What Should I Do If I’m Ashamed of My Published Work?

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The Blunt Instrument is an advice column for writers. If you need tough advice for a writing problem, send your question to blunt@electricliterature.com.

Dear Blunt Instrument,

I am back with a sadder question. Since publishing my book, I have come to hate it. Hate is maybe the wrong word. I am ashamed of it, and in turn, myself. I believe now that I rushed into publishing it because the opportunity was there. I got swept up in the excitement. Part of me knew I wasn’t ready, but another part of me thought, go for it. I went for it and now when I even think about it, I feel terrible. I never received any negative feedback about it (I received quite a bit of positive feedback about it, in fact, including some decent coverage on websites and such — ew sorry), but the small press world is kind, for the most part (unless it determines that you are deserving of less than that, for say, being an asshole). All of that said, I can’t seem to get over it. I think the book is juvenile and confused, and I am not a juvenile. I am in my 30s. But I am confused.

I saw a tweet a little while ago from someone who said, “I would never forgive myself if I wrote a bad book.” I don’t know if I’ll ever forgive myself, either, and I can’t figure out how to move on. For a time I thought that I would just work hard and write something else that would be so much better and erase the collective memory of my first book (I think I flatter myself to even think there is a collective memory), but I remain filled with doubt. And self-loathing. This might be a better question for a therapist, but here’s the short version: how do you recover from publishing shame?

I am sure many people feel this way, but I never see anyone talking about it. Shame is shameful.

Thank you xxo

Hi Blunt Instrument,

I’m a fiction writer and have been publishing online and in print for about 5 years. When I look back over my past publications, there are a number that just mortify me. In some cases, I just submitted too early, too eagerly (especially at the beginning). In other cases, I just feel that I’ve evolved, and my tastes are not the same as they were, say, three years ago.

I don’t really hear writers talking about this phenomenon. Maybe because it’s so obvious that this is part of the whole deal, or maybe because writers don’t feel comfortable admitting to having negative thoughts about their work. Either way, I often feel really alone in this. I worry about not being able to recover from work that now embarrasses me. Sometimes I wonder if it’s narcissistic to think that anyone gives a shit what I published three years ago, but there’s also the matter of just feeling disappointed in myself.

Anyway, all of these thoughts and feelings breed a neuroticism that can feel paralyzing and dooming at times. Would love your thoughts.

Thanks very much,

Jenny

Dear partners in shame,

I was struck by the similarities in your two letters. Both of you note that the embarrassment you’ve been feeling isn’t something writers often talk about, so there’s a meta-shame in even acknowledging writerly shame. (“Shame is shameful”!) However, I am sure you’re not alone in these feelings. One writer I know was quite proud of his first novel, until recently; he only regretted that it didn’t receive more attention. Now, more than a decade after he finished it, I’ve started to hear him say, when people tell him they plan to read the novel, “I’d sort of rather you didn’t.” What was our life’s work eventually becomes our juvenilia.

What was our life’s work eventually becomes our juvenilia.

There are two problems we need to address here: One, how do you deal with the shame you’re feeling now, so you can feel good about writing again? And two, how do you avoid feeling that kind of shame in the future?

To figure out a solution to the first problem, we need to talk about the idea of progress. Is or isn’t it illusory? As a writer, you’re going to be more or less cognizant of your progress on two different levels. One level is really about your private experience with your own development. Do you feel that you’re getting better? Is the writing you produce getting closer to the ideal of what you want to write?

It makes sense that young people, because they lack experience, would tend to undervalue experience and overvalue talent, which may be all they have. It also makes sense that older people would place a higher value on experience, now that they have it. I am not especially young, so you can take my bias into account, but I believe that experience is important, and that more life experience, reading experience, and writing experience are going to make you a better writer. Oddly, though, writers don’t talk a lot about this kind of progress. I’ve heard lots of writers say that “you can’t teach writing” — i.e., you’ve either got it or you don’t. This seems to be based on an assumption that writing ability is something static and unchanging, like a gene. Some writers, perhaps, don’t want to admit that writing can be taught (which is to say, that writing can be learned), because admitting that you can get better at writing means admitting there was a time when you weren’t a great writer.

The other kind of progress is more external — essentially, are you becoming more successful over time? I once asked a question on Twitter of writers with multiple books: Do you think your most successful book — the one that sold the most and got the most attention — is your best book? Most authors said no. As for me, my second book got a lot of attention, at least for a small press title, so I expected my third book to get even more. Well, that wasn’t the case. Careers do not inevitably progress according to some natural law. Success is mostly a matter of random luck; hard work helps but is no guarantee of success.

I think writers’ expectations of these two kinds of progress are usually backwards: They believe their talent is basically static, and progress will come mostly in the form of their talent being gradually more recognized. But the healthier and more realistic way to think about your career is that your writing will probably get better over time — if you work diligently and consistently, along with doing ancillary writing work like reading — whereas your publishing success will follow a much less predictable trajectory. Sometimes the writing you’re most proud of will get minimal attention, whereas things you barely care about, or that you don’t feel are representative of your style, might find a large audience. Once the work is published, it has a life of its own.

Of course, it doesn’t always work out this way; some people write a great first book, immediately experience explosive success, and then write crap for the rest of their lives, because it sells anyway and they can get away with it. But my point here is this: It is natural and normal and good, or in any case perfectly fine, that you should feel a story or poem or book you wrote in the past is not your best work. That means you’re getting better as a writer, by your own standards, and why should there be any shame in that? I want you to feel that what you’re writing now is the best thing you’ve ever done — and, moreover, that your best work is coming in the future. That kind of progress should excite you and keep you going.

It is natural and normal and good, or in any case perfectly fine, that you should feel a story or poem or book you wrote in the past is not your best work.

So how should you think about that older work? You should try to feel good about it. Remember that someone thought it was good enough that they spent time and energy and money to share it with the world, knowing their name would be associated with it. Remember it might be finding the right readers at the right time; just because your own tastes are evolving doesn’t mean there aren’t readers out there who are falling in love with your earlier writing the way your editors and publishers did. But go ahead and use it as motivation too — finish that better book you’re working on so that your readers can follow your progress.

(One quick aside: I don’t think it’s pertinent to either of your situations, but I feel I should mention this. I can imagine a scenario where you might want to take more aggressive action — for example, if you realized that something you published years ago was unforgivably racist or sexist. If something you published online is now morally repugnant to you, I think it’s fair to contact the editors and request that they take it down. They might not, but it’s worth a try. If the same thing happened with a book you wrote, you could talk to your publisher about it; they might agree to pull the book. At the extreme end you could try to buy all the extant copies, an expensive but viable solution. But I wouldn’t pursue these options just because you don’t think your old work is as good as it could be; it would be an insult to the people who published it.)

Now let’s get to that second problem: How to avoid future publishing shame?

Unfortunately, you have no guarantee that your future selves will feel the same about anything you do as your current self does. Your style as a writer and your tastes as a reader will evolve over time. But you can mitigate discord between these versions of yourself by practicing generosity and patience. Be generous toward your past selves; forgive them their writing and publishing mistakes. Those mistakes are part of your personal progress, and you’ve learned from them. Further, just because your tastes have changed doesn’t mean your old writing is bad; I often enjoy writers’ earlier books for their impulsiveness or loose ends, qualities that get ironed out as the writer matures.

Be generous toward your past selves; forgive them their writing and publishing mistakes. Those mistakes are part of your personal progress, and you’ve learned from them.

And be patient about your publishing success. Give yourself plenty of time with a piece of writing before you send it out. Try to find at least one trusted reader that you can share your drafts with before submitting them to publishers. That trust component is important — make sure you can count on your early readers for an honest opinion, not just empty encouragement. Remember that once published, things can stick around for a very long time, so be sure that a piece of writing is as good as you can currently make it before you set it free. But understand that there is no perfect amount of time to wait that will protect you from all possibility of regret; you won’t get a sign from the universe that your work is done; it’s a decision you need to make on your own.

Finally — let’s do our part to end the culture of meta-shame. If you hate a thing you published, go ahead and say so, but then let it go. Feeling a little bad about something — who says we should feel good all the time? — is not as debilitating if you take away the part where you feel bad about feeling bad.

Best of luck to you both.

The Mayor Who Gave His Town a Holiday for Sex

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“Template for a Proclamation to Save the Species”
by Ramona Ausubel

Perhaps it is the shittiness of the northern Minnesota town that keeps her residents from reproducing. Theirs is not a furious protest, a political movement. It is as if their lives are so boring, so deeply muddy that it hardly even occurs to two people to couple with enough feeling to create anything other than a disappointed sigh.

The small town’s mayor, Tom Anderson, reads a story about a mayor in a small Russian town, also cold and dark and relatively poor, also reproductively slow, who declared September twelfth “Family Contact Day.” The Russian mayor said he had chosen the date because it was exactly nine months before Vladimir Lenin’s birthday and he offered prizes — a station wagon, a refrigerator — for babies born on the same day as the Great Leader.

Tom had not meant to go into politics and hadn’t even wanted to remain an American. He had spent a semester in college in Russia and gotten a taste for fish eggs and first wave communism and had planned to stay and study literature but had to go home to the cold, flat north of his own America to take care of his aged aunt.

Tom thinks about a designated sex day. Everything around him is dreary. The economy droops. Winter is nigh. He takes solace in the fact that the whole city seems to have reached the sloppy bottom place, has sunk to the pond-scummy floor and that anything, it seems, would be an improvement. Tom begins to draft an announcement for the newspaper. He changes the name of the holiday to Love Day. He does not mention anything about communism or Russia — though some politicians seem to admire the brute force of Russia, this is a town where ‘socialism’ is the dirtiest word and Tom does not want to navigate the narrow channel between admiration and fear — so he claims the idea as his own. Everyone will get the day off, and they will stay home, and they will screw. And, the part that makes the mayor squeeze his fists in pride is the prize he will arrange: the first mother to give birth on June twelfth wins an economy car, a tiny white Ford.

The mayor’s decree is published in the newspaper. Online, the comments are mocking. The mayor wonders how it is taken in Russia, what the Great Leader would think. Would he be proud? Or is he watching from death as his birthday is commemorated with a badly made refrigerator bestowed upon a disinterested mother, her unprepared husband and their howling alien of an infant. On one side of the glass, there is a dream of perfect equality, and on the other, life in exchange for a kitchen appliance. There is something Russian about this, the mayor thinks to himself, but he is American and doesn’t know what it is.

Along with declaring the holiday, the mayor has a bench installed in the park, shaped like two hearts, side by side. The seat is curved to encourage couples to slide close together. He names this the Bench of Love. Teenagers immediately notice that from behind, the bench looks like two large butts.

In the newspaper, one Ruby Goebels is quoted: “I’m glad to have the day off. I have a lot of canning to do.” Still, a day off is a day off. No one considers not taking advantage of it. The question is whether the people will allow their city government to dictate their sex-schedule. For many, it is a humiliation, and instead husband and wife plan to sit side by side on the couch with the television blaring, drinking three fingers of whiskey at a time until someone gets hungry and opens a package of hot dogs.

For the teenagers, there is much confusion. It is in their nature not to do as they are told, yet what they have been told to do is so acutely in line with what they want. It is only when some of them point out that no one wants them to have babies, unmarried as they are, that they all rejoice, head to the big park after dark — thrilled to have been returned to that beloved state of disobedience — to find vaguely hidden hollows in which to fuck. Every few decades, the teenagers think, a politician might have a good idea.

Martha and Jeff act as if it is a Sunday — they cook bacon for breakfast and have beer with it. Martha does their laundry, folding her husband’s dozens of similarly striped t-shirts and baggy jeans and laying them in piles on the sofa. Across the street, Fat Henderson is standing naked, in profile, examining himself in the mirror. He looks pregnant. Martha cannot see his crotch, a fact she is grateful for, but she can’t help but think of the sad little display it must be: a deflated prize resting on two swollen, purple pillows. Martha imagines that Fat Henderson is trying to find a way of asking his wife to take up the Mayor’s suggestion, despite the fact that they are beyond the age of conception.

Martha and Jeff have been married since they were both pretty. She still is; the American man has a shorter window. His mother told him each morning in high school — “Your hairline is already beginning to retreat, your eyeballs will bulge like your father’s, your ears will grow and your lips will thin. You had better sign something with that girl of yours before it’s too late.”

Martha believes that her looks have a very specific expiration. She believes that no matter what kind of care she takes of her body, of her face, she will turn into an old lady the moment she has a child. It is like a fairy-tale curse on these mid-western plains. The short mom-hair, the square-shelf of a butt, the mini-van: they are fate, unavoidable, and their emergence will begin as soon as sperm and egg meet.

Whether this sad progression could be thwarted is untested. No generation of women has ever avoided becoming parents. Martha’s mother was a baby machine, congratulated by the church for her eleven children. For eighteen years straight, Martha’s mother had a shitting baby in the house. Martha had arrived in the middle, between Paula and Matthew, the only boy. She had no special role to play, not the oldest nor the youngest, not the idolized boy. Martha was part of an assembly line. She grew up with the feeling that children must simply appear, unbidden. Who would want to make any more of them? It was as if they hatched in some dirty, neglected corner like so many baby cockroaches and the grown-ups had had no choice but to try and raise them.

Martha and Jeff are pressed up against the wall in the living room on Love Day. They do not draw the shades. Martha can see a ghost of their reflection in the glass panes of a china cabinet she inherited from her grandmother. She admires her husband’s butt and her own lithe arms around his back. In the middle, Martha thinks to herself — There it goes. She can almost feel her calves fatten, her feet flatten and her hair turn grey. It is the exact ending of youth. Yet somehow, she is not completely sorry to see it go. She has been pretty a long time, and she is curious what the world looks like for someone who is invisible to men. What will it be like to walk down the street without getting the looks from every truck driver, every guy standing outside in the bitter cold, his own stale breath billowing out as dark and dirty as smoke.

From her position, she has a view of the whole room. Like a hologram, she sees the way it will change. The wicker basinet will take up that corner, there will be toys all over the floor, a pile of laundry. She sees herself, and it makes her tired. When the baby comes, Martha knows, it will make her wonder whether anything else has ever been true. You thought all that mattered? the world will say. That old life was a set, just a painted background.

For the next nine months, a small Ford will sit in front of the Mayor’s office adorned with a big red bow, which fades in the meager sunlit. He will look out at every few hours and allow the warmth to fill his chest.

In February, at the supermarket, Martha runs into Nathalie, a math tutor and the wife of the high school wrestling coach who really wants to win the car. “It’s the only reason good enough to ruin this body,” Nathalie says, running her hands up and down her hips and waist like they are for sale. Nathalie asks if Martha’s disinterest in the competition is a carefully crafted strategy, some kind of conniving.

In a unique fertility ritual, the wrestling coach hangs up magazine ads of small American cars around the bed. He is already picking out accessories for the new car. He has decided that he will have a car-shower on the day his wife has a baby-shower so that each pink or blue bib will be met with an after-market alarm system, an expensive looking stereo, a mountain-lemon scent air freshener in the shape a sexy mermaid and a set of perfectly unnecessary mud flaps, considering that the car will barely have enough clearance for a mall speed bump.

He does not say it out loud, but Tom has complicated feelings about being in power. There is shame, of course, in the fact that he had won his election with no opponent. All the other men in town must have figured out that they could make much more money — and suffer much less scrutiny — by working in office buildings and construction sites rather than serving the public. The mayor’s constituents assumed he was in it for the same reasons politicians here always had been — a little money skimmed off the top to buy veal, blondes. No one begrudged him because no one believed anything really would, perhaps even could, be changed. What man could convince the sun to stay up past 2:00 pm in winter? They were born in this place, on these high plains, and it put short borders around the territory of hope. Yet, Tom believes in something better. A little better, anyway.

In spring, the Mayor likes to drive around spotting bellies. It is frustrating to be a single man in a moment such as this. Tom cannot participate in his own game. But still, he feels personally responsible for each of those fetuses, as if he is their godfather. If not for him, the world would have less life in it, less actual life. He is always a little surprised when the women do not come up to him and offer their thanks.

But the mayor had not thought of how long the middle would feel. He had only considered the beginning and the end. Like two cans with a string tied between them, conception and birth connected in a way that is both miraculous and plain. For the mayor, who has no everyday miracle taking place in his own house, who eats leftover pizza for breakfast and runs on the treadmill in his basement and wades through the City Council meeting and has lunch with the football coach, the wait is frustrating and overlong. He worries that by the time he gets to the end, the story will not be his anymore, that when he proudly stands up and announces the dozens of lives born of his imagination, everyone will be at home, coddling babies they consider, wrongly, Tom thinks, their own.

For Martha too, the middle is a very long space of time. In it, she tracks the disappointments. At first, she does this in order to make counter-arguments, to explain to her baby that yes, it is dark almost all day long in winter, but in summer, you don’t have to sleep at all, I will never force you to go to bed. Instead, we will all three climb up the roof and lie on our backs in bathing suits, tanning at nine at night.

In the windows: women change shape and men change shape too and then feel angry with themselves for it. It’s the fat of sympathy building up, the men think. Devotion. Really, it is boredom and bad weather and probably would have happened anyway. Across the street from Martha and Jeff’s, Fat Henderson again stands in profile, naked, observing his inglorious façade.

Tom sits out on the two-hearted bench alone, sliding into the middle with no one to drift closer to. In the square appears a nurse he hired to talk to what he imagined would be a throng of expectant parents. She is carrying a paperback novel under arm and breathing on her hands to warm them.

The mayor goes over. “Hello, Ms. Walker,” he says. “Thank you for coming.” He motions to a podium he has dragged out from his office along with a series of connected extension cords and a microphone.

“I have the right day?” she asks. “I thought you said you had advertised.”

“I’m sorry. Would you like to give the talk anyway?”

“No one is here.

The nurse walks up the microphone. On the small black amplifier beside her, she switches a switch and taps the microphone to test it. Her eyes flicker over to the mayor every few seconds, asking a very obvious question.

“So,” the nurse says. She waits for someone to relieve her. “It’s not very good to drink when you are pregnant.” The mayor smiles warmly, nods.

“Husbands who smoke should do so outside.” The nurse’s voice booms out like some god of boring advice. And truly, no one passes. Not girls with rounded bellies, not young men, not old women, not children. It is as if the streets have been cleared in preparation for a terrible storm, a bomb threat, an asteroid headed straight this way. No matter how tightly tucked the nurse’s brow, Tom just smiles at her. Tell the world what you know, his eyes say.

“It’s getting dark now,” the nurse says. “I think I’ll pack up and go home.” It starts to snow. The low sun makes everything seem suddenly brighter for a moment before it shuts the light out altogether. The mayor feels that they are in a very old place, dust gathering around them, hundreds of years passing while the nurse folds her notes back into her book and brushes the flakes off her fake fur collar.

“Thank you,” he says. “It was helpful.” He means it. She realizes this, and it makes her just sad enough to hold his hand a little longer than she would have otherwise.

In the week before June twelfth, four babies arrive in all their pudgy, yowling glory. The mayor makes a special point of showing up to meet them all, have their pictures taken, commemorate the moment despite its lack of prize-winning-ness.

On June eleventh, Martha feels the first contractions and goes to the hospital after several hours of pacing, rocking, getting in and out of the shower, the bath. In the maternity ward, the miracle of life is an every day occurrence, a job to be completed and cleaned up from. One of the nurses brought in muffins. Someone is watching a talk show in another room, loud. The pain never lets up completely, just changes intensity. Sometimes Martha is not sure she can breathe. The nurses look at her, bored by her anguish.

At 11:00 pm on the night before the winning day, the wrestling coach and Nathalie arrive, he pulling her by the elbow. She has felt no contractions, not even a twinge, but he thinks maybe a change of scenery will help get things started.

“See, baby?” he says to her belly, “you are in the hospital now. Time to come out. You only have twenty four hours.”

The nurses refuse to give them a room so Nathalie sits in a plastic chair and drinks soda while the wrestling coach hovers outside Martha’s room with his watch in his hand, observing the minutes tick. “Come on, come on, come on,” he says to the minute hand, coaxing it to slow down. If he has a chance of winning the car he needs this other baby to be born in the next fifty-two minutes, on June 11th. The mayor joins him, his own watch in his hand, “Come on, come on, come on,” he prays to his watch, begging it to slow down. God, should he be following this small drama, is going to have to choose a side. 11:15 turns to 11:35. Martha is pushing. She is crying. 11:47 and the baby crowns. 11:58pm, and he is born. The baby, two minutes shy of a prize-winner, cries. Martha does not even check the clock, cannot consider the time. Her husband allows himself one small glance, but his heart only sinks so far before the tossing fists of his son buoy it. The wrestling coach does a robot dance down the hall to celebrate.

Nathalie does not go into labor. No one goes into labor. For the first time in the hospital staff’s memory, the ward is silent. The mayor walks the halls, saying, “You never know. Any minute.” The wrestling coach knocks on his wife’s belly like it is a door behind which someone has overslept his alarm. The nurses drink coffee and read gossip magazines. The muffins dwindle. “You should have more contests,” they say. “In a town as unlucky as this one, it will guarantee us the day off.” And indeed, it does. On June twelfth, no babies are born. There isn’t even another close call, a team to cheer for. Tom wonders how they’re doing in Russia. He imagines a shiny new Lada Neva sitting outside the hospital awaiting its new owners.

Seeing that her husband will not allow her to go home, the nurses finally let Nathalie into a room, only so she can fall asleep.

Martha looks at her baby who knows nothing yet of the world waiting: corruption, bribery, teenage drivers, being flat-footed, having too little money and too much beer, doing the dishes, going out for dinner and being disappointed in the overboiled spaghetti sauce, getting up for work before light, coming home after sunset, the roses wilting on the table, the list of jobs that need doing around the house: cleaning the tiny screen on the faucet, breaking down the boxes your aunt sent and writing a thank you note for terrible smelling bubble bath that was inside, scrubbing the frozen-on pink sticky in the refrigerator. This is life. Barring environmental or political catastrophe, Martha expects the world her child lives in to look much like this one. It can be difficult to see the miracle in it. To her bundle, she offers an out-clause: you were born, innocent and beautiful and straight from the lips of God, but if you look around and see the pot-holes streets, the mud puddles, the old nurses in too much makeup, and you decide you want to be an angel instead, I will understand. I will wrap you in a soft blanket, cover you completely up, and allow you to make your decision in private. If I open the blanket and you are gone, evaporated, I will forgive you for it. But if you are still there, pink and fussing, I will know that you have chosen to stay, to endure the old world. And I will try to teach you the tricks to make it easier. How to get on the bus without buying a ticket; how to pay for one movie and see three; how to fight with your father so that you always win; how to insure maximum darkening of the skin in the sun; how to find your life’s horizon — that place just far enough in the distance to keep you moving forward but not so far as to be discouraging. “For my part,” Martha says aloud, “I will give you food when you are hungry and warmth when you are cold. Let’s start with that promise. I’ll swear to it, my love, I will cross my tired heart.” She folds the blanket loosely over her infant until she can’t see him anymore.

Outside, the Ford’s red bow is slumped and bleached. The car is a minor celebration in front of an old blocky hospital. None of this went as planned, yet somehow Tom feels fulfilled. He was part of something, if only on the periphery. In the morning, he will give the car to Martha for being the closest, and Martha will sell it to the wrestling coach for a good price and put the money away. It will be enough to buy plane tickets to someplace warm every winter until the baby is grown. She does not need a car — for transportation, Martha has feet and the bus.

Light, heat, now those are worth paying for.

8 Books About Witches and Spirits That Will Bring Magic to Your Life

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On full moons, I used to gather with a group of women at a candle-lit table while we drank red wine and passed around bundles of sage. We had no idea what we were doing, but it felt cool to be coven-like. We’d all watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and got Tarot cards as gifts once, and wanted community that wasn’t another networking opportunity. Turns out we weren’t very original. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans have been getting less religious but more spiritual, and the witchy and supernatural are experiencing a surge into trendy territory.

But while Buffy-inspired covens may be a trend, witchcraft, sorcery, spiritualism, and all things magical have been alive and well in literature for a long time. Under the giant umbrella of magic we find spirits haunted by the trauma of ancestral stigmas or unnamed violence; an otherwise silenced group of people wielding new forms of agency and power; and alternate retellings of some real-world societal pressures. Here, we’ve collected 8 novels with witches, mediums, spirits, and other forces of magical might that continue to help us realize what we are cursed or enchanted by, and help us reimagine what might be possible instead.

Labyrinth Lost by Zoraida Córdova

Alexa Mortiz is the most powerful bruja of her generation and she’s only about to get more powerful. On her approaching Deathday, she’ll receive the cumulative power of her bruja ancestors before her. And she’s dreading it. She hates magic. In the past, the “power” has accumulated into a lot of pain — there was her godmother’s death, and her father’s disappearance after Alexa performed magic so horrific it chased him away. When she decides to cast one last spell that will strip her of her powers, she sends her entire family into the underworld of Los Angeles, Los Lagos. As Ana Grilo writes in her Kirkus Review for the book: “Mixing ideas from Ecuadorian, Spanish, African, Mexican, and Caribbean backgrounds, Labyrinth Lost is a story of dichotomy and identity: between here and there, between childhood and growing up, bruja and non-bruja, between independence and the pull of family.” And now, there are whispers of it becoming a movie, too.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz

When witchcraft and colonialism collide, you get fukú. According to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: “They say it first came from Africa, carried in the screams of the enslaved; that it was the death bane of the Tainos, uttered just as one world perished and another began; that it was a demon drawn into Creation through the nightmare door that was cracked open in the Antilles. Fukú americanus, or more colloquially, fukú — generally a curse or a doom of some kind; specifically the Curse and the Doom of the New World.” Whether it’s a demon, a curse, or something else, the science-fiction aficionado, wordsmith, and virgin Oscar is intimately aware of fukú. Is the fukú to blame for his virginity or is Oscar just not Dominican-man enough? When Oscar finally finds love with a woman in the DR who is attached to some violent political figures, everyone pleads with him to let her go. The curse is a slithering thing that wriggles into and out of focus, but haunts Oscar and the others all along.

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

Brave Orchid, Maxine Hong Kingston’s mother, was a doctor in China before coming to America. In the first section of The Woman Warrior, “White Tigers,” we learn about Brave Orchid’s battle with ghosts, with the smells and sounds of death, and the non-Western forms of medicine she practiced before moving to America. Maxine Hong Kingston asks what parts of her are American and Chinese, which parts are her own, and which parts are inherited from her mother and the women before her? Ultimately, which parts are made up, and which parts are real? Kingston collects the assemblage of identities and names them memoir. Transgressing the lines between myth-making, magic, and reality, story becomes the capacious category Kingston uses to generate both a sense of herself, her mother, and others.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Morrison’s novel is inspired by the story of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery and murdered one of her children and tried to kill the others in order to protect them from re-enslavement. As Morrison describes in the foreword: “To invite readers (and myself) into the repellant landscape (hidden, but not completely; deliberately buried, but not forgotten) was to pitch a tent in a cemetery inhabited by highly vocal ghosts.” In addition to the ghost of Garner, the novel is haunted more directly by the ghost of Beloved, killed by her mother Sethe. Beloved has now shown up on the steps of the house she lived in as an infant—only now she is a grown woman. She roosts in the house and expands as her mother Sethe, desperate to give her everything, withers and thins. In the end Beloved must be exorcised by Baby Suggs, the matriarch and healer for Sethe and the rest of the ex-slaves living in their Ohio town.

The Famished Road by Ben Okri

Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child, living in an unnamed Nigerian city. He narrates his experience straddling the spiritual and material world, as his spirit brothers and sisters try to pull him back into the world of the spirits, and Azaro tries to stay in the material world. Azaro loves his mother, who loves him and protects him, and his father, who is frustrated by having an abiku for a son, but becomes a boxer and later a politician to protect Azaro and the rest of his family. Then there’s Madame Koto, the whispered witch of the town who takes a liking to Azaro and his family, though her motives get murkier as the novel moves. The Famished Road won the Man Booker Prize for fiction in 1991. There’s myth, fantasy, legend, and just straight up piles of beautiful sentences in Okri’s novel.

When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore

This one’s a middle-grade novel, but the story is irresistible. Miel is a queer Latina girl whose wrists bloom into roses, and rumor has it she was born from the spills of a water tower. Sam is a transgender Italian-Pakistani boy who paints moons and hangs them in the trees, and no one knows where he and his mother came from. Sam and Miel have each other, and know enough to stay away from the four Bonner sisters, the four witches in town, who want to harvest the roses growing from Miel’s wrists to make an infallible love potion, and will bewitch, ensnare and bedevil the secrets out of Miel and expose them to the world in order to get what they want.

Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman

Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman introduced me (and many of us) to the syrupy-sweet Practical Magic when they starred in a 1998 film based on the book by Alice Hoffman. Gillian and Sally Owens live in a small Massachusetts town with their beloved aunts. They’ve inherited their status as outcasts from two hundred years of Owens women who have been blamed for everything that’s gone wrong in the town. Though Gillian and Sally will both devise their own escapes from the black cats and love potions of their childhood, it’s their magical roots that will bring them back together.

Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward

Sing, Unburied Sing opens with Jojo, a thirteen-year-old boy, trying to prove he is a man by killing a goat with his grandfather, Pop. When his father, Michael went to prison and his mother, Leonie, fell apart, Jojo got used to becoming a man too soon: he takes care of his baby sister Kayla, helps Pop on the farm, and sits quietly by his dying grandmother. Leonie loves the children’s father, Michael, in a way she cannot translate for her children, even though his white family will not acknowledge her or her children because they are black. Leonie, meanwhile, is also struggling with drug addiction and trying to ignore her own mother’s questions about whether or not she has “the sight”—and every time she gets high, her brother, who died in a violent accident as a teenager, keeps showing up by her side. When Leonie, Jojo, and Kayla go on a road trip to pick up Michael after he’s released from prison, it turns out Leonie isn’t the only one with “the sight.” Sing, Unburied Sing delivers more of Jesmyn Ward’s prolific lyricism, so get ready to be haunted by the story and enchanted by the prose all at once.

An Autobiography in Anime

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W e came to them early. The foremost of these passions, for most everybody but especially the girls, was Sailor Moon — the English-dubbed version that came on at 2:30 in the afternoon right after Bananas in Pajamas, always too early for those of us who commuted to schools outside of the South Bay and only got home around four or five, after free daycare, after aunt’s houses, after being snuck into the hospital canteens until our moms’ shifts ended on the days when every relative who might have a few hours to spare for childcare alongside a beer and television, didn’t have a few hours: not for the child, the beer, the television.

At home my family didn’t have a working VCR; our old one had a tape stuck in it that no one had bothered to dig out a second time after the first attempt with a screwdriver nearly ended up electrocuting my cousin to death, the one ten years older who used to employ long tickling sessions at his mother’s house as an excuse to feel me up, but we eventually bought one towards the end of Sailor Moon’s first season. My great success of that year was successfully timing the VCR to record the season finale, the one where Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask reveal their secret identities to each other at last. This is who I really am. Me, too. I didn’t know. Me, neither. It was an early lesson on what mutual revelation and mutual witnessing might have to do with love. I watched the episode again and again and again, then recorded it onto another videotape at a friend’s house, just in case the first copy broke. It did.

I watched the episode again and again and again, then recorded it onto another videotape at a friend’s house, just in case the first copy broke. It did.

Once hooked on the English dub, we wanted more. There was a biracial girl in our sixth grade class, Yumi, who almost passed for white. She owned videotapes of most of the original Japanese episodes, unsubtitled, nearly all of which were unaired in America, and which she rented out to the rest of us — rented, not loaned. That was how she told us we weren’t really her friends. I could swallow enough pride to rent one videotape, just one time, and so that year I watched, without understanding a single word, three filler episodes from the Sailor Moon Stars arc, more than a hundred or so episodes further along in the series than what had been broadcasted in California on UPN, a network that no longer exists, having been turned into the CW. The Sailor Moon run in America ended after two seasons due to poor ratings, a fact that to me beggared belief, since back then it seemed like everyone I knew was watching, everyone in the whole wild world. But it turned out we were the only ones.

We didn’t watch those exotic shows, like Beverly Hills 90210 or Baywatch, the shows about Californians who might as well have been Martians, for all they were familiar to Californians like us — children of Filipino, Mexican, and Vietnamese security guards, nurses, cleaners, cooks. Crystal Tokyo felt both liberating and knowable, more than any show about California where no one ever eats Filipino barbecue in a strip mall, where no one’s parent works sixteen hours a day at the hospital bedsides of Korean War and Vietnam War veterans, except when they were having PTSD episodes and all the Asian nurses were ordered to avoid them.

Crystal Tokyo felt both liberating and knowable, more than any show about California where no one ever eats Filipino barbecue in a strip mall, where no one’s parent works sixteen hours a day.

In our seventh grade class there was even a white girl — rare — of the kind that read fantasy novels alone at lunch time, who upon finding out that we watched Sailor Moon, successfully befriended us by saying she had an extensive collection of tapes and books at home that she’d happily loan to us. Loan, not rent. Through her eager, faintly clammy friendship came Fushigi Yuugi: the full series, some of the manga, even some of the OVAs (Original Video Animation, made for DVD release rather than TV). The story was corny, but we loved it: girlfriends who found an old book that turned out to be a time-travel portal. Entered it easy, like passing through a door, or a rite. Found themselves in another world. Made friends, lost friends, fell in love, got molested, staved off the end of the world. High realism, for where I was at twelve.

My Life as a Berenstain Bear

It wasn’t always just the girls. In high school, they showed Neon Genesis Evangelion late at night on PBS, and one of my best guy friends and I watched the episodes while on the phone with each other; sometimes commenting, sometimes sheltering each other in the kind of bonded silence that was easier to bear back when you could still twist up the telephone cord in your hands. We held each other on the line. We must have been fifteen; both Pinoy, both moreno, both with nurses for mothers, both with skin stretched gossamer in places from years of abusing corticosteroids to treat lifelong eczema. We went to our junior prom together, him in a rented tuxedo, me in a gold sequined dress with a slit that went up to my thigh.

My favorite character in Eva was Misato. Katsuragi Misato: 29, rarely without a beer, wears a grin so calcified it’s actually become real. A great shot with the Heckler and Koch USP sidearm, eschewing the Glock 17 of her fellow Nerv personnel; taking life lightly, her shutters closed up tight. I still remember loving the small detail that Misato and her college boyfriend Kaji once locked themselves up in a room and had sex for days, stopping only for beer and food. Two-dimensional aspirations, a dream of desire. It sounded like heaven, only bearable.

I still remember loving the small detail that Misato and her college boyfriend Kaji once locked themselves up in a room and had sex for days, stopping only for beer and food.

Director and creator Hideaki Anno described Misato as a loser girl-woman, an adult Tsukino Usagi — which is to say, an adult version of the main protagonist of Sailor Moon. Katsuragi Misato is what happens when the magical girl, the beautiful soldier and messiah (all epithets by which Sailor Moon was often described throughout her eponymous show) becomes an adult. Has to navigate problems that aren’t about saving the world, but surviving in it: day to day, meal to meal, missed connection to made connection. In fact, in the Japanese versions of Evangelion and Sailor Moon, Katsuragi Misato and Sailor Moon are played by the same voice actress, Mitsuishi Kotono. But PBS showed the English dub, so we couldn’t have known.

It was weird, admittedly, that Sailor Moon was blonde. At the time, we didn’t know anything about the postwar aesthetics of anime in Japan, or about the country’s own reckonings with war, whiteness and America. Consciously or not, we had been seeking out universes that might be populated by people like us, and Japanese anime seemed as good a place to land as any, so we took the yellow and orange-haired protagonists the way a realist takes on life, bad with the good. Though over the years we learned, as young Filipinx morenos in the Bay, that people like us was both far more and far less mutable than we imagined: we’d all been told that Filipinos weren’t “real” Asians, always from the mouths of the more middle-class, light-skinned East Asian kids in school, who as I remember were some of the first people I ever heard refer to Filipinos by the n-word.

We had been seeking out universes that might be populated by people like us, and Japanese anime seemed as good a place to land as any.

And certainly there was some controversy, at least in my family, over the fact that anime was a Japanese art form in the first place. My grandfather had worked in Guam for the U.S. Army during the Second World War, and my grandparent-age uncle had been shot and bayoneted by Japanese soldiers during the Bataan Death March, surviving only by jumping into the Pampanga River, falling unconscious, and waking up in the home of the woman who had retrieved his body from the river, and who would later become his first wife. My grandmother still told stories about how she and every girl she knew had to smear their own faces with dirt and charcoal, wear rags, all in the brittle hope that Japanese soldiers wouldn’t steal them from their homes and sentence them to a life of imprisonment and rape. Asian America was a universe, as many-starred and many-scarred as the universes in Sailor Moon: there were no knot-free pleasures. Twists, compromises, flexing an image like a funhouse mirror so the reflection almost, almost takes your shape: that was how we had to watch things, sifting the pixels for gold. But if you give kids next to nothing, they’ll still make a world out of it. That’s something any magical girl anime worth its salt will teach you.

Even now, long after all the playground theater has ended, one of my favorite characters of all time is still Sailor Saturn. She doesn’t even show up in the English dub of Sailor Moon; I had to discover her in high school, after my friend and I ordered videotapes of fan-made English subs off the Internet, from some late 90s/early 2000s Angelfire website with a tinny MIDI file of the Sailor Moon theme song that would start playing when you loaded the home page. Sailor Saturn’s the one with the sickly constitution and the physician father who goes off the deep end, the one called the Soldier of Death and Rebirth, the one called the Soldier of Silence and Ruin, the one called the Goddess of Destruction — all of which sounded just melodramatic enough for my tastes at the time. Sailor Saturn looked like me in all my kid photos: thick black bangs, fighting, hoping that pretending to be strong might actually count as strength.

At the climax of one season, Sailor Saturn’s the one who makes the turning-point decision to jump right into the heart of pure groaning evil to do what Sailor Moon herself — yellow hair, blue eyes, pretty as a main character, believes in happy ending — can’t do. Accept death, including her own. Go into the ugly groaning of the world and not come back from it.

But the show isn’t called Sailor Saturn: a girl like her is always the sidekick, not the protagonist. That was one early lesson. Predictably enough, Sailor Moon does end up going after her — and saves them all in the end, including Sailor Saturn, soldier of death and rebirth, soldier of silence, soldier of ruin, goddess of destruction, sickly dumbass set on suicide via demonic abyss. Sailor Moon isn’t a show about anyone jumping into the heart of pure evil and losing. You’d have to learn about that later.

But the show isn’t called Sailor Saturn: a girl like her is always the sidekick, not the protagonist.

Still, when Sailor Moon comes back from her rescue mission, her eyes are vacant, her face slack with shock. The background music plays Sailor Moon’s beloved theme song, but a new, unfamiliar rendering of it, with a forlorn, music-box timbre; the sound of an adult woman facing the apocalyptic debris of childhood. In Sailor Moon’s rictus-stiffened arms is the successfully retrieved Sailor Saturn, now transformed into a baby, swaddled in cloth. Survival-new. Second chance-new. They’ve both seen some shit — but they came back. Here were the episode’s lessons, magical as true love; as being saved by a friend who won’t let you down; as girls who survive. Not all wrecked things are wrecked forever. You could return from the ugly. You could live.

Why Sherman Alexie’s Sexual Misconduct Feels Like a Betrayal

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I would have believed just one allegation about Sherman Alexie’s sexual misconduct, but the School Library Journal comment section that started it all had six of them (some of which he has non-specifically admitted in his strange apology). NPR reported that ten women approached the news outlet as victims of his harassment, three of whom risked their careers to go on record about these allegations.

My outrage at Alexie’s actions hits me harder than the news of other celebrities who had been accused of similar behavior. It wasn’t just that his writing was beautiful to me. The #MeToo and Time’s Up Movements have proven that magnificent things can be created by terrible men; I’ve already reckoned, many times, with finding out that someone whose work I admire is an abuser in his spare time. But Alexie’s misconduct felt like a personal betrayal because his work has been so personally significant. His work was formative in my ability to recognize and object to racial injustice.

Alexie’s misconduct felt like a personal betrayal because his work has been so personally significant. His work was formative in my ability to recognize and object to racial injustice.

I didn’t read Sherman Alexie’s young adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian until my early twenties. It was assigned for my undergraduate writing seminar at the University of Pittsburgh, and it recontextualized my relationship with a toxic friend in high school. Junior, Part-Time Indian’s Spokane protagonist, has the plucky, curious voice of an irreverent teenager, one that sounded exactly like mine at that age.

Junior loves when his dad sings country songs and jokes about masturbation with his friend. He makes fun of his sister’s taste in romance novels and listens to his girlfriend list the places she’ll travel to once she leaves her small town. After a classroom outburst results in Junior’s suspension, he deals with the same apocalyptic thoughts that plague every teen’s mind when they’re faced with impossible situations: “My hopes and dreams floated up in a mushroom cloud. What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you?”

Junior was the first protagonist of color I read in a young adult book who sounded the way I wanted to write, and nothing like how my white high school friend Dara wanted to think of me.

Dara had always been confused by my inability to fit her Asian stereotypes. Over a conversation about my dad’s love of football, Dara stated matter-of-factly that watching football was “not an Asian thing.” When I started dating a white boy, she complained constantly about the loneliness I put her through and referred to the “difficulty” of being in an interracial relationship. She became obsessed with Korean pop music and gushed nonstop about songs I couldn’t sing because I am Filipina-American. To her, I wasn’t the “right” kind of Asian. The last straw came after I received minor accolades for my writing. Dara rallied friends to comfort her, wishing for my future failure. I was supposed to be a sidekick, after all, and she had only ever seen herself as the hero.

Part-Time Indian made me reflect on my time in mostly white writing workshops, writing stories about white characters so I would be taken seriously by white writers.

What I found most compelling about Part-Time Indian is how deceptively simple its premise is. Junior starts high school as an underdog in every way. He’s a poor, disabled new kid at school who’s been bullied all his life. By the end of the novel, Junior has new friends and a beautiful girlfriend, leads his basketball team to the playoffs, and earns the respect of both the communities of (white) Reardan and (Native) Wellpinit. It’s the quintessential All-American coming-of-age story with a Native teenager taking the spotlight in a usually white hero narrative.

Part-Time Indian demonstrated the power of diverse protagonists and made me reflect on my time in mostly white writing workshops, writing stories about white characters so I would be taken seriously by white writers. It was responsible for the first time I shot a death-glare at the white boy in my seminar who repeated ad nauseum how the novel was “only unique because the hero isn’t white,” and the first time I rolled my eyes openly at the white girl who agreed with him while working on her ancient Egyptian mythology adventure novel and didn’t think she needed feedback from anyone of Egyptian descent. Reading and digesting Alexie’s book was also the first time I saw Dara as a mediocre white woman who saw her friend of color as a threat, and the first time I realized that I didn’t need any of these people’s approval to write myself onto the page.

Part-Time Indian allowed me to notice and disavow injustice in my life — and this experience isn’t unique to me. Alexie’s works have long been praised for upending racist assumptions in the literary world, and Alexie has spent his career championing unheard voices across all marginalized communities. Unfortunately, he has disappointed us repeatedly in this powerful role, even before these latest accusations. When Alexie issued a vague, unsatisfying apology in late February regarding the sexual harassment allegations, I found myself screaming at his face on my computer screen: “This isn’t the first time we’ve seen you apologize!”

The last time Alexie apologized publicly was in August 2017, when he announced that he would be cancelling the rest of his book tour for his memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, citing the depression caused by reliving his mother’s passing in each city he toured. But for me, as an Asian-American woman writer, the most significant apology before the latest accusations came when Alexie was the guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2015. One of the 75 poets he chose for the anthology was revealed to be a white man using the pseudonym Yi-Fen Chou, wearing literary yellowface to take the spot of actual Asian-American poets in order to get published.

In a post on the Best American Poetry blog, Alexie apologized profusely for the pain he caused when his strategy to introduce more underrepresented voices to a large audience backfired. In his apology, Alexie laid out his approach to choosing the anthology selections, breaking down how many other voices he was able to include: “Approximately 60% of the poets are female. Approximately 40% of the poets are people of color. Approximately 20% of the poems employ strong to moderate formal elements. Approximately 15% of the poems were first published on the Internet” and so on.

It was this apology, its tone both defensive of his methods and sincerely appalled at the outcome, that convinced me that Alexie’s determination to bring attention to more marginalized voices was coming from a genuine, empathetic place. At the time, I was an intern for the National Book Foundation, and Alexie was a judge in the Poetry category for the National Book Awards. He helped give an Award to Robin Coste Lewis, a black woman poet whose collection was the first poetry debut to win since 1974.

It’s difficult to dismiss someone who, at least in the public eye, put in the work to create and bring more diverse voices into that world, and yet it’s necessary to recognize we’ve been placing too much significance on him.

I wanted to believe that this win absolved him somewhat, that he knew to take his mistakes to heart and could still use his authority in the literary world to put traditionally unheard voices in front of his own. I hadn’t thought that perhaps it was his authority that exacerbated the Best American Poetry scandal, nor that his authority was an inherent problem that stemmed from the white, patriarchal system that upheld him as the standard against whom other Native writers were measured.

What infuriates and upsets me about these recent allegations is the utter hypocrisy with which Alexie wielded his incredible power and influence within the literary world to prey on young, emerging women writers, some of whom were Native writers. It’s been very difficult for me to dismiss someone who, at least in the public eye, put in the work to create and bring more diverse voices into that world, and yet it’s necessary to recognize we’ve been placing too much significance on him.

Others are having difficulty dismissing Alexie as well. As of this essay, Alexie has evaded the punishments undergone by other authors who have been accused of sexual harassment. Unlike Jay Asher and James Dashner, Alexie has not lost his agent or his publisher. Publishers Weekly interviewed a number of independent bookstores to ask whether they would continue to stock his books, considering that Alexie himself launched the Indies First campaign to support such bookstores. There was no strong consensus among the bookstores interviewed about what to do in the wake of these allegations. The harshest consequences that Alexie has faced have been self-inflicted: he has declined the ALA 2018 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction and has requested that his publisher postpone the paperback release of You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me.

The essence of my struggle, and surely many others’, is in navigating the complexity of Alexie’s immense power and how we enabled him to exercise that power. We stand to lose much more in a conversation that focuses only on Alexie’s disavowal from the literary community and not how we, that literary community, allowed him to consolidate power in a way that hurt Native women writers.

The pain of these allegations, while repugnant and unforgivable no matter how powerful and talented Alexie is, wouldn’t have been so acute had we given more room to other Native writers.

We’ve let this apology cycle play out before, and we’ll see it happen again unless we learn how to stop concentrating power among just a handful of writers from marginalized backgrounds. Had it not been for our willing, enthusiastic praise of Alexie’s efforts in fighting racist norms, this labor could have been distributed among many other systemically silenced voices, and we would all have been better for it. The pain of these allegations, while repugnant and unforgivable no matter how powerful and talented Alexie is, wouldn’t have been so acute had we given more room to other Native writers.

This is part of the ugliness of living under a white patriarchal system as a person of color: when we’ve been taught to listen to white authority all our lives, it’s often difficult to hear other people of color from communities that aren’t yours. Alexie understood this dynamic well, but he betrayed our trust and hurt a community whose voices we need. However sincere he was about creating a more diverse literary landscape through these conversations between different communities of color, this work can and must continue without him.

In the midst of this scandal, I’ve found myself returning to the time when I first read Part-Time Indian and felt recognized. My nostalgia is burdened with the fact of Alexie’s harassment, but more than that, I wonder why it took until adulthood for me, a person of color, to feel connected to a young character of color. The lessons in Part-Time Indian were ones I didn’t have access to until I had already been inundated with experiences that taught me I wasn’t important enough to read about. In perpetuating Alexie’s legacy, even in infamy, by failing to question the way he rose to power, I let his victims and the communities he hurt feel the same way I did before reading his book: ignored and insignificant.

I wonder why it took until adulthood for me, a person of color, to feel connected to a young character of color.

Rather than waiting for apologies from my heroes, I need to reexamine whose voices I myself have felt were worth reading and who I’ve left out. I don’t plan on reading Alexie’s work anymore, nor recommending it to friends. Part of my reasoning is because of these allegations, and part is simply because I should’ve been reading more widely all along. Instead of viewing this as a loss to myself, I see this as an opportunity to look down the path that Alexie should have provided to other Native writers who create outside the comfort zone of the white establishment — writers whose stories are far riskier, far bolder, far more reflective of that community’s myriad narratives.

Why Are So Many Gay Romance Novels Written By Straight Women?

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Seeing yourself, whether it’s on the screen or on the page, is a powerful experience. So often, though, for queer people, the options are either super whitewashed or rooted in hurtful stereotypes. In gay romance novels, it’s both, and straight women writers are responsible.

When I started working as a book reviewer in 2009, gay romance was exploding as a popular romance genre. (Technically what I’m talking about is called “male/male romance”; “gay romance” is written by gay men for gay men, may not focus on a romantic relationship, and doesn’t guarantee a happily-ever-after. But outside the industry, these distinctions are elided, and most people think of all male-male romance novels as “gay.”) I was excited to see more indie presses focusing on LGBTQ stories and choosing romances that were complex, interesting, and dealt with issues like domestic violence or adoption. As a queer, trans reader, I looked forward to seeing myself in their pages. But I was surprised to find that some LGBTQ-focused stories were reflecting not me, but a straight person’s imagination of me.

I was surprised to find that some LGBTQ-focused stories were reflecting not me, but a straight person’s imagination of me.

The vast majority of gay romances are written by women. White women. Straight, white women. Straight, white women who, in their “about the author” sections, talked about their husbands, children, cats, chickens, and love of artisanal cured meats. The first time I noticed this, I flipped the book over in my hands, back and forth, looking at the ultra-gay cover art, and then the author’s photo on the back. I couldn’t reconcile the two. I may not be a gay man, but I know appropriation when I see it.

How could straight women feel that they have the authority to write gay romance? Because they’ve been told so by a culture that has long treated gay men as a neutered, fetishized object of curiosity. The trope of the tame gay man is a favorite in straight culture. Everywhere, the media gives us the gay-best-friend dynamic: straight women treating cis gay men like pets. “It’s just us girls,” they croon to each other, holding hands at the nail salon. A gay best friend is shown as the perfect accessory for any hip straight woman. He’s expected to be her personal shopper, fashion advisor, shoulder to cry on, sex therapist. His identity is not defined by him, but by how well he props up her ego.

In this dynamic, which I see enacted in gay romance novels, the truth of the man’s queerness is erased, because the character is gay only in the ways the straight woman author can imagine. She censors his sexuality by filtering it through a heterosexual lens. The author handles her gay characters like dolls, using them to act out her desires. She shoves the rubber faces together and smudges them against one another: Now kiss. The characters, who are labeled as gay, are only fantasies — -straight women’s fantasies, shared with an audience of straight women. The first time I read a novel like this, from its sex scenes to its deep, emotional dialog, all I could think was, Is this what we are to you?

The we is queer people: those of us who traditionally occupy the supporting roles in straight stories. When a straight woman decides to “redeem” the gay narrative by making her main characters mainstream-hot, cisgendered, able-bodied guys, and “gives them” a happy ending, she is not making progress. She’s not even being subversive. She’s merely repeating the age-old trope of straight people controlling queer bodies, and she’s doing it to make money and titillate the audience of straight women who buy her books. That’s right: gay men, the stars of these romances, aren’t the intended audience. Straight women are. So where does that leave gay men? Again, supporting straight women’s desires.

Gay men, the stars of these romances, aren’t the intended audience. Straight women are. So where does that leave gay men?

Now, far be it from me to pass judgment on someone else’s masturbation fantasies. God knows I’ve done plenty of politically incorrect things, in and out of the bedroom. My criticism of straight women co-opting gay bodies for their own pleasure is based on the belief that no person can ethically use other people, especially marginalized people, to benefit themselves. Claiming that gay romance written by straight women is somehow “LGBTQ representation,” only makes things worse. Sunny Moraine said it best: “Don’t you dare claim that you’re doing something progressive on behalf of populations to which you don’t belong. Because you aren’t. It’s not your progress to make.”

Straight women seem to feel entitled to write gay characters because they think homosexuality is simply an inherent desire to attract and please a man. She may think, “He’s just like me because he likes penetration and getting his hair done.” A gay character is just a straight woman with different genitalia, right? According to Lambda Literary, one male/male romance author said, “I write characters that seem to appeal to both genders without a problem. I just make sure I write men as men and not women with dicks.” And the sex scenes? She said, “I’m a nurse, I know where things go.”

Is that what we are to you?

This is why I gravitate towards publishers like Interlude Press, which consistently seeks out and champions LGBTQ voices — not just stories that feature queer characters. Olympia Knife, a historical romance, was a real standout. Riptide Publishing produced the lovely and subtle Hopeless Romantic, about a gay man who falls in love with a trans girl. These gems are the fulfillment of what gay romance can be: LGBTQ authors, writing about LGBTQ characters, for an audience of all kinds of readers, including straight women. I suggest that a greater diversity of authors might enlarge the mainstream’s understanding of what it means to be gay. Highlighting only people who conform and express themselves in a safe, straight-friendly, toothless way, neuters and erases LGBTQ people. As George Michael told The Guardian in a 2005 interview: “Gay people in the media are doing what makes straight people comfortable, and automatically my response to that is to say I’m a dirty filthy fucker and if you can’t deal with it, you can’t deal with it.”

Straight characterization of queerness that is written to appeal to straight readers by straight writers is bigotry. It may be gentle and well-meaning, and keep chickens in the backyard, but it benefits from oppression. The argument that “we’re all human” and united by a common human experience falls apart under closer scrutiny. If you dehumanize one group or place your personal wishes over their dignity, you have voided your creative license. There are responsible ways to write out of your lane. Hiring someone to be a sensitivity reader can be helpful, especially if that person isn’t out to stroke your ego.

Of course, that choice has its problems, too. Instead of perpetuating the dynamic of gay men educating straight women, or cosigning their choices, straight women who want to write gay romance might ask themselves the questions any writer should: Why am I writing this? Who is my reader? Am I adding something valuable to my genre? Is this story mine to tell? A sexy, frisky story about two firefighters may have commercial potential, but that doesn’t mean the writer has to pursue publication. If a straight writer is really that devoted to queer progress, the right action may be to step aside.

Why do we need a queer reimagining of straight stories, or a straight interpretation of queer stories, when we can create our own?

Most of all, it’s so important to center queer love, as understood by and lived by queer authors. Why do we need a queer reimagining of straight stories, or a straight interpretation of queer stories, when we can create our own? If straight women gravitate towards gay romance, that’s great,: but it should be romance on our terms. Instead of occupying space in a genre that objectifies gay people, it is better to support gay authors, especially writers of gay romance and other LGBTQ-centered stories.

Gay men, however they choose to present, or integrate into society, or maintain their relationships, must be respected. Celebrated. Centered. I’m hopeful that we will see more LGBTQ voices in romance, telling meaningful stories about love, trouble, and happy endings.

7 Books About Crafting and Creating

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Iam pretty much never not knitting. When I’m on my way to work, I knit on the subway; when I arrive, I knit during meetings (my workplace is fairly chill). When I meet my friends at bars and shows, I knit as long as it’s not a glaring distraction, and when I am home by myself I like to knit a couple of rows before bed.

Purchase the collection.

Knitting, in short, permeates every part of my life. I learned to do it, the story goes, before I learned to read, and so it’s fittingly the central subject of my first book, The Curse of the Boyfriend Sweater. The book is a collection of personal essays about crafting, but beyond the yarn and the needles it’s about how making things of all sorts has anchored me in the world, and helped me make sense of nonsensical things like grief, anxiety, joy, and even boredom.

Knitting came first, yes, but the reading was a close second. What follows are the books, some of which I’ve returned to again and again, that I frequently have to put down because they make me so excited to make everything from sweaters to essays to dinners.

The Knitter’s Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmermann

Really this entire list could just be books by EZ (as she’s affectionately and reverently known in the fiber community). This one is my all-time favorite. Not only is it just a mechanically great knitting book — filled with easy yet surprising patterns and techniques — it’s also a compelling narrative about the philosophy of knitting: when to hold tight and when to let go, when to freak out and when to allow yourself to make mistakes. I can’t say with 100% certainty that avowed non-knitters should read it, but if you find yourself at all curious about our world, it’s the perfect entry point.

Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hills

This book, first published in 1936 and commensurately outdated / at times outright offensive, isn’t about making objects so much as it is about making a life. My crafting has always been of a piece with my homemaking (lol), about how the objects I make look and feel in a space I’m building for myself. And whether you’re a crafter or not, if you are a person who lives alone (particularly a female-identifying one), this book is funny and clear and wise: “Be a Communist, a stamp collector, or a Ladies’ Aid worker if you must,” Hills writes, “but for heaven’s sake, be something.” It’ll make you want to instantly run out and put together a dinner party on a budget, or at least iron all of your shirts.

The Secret of Platform 13 by Eva Ibbotson

The only knitting that appears here is in the hands of an assassin named “Soft Parts” Doreen, who kills her victims by stabbing them in the temple with her needle. She is very squarely terrible and yet I don’t remember the name of any other character from this book, which I know I loved and reread maybe a dozen times as a child. I didn’t (and don’t) condone murder nor general villainy, but I do like the essential point that crafters, despite our twee outward appearances and reputation for calm, are not to be trifled with.

Knitting Yarns: Writers on Knitting edited by Ann Hood

My knitting and writing muscles have always been located very near each other — when I’m stuck on a difficult sentence or description, the solution has often been found when I pull out my needles and knit a couple of rows. It’s an easy, repetitive motion, which makes the motion of writing feel somehow simpler as well. This collection of essays by different writers who knit (Ann Patchett! Barbara Kingsolver!) confirmed for me that I’m not alone. It’s like listening to a chorus, watching how all these different perspectives and voices weave in and out, echoing and at times contradicting each other. It laid the groundwork for a lot of what I sought to do with my own (albeit solo) book.

At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman

Another book that is not at all about crafting but echoes exactly what I feel when it comes to writing about it: that small things are worthwhile and interesting, and it can be both luxurious and useful to meditate on them for a while. It’ll make you see ice cream, the postal service, sleep schedules and butterflies in a sharper yet fully familiar light. And if you’re a writer, you’ll most likely want to train that light on your own small favorites.

In the Company of Women edited by Grace Bonney

This book, composed of interviews with female entrepreneurs and artists and ~makers~ of all stripes, will inspire you to craft something, yes, but also to open up a charming storefront and start peddling your work to all your friends and neighbors and maybe Oprah. The collection brings together an accomplished, intimidating group, but it’s a testament to the idea that no one approach to creation is the same as another, and that everyone fucks up a few times before finally getting it right.

Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

My sister is also a crafter — in fact, a far more professional one than I. She makes baskets and sells them in stores, online, and at craft fairs around the country, but, like me, she uses the motion to help soothe and ground herself in the face of mental health struggles. She recommended this book to me years ago, as an antidote to some creative blockage I was feeling, and, I think, as a bit of an insight re: how she thinks of her art. I like to read it in brief snippets whenever I need to push through a scary moment, be it during an essay or a new sweater pattern, and also when I’m thinking of her.

Salman Rushdie Helped Me Recognize Myself—and the Love of My Life

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Novel Gazing is Electric Literature’s personal essay series about the way reading shapes our lives. This time, we asked: What’s a book that made you fall in love?

My phone buzzed at 5 a.m. I squinted at my screen, struggling to keep my heavy eyelids open. It was my fiancé, who was living in New York at the time. I was in Hong Kong. Our relationship was stretched taut around the globe and texts at odd hours were keeping it from unraveling. I sat up immediately.

“If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?” it read.

“President Obama,” I shot back.

“Not Salman Rushdie?”

“Oh duh — of course Rushdie, hands down,” I said.

“And if you could ask him anything, what would you ask him?”

The question left me confused because there is so much I want to say to him, so much I want to ask.

Where would I start? The moment I first picked up Midnight’s Children in high school? That was a part of my life that I now label as BR (Before Rushdie). Back then, I was a lanky nerd in Hong Kong trying very hard to run as far away from my Indian roots as possible. I would leave my mum’s hand-cooked lunch of potato-stuffed rotis uneaten and buried at the bottom of my backpack because of its embarrassing aromas of turmeric, coriander, and garam masala. I would strip, pluck, wax my arm hair and eyebrows, the thickness of which are so intrinsically tangled up with being Indian. I would lock away my love for Bollywood to make space for the Goo Goo Dolls, Oasis, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. And until then, I had never read anything by an Indian author; I just assumed they were inferior to the Chaucer, Charles Dickens, and Oscar Wilde classics we were studying at school.

I had never read anything by an Indian author; I just assumed they were inferior to the classics we were studying at school.

One day, I stumbled across a display at a bookstore that was dedicated to award-winning Asian writers. A friend of mine who had already read three of Rushdie’s books picked up Midnight’s Children and pushed it into my hands. “You need to read this,” he urged. I stroked its unbent spine, read the blurb, and decided to give it a shot.

A few chapters in, I was under Rushdie’s magical realism spell. I highlighted and annotated almost everything — every pun, every quip, every sharp observation of life, every riddle twisted into the plot. I bent its spine out of shape to a point where individual pages threatened to break out and flutter away.

Mrs. Braganza’s “gigantic pickle-vats and simmering chutneys” smelled like my mother’s kitchen at home. The twisty-turvy plot felt just as melodramatic as the Bollywood movies that I secretly, reluctantly loved. The ridiculous Sinai family were mirror reflections of my own family.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

In the book, a pregnant Amina sits in the back seat of a taxi and descends into Old Delhi to meet Ramram, a fortune-teller who may be “a huckster, a two-chip palmist, a giver of cute forecasts to silly women” or “the genuine article, the holder of the keys.” My mother, perched on the back of a Vespa, headed to her trusted palm-reading friend as soon as I was born to see what the stars had in store for me. He told her two things of note: I will live far away and I will meet a man who will take me there.

When my parents moved to Hong Kong — barely a year after my prophecy — my father worked hard to give us a life he never had. An apartment in the bustling neon city, an international education, the luxury to follow my dreams. I, in return, wanted to live up to his expectations. He poured his soul into my future. I wanted to make it worth every penny.

When I picked up Midnight’s Children, I was nearing the end of high school, contemplating my future, tossing and turning just thinking about repaying my father’s sacrifices. Rushdie reached out through the book and into my heart to give words to the thoughts spinning around my conscience: “I must work fast, faster than Scheherazade, if I am to end up meaning — yes, meaning — something. I admit it: above all things, I fear absurdity.”

How did Rushdie know exactly what I was going through? How did he understand me so well? I wasn’t the only person who connected so intimately with Midnight’s Children. Reviews of the book when it first came out famously described it as “a continent finding its voice” because it was so richly Indian, so truly relatable for the country. How did he understand us so well? Is that the question I wanted to ask him?

Perhaps I should tell Rushdie about my journey after Midnight’s Children (also known as AR, After Rushdie). The book cracked open a door ever so slightly and I pushed through with gusto, finding more pieces of myself in his other books as though Rushdie was now my fortune teller giving me, the bewildered hopeful, answers.

I leaped from Midnight’s Children to Shalimar the Clown. There I saw elements of myself in India Ophuls because I had reached an age where I yearned — like she does — to learn about my roots. Instead of shoving questions about my family’s history and my country’s past aside, I now wanted to confront them. That book painted the picture of the raw hatred that to this day tears India apart in a way that even my family who grew up there couldn’t put into words.

The book cracked open a door ever so slightly and I pushed through with gusto, finding more pieces of myself in his other books.

Then, at the start of university in London, I started to sink my teeth into The Satanic Verses. As I struggled to turn this rainy, moody city into my home, the protagonist Salahuddin Chamchawala was trying to do the same. My education there turned into a financial burden for my father. So my three years were glorious and unforgettable but also weighed down by “a nightmare of cash-tills and calculations.” Salahuddin’s realization that “England was a peculiar-tasting smoked fish full of spikes and bones, and nobody would ever tell him how to eat it,” was one that resonated with me too. At some point, like Salahuddin, I figured out how to eat the fish.

Again and again, at every juncture of my life, Rushdie was reading me while I was reading him.

By the time I landed on Joseph Anton, Rushdie’s memoir of his time in hiding, I was two years into my journalism career. My family wasn’t convinced this would be a long-term and fruitful path. The professional moves I wanted to make next were met with doors slammed in my face. Almost every route I took led to a dead end. I felt boxed in and worried that I would end up being just another absurdity, a blip, a speck, a disappointment. And right when I thought I had hit rock bottom, my previous boyfriend broke my heart. That one-two punch snuffed out the lights.

My cracked being turned to Rushdie for consolation. In Joseph Anton, I learned that India — his country, my country, our country — was the first to leave him twisting in the wind for writing The Satanic Verses, a fact that is so frequently overshadowed. India’s narrow-minded knee-jerk ban on the book placed the country on a slippery censorship slope that it is still riding today. I got a detailed look at his personal life under the Iranian Fatwa, which was so quickly destroyed as though he was a meaningless paper figurine that can be scrunched up and tossed aside. The entire world told him to put down his pen for the greater good. Yet he persisted. The path of self-doubt and dejection I was on was nothing compared to his. His strength through it all, which roared loud and clear in Joseph Anton, encouraged me to keep going. But I never figured out how and why he managed to find that determination and push through, despite such high stakes, while I in my own small world was willing to give up so easily. That — that’s what I would ask him.

“Why he kept going when the whole world told him to stop,” I texted my fiancé.

My fiancé. I was still getting used to saying that. I first met him exactly a month after I got through Joseph Anton. It was Halloween. He was dressed as a mad scientist, with fake blood splattered all over his lab coat. I was dressed as a sheriff, star badge and all. I was floored in five minutes. He was nonchalant and uninterested in me. He didn’t even ask for my number. So I gave him my sheriff badge, hoping that in the sobering morning light it would make him think of me.

At every juncture of my life, Rushdie was reading me while I was reading him.

It didn’t.

I found him on Facebook and realised the origins of his resistance were tied to an exam he was studying for.

Three weeks later, after back and forth messages, after his exam, we went on our first date. He charmed me with his humour, his puns, his quips, his sharp observations of life. We went for an Escape The Room game with nothing but riddles to find a way out. It all sounded like a Rushdie novel. And I was falling in love.

Three years later, his company flung him across the world. But he didn’t leave me behind. He rented out a room at the glitzy Ritz Carlton and turned it into our very own Escape The Room. A box with a clue led to another then another then I found that same sheriff badge and, taped to the back, a diamond ring. I couldn’t contain myself.

So here we are now. Me in Hong Kong, my life packed up in boxes ready to move far away. Him in New York, texting me about hypothetical dinner dates.

Three months later, it’s our wedding day at a small Hindu temple. We’re walking around the ceremonial fire. We’re exchanging garlands. We’re bowing our heads in prayer. Now, we’re united and sitting in chairs to take pictures.

My husband hands me a neatly wrapped present. “Remember what you told me you’d ask Salman Rushdie?” he said. I ripped through the wrapping and found Rushdie’s latest book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Inside, on the first page, a response:

“Alisha,

Free speech matters more.

Salman Rushdie”

Tears blur my vision and my jaw drops. “But how…?” I ask my husband. That moment confirms what I already know — I am going to love this man forever.

“I know people,” he says, shrugging and smiling.

I wonder, now, what would have happened if Rushdie didn’t care enough about free speech. I might not have read him at every one of my crossroads. And then what?

I may have never made space for an understanding of who I am and my country. I could’ve ended up hating London rather than embracing it. I may have locked my broken heart up in my chest, closing it off from the man who would bubble wrap it and take me far away.

In Midnight’s Children, Rushdie poses the question “where, then, is optimism? In fate or in chaos?” For me, it seems like fate.

A New Documentary About Gabriel Garcia Marquez Highlights the Joy He Brings to Readers

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I know how much of a cliché it makes me to say that Gabriel García Márquez is my favorite writer and Hundred Years of Solitude my all-time favorite book. As a Colombian, I worry that this preference reads as mere knee-jerk regionalism or worse, an example of a stunted literary taste. But what else am I supposed to think of an epic work that is at once so astonishing and so familiar? When I first encountered this sprawling novel in 9th grade, we were scheduled to spend an entire semester reading it, but I went ahead and finished all 400-plus pages in one weekend. It was the very first book I devoured, as unlikely a page-turner (will the dirt-eating bastard girl ever find happiness again? will the doomed butterfly-surrounded lovers make it, after all? will anyone really be born with a pig’s tail?) as I’ve yet to encounter. In the intervening seventeen years I have come to think of Gabo as a familiar presence in my life, someone whose prose can transport me back not just to that blissful weekend I spent reading the story of the Buendías for the first time, but to my own family experiences and conversations, which he was somehow able to conjure up in his novel.

As I watched Justin Webster’s reverent documentary Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez, my relationship with the Nobel Prize winner came flooding back. Even though (or, perhaps, because) I’d already heard the many anecdotes and stories being shared in the film by his siblings, his colleagues, and fans around the world (including President Bill Clinton), Webster’s documentary reminded me how much of my teenage obsession with Gabo has grown into an appreciation for the way he captured the Colombia I grew up with and which I now long for from abroad.

Serving as a kind of abridged biography-cum-critical-overview, Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez tries to analyze what it is that made the novelist so unique. This is, as it turns out, an insurmountable task, not least because the answer lies more within his pages than in his life — though the impetus to think of the two as intricately intertwined is precisely why his novels resonate so far beyond the borders of my native country. Like many studies of Gabo’s novels over the past several decades, Webster’s documentary focuses on wanting to offer viewers many of the “real life” stories of his life that went on to be immortalized in his words. Readers of Chronicle of a Death Foretold, for example, get a chance to see the actual town square where a young man was, indeed, knifed down by two drunken brothers, while fans of Love in the Time of Cholera get to hear (perhaps yet again) the story of how Gabo’s parents got together, which went on to inspire that 1985 novel. Except, since he was such an expert chronicler as well as such a keen raconteur of his own life (his two memoirs, Living to Tell the Tale and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, are nothing short of required reading), any attempt to illuminate his life and work cannot help but leave one wanting. The anecdote is never quite as beguiling as the chronicle; the former remains unpolished and credible, the latter — especially in Gabo’s hands — emerges as perfectly whittled and almost preposterous but also, and this is crucial, believable. (Unsurprisingly, Webster’s doc is infinitely more engaging when delving into the writer’s often under-discussed journalistic career.)

But there is one thing the documentary captures better than anything I’ve read on the Colombian writer: the utter joy readers find in his work. The most heartwarming and engaging moments of the film come courtesy of the passages of his writing that are read out loud by Webster’s many talking heads.

I’ve lived with Gabo’s words for much of my life. He was an ubiquitous presence throughout my high school years—the kind I imagine Pablo Neruda is in Chile and Shakespeare is, well, everywhere in the English-speaking world. Despite having moved no less than eleven times (twice to different countries), I still have my textbook paperback copy of Hundred Years, a torn corner of its cover serving as a makeshift bookmark. In its pages I can trace my own 2000-era musings on the Buendías: the very first blank page of the novel, in fact, has a key to the many symbols I used to flag important moments and recurring motifs that, even as a 9th grader, suggested I had a critical inclination that made the rest of my classmates snicker in contempt. Some are pretty self-evident; a heart symbol can be found next to highlighted passages where love was concerned, an “S” marks places when García Márquez talks explicitly about solitude, an exclamation mark stands next to “important moments” (which, apparently, I doled out with abandon, all but making this indexing an almost futile exercise). Others were more needlessly complicated: a tiny book with a B emblazoned in its cover signalled moments when the Buendía story echoed, mirrored, or read like a Biblical tale (I don’t know where I was going with that), two butterflies appear next to scenes where “yellow” (yes, just the color) appeared as a visual motif, and a comically small tombstone charted the many (oh so many!) instances when death was mentioned. To rifle through these pages is to witness firsthand just how bewitched I was by this novel and how eager I was to unlock its many secrets.

He was an ubiquitous presence throughout my high school years — the kind I imagine Pablo Neruda is in Chile and Shakespeare is everywhere in the English-speaking world.

The many underlined passages (I could never bring myself to use highlighter and opted for the clean lines of a mechanical pencil, and hated marginal comments which is why I doodled symbols instead) trace my very first instincts as a critical reader, wanting to connect disparate moments, bringing together images that recurred, and hoping to piece together the puzzle that was Hundred Years. Now, though, they serve as a time machine of sorts. Sure, these highlighted passages served a scholarly purpose. They were a way for me to call up needed quotes in the essays and exams I wrote on the novel during that semester (the only other novel that the Spanish department allotted more time in their curriculum was, unsurprisingly, Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote which took up one’s entire senior year). But they also function as a window into my high school self. I can glimpse, for example, why I was drawn to several underlined passages — “Only he knew at that time that his confused heart was condemned to uncertainty forever” is the kind of sentence a sensitive lovesick teenage boy would be drawn to — while others surprise me: what did I make of a line like “Little by little, however, and as the war became more intense and widespread, his image was fading away into a universe of unreality”? Reading it now, out of context and in translation, I’m struck by how perfect a description of Gabo’s work it is.

‘Phantom Thread’ Is the Love Story for Assholes We’ve All Been Waiting For

Like many of our Spanish textbooks, my edition of Hundred Years was published by an imprint called “Cara y Cruz” (Heads and Tails). The book included the full length of the novel on one side (“Cara”) and a series of helpful texts, including the author’s biography, standout quotes about the novel, a suggested bibliography as well as a short essay on the novel at hand (“Cruz”) on the other. For García Márquez’s 1967 text, the editors chose a feature by Carlos Fuentes titled “La Segunda Lectura” (On Second Reading). Nearly two decades after I first read it, the piece continues to color my own appreciation of the novel. With One Hundred Years of Solitude, Fuentes argues, García Márquez had given Latin America the chance to be mythic, making the many pasts and presents of the region come alive at the same time. “In each of these acts of fiction,” he writes, “the positivist time of the epic (this really happened) and the nostalgic time of an utopia (this could’ve happened) die and give birth to the absolute present time of the myth: this is happening.” It’s the only line in his essay I underlined and one I’ve gone back to revisit over the years — I used it for an essay on magical realism in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks in my freshman English course and recycled it again to talk about Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying the following year. Even as Webster never quite puts it in those words, the central thesis of his documentary merely echoes Fuentes: we may get the sense that the creation of Gabriel García Márquez requires us to revisit his hometown and talk with his family (and even with his Parisian girlfriend whom he left eventually to marry his sweetheart Mercedes), but only so that we will be better able to admire the way his prose borrowed but by some literary alchemy the likes of Melquiades in Hundred Years, he bore a new way of looking at his life, his country, and the world.

The promise and premise of a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude is the way it represented Colombian reality in the guise of novelistic myth. And so, in order to offer an origin story for a writer like García Márquez, one must work backwards, tracking the inspirations that led to the beguiling stories that have made him a worldwide sensation. The world of Macondo, the fabled small town that’s at the center of Hundred Years, functions as a microcosm of Colombia (and, by extension, Latin America). Framed by actual historical events — the civil war that beckons Aureliano, the banana massacre that only José Arcadio Segundo witnesses — Macondo exists at the intersection of reality and allegory. The magical realism that it helped globalize depends on reevaluating how we tell stories about what “really happened.” It’s no surprise that, to many who did not grow up in households where talk of spirits wasn’t uncommon (my grandmother spoke plainly about how her sister could divine who’d be dying next in the family as they’d appear to her in dreams) and in a country where one’s own national history seemed plausibly implausible, where a massacre could be both urban legend and historical fact, the impetus to understand Gabo’s work would focus on universalizing his words while at the same trying to anchor it in the mundane.

The promise and premise of a book like One Hundred Years of Solitude is the way it represented Colombian reality in the guise of novelistic myth.

“He chronicled, in a thousand different ways,” Clinton muses at one point in Webster’s film, “the futility of denying the promise of the human spirit.” Except, of course, Gabo’s books, no matter how universal they may feel, are, in essence, snapshots of a region. They’re so specific, so grounded in the particular, that their universality feels almost accidental. He said as much while accepting his Nobel Prize in 1982. Speaking in Stockholm, Gabo positioned his work as but an attempt to capture the implausible history of Latin America, with its mythical fauna, its delirious mundanity, and its virulent violence. “I dare to think,” he said, “that it is this outsized reality, and not just its literary expression, that has deserved the attention of the Swedish Academy of Letters. A reality not of paper, but one that lives within us and determines each instant of our countless daily deaths, and that nourishes a source of insatiable creativity, full of sorrow and beauty, of which this roving and nostalgic Colombian is but one cipher more, singled out by fortune.” Having moved abroad shortly after reading Hundred Years, I’ve continued to find in its pages a sense of a lost home, one nurtured both by my own childhood imagination as by my nostalgic reminiscences as an adult. An “unreal” Colombia that nevertheless feels like home.

8 Literary Perfumes for Book-Lovers Who Want to Smell Good

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Perfume and literature have long been entwined, each one referencing or seeking to summon the other. Many famous books center on or are based around perfume, from Patrick Suskind’s 1985 novel Perfume to the numerous books in which scents become plot points or character development. And perfume, for its part, is frequently obsessed with literature. Scent is a storytelling genre, one seeking to transport the wearer to a different time or place, a memory or an imagined history. Perfume makers are often directly inspired by literature, too; many perfumes are based on specific authors or characters, more general ideas of literary eras and history, or on the imagined scent of books and libraries themselves.

Here are eight suggestions of perfumes for the book lover. Whether you’re already fragrance-obsessed, or have never worn perfume before reading this, these scents will pair perfectly with a love of reading, and cater to a range of literary interests.

Photo via Lucky Scent

Cape Heartache by Imaginary Authors

Portland-based perfume company Imaginary Authors makes arguably the ultimate perfumes for book-readers. Each of their scents is based the story of a made-up author — name, date, works and all — and matches the fragrance to the imaginary author’s imaginary world. “The Soft Lawn” invents Fitzgeraldesque Claude LeCocq writing about the silver spoon and tennis whites set, while “Bull’s Blood” imagines a hyper-masculine Hemingway stand-in famous for a book about bullfighting and his father. But my favorite of their collection is Cape Heartache, a perfume based on an invented 19th century American novelist named Phillip Sava who wrote about his teenage expeditions to the Pacific Northwest. It evokes the old growth forests and foggy mornings in that part of the country perfectly, shot through with unexpected sweetness, like the smell of nostalgia.

Photo via CB I Hate Perfume

In the Library by CB I Hate Perfume

Book lovers often begin their interest in perfume by seeking out a scent that smells like old books. For many of us, our love of reading started by cracking open old paperbacks, whether from the library, or school, or borrowed from a parent’s bookshelves. In the Library evokes that dusty scent, the smell of yellowing pages and ink, but also the warm-body, indoor smell of a library, with notes of leather, paper, and wood polish. The scent is part of Christopher Brosius’ I Hate Perfume line, in which each scent is meant to evoke a particular memory, and he based this one on the smell of a 1927 signed first edition of his favorite novel.

Photo via Memo

Quartier Latin by Memo

Paris is a famously literary city, and Memo, a perfume line based on evoking ideas of place, focuses its depiction of Paris specifically on the city’s literary history. The Quartier Latin, from which the perfume takes its name, is the student district, known for all-night cafes where artists and intellectuals fought and flirted and debated philosophy. This perfume is meant to smell like paper and ink, like scribbling furiously in a leatherbound notebook. Notes of tonka bean, sandalwood, amber, and cedar come to together to evoke this vision of a romantic intellectual city.

Photo via Osswald NYC

Memoir Woman by Amouage

Memoir is a controversial genre, and one that has perhaps gotten a bad reputation in recent years, with the rise and fall of the confessional online essay. But this perfume — a rich, weird, androgynous scent with notes of absinthe, white flowers, cardamom, pink pepper, labdanum and leather — is memoir in a more old-fashioned sense, the recollections of someone fascinating who lived a long and weird life, with instructive and sometimes frightening stories to tell. The contrasts in the scent imitate the contrasts in a life story, with its twists, turns, hard lessons, sharp ups and downs, and moments of unexpected sweetness.

Photo via Lucky Scent

1804 George Sand by Histoires des Parfums

Histoires des Parfums’ fragrances are based on single years in history, often with a literary flavor. Other fragrances in include 1828 Jules Verne (a citrus marine fragrance) and 1740 Marquis de Sade, but 1804 is named for the year George Sand was born. A gorgeous white floral bouquet, the scent is clean, welcoming, and gracious, evoking the novelist’s famous generosity and love of nature.

Photo via Lucky Scent

De Profundis by Serge Lutens

Oscar Wilde wrote “De Profundis” (which translates “from the depths”) from prison, a letter to the young loutish lover who had put him there. It is a heartbreaking confession — and a confession in a literal, religious sense, as it draws closely on biblical ideas of sin and creation and depicts Wilde’s identification with Christ — mourning both his and his beloved’s vanity and weaknesses. It stands in contrast to Wilde’s popular plays and quips, as though his buoyant wit had turned inside out to reveal the wounded heart beneath it. From storied French perfume house Serge Lutens, created by famous perfumer Christopher Sheldrake, this perfume is inspired equally by Wilde’s famous letter and Psalm 130 from which it takes its name (“from the depths I have cried out to you, Oh Lord”), and is meant to be the smell of confession and resurrection, moving from the scent of ash and musk to the smell of Wilde’s signature chrysanthemum, and into greens, earth, and new growth.

Photo via Lucky Scent

Baudelaire by Byredo

Charles Baudelaire was perhaps the quintessential French dandy-poet, today famous as much for his persona as for his poetry, and Byredo’s perfume is a tribute to that persona, at once lushly floral and dark with sticky incense, like the interior of an intellectual salon being hosted in a wealthy home, full of smoke and booze and flowers.

Photo via Roja Perfumes

A Midsummer Dream by Roja Parfums

A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream is the Shakespeare plays most likely to be performed at an outdoor festival where the audience brings picnic blankets and sits on the lawn and gently swats at mosquitoes all night, and the particular joy of this specific experience is maybe the best thing about this play. Roja’s perfume in tribute to Shakespeare’s famous comedy evokes exactly that experience, combining moss, floral notes, vanilla, vetiver, and deeper cedarwood, benzoin, and musk, like the experience of dusk settling blue over a lawn full of community theater actors playing fairies and lovers.