Because I've seen a yam peel become flour, I refuse to admit to my uselessness. My grandma said if we are not from birth a finished light, we can be one made from scratch. I like this kind of (re)making: food waste spread outside on a mat enduring the bites of the sun, the tapering tip of chickens’ beaks, then all the rage from a blending blade, just to show the universe it is capable of thriving. Here, the things we celebrate the most come to us as a shock. Like yam flour. Like the luminary my burnt-out body would emerge.
September, or Self-portrait with Hemophilia
for Q.
We are still the country’s only butterfly and meadow.
I am beautiful because you say so. I am so close to
believing in my beauty. All the women I meet leave
when my knee blows itself big like a balloon. I,
prolonged bleeding. I spent years mistaking the hospital for home.
I don't understand, whenever you call my body an eclipse.
You say light is not light if it's not preluded by darkness.
That is what makes it sublime. That is why I think God is
not a void. In a recent poem, sapphires can also be found around the glasses
a woman puts on. You looked at me in a time of harvest and wondered why
I was not a blooming orchard. I have become one ever since.
A couple of years ago, after reading Brian by Jeremy Cooper—a book about a lonely reclusive film buff—I adopted a new adjective for describing a particular treatment of a protagonist by an author: tender. “This book is so tender!” I’d say to people and would register an immediate look of recognition from those who’d read it too: “That’s it—Brian is tender!” “Tender” means there is a perceptible care, a generosity, in presenting a character who, for the most part, is not receiving that level of care and generosity from the people that inhabit their fictional world. Part of the trick of the tender rendition, I theorized, was writing the character free of the irony that so often accompanies the presentation of off-kilter, “weird,” or hyper-imaginative human beings.
This spring sees the publication of Happiness Foreverby Adelaide Faith, who is based in Hastings, England. Faith’s protagonist, a veterinary nurse named Sylvie, is struggling with relatable, huge, and insurmountable issues that concern life and living. They are, in no particular order: “how to become the perfect human,” seeing herself “more as a person,” “carrying on,” “the meaning of life,” not being “an awkward person, a wrong person,” the desire to not feel “disgusting,” to feel “natural on the inside,” and to “fit in.” Coming to peace with the ubiquity of these challenges is a tall order, though Sylvie finds some solace in her daily rituals. She is good at her job, takes her brain-damaged dog to the beach, embraces new friendship with a fellow book-lover, contemplates the benefit of seeing the world through a dog’s eyes, and considers Pierrot, the commedia dell’arte clown, as a stand-in for characters in her own life, even herself.
Sylvie, who has a history of abusive relationships, also attends weekly therapy sessions at the home office of a well-put-together therapist. In Sylvie’s mind, the therapist embodies perfection; she is a cocktail of confidence, charm, professional success, and, above all, beauty. Indeed, in each therapy session, looking at the therapist’s face, her hair, the way the sunlight lands on that day’s choice of slacks and blouse, Sylvie sees “enough beauty … to sustain her for the rest of the week.” This beauty, one could say, crosses into the category of sublime, evoking its paradoxical reaction: Sylvie feels both awed and overwhelmed. The disruptive captivation that ensues is yet another problem Sylvie must deal with. What results is a story of an obsession, and the attempt to figure out one’s way through it, filtered through the mind of a highly imaginative woman with a peculiarly charming take on reality—all of which is rendered with gentle humor, warmth, and yes, tenderness.
Adelaide and I spoke over Zoom, from our respective homes, in Hastings and Toronto.
Marta Balcewicz: A big theme in your novel is perspective. Sylvie is often frustrated over having a limited lens, not knowing what other people are really like beyond their neat-looking exteriors. Since so much of contemporary literary fiction is first-person POV, I have to admit I felt a little pang of surprise upon encountering the third person in your book. Was there a process where you were deciding on the POV? Did you consider other options or was it always a third-person narrator in your mind?
Adelaide Faith: The very first version of this story was an essay called “The Pierrot Cure” and it was an uncomfortable mix of first and second person. It was kind of like self-help. When I decided to make a novel and put the story into scenes, I just automatically used third person. I think I wanted to make a novel that I could love in the same way I loved books as a child. I loved The Magic Faraway Tree and The Enchanted Wood more than anything. The books with Moon-Face and Silky.
Anyway! Maybe I also used third person so Happiness Forever wouldn’t be called autofiction, for a kind of privacy, because people do assume things are autofiction nowadays and third person feels safer that way (and I couldn’t bear to call a character Adelaide). I feel like it would be uncomfortable for me to try first person for a whole novel, I’d find it really hard to separate myself from the main character. And maybe I wanted to limit the amount you see in Sylvie’s head; I just think it’s too much a lot of the time, to see inside a person’s head. Especially Sylvie’s.
MB: Did you not want readers to know your protagonist in a complete way?
AF: Does it sound like an ungenerous thing, to not write in first person? I’d not considered that before. But you know, it’s close third. I think if I wrote in first person, I’d find it excruciating. I just feel less embarrassed about being human when I write in third person. At one point in the book, Sylvie wants to video herself, because she thinks it would be easier to really believe she is a person if she saw herself on video. Maybe writing in third person is a bit like that for me. It makes thinking about a human easier, you know, a little bit.
MB: At a few points in the novel, Sylvie discusses books, their function and what they mean for her. She sees books as a means of “getting into heads.” The idea also recalls this fairly quoted and really nice line of Proust’s, from volume seven of In Search of Lost Time: “By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe which for him is not ours, the landscapes of which would remain as unknown to us as those of the moon.” In describing reading novels, Sylvie says to her therapist: “I think maybe people in books are more what I expect people to be like,” and the therapist responds, “Well, you are seeing the inside of a person…you get to see their thoughts… It’s probably why a lot of people read—for human connection.” Did you feel you were following through with these functions and aims of novels in writing Happiness Forever?
People are better in books than in real life, mostly because they’re an edited, condensed, distilled version of people.
AF: When you ask that question, I see Sylvie’s predicament in a way I hadn’t seen it before. Maybe the problem is the kind of books she’s reading! Sylvie’s really bad at getting on with people, at work, in her family, in relationships. And everyone disappoints her because they’re not like a character from the books she reads, and she doesn’t know how to relate to people. But she’s reading Herman Hesse and William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, books like that, where the people don’t speak about tons of crap and where everything is symbolic.
People are better in books than in real life, mostly because they’re an edited, condensed, distilled version of people. It’s a really good version of people! You don’t generally include the mistakes or the super boring parts of people. But your question made me think…maybe if Sylvie read more contemporary novels, or more trashy novels, she would be better prepared for contemporary people.
MB:So what book would you loan Sylvie?
AF: [Laughter] Hmm just a really popular book, a door stopper, where there are problems at work, phone calls between the characters and their mothers, wedding scenes, hen parties, sex scenes. [Laughter] I don’t know, I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m not sure if I’m being mean. A book where you feel like you’re watching TV!
MB: I wanted to return to Sylvie’s complaint about books, what she calls the “one way” nature of the exposure and honesty that happens in books, as it’s only the reader who learns about the characters. Sylvie says books are to blame for “making us think we can know another person.” This speaks to her dilemma in the therapy room, where she is desperate for a more intimate relationship with the therapist. She tells her, “It seems crazy that we can never know what it’s like to be another person” and when the therapist answers, “the best we can try is to speak honestly here in the therapy room,” Sylvie points out, “Only one of us can do that.” At one point, Sylvie is reading a book of psychology case studies and hopes that the book will essentially contain a “scene” like the scene she wishes to have with her own therapist. She says that if she found such a scene, she’d give the book to the therapist. Is there a meta quality to these discussions of books in Happiness Forever? Is your novel a wish fulfillment in any way?
AF: I definitely give books to people to give them a message. When I was 15 or so, I gave my mum The Prophetby Kahlil Gibran. Do you know it? It’s really teenage, it’s kind of corny. There was a poem about children, saying the parents are the bow and the child is the arrow. “You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow.” I gave it to my mum for Mother’s Day and marked that page and when she read it she started crying and I felt so bad, I felt really bad about that for 30 years. And then I saw her recently and I mentioned it and she didn’t remember crying! She was like—no I really appreciated it, and I knew exactly what you meant!
MB: But what about for a writer? When they put their own novel out into the world, when you wrote Happiness Forever, could that fulfill a wish?
AF: Oh! Well, I think the only way my own novel is wish fulfillment is in how it let me order everything, give a girl’s life some order and balance, allow for connections in all parts of her life. Don’t you find that two-thirds of the way through writing something, you start seeing lots of connections? Even in colors and shapes, in dates and days of the week. Everything gets really meaningful, and I really love that part. It feels like magic, it feels like we are meant to be alive. I would like life to be like that.
MB: Wow, so for you it was the process, how the writing happened, that comprised the experience of wish fulfillment. That’s so much more intricate than the content of the book containing a fulfilled wish, a realized dream!
AF: [Laughter] Well, I did have a therapist once that I wanted to make friends with, but I don’t think I would go to the effort of spending years writing a novel to try to get her to be friends with me. This wish fulfillment thing makes me think of a 1storypod episode—Sean Thor Conroe’s podcast. He had Olivia Kan-Sperling on and she was talking about the genius of Sally Rooney, how she’s writing fantasy fulfillment porn for girls that read books because the weird/bookish girl gets the hot boy against all odds. Her books are like catnip for girls who read. But no, I don’t want to do wish fulfilment. I don’t feel that good when wishes are fulfilled, even in books.
MB: In reading a novel so focused on a character’s week-by-week therapy sessions, the query “will they get better?” or “have they been cured?” hovers—this imperative of recovery, however “recovery” or “cured” might be defined. In writing Happiness Forever,did you consider an arc, a trajectory of progress and curing? Or was the arc of “recovery” not at all a concern?
AF: I was on this writing course in Brighton and they were constantly talking about arcs and how the character has to change throughout the book. One teacher said the character has to change even per chapter. It was so exhausting because I feel like people don’t change. I feel like I don’t change. My body’s changing, my body’s doing an arc, but mentally I feel basically the same as when I was 16—more or less—and I like the same things. I wear the same clothes, I eat the same food, I like the same physical things (reading on the beach, swimming), I like the same films, I listen to the same music, my favourite band is still The Cure. I veered off and experimented with loads of crap and now I’m fairly old, and I’m just like, “Oh wow, I’m still enjoying Herman Hesse, I still like William Burroughs and William Faulkner and David Lynch and Harmony Korine.” So I don’t really like the arc thing. I did try to do it, I drew Freytag’s pyramid, because I try to be a good student…but it was just impossible to me.
And the question of there being an arc of recovery, I don’t know about that either. There’s this book by Irvin Yalom called Every Day Gets a Little Closer: A Twice Told Therapywhere a girl gets free therapy sessions if she writes about them afterwards. Both she and the therapist write a report after each therapy session. At one point I think she feels “cured”… she’s able to talk to her therapist in a mature way and react in a mature way. But it’s this “therapist’s cure”: she’s only changed with him, because she wants to please him, which you kind of do with your therapist, you want them to like you. But with everyone else, she’s exactly the same. I think that’s a real danger in therapy.
I think for Sylvie, the most important thing that the therapist does for her is make her feel not weird. I think that’s what she needs. She’s felt like a weirdo her whole life—at home, at school, at work—and the therapist lets her experience someone treating her like she’s not weird, even though Sylvie tells her kind of weird thoughts.
I guess though, in this novel, what she goes to therapy to cure ends up not being her main problem. The problem becomes the obsession with the therapist. I suppose a therapist would suggest it is the same problem but…
MB: Is writing for a writer ideally akin to a client talking in a therapy room?
AF: Yes, I think so! Because you have complete freedom in these two places. I like to watch this clip of Sheila Heti talking about writing where she says: “Writing is the only place you can be free.” I went to some of her online classes, they’re brilliant, and she says things like: “You can write what you want! Follow your curiosity! No one’s looking over your shoulder.” It’s the same in therapy, it’s the one place you’re allowed to, or actually supposed to, say what you really want to say without worrying how it will be received. Once on a writing course, one of the exercises was to write something and then burn it or delete it from your computer… that was an exercise to try to help you to write whatever you want without worrying.
MB:How did you feel about adding autobiographical elements in your novel? You gave Sylvie the same job you have; she’s a veterinary nurse.
I wanted to write short chapters you could hold in your head in one go.
AF: Because Sylvie’s so awkward with people it just made sense to have her do my job, which is working with animals. I mean it’s easiest to write about your own job; you know the lexicon, you know the procedures. I really like specific job details in books. Like in Sean Thor Conroe’s Fuccboi where the character is working for Postmates, delivering food, and he does a whole description of how he keeps everything dry and makes sure the drink doesn’t spill, how he gets his bike ready, what he wears, it’s really really specific. I love that. When Shy Watson was on Conroe’s podcast, they were talking about how propulsive it is when the character is at work. The novel she was writing had the character working in McDonalds. I’m really looking forward to that one.
MB: Were there any books you held close to your heart (and your writing desk) while working on Happiness Forever?
AF: I think Sweet Days of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy, and also King of Joy by Richard Chiem. Sweet Days of Discipline is about obsession in a boarding school. King of Joy is so beautiful—it’s not my usual scene, I mean because the characters are making porn films, but he is such a beautiful writer. I suppose King of Joy to me feels more like Hermann Hesse or something. There’s not loads of never-ending detail, it’s more sparse and careful, and it’s constantly fascinating, and devastating, with beautiful scenes. It’s quite magical. It’s a very, very sad story, but it’s just so beautiful the way he does it.
MB: Is sparsity of detail particularly important to you, or was it when you composed Happiness Forever?
AF: A lot of stuff I’ve tried to read recently has felt like watching TV, when people just go on and on. In modern life, there’s just so much detail, it’s constant detail, it’s exhausting. And where does all this detail go?! Do you think it stays in your brain? I don’t really want it to stay in my brain. I wanted to write short chapters you could hold in your head in one go. I didn’t want tons of characters and tons of scenes, with so much backstory. I wanted it to be simpler, like living in a small town, not a city. I think when there are loads of scenes and loads of characters, it’s harder to hold it in your head and attach meaning to it. I just don’t think too many details are that important, I guess. I think it’s easier for a book to hold meaning and emotion if you are more careful with the amount of detail you put in.
MB: Speaking of a simpler approach to things (and evoking my earlier mention of Proust), I heard that you like questionnaires. I wanted to ask you what your favorite question is in the Proust questionnaire, and how you’d answer it.
AF: I love questionnaires! There was this one old boyfriend of mine who I hadn’t spoken to for 15 years. And when we got back in touch, it was so overwhelming to speak to him again, so I made him a questionnaire. Then we didn’t have to catch up in endless messages, he could just fill in the questionnaire. There were questions like: “Have any of your friends died?” “What’s the best invention you’ve seen in the last 15 years?” It was all like stuff like that. Questionnaires are a nice, controlled way of doing things [laughter].
In the Proust questionnaire, I like the question: “What do you consider your great achievement?” For me, I think that would be leaving my editing job and instead working at an animal shelter. I’d done an English Literature degree, I was editing in an office, and it was good pay, it was a good job, you got treated well, you got sick pay, etc. But I quit and got this minimum wage job, basically cleaning up dog shit for like eight hours a day. A “kennel hand.” On paper, it was such a stupid thing to do. But I feel like that was my greatest achievement because I was happier. I want to be around things I want to be around—which is dogs, even though they keep shitting—and not a big whirring computer, a photocopier, and a mocha machine.
MB: What about Sylvie, what would her favorite question be?
AF: I think it would be: “Your favorite heroine in fiction?” And she would answer: Frédérique, from Sweet Days of Discipline.
I figured out I was asexual in the early 2000s, back when the official definition in the dictionary related to the biological reproduction of plants and spores. This wasn’t the easiest time to be ace. There were no ace characters on TV (unless you count “Sebastian the Asexual Icon” on The Late Late Show, which was meant to be ridiculous), no ace characters in movies or in books that I could find, no ace Meetup groups or book clubs or Discord channels. Low sexual desire was pathologized as a disorder by the DSM, and I had to attend couples counseling with an asexuality info sheet in my hands. (Even then a therapist accused me of making up the orientation.) The few people I shared my identity with had no idea what I was talking about, and I learned pretty quickly that it was easier to not bring it up. What there was: the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN), an online community founded in 2001 by David Jay that let people like me know that nothing was wrong with us, despite all the messages we kept receiving from the world.
Fast forward to now. There have been many positive developments in asexual and also aromantic awareness. The DSM-5 has officially recognized asexuality to be an orientation rather than something that needs to be treated. The A (for asexuality, aromanticism, and agender) was, in theory, added to the LGBT alphabet—though often the A is still left off or reduced to a plus sign in a move that can feel like erasure.
Merriam-Webster updated its definition of “asexual” to include “not experiencing sexual desire or attraction” and “aromantic” was added in 2019. Currently on Meetup.com, there are 35 aspec groups—representing the spectrum of aromantic and asexual identities—with 21,251 members across the world. And in January 2023, a beautiful and serious Lithuanian film about an ace-allosexual relationship called “Slow” won the Best Directing Award in the World Cinema Dramatic category at Sundance. But in literature, especially in the type of fiction that tends to be well-publicized (like literary fiction from Big 5 publishers), I’m still waiting for writers to explore themes that decenter the role of sex in our stories while expanding our notions of what love looks like.
My collection of stories, Portalmania, places asexuality at the center of most stories and in the shadows of all of them. It’s a different version of asexuality than the one I see most often on social media and in other public spaces, where being ace can look like a younger person focused on queer joy and ace pride. In Portalmania, asexuality is inhabited by middle-aged women in mixed-orientation marriages who are in direct collision with the standard narratives of compulsory sexuality and heteronormativity. My portrayals of love, committed relationships, and sex are difficult and messy and can be intentionally upsetting to read because I want to show how traditional narratives and traditional scripts and traditional definitions of love are confining, not only to asexuals, but to everyone.
This reading list contains several of my recommendations, but simply and sadly, I wasn’t familiar with enough ace books to fill a list on my own. I asked a few authors and thinkers involved with the ace community for some of their recommendations to include as well.
Written with both ace and non-ace readers in mind, Chen’s Ace is essential reading. Part personal exploration, part reporting, part social commentary, this book proves, hands down, that the ideas at the center of asexuality should be of interest to all of us. Ace encourages us to recognize what constraints exist around our current ideas of intimacy and relationships and then to imagine what could happen if we let those constraints go. I know the world would be a better place if everyone read this book.
This novel follows Adina Giorno, who may or may not be an alien, as she struggles to understand humanity while reporting back her observations to a mysterious presence on the other side of a fax machine. Adina never calls herself asexual—rather one of her friends labels her that way—so at first I was hesitant to include the book in this list. But putting labels aside, Beautyland is certainly the story of someone who experiences relationships, sex, and love differently, and Bertino captures in compassionate detail the confusion of trying, in current society, to date and be in a relationship and experience some kind of intimacy if you’re not interested in sex. I particularly appreciate the portrayal of a mixed-orientation relationship between Adina and another man, as well as the ample room that’s given to exploring Adina’s deep rich friendships.
For portal fans like me, this novella (the first in a series) has such a fabulous premise: Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children is a boarding school for young people, mostly girls, who have unhappily come back from portal worlds. They’ve been sent to the school by their frustrated parents who won’t accept how their children have changed. Part of the delight of Every Heart A Doorway is hearing about all the different worlds the students have lived in and loved. But this book is also an important one in terms of asexual representation. Published in 2016, McGuire’s book has been called “one of the first mainstream books to explicitly use the term “asexual” for one of its characters and has been one of the most prominent books with asexual representation in SFF since its release” (Lynn E. O’Connacht, Book Smugglers). It’s certainly the first book where I met a character who was aware she was asexual. I think McGuire does a fabulous job portraying her diverse cast of characters with humor, interest, and complexity.
The narrator of All Systems Red (who calls itself Murderbot) is a wry, socially awkward, agendered, self-hacked security cyborg who enjoys watching soap operas (though it fast-forwards through the sex scenes due to boredom). Murderbot’s current assignment is to watch over a group of researchers on an unnamed planet. Soon some anomalies are noticed on the planetary maps, and Murderbot has to figure out what’s going on while trying to protect the team of scientists it has grown to care for. In less confident hands, the robot-as-asexual trope may have come off as irritating or wrong. But Murderbot is one of my favorite narrators ever. Funny, shy, self-aware, and occasionally snarky, it connects with people only in its own way, forming some moving and unique relationships.All Systems Red leans a little toward “hard” science fiction— think drones, implants, hubs, transports, hatches—but I still believe typical literary readers who don’t often read sci-fi can deeply enjoy this one.
This graphic memoir relates Maia’s experience growing up as e (Maia uses e/em/eir pronouns) tries to figure out eir identity: what gender e is, who e’s attracted to, what attraction means to e, how e feels about sex, and what sorts of relationships e wants to have in eir life. One of my favorite passages is when Maia describes the relief of realizing that eir life can reflect who e actually is. “I remember when I first realized I never had to have children. It was like walking out of a narrow alley into a wide open field. ‘I never have to get married.’ ’I never have to date anyone.’ ‘I don’t even have to care about sex.’ These realizations were like gifts that I gave myself.” The book, to me, is often about language—specifically the words we use to describe ourselves—and how language can either constrict or expand the possibilities of identity. Since its publication in 2019, Gender Queer has gone on to become one of the most challenged and most frequently banned books in U.S. public schools.
Earthlingsby Sayaka Murata (English translation by Ginny Tapley Takemori)
“Earthlings is a genre-bending novel that combines a coming-of-age story with a homecoming tale, blending dark humor with a magical realism that becomes indistinguishable from traumatic dissociation. Following a horrific sexual assault by her teacher, young Natsuki goes on a winding—and gruesome—journey into adulthood as she struggles to reclaim her body and find her way home to her alien planet. An asexual marriage becomes her cover as Natsuki refuses to become a cog in the factory of life that demands labor, marriage, and reproduction. The alien motif serves as an allegory for both the dissociative effects of post-traumatic stress and a sense of societal unbelonging, while Natsuki’s relationship to asexuality forces a confrontation with the significance of sexual trauma in the asexual narrative. A sinister critique of capitalism, consumption, and romantic compulsion, this book is sure to make you squirm.” Recommended by KJ Cerankowski, author of Suture: Trauma and Trans Becoming and the forthcoming Nothing Wanting: Asexuality and the Matter of Absence
“Elseship should be at the top of the list for anyone interested in ace literature. It’s not ace 101, it’s certainly not an explainer, it rarely even mentions asexuality. And yet, at least to me, aceness and questions of ace experience suffuse this gorgeous, inventive memoir. The skeleton is the unrequited love between the author and her housemate. The meat consists of Tree’s exploration—both erudite and emotional, with diagrams and quotes and reflections—of all types of love, and what happens when feeling bursts forth, unruly and illegible, forcing you into unfamiliar territory.” Recommended by Angela Chen, journalist and author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex
“Loveless is a coming-of-age story that follows Georgia as she begins university. In university, Georgia becomes exposed to aromanticism and asexuality, eventually realizing that she identifies as both. Loveless is one of the first—and still one of the only—works of fiction to explore self-discovery from an asexual and aromantic lens. It’s fun, heartwarming, and offers sharp insights into being asexual and aromantic in a world that assumes those identities are impossible.” Recommended by Canton Winer, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northern Illinois University
“A historical review of how compulsory sexuality (the idea that everyone should fall in love, get married, and have kids, at the right age, with the right gender, and for the right reasons) has roots in sexism, racism, capitalism, and other systems of oppression. It helped me contextualize political trends I see in the news today. It is not just a brainy look at the world—it connects the dots between my experience and others who share the same struggles. I feel less alone and more hopeful in building solidarity.” Recommended by Luisa Chan, book club organizer for the San Francisco Bay Area Ace Meetup Group
In her searing and revolutionary memoir First in the Family: A Story of Survival, Recovery, and the American Dream, writer and mental health advocate Jessica Hoppe discusses and inspects addiction and how ingrained the culture is within BIPOC communities, notably within the Latine community. In writing that feels deeply cathartic and personal, she recounts how she arrived to her ongoing recovery from alcohol addiction and utilizes the story of her upbringing, along with stories of her loved ones and their interconnectedness, to unpack and interrogate intergenerational trauma and its connection to addiction. She also connects this to the ways BIPOC experiences and narratives are erased from recovery institutions, such as through stoicism within these communities that creates a barrier from being able to seek help.
First in the Family approaches and scrutinizes the American Dream and its harmful role in perpetuating addiction in BIPOC communities. Hoppe exposes the snake pit that is the American Dream through telling of its negative influence on marginalized communities who strive for a life in a country whose societal standards weren’t created for them. It also asks how this concept has been able to capture and entrap generations of marginalized communities, people who only wanted a better life.
I got the chance to correspond with Jessica Hoppe via email about her journey writing this memoir, the model minority mold society forces upon marginalized communities, and how storytelling can liberate us.
Ruby Mora: Where and when do you feel was the start of your journey in writing First in the Family?
Jessica Hoppe: I’d been writing—pitching, freelancing, blogging—for about ten years. Chasing bylines, hoping they would amount to something meaningful. The goal of writing a book was there from the beginning, but the call didn’t come for a long time. Nor did I have any idea how to navigate the publishing industry.
An outline, I’d say a sketch of the idea, formed when my grandfather died. Though I was nowhere near prepared to write it, I felt what can only be described as a calling, cliche as it may be. I was a few months sober and visiting my family at my sister’s house when we received word from Honduras that he had passed. My mother was devastated and opened up to me for the first time about the cause of his health issues and, ultimately, his death: alcoholism. They had been estranged for most of her life and thus mine. I had no relationship with this man, but suddenly, I felt connected to him. I asked my mother how she felt to have had a father who was an alcoholic and now a daughter. When she snapped at me for calling myself (and my grandfather) an addict, I knew that what threatened to come between us was a story, a lie, and I wasn’t going to allow anything to divide us. I needed my mother; I needed my whole family if I was going to survive and get well. I sensed, once again, that delta, the story told to people at my bougie AA meeting in Tribeca, NY, and the propaganda sold to families like mine. I will never forget that moment. A version of me died, the perfect reflection, the twinkle in my mother’s eye, but I stepped into it. It felt like jumping off a cliff emotionally. I held her, and we cried hard as I assured her I was, in fact, an addict. My mother accepted it and said she loved me. You’d have to ask her if she loved me more than ever, but I know she loved me for who I was, not who I was struggling to pretend to be. And that’s recovery.
After several years of rebuilding my life, the book kept calling. I was compelled to listen and soon speak up. Then, in the summer of 2020, I worked with Hanif Abdurraqib and published a piece for GEN Mag (a popular albeit short-lived magazine on Medium) titled The First Step to Recovery Is Admitting You Are Not Powerless Over Your Privilege. The response was overwhelming. I was thrilled! That’s when I knew for sure—this is the book.
RM: It’s astounding how such a major life shift caused not only your mother to open up in this capacity, but also your own realization.
I needed to challenge the narrative we’d all absorbed about the addict.
JH: Yes,that was when my recovery became real—to me, my mother, to my whole family. I knew this wasn’t something where I could put my tail between my legs, go clean myself up in the corner, and return the perfect daughter again. I understood the assignment, and it was so much more than abstinence. I needed to challenge the narrative we’d all absorbed about the addict, about drugs and drug use. At this stage in my recovery, I identify more as a “person in recovery” than an “addict,” though I use the two to describe myself. But, at that moment, I understood the power of embodying that label in the face of my mother’s fears and prejudices. To reconcile the fact of it and my co-existing, it forced her to interrogate it. Which inevitably pushed her to have compassion for her father. And I became a bit obsessed with reclaiming our story, the whole and true story of what happened to us. I discovered that substance use disorder wasn’t a deviant act or moral failure—it was a perfectly human response.
RM: Two of the many topics I identified within your memoir were the pressure to fit the mold of a model minority and the model/protective child to your parents, and I couldn’t help but see how interwoven these two desires are. I especially connected with this sentence deeply:
“The weight of that responsibility hung heavily on me. I couldn’t relate to kids my own age. They seemed to expect the adults to care for their feelings, while I took my mother’s feelings upon myself and never felt safe to express my own.”
How did it feel reflecting on this during your writing process, and do you also believe they’re interconnected?
JH: Absolutely, I had always assumed my mother and I were super close—and we were. We are. But that assumption was based upon how much she revealed to me. I felt like there were no lies or secrets between us because she told me everything. What I realized when I got sober was I was the one withholding—I wasn’t telling her my secrets. I didn’t want to worry or burden her, sort of protecting her from my truth while undermining her capacity to love me for who I am.
As the daughter of Honduran and Ecuadorian immigrants, I became addicted to measuring my value and self-worth by my achievements, unable to simply exist as a daughter to my mother and father. Identifying as an addict disrupted everything my family and I had been programmed to believe about the American Dream. And it was those toxic ideas—which we all internalize—that were keeping us apart, not us.
That’s why I felt it was so important to offer a sort of blueprint for understanding how systems affect substance use disorder, for just as we must understand how a drug operates within our bodies, we must also understand how systems of domination are at work in our lives. I was able to narrate and contextualize this imperative work by telling the story of my recovery from substance use disorder—along with my family’s history of chronic illness—as a legacy of colonialism and examine the two against the broader historical context of the criminalization and racialization of drug use in the Americas, in order to interrogate the American Dream as the ultimate gateway drug.
RM: With your memoir—in which you were able to cover and interrogate so much—you not only identified this legacy of colonialism in the context of addiction, but also stressed that the fault behind why addiction occurs doesn’t stem from the individual, but from the overall systems that work against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, in a culture that has put the blame on the hurt.
JH: Precisely. It’s the classic cycle of control—create the conditions that cause the “problem” so you can sell the solution back to the victim. In the case of drugs, propaganda is key because the story justifies the policy that exacerbates the conditions creating symptoms that seem to affirm the propaganda. It’s all about the story and who controls the narrative.
We use drugs when we are sad and lonely and hopeless. But this story is not good for American business.
The great American drug story is one of sin, of the individual falling out of step with society by succumbing to weakness, indulging the taste for the devilish spirit inside us all to the point of degradation. The only result of this wayward path of bad behavior is punishment or redemption. Historically, fatal drug use has risen alongside colonization, industrialization, and times of collective societal pain, such as war and economic depression. We use drugs when we are sad and lonely and hopeless. But this story is not good for American business. Drug use is best framed as a morality tale, one narrated by white supremacy, specific drugs coded to specific groups—cannabis as Mexican locoweed, cocaine ghettoized as crack. Among other forms of oppression, such coding triggers the need to assimilate, align, and aspire to whiteness in order to survive.
This was the story I wanted most to tell because it was the key to my recovery. And I knew I had to be explicit in exposing it because shame is what stands between us and the help so many rightly need and rightfully deserve. The shame the system has codified into stigma is by design—it costs lives. That shame is not ours.
RM: One of the most impactful parts of your book was the chapter “Unreliable Narrator” and the subsequent chapter “Rock Bottom” where you talk about the near-death experience you had that led you to self-interrogation, along with writing out your entire first dialogue you shared at the AA meeting. In recollecting these events in order to add them to your memoir, what went through your mind?
JH: I was in avoidance for a long time. In many ways these were the hardest chapters to write, but once I was there, it was all flow. Writing “Rock Bottom” via stream of consciousness was a device I used, like morning pages, to get it out and onto the page. I thought I would go back and polish, giving it more of a narrative structure, but I just loved how the voice popped. What was interesting about relating this experience was that I have no memory of the event. I have blotted, minimal recall, but as I say in the book, my body remembers. What I do have is the testimony of the stranger who saved my life, and I keep our correspondence hidden, safely hoarded (lol) in the back of the credenza in my office. I knew in order to write this I’d have to read it again. I hadn’t faced that conversation in years, and it’s still very painful. But it also transported me right back to that feeling of insanity which jolted me into this rapid desperate expression that you read (and hear) in my book, a transmutation. The anger of being disembodied, of being so careless with myself, and then the miracle of that seed being planted when someone sees you, and offers you kindness at the lowest possible moment of your life. Seeing what you don’t or can’t see within yourself, and not giving up on you. It’s salvation.
“Unreliable Narrator” was the result of numerous revisions. I was reading How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water by Angie Cruz, and I fell in love with her narrator, Cara! That voice was like a sucker punch, and I sensed a hesitancy in my prose. I was still studying and comparing and justifying and fearing my past while suppressing my voice. I remember I started singing. I got on YouTube and watched the old vocal exercises I did as a kid. I breathed from my belly, opened my mouth as wide as I could, and let it all boom out. I heard the sound of my own voice. It was uncomfortable at first, but ultimately, a liberating exercise.
I also love Cruz’s use of documentation to generate unique forms of narration, so I had a lot of fun writing that police report. The reader and I deserve it.
RM: Storytelling can bring healing, and you share not only your story, but your family’s—your grandfather, especially— and how both knowing his story and reflecting on what he could have struggled with helped in your recovery, break generational cycles, and strive towards liberation. In what ways do you feel storytelling can liberate us as marginalized individuals?
JH: As it relates explicitly to addiction recovery, I’d say it’s crucial. Experts in the field of substance use disorder agree that stigma, particularly for Black, Indigenous, and people of color, is one of the biggest obstacles to treatment. And the most effective way to combat stigma is by telling our stories. The erasure of the historical record of BIPOC voices within the recovery movement resulted in a paucity of archival material, leading to conflicting narratives and the success of the white agenda not only to paper over the truth but also to prioritize and elevate a “norm” rather than crediting the roots.
That shame intimately affects us and divides our families and communities. The dominant cultural narrative of the addict remains the same—we’re immoral people, doing bad shit and refusing to stop because we’re selfish. Seeing me fully would require my family to interrogate that. Which would inevitably shift their understanding of the disorder and, in a way, rewrite our family history.
Dysfunction persists through silence, and silence is facilitated by shame.
It took me a while to realize and even longer to admit that I had a problem with drugs and alcohol. The only people in my family who suffered similarly wound up dead, deported, or in jail, and it has taken consistent effort to undo the programming attached to those outcomes. Understanding the true role of our country’s government in spreading this epidemic of addiction to poor communities of color—those denied fair access to resources and care, both medicinal and therapeutic—was crucial to me. It helped me shift the focus of blame for my condition from myself and my family to the truly responsible and to work consistently with my family to identify and understand this.
Dysfunction persists through silence, and silence is facilitated by shame.The isolating symptoms of addiction inevitably lead to a cycle of demoralizing behavior—a perpetual state of humiliation. And I was determined to change that. As I mentioned before, the moment I told my mother I was an alcoholic and sort of forced her to hear it—to process it and see me as its embodiment—that felt like reclamation.
Trust me, it was hard. I wanted to be the perfect daughter, the perfect tía to my nieces and nephews, someone they could admire and look up to. And I know being open about my recovery doesn’t inoculate them, but by offering myself as an example, I could initiate a new conversation. They can see there are other fates for those afflicted besides death and disgrace—I can be a realistic vision of a person who looked like them in recovery. I could tell them the true story.
RM: That silence and the shame that facilitates it causes so much harm, and the steps you’ve taken and shared in your memoir towards breaking the cycles of shame, silence, and dysfunction are tremendously inspiring. Opening up about these topics and mental health, overall — especially as it connects to addiction—is a very taboo topic in the Latine community. What are some of the hopes you have in how these conversations shift with the release of your book?
JH: Thank you for saying that. It’s been eight years, so I sometimes take my recovery for granted and forget to acknowledge the hard work—how incredible it is. Received and much appreciated.
In the book’s first few pages, I say, “I’m writing this book not because I believe my story can save you but because I want you to know: yours will.”
I want all of us to move beyond the fear and shame that shrouds the conversation about addiction so we can begin the healing journey together. To dispel the mystery around every taboo subject (mental wellness, abuse, etc.) and unburden ourselves from the lies spoon-fed to us by the empire.
I also don’t want to continue to think of addiction and drug use as this otherized issue—this is a human story about the human condition. And I hope my book can illustrate that.
RM: Returning to the chapter “Rock Bottom,” the last thing you say during your first time speaking at an AA meeting was that you have never been able to face yourself, and that takes a lot for anyone to admit. Who do you feel is the self you face presently?
JH: One of my favorite threads in the book is this concept of being desalmado—a word my mother used to describe her father to me, a man with no soul, she said. There are many religious and cultural beliefs surrounding the power of alcohol to sap the soul. But I learned through the work of Eduardo Duran, Indigenous teachings also reflected in Bruce Alexander’s dislocation theory of addiction, that it is the pain of disconnection—the violence of being forcibly separated from who we are to survive—that is the thief that injures us. What Duran calls the “soul wound.” At that moment in the story, I, too, was desalmada.
Over the summer, I traveled to Izalco, El Salvador, with my partner to visit the Nawat pueblo he’s from. There, I learned a prayer of thanks to the earth’s four corners. But it’s not just about reciting words of thanks to Mother Earth—you offer gratitude from the heart of your essence to the heart of Earth: to the heart of the sky, to the heart of the air, and to the heart of the water. I say that prayer every day, several times a day, and I can feel it radiating from inside me, a profound and grounded awareness of who I am, my right to exist in my fullness, and the integrity of my soul that I offer to those I am in service to and in community with.
My soul has found its home, and it’s safe with me.
It was still early. The northern lights hung like creamed angels, and my sister went out alone to feed the pigs. As the snow crunched beneath her boots, she repeated the Lord’s Prayer to herself, trying to remember what came after deliverance. She was nine and already accustomed to the occasional feeling that her world was spinning out of control.
She found the pigs hiding in the corner of their pen, away from their space heater. They hadn’t touched yesterday’s feed. She didn’t know why. For several minutes, she tried to scrape the old pellets from their trough, but they were frozen solid. In the woodland wind with the stars all falling westward, she grew vaguely afraid.
Something creaked in the dark, and she looked up toward our house. The sound seemed to be coming from underneath the snow. She stepped toward it, the pigs silent at her back, and for a moment, the yard seemed perfectly still.
Then she screamed. Across the yard and into the street, the snow erupted with thousands of rodents. They were like maggots bursting from a carcass, zigzagging and trampling one another. One scrambled up her leg. She kicked it away. They seemed to have no idea where they were. The pigs barked at them, and they dashed for the tree line, following one another blindly. By the time she reached the front door, cold air burning her lungs, no sign of them remained but rough, white scarring in the earth.
I wasn’t home to see my sister come in panting, exclaiming how the apocalypse had arrived and it was starting on our lawn. I didn’t witness my parents’ reaction. I can only imagine it. I imagine that had my sister borne testimony to a revelation of doom on any morning other than that one, our father would have encouraged her. “Damn right,” he would have said, barely listening, and then he might have cited the biblical plague of rats at Ekron, consoling her with the admonition that judgment ought only be feared by sinners, socialists, and queers. On any other morning, our mom might have tried to pacify her with promises of red Jell-O or a trip into town to play at the entertainment annex. But my parents’ mood on that particular morning is difficult to guess for the same reason that I am limited to guessing: For on that morning they were preoccupied by the discovery that I, their other child, was gone. In the middle of the night, I had finally run away.
I was twenty and had lived in Keber Creek, Alaska, pop. 900, all my life. My father moved us out there the year I was born, after getting a job in the town’s opencast gold mine. He charged holes for blasting. I remember walking to and from the mine with him as a kid, long walks that he spent excoriating me for not appreciating this opportunity to live out in the boondocks, or as he put it, “amidst Creation.” I remember the mine’s looming concrete walls and how the aspens quaked each time the blasts went off. During my teens, his job was abruptly automated, and the week before my sixteenth birthday he received his pink slip.
He was encouraged to move to an A-O Company town outside Eugene for retraining. I wanted us to go, to leave Alaska. But we stayed. My father was sick of relying on corporate caprices; he appreciated his frontier liberties and said he would find gig work. He never did. Instead, he retreated into bitterness and religion. He had always had a survivalist streak, and this grew inflamed in the want of employment’s civilizing influence. My father was a Mormon who believed even his own Church’s leadership in Salt Lake City was infiltrated by Jews—you can imagine how he felt about, for example, the government. He obsessed over eschatology. For as long as I can remember, he was forecasting society’s spectacular collapse. Violent scripture was his favorite. I feared him. Unlike some other mine workers, he didn’t imbibe, and for that alone I’m inclined to thank his God, but there really wasn’t much difference between an impatience for annihilation expressed by drinking oneself into oblivion and one expressed through his particular brand of piety. While technology-driven unemployment led many men of his generation to pine for the past, he just prayed all the more fervently for a hastening of the End.
I, by that time, did have a job: doing custodial work at our town’s largest church, a crummy little bethel held up by wood glue and blind prayer. Suddenly my family’s primary breadwinner, I drew our livelihood from the building’s lightbulb sockets and clogged drains. Attached to the narthex was a small arcade, Keber Creek’s only recreational facility, stocked with Old Testament–themed video games for the betterment of the youth—Frogger: Red Sea Crossing, Balaam’s Donkey Kong; the machines sat unlit most days, like tree trunks after a forest fire. I spent many afternoons climbing up the narrow wooden ladder to the church’s belfry and there, above the haggard white pines, I would smoke Natural American Spirits and scroll social media on my little 1600p, watching other kids thousands of miles away dance in Eastern ruin bars, kiss astride mopeds, or drink champagne on observation decks above the Champs-Élysées. Sometimes I posted videos of my own. They were nothing better than what any teenager posted in those days (thirty-second clips of me calling Democrats idiots, and later, when I grew uneasy with my father’s politics, deepfake videos of celebrities dancing), but I took to social media with a seriousness certainly enhanced by the fact that the world online seemed to me more important—realer, even—than my backwater hometown.
It was my minor addiction to social media that led me to contact Victor Bickle and earned me the ticket that would end up freeing me from Alaska, not quite for good but for a very long time. Afraid of my overture being lost among ordinary fan messages, I refrained from fawning over Bickle’s videos. In truth, I didn’t really understand a lot of his Scroller content. Bickle, a professor of mechanical engineering at Columbia University in New York, had garnered attention online the year before with a ten-minute video about the structural instability of the Queensboro Bridge—released six months before the bridge’s shocking collapse. In the six months before the accident, his post had garnered fewer than eight hundred views, and then, overnight, eight hundred people were dead, and the video was trending on CNN’s homepage. The earnest forty-year-old professor was suddenly a media go-to. Since then, it was common for his videos to be picked up by mainstream outlets. “Professor Victor Bickle, who predicted the Queensboro Catastrophe, releases his latest warning.” He railed against corrupt regulators, becoming a champion of transparency and of the public’s understanding of the world around them. His videos were technical—too technical for me to follow—but I admired his success. He was handsome, in a lanky, brainiac sort of way. And while I didn’t understand him, I hoped he might understand me, for Victor Bickle, the sudden minor celebrity, had been born and raised in Keber Creek.
I sent him a private message saying that I admired him for getting out of KC and said that I, like him, aspired to make something of myself. I wanted to learn how the world really was. I asked if he might share any advice, or perhaps even take me under his wing, as an aspiring content creator.
When three months passed and Bickle didn’t reply, I feared I’d overstepped in presuming a kinship between us. I read that he’d left Keber Creek on his own at seventeen for university; I, a twenty-year-old church custodian, probably resembled the very thing he’d rejected. In truth, I had spent most of my life in Keber Creek trying to fit in. I’d grown from a church youth so desperate for the counselor’s favor that I volunteered for testimony every month, to a middle schooler who threw rocks through my teacher’s windows in the hopes of winning acceptance from my peers. When the other boys in my school groped Rebekah Hamsley after she blacked out at Winter Dance, I fearfully joined in, but then snitched on them the next day. I followed my classmates in ridiculing Brian K., the “fag,” but apparently that made me no less “faggy” myself. I’d wanted to fit in desperately; I just never figured out how. As a kid I cowered at everyone’s disapproval, which to me were correlates to, if not strange incarnations of, the primary disapproval—my father’s—which I fought and fought through adolescence before finally emerging disaffected only in my late teens. I recognize the sour grapes element to this account—I only resolved to ditch Keber Creek after it repeatedly rejected me. But I had other catalysts too for disillusionment during my teenage years. The world changed. The westward circuit normalized flights between the lower forty-eight and the capitals of Europe and Asia that took barely an hour, making our isolated Alaskan town seem to me increasingly irrelevant. Unemployed, my father hoarded his welfare checks while cursing government largesse (he was the type never to forgive someone for doing him a favor). He turned our moldy prefab house into his pulpit, and as one prophesized apocalypse after another failed to pass, his aggression grew. So did the rift between us. And all the while, the screens around me presented with increasing persistence and allure all the things in the world I was missing.
It seemed obvious to me that our town was already suffering its apocalypse as the mine automated, job after job, and the only thing to do was move on already.
It seemed obvious to me that our town was already suffering its apocalypse as the mine automated, job after job, and the only thing to do was move on already. I thought maybe Victor Bickle, a man of the world and of prestige by way of science, could rescue me. I had no real evidence for this, no history to draw on. Just another kind of faith.
When Bickle finally replied, his message was brief.
Dear Tanner, it said. Apologies for the delay. Been a hectic time for me. I would love to meet you and help however I can. You say you want to “get out” of Keber Creek. That’s something I can understand! Would you like to meet me for lunch in New York? How about Ronan’s Grill on 37th at A.H. 973,839? You will love Ronan’s. I’m sure I can refer you to a job in the city if you’re interested. I’ve attached a credit for circuit flights, on me. But if this isn’t of interest, no need to explain. – VB
I turned the message over and over in my mind as I showered that night, using all the hot water. Sitting down at dinner with hair still wet, my heart raced. To meet for lunch tomorrow. So casually proposed, as if New York City were just down the street. I obsessed in particular over the closing line, “no need to explain,” intimidated by its cool indifference. (It didn’t occur to me to interpret it the other way, as a preemptive defense against rejection; I wasn’t yet trained to see in things their opposites.)
But Bickle should have known that even just making use of circuit passes would be impossible for me. The closest pod station, in Fairbanks, was eight hour’s drive on unplowed roads. Our snow machine didn’t have that range. I sat at the table, rolling dirt between my toes. The only option was my father’s pickup truck. I knew he’d never let me take it, but as my mother slid misshapen trout cakes onto our plates, I worked up the nerve to ask.
“What do you need my truck for?” he said. He sat on the couch in the adjoining room, watching news about migrants at the border three thousand miles away.
“To get to work tomorrow morning,” I lied. “The snow machine is empty.”
He told me to go across the street and borrow a shot of propane from the Tumeskys, mix it with corn oil. The dogs wrestled in the hall.
“The engine isn’t working,” I said.
He looked over. “You fucked up the engine? What’d you do?”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Well, fix it.” He turned up the TV.
Cold seeped into the house through cracks in the carbon fiber siding, and little moths tapped on the windows, fighting to get in front of one another as if each thought its own warning was more important than the rest. Across the table, my mom ate with her fingers.
“Busy day at work?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“Answer your mother,” shouted my dad.
“He did,” said my mom.
“He ought to speak to his family in complete sentences.” He beckoned my younger sister Ashtyn, who brought him another can of nonalcoholic apple beer and collected his empties. My mom drew plasticky trout bones from between her teeth. I had a headache and craved a cigarette. I kept imagining myself walking out the door and never coming back. I glared at my father, at the truck keys carabinered to his belt loop.
“Your brother doesn’t know how the real world works,” he said to Ashtyn.
She looked at me, her overgrown hair the same shade of red as his, and mine. His gaze didn’t leave the TV. I watched him, smarting.
“Hypocrite,” I murmured.
“What did you just say?” demanded my mother.
My father looked over. The TV was blaring about Christian values so loud that there was a chance he hadn’t heard me. I looked at Ashtyn. Her eyes were pleading, wishing to be left out of it.
“Come here,” said my father.
I stayed where I was, frozen between the immaturity of refusing and the emasculation of giving in.
“I said come here.”
I took my last bite but held on to my knife. It was he who finally stood. Hunched, he walked over. He was a man who’d spent adolescence waiting for relief from his family’s bank debts to come in the form of widespread calamity. A man (I now believe) tormented by the mounting possibility that his life might not be a labor of preparation for the world’s climactic end, but rather a labor of endurance through countless small disappointments. He moved very close to me, so close I could smell his Ocean Breeze bodywash, which was the same as my own. Neither of us, father or son, had ever stepped foot in an ocean.
So quietly that not even my mom would hear, he said, “I’ve tried to create a good life for you, boy. It’s up to you whether you deserve it.”
That night I tossed and turned. Owls hooted to one another over our property. After three hours, I gave up on sleeping. The clocks flashed A.H. 973,826:02. I crawled out of bed and began packing for New York.
I emptied my “luau pack” of all my father’s survivalist shit no one would ever need (the tent, the unloaded rifle) and stuffed it with clothes, stashing at the bottom all the money I had managed to steal from the church over the years. Three hundred dollars. I looked out the window. A circuit vessel’s blue light streaked across the moon.
“Tanner,” Ashtyn whispered. “Is something wrong?”
“Everything is fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about me.”
I found my father asleep on the couch, changing colors as pundits disagreed. I stood so close that I believed I could feel the warmth of his body. His breath was strained. I reached down and unhooked the Dodge keys from his hip. He stirred. As I left the room, seeing him for the final time, I heard a woman on TV saying her offer wouldn’t last forever and him mumbling, “Amen.”
The drive was quiet. I put on the electronic music I liked but, feeling anxious, soon turned it off. I drove through to morning, along endless chain-link fences, escaping the Arctic Circle to find the sun. Its rise over the highway tundra was freer than anything I’d ever seen. Route 2 bridged the Chatanika, and rush hour traffic began to collect. I’d never been so far from home before. I pressed my phone against the pickup’s windows, taking photos of the big animated billboards. At the end of a mountain tunnel, in low light, Fairbanks appeared. The river was incredibly bright, as if filled with fire, strapped down by bridges, squirming between blue roofs. The city seemed so much hungrier for inhabitants than Keber Creek, so much larger not only in space but in spirit. Yet even as capacious as the city was, I soon hit gridlock. And construction: Even as big as it was, it was being built bigger. Cranes fed on Fairbanks from above. Sawhorses blocked every other road, and men with jackhammers were tearing up the detours. There was no snow. The directions off my phone kept rerouting. My truck seemed to be the only one around that wasn’t driving itself, and nearing the pod station I was taken by lights and arrows, loudspeaker announcements, and the mineral breeze of industry. It took effort to keep my focus on the road in front of me. I parked in the open-air long-term lot and hardly had my duffle out of the truck bed when a passing car honked at me to move. I turned to see the car was empty. It wheeled around into the passenger pickup line as a circuit vessel popped overhead, and I darted across the street toward VISA HELP, DUNKIN’ DONUTS, and PODS—ALL DESTINATIONS.
In the pod station’s domed lobby, a few dozen travelers rested on wooden benches, drinking coffee and staring at their phones. I stood by the door to my platform, anxiously rechecking that I had mapped the right route. There were a dozen circuit vessels crossing over Fairbanks every hour, and you had to be sure to board the pod that would shuttle you up to the vessel you wanted. The pods went up and down, but the vessels never landed—they orbited the Earth, again and again and again. On clear mornings in Keber Creek, I would look up and see their contrails crisscross. Their paths inclined northward or southward to varying degrees, but as a rule, all circuit vessels orbited roughly from east to west. That was the model drawn up by the world’s oldest and largest circuit vessel carrier, the Circumglobal Westward Circuit Group, or CWC, upon whose dreams of commercial empire the westward circuit had first taken its way. It was for CWC flights that Victor Bickle had bought me a day pass, good for arrival and departure at any of CWC’s tens of thousands of pod destinations in fifty-eight countries (even more for US citizens who added special visas to their passports). I knew there were people who viewed circuit travel as a basic necessity (and a single-day pass didn’t cost so much by most peoples’ standards: around fifty New Dollars for regular users and even less for first-time users off-peak), but I couldn’t imagine ever losing the sense of wonder I presently felt at possessing one.
The platform door slid open to another, a revolving door through which several passengers emerged, some popping their ears, some rolling their necks. After the last woman exited, I attempted to enter, swinging my duffle ahead of me. I hit the revolving door like a wall.
The woman who’d just depodded called me honey and said, “You gotta scan your ticket to unlock the turnstile.”
She pressed my phone against a small blue panel, the two screens kissing teeth to teeth.
Once through, I found myself alone in a round cabin about three yards across, encircled by a low bench. It wasn’t heated, and I saw no place for luggage. The only compartment I could find was stocked with barf bags.
“Welcome to CWC,” said a female voice from somewhere above. The wall across from me, which was a screen—all the pod walls were screens—played a promotional montage. It showed people stepping out of pods into various city centers and festivals. I recognized Paris and Hong Kong. A blond kid and his mother were shown exiting a pod in the center of Times Square, and the camera panned up to a bright sky with a circuit vessel approaching—all fuselage, no wings—getting closer and closer until it reached the depth of the screen and burst right out. It was aiming straight for my head. I ducked as the hologram entered the screen behind me with a digital shiver.
Everything was bluer than blue, and the voice said, “Welcome to the world.”
The turnstile locked.
“Excuse me,” I said to no one. “Are there seatbelts or . . .”
As the floor and ceiling began to vibrate, I felt myself growing lighter, rising off the bench. I groped for a handle. Then I noticed my duffle sliding off the bench’s edge. I reached out to it and was knocked forward by an invisible force. I screamed. But my hands didn’t hit the floor. I was weightless. The pod had taken flight.
Victor Bickle, Ph.D., was not quite so attractive IRL. Ejected from the protective frame of the screen, his rangy height, at six-foot-one, seemed to put his head at constant risk. He was balding—you never saw that in the videos, how his brown hair folded over in capitulation and frizzed out in alarm around his ears, which were truly humongous, like a child’s drawing of ears, rounding out his physiognomy in the videos, but here, in the physical world, looking bony and appendant. He waved me over to his booth, and I made my way around young finance bros wearing fleece pants with the names of their employers stitched across the seat. Steaks sizzled in the wet New York City air. I was starving.
Ejected from the protective frame of the screen, his rangy height, at six-foot-one, seemed to put his head at constant risk.
My parents had called. I hadn’t answered.
“Tanner,” said Victor Bickle, extending his hand. “You’re late, but that’s okay.”
He wore a mustache, which intimidated me then, though later I wouldn’t be able to help imagining him shaping it alone in his bathroom, and it endeared him to me.
Sitting down, I explained that I’d actually arrived early and had waited at the door to meet him.
“Why would you wait there?” He laughed. “The food is inside the restaurant.” He said I would love the food here at Ronan’s. “I come to Ronan’s whenever I’m stuck in Midtown. Everyone I take loves it here.”
“It seems really lively,” I said.
He replied, “Well. It’s not that lively.”
We ordered lobster.
“So you’re from Keber Creek too, huh?” he said. “My condolences.”
“It’s surreal,” I said, “being here in New York.”
“Yeah. It’s almost half as good as the pictures.”
I laughed. In truth, I had feared New York might offer nothing more than what I’d seen online, but on the contrary, the things I saw astonished me precisely because I recognized them so well. The dripping AC units. The flags at half-mast. The Empire State Building penetrating low clouds. To see New York was to step into my own personal dream, uncannily realized.
Bickle asked where I’d landed.
“Thirty-fourth Street,” I said. “I expected there’d be a station like in Fairbanks, but the pod just fell down onto a platform in the middle of Herald Square. There were like a hundred people waiting around it to board.”
“They’ve got a station in Fairbanks now?” Bickle said.
“Yeah.”
“Wow. You know, since leaving Alaska twenty-odd years ago, I’ve never returned.”
“That’s amazing,” I said. “Did you leave family behind?”
Bickle looked at me. The air was warm and oily, redolent of seafood and rubber. “I left for college. My dad was a surveyor for the gold mine. I apprenticed there, and the company got me a scholarship.”
“My dad worked at the gold mine too,” I said. I told Bickle that I didn’t know much about engineering but I loved his online videos. “I might have mentioned, I make videos myself. Nothing serious.”
Our lobsters arrived. They were more like crayfish.
Bickle said, “That Queensboro Bridge video changed my life. Now, I can film a five-minute rant and a stadium gets renovated. No one wants to risk a lawsuit for having ignored my warnings. The truth is, it’s funny, but I don’t even need another prediction to come true. If I say an ugly mall is going to collapse, these pathetic little commissioners all scramble to tear it down and rebuild it before we can ever find out if I was right. That’s impact. You know I have two million followers on Scroller now? And I’ve gotten offers. I’m actually considering changing jobs. I’ve been butting heads at Columbia. I’m sick of it. I want to do something real.”
I waited for him to begin eating, while he waited on more butter.
If he noticed me waiting, he chose not to release me. As he spoke, he
kept waving—with both arms—at our server. An elderly man fell down
across the bar, causing a minor stir. When we finally ate, my food had
a chalky bitterness, almost what I imagined poison would taste like,
but Bickle ate the same thing and didn’t mention it.
More than halfway through the meal, he finally stopped talking about himself. “Tell me, Tanner,” he said. “What are you looking for?”
Although in his message he’d already offered to find me a job, I feared that to ask for one outright would seem too forward. Instead I said euphemistically that I’d be grateful for any advice about making a career outside Keber Creek.
“Well, are you willing to run errands?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Shovel shit?”
I told him I was a janitor before.
“Do you have any moral stipulations?”
I thought about it. “Probably,” I said.
“Okay,” said Bickle. “That’s good, I guess.”
He asked how I liked to be managed. Having no experience working under different managers, I wasn’t sure how to answer. I considered saying I liked to be given the opportunity to do work that would make a real impact, since this seemed to be something he valued, but it occurred to me that if he cared about impact, people like him might want to hire others who would do the more thankless grunt work. Ultimately, I just answered, “I don’t mind it,” hoping that was funny.
He smiled. He did seem to like me. He said there were lots of jobs out there.
“This is actually quite an exciting time for me,” he said. “I got contacted the other day by the CWC group.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Yeah, they’re looking for a spokesperson. They want the company to have a familiar face. Someone who people see as being on their side. We’ll see. I think of myself more as an independent voice. It’s important that I retain my independence, right?”
“Totally,” I said, realizing to my disappointment that for the rest of the meal, we would be talking about him again. As he went on about his own options, my gaze wandered. I noticed two homosexuals holding hands. One smiled at me (I thought of the cephalopodic creatures of the gruesome Sodom Striker game in Keber Creek’s church arcade). When I returned my focus to Bickle, he was talking with food in his mouth.
“Circuit travel isn’t the flashiest thing to become the spokesperson for,” he said. “I mean, it’s glorified airplanes. But then, it’s more important than bridges. And any collaboration with a company as big as CWC would really grow my platform. I’m a little concerned about this day contraction stuff that’s come out lately, but, you know, the agencies putting out that research are the same ones who got Queensboro wrong.”
“What’s day contraction?”
“You haven’t heard about day contraction?”
I made some excuse for my education, but he didn’t seem to care. He kept rattling off the pros and cons of his own career opportunities. I grew doubtful that he had any jobs to connect me with at all. Outside, smoke poured up from the sidewalk, ignored by passersby. I wondered what it was. I’d been awake for thirty hours.
“I thought CWC already had a guy in their commercials,” I said. “Captain Sam? ‘Welcome aboard, I’m Captain Sam.’”
“Pederast.”
“Oh.”
“And sure, I’m ready to be making real money,” he said.
For the rest of the meal, he talked about how you can’t live in New York on a professor’s salary, you’d be better off in Keber Creek.
“Anyway, my advice for you,” he said. “Stay out of academia.”
He stood. Following him from the restaurant, I stepped out into the full light of Midtown and within fifteen seconds was almost struck by a scooterist. “Goddamn one-wheels,” said an Indian man with a holographic chess game open on his tablet. “Oughta be illegal.” It was January, and New Yorkers ate on park benches, greedily, like squirrels.
“Well,” said Bickle. “I’ve gotta run. But it was nice meeting you. You seem like a good kid. I’m going to be in touch about jobs. Give me like one week.”
“Thank you so much,” I said, wishing I could believe him.
“Of course,” he said magnanimously. “And hey. What did you think of Ronan’s?”
In 2020, SARS-CoV-2 burst onto the scene in the United States, representing what seemed sure to be a break with normal operations and thrusting a spotlight onto American healthcare. Five years later, rather than receiving a glaringly necessary overhaul (or even the continuation of benefits offered in 2020 to alleviate the burdens of the pandemic), the state of American healthcare remains abysmal and threatens to devolve even further. Proposed cuts and changes to Medicaid—the largest source of health insurance in the U.S. as the primary insurer for ~80 million people—have the potential to disrupt care for already underserved populations. Healthcare for trans people, particularly trans kids, faces unceasing attacks. Public health institutions and research are being gutted, and pandemic preparedness is repeatedly undercut.
Americans’ anger with their healthcare system reached a fever pitch in December 2024, when the CEO of United Health Group was executed in the middle of a New York City street. Then a rare thing happened: the general American public came together to express effusive joy, informed by collective dissatisfaction, rage, and disillusionment. With an estimated 41% of Americans shouldering some form of medical debt, people are recognizing the connection between arbitrary healthcare costs, insurance denials, and the steeply rising salaries of healthcare executives. Something has to break.
My debut poetry book, cells, fully differentiated, out now from Noemi Press, is an account of an existence subjected to, shaped by, and never fully certified by the American healthcare system. Drawing on my experiences as a disabled person living in the liminality of non-diagnosis, cells explores the role of neoliberal capitalism in the formation of, the care for, and the quotidian experience of chronic illness. The book depicts phone arguments with insurance companies, illustrates the endless tug-of-war for credibility and legibility, struggles with the way pathologization is deployed as metaphor, and grapples with what it means to deal with failing health in a failing state.
In this reading list, I highlight books that depict the impacts of neoliberal capitalism and fascism on our collective health, reflect on encounters with Western healthcare systems, and call for a popular movement towards healthcare for all. The ten books that follow range from theory to poetry to memoir, yet find commonality in their emphasis on possibility and action. More than simply calling out the bureaucracies and processes designed to provide us with the minimum while extracting the maximum, these books illuminate paths forward and offer strategies for organizing against capitalist exploitation, harnessing the power of the people, and finding strength in solidarity.
Written by the hosts of the podcast Death Panel (itself an excellent collection of “texts” that serve as a balm in the current moment and provide instruction for action), Health Communism declares both that capitalism is inherently incompatible with health, and that health is fundamental to capitalism. As the book begins, “Health is capitalism’s vulnerability.” Adler-Bolton and Vierkant define the “surplus class” as those who are labeled as a burden, or a drain, on the economy, including but not limited to the chronically ill, the disabled, the unemployed, and the elderly. Building upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of organized abandonment, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant describe the “extractive abandonment” that operates to systematically render the surplus class disposable (that is, exposed to conditions that enable premature death) and, simultaneously,extract capital from us.
But Adler-Bolton and Vierkant have robust proposals for fighting back. Their history of the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) provides a model for organizing and ideology. They call for the centering of the surplus class in our movements. In explicitly naming the alternative to health capitalism, Health Communism offers a clear path forward for the left and confers on us the power to demand health liberation.
This collection of essays unpacks the political economy of disability, arguing that disability is a social category primarily constructed through its relation to labor. By dividing potential workers into “the able-bodied” and “the disabled,” capitalism coerces disabled people out of waged work and instead extracts value by treating the disabled body as a commodity, and its need for care as a source of profit. Russell points out that not only do meager benefits and the continued neoliberal destruction of the social safety net coerce workers into productivity for fear of becoming disabled, austerity and bureaucracy also operate to withhold welfare and keep disabled people in a state of precarity. Ranging from U.S. imperialism to eugenics to institutionalization, Russell employs Marxist analysis to explore what so many Americans know firsthand—the intimate connections between health, disability, and one’s ability to work.
In The Next Shift, Winant describes the striking transformation of Pittsburgh’s economy from steel to healthcare, arguing that this transformation is no accident and is a direct result of the increased care needs of blue-collar workers. In contrast to the strong unions of the steel industry and their labor wins, Winant emphasizes the “mass low-wage private-sector employment” imposed upon the majority of healthcare workers, workers who are as important as they are underpaid and exploited.
While Pittsburgh is a stark case study, the processes that Winant describes have been enacted all over the States, and thus The Next Shift offers a crucial assessment of what the rise of the healthcare industry means for healthcare workers, patients, and caregivers alike.
In conversation with an array of thinkers and patients, Anne Boyer’s memoir, The Undying, depicts her experience with triple negative breast cancer and seethes against the vast societal and gendered connotations of the condition. With a studied cynicism towards the institutions she interfaces with, Boyer writes of “drive-by mastectomies,” chemotherapy medications that cost more than yearly salaries, and the unremitting requirement of work during sickness. She reflects, “When reading historical accounts of breast cancer, I am often struck by a world on which profit hadn’t taken such a full and festering hold.”
For Boyer, the origins of her cancer are haunting. Boyer leverages this into revolutionary anger: “Immobilized in bed, I decide to devote my life to making the socially acceptable response to news of a diagnosis of breast cancer not the corrective ‘stay positive,’ but these lines from Diane Di Prima’s poem ‘Revolutionary Letter #9’: ‘1. kill head of Dow Chemical / 2. destroy plant / 3. MAKE IT UNPROFITABLE FOR THEM to build again.’” More plainly, Boyer writes, “I would rather write nothing at all than propagandize for the world as it is.”
In Disabled Ecologies, Sunaura Taylor revisits a land that has had embodied impacts on her —its toxicity the likely cause of her genetic condition—despite the fact that she has not lived on it for decades: a Superfund site on the south side of Tucson, Arizona. Considering her birthplace as exemplifying a “disabled ecology—[a network] of disability [created] when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered,” Taylor investigates the history of the contaminated aquifer. A key component of that history was the formation by local residents, many of them Mexican American, of the group Tucsonans for a Clean Environment (TCE, named after a key toxin in the aquifer), which aimed to unearth the truth of the violence enacted upon them and to fight for justice, reparations, and the decontamination of their land.
Forming an instructive theoretical basis for an “environmentalism of the injured,” Disabled Ecologies is a beautifully written, captivating feat of archival work.Utilizing the networks of disability created by the U.S. military industrial complex, the book proposes ways we might leverage our interconnectedness on local and global levels to resist.
In this crucial intervention into disability studies, Jasbir Puar emphasizes that the source of much global disability and illness can be tied to the concept of “the right to maim,” or the asserted right of the state to enact mass debility on populations as a form of enforced precaritization. Defining “debility” as a “slow wearing down,” Puar highlights how neoliberal capitalism and U.S. imperialism, work and war, use debilitation tactically to incapacitate and capacitate racialized populations and thereby control them. Through discussions of the impacts of the U.S. war machine and Israel’s exercising of both “the right to maim” and “the right to kill” on Palestinians, Puar argues for a framework of disability that transcends pride and identity discourses. Instead, Puar names debility as a mechanism of state violence and takes that, rather than the push for acceptance of difference within neoliberal systems, as a launching point for disability scholarship, organizing, and activism.
In Mad World, Micha Frazer-Carroll locates the Madness/Mental Illness “epidemic” squarely within capitalism, highlighting “how the world drives us Mad, how the world comes to categorize us as Mad, and then, how the world responds to our Madness.” Drawing from principles of the disability justice movement, Frazer-Carroll deconstructs the asylum, diagnosis, carcerality, and the sickening impacts of labor exploitation, with thoughtful attention to the way linguistic formations operate within these systems of oppression. She foregrounds the lived experience of Mad people, calling for us to “uproot our assumptions and centre knowledge ‘from below’—which often contradicts that of charities, medical institutions, and other professional experts.” Frazer-Carroll argues against disavowal, attesting to the necessity of solidarity in delivering us into a liberated future.
In Decarcerating Disability, Liat Ben-Moshe thoroughly disproves the popular notion that the deinstitutionalization of asylums, beginning in the 50s, paved the way for increased incarceration of disabled and Mad people. Instead, Ben-Moshe identifies deinstitutionalization as the largest decarceration movement in US history and suggests that it can offer essential lessons for prison abolition movements. Decarcerating Disability provides a much-needed assessment of the intricate relationships between disability and carceral abolition, illuminating histories and knowledges in service of abolition movements.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues and the threat of H5N1 escalates, Thrasher’s analysis of the “viral underclass”—the class for whom instability and structural inequity combine to heighten vulnerability to pathogens—is obviously urgent; but then, as Thrasher illustrates, it has been for decades. A scholar of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Thrasher depicts the disproportionate impacts of viruses on already precarious populations, making the point that this vulnerability is not inherent but manufactured. The book is structured around what Thrasher terms “social vectors,” or forms of oppression that magnify the harms caused by viruses, such as racism, capitalism, borders, and the liberal carceral state. Through empathetic reporting, Thrasher argues against the popular narrative of “patient zero” and the pathologization of people who contract viruses, while emphasizing that viruses are not nefarious, malevolent agents—viruses are an inevitable feature of our environment. Given the boundary-defying nature of viruses, Thrasher envisions them as evidence of human and interspecies connection and interdependence, and suggests our learnings from viruses can aid us in creating “a new ethic of care.”
Drawing from her time reporting on the largest Ebola epidemic in history, Seema Yasmin’s poetry collection explores the permeability of the relationship between humans and viruses while challenging the authority of medical and public health institutions to dictate these relationships. Repeated “WHO said” poems deftly call into question the communications of a global health authority and contrast these with the lived experience of patients and healthcare workers.
Invoking an epigraph from Marwa Helal, “poems do work journalism cant,” Yasmin uses a plurality of forms to navigate these systems and questions; her poems take the shape of surveys, bingo cards, phylogenetic trees, and forms that purport to translate the language that patients use to describe their suffering. Yasmin takes her vast array of experiences—as poet, as journalist, as medical doctor—and transforms them into a groundbreaking poetics.
In The Lilac People, my debut novel about trans people in Weimar Berlin and Nazi Germany, I have a side character so small, they’re downright tertiary. Dora Richter has no speaking role, nor does she have any impact on the plot. And yet she’s included because she’s important, and she was real.
As is often the case when researching marginalized or erased histories, things were incomplete. There were pieces missing in Dora’s life story, and eventually it cut off completely. After a certain point, she was never seen or heard from again.
At least, this was the narrative for decades. I take pride in being as accurate and thorough as possible with my research, so I followed the trail of the dedicated historians before me, equally determined to provide as complete a picture of Dora as I could. With trans history so dear to me, there’s no worse fate to me than appearing to be, in a word, wrong. Especially if it’s too late to correct that wrongness.
But the tricky nature of recovering marginalized history is it’s never done. It shifts, it surprises. There are inevitably parts that remain empty or obscured, and yet sometimes something new pops up despite the tireless efforts of previous historians. Sometimes that new discovery is also quite big.
Dora’s seemingly concluded history did recently shift, and me and many others were indeed surprised. It was also too late for me to do anything about it.
At the time of writing The Lilac People, this is what I knew about Dora Richter.
Dora Richter was a trans woman (“transvestite” at the time) known as the first documented person to have undergone a complete, gender-affirming vaginoplasty. She was born in 1892 in Seifen (now Ryžovna) in the Kingdom of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic), and is believed to have been the second of seven children. She exhibited so-called feminine behaviors by at least six years old and became a baker’s apprentice around the age of seventeen. She dressed as a woman in her free time and eventually headed to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (the Institute for Sexual Science) in Berlin when encouraged by a friend. The Institute had many resources available for trans people.
She was arrested multiple times in Berlin for her so-called crossdressing, and otherwise worked as a male-presenting waiter and cook until she got her first of at least three surgeries in 1922 around the age of thirty. After completing the first surgical step of her vaginoplasty journey, she worked at the Institute for Sexual Science as a maid and domestic servant alongside other trans women who had elected to do the same. (One of the many resources the Institute offered to trans people was employment, when available. The Institute’s co-founder, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, recognized how difficult it was for trans people to find employment.)
Dora was well loved and respected at the Institute and was affectionately nicknamed “Dorchen” (“Little Dora”) by Dr. Hirschfeld. The other maids were also loved and respected, as exampled from this observation by Dr. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, a surgeon at the Institute and who performed one of Dora’s surgeries:
It was, moreover, very difficult for transvestites to find a job.(…) As we knew this and as only few places of work were willing to employ transvestites, we did everything we could to give such people a job at our Institute. For instance, we had five maids – all of them [MTF] transvestites, and I shall never forget the sight one day when I happened to go into the Institute’s kitchen after work: there they sat close together, the five “girls,” peacefully knitting and sewing and singing old folk-songs. These were, in any case, the best, most hardworking and conscientious domestic workers we ever had.
But then, on January 30th, 1933, Hitler became chancellor. Just three months and some change later, on May 6th, the German Student Union, who were by this point young Nazis, ransacked the Institute. This soon led to the first documented queer/trans book ban, a book burning.
For a while, this was where Dora Richter’s story ended.
For a while, this was where Dora Richter’s story ended. It was originally believed that she had been murdered that night, and so this is what my characters believe in the book. However, in March of 1955—22 years later—more information about her finally surfaced. In an article by Charlotte Charlaque—another pioneer of trans woman history in Berlin, who also fled—in the American magazine ONE, it turned out Dora had escaped from Germany after that day at the Institute and went to Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic). She became the owner of a small restaurant in her hometown of Seifen/Ryžovna.
In 1934, she was finally granted a legal name change to Dora Rudolfine Richter (Czech version: Dora Rudolfa Richterová) by the president of Czechoslovakia. (According to historian Clara Hartmann in 2023, her baptismal record was finally updated with both her correct name and gender marker in 1946. It was updated by a priest and stamped by the Catholic parish office of Seifen, which are details I just find interesting.) She owned her own home in Seifen/Ryžovna, remained unmarried, and eventually worked as a lace maker.
But in 1939, she again fell off historical radar. On the surface, this wouldn’t cause much alarm. People disappear into history all the time due to a lack of consistent records. But with the fact that the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, suddenly her disappearance doesn’t seem so benign. After surviving the Nazis once in Germany, historians speculated she wasn’t as lucky the second time around in Czechoslovakia.
Since I take pride in the accuracy of my work and strive to honor the legacies of the transcestry, I wanted to make sure readers knew these extra pieces of Dora’s life. I included a shorter version of them in the book’s back matter. I also included a definitive final sentence: “The rest of her life is unknown.”
This was how it was for the years of research for my book, straight through to early December 2024, when it was time to send back the final pass pages to my publisher. After sending the final pass, I could never alter the book again. Ever. This is how it would be published in April 2025.
So I attempted to be meticulous for the umpteenth time, combing through everything for inaccuracies, updates, and typos on all levels of craft, content, historical accuracy, and grammar. Then, with both relief and anxiety, I sent the pages over. That was it. I never had to (or could) look at the manuscript ever again. This moment comes for every author. Surely it’d be okay.
Just days after sending off my final proof pages—now 69 years since the last known update about Dora in 1955—I heard the news: historian Clara Hartmann had uncovered new information about Dora Richter. It turned out this news had gained attention almost exactly two months before I sent in my final pass pages, with some of it originally published more quietly six months earlier in June 2024. I’d completely missed it.
By the time I heard, I knew it was too late to update my back matter. One simply does not mess with printer deadlines. Immediately, that sentence haunted me: “The rest of her life is unknown.”
Immediately, that sentence haunted me: ‘The rest of her life is unknown.’
Dora, it turned out, lived to the age of 74—an exceptionally good lifespan for her time. She continued to live in Seifen/Ryžovna until 1946, when the end of WWII led to the expulsion of Germans from places such as Czechoslovakia. She then went to Allersberg, Bavaria, where she remained until her death in 1966. According to Clara Hartmann, neighbors fondly remembered Dora as a cheerful old woman who kept a pigeon in her handbag. She was rarely seen without that handbag, which supposedly was used as a makeshift nest for the pigeon, and into which she was sometimes seen dropping food. She lived with a man who some neighbors assumed was her brother, but others believed was her lover. (Couples living together outside of wedlock was frowned upon.)
When I heard the update on her life, I had a mix of feelings. One of them was joy at the simple fact that Dora had survived. Another was awe, that somebody had managed to find out more about Dora Richter and the lengths to which that historian went. But I also felt frustration. I’d just spent how many years researching all this stuff, only to miss such a big update by at least two months, rendering my book technically outdated before it even had a chance to debut? It was admittedly from a place of stubborn pride for me, the pride I take in being as accurate as possible in histories that are often quickly dismissed as speculative or false. Had I gone to the same lengths that Hartmann had when trying to find new information about Dora? Not even close. Was I still worried people would see me as a hack who didn’t know what he was talking about? Well, yeah.
But after feeling my medley of feelings, I began to reflect. In my book’s back matter, I’d also included the following: “We’ve entered a time when people are finally discussing and researching trans people during the Nazi era, and I welcome the updates, changes, and discoveries that occur beyond my armchair-historian novel.”
Trans history is far from over.
Three things jumped out at me, rereading that statement: 1) I meant it, 2) I didn’t realize how quickly this sentiment would be put into motion, and 3) my phrasing of “the updates” as opposed to “any updates” indicates that it wasn’t just hopeful thinking on my part that more trans history would be on the horizon. It was a recognition of how trans history works.
I realized I’ve never been happier to be wrong. And this, it turns out, is the best part about researching trans history.
As more trans historians enter the profession and more ally historians check their assumptions and (over)simplifications about the history of gender, some of the holes of gender non-conforming history are filling. Lost pieces are being found, and whole or nearly-whole pictures are coming together after generations of obscurity.
When we think of historical erasure, we often think of the more physical side of things: the destruction of artifacts, books, and other primary sources that confirm the past existences of a marginalized identity. However, as I’ve written elsewhere, this is only the first in a four-step process of erasure. The others are the destruction of the people, the destruction of meaning, and the glossing over/sometimes-willful misinterpretation of modern recoveries of said histories.
I used to think that Dora Richter’s story ended with that second step: the destruction of the people. However, thanks to the tireless dedication of Clara Hartmann (and, earlier, Charlotte Charlaque), we now know that isn’t the case. We now know that she survived the Nazis not once, but twice. We now know that against the odds, she went on to live a long, happy life. We know that trans history is far from over, that it has always been and continues to be a collaborative effort within and beyond the community, people contributing new pieces of information as they find them. We’ll continue to recover, discover, and awaken histories that either were erased in any of the four above steps or have been slumbering this whole time, undisturbed, because none of us yet know they’re there.
But perhaps most importantly, we now know that such stories sometimes come with a happy ending. The reality is there. All we have to do is look.
In 2016, I moved from Philadelphia to the Upper Midwest, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to attend a creative writing program. My family struggled to adjust, and no one struggled more than I did. It wasn’t the remoteness or the weather that challenged me most, but the way people communicated. I hadn’t realized the way the east coast had conditioned me to be blunt and open, and I balked at the strange combination of warmth and reservedness I found in the Midwest. And, more than anything, I felt like a queer weirdo. I set most of my stories at home in Philadelphia, a place that was becoming squishier in my mind, but I failed to see how to square my queerness with the new setting in which I was living and writing. I told my fiction professor I was thinking of leaving the program and Michigan. She gave lots of good advice. One of the best pieces: read Lori Ostlund. I started with “All Boy,” and then one by one read and re-read all of the stories in Lori’s debut collection, The Bigness of the World. No book had meant as much to me since I found Harriet the Spy and Matilda in childhood and felt myself wrapped up in the queerness of these little girls’ worlds.
In her stories as well as her novel After the Parade, Lori captured something about queer people who grow up in small Midwest towns and strike out to the coasts, or to New Mexico, or abroad, that moved me intensely as someone who had traveled in the other direction. Even though I was new to the Upper Midwest, I saw my new friends and acquaintances and their families and contexts captured. So when I saw that Lori was publishing a new collection in 2025, I did something I had been meaning to do for years: I reached out and told her how her writing had changed my life. I didn’t drop out of school and retreat to the coast like I had told my professor I would. I stayed, finished my degree, and now, years later, find myself writing and teaching in Lori’s home state, Minnesota.
I couldn’t wait to talk about her new collection, Are You Happy?, whose stories strike out in bold directions but at whose heart is the same measured, hyper-realistic prose that allows astounding access to the interior lives of characters who often keep their innermost thoughts secreted away from their family and friends. I wanted to know how she does it, and how her interest in “the bigness of the world” continues to morph and attach to her new stories.
Krys Malcolm Belc: There’s this interesting movement I noticed through the collection where, especially in the first couple stories, there are huge events that are really shaking up people’s lives, like the loss of a child, or the plane accident described in one of the stories.
And then there are a couple stories later where it’s more about accretion of smaller events [that] sometimes don’t ever coalesce into a big event. Two women who believe one of their neighbors may be watching them, a teacher who feels menaced by one of her students.
I’m wondering how you’re thinking about big events and small events in your characters’ lives.
Lori Ostlund: Every time I’m asked to describe the book, one of the things I talk about is that specter of violence. Events that actually happen are one thing, but in some ways, I’m almost more intrigued by the big thing that never comes to fruition, but your whole life, at least for a moment, is defined by feeling that it might.
“The Stalker” is the last piece that I wrote for this collection. I wrote it last year, and it’s about a stalker that I had. I think every teacher has something like that, a moment in their classroom that leaves them feeling slightly uncomfortable. What I remember most is my own reaction, which was to feel that I was over responding to it, giving it too much credence.
It was this big guy who would always stay after class and wait for everyone to leave and always wanted my time in this very specific way. One night I told him I needed to get going, and I was gathering my things, and I turned around and he was like two inches behind me. I just remember looking up at him and [seeing] this look like he wanted to kill me. I left, it was at night on this remote campus, and by the time I got home and started to tell [my partner], Anne, and she was like, You gotta talk to your boss.
I think loneliness remains one of my preoccupations as a writer.
If you just say, what’s the end of the story, the end of the story is nothing happened. But I’m interested in that whole in-between, when all you’re doing is reacting to it and thinking about it, and how it transforms everything.
KMB: This isn’t the first time I’ve seen New Mexico in your work, but I did feel like Albuquerque, especially, but also Santa Fe [in “Two Serious Ladies”] were very big and built out in this collection. How were you thinking about presenting these cities to your readers?
LO: The novel that I’m working on is set in Albuquerque. My wife and I started an Asian furniture store, which we ran for seven years, called Two Serious Ladies. The novel is also about this undercurrent of violence that runs through things. And it’s also about loneliness. I think loneliness remains one of my preoccupations as a writer.
The book is definitely an Albuquerque book in some ways. I think that people don’t really know much about Albuquerque. If you say New Mexico, people just default to Santa Fe.
I like Santa Fe, but it’s not my New Mexico. I lived in Albuquerque for many, many years. I think you’re making me aware of the fact that maybe I write about it more comfortably when I don’t live there. 20 years ago we moved [to San Francisco]. I always say that I can’t write a thing about Minnesota when I’m there. I think that that remains true, yet it’s factored so much.
I always feel like my job as a writer is to sit between the world that I know, that very specific world of towns of 400 people, and interpret that for the rest of the world. Albuquerque is a very specific place also. It has a very high per capita crime rate, and that’s what people tend to know about it or fixate on, but that’s not necessarily the world of Albuquerque that I’m presenting.
KMB: Many of your characters seem to be people who withhold things that they’re thinking, either because of their constitutions, or because they’re coming from a cultural context [like the Upper Midwest] where we don’t say the things that we’re really thinking. Reading through the collection and getting to the last story, “Just Another Family,” Sybil is a character who says “the thing” to be provocative in an almost aggressive way.
In one moment, Sybil’s Mom, who talks around things and is a very elliptical speaker, says, “You know how your sister gets about the kids” when Sybil asks why she moved her deceased father’s guns into the room where she’s staying.
And Sybil says, “You mean how she gets about not wanting them to blow their heads off?” She just says it. I want to hear a little bit more about writing this character who goes against the rules that so many of the other characters are following.
LO: This is a character who is really struggling against something and so she’s saying all of these things because she hasn’t made her peace, hasn’t done that work yet of figuring [herself] out.
A reader said that they really like that story because the narrator reveals herself to be such an asshole. And I don’t know why, but it gave me such pleasure because I thought, That’s it exactly. That’s what I was going for. That pushing back.
I grew up where nothing was talked about. My understanding of how [to] write dialogue in particular, but I think everything else too, came out of that. The most interesting things were unsaid. Humor is created by understanding how to put the words on the page in a certain way, and knowing when to stop, when to create that restraint. And all of that went away a little bit when I wrote “Just Another Family.” It went in the opposite direction.
That’s kind of the way I define Midwestern humor: We’re happiest when we make a joke that no one else gets.
A friend read it, and he said, “I’m so interested. Your characters often seem to take great pleasure in making a joke that people don’t think is funny.” That’s kind of the way I define Midwestern humor: We’re happiest when we make a joke that no one else gets. We don’t laugh outwardly but [are] laughing inside.
Sybil is all of that, all these pieces of me that are maybe pieces of me if I’d gone a slightly different path. It gave me a certain pleasure. As a writer, I’m really intrigued by that gap you have to be able to open up on the page, and it’s the gap between what a character knows about themselves, our narrator, and what the reader knows.
KMB: A lot of the protagonists have a partner character who serves as a bouncing off point. In “Just Another Family,” [Sybil’s partner] Rachel says things that are right about how Sybil acts like the worst version of herself when she’s dealing with family stuff, but on the other hand, whenever Rachel would say these things to Sybil, I would tell myself, Don’t hate her too much! And I wanted to tell Rachel, Just remember that when you go back home, it’s not gonna be like this.
You developed my affinity for the character who, if you just went by actions on the page and the way that she’s interacting with her sister and her mom, you’d be like, God, she just stinks. But you know there’s this other self that [Sibyl] can get back to when she leaves.
LO: Maybe this is just a shift in me, but I’m not very interested in cynicism right now. As I get older, I feel it’s really easy to become more cynical. I can see how, and I can easily reflect each other’s cynicism back to each other.
When I was writing this final version of that story, I could feel early criticism that nothing really happens with this character, and the way that I addressed that or wrote into it had to do with the fact that I didn’t want the story to just be cynical.
Petra [Sybil’s neice] saying [“Were Sybil and Rachel born together in a big bubble?”] at the dinner table was an opportunity to show how miserable everyone is. [It was] just this awkward moment and that was it. But later I started to think about it. Suddenly that became bigger, and it became one of the moments I was writing toward at the end, a more hopeful moment.
KMB: I was thinking a lot about domesticity and queer domesticity in particular throughout this story, [how] sometimes these stories are about the safety that you can create inside of a home.
We create the bubble. When you have the bubble, then you’re the self you need to be to go out in the world and do stuff, right? We can go be teachers and work in our community and connect with other people, in a way that we can’t do when we’re in the dysfunction of the place that caused us to make the bubble.
LO: I completely agree. That bubble was one of those things that got handed to me. Years ago, when we were living in Albuquerque, we had good friends who lived around the corner. They were over at dinner one night, and their daughter, who was like three at the time, she just sensed something, and she asked whether we were born in a bubble together. I think she was noticing something, and she understood that we had this connection that felt big, but she also understood that we were kind of separate from the world in some ways, and that was how she expressed it.
And I loved it. I thought, I’m going to figure that out someday. That’s going to go in a story and I’m going to figure out what it means.
KMB: In “A Little Customer Service,” there’s a moment where the protagonist, Tara, is charged with freeing the caught mice that her older, possibly manipulative girlfriend-figure catches inside of her home. Tara gets in the car with the girlfriend’s kids, they drive out of town, and they’re going to be releasing these mice. One of the children is upset, and he says, “Tara, do you feel sad about how the world, how big the world must seem to him right now?”
I want to talk about your enduring interest in the situation that this mouse is in. There are the people who stay, the people who leave, and then this mouse, the people who are on the threshold of something.
LO: When I was writing The Bigness of the World, I had all these stories, and I didn’t know how they connected beyond the fact that they all came out of my brain. I was stuck on the title story, and I knew that I needed something.
So Anne said, “Let’s go. Let’s go to Point Lobos and let’s go see the ocean.” So we drove down there, and we’re walking along, and Anne said something to me like, “Your mother should come and visit us,” which just terrified me because my mother has never really left Minnesota. She’s never been on a plane.
Being gay saved me.
Much of my adult life has involved estrangement. So this idea just seemed awful to me. I said to Anne, “Why would you say my mother should come and visit us? She’s fine where she is.” And Anne said, “Well, because she’s never seen the ocean.”
And I said, “Well, why does she need to see the ocean? She’s lived this many years without it.” And she said, “Well, you can never really understand the bigness of the world if you haven’t seen the ocean. “
I think I always, because I was so curious, wanted to just go out in the world. Being gay saved me. It pushed me out. And the very first time I saw the ocean, I was in my early twenties, and I remember so clearly that feeling of thinking the world is huge. And I understood equally people who would look at the ocean and feel that sense of awe, and people who would see it and retreat. I understood both of those, and maybe that’s because I have both of those inside me. That is one of the things I come back to all the time in my writing: That feeling of fear of the world, and a need to retreat from it, to close it off for whatever reason—because of fear, because of that specter of violence, because of whatever it is inside oneself—and that need to engage.
And so I think the mouse has that thrust on him, doesn’t he? But Tara is really speaking more about herself. Tara was an interesting character for me to write because I don’t really identify with her. It was a story in many ways about class, and I am interested in class issues. My parents didn’t go to college. I grew up in this hardware store. When I left, I went to a state school an hour and a half down the interstate.
I live in a world now where the people around me grew up in a much different place. They went to different sorts of schools. I always call it “the credentialing”: the conversations about where did you go to school and where did you vacation when you were a kid with your family, and all these sorts of things that had no bearing on my life whatsoever.
My partner, Anne, she’s first generation born in this country; her parents were Holocaust refugees. Her father was a professor of Russian history and her mother a psychiatrist. When she hooked up with me, they were like, Who is this woman from Minnesota? You know, her father referred to it as “the provinces” one time. So Tara interested me, but still, even though there were so many things about her that I could relate to, she was again who I would be if maybe I had not gone out into the bigness of the world, if I had stayed at a certain place. She’s curious, but stuck in the mud a little.
Tara is in and out of school, and then in this relationship that’s clearly not going anywhere. And you see that she would like the ocean, but [that] she might not get there. She might not fit into that dichotomy of characters. That’s completely who she is. It’s the parallel life that I never pursued, but I still feel it.
I was trekking through the neighborhood next to mine, on my way to work. It was a long walk, but one of those perfect summer days that just a few months earlier, in the thick gloom of Boston winter, would have felt impossible. And so, when it finally comes, the city soaks it in. My strolling location: a wealthy neighborhood with one of the highest PhD per capita ratios in the country. You get the idea: brownstones and irregular, shingled mansions. It was summer. I walked. Other people walked. Some people ran; some people biked. Past the Greek bakery, and the nail salon, and the Russian School of Mathematics. I have no idea what the Russian School of Mathematics is, only where.
On my way past a daycare—one of three on my route—I scooted over on the sidewalk to make room for a 4-seat stroller. It was a red plastic square of babies in two rows, each strapped into a swiveling seat and lazing in its own orbit, caregivers at either end to push and clear the way. It was distracting—so many babies. So many babies staring at their own hands. They rolled by, all of us in a daze. And there, around the corner I skirted to make room for the tiny, was the mirage. One minute, I was watching babies not watch the sky. The next, instead of breath, there was a great silence blooming in my chest.
The mirage had a three-column porch, and a big, purple, wooden front door. Behind the glass in the door hung a panel of lace. Maid of the mist. It had taupe-painted shingles and white trim and wide windows and bright plants in the yard. A yard. In the city. Green, glory. The windows held the same kind of glass as the door: the thick, old kind that warps vision. Above the porch, a widow’s walk. To the right of the porch, a tower. It started on the ground and ended at the sky, topped with its own cone. Tower.
I could tell you it’s a Victorian, but that summons frills and buttresses and stripes, and I hate multicolored trim more than almost anything.
I could tell you it’s a Queen Anne, but I think she did frills also. Edwardian? I give up.
I tell you: It was perfect, the kind of perfect I didn’t know had power over me.
Years ago, when friends of mine from college started buying houses, I considered it a lack of imagination. They married within twelve months of graduation. They got something like the job they had studied for. (They had studied things with jobs: engineering, elementary education, business.) They looked around for what to do next. Too soon for babies. What were strangers their age doing? Buying houses. Purchasing long-term hobbies. What does homeowner Jim do for fun? He mows the lawn and squares the hedges. What does homeowner Sally do? She wallpapers the hallway and organizes linens.
Okay. In this gender-normative example, I’ve given Sally the tasks that don’t seem too bad, Jim the ones that make me want to go back to bed. Now you know who I am.
But my point remains: Isn’t boredom why some people—confident people whose lives are working out for them—buy houses? Boredom is the root of all my mistakes. That, and the adult disappointment of being bookish.
When these friends were buying houses, I was in grad school to become a writer. I was moving, again. I wanted no plot of land to commit and return to. I wanted no possessions that couldn’t fit in my car. Their confidence shocked, horrified, me. How dare they feel so certain, make such permanent decisions. Fools.
But I am beginning to know humility. What if, instead of boredom, or a lack of imagination, some people buy houses out of love?
The mirage owned me.
What a traitor, my heart.
That evening, after work, I walked home on the other side of the road, stopped and stared across two lanes and two sidewalks so I could take it all in. I sighed. I wanted it. My house.
I started taking people around to see it. My husband, when we were out walking. My sister, when she was in town. Do you want to see my house? Let’s go!
Now, I see it in dreams. Not necessarily my house, embodied as is it a mile from my current apartment. But my house. In the dreams, there is an open back door and hours of sunlight. There is a kitchen counter covered in fresh tomatoes. Sometimes, out the window, it is snowing. Sometimes, I’m holding a book inside my bathrobe. Always, I’m not wearing socks, and I am not afraid.
I can’t believe I’d want something as frivolous as a house with windows so old they warp vision.
But I am afraid. Bamboozled. I’ve never longed for property ownership. It sounds like that: onerous. Lawns to mow and driveways to shovel and insurance to buy, property taxes to pay. What am I forgetting? It doesn’t matter. The worries would have my name on them, searching me out like heat-seeking missiles. With an unstable job—unpaid writer, part-time college writing instructor twice over—and an ancient car and a partner deep in the throes of a terminal degree in a field with no prospects (it’s not engineering), my life can’t support anything else maintained by worry and sinkholes of time. I can’t believe I’d want something as frivolous as a house with windows so old they warp vision.
As with most problems of my heart, the cause is, in part, books: Barton Cottage, Orchard House, Manderley, Pemberly, Villa Villekulla, Bag End—I am happy to be swept away by the literary fantasia of a house with a name, a house with a character.
But also, it’s New England. Currently, I live in Boston. That’s where I saw my house. Or rather, I saw it in a small city that exists within the limits of the city of Boston but for predictable demographic reasons, refuses to incorporate into the city proper. And I grew up here. Not in Boston, but two hours southeast, on Cape Cod. For the years I was in college and graduate school, years that I maintained I had no interest in homeownership, I lived elsewhere. Places where blocks were squares, places where road names were grid numbers, lawns and roofs were flat. Places where the windows were never drafty, the radiators never clicked out of time, the floors were more likely to be carpet than hardwood, the front doors insulated metal. Who am I kidding: there were no radiators. There was central air. The houses were, perhaps, affordable, but they inspired nothing in me. It was not as bold as I imagined it was to claim that I didn’t want to own one. I didn’t like them.
It took three years of life in Boston for New England—the land of old houses, the land of my childhood, mythologized in steep roofs and irregular floor plans; thick, wooden doors and painted shutters—to break me.
There is, especially here in New England but not only here in New England, an industry built around the care and feeding of old houses. The bureaucracy: Historic Preservation Committees regulating flora and fauna and paint colors. The money: replacement wallpaper companies. Irregular, historic window companies. Furniture preservation shops. Antique shops. Historic plaque shops, so strangers can know the age of your house, the last name of its first inhabitants. There are those businesses that painstakingly scrape back every layer of paint until they find the Original Shade. They will mix and sell you the Original Shade, for another small fee. And then, there are all the plumbers and electricians and painters and carpenters and stone masons called to fix what breaks often: old houses.
But before and after all this, there is the legend-maker, the mythology-builder, the jewel of WGBH, now in its 42nd season: This Old House. Perhaps you’ve seen it. I can’t imagine anyone not having seen it but then, I was raised on inherited, Puritan air: public television and frugality.
In This Old House, men in faded button-down shirts restore an old house. In every episode, there are scenes of boards being sliced and perfect holes being drilled. Men point to crumbling moldings and remove old wires, replace them with bright, new wires and fresh moldings. These men are methodical. They never make mistakes or imperfect cuts. The sound effects, too, are flawless: not so much construction that you get a headache, just enough screwdriver buzz that you believe work is happening. Everything fits as it should. By the end of the show, everything works as it should too. Everything is or will be a beautiful old house, impeccably maintained. No one tries to modernize the décor, only the functionality.
There is a spin-off show called Ask This Old House where viewers—people who own old houses—write in with home-repair questions. If their question is good enough, one of the Ask This Old House men shows up with a crew to film the solution. The homeowner helps and learns. Now we all know how to solve a humidity mystery, how to ground a wire, how to pick out a water-efficient toilet. We believe we could do it, and do it well.
We love old houses. We dream of old houses.
If we’re talking about brainwashing and mythologizing historic homeownership, I would name This Old House as one of the main perpetrators. It gives us faith in the knowability, the fixability, of old houses, of our own ability to possess and improve the things we love.
We love old houses. We dream of old houses. We never used to, but our fate was fixed long before all that. What I mean is, I never had a chance.
But I should know better, better than the TV show, better than the twee of Gilmore Girls, the rose-colored glasses of tourism: I grew up in an old house that tried its hardest to be inhospitable. Its repairs weighed on my mother’s shoulders almost as much as her children. In many ways, the concerns were one and the same: the hot water heater broke; the exterior walls weren’t insulated; the windows pre-dated adults and had sash cords in varying states of disrepair; the electrician came once and told us it was the wiring was “as old as it gets.” I thought this was exciting and told my friends. My house was historic! Combustible! One of those friends lived in the certified second-oldest house in town. Her house had a milk snake living in the walls. She won.
If we’re talking about betrayals, there is my heart: how it added desires without warning.
And there is Boston: when I was a child, Boston was the city. My family came here to go to museums and Christmas shows and the airport. I was excited, after years of early adulthood in the Midwest and then the South, to move to Boston, back home, almost. But in the five years since, Boston has chewed me up and spit me out scarred: there are no rooms in its inn, not for people like me, people who missed the entrance exam into the new upper class. I thought it would be a city of readers, and it is, but the city belongs to biotech and hospital and university administrators. They are re-making it in their image: filling in the ocean to assemble new neighborhoods of glass and metal, refurbishing historic buildings into lab space, constructing luxury housing with centralized air conditioning and color-splotched, squared exteriors, applying for zoning exemptions to stretch architecture further and further into the sky. They have exploded the housing market. They don’t care; they can afford any rent. They fund STEM programs in every university. They read self-published business e-books and Malcom Gladwell. They don’t remember taking an English class, having their heart broken by a sentence.
So, Boston has betrayed me twice over: it rejected me and all the literary dreams I had for myself. It is not a place to be a struggling writer, not financially, not socially. And, this rejection exposed the person I did not know I was, a conventional sort of person who wants a house and garden to control and neighbors to monitor out the window.
Okay, I’ll give the city this: it’s great for neighbor-monitoring.
By the time my parents were in their early thirties, as I am now, they had bought and sold one house and purchased another, the one my mother still lives in, the one I grew up in. My parents, when they bought this house, had three children, a fourth on the way. My father was a social worker. My mother was a teacher by trade, hands full of children.
When I turned thirty, none of my siblings had houses or children. You could call it choice, and it’s true that I choose not to live in Indiana, or Illinois, or Iowa where the housing market might look more realistic. That’s where my college friends, the ones who settled years ago, live. But I am not of such places. I tried to be, but like I said, my fate was fixed long ago.
Here, in Boston and its historic suburbs, we cannot afford houses, let alone children. We have things our parents had—Puritan work ethics and loves of beauty— and things our parents didn’t have—graduate degrees and student loans and two-career households—but property ownership isn’t for us. Deeded land is for people with other kinds of degrees: medical research, technology, old money, university deans.
So perhaps it’s only logical that I’m in for a pound, not a penny—if I’m going to dream of a vestige of a lost world, it might as well be as ethereal and unlikely as possible. ’70s ranches do not cut it. Neither do ’60s split-levels. Neither does anything built in the past 50 years. Overall, I hate new houses. I shrivel inside of them. The floors are too quiet, the walls too flat. The vacuum can fit in every corner. I can’t breathe. They’re not dead; they were never alive.
All I ask is Green Gables. Wood and windows and porches and no talk of career tracks. Perhaps, instead, a vicarage in southern England?
A tower. Is it too much?
My house, too, the embodied one with a tower, is in one of the most expensive corners in an already expensive city. Think of trying to buy Versailles. Think of thinking Versailles seemed like a nice place to live. Different insanities.
Myths, of course, are designed to teach us things. Why there is fire, and winter, and death. Why we should temper ambition and curiosity.
But myths are simple stories, and in this, they are lies. They tell only one truth, and they tell it briefly and without shadows.
We want to believe that we can forge the things we love into our own image.
The myth of This Old House is that old houses are maintainable, affordable, practical. The lie is that love and measuring twice will be enough to make your old house a beautiful old house with level floors and safe wiring and just the right amount of project, whatever that amount might be for you. We want to believe that we can forge the things we love into our own image. That if we are patient and kind and generous, the object of our affection will mold itself to our desires.
It works for the faded-shirt men.
But it doesn’t work for cities. They are inflexible, mechanical, maniacal.
It doesn’t work for careers.
It doesn’t work for people either. Even if we think we know who we are, what we want, we can’t guarantee our hearts, can’t barricade them against internal winds of change.
Last summer, when I looked up from the rolling sidewalk babies, saw the mirage, and realized I wanted it, I was appalled. Here was something else I wanted and would never have. I would have to live with more longing, specific longing. I’ll never own that house, maybe a house at all.
If I can critique my desires, see all the flaws and pitfalls and cultural mirages they are built upon, can I release myself from them?
If I can admit my dreams are unoriginal—an old house, a plot of land with my name and clothesline on it, neighbors I can wave to—can I absolve myself from the shame of conventionality?
If, narratively speaking, a crisis is a moment of breakage in which the character receives a wound from which they cannot recover, that old, three-million-dollar house was mine. It was the moment I knew I was cursed in the way I had once thought myself exempt from: to desire ordinary things. What a fool I had been to think myself special. Old houses are the original sin of growing up in New England: we are born with them in our blood.
Faced with the purple door with the lace in the window, the porch, the tower, the whole shimmering mirage, I was as powerless. I transformed into what I was: a person whose dreams were not working out for them. A disappointed, disintegrating, adult, considering who she had once been, all the other things she might have wanted, too, instead, had things been different. I had told myself I didn’t want what my old friends wanted—no suburban neighborhoods, no wide, flat lawns, definitely no dogs—and it was true. I hate dogs. What I hadn’t known about myself was that I carried my own version of their dreams: A cat. An oak banister. A bed next to a drafty window so I could drift under a down comforter on a February evening and read, the wind on the other side of the wall howling me to sleep. It was in no way original. But I was on no track to have it, any of it, and I knew it and I knew, like an arrow to the heart, that I wanted it. My house.
I didn’t know if I could surrender my other dreams—the ones that were slowing sucking the marrow from my bones, the ones that gave me barely enough money to live, never enough to save or pay off student loans or move into a two-bedroom apartment—for it, but I knew, for the first time, that there was a cost to my choices. I had decided to try to be not an engineer or a doctor or a lawyer or a nurse, but a writer, and the bill had come due. The first, not the last, of its kind. My house, never mine, not even in the distance, not for me, not if I kept expecting writing and Boston and academia to love me back. I sighed. It was too late to weep.
Motherhood as the epicenter of women’s lives was all I’d ever witnessed, so when, at 28, I realized my center was not there, I prodded the emptiness in my womb. Was I hollow, or was my center elsewhere? Are there others like me? Where are they? I had to find them.
My search started in books. But the books I found about childlessness were dense with numbers and technical terms, relied on melodramatic testimonies that made motherhood sound like the only thing worth living for, or supported antinatalist rhetoric on the verge of referring to children like the plague. The books I found were academic, dogmatic and radical. I had no use for any of them. Deep down, I knew that the fact that I couldn’t find anything helpful in those books meant something. Maybe I was looking for a book about a feeling. Maybe the question was not what childlessness was but who didn’t have children and how they felt. So, I looked for works by authors who are not mothers by choice, circumstance or ambivalence.
Ten years later, I wrote my own book on the topic. Part memoir, part exploration of childlessness through candid conversations, Others Like Me: The Lives of Women Without Children is the story of fourteen women around the world, from different walks of life, who don’t have children. It’s also my story and the story of why I had to find them.
Tracing the spines of the books that line my shelves, I’ve plucked nine favorites by women who placed writing, not babies, at the center of their lives and flourished outside of motherhood. Here they are.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti is so foundational that discussions in women’s communities about the motherhood dilemma are split into before and after this book’s existence. There had been conversations, chapters, self-help guides and dissertations on this topic, but not an entire book, free of academic jargon, written in first person with such candor, originality, and depth. Heti dedicated almost three hundred pages to a lyrical meditation on whether or not to become a mother, inquiring tirelessly about the many aspects of the most consequential decision of adulthood. In doing so, she found a new language to express the modern woman’s possibilities outside the norms of femininity.
My copy of Motherhood has quotes highlighted on almost every page. One to remember: “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning away from the living – an insufficient love for the rest of us, we billions of orphans already living.”
These Precious Days is a collection of essays on home, family, friendship, and writing.About halfway through, in “There Are No Children Here,” Ann Patchett sets the record straight about her choice regarding parenthood: “The thing in my life that is most extraordinary is that I have always known what I have wanted to do… I have never wavered. I never wanted to get married, I never wanted children, I never wanted to be rich, I never wanted a big house… everything was designed for this one thing: I wanted to write.” And so she did. Nine novels, five nonfiction books, three children’s books and counting. Lucky us.
Mid-pandemic, Joy Sullivan left a relationship, a house, and a job. Then, she drove west, crossing the United States from Ohio to Oregon. Two years later, she published Instructions for Traveling West—over a hundred poems bound together in a beautiful debut that puts the reader in the passenger’s seat.
Sullivan’s poetry is translucent, sensual and sensorial, trapping us in the illusion that we are watching her life unfold from inches away. Yet, somehow, while intimate, reading her never feels intrusive. The verses in “Comments Section,” “Almonds,” “Burn,” “Queen,” and “Culpable” hint at her thoughts on Instagram followers, Uber drivers, and waitresses prying on her reproductive status and plans to procreate.
A quirky, witty, and unpredictable novel that mirrors some aspects of the author’s life while telling the story of Keiko Furukura, a 36-year-old Japanese woman who has been working in the same convenience store for eighteen years. Sayaka Murata is Japanese and worked part-time at the cash register for many years before quitting to devote herself to writing. Published in 2016, Convenience Store Woman is Murata’s 10th novel and has been translated into more than 30 languages.
Wishing to depict how odd the people who believe they are normal are, and the social pressures of being a single woman in your 30s in her country, Murata gives voice to a workaholic female protagonist who chose to never have sex, get married, or have kids. She is aware that her ways are perceived as socially awkward and a source of constant worry to her family, but she doesn’t seem bothered by any of it. Keiko doesn’t want to fit in. She knows what makes her happy, and she’s not going to let anyone take her away from her convenience store.
By uncovering seven plastic boxes of family memorabilia in the corner of her office, Amy Tan goes deep into her traumatic childhood, reflects on her Chinese heritage, and offers insights into the nature of creativity and her writing methods. Where the Past Begins is a poignant and humorous memoir that recounts Tan’s complex relationship with her mentally ill mother, the loss of both her 16-year-old brother and her father within months of each other, and examines her love for art, music, and linguistics.
Old letters to and from her mother, some dating from 1969, when Tan went to college and they separated for the first time, give further insight into a relationship marked by frequent emotional fights and declarations of love. Sunk deep into the material evidence of their mother-daughter bond, Tan shares her feelings about becoming a mother herself, expressing no desire to pass along her genetic structure by stating, “What’s in me that I’d have wanted to pass on is already in the books.”
These are six bold essays from Irish author Emilie Pine about growing up with an alcoholic father, the heartbreak of dealing with infertility issues, feminism, sexual violence, and depression. All six are worth reading, but the fourth one stands out. In “Notes on Bleeding & Other Crimes,” Pine spills all across the page: “this period blood, this pregnancy blood, this miscarriage blood, this not-pregnant-again blood, this perimenopausal blood […] a shocking red to fill the white.” Notes to Self is vivid and visceral, reflecting vital aspects of life as a woman today.
Is it possible that life without romantic love is not so bad? In her first nonfiction work, British poet Amy Key pays tribute to Joni Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue, which she considers the basis for her view on romantic love. Chapter by chapter, Key dissects her life and the album while creating parallels between the two and asking big questions about an unplanned singlehood.
Her nuanced narrative makes space for confessions of shame, jealousy, and regret as she wonders about the parts of adulthood she would miss, such as motherhood, if she were to continue to be the sole curator of her life. From redefining “a family home” to building a house shaped by her needs and appreciating time alone or with friends, she gives us full access to what her days look and feel like as she finds fulfilment in other iterations of love.
Manifesto: On Never Giving Up walks us through how Bernardine Evaristo came to be the first Black woman and Black British person to win the Booker Prize, receive over 80 awards, nominations, fellowships, and honours, and have her books named the Book of the Year over sixty times.
Delving into her English, Nigerian, Irish, German and Brazilian heritage, romantic relationships, personal development and activism, Evaristo outlines her trajectory over six decades. Her ninth book also offers glimpses of her decision not to have children. “Instead of becoming a mother, I became an aunt and godmother, roles I’ve loved. I also describe myself as child-free, as opposed to childless, which implies a failure to fulfil my role as a woman rather than an active choice not to have them.”
Published in 1998, this is the book in which the former president emerita of the Poetry Society of America, Molly Peacock, tells the story of her dysfunctional childhood, her decision not to have children and her search for purpose and joy through creativity. This is also the book I found in 2013 at the Malmö library and returned only after shipping a copy from the United States to Sweden. This is the book I carried on trains and planes as if it were my emotional support animal. And the reason why, eight years later, I contacted Molly and told her that I too was writing a book about my choice not to have kids and that I needed a mentor. She said yes and guided me through the dark patches. When I finished writing Others Like Me, I dedicated it to her: the author of the first book that helped me visualize the life of an older woman without children.
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