How Pregnancy Taught Me to Say No to Everything and Write Novels Instead

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I noticed it early in my first pregnancy, when I was 32: the world treated me differently with a baby inside me than it did when I was a solo human practitioner, uterus vacant and belly comparatively flat. Some of the changes I didn’t mind: a dependable seat on the subway during rush hour, encouragement from my boss to go home early for no particular reason. Thoughtful gifts that turned up unexpectedly from far-flung relatives: pricey swaddling blankets, the nursing pillow with the all-time cringiest product name: My Breast Friend. Other turns were not as nice: the strangers who felt free to fondle my belly, the wild-eyed guy who screamed he’d “put a death curse” on my baby after I’d “stolen” his parking spot. My male obstetrician, who seem fixated on my weight gain, reminding me to keep an eye on it at every appointment.

But the most prevalent change I felt as a pregnant woman was the general permission to opt out. Of anything: dinner with friends, after-work drinks with colleagues, jogs in the park. Of cleaning the bathroom, book club meetings, my exercise regimen and cooking dinner. Of answering the phone.

The most prevalent change I felt as a pregnant woman was the general permission to opt out.

I realized, with increasing exhilaration, that as a pregnant woman, I was off the hook. Nobody explicitly told me I had a pass, of course, but it was something I felt, a subtle shift in energy between me and everyone else: my husband, my colleagues, my friends, my own mother. For the first time in my life, I felt the power to say No, without fumbling through excuses. My excuse was growing inside me. Anyone could see it.

Why was this significant? Well, I’ve always had unusual difficulty saying no to everyday requests from perfectly nice people. I first became aware of this tendency in college, and of the pattern intensifying as I moved into adulthood. On the surface, the inclination toward “small yeses” (as a therapist once called it) might not seem like a problem. But ordinary appeals — even well-meaning invitations — anything from Can you grab the dry cleaning to Got a little time to talk? to Want to come with me to a show tonight? — had begun to stir vague panic in my chest by the time I turned 30. Not because the individual questions were unreasonable, or because anyone was trying to take advantage of me, or because I was truly opposed to the activity at hand. The panic stemmed from the feeling that, regardless of my actual desire — and unless I had a real, hard conflict (or made one up) — I could not say no.

I did this over and over and over, for nearly a decade. Between grad school and having children, mid-20s to early 30s, I became the sort of writer who did not publicly identify as a writer — despite having written furiously from an early age, despite having completed an MFA, despite having published a slew of poems and short stories. Privately, writer was my primary label, right up there with woman and human. But when people asked what I did, I’d consider for a flash how much time I actually spent writing — as in, ass-in-chair, words-on-page — and say, Well, I work full-time in HR, but I also write fiction, sometimes.I got an MFA, so…” I’d trail off with a self-conscious laugh before quickly segueing into, And what about you?

Perhaps it was spinelessness, or a classic feminine desire to please, or a dearth of self-knowledge. Perhaps it was a confusion of priorities, or a lack of discipline. Whatever the culprit, one consequence was crystal-clear and chafed at me every day: I was not writing enough, or hardly at all, despite the fact that I desperately wanted to be writing. I had no time to write, because I chose to have no time, by saying yes to everything else.

I had no time to write, because I chose to have no time, by saying yes to everything else.

I spent my first pregnancy noticing the opportunity to change my accommodating ways, but not doing much about it. After my son was born, I slipped back right back into yes-ing, perhaps more wantonly than ever. When he was almost one, we moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, where the weather was always great, and I downgraded my HR career (always more of a necessity than a choice) to very part-time contract work. The combination of 75-degree, blue-sky days, a minimal paycheck, and ample unscheduled time with my son made me feel beholden to some hazy debtor. Even though mothering was plenty challenging, it didn’t feel like enough of a contribution, and being a mostly stay-at-mom seemed too luxurious. In retrospect, this would have been a perfect time of life to write, but instead, I filled it up with nonstop obliging of other people: I agreed to edit the resumes of people I barely knew (everyone’s favorite “small favor” to ask of their friend who works in HR), volunteered to host toddler playdates, spent hours counseling a new mom friend about her divorce, shuttled my son to ridiculous activities he mostly screamed (not happily) through, like “Baby Zip Line Time!” Most nights, I prepared elaborate vegetarian meals to eat with my husband, turning down his frequent offers to simply pick up dinner on his way home.

Why, why, why? I desired almost none of these commitments I’d imposed upon myself. In the shower, I would fantasize about a perfect day: a few sweet hours with my son, a little money-making work, a solid bank of writing time, dinner that magically appeared on the table.

In the shower, I would fantasize about a perfect day: a few sweet hours with my son, a little money-making work, a solid bank of writing time.

But I was not writing. Not at all. Instead, I was scrambling to Target and Kidnasium and chopping vegetables.

Everyone appreciated my efforts, but no one required them. But I needed the acknowledgements. I needed to be verified as doing stuff for other people, being industrious, helpful. The need burned hot and low inside me, re-igniting with every invitation, every potential favor, every casual request. My first reaction was always to speculate what the other person wanted me to say. My own desire, well — I’d deal with that later.

My real desire was to write. I had an idea for a novel in my head, rumbling and writhing and demanding release. And yet I would not make the time to release it. A hard knot of self-disgust lodged permanently in my gut. I softened it by telling myself, over and over, that the time would come. That at some point, in the not-too-distant future, the universe was going to hand me a chunk of sumptuous, golden time to write a novel, its purpose as clear as a holiday turkey on a platter.

The irony was, I’d already been handed the turkey. A writing life back then, in fall of 2009, was fully available to me. I had childcare and a wonderfully supportive husband and a godforsaken laptop. All I had to do was open it.

But then a text chimed from a mom friend with a two-year-old: Possible for me to drop Maddie off for a few hours? Have an appt.

Sure thing! I shot back, and began combing my pantry to make sure I had little Maddie’s favorite snacks on hand.

And then I got pregnant again.

The morning sickness smacked me almost right away, something that hadn’t happened the first time. For a few weeks, the nausea and exhaustion were so intense I could hardly drag myself out of bed.

Then, it passed. I felt better. Much better. My husband and I announced the pregnancy. And then I remembered how it worked: the proffered subway seats back in Brooklyn, the encouragement from everyone to take it easy, the unexpected gifts.

The lowered expectations.

The easy Nos.

I got out of bed, ten weeks pregnant, and I began to write. I quit my mom’s group, referred people with problem-resumes to a good staffing agency, and let my husband fill up our Veggie Grille punch cards with takeout dinners.

With my new free time, I wrote and I wrote and I wrote. I wrote more that year, at 34, than I had in all of the previous decade; through a few thousand words a day (most of them throwaway, but still), the novel stuck inside me unfurled and released.

The pregnancy gave my sense of time new hard edges, parameters. My writing time no longer felt elastic or endlessly available. There was no creative paradise waiting for me somewhere outside the time-space continuum. There was, however, another newborn, another set of raw nipples, months of sleeplessness, just around the corner.

My writing time no longer felt elastic or endlessly available. There was no creative paradise waiting for me somewhere outside the time-space continuum.

So, I needed to write now — while my pregnancy was cushioning me from the endlessly-demanding world.

The world could wait.

I finished a draft of my novel before my first daughter was born in August of 2010. Eventually I landed an agent and sold it. It was published in 2014, right around the time I got pregnant again.

I got bolder with the third pregnancy. I got up in the early morning dark and left the house. The kids were tiny — I’d just weaned my daughter — and mornings weren’t exactly a breeze. But my husband could handle it — of course he could! In fact, my going out in the mornings to write had been his idea, years ago. I’d just never taken him up on it.

Reading About the Worst Parts of Motherhood Makes Me Less Afraid

Why are you never at breakfast? my son sometimes asked me. Why can’t you work at home?

Because Mama needs to write, I said. Then I revised it: Because Mama loves to write.

My third pregnancy chugged along, bringing the same swollen calves and a preoccupation with Wetzel’s pretzels. This time, I didn’t even wait to “feel” the permission from others set in; I simply bashed into another novel and finished the draft shortly after my second daughter was born. It took longer to revise and sell this time, but I did it. Shockingly, it’s about motherhood, and desire, and time.

Most of our lifeline is unspecific. We know roughly when things will happen, but not precisely. Death looms on some vague horizon. Pregnancy, on the other hand, is a clean nine-month(ish) time capsule. It comes with its own unique set of expectations. It’s not an easy time, but for me, it was an essential gift. Twice. It enabled me to live according to my deepest-held priorities: to write regularly, with purpose. I may have always had the permission, but pregnancy gave me the courage claim it.

I may have always had the permission to write, but pregnancy gave me the courage claim it.

I no longer need to be pregnant to hold writing at the center of my life. This is fortunate, since I’m in my 40s now and not having any more babies. It’s sometimes still a struggle to guard my writing time, to protect it, to make it nonnegotiable, to not let competing priorities swallow it. Having a writing life, I’ve learned, is a matter of balancing desire with responsibility, discipline with flexibility, generosity with self-care. I’m still not immune to granting small yeses to the wrong requests. But I’ve learned to pause and ask myself what I really want from the brief, precious hours of my day. And when anyone asks, I never hesitate to tell them I’m a writer.

The 8 Best Curses In Literature

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For as long as we’ve told stories, we’ve told stories about curses. Often they’re punishments, occasionally they’re strictly allegorical, and sometimes they’re just plain bad luck.

Purchase the novel

But whatever their explanations, these enchantments provide exactly what we human beings long for both in literature and our daily lives — clear causes behind ruinous effects, explanations for the frightening and irrational.

Our misfortunes are much easier to bear when we attribute them to gods or evil spirits, and our guilt is much easier to stomach when we view events as operating outside of our own power. As Alexander Chee’s Lilliet Berne tells us, our true misfortune is “not that we cannot choose our Fates… [but] that we can.” Still there’s nothing like a good magical malady to get a plot moving, subtly moralize, or set up a scare.

Here are the eight best curses in literature:

Cassandra in The Iliad by Homer

You can’t beat Greek mythology for tragedy. Cassandra sees her future — which includes the downfall of her family and the destruction of her home — and is cursed to have no one believe her visions. In several versions of her story, the god Apollo first gifts her with the power of prophecy, then curses her to never be heeded when she refuses to sleep with him in thanks. Some things never change.

Lilliet Berne in The Queen of the Night by Alexander Chee

Chee’s novel is steeped in the melodrama of the operatic form, so naturally his heroine is plagued by a curse. Lilliet is a falcon soprano, doomed to one day lose the lovely voice that both launches her career and puts her in path of danger. Whether or not the curse is real, Lilliet operates under a veil of superstition and intrigue, making drastic decisions in the name of her supposedly inevitable fate.

Effia in Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

A fire rages in the woods on the night Effia is born, and because of this her village thinks of her as cursed. She’s told she’ll never become a woman and will be sterile. Though this curse “may have been rooted in a lie…it bore the fruit of truth:” Effia does have a son with a British slave trader, but her descendants struggle with colossal horrors throughout the next century.

Madeleine in Madeleine is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

The cause of Madeleine’s long, enchanted sleep is unclear — she falls into it after being horrifically punished for a sexual encounter with a man in her provincial French town. Throughout Bynum’s delicious novel, Madeleine is asleep and dreams about a gypsy circus and fantastic metamorphoses. Perhaps it’s waking life that is the actual curse.

Ursula Todd in Life After Life by Kate Atkinson

Here’s another curse that might actually be a gift: each time Ursula Todd dies, her life begins again from infancy. This allows her to live out all sorts of alternate histories, each time with a faint sense of déjà vu that steers her away from her previous cause of death. Atkinson’s clever structure reminds readers of the curse we share with Ursula: the utter randomness of seminal events.

The Watson Family in The Book of Speculation by Erika Swyler

Simon and Enola Watson come from a family of breath-holding carnival mermaids, yet one Watson woman from each generation mysteriously drowns on the same day each year. Bizarre ecological events, a strange old book, and a collapsing house hold the clues to the curse of July 24th — if, that is, Simon the librarian can piece them together in time.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke

Most literary curses are cast towards the beginning of a novel, and the recipient spends the story dealing with its effects. Not so for Strange and Norrell, who come into their curse at the very end of Clarke’s fantastic book. Having helped prevent disaster, the two magicians are cursed to remain together in darkness. For the competitive, ill-tempered magicians the curse of eternal togetherness is just as damning as the storm cloud that follows wherever they go.

The Pyncheon Family in The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Gothic literature is rife with ancestral curses, but none is more notorious than the one cast by Matthew Maule on Colonel Pyncheon, the man who stole the land on which he built his family home. Fast-forward one hundred years or so and we see the Pyncheons continuing to suffer an array of misfortunes, which include unjust imprisonments and untimely deaths.

How Many Emails Does It Take To Not Apologize?

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“Someone is Recording”

by Lynn Coady

Hi Erica,

I don’t know if you were expecting to hear from me or not after you posted your piece — but here I am. It does feel a bit strange to be getting in touch after all this time and under these particular circumstances. I often thought of dropping you a line in the years after I left Ottawa. I wanted to so many times. But honestly, I assumed you wouldn’t be thrilled to hear from me and it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. Now that I’ve read your essay, I can’t help but think that, despite your very clear irritation with me, you were, in your way, reaching out. If that’s so, I’m glad you did.

And I’m glad you’re giving us this opportunity to hash out what happened. I’ll admit to being a little blindsided that you chose to do it in quite this way, and in this particular venue. My wife tells me thepinkghetto.soy is sort of a DIY, Millennial-centric version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s website — Goo? — with a sprinkling of personal essays. But I suppose a Millennial audience is the only one that matters these days, at least when it comes to those all-important “clicks.” Anyway, I’m very happy to know you’re still writing — it brought me back to the days when we used to comment on each other’s work. And to be honest I’m grateful to you for taking initiative to re-establish contact in such a decisive and — let’s face it — attention-getting way. I understand how important it must’ve been for you to write that piece. I do wish you had contacted me before taking it online — honestly, my delight in hearing from you again would’ve overrode any defensiveness or hostility if that’s how you were expecting me to respond. But the important thing is it’s out in the open now, and we can finally talk about it. It’s bothered me over the years, especially after how we left things. And you know what? I’d be lying if I said I haven’t missed talking to you. We had some great conversations back then.

Let me start by saying I was young and dumb. I’ll to cop to that a hundred percent. And insensitive, and kind of pompous and up my own ass, absolutely — a white, male Ph. D candidate in full plumage. Yup. The only thing I really take issue with in the piece is what you call our “power dynamic.” Erica, what power? I was a TA. Hollister barely knew my name; it’s not like I somehow maneuvered him into hiring me so I could be the one overseeing your grades. Not to mention that our relationship had run its course long before you signed up for the class. And I was fine with that, despite what you assert in your essay. (Relationship is maybe too polite a word for it, but we were definitely involved, I think you’ll agree. I think you’ll also recall who made the first move. I certainly do. And it’s a very nice memory, by the way.)

That’s that my only quibble. Otherwise I just want to say bravo. It could not have been easy to put something so personal out there — although one of the things I always admired about you was your fearlessness when it came to “just letting it all hang out” in both your writing and your life. As you know, I tend to be a little more circumspect in my own work, more about ideas than feelings, but maybe that’s why your stuff is striking a chord with the kids on thepinkghetto.soy while mine remains a favorite of today’s hottest academic journals, ha ha. So, yes, the essay threw me at first. But ultimately it was good to think about those days again and consider another perspective, even if I don’t agree with that perspective one hundred percent. It shook me up, but we all need shaking up from time to time.

Anyway, it was great to read your work again — your way with a wry turn of phrase is as devastating as ever — and I’d love to hear more about what you’re up to. The bios on thepinkghetto are pretty scant, but exciting to hear you’ve been making a go of things in New York. Gatineau girl makes good! On my end, I finally landed a tenure track post at a liberal arts college down here in the wilds of Illinois. I have a daughter now who is — if you can believe it (I can’t) — ten years old as of last April. She’s called MacKenzie — Kenz for short — and is currently obsessed with, of all things, mushrooms. If you’ll indulge a doting dad, I can’t resist attaching a photo. This was taken by Kenz’s mom at the Grand Canyon earlier this year.

Please let me know how you’re doing. And thank you, Erica. It’s been genuinely illuminating to read your piece, to see things through your eyes and think about those days again. Thank you for giving me the opportunity, and the opening, to be in touch and to renew, I hope, our friendship.

all the very best,

Gary

Dear Erica,

I just turned 43, so if memory serves, that makes you around 38? Which strikes me as a little old (sorry) to be hanging out in obscure corners of the internet, posting your personal correspondence alongside teens girls sharing their diary excerpts and selfies and (this is the first thing I saw when I called up the site, FYI) compilation videos of blindfolded people spraying shaving foam into their mouths after being told it was whipped cream. When I didn’t hear back from you, I thought — Fair enough. I reached out, you turned away — that’s your prerogative. We don’t have to correspond. You’ve said your piece — said it to all the world, or at least to your snark-addicted young chums on thepinkghetto.soy — whereas I restricted myself to keeping my feelings about your essay between us. That was my intent anyway. Until you posted them.

It’s clear you’re not interested in hearing my side of things, and you’re welcome to post whatever you like, but I think it was a little offside to cherry pick the excerpts of my letter that you did and then embellish them with your own disparaging commentary. I’m sorry if I sounded at all condescending previously (“douchey” in your words — okay, I’ll own it), but I think you’ve spent enough time around humanities profs to know douchey is something a hazard of the trade. So ok, now I look douchey in front of your delighted teenybopper fanbase, but is that a fair way to win an argument? Is that “what the kids are into”? Maybe you’re no longer interested in what’s fair. Is it possible, Erica, this brief spate of online attention has gone to your head a little? Because this is not the woman I remember you to be.

I remember you as a passionate debater, obsessed with clarity and drilling down relentlessly in every argument to get to the truth. This thing you posted wasn’t worthy of that person. Look: I know I was a bastard at times back then. But you have to admit your part in all this too. There’s the matter of your hero-worship of Hollister, which I have to say your essay glossed over. You sneeringly call him “the great male author,” as if that’s not how you actually saw him back then. You were desperate to impress him. (I even warned you about that, about coming off as too abject. Remember?) But when you didn’t, you blamed me.

And, fair enough, I was a jerk about it. I was defensive and I’ll admit, it was hard to maintain my objectivity after all your accusations. But let’s not pretend all this wasn’t a two-way street.

I want you to know I shared your latest post with my wife, Andrea. I let her read the first one too, as she and I don’t keep secrets from one another. We stayed up late after Kenz had been tucked into bed, talking about everything that happened, and with Andrea’s help I was able to put my hurt feelings aside and really come to grips with the role I played back then, and why, after all these years, you are still so angry about it. And so dead set, it seems, on making a fool of me online. Andrea asked me if, in my previous email to you, I ever said that I was sorry. I was sure that I had, but reading it over again I realize that, while apologetic in tone, the email doesn’t contain a genuine apology. So I apologize for that and — Erica? I apologize for everything. I’m truly sorry I hurt you. I understand if that’s not enough. I won’t write to you again.

With only good wishes,

Gary

You know, Erica, everything you said in that interview on YouTube, you could have said to my face. Is it that you think I won’t hear the things you have to say? Is that why you don’t bother? Because I’m telling you, I will. I have been. Can we actually talk? You can Skype me — my handle is IsntitByronic — or call my cell, the number of which has been at the bottom of every email I’ve sent you so far.

We need to work this out between us. I’ve had to lock my Facebook account thanks to your fan base, who think it’s hilarious to post memes they’ve fashioned from the sections of my emails you made public. The images accompanying this is not the woman I remember you to be were in particularly bad taste. My students contact me on there, or they used to. I also had a Twitter account I hardly ever looked at and yesterday a colleague hinted that I should. I saw I had over 100 mentions, all linking to your interview. I read a handful — I can’t imagine how empty a person’s life must be to spend all their time trawling the internet looking for strangers to mock and scold. Then I just shut the account down. These are your people, not mine. But maybe it’s time we take the dirty laundry inside, what do you say?

You should know I’ve had one or two people contact me wanting to hear my side of the story. I don’t know who these individuals are — honestly the fact that they even care about something that happened 15 years ago in Ottawa of all places strikes me as ludicrous. And splashing my private life across the internet isn’t my way of doing things. But if the harassment continues I’m not sure what option will be left to me.

Or we could just drop all this nonsense and talk like two old friends. The friends I thought we used to be.

Please just call me. Give me a chance to show that I hear you, Erica.

Gary

From: Burnam & Pace Law Group

To: Erica Shaffner:

RE: Cease and desist from online harassment

Dear Ms. Shaffner:

This CEASE AND DESIST ORDER is to inform you that your continued actions against our client Gary Weiland, including but not limited to:

1) Publishing false and defamatory assertions in various online venues including but not limited to thepinkghetto.soy

2) Inciting harassment of Mr. Weiland by publishing mocking and disparaging posts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook Live, Snapchat, Instagram, Reddit, WhatsApp Tumblr, LinkedIn and Flickr (where you posted images of Mr. Weiland that had been altered in various unflattering ways, including but not limited to: dressed as a mime, fashioned to resemble the cartoon-duck character Baby Huey, and with face superimposed on renderings of both Catherine the Great and her horse).

3) Giving online interviews wherein you characterize Mr. Weiland with disparaging and nonsensical language which we can only conclude is geared toward inciting the public’s hostile interest in him, including the epithets: “assbucket,” “shitsplat,” “chickentits,” and “knob.”

We insist you cease these activities immediately. You are to stop discussing Mr. Weiland online and in public and we require that you forward written confirmation to us affirming that you will do so (please see attached template). Severe legal consequences will ensue if you fail to comply with this demand. Your activities against Mr. Weiland constitute harassment and incitement to harass and have had an increasingly deleterious impact on our client’s quality of life. Mr. Weiland is prepared to pursue criminal and/or civil legal remedies should these activities against him continue.

This letter is the first and only warning you will receive.

Sincerely,

Amanda Cowan, Esq.

Hi Erica, me again. Whew, this whole thing has sort of blown up, hasn’t it? I’m sure you were as dumbstruck as I was to see the segment on MSNBC last night, however brief it was. It’s amazing what passes as news these days, but I guess that’s the age we live in now. I know you never intended for it to go this far. I’m not totally lacking in a sense of humor (you’ll remember, I’m sure, that brief but intense limerick writing phase I went through back in Ottawa) and as difficult as this process has sometimes been for me, I do see the joke. The other day I even caught Andrea chuckling at your Instagram feed. It took me a minute, but pretty soon I was chuckling right along with her. So believe me, I get it. The culture is going through some kind of catharsis right now I guess, and catharsis isn’t always a logical or intellectual process — sometimes it just involves venting. Society needs its whipping boys and when I consider how easy I’ve had it up to this point as white, male etc., I realize there are worse things than being made the butt of a joke — even a joke that’s gone viral.

So I’m trying to be sanguine about all this. But I realize sending a letter from my lawyer was not a particularly sanguine move, and I’m sorry about that. Amanda isn’t even really my lawyer — I mean, she is a lawyer, but she’s Andrea’s sister (they’re twins). She advised me the letter might not be a good idea (let that be a lesson to me: believe women!) but I was feeling a little at my wits end last week, so I asked her to put her own spin on some boilerplate language and stick on her firm’s letterhead. It struck me, reading it over afterwards, that maybe she’d had a little too much fun with it, but then I thought that was probably okay — really the letter was meant to be nothing but a friendly warning and I hoped you would take it in that spirit.

As I said, things were stressful last week. There’ve been a few crank calls and I had some students walk out of my class. There was even an impromptu sit-in outside the Chair’s office so, you know. It felt like maybe not everyone was getting the joke.

Anyway, now that we’ve had our designated fifteen minutes of fame, I’m looking forward to getting back to my life, as I’m sure you are too. This has been a real learning process for me, and I promise you I’ve taken a good hard look at myself since your essay was published. As difficult as it’s been at times, I’d like to think the experience has made me a better man, husband and father. On that note, Kenz is in the next room, calling for me to tell her a story before bed, so I’d better sign off. She’s been a real ray of sunshine throughout all this — I like to think we’ve done a pretty good job of shielding her from it so far.

I wish you all the best, Erica. Eager to see what you’ll do next with your new high profile. It’s so impressive how your sensibility seems to have sparked with this new generation — perhaps you’ve been ahead of your time all these years! Is a book in the works? (I was such a fan of your poetry back in our Ottawa days — would love to see you get back to that.)

Gary

Erica, I don’t know if you’re checking email, but listen I had no idea who this Rand-o guy was when I agreed to the interview and I am truly, truly horrified by what’s happened. Rand-o’s been in touch on and off for a while now and he came across as sympathetic and thoughtful in his emails. I guess I was just feeling frustrated after your appearance on Good Morning America as I honestly assumed you would have gotten all this out of your system by now. Plus, I was floored that any respectable news organization would hold up our personal internet dust-up as something “emblematic” of the “cultural moment” — that had me doing an actual spit-take (which Kenz found hilarious). So, yes, I acted rashly when it came to Rand-o. I didn’t do my due diligence.

Certainly, all I had to do was type his name into Google (as Andrea has constantly been reminding me) but who would have dreamt this guy had such a massive following? I was astounded by what they said on the news — three hundred thousand plus followers on Twitter? Conferences, a book deal? He was charmer, absolutely, but when we Skyped I thought — Oh Christ, he’s just some kid in his basement, right down to the vintage movie posters on the wall behind him (guy has a major fixation on Ghostbusters). Not to mention the toys — actual toys — on the shelves. I’d felt so ridiculous for having agreed to the interview — he looked barely out of braces. Anyway, I hope your mom is ok. Andrea tells me this swatting thing is a pretty common tactic of the “Randovians”, but I promise you I had no idea. I read she was taken to the hospital after the incident but released a few hours later, which hopefully means she wasn’t injured? And I dearly hope the damage to the house was minimal.

I know you need to keep a low profile right now, but I’d encourage you to get in touch once the dust settles. I think our only option at this point is to present a united front. We should release a joint statement saying that you forgive me for my part in all this and I forgive you for yours and that we’ve reconciled our differences. It’s the only way this ends.

Gary

Really? You’re just going to issue random communiqués from your underground internet bunker from here on in? How long do you think you can keep this up? Some of us, here above ground, have lives we’d like to get back to. I’m off work for the remainder of the semester thanks to all this. Students have started boycotting my classes en masse. The administration would dearly love to get rid of me at this point, especially after my impromptu speech in the quad — maybe you caught it on Facebook Live? (I had no idea someone was recording me, by the way — but then again someone’s always recording these days, aren’t they?) I was actually pretty impressed it got so many views. Good Morning America didn’t exactly come calling in the aftermath, but a few other people did, and I am weighing my options.

All right, stay underground if that’s what you want, Erica. And pop your head up like a feral gopher to bare your teeth at me online whenever the spirit moves you. Just know that you can come out anytime. You can end this. We can end this together — all we have to do is tell the world that I am sorry and you forgive me. And that I forgive you, too, for making such an outlandish stink about all this. (Sorry but I think that needs to be said as well, since it’s become a major issue in certain circles — as I’m sure you have noticed. If we genuinely want to de-escalate, those circles will have to be appeased).

So why the hell don’t we?

Gary

PS — I don’t suppose you’ve noted all the renewed interest in Hollister? A former classmate sent me a link — apparently some publisher is reissuing Psalms of Kanata. So congrats! It would seem the “great male author” is ascendant once more, all thanks to your efforts.

Okay so if I’m interpreting your latest post correctly, the sticking point seems to be that you don’t believe I’ve actually been sincere in anything I’ve said thus far about what happened FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS AGO back in Ottawa. And that I’ve “glossed over” what you call my “actual wrongdoing.” Oh my god. This is amazing to me. As thoughtful, careful and abject as I’ve been in the absurd amount of emails I sent to you — emails you haven’t even dignified with a response — and for all my self-flagellation and prostration at the altar of your fathomless feminine rage, nothing I’ve said has been good enough. Cool, cool. Good to know. Guess I can get up off my knees now.

It’s been good to have this time off work and really think about this crusade of yours and the toxic pathology behind it. Andrea and I discussed it at length but she got weary of the subject after a while, which I can’t blame her for — unfortunately, unlike her, I don’t have the luxury of tuning all this out. It’s helped a lot to talk about it online — there are a stunning number people out there who are quite happy to chat with me about it deep into the night. There are wingnuts, sure, like some of Rand-o’s boys, but there are a great many more generous, compassionate individuals on the internet than I originally gave it credit for. I’ve explained to them that even though I’m not teaching right now, I’m still getting paid, but they can’t seem shake the idea that I’ve been kicked out of my job (that’s why 4chan posted your boss’s phone number and your work address if I’m not mistaken? Which I did not encourage btw). Anyway, they insisted on raising money. The level of support has been really staggering, not to mention clarifying. To know I have so many people on my side in this. You’re just one person, Erica. One person who interpreted my actions a certain way, many years ago. I remember things differently. And I have as many people on my side in this as you do on yours. Maybe more, I’m starting to realize.

So I’ve decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. I have lots of time on my hands right now, especially with Andrea and Kenz taking a break down in Florida with Andrea’s parents, so I’m thinking it might be time to put together a book, maybe using the last couple of speeches I gave as a jumping off point. (Don’t know if you caught the most recent one — over 200k views!) As you may recall from our Ottawa days, I’ve always wanted to try my hand at something book-length. A crossover book — every academic’s dream, as Hollister used to say. Poor old Hollister — he always used to wax a little melancholic about his reputation whenever we got together for drinks back in the day. Too bad he didn’t live to bask in the attention he’s getting now. Then again, I’m not sure he’d know how to handle it. In a way, I’m grateful for my crash course in all things internet these past few months. It’s been painful at times, but it was a wakeup call. I really do feel more equipped than ever to embrace a wider audience. I guess I just never had the material before now.

This Romance Novelist Trademarked the Word ‘Cocky’

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Arrogant, brash, confident, bumptious, swollen-headed, swaggering, cocksure—indie authors with a fondness for steamy scenes better crack open that old thesaurus, because “Cocker Brothers” author Faleen Hopkins thinks she owns the word “cocky” now.

You may (or may not) have heard of Hopkins’ series featuring six bad-but-not-really-boy brothers and their glistening abs. Starting with the first back in May 2016, Hopkins has been on fire publishing book after book of Cocky [Insert Fantasy Male Archetype here]: roommates, bikers, cowboys, marines. You name it, she’s cocked it.

Hopkins’ journey from photographer/actress to indie writer is an inspirational success story (up to a point) for anyone who hopes to make a living off self-publishing. Hopping between tales of supernatural vampire lovers and erotic bodice rippers, her writing has gained her a steady following, and her Cocker Brothers Series is prominent enough to deserve its own brand.

Too bad Hopkins took that fame a touch too far when she decided to file a trademark not only for the title of the series, but for the use of the word COCKY in any and all romance titles.

Back in September 2017, Hopkins filed an application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which as of April 17, 2018 registered the word as trademarked “without claim to any particular font style, size, or color.” In essence, Hopkins is laying claim to COCKY. Any other romance authors who want to use it in their title will have to fight her for it.

This Book That Scammed Its Way Onto the Times Bestseller List Is Real, Real Bad

Sound extreme? Well, Hopkins took things a step further when she began going around to various independent authors via social media and email requesting that they retroactively rename their novels on Amazon else they risk legal repercussions.

Hopkins defends herself in a series of tweets on May 4 claiming that she wants to enforce the trademark not for herself but for her readers.

She also emphasizes for any authors who may be upset with her actions: “It’s a brand. And everyone who wants to can keep their books, rankings, reviews and their money by retitling which takes one day.”

Hopkins is not unfounded in this belief. Titles are one of the eBook details that can be changed relatively easily on Kindle Direct Publishing.

However, what she does not remark on are the difficulties and costs included in changing titles, redesigning covers, and remarketing books that were already published and bought by readers. Pushback against Hopkins’ trademark has already begun under tags like #CockyGate and #SaveCocky on Twitter, and as of May 8, 2018, a petition to cancel the COCKY trademark achieved over 18,000 signatures from writers and readers who reject ownership of words.

While Hopkins has every right to defend her original content, it is a shame that it comes at the expense of her fellow independent authors who can’t afford a lawsuit battle. Even if it is legally permissible, it is in effect an assault on the romance publishing community, at least among independent authors — and it’s not one that’s likely to endear Hopkins to people who might otherwise want to publish or work with her.

But maybe she doesn’t care. After all, judging from her recent behavior, she’s brash, swaggering, confident, swollen-headed… oh. Maybe this is just research for her next book, Cocky Author.

We Need More Non-Binary Characters Who Aren’t Aliens, Robots, or Monsters

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There’s a running joke in NBC’s The Good Place about Janet, the neighborhood’s anthropomorphized operational mainframe. Every time one of the other characters calls her a “girl” or a “woman,” she cheerfully corrects them, “I’m not a girl.”

The point is that Janet is a manufactured database and not a person. But bound up in this idea is a more complicated one: that Janet, not being a human at all, is also specifically not a girl. She is a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence, and while she presents in a feminine manner she doesn’t identify as female — or even have a sense of binary gender identity. She’s a non-binary character on a major network sitcom whose gender identity, or lack thereof, does not define her — a feat which should be in and of itself a kind of revolution.

Where non-binary characters appear in literature and culture, they are more often than not robots, or aliens, or monsters.

The flip side, though, is also embodied in the joke: Janet isn’t a girl because she’s not a person. Where non-binary characters appear in literature and culture, they are more often than not robots, or aliens, or monsters. They are not so often, as I am, human beings.

I came out as non-binary in a series of stages, over the course of a number of years. It was a hard identity to put a name to, to come to understand. I’m still not completely out, and I tend to hide my gender in situations where I’ve been made to feel like it’s an inconvenience — with professors who make no space in their classrooms for considerations like pronouns, with family members for whom explaining the concept would fall on ultimately uncomprehending ears, with my housemates in the all-female campus housing in which I live.

No queer identity ever comes with a singular “coming out,” and every time I meet a new person I fall into a routine of social calculus to decide whether or not it’s worthwhile to explain my identity. Will I see this person again? Will they attack me, if I tell them? Will they respect my pronouns, if told? Will they invalidate my identity if I reveal it to them at a later date, or take offense that I didn’t tell them earlier? I have a body that is read as female, no matter what I do, and sometimes the process of explaining that I’m not a woman isn’t practical in the moment.

I don’t like that my social identity boils down to some kind of cost-benefit analysis, but society’s understanding — or lack thereof — of non-binary gender forces me to think of it that way. Social interactions are structured with this mental math at the forefront. When faced with someone new, people instinctually calculate the answer to a rote question which will influence almost everything about the way they will interact with this person: are they a boy or a girl?

There is no room, in this question, for the answer to be “no.”

The first time I realized I was non-binary, I was listening to a recording of Andrea Gibson’s poem “Swingset,” which opens with exactly this question: Are you a boy or a girl?

In the poem, Gibson never answers the question: they can’t, or perhaps they don’t need to. The normalization of their non-binary gender, the understanding that there is a third answer — a non-answer, in its own way — to this question, revolutionized me.

There is a recent trend in speculative fiction towards the inclusion of characters with non-binary genders, or characters who use non-binary pronouns (they/them/their, xe/xem/xyr, etc). Every time I see a singular they in one of the science fiction or fantasy novels I’ve picked up to read in my vanishingly small spare time, my heart skips a beat in joy and disbelief.

And yet, nearly every time a character in speculative fiction uses non-binary pronouns, it is also a signifier of something other than just gender; it is a signal to the reader that there is something other about the character in question, something which sets them apart from the other characters, and from the reader, too. It is a shortcut to remind the reader that, whoever this character is, they are emphatically not human.

It is a shortcut to remind the reader that, whoever this character is, they are emphatically not human.

For example: in Victoria Schwab’s Our Dark Duet (2017), the second book in her Monsters of Verity series, Schwab introduces a character who uses they/them pronouns. The character, Soro, is a Sunai — a monster of vengeance that consumes the souls of criminals. Their non-binary gender does not go unremarked upon in the book, which might normalize it the way any other character’s gender is unremarkable. Instead, this happens:

[When] he’d worked up the courage to ask whether Soro considered themself male or female, [they] had stared at him for a long moment before answering.

“I’m a Sunai.”

There are no non-binary humans in Our Dark Duet.

This scene should be significant — here, in a novel that isn’t about gender, a character is calling attention to the aching lacuna left by the binary question, “are you a boy or a girl?” They are finding an alternative answer. When Soro answers, I’m a Sunai, they are finding a new way to answer the question.

I’ve answered the question this way, too. A young child at my place of work once asked me: are you a boy or a girl? I panicked and answered: I’m a librarian. Can I help you find something?

But Soro’s answer actually becomes significant for a different reason. Their answer, I’m a Sunai, emphasizes above all else that which makes them inhuman, their monstrous identity. Because the other characters in Our Dark Duet are decidedly and unremarkably delineated as either male or female, Soro’s gender identity — or, more accurately, their refusal of gender — becomes a feature of their monstrosity. The answer comes not from a lack of identification with “male” or “female,” but from a lack of identification with humanity as a whole. It becomes synonymous with being an Other, just another way they are unfathomably different from those around them.

The answer comes not from a lack of identification with ‘male’ or ‘female,’ but from a lack of identification with humanity as a whole.

Our Dark Duet isn’t the only work of speculative fiction which does this. In fact, unlike in the lived experience of the non-binary people they represent, in speculative fiction characters who are neither a boy nor a girl are almost always something else. They are almost always something inhuman.

In Becky Chambers’ novel The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (2014) there is a genderfluid alien species known as the Aandrisk, who cyclically fluctuate among three genders: a male-aligned gender, a female-aligned gender, and a neutral gender identified with neo-pronouns.

There are, also, no notable genderfluid, non-binary, or transgender human characters in the novel.

The sequel to Planet — A Closed and Common Orbit (2016) — tells the story of an artificial intelligence named Sidra, who struggles with fitting into a body that does not fit her, and searches for ways and means of making that body into a place in which she can feel at home. Because of Sidra’s struggle, themes of embodiment run throughout the novel, and each character struggles with it in one way or another. An Aandrisk character named Tak plays a major role, with his/xyr/her gender fluidity never underplayed but treated as absolutely normal, which seems to cement the themes of gender identity squarely at the forefront of the novel. His/xyr/her ability to change his/xyr/her body in accordance with the gender-of-the-day is something Sidra envies.

And yet: it is only an alien character who deals openly with gender identity.

Tak and Sidra are joined by two human characters: Pepper, who was cloned to work in a manufacturing plant and escaped at a young age; and Blue, who was disowned by his wealthy ruling-class family for his persistent lisp. Every character in Orbit struggles, in their own way, with turning their body into a habitable home. To parallel Sidra’s narrative, as she struggles with the discomfort of not fitting into the body she was given, it would have been more than fitting for either Pepper or Blue to be non-binary or transgender. Blue, in particular, has a veiled past that isn’t revealed until late in the novel; until I reached the point where I realized that it was for his speech impediment that his family disowned him, I was certain he was trans.

But when only an alien’s relationship with their body involves a deviation from concepts of binary gender, the exclusion says more than the inclusion does.

It feels lazy, in a way. As if an author is checking off a diversity box for “character uses alternate pronouns,” but can’t be bothered to stretch their mind enough to imagine an actual human who might identify that way.

It feels lazy, and it feels — quite literally — alienating.

Often, like in the case of Soro or Janet, non-binary identity becomes a specific indicator that a character is not human, a distinct marker that sets them apart from humanity where their appearance might not. Other times, as with Tak and the Aandrisk, non-binary identity is meant to signify just how different — how alien — another culture is to humans. Non-binary identity becomes a shorthand for whatever it is that sets a character or group of characters apart from humans.

The problem here is that the non-binary people like me who want to see themselves represented and validated in the fiction they read, who might benefit most from seeing a character with alternate pronouns in their escapist media — are human. And most of the time, we’re faced with a daily barrage of people questioning the legitimacy of our gender identity.

When the only non-binary characters in media are aliens, robots, and monsters, we tacitly assert that the non-binary people in our lives are unnatural.

It doesn’t help anyone to say that aliens, robots, and monsters may have non-binary identities, but to imply by exclusion that humans do not.

When the only non-binary characters in media are aliens, robots, and monsters, we tacitly assert that the non-binary people in our lives are unnatural, that there is something inherently inhuman about their existence.

Gibson’s poem “Swingset” is, among so many other things, about the experience of being human. Their kindergarten students, wide-eyed and curious, batter them with a litany of questions which always ends with the innocent inquiry: Can I have a push on the swing? — the only answer provided to the unanswerable question presented in the poem’s first line.

The poem, as I replayed the video obsessively for weeks when I was seventeen, showed me a reality in which I did not have to be a boy or a girl, in which I could be something else and still be myself.

“Swingset” meant something to me, in my teenage struggle with my gender identity, because I could see myself in it. The non-answer to the unanswerable question gave me permission to accept that my gender was allowed to be unanswerable, too.

When this question is answered, and the answer is, “I’m a monster,” or “I’m an alien,” that permission gets lost in the shuffle.

There is speculative fiction that gets it right sometimes. But I can count on one hand the stories I have found lately that include gender non-conforming characters who are humans.

The ones that do, for me, are revolutionary.

Take, for instance, the podcast Friends at the Table. Their science fiction series COUNTER/weight includes, yes, robot characters who use they/them pronouns, and yes, an entire nearly-human alien race whose concept of gender is completely dissimilar from our own. But it also includes several non-binary human characters, such as the genius roboticist Cene Sixheart, and the Divine Candidate Kobus.

The message this sends is different: it shows us a future where humanity has eclipsed its obsession with binary concepts of gender, where non-binary gender is as much of a norm for humanity as it might be for an alien species that never developed the concepts of “male” and “female” to begin with. It shows that there is nothing inherently alien, monstrous, or unnatural — “inhuman” — about an identity that doesn’t fall in line with the gender binary.

There is nothing inherently inhuman about an identity that doesn’t fall in line with the gender binary.

It shows, in the same way that “Swingset” does, that non-binary people are just as human as anyone else. It erases the equation between non-binary and alien, blurs the strict separation that aligns binary gender with humanity and non-binary gender with everything else. It gives us space to see ourselves, whoever we may be, exactly as we are.

It is vital to be conscious of the dangerous patterns that can emerge from a kind of representation that isn’t aware of its own history, or the implications it makes when it is not written with care. Otherwise, we end up reaffirming a system which continues to alienate non-binary gender and those who identify with it.

I love non-binary monsters. I love non-binary aliens, and non-binary robots. I love space operas and paranormal romances and anything “inhuman” that I come across. But sometimes there are days when — exhausted by the social calculus of navigating a world that does not make space for me, that does not take me for what I am — I need my fiction to remind me that I am human, too.

How ‘Moby-Dick’ Illuminates American Tragedies

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In March, like millions of others, I was overcome by the news of a devastating car accident involving a family whose SUV had plunged off a cliff in northern California, tumbling into the brink of the Pacific a hundred feet below. Authorities recovered the bodies of five people from the overturned and partially submerged vehicle and its vicinity — Jennifer and Sarah Hart and their adopted children Markis, Abigail, and Jeremiah. Still missing were three more adopted children, Hannah, Ciera, and Devonte. The parents were white, all their adopted children black. One of them I recognized. In 2014, photographer Johnny Nguyen captured the iconic image of a tearful Devonte, then twelve years old, hugging a Portland police officer at a protest supporting justice for Michael Brown. The photograph went viral, and for those like me who remembered our reactions to it years later, the possibility of Devonte’s death added an especially cruel twist to the story.

Alarmingly, investigators judged the crash not to be an accident at all but intentional. According to the SUV’s onboard computer, the vehicle had been at rest in a flat pullout along the highway before accelerating steadily to the point it left the cliff. This grim recounting was difficult to reconcile with Nguyen’s photograph, which had evoked parents fearing for their black son’s future in America. But official documents told a different story. Child abuse accusations against the Harts began a decade ago, and in 2011, Sarah pleaded guilty to a domestic assault charge after striking Abigail, then six years old, with a closed fist and holding her head under water. More recently, a neighbor recalled Devonte asking for large quantities of food for his siblings, whom he said were being starved. A frantic Hannah escaped to the same house in the dead of night and begged not to be returned to her abusive home. The Department of Social and Health Services in Washington state launched an investigation, attempting to contact the Harts at their home. Three days later, a passerby spotted the family’s wrecked SUV along the rocky shoreline below California’s Highway 1.

Friends of the Harts defended Jennifer and Sarah, eulogizing them as model parents who sacrificed to give their adopted children a second chance in life in a loving family. Magazine-quality photographs of the smiling, active children curated that very impression of a hip, modern, interracial family. They are like promo stills for a network sitcom pilot: a group hug in matching Bernie t-shirts, a dapper Devonte stumping for charity, the bunch basking in the majesty of a Western mountain range. This family is from the future, they declare. “We can change the world with kindness” reads a colorful, crayoned sign held up by a grinning Devonte. In fact, Devonte owns so many of these shots that it’s easy to believe what a family friend had said about him, that he was the leader of his brothers and sisters despite his age. Whatever Jennifer and Sarah thought they needed to be, the key to achieving it was Devonte, the magical kid whose embrace promised dispensation for an original sin.

But the story of the Hart family didn’t strike me as futuristic so much as familiar, like a very old tale, recast. The more I read about the Harts, the more I thought about another old story, one that inevitably reappears in my life every few years. I’d first read Moby-Dick as a graduate student over twenty years ago, and I used to teach it to my own students before doing so began to seem like too big of a commitment for everyone involved. After spending some time away from the book, however, I realized that I loved discussing it with others not for its sake but for my own. For me, talking about the fate of the Pequod has always been to say something about the calamities of our present and our place among them. To read Moby-Dick after a crushing tragedy is to try to gain a measure of control over the seemingly incomprehensible — to name monsters, so to speak, and to not let that charge consume you.

To read Moby-Dick after a crushing tragedy is to try to gain a measure of control over the seemingly incomprehensible — to name monsters, so to speak.

The indebtedness of Moby-Dick to the language of Milton and Shakespeare can distract from its American origins. Moby-Dick is fashioned from its own era, one in which white men like Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun — and now, Herman Melville — brawled on paper over the prospect of slavery extending indefinitely. Melville began the book only months before the Compromise of 1850, which briefly defused threats of secession in part by enacting a stricter version of the Fugitive Slave Act. His own father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, became the first northern judge to enforce the law when he ordered Thomas Sims, who had escaped from slavery to Boston, returned to his Georgia owner. Bargain in hand, the Union gamely tried to outrun a reckoning with the issue of slavery — and did, for about ten years. When Nathaniel Philbrick said that Moby-Dick contained “nothing less than the genetic code of America,” he meant that it had been consecrated in the unresolved, foundational crisis of the nation. Since Moby-Dick, America has never stopped trying to outrun this history.

Like the book’s narrator Ishmael, Jennifer and Sarah Hart appeared to be souls unsure of their purpose but shored by the prospect of an odyssey manned by the right crew. They adopt three black children and then three more, including Devonte. They tell reporters that they are saving Devonte’s life from a mother who pumped drugs through his veins in the womb. They correct those who say that Devonte is one lucky kid: no, they are the lucky ones. “Yes indeed he is living proof that our past does not dictate our future,” they add. They are two white mothers and six black children and call themselves the “Hart tribe” because they are one people now. They elude racist teachers and neighbors in Minnesota. They turn up at New Age music festivals, Bernie rallies, and, memorably, a Ferguson protest. Their pictures say it all. They are outrunning history, they are doing it, and they will send us postcards along the way.

But how do you outrun a history that has always been a part of you? How do you outrun slavery and all that it has wrought in you, despite generations gone? That history is there once you bid for three children against a family still fighting to keep them. Or when you ink your family name over theirs. That history is yours, unbounded by century or border, each time you flog your children, ritualize their hunger, ban their lessons, and coach their smiles before strangers. It is present the second you think to bind them to you for good because you believe that none will ever work, marry, have kids of their own, or “grow up to have normal lives.” That history includes all of those who let you get away with it — until, too late, a few didn’t anymore, and men with guns arrived on your land to tell you to stop. Your quest to know black experience, to make it your own even if you must coerce it out of those in your care, is not a new story at all.

To read Moby-Dick after tragedy may be, above all, to promote Ahab in our imagination. Allegories abound of tyrants and their enablers. The late Alan Heimert, tracing the origins of Moby-Dick back to the political divisions of 1850, proffered a likeness between the captain and John C. Calhoun, the South Carolina slaveholder whose body failed him famously before the Senate and kept him from delivering a final screed against compromise with the North. In the chapter appropriately entitled “Moby-Dick,” Ishmael begins the long tradition of pondering Ahab, loosing his imagination upon the old man and the significance of his injury. From the time Moby-Dick took his leg, “Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale,” Ishmael relates, “all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations.” I suspect that Jennifer Hart likewise saw her body through the eyes of others, its whiteness signaling a history she wouldn’t abide for herself. Returning to the book now, I wondered about the brutal compensations we make for our bodies, for their fitness for this world, doubts that push us onward to prove something, across oceans if necessary, farther than we’d ever thought we’d go.

Returning to the book now, I wondered about the brutal compensations we make for our bodies, for their fitness for this world.

Jennifer Hart wouldn’t be the first parent who needed black children to see herself as a good white person in this world. She too vented exasperations, decrying how racist classmates and strangers on the street had harassed the family, Devonte especially. Hate had chased them out of Minnesota, she said, then Oregon after the viral photo. The children rarely played outside, neighbors now recalled. Hart felt isolated, even from those close to her. “I’ve been struggling with the colorblindness I’m surrounded by in my circle(s) of friends. My children are black,” she wrote on Facebook. “There are so few people in my life that I feel really GET it. Love and light seem to be the only things in the tool box. That’s not being an ally for black lives.” The outburst is like an Ahab soliloquy, simultaneously impotent and entitled, a fist shaken at the sky and all below it except one. On paper, Jennifer Hart played the white savior, outwardly nothing at all like the terrible Calhoun. What the two shared, however, was an unwavering certainty of the nature of their place among black people and then the audacious confidence it gave them before their peers.

“Oh, ye frozen heavens!” Ahab rages, “look down here. Ye did beget this luckless child, and have abandoned him, ye creative libertines.” Pip, a young black sailor deserted by his mates, tossed amid the immensity of the sea, “saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad.” Ahab succors the boy, convinced that Pip alone can penetrate worldly artifice. In the chapter entitled “The Cabin,” Ahab leaves Pip to fight Moby-Dick without him. “No, no, no! ye have not a whole body, sir,” cries Pip, “do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.” Ahab is moved by the loving entreaties yet will not be swerved. It is one thing for Ahab to dispense pity, or to command it, but he will not suffer it himself. “Weep so, and I will murder thee!” he warns. Ahab errs in believing that the integrity of his cabin is an extension of his own, protecting his ward from white whales and men alike. “But here I’ll stay,” Pip concedes, “though this stern strikes rocks; and they bulge through; and oysters come to join me.”

Reading Moby-Dick isn’t necessary to understand the story of the Hart family. The facts are clear. Two white women adopted three black children because they felt they needed to and could do so. Despite accusations of abuse against them, the women were allowed to adopt three more, this time away from an aunt petitioning to stop them. They beat and starved their children, taking them off the grid once authorities asked too many questions. Their family, friends, and neighbors, for their part, asked too few questions until it was too late. Across state lines, systems and their agents enabled them, failing the innocents entrusted to them. Caseworkers closed investigations into the women because they “look normal.” At the end, intoxicated, Jennifer Hart shot her family off the edge of the continent, killing most and probably all of them, because they would be taken away from her, and she needed them to be herself. You don’t have to read Moby-Dick to know this.

I can say only that I did to help me to remember this catastrophe, especially as weeks of investigation passed, reporters moved on, and tweets dwindled. Perhaps reading Moby-Dick after tragedy enacts a desire to stay with a story, to not have it leave you just yet, to believe that there’s something else to say despite the other news of the world crowding into the frame. It is to insist that the book’s mighty theme belongs to the story at hand too, that there are bonds, even if you must grasp at them yourself. It is to say that its pages record every angle of this story too and to take your time dwelling upon them. Ishmael himself, after all, muses that his story pales in comparison to other historical events in the “programme of Providence” — the “whaling voyage by one Ishmael” sandwiched between “Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States” and “Bloody Battle in Affghanistan” — but he tells it anyway, sensing a connection. Like so many others who sat down to read Moby-Dick for the first time, I believed I would never finish it, and here I am reading it again because other stories finish too soon.

To read ‘Moby-Dick’ after a tragedy is to insist that the book’s mighty theme belongs to the story at hand too.

Moby-Dick is all about keeping a story going. There’s always something else. This truth visits Ishmael’s boon companion, the harpooner king Queequeg, who, moments after deciding to die in his coffin, “recalled a little duty ashore, which he was leaving undone; and therefore had changed his mind about dying.” There is nothing else for the monomaniacal Ahab, who streaks toward the conclusion of his tormenting single story, the path “laid with iron rails” upon which his “soul is grooved to run.” Jennifer and Sarah Hart imagined they were chasing down a malignant evil too — the racism polluting every space around them except their own. I pray that in their last moments, looking out across the Pacific, and then at each other, they spied at last that ghastly monster they had sought, as Ahab did, embodied before their very eyes. Ishmael is the sole survivor of the doomed Pequod, saved by Queequeg’s coffin turned life-buoy, now tasked with telling the story of an illegal and immoral voyage, in all its minutiae. That story is ours now.

Two weeks after the crash of the Hart’s SUV, searchers recovered the body of a child brought back closer to shore by a storm, later positively identifying her as Ciera Hart, born Ciera Davis. As I write this, Hannah and Devonte Hart are still considered missing by the FBI, which has released posters with their photographs, essential details, and last known whereabouts. Their baby faces are sobering juxtaposed with their true ages, Hannah aged sixteen, Devonte fifteen. We’re asked to keep looking for them. For their sakes and our own, let us ransack all the known places we inhabit, in the world and on the page, in search of them forever. I hope we see them everywhere, forces impossible to outrun. To those like me who found their tragedy unfathomable at first, take care in what you make of them and what they need from you. As so many familiar with their story have said, they appear much younger than they really are.

7 Books That Prove Small Talk is a Big Deal

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Here on the East Coast, we’ve had a very long winter that suddenly turned into summer and then went back to winter, summer, and then into allergy season. And through it all, we’ve been talking about it nonstop. Some would say this fixation on discussing the weather is deadly boring. Conventional wisdom would say that, for instance, and so would Oscar Wilde: “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing,” he has Gwendolen say in The Importance of Being Earnest. “Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.” But other authors think weather is a surprisingly rich topic: “When all is said and done,” Alice Hoffman wrote, “the weather and love are the two elements about which one can never be sure.” Is discussing the weather boring? Or is it actually the most interesting thing you can talk about?

Way back before she hosted Serial, radio producer Sarah Koening had her mother give This American Life her seven rules for the seven things you are not supposed to talk about because nobody cares. These were diet, health, dreams, route talk (i.e. your driving or subway choices), money, your period, and how you slept. Inspired by those rules and that episode (which permanently haunts me), we decided to put together our own list of seven small talk topics—some of Koenig’s, and a few of our own—that make for stories we really care about.

Weather

Blankets by Craig Thompson

Talking about the weather is downright compulsive. In his book Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve, Ben Blatt analyzed the data on 20th century classics and bestsellers and found that a lot of authors not only write about the weather, but use it as their first sentence. Twenty-six percent of John Steinbeck’s novels open with weathery things, 21% of Willa Cather’s, and 14% of Edith Wharton’s books do too. (And then there’s Danielle Steel, who takes the cake at 46%.)

Weather colors this entire graphic novel — literally. Growing up in Wisconsin in a devoutly Christian household, Craig is coming to terms with change: change in his relationship with his brother, Phil, with his relationship to his Christian faith and his parents, and his relationship with Rainia, another outcast he meets at a Baptist summer camp. All of these relationships are haunted by abuse that traumatized Craig as a child. All of the artwork is done in a subdued, bleak and beautiful white and blue, mirroring the wintry ice and snow that blankets (excuse the pun) the landscape.

Dreams

Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Okay, so Creative Writing 101 rule #1 condemns the use of the “it was all a dream” trope, but dreams find plenty of other ways to make it into fiction. From Charles Dickens to Gabriel García Márquez, dreams still possess a lot of narrative power.

In the title story to the collection, a nine-year-old bookworm has a bad dream about a book she loves. The book, she finds in the dream, suddenly has an extra bundle of pages at the end, an unfamiliar epilogue. The boundaries between her own agency as a dreamer and the creative impulse of a writer are rigid: “It didn’t occur to her then that she was the author of her own dreams and must have invented this epilogue herself. It seemed so completely a found thing, alien and unanticipated, coming from outside herself, against her will.” She decides not to tell her mother about it, because she fears the immortality of words said out loud. She decides to distract herself from the nightmare with a prank that her mother witnesses and believes to be an extension of her husband’s spite. But she decides to tell no one, either. The silences start to away at each other, and have devastating consequences. The collection of nine stories is filled with the strange, confessional ways mortality creeps into our brainspace, and how we deal with each other when we can’t seem to speak those thoughts out loud.

Route Talk

Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita

Give us a quest narrative, and we’ll show you how much time we spend talking about how to get from point A to point B. And if you live in an urban area with a public transit system that’s been declared An Official State of Emergency, I dare you not to talk about your miraculous arrival to work a mere ten minutes too late.

In Tropic of Orange by Karen Tei Yamashita, a giant mutant orange is stretching out the border between Mexico and the United States. Disasters and sensations abound: including the man who carries the orange across his back and over the border, a wrestling match between “SuperNAFTA” and “El Gran Mojado” and a symphony conducted from an overpass on the freeway. Told from seven points of view across seven days, Yamashita originally wrote the book in the spreadsheet program Lotus, while she was working a temp job. It’s early-ish internet and commentary on 1990s multiculturalism in the cradle of LA, a city constantly being destroyed in re-imagined apocalypse films. Because doesn’t every commute, no matter where you are and where you’re going, feel a little like a mini-apocalypse?

Sleep

Sleep Donation by Karen Russell

Karen Russell can make the most mundane struggles sparkle and snap into vivid dramas. In her novella Sleep Donation, America is facing a deadly insomnia epidemic. The Slumber Corps, the benevolent capitalist enterprise with donation centers all over the country, is encouraging people to donate their sleep to the sleepless. Trish Edgewater’s sister Dori was one of the first victims of the epidemic, and she has dedicated her life to the cause, now serving as a recruiter for the Corps. She convinces a family to donate their infant, named Baby A, to the cause, as a universal sleep donor with dreams so pure that the Corps’ dependency bleeds into exploitation. Meanwhile, an unidentifiable Donor Y’s nightmares are poisoning the whole supply, leading some to choose death by insomnia over the unknown horrors on the other side of falling asleep.

Diet

The Young Bride by Alessandro Baricco

I am not here to defend dinner party conversations about why so-and-so doesn’t eat meat or when your BFF stopped eating gluten or who is eating bugs for fun. As a former vegan/vegetarian, I believe diet is one of the biggest conversation killers. Let’s skip the talk about the newest dairy-free milk trend (we get it, you love oat milk), and move on to the weirder diets that live in fiction. And before you ask — we didn’t go with The Santa Clarita Diet because it would have been too easy.

There’s no way to write a synopsis of The Young Bride that does justice to what it feels like to read it. The book is a fairy tale with all the dark, smudge-y parts of life rubbed in. A young woman is promised to the son of a noble family, somewhere in Europe in the early 1900s. She’s never met him, and when she arrives at the estate, she is introduced to the insular family shrouded in traditions made to keep death away. The family never sleeps in order to make days fold into each other, and in a way, stop the passage of time. Desire, pleasure, and passion are big juicy characters, almost independent of the members of the family. The young bride experiences pleasure, desire, and fantasy, not through longing for the unknown lover boy, but through his very physical and sensual mother. I’ve chosen this one for diet because one of the main activities for the day is a four-hour breakfast, one that keeps the family feasting at the table until lunch, in another attempt to defy mortal endings. In other words, if you want to slow down time, all you have to do is eat breakfast all day long. I am choosing to ignore that fact that my affinity for all-day breakfast menus might map onto my fear of mortality.

Health

Hot Milk by Deborah Levy

We are in a moment ripe with witty, bone-dry intellectual women protagonists, wandering and wading in the best messes of their own creation. (Add Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney and The Idiot by Elif Batuman to your starter-pack if you haven’t already.) This is a very good thing. And Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk is a celebration of the wandering, wary relationship between a mother and daughter. The first thing to break in Hot Milk is Sofia’s laptop when it falls on the floor and cracks on the first page of the novel. She cannot help but see correlations everywhere: “My laptop has all my life in it and knows more about me than anyone else. So what I am saying is that if it is broken, so am I.” Sofia, the Anthropology Ph.D. dropout, is in a small Spanish town with her mother because her mother cannot walk (most of the time). Her mother’s legs are her Sofia’s legs; her mother’s pain, Sofia’s own pain. Her mother’s care has become Sofia’s full-time job, and the two have invested most of what they have to come to this small Spanish town for a cure.

Babies

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

In her New York Times review of Mothers by Jacqueline Rose, Parul Sehgal declared that the girls are gone from fiction but the mothers are flooding in, with “radiantly specific dispatches from almost every corner of motherhood.” While stories about motherhood and babies should not be conflated, it is often assumed that stories about other people’s babies are told by mothers of said babies. Gold Fame Citrus illustrates how to tell stories about other people’s babies. The damning draw of California — gold, fame, citrus — has dried up in the not-so-far-off future landscape of Amargosa Dune Sea, a dust bowl that’s eating away the West Coast. While others are being evacuated to havens on the East Coast, former-model/propaganda tool for the failed water infrastructure system, Luz Dunn and her boyfriend/former-soldier Ray decide to stay, shacking up in some starlet’s abandoned mansion, where Ray builds a half-pipe and Luz wraps herself up in Hermes. LA is now a refuge for the reckless and wrecked. One night at a party, Luz and Ray see a neglected infant, all of two years old in a saggy diaper at the periphery of a band of teenagers, and decide to take the baby named Ig. In short order they realize their rations aren’t enough, and set out on an adventure to find a more hospitable place to raise the baby. What’s so frightening about the landscape Watkins brings to life is how close it is to the one creeping up just over our shoulder right now.

How to Write a Second Person Story

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You’re an author looking to make a splash in the literary world. You want to write something so different, so far out of the box, that readers everywhere will sit up and pay attention to your unique voice.

Then it comes to you: write a story from a second-person point of view! You’ve heard countless times before that this is something to avoid. “But rules are made to be broken,” you declare, as you boot up your word processor and begin drafting a story where ‘you’ is the primary pronoun. You soon discover, though, that the second person can be harder than it looks.

Most writers have tried, or at least considered, writing a story in the second person; it seems like an appealing challenge, and a cool way of making a story stand out. But as anyone who’s tried it can tell you, it’s tough, and the results are rarely amazing. In this post, we’ll look at the effect of writing in this peculiar POV, offer up a few tips, and examine a few of the authors who have done it successfully.

Why everyone hates “you”

A quick poll of literary editors will reveal that they’re pretty unanimous about writing a novel in the second person — most of them strongly advise against it.

“I rarely tell an author not to do something, but an entire novel told through the second person can become wearying,” says editor Kristen Stieffel, “especially when the protagonist of the story is unpleasant, as is the case in Bright Lights, Big City. I’ve never been able to finish that book.”

I rarely tell an author not to do something, but an entire novel told through the second person can become wearying.

Stieffel is referring to Jay McInerney’s debut novel set in the cocaine-fuelled party scene of 1980s New York. The second-person point of view is designed to put the reader on edge, evoking the feeling of being stuck in an elevator with a coke fiend.

Bright Lights, however, is often seen as the exception that proves the rule: someone already did it, so don’t bother. Readers find second person strange and alienating — which can be counterproductive if the author’s intention is to bring the reader closer to the story. It’s also notoriously hard to write: wrangling pronouns and ensuring that the copy doesn’t overflow with endless incidences of “you say,” “you are,” and “you go” can distract the writer from the basics of storytelling.

But if you do insist on going the second person route, there are a few pieces of advice to consider.

Tips for writing in the second person

1. Make sure it’s appropriate for the story you’re telling

Doing something for no other reason than to impress is the literal definition of pretension. You must have a reason for writing in the second person — and it must involve the reader’s experience.

Lorrie Moore’s debut collection of short stories, Self-Help, features pieces written in the second person. On the surface, they take the style of how-to books, which naturally use the “you” pronoun as its default. But beneath that “gimmick,” there are stories of vulnerable, sensitive characters. We get the sense that the narrator is hiding behind a mask, perhaps to soften the shame of recalling an awkward experience.

You must have a reason for writing in the second person — and it must involve the reader’s experience.

2. Avoid too much repetition where possible

Writing in the second person runs the risk of getting repetitive if you constantly remind your reader (and yourself) that you’re writing in the second person. To avoid this, literary editor David Keefe suggests writing stories without the pronouns ‘you,’ ‘your,’ and ‘yours.’

“I’ve heard this referred to as “implied” second person. Sentences that take the imperative form rather than declarative: Look at the water. Chew slowly. Face the wall.”

This leads perfectly into our next tip…

3. Set it in the present tense

In reading a few second-person stories (Italo Calvino’s On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, for example), you will notice a trend of writing in the present tense. This is perhaps common for two reasons.

If the aim of using the second person is to create an intimacy and immediacy, then using the past tense can soften that effect by adding a layer of detachment. It’s also more familiar: epistolary novels or blog posts, for example, will speak to the reader in the present tense. It’s a form that readers are used to and is, therefore, less likely to jar them.

How To Fall in Love With How-To Essays

4. Consider using it sparingly

Regardless of how well-written it is, a novel in second person can be challenging for readers. As a result, it can start to tire them if goes on for too long.

It’s not uncommon for novels to switch point of view characters between chapters. Some novelists have taken it one step further by experimenting with occasional second-person chapters. Iain Banks’ Complicity alternates chapters told from the perspective of a journalist with sections written in the second person, from the viewpoint of a killer.

Second person is an intense POV, and by allowing your audience a “breather,” you can go some way towards making it a more palatable read.

Second person is an intense POV, and by allowing your audience a “breather,” you can go some way towards making it a more palatable read.

5. Choose a form that makes sense

Sure, the second-person isn’t exactly the most obvious choice of perspective for 99% of novels — but what about the other 1%?

Some formats are a perfect fit for the second person point of view. We mentioned how-to stories earlier, for instance. How-to blog posts already address the reader directly, so it’s not a wild move to take it that one step further for a novel. There’s also the epistolary novel and “choose your own adventure” books, which make copious use of this point of view. Gimmicky? To an extent. But the second person is popular within these forms simply because it’s natural — and it works.

6. Test the waters with a short story

Because of its tendency to be unrelenting, second person is less popular in novel-length works than it is in short stories. Lorrie Moore and Margaret Atwood are just a few of the writers who have experimented with the form. And it’s a lead that authors should certainly take before putting their stock (and time) into crafting a 70,000-word narrative.

Remember that the same rule applies to short stories: unless you have a compelling reason for choosing the second-person, you might be doing yourself a favor by reverting to a less esoteric point of view.

What is the Distance Between Two People?

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I f TRAIN A leaves the station going 60 miles per hour and TRAIN B leaves one hour later going 85 miles per hour, how long will it take TRAIN B to catch up with TRAIN A?

This example is just one of several word problems you will encounter in your life. Most word problems do not immediately identify themselves as such — rather you stumble into them on accident, perhaps over drinks with your significant other or in the backseat of a taxicab.

Let’s begin. Distance equals the rate times the time. In knowing that our distances are the same, we must first learn to set them equal to one another.

D = RT
D = 60T for TRAIN A
D = 85(T — 1) for TRAIN B

But you say wait no, not quite, our distances were never exactly the same. You were always slightly further away at all times, regardless of the reference point. During parties or dinner or sex, you made a series of small calculations to appear far off, not here, somewhere else. Whether or not you were actually deep in thought, you consistently had the look of someone attempting to hold a lot of numbers together, like doing long division in your head. This absence must be factored, you say. This nothing must be accounted for.

Yeah, okay, but that’s hypothetical distance, an imaginary number that while being complex and valid in its own way, is completely useless here, I say. For instance, let’s say we are walking through what some might call a shitty part of town. The kind of place where rock bottom rises to the surface, and nervous commuters quickly pass by the lowest point of someone else’s life. Isn’t it awful, you say. Let’s cross the street. I say no. That’s worse. It would be rude not to walk right through them. How is that helping? you say. By marching past a dying body, you don’t suddenly get to lay claim to their experience.

Because I believe other people’s tragedy is a thing you must learn to intake, like those trace elements in the air no one mentions — you know it’s there, you breathe it in, but it’s still just air. There’s no lingering feeling. You’re never thinking, this argon tastes strange.

That’s stupid, unproductive, doesn’t change anything. In putting yourself through a bad experience, you’re creating just enough tension to feel as though you’ve sacrificed something without actually doing anything. Their pain is your table stakes.

I swallow my tongue and check the time. I’ve never been good with words so I’ve learned to hide behind numbers. Oh look, we’re late.

60T = 85(T-1)
60T = 85T — 85
60T — 85T = -85

Some word problems present themselves clearly. For instance, in an argument over a weekend camping trip, someone might say something like, it’s not about the tent, it’s about what the tent represents. This is tricky, because at first it appears as though you are solving for tent, but you are in fact solving for x — tent. That is, everything else besides the collapsed tent in your hands — limp, formless, and looking nothing like a home. You decide to do what idiots do: ignore the instructions and work towards what you know to be true. Namely, tent. As you slip the silver poles through their tiny folds, maneuver the deflated casing around, and attempt to stake your claim, your partner continues to pursue the real heart of the problem: infinite universes that contain neither tents nor you.

It doesn’t stop there. Real word problems are more dynamic than textbook ones. Often, they mutate and compound even as they are being written. From tent and tent representation, we can easily phase to semantics and value deconstruction. It’s not what you said, but how, why, and when you said it.

Now, of all times.
Here, of all places.
You, of all people.

And even after it becomes clear we are no longer solving for tent, there is still the dull fact of needing to sleep somewhere. One way or another, a solution is found. You knew all along, they say. You only wanted to watch me struggle. You wanted to be proven right. How can you say that, you say. Where’s your proof?

-25T = -85
T = -85 / -25
T = 3.4

Three-point-four hours (204 min.) after TRAIN A leaves, TRAIN B will catch up to it. We know this because:

60*3.4 = 85(3.4–1)
204 = 85*2.4
204 = 204

Meanwhile, the real world contains hardly any proof whatsoever. It only takes a small amount of pressure on any known fact before it unspools into a mess of numbers. Just yesterday, you tried to receive a refund for a train ticket when, after waiting for 22 minutes, it had still not arrived. Exiting the turnstile, you got in line, waited your turn, and when signaled, spoke into a circular grid of holes drilled into a panel of plastic.

Hello I would like my money back, you say. I can’t do that, they explain. Why? Buying a train ticket has nothing to do with riding on a train, they say. We make no guarantees for trains, arrivals, departures, coming or going of any kind. So what am I buying? you say. You’re buying time — and the ability to stand over there versus over here. Solving for time, you exit the station understanding that whatever the operator gained was just lost by you.

No one ever explains what happens after TRAIN B catches up to TRAIN A, what that would look like, or why they are pursuing each other in the first place. This is what’s sometimes called a given — which is basically when someone doesn’t give you anything and hopes that’s okay. If these trains are on the same track, this is a word problem about other people’s tragedy. If they’re parallel, it could be about what the trains represent. If the trains are not even aware they are racing, it’s a case of over there versus over here.

Setting your distance, you call your partner from the platform. Both inbound and outbound trains arrive at the same time, making it difficult to hear one another. If you get home first, do you mind cleaning up? they ask. Make sure you wipe the residual spit off the toothbrushes, I have people coming over. If you get home first, can you start dinner? you say. I haven’t eaten all day and my mouth tastes like stomach acid.

Math is elastic, which is why even though there are an infinite number of word problems, there is really only one. It’s the reason — In order to make dinner the kitchen must be cleaned, but making dinner dirties the kitchen.
— can also be expressed as: I can’t relax until the house is clean, but I just want to relax before cleaning the house.

— or even: I don’t hate you, I just hate who I am when I’m with you.

Two-hundred-and-four minutes later, you take turns approaching zero to see who can get closest without actually touching. It’s entirely possible you’ve won but you have no proof.

8 Funny Books About Grieving

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Grief isn’t funny. Or is it? Big, difficult life events like the death of someone we love make us realize how much we can’t control. But finding the darkly funny moments in the midst of tragedy seems to help us weather tough times.

Purchase the novel

In my experience, the state of heightened sensitivity that comes with loss can actually make us more aware of what’s funny and absurd about life. And that’s a good thing: by not losing our ability to laugh, we’re retaining a defining element of our humanity.

I thought a lot about the interplay between grief and humor while writing my debut novel, Alternative Remedies for Loss. Alternative Remedies is the story of a family coping (and sometimes not coping) after the matriarch dies. In literature, as in life, many of us crave the catharsis of laughter when the going gets heavy, and it felt true to me that the story of a mourning family could contain many comic moments. If you agree that grieving and humor go together like salty and sweet, check out these eight gems.

All Grown Up by Jami Attenberg

It might be more accurate to say that Jami Attenberg’s most recent novel, constructed as a series of vignettes, is about avoiding grief. While Andrea Bern’s young niece is dying of a heart condition in New Hampshire, Andrea stays in New York City, postponing visits to her family. I bit my nails wondering if Andrea was going to pull it together for her family before it was too late, but her painfully honest observations about life as a single woman approaching 40 had me laughing from the opening pages.

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

This graphic memoir, which was adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, explores light dinner-table topics like death, sexual identity, and family secrets. But Bechdel and her siblings have a matter-of-fact relationship with death because they grew up helping out at the family-owned mortuary, and the freshness of the form beautifully complements the emotional complexity of the story.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Secret lovers of curmudgeons (like me!) will fall for the grumpy Ove, who has given up on life after his wife dies. When an unexpected friendship forms between him and his new neighbors, this darkly comedic Swedish novel, a runaway international bestseller, takes a turn for the heartwarming. The Swedish film adaptation is being remade in English, starring Tom Hanks, so if you want to say you read the book first, now’s your chance.

The Antiques by Kris D’Agostino

As a massive hurricane hits their family hometown of Hudson, New York, the Westfalls gather to plan their father’s memorial service. I love nothing more than a good, tangled family drama, and D’Agostino’s unsparing take on estranged siblings Charlie, Josef, and Armie makes this one both sharp and very funny.

Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett

I tend to be wary of child narrators, but ten-year-old Elvis Babbitt was the perfect blend of fresh and astute in Hartnett’s charming debut. After her mother drowns while sleepwalking, Elvis must contend with not only with her own grief and the mystery surrounding her mother’s death but also the dangerous sleepwalking habits of her older sister Lizzie, and her father, who is wearing her mother’s bathrobe and lipstick around the house to console himself.

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

Okay, so it’s more a book about marriage than about grieving, but Heiny’s first novel is laugh-out-loud funny, and does contain an unexpected death, which Graham and his wife Audra, must process. This is a tale of two marriages, of the challenges of parenthood, and of knowing when to let go.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

This slim delight of a novel is told in diary form over the course of a year when 30-year-old Ruth moves home after a breakup to help care for her father, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Ruth’s observations are astute and quietly hilarious, and Khong treads over heartbreak, betrayal, and loss with the lightest touch.

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

A writer grieving the suicide of her close friend and literary mentor inherits his 180-pound Great Dane, who is also in mourning. I found this brief, rich tale incredibly moving, but it’s also sprinkled with darkly comic observations about writing workshops and pet ownership.