How Self-Publishing Made Today’s Small Independent Presses Possible

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This post was made possible by a sponsorship from Reedsy.

When you look around at the most beloved books of the past decade, the books that seem destined to be classics, one thing becomes clear:

Small presses are amazing.

Whether we’re talking about the more literary side of things (like Citizen or Grief Is A Thing With Feathers, both published by Graywolf) or weirder sci-fi projects (like Small Beer Press raising a $72,000 Kickstarter for John Crowley’s translation of The Chemical Wedding), some of the coolest things happening in the book world are happening by way of the small press.

Some of the coolest things happening in the book world are happening by way of the small press.

We’re also seeing some pretty crazy sales numbers in the indie book world, supporting the idea that small presses are riding a huge wave right now. Between February 2014 and May 2016, the percentage of eBook sales attributed to the Big Five publishers fell from just under 40% to below 25% In that same window of time, indie publishers went from producing under 25% of eBook sales to being responsible for just below 45%.

While the burst of small press publications we’ve seen over the last 10 years or so is undoubtedly a good thing, one thing that often gets overlooked is just how it came to be — and more specifically, how modern self-publishing made it all possible.

To understand all of this, you need to know what makes modern self-publishing different than the self-publishing of 10 years ago.

How to Name Your Small Indie Press

How Self-Published Authors Became Book Marketing Experts

In recent history, the only real marketplaces for books were controlled by major publishers. If you were an author who wanted to sell copies of your book, you needed major bookstores to carry it, and that could only happen if you went through a traditional publishing house. Self-publishing, as a result, was reserved for people who didn’t care about selling copies.

With the rise of the internet, and Amazon in particular, self-published authors found a way to sell books that didn’t involve negotiating with bookstores. And when a real sales channel opened up, dozens of book marketing strategies soon followed:

  • There was suddenly a premium on having a good author website, where you could blog or give away free writing to build a massive email list of readers.
  • Authors like Mark Dawson began using Facebook Ads to sell books, A/B test covers and to drive signups to their email lists.
  • Amazon released their own advertising platform (multiple, actually) that authors were able to use to boost their sales.
  • Authors began compiling “street teams” of their friends and colleagues, who could seed their book with reviews and social shares to get the ball rolling when a book debuted.
  • The position of “Freelance Book Publicist” was, for the first time, not just a job title you made up to sound employed.

Self-published authors were approaching book marketing the way a startup might approach marketing their company, and they were killing it.

Self-published authors were approaching book marketing the way a startup might approach marketing their company.

It didn’t take long for the success of self-published authors to trickle into the small press world. After all, most small presses are started by a couple of friends who’d like to publish other writers’ work — typically with the same processes self-published authors use.

How Kickstarter Is Changing Publishing

From Self-Published Authors To A New Generation of Presses

Literary magazines, anthologies, and full-blown presses start popping up at an astounding rate, and some pretty amazing writing was published as a result.

The Adroit Journal, one of the most popular literary journals in America (especially among young writers), was started by a group of teenagers and originally published using a print-on-demand publishing service.

Through some popular events (like letting writers submit unlimited amounts of work to the journal for one weekend), they were able to create a massive subscriber list, and laid the groundwork for an insanely successful journal.

Sibling Rivalry Press, the amazing small press that published Ocean Vuong’s first chapbook, Burnings, uses Ingram — one of the biggest platforms used by self-published authors for book distribution — to distribute their books, and has built a massive community by publishing multiple literary magazines under the Sibling Rivalry umbrella.

And countless small presses use ecommerce platforms like Big Cartel, Shopify, and Squarespace to sell books directly to their readers — something that was previously only done by people who couldn’t get traditional publishing deals, i.e. self-published writers. Here’s an example from the amazing Two Dollar Radio, who recently published Hanif Abdurraqib’s They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, and host their entire store on Shopify:

All of this points to the same thing. What modern self-publishing has done — whether we’re talking about the small presses listed above or the new generation high-quality hybrid publishers like Bookouture and Mascot Books — is democratized our ability not just to publish books, but to market and sell them.

Modern self-publishing has democratized our ability not just to publish books, but to market and sell them.

As a result, some of the best writing of the last century has been published and championed by some of the coolest presses ever put together.

About the Author

Emmanuel is the CEO of Reedsy, a marketplace that connects authors and publishers with the world’s best editors, designers and marketers. Over 5,000 books have been produced via Reedsy since 2015.

The Art of Time Travel Through Friendship

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An Involuntary Biography of Love

by João Tordo, translated by Hugo Dos Santos

The first time I saw him, he was sitting on a bench, in the middle of the street, playing a brown, four-string guitar, old and in poor shape. There were two people standing in front of his bench; to our left, the circular plaza, where girls sculpted of stone, in their perpetual youth, played with a metal hoop, next to a boy, also sculpted of stone, who drank from a waterspout. It was late April or early May (I can’t recall exactly), but Winter seemed reluctant to leave us. The passersby headed toward downtown Pontevedra wore coats, because a piercing cold cut through and up toward the threatening clouds above the city.

A man who listened with us sighed and said: “What a mess. Why don’t you go learn how to play.”

I stayed listening to him, along with a young girl wearing a knit hat and a book bag. Then she also left, while he went on fiddling with the instrument. The music was unpleasant and dissonant; watching his wan profile, his furrowed brow, despite his young age, his glasses at the end of his small nose and his lower lip hanging, it occurred to me that the instrument wasn’t meant to play music, but rather to soothe some unseen pain. He stopped and looked at me, surprised, as if I were not supposed to be there — nor the street nor the plaza nor the girls eternally playing with their hoop.

I tried to smile, but I must have made a strange face; I left. Because I was distracted, I didn’t pay attention to where I was going and the waterspout wet my shoes and the bottom of my pants. The next day I saw him again, but I didn’t approach: it was Sunday, I was tired and had come downtown strictly to pick up groceries — just enough to keep in the fridge for a couple of days, so that I would have to go out again on Tuesday, because I liked to get outside after all the hours spent at the university. I glimpsed him from a distance. This time he wasn’t playing: a light rain was coming down and the man with the boyish face sat next to his guitar and seemed to be reading a book, very concentrated, absorbed, shaking his right leg, seemingly unaware he was doing so.

I wanted to go talk to him, but I didn’t do it. I hesitated a few seconds, went as far as taking a step in his direction before retreating, asking myself why I would possibly want to talk to a stranger — even if in Pontevedra a stranger spotted more than once in the same place becomes a resident or, at the very least, a local attraction. Discouraged, I made my way home. I crossed the street and, without meaning to, ended up taking a route longer than usual, crossing Praça da Ferrería, decorated by the flowering camellias, the tables outside the coffee shop half-filled with tourists and old locals, and going up Benito Corbal in the direction opposite to that which I would have taken if I had wanted to go directly home. The grocery bags weighed heavier now. I ended up wandering, reflecting on that character sitting on the bench and on my life, taking my time on the sidewalks without noticing the people or shop windows or the late afternoon that slowly unveiled the evening. Lost in my thoughts and unaware of exactly how, I crossed Rua de Castelao. I imagined the writer who lent the street its name leaning over the railing on a balcony, a sunny second floor apartment facing a type of plaza; I imagined Castelao observing his own likeness sculpted in shale (in a style I considered questionable and rather somber — it was not uncommon to find myself meeting Castelao in a nightmare, his figure curved beneath the weight of Francoist Spain, spitting truths into my ear), the sculpture refusing to return his stare: one of those stares a real flesh and blood version, with a cornea and iris, the other version cold stone.

I made my way and, finally, nearing Joaquín Costa, I thought again of the man with the guitar. I thought also of Andrea, probably sitting on the couch reading a magazine or watching tv in that lethargic daze she always watched tv with — one leg over the arm of the couch, one arm hanging limply to the side — in her characteristic slouch. I remember that I walked through the front door after three flights of stairs and I remember that I called her name; no response. I crossed the foyer and, in the hallway, instead of turning right to go into the living room, I cut left toward the kitchen and, before resting my bags, whose handles had drawn deep grooves in the palms of my hands, I smelled cigarettes. In four or five decided steps I was at the door to Andrea’s room. I knocked; a few seconds later, she opened. Her eyes were bloodshot and she had her hair up, a pencil across the bun. She wore dirty overalls and held, in her right hand, a paintbrush. Her room was a mess. In the center, a white canvas looking like it had been smeared by a child, and a cigarette burning on an ashtray near the window.

“What have I told you about smoking,” I asked her.

Andrea shrugged her shoulders. Under her overalls, her chest quivered.

“You smoke.”

“Smoked. And you’re just sixteen.”

“Almost seventeen. Going on fifty.”

We eyed one another for a long moment. This often happened to us; while I searched for the right words, she searched for conflict. This was a challenge I had already lost. I thought of telling her about the figure of a man residing in the plaza where the stone girls played with a hoop and I thought of telling her that I wanted to invite him to come on my radio show, but I saw, through my daughter’s furrowed brow, that it would be in vain; that all my words would be little more than air exiting my mouth, swallowed by indifference.

“At least smoke outside, then,” I asked her.

I went into the living room and stood contemplating the moon, squeezed between the clouds, looking every now and then at my reflection in the window. I was starting to slouch, I thought; my shoulders slumped and my stomach protruded, despite my thinness. In other times, when I met Andrea’s mother, for instance, women had told me I was an attractive man. Now, I was sure I would pass unnoticed in a room full of people. From Andrea’s room I heard traces of the strange music she’d recently started listening to, melancholy songs in foreign tongues, and I wished what a father should never wish for — that the next day would come already, the day her mother was scheduled to pick her up, and then I wouldn’t have to see her for another week. It had become a source of stress in my life. Until she became a teenager she had been a sweet, if reticent, child, quiet, a conscientious student. She’d attended a Catholic school, to which I’d been opposed from the start without great effect: the Sacred Heart of Jesus of Pontevedra had been Andrea’s school during her early and later years, because Paula insisted. Maybe in response to that education, Andrea had come home one day with a tattoo, a crow on a wire that circled her ankle. I was at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper, and I saw it at once: it was Summer, my daughter wore a school skirt and the tattoo was fresh, the skin around it purplish and inflamed.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A cheese sandwich,” she said, and slipped into her room.

It was the first time Andrea spoke to me in that tone. Many would follow, of course; yet, in that instant, I understood that I had lost not only my marriage but also my daughter. Some time later, her mother called me and, in a voice heavy with spite — as if I were personally to blame for my daughter’s metamorphosis — announced to me that Andrea had a boyfriend (whom she described as a delinquent), that she had become cynical and keen to talk back and that she had decided she wouldn’t be going to college because she’d announced that, after high school, she intended to travel instead of studying. To undercut those notions, I tried to ensnare my daughter in long conversations, which turned into monologues. I took her to dinner at her favorite Chinese restaurant, Long Fon, and, when that trick failed, I took her to Alameda, where I soon understood my mistake: if Andrea had distanced herself, crossed over the invisible threshold to that limbo preceding adult life, it wouldn’t be in a fancy restaurant, with waiters in bowties and napkins folded in creative shapes, that I would find a way of reuniting us.

It had been three years since I’d started my radio show. It was a weekly program with virtually no audience; the station was called Rádio Pontevedra and the program was titled Happy Days, despite airing at night, between one and two-thirty a.m., and having very little to do with happiness. While I had majored in Literature, I had wanted to be a journalist — I had, at the age of twenty four, completed an internship at El País, in Madrid, which led to a brief and demeaning career in small-town journalism; through a friend, I later received an invitation to teach in Compostela. Since 1990, every Fall, I took in third-year students and spoke to them about Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Joyce, Woolf, Byatt and, depending on the current literary trends and my personal disposition, McEwan or Ishiguro or Amis. The university wore on me, however; the repeated readings bored me and my students seemed, with each passing semester, ever less interested in literature and ever more distracted by the banalities of a world tinged in monotony — or, who knows, maybe my own monotony had tinged everything in a neutral tone. It was possible that I had contaminated them. As such, the radio show offered the only outlet I knew of to escape the swamp of my existence and breathe for an hour and a half, far from the paperwork routines of the university and the vicissitudes of my life as a divorced man.

It was because of Happy Days that I formally met Saldaña Paris. Rather: I was thinking about my radio show when I saw him again. I don’t remember exactly how long it had been since the weekend when I had first seen him; I know that, on a morning when the weather had finally turned and the shy Spring sun had finally broken over the streets, I was walking through the old part of the city. It was Wednesday, a day I didn’t teach any classes, and, crossing the street to Praça Méndez Núñez, I was late to glance at the building for Café Universo, whose facade, painted in a purplish hue, contrasted elegantly with the sky. Those colors soothed me. Then I saw him. He stood next to the statue of Valle-Inclán, hovering over it, observing the most minor details of the writer’s face: the diamond-shaped beard, the metallic eyeglasses, the hat, the pointed nose. Rámon Mária del Valle-Inclán, the poet and romantic who lost his arm at the age of thirty-three: the statue carved of basalt in that stone plaza of Pontevedra was chiseled in his likeness, a short man, with a cane, an old and round pair of eyeglasses. Saldaña Paris was a little taller than the statue — if the statue was accurate, Valle-Inclán had been a very short man. I watched him touch the statue’s left arm, the sleeve of his basalt coat, thinner than the other sleeve, empty of flesh, disappearing inside his coat pocket. He stroked the sculpture with tenderness. He took a step back, pulled out a notepad from his back pocket and scribbled something. I approached, unable to contain my curiosity any longer or further delay the meeting that now felt inevitable, I introduced myself. He extended his hand, which felt small in mine. I had begun to tell him some banalities concerning Valle-Inclán when he interrupted me.

“Mr. Valle-Inclán lived in my country almost one hundred twenty years ago. According to some reports, he traveled from Galicia and established himself there as a translator and correspondent. He lived in Veracruz, where my maternal grandfather was born, whose name was Miguel, like me. Except his name was Miguel Agapito, a name he wasn’t particularly fond of.” He returned the notepad to his back pocket; he seemed to be trying to grow a moustache that was no more than some light fuzz. His eyes were blue: very blue and very sad. “Apparently,” he continued, “Valle-Inclán participated in a duel with a conservative or anti-liberal journalist and took a serious beating in Veracruz, which was not uncommon in those days.”

“That’s how he lost his left arm,” I continued. “In a similar argument with a journalist, an argument that turned violent.”

“Manuel Bengoechea, in the lobby of Hotel Paris, in Madrid. He hit Valle-Inclán with a cane, fracturing several bones. The left forearm acquired gangrene and they had to amputate it,” he added. He had a soft accent and frail voice, almost feminine. “Journalists bothered him and Valle-Inclán did not tolerate fools. Or anyone who argued without, as he deemed it, sound reasoning or logical grounds. I empathize. If our world were different, I’d do the same. Today is trickier because, if you live in Mexico, where at night clubs every Saturday night heads can be decapitated, arguing with someone can lead to, simply, the drawing of a gun and you taking a bullet to the head. And let’s agree that while it might be bad enough to lose an arm in an argument, it’s certainly not worth losing your life.”

I invited him for a drink. We crossed, slowly, Praça de La Leña and descended down Figueroa toward Praça Peregrina. He walked in silence, his hands behind his back, observing everything in his path with fluttering eyes, two colorful and restless fire-flies. I told him the story of the city and its buildings; Saldaña Paris agreed by nodding his head, stopping now and then to note something in his rumpled notepad. At last, we arrived at the newer part of Pontevedra. As soon as we were inside Café Moderno, he became very interested in the life-size statues of six men sitting around a table — in truth, the statues were replicas of replicas: in the plaza outside the cafe, the same men existed in a similar formation, chatting, sculpted in bronze and led, in the center, by violinist Carlos Quiroga (the others were Valentín Paz-Andrade, Castelao, Carlos Casares, Alexandre Bóveda, and Ramón Cabanillas, all of them Galician writers and intellectuals). Inside the cafe, the statues were in color, not bronze, and wore red, blue, and green ties; one of them had a bowtie, the other one a hat.

“What a bunch,” said Saldaña Paris. “They look like a Lego set imagined by Kafka.”

I showed him around the cafe. He didn’t seem interested in the gaudy paintings on the walls, but he seemed specifically drawn to one by Laxeiro titled El Manantial de la Vida. “Good title for a book,” he commented.

We sat next to an old couple and ordered beers. We continued talking about Valle-Inclán — he insisted that the Galician became a writer in Mexico, during his first trip across the Atlantic. I later asked my Mexican acquaintance what he was doing in these parts. He avoided my question.

“Where are you from?”

“I’m Spanish. My parents are from Rosal de la Frontera.”

“Where is that?”

“In Andalusia. Near the border with Portugal.”

“So you’re almost Portuguese.”

“I just made it,” I joked. “During Franco, my father used to say that, despite everything, the Spanish were actually lucky: at least, they weren’t Portuguese.”

“I like the Portuguese,” he objected.

“My father said a lot of dumb things.”

“This cafe is already familiar to me,” he said, after the waiter brought over our beers. I paid; he didn’t budge. “It’s as if I have been here before, even as I’m sure I’ve never set foot in this place.”

“Lots of people feel that,” I replied, taking a sip of my beer. “This was a movie theater once. On the first day it opened they projected sixty one films.”

“In Mexico, they would have set fire to this place during the revolution.”

“You have a low opinion of your country.”

“And why shouldn’t I?” he countered, picking up his beer.

He then started to explain how he felt about his countrymen: they were all bandits, caciques, drunks, losers, and assassins, terrified and insignificant; who, once the world was finally and decidedly swept clean to mark the end of times, the only surviving creatures would be mariachis, with their ridiculous costumes and their homemade musical instruments, singing their songs for the rest of eternity.

“Beautiful image,” I said. “Are you a musician?”

“I am above all a poet,” he answered. “Or maybe I’m a musician, and what I write are song lyrics. Except my songs are pretty shitty. When I was eighteen I wanted to be a lawyer, but then I read Bioy Casares and decided I wanted to be a writer. Then I read Borges and understood that I would never succeed in writing fiction, or that the son of a bitch had already written everything there was to be written, and so I decided again to become a lawyer. I enrolled in law school in Mexico City for two years. I spent the entire time walking up and down Insurgentes Sur, finding ways to skip class, until my parents told me — or rather, my father told me, because my mother had by that point already left for Tijuana with her boyfriend — that, if I wanted to keep living at home, I had to either study or work.”

“And so what did you do?”

“I left. Have you read Bolaño?”

“Some.”

“Well I didn’t know him at the time. Maybe he hadn’t even published yet. But when I read his work, much later, I learned that he had been writing my story over and over again. Our story: that of Mexicans lost in Mexico, as he called us. Instead of staying in school, I traveled. Once and for all, I left behind the notion of becoming a lawyer. I walked through the desert, I saw the cities of the interior, I visited Tehuantepec and Matamoros. I had my uncle’s inheritance money: it wasn’t much, but I also didn’t need much. I started writing. That is: I stopped scribbling and I started writing. I sent out a poetry manuscript that I’d assembled in cafes to a literary contest in Guadalajara, a contest for new writers, and I won. On the first try. It was unexpected: I, who had never published anything, anywhere, had suddenly won real money with fifty measly pages.”

The sadness had evaporated from him: he spoke with pleasure, as if he had, for months, been coerced into reticence, and had now finally found his chance at freedom. We drank our beers. I wanted to invite him to appear as a guest in my show, like I had been meaning to for several days, but I hadn’t yet found the right moment.

“And what did you do with the money?”

“What a question. I returned to Mexico City after learning me about the congratulatory letter from Guadalajara. It was the only time I heard him falter: that is, the only time he folded, let himself be overtaken by emotion. He could care less about my writing, of course. But his son had won something, had emerged among winners. When I arrived home, I picked up the check, packed a bag, and took off with aims of spending it all in Las Vegas. I couldn’t think of anything better to do with it. And, in Las Vegas, in another unexpected turn of luck, I won tons of money, which allowed me to travel to Europe. I landed in Madrid on a September morning in 1993, barely awake, and ten years would go by before I set foot in Mexico again.”

“Wait,” I interrupted, leaning forward. His eyes were bulging out of his head, as if he suffered from exophthalmos. “I would like you to tell me this entire story, but not here. And not now, tomorrow, between midnight and two in the morning.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain.”

On the following day I returned from Santiago at 10 p.m. I had dinner at home, alone, the television on mute. While I ate, I imagined Paula in bed with her boyfriend — she reading a magazine, he reading the sports pages — and I felt satisfied in being alone. It was true that, on the days of my show, I felt happier or less defeated — but it was also true that, on that particular Thursday, the anticipation of that special guest gave me an added sense of excitement. I admit that I am not sure what I saw in him. At first glance, Saldaña Paris was a bland man, without much refinement in his dress, with features stressed with an excessive anxiety; a short and awkward creature who would go unnoticed in any part of the world. Much later I understood — after it was too late, after I’d become far too involved — that it was precisely those features that fascinated me.

I was mesmerized by his melancholy, a melancholy he had no interest in abating; a long and persistent melancholy, that he kept like a companion. That unhealthy condition that presents itself in the form of ghosts and can weaken even the sturdiest of convictions. So opposed to my own condition, which I could not label as melancholy — maybe disappointment or a broken spirit. Saldaña Paris was truly melancholic: a man from another era, trapped in ours; a man from a time where happiness was not a requirement, merely the fortune of some lucky fools.

When I reached the entrance of Radio Pontevedra he was already waiting for me, leaning against the wall. It was eleven thirty. He had brought with him a guitar in a black case and that notepad in his back pocket. Spring had arrived, and the smells of camellias and of the Lérez River permeated the air. We said hello and walked in together; he didn’t seem nervous, rather intrigued. He asked several questions about the show, which I answered while we walked inside the radio station and settled in around the round table equipped with headphones and microphones. Over in the corner, the news played on a television screen.

“Every week I invite a guest,” I explained. “The idea is for the guest to be someone unknown. The concept of the program, actually, is to be the opposite of daytime radio shows where guests are, usually, either famous or relatively well-known people.”

“In that case you can rest assured. No one knows me. Neither here nor in Mexico. Even the woman from whom I rent a room calls me Eighteen.”

“Eighteen?”

“It’s my room number. She’s very old. I think she witnessed the fall of Rome, but I can’t be sure.”

Saldaña Paris rested his guitar and placed his notepad on the table. He fiddled with a pair of headphones, tried them on. On the other side of the glass I watched Julia Montel, who slid with elegance across the production room to the mixing table, where she adjusted a few of the controls. We heard her Andalusian accent echoing through the speakers:

“And a happy day to the two of you,” she said.

The Mexican poet raised his head, seemingly confused. Julia’s slim figure came into the room. She was beautiful, a realization that always arrested me when I first laid eyes on her every Thursday night and observed, askew, the way she picked up her brown hair with various clips, while the show unfolded and I allowed my interviewees to run on and on about whatever they felt like talking about. Every week, by the time the show came to an end, her long hair had transformed into an abstract sculpture, a wire frame, some loose threads here and there; her freckles more pronounced, her translucent green eyes. She had the advantage of both youth and beauty: Julia was twenty years younger than me and she had recently finished her degree in Vigo, where I still held out hope that Andrea would disappear for a few years. I had the disadvantage of feeling far too anxious and timid around her to ever tell her how much I liked her.

“I am the overnight producer,” she announced, as her introduction to Saldaña Paris.

I noticed for the first time the poet’s visceral and strange behavior. He stood up too quickly and grabbed Julia’s hand with far more intensity than was to be expected, leading it to his lips; he planted a kiss on the back of her hand, without ever ceasing to eye her over the frame of his glasses, and didn’t retake his seat until she had left the room in mild shock.

The lights dimmed and, eleven minutes later, we were on the air.

Jez Burrows Finds All His Stories in the Dictionary

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Underneath the definition for the word “burrows” in the dictionary is this sentence: “The little penguins dig out long burrows to use as nests.”

Purchase the novel

In 2015, Jez Burrows printed a zine collection of stories made up entirely of sample sentences pulled from the dictionary at his booth at the San Francisco Zine Fest. From there, his twelve-page zine evolved into Dictionary Stories, a collection of found sentences repurposed as genre-blending stories ranging from lists to flash fiction to longer prose stories.

I spoke with the author about his love of words and the challenges of creating new fiction made entirely from remixing and combining sentences.

Adam Vitcavage: What fascinates you about sample sentences from dictionaries?

Jez Burrows: I love language and I am fascinated by words in general. The most significant role dictionaries played in my life is a game my grandmother and I would play; we would pick a word and read the definition, then we would pick another word from the definition and continue that way. It was a glorified way to read the dictionary, really.

The idea [for the book] started one night when I had to look up a word’s definition and the sample sentence was so melodramatic that a light bulb went off. I had never paid attention to them before. I thought I could take advantage and play around with them.

AV: Did any of the early stories from the zine end up in this collection?

JB: A handful did, but the stories that made it through were richer and bolder because I edited them more closely. When I wrote those first stories, the method I had for sample sentences was looking through a print dictionary and trying to find sentences that would work.

AV: Why is the book organized into an alphabetical catalog?

JB: I wanted to pay homage to the source material and organizing it alphabetically seems like an obvious choice.

The New Oxford American Tells a Story — An Essay by Helen Betya Rubinstein

AV: When I’ve talked to writers of short story collections, they usually mention that finding the right sequence for their stories is so important because they need the first story to be compelling enough to make readers stay. Since this is a experimental collection, are there stories that stand out that you think will entice the reader to read the whole book?

JB: My book has a lot of different genres and form. Some stories are just prose and some are lists. One list, “Fifty More Ways to Leave Your Lover”, lends itself perfectly to sample sentences. Another short prose story called “A Walk” uses only sentences taken from the A section of the dictionary which adds another writing constraint. “Haunting the Docents” is about a heritage site where ghosts are hanging out with the tourists. If I had just tried to write that as a short story, I don’t know if the idea would come to me. That story came about purely because I found the right sentences.

The idea started one night when I had to look up a word’s definition and the sample sentence was so melodramatic that a light bulb went off.

AV: What was the most challenging part about the whole book?

JB: The alphabetical structure. When I started, my editor and I made a list of themes that would be great to cover in a story. The tricky part was trying to write to a theme with found content. There was a balancing act to make sure each letter has enough themes and that the themes felt varied but also complementary to each other. We wanted the stories to feel universal but also with a few red herrings and complete non-sequiturs added in just to be interesting.

AV: How long did you spend collecting the sentences on a story?

JB: It depends based on the form. Lists were more straightforward to put together. The fastest story was over the course of an afternoon where I got lucky and found the sentences I needed. There were a few stories I was chipping away at for many a fortnight. I knew I needed the perfect sentence to make it worth it, it was just a matter of finding it.

AV: Were you pouring over dictionaries before you went to bed at night?

JB: I ended up with a dozen dictionaries and digitized them to be searchable PDFs. A lot of the time was spent picking random pages and inputting interesting words to see if anything worked. The other half of the time was spent categorizing.

AV: What were the categories?

JB: I was using Scrivener to collect everything I was finding. I had a file for every dictionary I was doing and each dictionary had categories like: food, fitness, film, gardening. I had full sections that began with he and she as pronouns. Whenever I found something that fit into a category, I would drop it into a file just in case I ever needed it. Sometimes I would find a sentence that was so captivating, a sentence that I just had to use, that it become its own category.

Sometimes I would find a sentence that was so captivating, a sentence that I just had to use, that it become its own category.

AV: Out of all of this time looking in dictionaries, did you come across a word that is now your favorite?

JB: Yes. The word is “flocculent.” I don’t think I am ever going to have to use it, but it’s fascinating to say and means “having or resembling tufts of wool.”

AV: That’s a great word that I am sure you’ll use eventually. Your Instagram bio says that you’re an illustrator and a graphic designer. Then you say you’re a “writer (alleged).” Do you now feel like you’re a writer?

JB: Well, I honestly don’t know. When I tell people about the book, there are some who say that I am more of an editor than a writer. I guess you could make a case for that, but we’ll see. I am keeping that bio, it puts the emphasis on everyone else deciding if I am a writer or not.

Now Is the Time to Read This Novel About the Early Days of the Third Reich

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I ’d packed After Midnight, Irmgard Keun’s novel about life during the rise of the Third Reich, to read on the train from New York City. I didn’t know that its last pages took place on a train as well, or that they brimmed with tension and with the most bittersweet kind of hope. I also didn’t know that I’d be nearing the end of the book when Border Patrol entered the train at Syracuse, NY, to question nothing and no one except the family — man, woman, infant in arms — of visibly South American descent sitting a few rows behind me.

I just sat there — we just sat there, the great physical machine that contained us all sat there, while the man displayed papers and gave explanations. These satisfied the Border Patrol agents and they went away. The family got off the train at Buffalo. They had never crossed a border, not on that trip. They’d never meant to.

The policy that allowed Border Patrol to question them up to 100 miles from the edge of Canada was not new that winter of 2010. Neither was After Midnight, though Melville House had just put out the first English translation.

It was the Obama era. I posted indignantly on Facebook about Border Control’s incursion, how wrong it seemed. I also posted about how perfect and haunting the book was, in spite of — maybe because of — its moments of melodrama and dark humor. A few of my friends, the more permanent radicals, agreed on both counts. The rest didn’t talk about Border Control in those days.

Then 2016 happened. Experts on fascism asked us to notice what had changed, and I did. They didn’t ask, but I had to notice, what hadn’t changed because it had been there all along: Border Patrol on the buses and trains that never crossed the border, the Prosperity Gospel loathing of the poor as borderline human, the constant fear of harmless things and bland acceptance of genuine threats, the craving for that leader who would fix it all.

Experts on fascism asked us to notice what had changed, and I did. They didn’t ask, but I had to notice, what hadn’t changed because it had been there all along

America’s immigration policy, never gentle, became a scourge among even the most harmless — children, parents, spouses, business owners, local fixtures, friends. As winter turned to spring I felt like I was protesting always. I joined the indignant crowds protesting a travel ban in sight of the Statue of Liberty; I congregated in Washington Square Park with hundreds of others to reject Trump’s threats against sanctuary cities, drafty and leaking shelters that such things were; near City Hall I listened as unions described how they would rescue their members and city councilwomen their constituents. I did not know who I would rescue or how or whether I would know what to do. I had never rescued anyone before.

I thought: I should re-read After Midnight.

The other work on the rise of the Nazis that I felt compelled to re-read was the first volume of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but that was different — a widely recognized classic that invited every reader to imagine themselves a mouse. And such books, putting the reader in that skin, are valuable, which is why they are numerous and often beloved. But After Midnight, alone among the books I’ve read, is a book by a cat that puts the reader square in a basket of kittens — where so many nice white well-meaning book-reading women like me, in real life, in the current moment, are.

How ‘The Remains of the Day’ Helped Me Understand Brexit and Trump

Keun published After Midnight in German in 1937, although the Nazis had banned her work years earlier due to frank portrayals of Weimar women at their most jazz-loving, sex-having, career-plotting, and generally liberated. The banning cost her her marriage to a Nazi supporter, and she became romantically involved with a Jewish doctor and went into exile. A few years after she finished the novel, she’d pull off one of the oddest survivals of World War II: having her suicide reported to the press so she could sneak back across the border and live under a false identity, largely in hiding, in Germany itself until the end of the war. That decision speaks to a woman who still felt a baffled love for her nation, even after it turned monstrous.

Sanna, After Midnight’s protagonist, is not so worldly wise as 1937 Keun, but she is in many ways equally determined. She is introduced to readers in the midst of managing her friend Gerti. Gerti is in love with a half-Jewish boy and, far from frightened, is driven to ever-greater throes of passion by the forbidden nature of their romance. A more conventional novel might have made her the heroine. The two girls (and their other friends) seem much alike to begin with, as they all spend the early pages plotting minor victories over the constricted world in which they find themselves: plotting to flirt with SA men while not overcommitting or angering them, to obtain a new blouse for the evening’s party, to lure a crush to that party.

Yet Sanna, not Gerti, breaks the pattern of her life and ends the brief novel fleeing her home and country. What turns her from her day-to-day concerns onto the path of a political exile isn’t the stuff of heroism, exactly — no sudden prophetic vision of the horrors to come or blaze of righteousness. A bit of young love, a bit of cynicism to see through the political passions of her elders, a bit of raw fear — those are the ingredients of an imperfect awakening.

What turns her from her day-to-day concerns onto the path of a political exile isn’t the stuff of heroism, exactly — no sudden prophetic vision of the horrors to come or blaze of righteousness.

Sanna’s good and bad qualities draw from the same well. Her good actions are often self-interested, meant to protect her self-image or the narrow circle of her loved ones. She’s impulsive, and her insights into her own character are imperfect. It’s easy to imagine the Sanna of the beginning of the book sticking a safety pin in her coat lapel, especially if Gerti did it first, and equally easy to imagine her pulling it out again — or forgetting entirely that it was there as she watches the police escort the dissenter at the parade away. It’s also easy to imagine her feeling terrible about that afterwards, for whatever else she may be, Sanna is at least willing to reflect on herself and try to do better.

Though Hitler appears in this novel, flying through town — and symbolically dividing the city, making it impossible for people to carry out their ordinary lives while his parade route takes priority — the real antagonists in the work are as un-epic in their villainy as Sanna is in her heroism. The good Germans of After Midnight use the Gestapo as a tool to pursue petty grudges and rivalries, flinging accusations of Communist sympathies and Jewish ancestry to clear perceived obstacles from their paths in love or business. They register that there are suddenly vicious consequences for the wrong off-hand remark or joke, but it only seems to excite real indignation in a few — and it excites something else, enthusiasm, a sense of exaltation, in others.

The thing that struck me most on reread, the thing I hadn’t yet noticed in 2010, was how futile every action can feel.

The thing that struck me most on reread, the thing I hadn’t yet noticed in 2010, was how futile every action can feel. People who have articulated theories against Nazism achieve little in this book. Some, like Sanna’s older brother Algin (once himself a banned writer, now the author of pro-regime propaganda, no doubt a figure of particular road-not-taken resonance for Keun), make doomed gestures at escape and fall into inertia. Others, like the journalist Heini, succumb to despair. But it is Sanna and her boyfriend Franz, each initially apolitical but driven by loathing for what Nazi Germany has done to their friends, who actually make dramatic moves of resistance.

Written as it was in the midst of the falling night, this is not a book that instructs us on the specifics of how to save ourselves, let alone others. Sanna saves only one person and her exile, even in its first moments, is a lonely thing — and we know that Keun, faced with the same loneliness, risked it all to return. What After Midnight does is let us look around in the dusk and see how alarming the familiar monsters have become where they loom. We know that dawn came once — but in daylight we did not do enough to clear them away, thinking them tame.

Being a Quiet Girl in a Very Noisy Time

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Facebook recently informed me that I have had an account now for ten years: the whole of my adult life. I will be 28 in a few months, and in the past ten years I have watched, via Facebook, at least three acquaintances go through mental health crises: first, the odd syntax, then the long rants on obscure topics, the strangely-angled selfies, the unsolicited poetry, the deep silence of disappearance.

In each of these cases, I did nothing. I did not reach out in support. I did not report the posts. I did not try to get in touch with the person’s family or close friends. Instead, I agitated, trying from the shadows to guess what was going on, telling myself all the while that it wasn’t my business and that I should stay quiet.

What we have done to ourselves is create a perpetual theater of human interaction, in which one is never exactly off-stage.

Quiet is the word I most intimately associate with social media. The irony shouldn’t be lost on anyone; who has not felt cowed by the sheer volume of conversations being carried on on around us at all times? Scrolling through feed after feed, day after day, I become a virtual wallflower, lurking at the edges of chatter, aware of my own invisible, awkward presence. More than anything, social media has reminded me of my introversion on a daily basis, worried it to a dull and ever-present point:

How should I reply? Should I like this? Who read my post? Is this caption funny enough? Why didn’t she like that? What is he up to, now? Is it even my business? Do I even belong here? What if I say the wrong thing? What if I say nothing at all?

What we have done to ourselves is create a perpetual theater of human interaction, in which one is never exactly off-stage. In this theater, there are so many tones of voice, crossing each other all at once, that it is impossible to know when the drama has reached its peak. It’s hard to tell when you are meant to be the leading lady, or a member of the chorus, or just part of the audience.

I regret very much that I did not say anything. I am grateful that my acquaintances, as far as I can tell, may be all right.

I spent most of my teenage years selectively mute. I am borrowing the phrase from a fellow teacher, who used it to describe one of her students. For months, I turned the phrase over and over in my mind like a shiny coin, studying the engravings. I am still turning it over, even as I am sitting quiet girls down and telling them things like,“You’re going to have to start talking eventually. People aren’t ever going to leave you alone about it. I know. I was you. Everyone told me, and eventually I got so tired of it I started talking. Now look at me! I never shut up.”

In presenting myself this way, I am offering these quiet girls a model of hope: You don’t always have to be quiet. You can be powerful. Your words matter. Everyone wants to hear them.

Except none of this is true; I am still a quiet girl. I am not powerful. My words may matter, but no one, especially the fidgeting girl in front of me, wants to hear them. These quiet girls do not need my hope, because nothing is wrong with them, nothing at all.

These quiet girls do not need my hope, because nothing is wrong with them, nothing at all.

A scene: I am four years old. I am in the preschool classroom, standing at the play kitchen, where I pretend to chop tomatoes. Who am I chopping these imaginary tomatoes for? I chop and I chop and I chop a big pretend pile. I share with no one. I don’t even like tomatoes.

In an office somewhere: “We would like to hold her back a year, because she doesn’t seem to enjoy playing with other children.”

My mother: “Why does she need to enjoy playing with other children?”

It should not strike anyone as unusual that, in lieu of making friends, I wrote stories. I did this to entertain myself, to fill up the quiet space I had cultivated.

To be clear: quiet girls are not necessarily sad ones. I was terrifically happy. I was blissfully unaware that being quiet was a problem until my teenage years, when it seemed to be on everyone’s minds, when quiet came to mean weird or sad or strange.

I found community online, in the early phase of the internet: in Yahoo! Groups called “Serious Teen Writers” and “College Writers,” and “Fiction Writers,” among others. I still receive email notifications from these groups to the address I had carefully chosen at fourteen — username: “storyspinner” — even though as far as I can tell, no one populates these groups anymore. The emails all automated, scheduled to repeat into eternity.

At fourteen, I started my own literary journal, although I would not know what a literary journal was until years later. It was called The Writ, a play on words that captured the demand I felt to write. I took the necessary steps to bring The Writ to fruition: coded the website myself, did the layout for every issue (of which there were, ultimately, only two or three). Soon after I began soliciting work, a young man — initials, incidentally, B.S. — in one of my writers groups reached out, wondering if I would publish something written by his mother. Our correspondence became a partnership. He was a few years older than I was, and when he went to college, he decided to turn the magazine into a club of the same name. Perhaps of little relevance, B.S. also sent me my first invitation to Facebook, which I declined, as I wasn’t yet allowed to use social media.

By sixteen I had realized that he wasn’t interested in working together; he just wanted my idea. I had stopped communicating with him entirely, a habit we now call ghosting, a favorite defense mechanism of the introvert. Why he didn’t merely start from scratch still puzzles me. Instead, he sent an email:

Under Article one of the Constitution of The WRIT Teen Writers’ Magazine, if you do not reply, you will be expelled from the magazine. I hate to say this, but I have sent emails to you and gotten no reply. This is your final warning, and if there is no reply by the end of the week, I will formally take over all major productions under The WRIT’s requirements. I hope you understand this and do not take offense at this email if you are still there.

En Cristo por siempra,

B.S.

I have never looked back on this memory as traumatic, although I suppose it could and should have been. I suspect that I expected it, which foreshortened any anger or betrayal I might have felt. After all, I had not replied. After all, I could have said something.

I graduated from high school, as scheduled, in 2008, one of six valedictorians in a class of 385. At the ceremony, I would give a speech before a crowd of my teachers and peers and their families. I had written several drafts. Oddly enough, for a quiet girl, I wasn’t nervous; I had never been nervous about public speaking. It was more that I felt bothered.

For me, high school wasn’t the charmed experience I believed the rest of my classmates were having. “High school is rarely charmed for quiet girls, for smart girls, for girls like you,” I sometimes catch myself telling the ninth graders in my English classes. My valedictorian speech was full of the trite clichés I knew people wanted to hear. It was serious, because I was not brave enough to risk being funny, and it was gracious, because I knew that if I was going to speak in front of a crowd of people safely, that was all I could be. It was good, but it wasn’t honest.

I had realized that there is power in being a quiet girl: that when a quiet girl suddenly starts talking, people listen.

I brought the draft to my eleventh grade AP Language and Composition teacher, Mr. Benoit. He read it over. He had been patiently reading over my drafts of things for years, and once, I had cried in his class, after giving a speech to my peers about how much my dad meant to me. He liked the valedictorian speech, offered a few suggestions. I said I did not want to give it.

“Why?” he asked.

“I don’t feel this way. I feel like a lot of these people were hard on me. They don’t know me, and I don’t know them, and this is fake.”

“Why don’t you try writing another speech?” he suggested.

I considered it, but in the end I gave the false speech I had written, because I could not risk saying what I felt. I knew it was inappropriate for the occasion. I had cleaved to my lessons.

Of the six valedictorian speeches given that evening, mine was the only one quoted in the local paper:

“We may be here for a short while,” said Lewis as she advised the class of 2008 to strive to be remembered as more than just graduates. “Be remembered as part of a legacy.”

For a brief period in my mid-twenties, I thought I had left that quiet girl behind. I had taken everyone’s advice; I started saying what I felt, even when it wasn’t polite.

I had realized that there is power in being a quiet girl: that when a quiet girl suddenly starts talking, people listen. What I hadn’t yet realized is that they aren’t always listening for the right reasons. Mostly, they want you to shock them, to reveal yourself, to give occasion for them to remind you why you became a quiet girl in the first place.

“All this writing you’ve been doing,” says one, “is great, but now you need to go out, grow up, and live some life.”

Nowhere is this more apparent to me than on social media, where emerging to say any little thing can become the argument of someone’s afternoon. As a writer I’ve learned to choose my language carefully. I know that a word is both sign and signified; it means, and in meaning, it can wound.

My anxiety around speaking — on the page, online, out loud — is the anxiety of responsibility to use language well. Every year, I begin my freshman English classes by explaining language’s power. I tell them that when someone recites a story before a live audience, science has shown that the audience’s brain waves sync to the speaker’s.

“Stories are mind control,” I say, “They bring us in closer touch.”

I show them slides of advertisements. I show them propaganda.

“Stories will liberate or destroy us,” I continue. I see their concern.

In understanding the weight of language, at some point my care became apprehension. My quiet came back. I felt the need to take my time. On the page, this is possible. In the world, where the speed of language seems only to be increasing, I always feel three steps behind.

In the world, where the speed of language seems only to be increasing, I always feel three steps behind.

A scene: My boyfriend and I are in the kitchen. I am making bacon, and listening to him tell a story. The story reminds me of something. I become excited. I run into the other room, leaving the sizzling pan on the stove. I return with a book. I say, “I feel like this is the book I have been waiting my whole life to read.” I elaborate, “It’s not even that it’s a great book, just that I feel like it captures my childhood in a way.” I turn to a dog-eared page. I begin to read an underlined quote:

“It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, ‘New Folsom’ (a quarter mile removed from ‘Old Folsom’) in 1986, Avenal and Ione and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipatria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at — ”

“You don’t have to read all that,” he says. “You can just get to the point.”

“But that was the point,” I say.

Even at home, there is occasion for failure; I am again in a too-small kitchen, chopping tomatoes only for myself.

On a random day at work, I decided to tally all of the questions my students asked. In approximately 230 minutes, there were 153 questions, or one every 90 seconds. Their questions ranged from “Can I go to the bathroom?” to “How do you know when the author is using irony?” to “Have you ever been to Aventura?” We cover the personal and the political and the practical. I am constantly answering questions, or asking them; research shows that teachers ask up to two questions per minute, or one every thirty seconds. I am never not talking.

Research shows that teachers ask up to two questions per minute, or one every thirty seconds. I am never not talking.

Still, I am quiet. When they want to know how I feel — not just how I feel right now — but how I feel deeply, overall, I do not answer them.

“You’re hard to read,” the savvy ones say, picking up the fact that my vibrant expressiveness, my raging joy and bewilderment and humor and delight are all a form of method acting, meant to solicit their engagement.

On social media I read the stories of teen girls who will not be quiet. Even their silence speaks.

Is it okay to admit, even just a little, that I want to be like that?

Instead I burrow; I agitate; I lay words down on paper. The realization that this life is a loneliness profound and sparsely punctuated: I wrote that sentence.

I engage with social media while hating it, wondering all the time whether or not I’m doing it right.

When a friend calls, I am both panicked and grateful.

“How are you?” we say, “How are you?”

We discuss what we came to discuss: my manuscript.

My friend, like all my dear, good friends, tells me: “I want to hear a little more of her voice.”

Leslie Jamison Wanted to Write a Book That Felt Like an AA Meeting

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Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is not an addiction memoir. Nor is it linked essays in the style of her previous bestseller, The Empathy Exams. The Recovering is an earnest and gritty account of alcoholism and substance dependency written in a hybrid style of essayistic memoir, cultural criticism, and historical narrative. The work considers how being an artist, a writer, or a lover sometimes calls upon “addictive” behaviors, and how many of the insecurities that might drive an addiction can fuel creativity. Chronicled are relapses and life threatening realities, but also the success that Jamison achieved even while in the throes of alcoholism.

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The author finds echoes of her life in other artists—legends like John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Denis Johnson, Billie Holliday, Raymond Carver, Amy Winehouse—but she doesn’t examine her past or theirs through a lens of tragedy. Rather, Jamison dives deeper, unearths the complexities of the individuals and their conditions, and in so doing, explores her own multiplicity. Jamison’s narrative of getting better is as compelling as the story of a life in spiral because her life didn’t fall apart; her recovery process is more nuanced because her “problem” was harder to define.

Just as Jamison’s alcoholism didn’t follow the arc of dysfunction to function, The Recovering traces a very different trajectory of healing. I spoke with the author about how she conceived an anti-memoir about addiction, and the kinds of creativity that sobriety flattens and animates.

Yvonne Conza: How important was it for you as a writer to structure the material as a hybrid genre and not as linked essays?

Leslie Jamison: From the beginning, I knew that I wanted to write a book that worked like a meeting — a book that was structured both by otherness (the idea of coming into contact with the lives of strangers) and by narrative (the idea of lives turned into stories). It felt important to me both that the book be composed of many discrete stories and that these stories — woven together — create the fabric of a cohesive larger story: the story of addiction and recovery writ across many stages and many scales; the scales of particular lives and the scale of American culture and public imagination across the course of the twentieth-century. I wanted the book to toggle between the individual and the social in the way that a recovery meeting does; and I wanted it to feel like a gathering of voices, in the way that a recovery meeting does. I also wanted a book that felt propulsive to read, that had real narrative momentum, and for that reason I wanted the book to use my own life as a kind of driving narrative core to which the other stories could be attached.

I wanted the book to toggle between the individual and the social in the way that a recovery meeting does.

YC: What were the challenges you faced as a writer to balance the repetitive elements of “redundancy” and “relapses” within the addiction story?

LJ: We often think of an “easy” or predictable structure for stories of addiction and recovery — things got bad, they bottomed out, then got better — I’m fascinated by the ways in which the story of addiction is often actually a really difficult story to tell. If it’s told honestly, with fidelity to the inglorious truth, it’s a story riddled with repetitions and redundancy, constrained by a certain kind of narrative claustrophobia. The experience is really just: crave, use, repeat. And after a while, that gets pretty boring — to live, or to read. The story of addiction often lacks a satisfying narrative trajectory because it’s defined by the cyclical structure of relapse; and I wanted to honor both of those elements in my book — the tedium of addiction, and its cyclical patterns — while still telling a story, across the course of the book, that had a certain kind of momentum and thrall. How to suggest that even though we might think of sobriety as the “boring” part of the story, there’s a fair amount of pretty deadening boredom baked into addiction itself — but how to evoke that tedium without writing a tedious book? It felt like its own small-scale aesthetic high-wire act.

YC: In telling this story, what made you trust in crafting the first person pluralist voice? And when did the book’s structure become distanced from memoir?

LJ: I love the way that various voices in the book speak across its braided sections, so that Berryman’s words might help illuminate something about Jean Rhys’s life, or my own. I wanted to create that kind of echo chamber, and it was part of my conception of the book from the very start — that it be composed of multiple lives, multiple stories, multiple voices, rather than just my own. It was never going to be a traditional memoir. Part of that had to do with wanting to create a book whose structure enacted the same outward turn that recovery had involved, for me — finding something saving in paying attention to other lives. Part of that had to do with the aesthetic challenge of writing a kind of anti-memoir — bringing together multiple plotlines and multiple voices, splicing them in a way that created resonance without forcing false conflation or losing momentum entirely. And part of it had to do with wanting to resist the idea of a single formula for the addiction or recovery story; I wanted to complicate that by offering a bunch of different stories that followed a bunch of different trajectories.

I want this person to love me, but what if he doesn’t? I want this editor to love me, but what if she doesn’t? I want this reader to love me, but what if she doesn’t?

YC: Is there a link between “rejection” and the “desire to blunt the edges of it with alcohol” built into writing programs?

LJ: So much of the book is about rejection — and the fear of rejection — and about the ways that consciousness seeks to avoid or console the prospect of rejection that comes attached to all forms of desire: I want this person to love me, but what if he doesn’t? I want this editor to love me, but what if she doesn’t? I want this reader to love me, but what if she doesn’t? Rejection was very much in the soil and the water at my MFA program in Iowa — its prospect lurked over everything we did, every manuscript we submitted, every agent meeting, every late-night talk in every bar — and I can’t speak for anyone else, but part of what fueled my drinking was the sense that I could inoculate myself against the impact of that rejection if I could find my own solace in the booze itself.

YC: When you were writing The Gin Closet, published in 2010, did the tension of sobriety and relapse inform your writing? Or, challenge it?

LJ: Oh, absolutely. That tension is like an invisible architecture structuring the novel, whose two central characters both have troubled relationships to booze. One of them is an older woman drinking herself to death in a trailer in the Nevada desert; and I think I created her as an exaggerated version of the way I sometimes imagined drinking: toward complete destruction, without any limits. A friend of mine (who also happens to be an author who has been sober for many years) said that she always thought that novel had a profoundly ambivalent relationship to alcohol, and she’s absolutely right. During the years I spent writing it, I was mainly drinking — but I was starting to think about quitting, and wondering what that would be like. So some of the writing about sobriety and recovery in that book rings a bit hollow, and a bit grim — it’s hollow and tentative, a fearful imagining of what it would be like to give up this thing I couldn’t imagine living without. But the writing about booze is very visceral and committed — written from deep inside that state of thrall, just starting to become aware of itself.

YC: Has sobriety altered your writing and creative impulses?

LJ: One of the driving questions of The Recovering is about the relationship between creativity and sobriety, and — specifically — what kinds of creativity might be spurred by sobriety, rather than flattened by it. Which was one of my fears about getting sober — that I’d lose a certain volatility that was animating the work — and a fear I found almost all the writers I researched also shared, in some form. Part of what animated this project was the desire to find models for what sober creativity might look like. For me, creativity didn’t come immediately in sobriety — there was a lot of internal baggage and bullshit I needed to sort out first, and there were many months spent throwing myself against those sober nights, trying to make them creatively productive. If I wasn’t drinking, I should be getting something done, right? But eventually, sobriety did open up tremendously exciting new veins in my work — especially, a turn toward the lives of others (in archives, through reporting) and toward a mode of hybrid nonfiction that brings my own life into conversation with these lives. Among other things, I’ve found sobriety to be a call to pay attention to the world beyond my own mind — and I’d like to think my writing is a testament to that attention. Things like interviewing and reporting that would have been nearly impossible for me to do before I got sober — because constitutional shyness, aversion to strangers — have become important strands in my work. I also think recovery meetings — and the way they honor the interchangeable story, rather than expecting (or even wanting) everyone’s story to be “unique,” has changed the way I think about personal narrative: someone’s experiences don’t have to be exceptional to be worth narrating, they only have to be observed with acuity and rigor.

YC: How did you organize the various narrative and thematic lanes of personal, cultural history, research, and reportage within your material? Were they developed as separate ideas prior to working in concert with one another?

LJ: First of all, I love that phrase: “thematic lanes.” It speaks perfectly to the sensation of putting this book together — feeling that there were all these various streams or threads, each one with its own velocity, and I was somehow trying to navigate between them. At first, I had no clear plan. I had fragments of personal writing about my own experience, and I had tremendous amounts of archival research and literary criticism from my doctoral dissertation at Yale (about writers who got sober, the institutions that tried to get them sober, and the work that emerged from their sobriety), and I had vague visions of a book that would put my story alongside the stories of others — but I had no clear sense of how I’d put it all together. I was lucky enough to have a one-month Lannan Foundation residency in Marfa, Texas during a particularly crazy period in my life — when I’d been able to do very little writing at all — and at the beginning of that month, I took of stack of blank white paper and wrote out all the pieces of all the stories I wanted to tell, including my own. Then I spread those pieces of paper across the floor of my office (An actual office! An actual desk! Actual floor space! Back home in New York, I lived in a rent-controlled one-bedroom with two other people and had none of these things…). I arranged the pieces of paper across the floor — I think there were fifty or sixty of them, at that point — crafting a possible vision of what the book might look like, and that allowed me to start writing it, following the spread of pages as a kind of map, writing one page at a time. It gave me a way to begin.

‘The Recovering’ is about the relationship between creativity and sobriety, and — specifically — what kinds of creativity might be spurred by sobriety, rather than flattened by it.

YC: How do you define sobriety? Does the meaning of sobriety change over the course of a life?

LJ: That’s a more complicated question than it might seem to be at first glance. Roughly put, I’d define sobriety as liberation from the state of toxic dependence — in this context, dependence on a substance. That’s not necessarily the same thing as abstinence, though they often converge. For me personally, sobriety involves abstaining from any substance that substantially alters my state of consciousness — but I’m also wary of the ways in which abstinence can become a kind of tyrannical imperative, or a narrow definition of recovery. For many people who have had problematic relationships to substances, meaningful sobriety might constitute an altered relationship to drinking or recreational drug use that doesn’t feel consuming, destructive, or obsessive. More than anything, I believe that it’s impossible to know what another person needs in order to feel sober, impossible — from the outside — to adjudicate the difference between self-justification and functional moderation. I try to reign in those kinds of presumptive verdicts. And yes, absolutely, sobriety can change over the course of a lifetime. I think it always does. For me, that has involved bringing a kind of sober mentality — trying to own my mistakes, to relinquish control over others, to see beyond the edges of my own life — to the circumstances of my life as they’ve changed over the years: relationships ending and beginning, starting a family, building a life as a teacher. What it feels like to live through these chapters sober keeps evolving; it would be impossible for sobriety to stay the same.

YC: I read that you cut 100,000 words from the manuscript. As is, it’s a large, encompassing book. What are two things that you struggled with taking out?

LJ: Ha! It’s true. I cut a huge book out of this huge book and it’s still a huge book. At one point, my aunt — who’s also a writer — told me: “Maybe you just need to accept that you’re writing a big book.” I had to give up on the fantasy of the slim volume. Most of the work that gets called “hybrid nonfiction” is slim in that way. This is something else.

Two things I struggled with taking out? I’d say I struggled most with cutting lots of close readings of literary texts — the kind of analysis that constituted the bulk of my dissertation, but often felt unwieldy or repetitive here — and with taking out details from my personal story that felt emotionally significant but weren’t necessarily serving the narrative. I hated cutting out pieces of the major love story in the book — road trips we took, love letters we exchanged, the private languages we invented, the ways I found myself in his poems — because I didn’t want to narrate our relationship exclusively in terms of difficulty; I wanted to honor what had been beautiful and blissful about it, too. And to some extent that impulse was right: there’s a sophisticated art to representing happiness in compelling and surprising ways. But I also had to recognize that there was a difference between what I wanted to honor and what a reader needed to know.

Because my writing lives and dies by its details, I find it excruciating to cut things that other people might dispatch with more readily: the syrup and waffles a woman vomited all over her college girlfriends after a drunken binge, or the time — years later — she accidentally ate an ice cream sundae covered with crème de menthe while she was taking Antabuse; feeling betrayed that even this small pleasure had betrayed her. These are the gleaming particulars that help me immerse more fully in the lives of others, and I hate to see any of them go.

YC: The line: “I’d always suspected love came as a reward for saying the right things.” While the sentence is linked to a specific relationship, did the tension of “saying the right thing” impact your approach to your earlier writing at Yale and Iowa?

LJ: I think the imperative to “say the right thing” is a thread linking together many situations and compulsions in this book: the desire to win institutional approval, the desire to win and maintain the desire of others, the desire to win over the room at a twelve-step recovery meeting. I dramatize two very different Iowa scenes as bookends or foils for each other: a group of aspiring writers sitting in a basement party, competing to tell the “best story,” and a group of people sitting in a church basement, years later, telling the stories of their desperation in order to help one another survive — those are two very different visions of what the “right thing” to say might be.

Wreckage and crisis are urgent narrative situations that are inherently unresolved — something is broken, which is usually more compelling than something being un-broken.

YC: Do stories of wreckage receive more attention than those of recovery? Is wreckage inescapable, or just overly enticing to readers?

LJ: Well, I think it’s only natural that tales of wreckage compel us — and it’s not just a sinister case of rubbernecking to get a better glimpse of the car crash at the side of the highway. Wreckage and crisis are urgent narrative situations that are inherently unresolved — something is broken, which is usually more compelling than something being un-broken. Problem is the engine of narrative. But with this book, I was interested in making the argument that repair and recuperation can also be compelling narrative situations; in refuting that wreckage has a monopoly on our compulsive attention. I’ve always agreed with Tolstoy that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but reacted against the notion that happy families are all happy in the same way — positive states like happiness and recovery can be as multiple, as subtle, as dimension and striated as their darker cousins.

YC: Your ex-boyfriend Dave is mentioned several times in the book. Did he, or anyone else mentioned in the book, read your manuscript prior to it being published? Who is your first reader? And, what are you looking for from a first reader?

LJ: When I’m writing nonfiction about my life, I try to give everyone I write about the opportunity to read the material so we can discuss it. So I invited almost everyone I mention in the book to read this manuscript — or at least the pages in which they appear — as I was working on it, including Dave, who actually read two different drafts, and whose feedback was deeply insightful and helped make the book stronger and more faithful to the complexity of the truth.

My first reader is almost always my husband, Charles Bock, who is a beautiful novelist and essayist and who manages to tell me — honestly and supportively — what I most need to hear. His intelligence and humanity and wisdom were my companions as I worked on this book. What do I look for from a first reader? A strong sense of excitement at my project — that I’m doing something fundamentally worthwhile — and brutal honesty about everything I need to do to make it better.

YC: Is there a new project you’re working on?

LJ: Yes! Well, in the immediate moment I am deeply tucked away in the baby cave with my newborn daughter, who is seven weeks old. But soon I’ll be doing a round of revisions on my next book. It’s a collection of essays about haunting and obsession, including pieces about kids with past life memories, the residue of the Sri Lankan Civil War, a group of folks obsessed with a mysterious blue whale known as “the loneliest whale in the world,” the immersive online platform Second Life, my own vexed history with Las Vegas…it’s stuff I’ve been working on for the past six years, but I’m excited to bring it together. I’m also secretly working on another novel, and daydreaming an essay about C-sections.

Is It Possible for Machines to Translate Poetry, When Humans Can Barely Do It?

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In 1537 the French writer Clement Marot wrote a short, light-hearted poem called “Ma Mignonne” about a young lady fallen ill and a provocation for her to get better quick. The poem is skinny but dense, a set of 14 rhyming couplets where each line is only three syllables long: “Ma mignonne / Je te donne / Le bon jour” and so on. It takes a lighthearted approach to the affliction: in short, illness is a prison from which to escape, so the young lady should eat preserves so she won’t lose her figure. Perhaps Marot wrote it as a social gesture to her father, or a subtle and provocative invitation to the girl herself; it is no great work of serious literature. But centuries later the cognitive scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote a 500+ page tome about “Ma Mignonne” called Le Ton Beau de Marot. (Don’t worry, it’s in English.) Or rather, Hofstadter wrote a book about his attempts to translate the poem into English, about the hundreds of English translations he collected from friends, about the strangled strangeness of moving words between languages.

It is a book that truly warrants the word obsessive.

At the heart of Le Ton Beau de Marot is a struggle to understand what translation really does. What does a literal translation of a poem even mean? Hofstadter begins his book with two of his own translations of “Ma Mignonne,” the ones that started his multi-year quest of perfectly translating it. At the time, he thought of the translation as a simple challenge he didn’t quite have the knack for. As his compulsion to better translate this poem grows, he collects more and more translations from friends and colleagues, intrigued by each new rendition and what it prioritizes.

Some translations focus on preserving the rhyme scheme, rhythm, or sentence structure of the original, but change the humor, diction, or details; others retain the specifics, but are willing to change the sound. An early version by Hofstadter reads: “My sweet dear, / I send cheer — / All the best!” As he begins to ship out the poem as a translating challenge, we discover many other interpretations. The one beginning “Chickadee / I decree / A fine day” is written by Hofstadter’s wife, Carol.

Hofstadter discusses cultural translation, the idea of not just translating the words but also the ideas, the locations. Is it all right to transform fruit preserves into breakfast meat if that better represents the idea to a modern, North American reader? The original poem includes a self-reference to Clement — should that now, if Hofstadter is translating, be Douglas? Does an “accurate” translation require the same details, or the same effect? What is it acceptable to change when transporting a work across languages, time periods, and cultures? When does a poem become a different poem?

What is it acceptable to change when transporting a work across languages, time periods, and cultures? When does a poem become a different poem?

I have been told that it is impossible to translate poetry. In a poetry workshop I heard a long, impassioned lecture about the fact that “raven” sounds kind of like “never” backwards and thus Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem can never slip out of its English prison. Given the intricacies and difficulties of poetry I read in English, I cannot imagine the subtleties missed when I read translated poetry. The entwinement between sound and word and sense cannot be truly replicated in a different language. As Hofstadter demonstrates with over 60 renditions of “Ma Mignonne,” there is no perfect solution. In attempting to solve the puzzle of translation, he merely creates a kaleidoscope of options that, to be honest, become exhausting to read.

The draw of this book is not the poetry, which at best amounts to a short and whimsical thing, but rather the engineering approach to the poetry, the puzzle of it all. Each translation sketches a different possible solution, as if a perfect translation were available would we just articulate what exactly we wanted out of the endeavor. Hofstadter, after all, is not a translator but a scientist, buried neck deep in his own ideas about artificial intelligence. He takes the simple “Ma Mignonne” and asks: what’s really happening when we read it? How do we make sure that happens in English?

Being an artificial intelligence researcher, Hofstadter gave his translation challenge to computers as well. He was disappointed in the results, but intrigued by what machine translation missed. Like so much technology, the advent of machine translation in the U.S. has its origins in defense: a desire to keep up to date on Russian science during the Cold War. And like Hofstadter’s approach to “Ma Mignonne,” this endeavor was indeed seen as a puzzle. Warren Weaver, one of the founders of machine translation, suggested in 1955 that we frame translation as a cryptography problem: “When I look at an article in Russian, I say: ‘This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.’”

But machine translation struggled in its early days. In 1960 the Israeli philosopher and linguist Yehoshua Bar-Hillel argued that “fully automatic high quality translation” was an impossible dream. He liked to talk about these two sentences: “the pen is in the box” and “the box is in the pen.” How does a machine know that “pen” refers to two very different objects? He argued that this requires such a wealth of world knowledge that computers would basically have to become sentient. Which, for all the fear of an AI takeover, they are not. Not even in 2018. Not even close.

Yet a quick perusal of Google Translate suggests that our best translation machines can correctly translate Bar-Hillel’s problematic sentences in Spanish. (But only when properly punctuated with a period at the end of the sentence! The machine is finicky.) In German and French it fails, and it may do so in other languages, but Spanish demonstrates the machine’s potential. Something has cracked open without requiring a sentient computer.

Current systems, from Facebook to Google to Baidu, use machine learning, a catch-all name for many different algorithms. Translation uses an algorithm with millions of parameters that, when those parameters are set just right, does an amazing job at taking in one sequence of numbers and outputting another, very specific sequence. For machine translation, the input numbers represent words in the original language, and the output ones are the secondary language. Machine learning requires huge amounts of “training data,” troves and troves of human-translated text that are used to teach the algorithm how the conversion works. Machine learning is not a one-to-one symbol mapping system or even a sequence of logical statements to connect two languages. The engineers working on these algorithms don’t necessarily need to know anything about the languages at hand. In fact, it may help if they don’t. The famous quote among engineers is from Fred Jelinek, a Czech-American researcher originally working on speech-to-text: “Every time I fire a linguist, the performance of the speech recognizer goes up.”

Machine learning is not a one-to-one symbol mapping system or even a sequence of logical statements to connect two languages.

Hofstadter would prefer a more nuanced approach. In a recent article in the Atlantic, he digs into the failings of Google Translate by analyzing its translation of French, German, and Chinese texts into English. The main problem, he states, is its lack of understanding. He laments that “Google Translate isn’t familiar with situations.” Our best results are not intellectual, as Hofstadter would prefer, but statistical: given everything the machine has seen in the past, what is the most likely translation of a new sentence?

One of the consequences of such an approach is that the results can be hard to interpret. Google’s current system was delayed in its release partially due to a problem that the developers nicknamed “hallucinating”: sometimes the algorithm outputs a sentence in which one or two words are translated randomly. Perhaps the algorithm has no high-probability output and so just guesses. It is hard to unravel why a machine learning algorithm does what it does. All we know is that generally it does pretty well.

It is hard to unravel why a machine learning algorithm does what it does. All we know is that generally it does pretty well.

For all its recent success, in some ways the goals of machine translation are modest. Most commercial machine translation is for weather reports, or instructions, or to aid human translators. Even Weaver didn’t claim that machine translation would ever achieve elegance or style. In a 2015 New York Times profile of statistical machine translation, a researcher tells the reporter, “We’re great if you’re Estonian and your toaster is broken.”

But as a poet, it’s impossible for me to ignore the style of machine translated language, even if style was never its goal. Everything has style, regardless of the intent. The funny trick of taking a sentence, translating it into another language and then back again, over and over, and watching the sentence mutate like a whispered secret between gossiping children, is mesmerizing. Is it funny because the machine is getting it so wrong? Or is it funny because it highlights how language is slippery in its meaning? To say a machine is getting it “wrong” is to suggest that there is a “right,” that there is a puzzle here with an answer. There is not. But as an engineer I want to argue that surely some translations are unlikely or misleading; there may be many correct answers but are there not also many incorrect answers? “The box is in the pen.” Here the pen is not a writing implement but a small, fenced-in area. This can be translated incorrectly.

To say a machine is getting it “wrong” is to suggest that there is a “right,” that there is a puzzle here with an answer. There is not.

Perhaps. But to read “the box is in the pen” with an eye on a ballpoint pen, holding within its slender body the potential to draw a box on a blank page, is simply to reinterpret the sentence in unusual way. Unexpected, but not wrong. Perhaps the times the machine may be marked as wrong are the times we see the machine’s strangled view of the world, the strange interpretation of an algorithm suggesting a new perspective. Is this not part of poetry? Turning words onto themselves to find new meaning?

The style of a machine-translated sentence is strange and surprisingly moving, as if the machine were asking that I imbue it with a soul.

This is what I love about poetry, English poetry but also translated poetry: the way it becomes a brief window into the mind of another, the words themselves not strictly meaningful, always odd, sometimes straightforward in their meaning and other times leaving me completely lost. I can know so little about the choices of the poet, yet the words enthrall me as an unexpected sequence of sound and sense. When a poem eludes me, I want to find the connections already living in the poet’s mind even if that truth is not truly available. Similarly, in machine translation it feels incredibly natural to interpret the choices the machine made, to make its words make sense, even though “sense” may not be the right word when considering a computer. And so the style of a machine-translated sentence is strange and surprisingly moving, as if the machine were asking that I imbue it with a soul.

None of the translations of “Ma Mignonne” in Hofstadter’s book were entirely satisfactory; no translation perfectly teleports the work into another language with all its rhythms, nuances, and connotations intact. Instead, each translation poses its own questions about the original. The results of machine translation ask these questions too. Machine translation highlights a collaboration between the human mind and the machine, which we live alongside but are yet to really understand.

“Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would” Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages

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On an unnamed part of the internet, young adult author Gwen C. Katz found a delightfully deluded male author claiming that his facility with writing natural women characters constituted an unassailable rebuke to the idea that we need diverse authors to write diverse viewpoints. If a male author can write a woman this convincing, surely there’s no need for the #OwnVoices movement!

Some of his other perfect descriptions—which, remember, he himself was claiming were evidence of his skill—included “I could only imagine the thoughts that were running through his head. Naughty thoughts,” and “I could imagine what he saw in me. Pale skin, red lips like I had just devoured a cherry popsicle covered in gloss, two violet eyes like Elizabeth Taylor’s.” A cherry popsicle covered in gloss, y’all. Why would you even eat that? And TWO eyes, just to be clear.

The whole thread is worth a read, but it got even better once writer/podcaster/cat tweeter Whitney Reynolds proposed a Twitter game: Describe yourself the way a male author would.

“I never expected it to blow up, it was a joke made to a friend while I was ripped on Franzia. But it clearly resonated!” Reynolds told Electric Literature. “The thing that stuck out to me most is how many women responded with something along the lines of, I’m old or fat or a woman of color, so I wouldn’t be described by a male author at all. I might as well be invisible.” Those responses, taken together with the women who waxed rhapsodic over their booby boob-shaped boobs, constitute a pretty damning indictment of the state of writing about women and people of color.

If you’re a male writer, this is actually good news! It means you have a chance to listen really carefully and do a lot better in creating your women characters. Consider, for instance, writing one who’s cutting as hell and 100% has your number.

Below are some of our favorite responses to Reynolds’ challenge—but it’s not too late to pour yourself some Franzia and jump in.

‘Love, Simon‘ Makes Being a Gay Teen Seem Normal—And That’s Where It Fails

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Dear Simon,

I hesitated over sitting down to write to you. It’s now been a couple of weeks since I caught your story on the big screen. Every day since, I’ve seen friends near and far share teary-eyed confessions about what it’s meant to them to see your coming-out narrative in such a widely-marketed mainstream movie. How they loved the earnest message at the heart of your film; how they wish they’d had this sort of story growing up; how watching it with their friends, their families, their husbands made the experience all the more touching.

You’ve probably been getting all sorts of messages like these, reminding you how important it is for all of us in the LGBTQ community to see such narratives being embraced and celebrated in glossy Hollywood flicks. But Simon, at the heart of your charming tale of how a lovestruck pen-pal friendship leads to a comedy-of-errors-turned-rom-com(ing-out flick) is a celebration of normality that kept nagging at me.“My name is Simon,” you tell us in the trailer, “For the most part, my life is totally normal.” You go further: “I’m just like you.” Except for the fact that you have a giant secret: you’re gay. Putting aside who the “you” in your voiceover narration is really encompassing (fellow suburban teens? Why is it assumed that “you” are straight?), your insistence that your gayness is merely incidental baffles me.

I mean, I get it. There’s a level of progress that well-to-do kids in 2018 from liberal-leaning families in urban enclaves can point to to say that sexuality really isn’t that big of a deal. At its core, the fact that you can announce that you’re just like us is proof that our discourse surrounding homosexuality has shifted in the right direction. Twenty years ago, your reticence about coming out might have been motivated by fear. Instead, as you put it in Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, the novel on which the film Love, Simon is based, “the whole coming out thing doesn’t really scare me. …It probably wouldn’t be the end of the world. Not for me.” You’re just worried about how your coming out might affect your pen pal “Blue,” who came out in an anonymous post on an infamous school online board. A straight guy in your class is threatening to make your secret emails with “Blue” public, and you don’t want him to be spooked if your shared secret gets out. But that admission — that coming out is more awkward than scary, more of a chore than a gamble — also signals the very privilege that you carry and which marks your story at every turn.

You live a picture-perfect life. You own a car, have a room straight out of a PB Teen catalog, and go to the kind of school that would put on a production of Cabaret (albeit starring an insufferable straight guy as the Emcee, so you know, not without its faults). Your movie mom is Jennifer Garner, for god’s sake! The narrative engine that makes your coming out feel both ordinary and extraordinary at the same time comes not from the consequences you’ll have to face, but from the poor choices you make in deciding to sidestep the awkwardness of it all (like, say, letting yourself be blackmailed rather than come out on your own terms). This is the kind of plot and character I’m supposed to find emboldening: look how far we’ve come, being gay is so normal that it’s just one of many things teenagers can screw up! But is this wish fulfillment or willful myopia? Perhaps it’s both, though the way your film imagines gayness when divorced from your own self-described “normal” life suggests more of the latter. You almost had me quoting Michael Warner’s The Trouble With Normal at friends recently, a book I wish didn’t feel so contemporary even when it’s almost twenty years old! I mean, I can’t believe we’re still litigating whether convincing the majority of Americans that queers are “normal” (“just like you!”) is still the most effective way of demanding tolerance. How much gets sacrificed in the service of catering to this so-called normal society?

How much gets sacrificed in the service of catering to this so-called normal society?

Take Ethan, your fellow gay classmate. He’s black, femme, and fabulous. He’s not quite as much of a punchline as I’d feared, but he remains a foil to your own brand of inoffensive gayness. To your schoolmates (and to many audience members catching this film) he’s the kind of gay teen we’ve come to expect. Not really a walking stereotype, but close enough that he could never quite pass. Indeed, as we see in the film, his coming out prompts suppressed snickers; his friends are supportive but his sexuality was never going to be a surprise. In a story that hinges on how invisible gayness can be — you don’t know who Blue is; he could be any of the gorgeous young men you pass down the hallway every day! — Ethan’s gayness represents a level of visibility and risk that your own story wishes to steer clear of. If this film were called Love, Ethan, we know his first words wouldn’t (couldn’t!) be “I’m just like you.” And, indeed, your own attempts at sussing out who your beloved pen-pal is operate from the very normcore framework you’ve sketched out for yourself. It explains why you flinch whenever anyone who might not fit these limited parameters (like, if they’re fat) emerges as a possible Blue contender.

Immediately I realize how much of a cynic I’m being. But I worry about what gets left behind when our public models of gayness are so innocuous. Simon, when you imagine being out and proud in college, your fantasy plays like a ’90s GAP commercial, with kids in bright colored tees dancing around their dorms Fame-style. It’s a slight nod to the stereotype that gays love musicals, but it’s so artless that it only showcases your lack of imagination of what theater fags would actually look like in the real world. Theater fags are so much weirder, Simon. And then, when your coming out prompts a makeover montage you basically go from wearing shapeless t-shirts to… wearing slightly better-fitted shirts.

I worry about what gets left behind when our public models of gayness are so innocuous.

I understand this impetus. Teen comedies have long trotted out gay guys (particularly of the “straight girl’s BFF” variety) that fit into neatly understood clichés. I think back to Clueless’ Christian and Mean Girls’ Damian, Miss Stevens’ Sam, or even the fabulous boys of GBF, and I can see why it’s seen as refreshing that we finally get a teen gay guy who’s, you know, not that gay. It can be read both as a sign of how far we’ve come (we’re not all sissy fags, you know?) and as an embrace of the kind of heteronormativity we should be challenging instead. Yes, Simon, you’re not a gay stereotype — but you’re kind of a straight stereotype. Is that really better?

“Why is straight the default?” you ask in the book — a motto that’s become central to the film’s marketing. “Everyone should have to declare one way or another,” you suggest, “and it should be this big awkward thing whether you’re straight or bi, or whatever.” There’s that word again: “Awkward” is as extreme a scenario as you can conjure. In the film you have a similar moment, when you turn to Ethan and admit that he’d made coming out look so easy. It’s a misconception he is quick to rectify (all too politely, I might add), giving us insight into how life at home is actually still a struggle no matter how out and proud he may act at school. I was happy to see your privilege being called out so explicitly, a reminder that just as straight is a default in many stories, suburban kids who face only “awkwardness” when they come out are still the default in stories about the LGBTQ community. While I can’t expect your story to carry the burden of this representation, I can wonder why your story would be the first to get such support from a Hollywood studio — a question that’s perhaps much too rhetorical to be even worth asking.

‘Call Me By Your Name’ Made Me Realize What the Closet Stole From Me

If I’m being honest, though, Simon, I was sad to see that the one way in which you were decidedly like everyone else around you—a horny teen—was downplayed even more than in the book. I missed the way your conversations with Blue on the page often skirted the line of propriety. (“You have me curious. A banana? A hot dog? Cucumber? :)” you ask him, when he says that he’s eating. “Mind out of the gutter,” he coyly retorts.) You even discuss fantasizing about sex, which leads to a clipped scene where we’re to understand some sort of self-pleasure takes place. The book engages not only with teen gay identity but with teen gay sexuality (if ever so fleetingly), which may not be palatable enough for the movie, but is crucial to the real-life experience of teen crushes, sexual awakening, and coming out.

I’m not saying I needed you to fuck a peach in broad daylight or get a hand job at the beach bathed in moonlight. But I kept waiting for these on-screen teens to act like the hormonal messes I know them to be. This is a celebration of same-sex love, but it sanitizes same-sex desire.

I kept waiting for these on-screen teens to act like the hormonal messes I know them to be. This is a celebration of same-sex love, but it sanitizes same-sex desire.

I’m so happy you’re in our lives and that your story will be seen by TBS viewers for years to come. But I’m also hoping we can find a way to support films about gay teens whose stories may not be quite as easily digestible. You, and the viewers who relate to you, could benefit from catching films like Saturday Church (about a gay teen finding himself in New York City’s ballroom scene) or Freak Show (about a boy running for homecoming queen in his conservative school). Will it be too much to expect for your fans to seek out Sundance winner The Miseducation of Cameron Post when it’s eventually released? It’s funnier than it has any right to be and has just as uplifting and liberating ending as the one you espouse, if one more grounded than your suburban ferris-wheel-fantasy. But it took months for Miseducation to be picked up, no doubt because its depiction of lesbian sexuality is frank and its handling of gay conversion therapy necessarily upsetting. Real gay teens need these messy stories more than they need your unattainably “normal,” neutered, sanitized one. But it’s exactly the neatness, focus on romance over sex, and emphasis on “normality” that makes your story comfortable enough for 20th Century Fox. So seek these other films, Simon! Watch them with your friends and share them with your fans! And if you need any more suggestions, you know where to find me.

Love, Manuel

It’s Okay to Give Up on Mediocre Books Because We’re All Going to Die

Posted on by 007595

The fall I was 17, I lived in Paris and read just over 90 books. I was working as an au pair for a newborn, which gave me plenty of hours when I had to be quiet, stay inside, and pass the afternoons alone. It was 2005, so I wasn’t yet spending endless time on the internet; I didn’t have a laptop or a smartphone. I had very few friends in town. I read books that I loved and others that I didn’t very much enjoy. But even if I hated the book, I forced myself to finish it. I was a compulsive finisher. No matter how much I disliked a book in the beginning, I felt like I owed it to the book, and its author, to give it a chance to redeem itself — and by a chance, I mean until the very last page.

I loved telling people that I always finished books. I loved the righteousness of being able to say that I could count on one hand the books I’d given up on. This obviously made me really fun at parties, but it was also part of a larger pattern of perfectionism that made me anxious and self-critical.

I had on my shelves then (as I still have) dozens of unread books. And still, I kept buying new ones. These unread books weighed on me; every time I saw them I was reminded of all the other tasks I felt behind on: the unreturned calls and texts, the emails I wasn’t able to keep up with in my personal inbox because I spent all my time and energy on my professional inbox, the room in my apartment that needed painting and plant that needed repotting.

These unread books weighed on me; every time I saw them I was reminded of all the other tasks I felt behind on.

In early 2016, I gave myself a challenge: no buying any new books. I was going to read the books I already owned, one by one, until my queue was clear. That project didn’t last very long — but it did change my life in another way. Realizing the gargantuan task that was in front of me if I was to read all the unread books on my shelves, I began questioning my resistance to quitting books once started. In a note to myself from that time, I wrote: “Why do I keep investing time in it even if I’m not super jazzed on it?” It was about a feeling of accomplishment that I was looking for, but my continual need for that feeling was out of control.

Just over ten years after that fall in Paris, I finally stopped being a compulsive book finisher. I’d learned two things in particular that helped me quit. One, I realized literally NO ONE cares if I give up on a book except me. (And maybe the author, if I told them, which I wouldn’t do because…no.) Two, I realized that I’m going to die.

Not tomorrow, knock on wood, or next year, God willing. I don’t know when, but I know better than I knew at 17 that I’m mortal, and that the hours left to read are limited.

It’s not that I had no awareness of time’s preciousness before. In fact, my appreciation for the time a book takes to make probably contributed to the compulsion to finish each one. As a writer myself, I was painfully aware that the author had, over the course of many months or years, tried their best to create something that mattered. I hated the idea that their effort would be in vain. But at a certain point, what mattered more than protecting their feelings was realizing that my time was a finite resource, and that no one was safe-guarding it for me.

One, I realized literally NO ONE cares if I give up on a book except me. Two, I realized that I’m going to die.

Perhaps ironically, it was a book that helped me take seriously the idea that I don’t have to finish every book. It’s called A Year To Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last, by Stephen Levine, a Buddhist teacher and writer — and yes, I finished it. Levine invites the reader to reflect on how they’d want to live if they knew they really had a terminal illness, with a year left on the table. Regardless of your age or health, he asks the reader to make amends, prepare your will, get your affairs in order, and cherish time with loved ones. And while there were plenty of distinct actions I felt moved to do after reading his book (apologize to a handful of people, plan a weekend trip for my closest girlfriends, empty out my childhood room), there were also some more general behavioral shifts I knew I’d make if given a deadline for my life, shifts I might as well make starting now. One of those was that I’d stop forcing myself to read books I wasn’t enjoying or learning from.

I’ve given up on a handful of books in the last year, but the one that stands out the most to me was in fall of last year. I was on a road trip, solo, through the Pacific Northwest and into Canada. At the beginning of the trip I’d found a copy of a new novel by an author whose short story collection I loved. The novel had hit the New York Times bestseller list; plenty of people were raving about its interesting structure and point of view. I started reading it on my trip while in a semi-rural part of Canada; I had plenty of time for it. And yet, I just didn’t care. I tried; I gave it 25 pages or so while sitting on the front porch of the cabin where I was staying. And then I gave up. Maybe I didn’t give up forever; maybe when the time is right, I’ll be able to find the book again and have a chance to love it because I didn’t force myself to tolerate my way through it now. But maybe I’ll die before that happens, and if so, I’ll be glad I read something I liked instead.

Maybe when the time is right, I’ll find the book again. But maybe I’ll die before that happens, and if so, I’ll be glad I read something I liked instead.

These days, I typically give books until around page 25–60, depending on the length of the book; I like to read close to 15% before giving up. If I’m merely confused, sometimes I’ll push further; if I’m bored, I let them go. I try to choose my reading list with an eye on diversity of the author or protagonist’s gender, ethnicity, nationality, and so on. I also aim to read more books by women than men (2:1, if you’re curious) to make up for the many years of missing out on women’s voices, when I didn’t pay attention and was reading almost exclusively men. I was initially worried about a correlation between the books I give up on and the author’s similarities or differences in identity to mine, but I haven’t found any meaning to the books I don’t want to finish. I still want my ideas to be challenged when I’m reading; I still want to learn and to think in new ways. But, as Austin Kleon says, paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges, sometimes a book just isn’t for me.

Around the same time as I gave up on reading what didn’t grab my interest, I also gave myself permission to start reading more of what I love. Which, it turns out, is a lot more YA than I was previously reading (next up is Eleanor and Park), and a lot more rereading books that I once loved but haven’t revisited in years (like the His Dark Materials Trilogy, Etty Hillesum’s journals, and Zami by Audre Lorde). Interestingly-structured memoir and autobiographical fiction keep calling to me, as do self-help and spiritual books. Do you think that’s not literary enough? I don’t really care. Life’s too short.

I was worried giving myself permission to quit books early would impact how many I’d ultimately read. But last year, while working full-time and completing a book manuscript (as well as some shorter pieces), I read more than 75 books. I also gave up on maybe nine, but because I didn’t force myself to plod through books that bored me, I was able to move quickly and happily through the ones I did stick with. And that’s part of the point of reading for me: enjoyment, which in a literal sense means receiving joy

I still haven’t written that will, and I have a few lingering apologies left to make. And while I miss the sense of abundant, even excessive time, that I felt in Paris, I wouldn’t give up the clarity I have now: that time in this body is limited and precious, and that I am well served by reading whatever the hell I want.