Juice is a non-sequitur, rip-roaring delight with diction pulled straight from the depths of the internet.
“On April 7th, 2026, people stopped being born. On the same day, people stopped dying, and people stopped aging,” Ten explains.
“ham cheese. ham cracker. cheese cracker. ham and cheese cracker. ham and cheese,” Juice says. “rip lunchables”
That extra “7” in 17776 isn’t a typo; the bulk of the action in the story takes place 15,000 years in the future. It’s a future that’s at once totally alien and strangely familiar: for reasons that no human or satellite has been able to puzzle out, people stopped dying, aging, and being born in 2026. Everyone on earth in 17776 has been alive for 15,000 years, too. In the time between, humanity fixed everything that needed to be fixed and solved everything that needed to be solved (or, more accurately, decided that they had reached their plateau). All that’s left for mankind now is recreation — they make games, and they play them. In America, they play football.
17776 takes the shape of a horror story where the agony of boredom is the enemy, and empathy the triumphal hero. It’s thrumming with the barely-contained unease of this new world. 17776 doesn’t dwell on the terror of its premise, but horror is pressing up against every part of the narrative from underneath, right below the surface. It’s is a masterwork of suspense, both in individual chapters like Chapter 17 (“No no no no no no.”) and over the course of the whole story (my heart stopped when Nine’s battery warning flashed in Chapter 23). It’s a suspense that makes your skin crawl from the very beginning: though you can access 17776 from a dedicated title page if you’ve visited the link before, it’s first introduced as a seemingly normal SB Nation story that slowly dissolves into repetitions of “Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong.” In Chapter 1, you feel Nine’s raw desperation and isolation, compounded by the fact that neither you — nor they — understand what’s happening to them. And the format itself just increases the unease — in order to continue the narrative, you have to physically scroll farther and farther, the months and years of the calendar stretching into physical space.
17776 takes the shape of a horror story where the agony of boredom is the enemy, and empathy the triumphal hero.
Even when the narrative dives into the details and goes long about the minutiae of the specific football games, the satellites uncover the human impetus behind each increasingly unbelievable game format. “Boredom is their only enemy,” Ten explains. “And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives.” “the point of play is to distract yourself from play being the point,” says Juice. In Chapter 20, Eddie Krieger — a player who has been hiding out in the same cave, with a football that’s still in play, for 9,313 years — admits to the agony of endlessness: “The game only barely matters to me at this point,” he says. “It’s enough to keep me going. It’s an objective, you know? It’s an objective.” The stranger Eddie is talking to is a missionary — a true believer in God—but he offers up one of the most chilling lines in 17776: “Maybe I am in Heaven, and Heaven is scary.” That’s perhaps the best description for the world of 17776, where mundane anxieties and griefs are swept away in favor of the deeper horrors of eternity: a scary heaven.
The fact that 17776 is funny, and often beautiful, keeps you at arm’s length from the abject horror of what endless life on Earth would actually look like. While Bois fleshes out his world with an enormous amount of detail, there are certain questions that are never answered. Are people unkillable, as well as immortal? Has no one tired of soldiering through eternity and tried to find the answer to that question? But no one talks about death — self-imposed or otherwise — except as a relic of a time that no longer exists.
17776 looks its premise in the face with relentless optimism — an optimism that I found a little bit hard to believe. When Nine asks Ten why technology hasn’t advanced in the past 15,000 years, she replies that “those advances would inevitably intrude on their humanity. People wanted to walk. They wanted to take the bus that smelled like cigarettes. They wanted those precious three minutes between asking a question and knowing the answer.”
Yes, it’s the end of the world; yes, whole cities have sunk into the sea, but our worst impulses have vanished with them.
I’m not sure if this is true of the world we live in, but it’s true in the world of 17776, where all other ills have been done away with. Yes, it’s the end of the world; yes, whole cities have sunk into the sea, but our worst impulses have vanished with them. And that’s because 17776 loves people. That’s its antidote.
It focuses on people at their best and most human, which is made doubly beautiful by the fact that everyone in 17776 has either learned to become human or fought to maintain their humanity in the face of becoming something different. (Are we human without all our worst parts? Are we human without death?)
17776 loves the way that people love people, and the way that people love satellites, and lightbulbs, and the useless, myopic detail of the games we create. The whole narrative is an ode to that same character trait that causes people to reach out and try to pet their Roombas — or to affectionately draw fan art of anthropomorphized satellites.
Juice spends all of Chapter 10 explaining the world’s ugliest stadium with all the pride of a parent, exhibiting an enthusiastic obsession with the people who built it. Whenever anyone apologizes for being boring or annoying, their conversational partner is eager to reassure them. “No, no, no, it’s a beautiful story,” says Nancy in Chapter 8, after listening to a citizen of Bee, Nebraska, talk about a small and inconsequential ballroom. “I love it.”
The world’s ugliest stadium. (Image by Jon Bois)
This hyperempathy is overflowing from every facet of 17776, but I was most affected by it in Chapter 20, where Eddie Krieger — the man in the cave whose isolation rivals Nine’s — is found by the missionary, a member of a group called No Rock Unturned. “No Rock Unturned is a project made up of people like me who walk all across America,” the man begins cheerfully. “Our goal is to eventually count everyone in America as a friend!” In this version of America’s future, no one is left behind; no one and nothing is allowed to be lonely or forgotten — not even the ordinary landmarks that Juice shows Nine in Chapter 16, ponds and sidewalks that no one has visited in thousands of years.
17776 loves small things by watching them. It lavishes attention on things that we would not consider meaningful in 2018, much less 15,000 years in the future. Ten recites a eulogy for the Livermore Bulb, a lightbulb that burned from 1901 to its untimely destruction-by-football in 17776: “The bulb lived, to us, and life deserves to be immortal,” she says. “It will live on in our memories, where it will perhaps find more happiness than it ever did hanging from a ceiling. We love you and we will miss you.”
Even the close-to-last words from our three favorite satellites are simply a mutual declaration: “I love you guys.” “Love you too.” “love y’all too”
After the end of the world, human curiosity is still intact, and it’s what keeps us alive. So even when 17776 centers on the futility of endless play, it walks that razor’s edge between horror and the beauty of love. People latch onto football out of desperation, because it gives them a reason to live. People latch onto football because creating things with other people is what we’re built for.
It’s 2018 now, which means we’re one year closer to April 7th, 2026. The Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is being tested right now, and we’re fast approaching its 2022 launch. We’re one year closer to 17776, but we seem to be moving farther from its idealized picture of humanity with every day that passes. The past year, on a global level, has been exhausting, and heartbreaking, and full of reminders of the worst and most inhuman things that people can do to one another. The horror of the world is enormous and overwhelming.
We’re one year closer to 17776, but we seem to be moving farther from its idealized picture of humanity with every day that passes.
But: It’s 2018, and right now, the Livermore Centennial Lightbulb is still burning in its socket, soft and yellow-orange, just as it has been for 117 years. Its glass is cloudy. The light it gives off is not bright; it hardly even fills the firehouse of the Livermore-Pleasanton Fire Department. But it is steadfast, it is cared for, and it is loved. It’s a beacon — for some, a pilgrimage.
17776 gave its residents immortality. What they did with it — and the kindnesses they chose to do to their neighbor — was entirely up to them. And every day, they choose to latch on to the things they need in order to survive one more day, because with every new day comes the chance to notice someone for who they are, and for who they are capable of becoming.
The verse on the missionary’s question list in Chapter 20 is Philippians 4:8: “Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy — think about such things.”
It’s this sense of awe that permeates the narrative as much as — if not more than—the horror does. “the mere fact that anything exists is a miracle in the first place,” says Juice. 17776 pays unwavering attention to the beauty in ordinary things, because in the end, that is what’s most important: remembering the things that were, and loving the things that remain.
The world is big, and it is terrible. We are not the sun, or even a street lamp. But each one of us can be the Livermore bulb. In 17776, Jon Bois sees the love that we are capable of. Each one of us can pour ourselves out in the way that everyone in 17776 does, and the way the Livermore Bulb does: quietly and steadily, with empathy for everything and everyone. We can notice, and from noticing, watch; we can watch, and from watching, love.
We can choose to keep living for love. It’s what 2018 needs from us.
Three years ago this spring, I began an interview series on Fiction Advocate called Non-Fiction by Non-Men. Despite the name of the parent site, I started this series with the hope of being an advocate of nonfiction. I was a year out of my M.F.A. program at Columbia University, where I studied creative nonfiction, and as I was cleaning out boxes of old workshop drafts and photocopied syllabi, I was dismayed to realize that I had spent most of the past two years reading work written by writers who were mostly men, mostly white, mostly straight, mostly cis, mostly American or European, and mostly dead, or at least well on their way. I made a New Year’s resolution to spend 2015 only reading books written by women writers, and then I decided I wanted to go one step further: I wanted to talk to these women. I wanted to ask them questions about their experiences as writers, how they approach writing in general and nonfiction specifically, and, most importantly, I wanted their names to be known. I also wanted an excuse to email some incredible women I admire and try to trick them into being my friend under the guise of a professional interview.
I began by talking to the women writers I knew personally, through my M.F.A. program, those who had been my professors and mentors — Patricia O’Toole, Margo Jefferson, Lis Harris, Cris Beam — and, from there, the ripples began. Those women recommended other women for me to talk to, who recommended other women, who recommended even more women. (So far all the interviewees have been women, but I named it “non-men” with the intention to include genderqueer writers as well.) Though men were still dominating the nonfiction bestseller list (and still are: as of the writing of this, only three of the fifteen paperback nonfiction bestsellers this week were written by women), I realized there was a nonfiction mafia of women, looking out for each other, supporting each other, and encouraging each other. And from speaking with them and listening to them, I learned, and continue to learn, so much.
So far I have published 39 Non-Fiction by Non-Men interviews, one a month for over three years, and I have no intentions of stopping any time soon. Most recently I interviewed Morgan Jerkins (author of This Will Be My Undoing, interview to be published in August 2018) and Nicole Chung (author of All You Can Ever Know, interview to be published in September 2018). Being able to talk with these smart, kind, thoughtful writers has been an education in itself — I have learned more from them, dare I say, than I learned in my M.F.A.
Here are just some of the things I have learned from Non-Fiction by Non-Men.
THERE IS NO ONE PATH TO BECOMING A WRITER
Some days I am so jealous of my friends who are lawyers. They knew what they wanted to do, and they followed the path to get there: law school applications, LSAT, three years of law school, studying for the bar, passing the bar, and then, boom, they’re lawyers. The path to becoming a writer, however, has no such checklist. Some get an M.F.A.; others never finish college. Some start as journalists; others start by writing secret blogs. Having no set path can be totally terrifying, but also liberating.
Patricia O’Toole: I went to a Catholic grade school, and in the 1950s it was clear — even to a six-year-old — that priests have much more power and many more privileges than nuns. And that boys had more prerogatives than girls. I didn’t want to be in the girls’ choir. I wanted to be an altar boy. And I didn’t want to try out for the cheerleading squad. I wanted to be on the basketball team. Not possible, and nobody could give you an explanation that made sense, so you’re left with a big “Why?” If your temperament takes you toward writing nonfiction, that “Why?” opens field after field of inquiry. In my case, the questions were about the dynamics of power — between men and women, haves and have-nots, the strong and the weak, the citizen and the state
Cris Beam: I really love learning about different types of people, and I love reporting on them. I started out as a journalist–I’ve always wanted to know how people think, and why they do the things they do. I write to try to understand how people make their decisions, how they live together, how they form communities. You can do that with fiction, you can imagine—but nonfiction allows me to actually spend time with people and ask them questions I might not be able to ask in fiction. Nonfiction allows me to be a kind of spy.
Nonfiction allows me to actually spend time with people and ask them questions I might not be able to ask in fiction. Nonfiction allows me to be a kind of spy.
YOU DON’T CHOOSE NONFICTION; NONFICTION CHOOSES YOU
Almost every writer I have interviewed told me that she first thought she was going to be a novelist; fiction seems to be everyone’s first love. But then some of us realize that the things we make up aren’t nearly as exciting as the things happening in real life, some of us start to get paid to write about the world around us, others fall in love with the form of the essay, some are just really bad liars. No little bookish kid ever seems to think, “When I grow up, I am going to write researched longform essays.” Instead, as you grow as a writer, nonfiction seems to choose you.
Mary Mann: I moved into nonfiction because that’s just how things shook out. I had an internship at The Onion when I first started out. Obviously those stories are not real, but they treat it like journalism — writers spit-balling stuff off each other. I liked that world… I applied to the nonfiction program [at Columbia] because it felt natural… I also just love to read nonfiction. I love essays. And I love Geoff Dyer — for a while I was just reading and rereading his books. He was a big draw to Columbia’s nonfiction program, but he was also how I got into nonfiction in general. Looking at him, I realized you can do all the fun things when writing nonfiction: you can write, you can research, you can travel. You can do that with fiction too, but it made more sense to do that with nonfiction. Maybe it was just the examples I had.
Elizabeth Greenwood: Nonfiction feels like the only genre available to me. I wish it were more of a decision! … The best compliment I ever received was from a professor in college who said she thought I lived equally in my head and as in the world. Writing nonfiction is the best way I’ve encountered to honor that tendency. I’ve gained entrée into places I do not belong, and I have the luxury of following my curiosities… And I probably ask inappropriately personal questions at dinner parties.
FIGURING OUT HOW TO MAKE A CAREER AS A WRITER IS HARD
People don’t like to talk about money, but figuring out how to make money while also giving yourself enough time to write is one of the hardest balancing acts there is. It will take some time for you to find the thing that is right for you, and not everything works for everyone. Some people teach and write, others edit and write, others wait tables and write, others work in advertising and write. And, eventually, maybe, one day, you’ll be able to just write. But it takes time.
Mandy Len Catron: Having the time to really think about a subject and come to a mature, sophisticated perspective feels like a luxury, and a luxury that’s increasingly unattainable. That’s what I love about teaching. It doesn’t pay a lot, but it has a lot of flexibility, and it puts me in this position where my writing doesn’t have to respond to any market pressure. I can take my time thinking about things — but I have less time than I might as a freelance writer. So there are always trade-offs.
Nina MacLaughlin: I wasn’t in a nonfiction-writing mode when I took the carpentry job, and I wasn’t thinking it would be an interesting writing project because I was thinking about short stories and novels. But at the same time, every experience has that possibility. It wasn’t that impulse, though, that drove me to write Hammer Head. Later, I was pretty sensitive about this when the book became a reality — all these gimmicky experiential books like “the year I spent without shoes” or whatever. I really didn’t want to do that. People ask that often, oh, you’re trying carpentry as a woman and writing about it. But it’s been seven years now, so it’s no lark. It wasn’t just a vehicle for a book.
WHEN IT COMES TO WRITING ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE, YOU CAN’T WIN
People get mad if you write about them (“How dare you put my private life on blast?”) and people get mad if you don’t (“What, I’m not important enough to write about?”), so just accept that you can’t make everyone happy. You also can’t predict anyone’s reaction: maybe you think that your aunt is going to take issue with your descriptions of the abuse she suffered as a child; instead, she is pissed you described her hair as “brown” and not “auburn.”
Liz Prince: When I was in my early twenties, a lot of my comics were shorter gag strips about humorous situations my friends and I would get into, so my friends would actively try to make it into my comics. A lot of people assume that my friends would want to avoid being depicted in my work, but it’s actually been the opposite: I had friends who were hurt by the fact that they hadn’t shown up in my comics. They would say, “What, am I not funny enough?” So while I was deciding what I might put in a comic, my friends were trying to guess those situations or manipulate them in some way.
Sarah Perry: I tried to keep myself in the mindset that no one would ever read this thing. Otherwise I knew my tendency would be to self-censor. I would write what I needed to write and cut back later. But there are some family revelations that were really hard things, things that I had heard whispers of, or sideways rumors of as a kid, that only later got confirmed by my one aunt who will talk about these things. There were these big traumatic silences in my family that were, unfortunately, thematically related to Mom’s death. It was really difficult to figure out where my story ended, and what I had the right to say. It’s your story, it’s your life, you have the right to tell that, but you can’t just tell your story alone because everyone’s stories are connected. At some point you have to draw a circle. And I think there are a few things I mention in the book that I arguably don’t have the right to, but I had to make the decision and stand by it.
It’s your story, it’s your life, you have the right to tell that, but you can’t just tell your story alone because everyone’s stories are connected.
ACCEPT THAT YOU ARE GOING TO MAKE MISTAKES
When writing it’s easy to become paralyzed worrying that you are going to get something wrong. You will. Don’t use this as an excuse to be lazy about fact checking or research, but know that you are definitely not going to get everything right. Once you accept that fact, writing becomes a lot easier.
Edwidge Danticat: I am terrified of making mistakes, getting things wrong. Whenever you write nonfiction about anything whatsoever, someone will write to tell you that you maligned them or got something wrong. I like working with fact-checkers. When you work with big publications you get that, but it’s not always a given. Someone will always question your interpretation of things, but I like to get the factual things as right as possible and I feel a bit crushed — and somewhat ashamed — when I don’t. I recently read a profile of a writer who said she cried when she got things wrong and had to have that correction line at the bottom of her piece online. I can totally relate to that.
Daisy Hernández: After [my memoir A Cup of Water Under My Bed] was published, I realized I had never thought to ask [my family’s] permission or engage with them too much, because I felt a lot of ownership of their stories and the stories of our relationships, because my view of them had been so shaped by white America. I never asked my mother if it was okay to disclose that she had been undocumented. The memoir came out and I realized that was wrong, so I asked her after the fact, and she said, okay, why not! I got lucky there. So now I use that to remind my students that when you are going to write about other people, you are going to make mistakes. You cannot possibly see everything and predict everything, so you need to anticipate that you will make mistakes along the road and you will rectify that when the time comes.
You will often doubt yourself, especially when you are writing on a subject that is in a field you are not an expert in. This is okay. Use your status as an outsider as a way into the material, do your research, and, in the end, trust yourself.
Rebecca Traister: I didn’t come to politics writing as an authority, I came to it through feminism, because there was a woman running for president in 2008, which led to me writing about presidential politics. So it was actually okay with me for a long time that I wasn’t an authority. There was a learning curve for me before I accepted my own authority.
Anya Yurchyshyn: My first draft [of My Dead Parents] was 40,000 words longer than it needed to be. That is not a good thing. That is not what an editor wants. I had a whole chapter on my father’s career, as if anyone reading my book was reading it to learn about merchant banking. But I had known so little about his career and I was afraid of my own authoritative knowledge that I wanted everyone to know everything I had researched, to prove to my readers that I had become an authority. But I wasn’t able to make those decisions while researching, and I was so afraid of leaving something out, which is why I over-researched so much, and then, when I was writing, I wanted credit for doing the work. But your own poor time management is no one else’s fault.
WRITING ABOUT YOUR LIFE HELPS YOU MAKE SENSE OF IT
So many of the writers I have talked with said that they were pulled to nonfiction after years of journaling. Even if you primarily write novels or short stories, journaling about your own real life can help you figure out what you think about the world. It can be a form of therapy.
Jennifer Finney Boylan: Our lives are full of chaos, random and contradictory events that make you feel like you’ve just gone off the big flume at the end of Splash Mountain, leaving you dizzy, confused, and drenched. Finding a narrative for your life brings sense to that chaos. I can say that nothing taught me so much about being a woman as writing. In the same way, the challenge of writing is that, while it can be really great therapy, great therapy is not necessarily good writing.
Melissa Broder: Writing has helped to keep me alive and give me a sense of meaning. It gives me a sense of motion and a feeling of control. If I am in this big moveable world, being moved by forces not my control, writing gives me the illusion of having a little treadmill in the abyss. Through writing I can square off an area, and I can move within that area… My journal is largely a lot of exercises I am doing with myself to keep my mind from consuming itself.
The challenge of writing is that, while it can be really great therapy, great therapy is not necessarily good writing.
GENRE IS TOTAL BULLSHIT
While I focused my series on women who write nonfiction, so many of my interview subjects told me that they don’t primarily identify as “nonfiction writers.” Many started as poets or short story writers; others have written fiction and nonfiction simultaneously. Genre is fluid, and you shouldn’t box yourself in. Sometimes writing fiction can help you figure out how to write better nonfiction, and vice versa.
Eula Biss: As a teacher, I sometimes talk about sub-genres of nonfiction as a pedagogical tool to help students think about certain features of the work we are studying, but I understand sub-genres, like genres, as false categories. There’s long-form journalism, for instance, that looks identical to personal essay. There’s memoir that is also art criticism. There’s literary criticism that is essentially memoir, sometimes unintentionally. I think of lived experience as a form of research, so I don’t treat passages that are drawn from lived experience differently than I treat passages that are drawn from other sorts of research.
Suki Kim: I think what is so unfortunate about genre is that people think about it as so black and white. It’s either reported nonfiction or it’s a memoir. But that’s not true. There is a whole tradition of literary nonfiction that involves blending [genres]. There are the bones of the story, which would be the reporting, but then you try to build the story in a literary way — not just handing over information but handing over ideas. But depending on how the publisher packages the book, people only look at it as one way or another… Perspective changes everything.
THE INTERNET IS THE BEST AND WORST THING TO HAPPEN TO NONFICTION
Many of the writers I interviewed got their start through blogging or writing for online outlets. The Internet is great because it has allowed so many more people — often those who have long been denied a platform, such as women and people of color and LGBTQ folks — to be heard. But, at the same time, there is now much more noise, and, also, sometimes maybe people who don’t deserve a platform have one (i.e. Neo-Nazis). The Internet also allows for writers and readers to interact on a more personal and immediate level — for better and for worse.
Dodai Stewart: It’s exciting, because you can discover writers you never would have been able to find in the past. And for all the bad things about the Internet, it is a meritocracy: if something is good, it gets shared, and you will see it, even if it’s a writer you’ve never heard before or the subject matter is something you wouldn’t have looked into yourself.
Samantha Irby: I say all the time that all I want to do is make a woman laugh. Life is trash and it’s hard, and there will be people who make you think and feel and all that, but if I can make you laugh or bring you delight you in some way, that’s why I do it. So when people reach out to me and say hey, I was having a terrible day and I read this thing you wrote, and I felt better, that makes it worth it to me. And I’ve consistently gotten that feedback. Sometimes I wonder why I’m still doing this, like I think ughhh who still has a blog anymore, but then I’ll get an email from someone saying that a post from two months ago made their day. If someone, somewhere, is still laughing at it — that’s the biggest reward. Knowing that people enjoy it. Especially when it comes to my blog — I do that shit for free. I don’t even have ads on it. It’s just a labor of love. So when I get those messages from people, it makes it all worth it.
Don’t write about something because you think it is trendy or marketable. If you write about the things you really care about, your passion for that subject will come through. Readers respond to that. And don’t let anyone tell you that there are subjects that are off-limits to you because of who you are.
Meghan Daum: I love the personal essay because it can incorporate so many different genres in a single piece of writing. There can be elements of reporting, criticism, memoir, poetry, comedy, and on and on. Certain stand-up comics are essentially essayists in that they’re up on stage reflecting on a set of ideas or observations.
Margo Jefferson: My first official job was at Newsweek in the 1970s. The challenge for a writer of color and for a woman is that it was very easy to get stereotyped as the person who would write exclusively about black literature, women’s literature. I made a very conscious decision to write about both and not to do that exclusively. I would not let myself get pushed off turf, which I was capable of writing about — reviewing European literature, European history, white American male artists. I worked very hard to do all of those things. And I made sure that other people of color, women — I made sure that their work was reviewed by me, because I cared about it — and it was almost never getting reviewed by anybody else… It was my way of asserting two kinds of power and confidence and authority. The power I had as a black person and a woman, and the power I had to look at the world and the larger culture.
LEARN FROM OTHER WRITERS
I asked every writer I interviewed to quote another woman writer of nonfiction that she admires, and the reoccurring problem each writer had was trying to narrow down which quote to choose. Read, read, read. There is no better way to learn how to write.
Ann Friedman: Women writers, or anyone in a competitive, creative field, are bound to feel sometimes that there are limited spaces for success. That if another woman succeeds, there’s no room for them to get great assignments or land a dream job. That’s a fucking lie. Women writers need to recognize that our work is very powerful when read in tandem with other women’s work — and that a success for one of us means opportunities for others, too… I definitely still get jealous. I read things and go, “Oh my god, she’s so good, I’m never writing another word again!” I have to remind myself that our work is different. And try to learn from what makes her stuff so good. And, if I’m in an exceptionally zen mode, send her an email telling her how much I liked her article.
Miranda K. Pennington: In a letter in response to some rough reviews, Charlotte Brontë wrote, “It would take a great deal to crush me.” I want it as a tattoo on my wrist, but I think that would be kind of tempting fate because my wrist would actually be pretty easy to crush.
PEOPLE ARE GOING TO GIVE YOU CRAP
Some people might not like the fact that you are writing. Some people might give you a hard time for who you are. Find the people who support and encourage you, rely on them, and try your best to ignore the rest. They’re jerks.
Scaachi Koul: Ten years ago people started to say oh, women are writing memoirs and essays, how weird, but women were already writing essays and memoirs, it was just then that people started to notice… At the very least the industry is realizing that [nonfiction by women] can be profitable. You’ve got your Roxane Gays, your Lindy Wests, your Jessica Valentis, and your Sam Irbys, who write these really wonderful, interesting books, and they start to make money, and everyone all of a sudden everyone goes what? This is legitimate? And they shit themselves because they never knew it could be possible. I mean, we’re still struggling with people being cool with women writing fiction, so I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised. I’ve done interviews with people where they are like oh my god, get a load of you, you’re a girl and you’re funny? Like they don’t understand how it’s possible, and then I’m stuck explaining how I can have a vagina and be funny… I mean, well, my humor does come directly from my ovaries, straight from vulva to mouth.
Lis Harris:I had people say to me, “Oh, you’re a serious writer! But you’re so pretty!” They think they’re being charming, and you want to spit.
Ten years ago people started to say oh, women are writing memoirs and essays, how weird, but women were already writing essays and memoirs, it was just then that people started to notice.
WRITING NONFICTION GIVES YOU POWER
When you write nonfiction, you are in control of the story. So often marginalized groups do not get the power to control their narratives; writing nonfiction changes which voices are being heard. Keep writing, keep pushing, and keep telling the stories that the mainstream isn’t hearing.
Amani Al-Khatahtbeh: I started writing nonfiction as a means of survival. For me, writing was the only space I could squeeze myself into. Chronicling my experiences became a way to make sense of them. It also felt like the only way I could get my voice out there. When I held the pen, I was the one with the mic. It not only empowered me with a platform, it also connected me with my friends and other likeminded people.
Virgie Tovar: I always got the sense that people wanted me to be silent, that I was some kind of inconvenient witness to the culture and the darker side of people. When you’re a fat woman of color, you see a part of humanity that people with privilege don’t see, and the culture wants to silence that… When you’re a woman, your perspective is not the perspective that society is operating within. Women are constantly getting gas-lit by society, but when we write the story we place ourselves as the director of our own interpretation. Our perspective is no longer up for debate. It is simply truth. So when you are a woman writing nonfiction, you are getting to dictate the terms of the world…
NONFICTION BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER
Nothing feels quite as good as relating to a piece of writing — either as the writer or the reader. Being a human can be a very lonely experience, but to send something out into the world, or to stumble on something that someone else has created, and to find someone else who relates to your story… that’s what it’s all about.
Michelle Kuo: Writing about people makes you more compassionate about them, and that’s rewarding. It pushes us to be more ethical, alert, active. I went to Arkansas and Mississippi for a book tour, and the reactions to the book there were so different from on the East or West Coast. People there saw Reading with Patrick as a call to action. It inspired them to get into literacy work, or research how to become involved. Writing nonfiction gives you the sense that there are real, pulsing people out there… Nonfiction helps people realize and become more aware of being part of a web of humanity.
MariNaomi: Some of my stories feel so personal and weird, I worry that people won’t relate. That makes it extra special when readers tell me they identify, or that my point of view opened their eyes a little. It’s the reason I do all this.
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