Page 5 – Electric Literature

You Can’t Uncast a Spell

Posted on March 10, 2026March 10, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

One could argue that Gregory Maguire’s novel, Wicked, and its Broadway adaptation are entirely different stories. Alongside the stage musical’s revision of key character personalities, relationships, and even fates, it also softens the novel’s highly adult themes for a more diverse audience. But what binds the two together is an understanding that Wicked is more than a prequel to The Wizard of Oz—it’s an allegory for fascism and its irreversible cruelty. While the first Jon M. Chu stage-to-screen adaptation, Wicked, seemed aligned with this perspective, the much-anticipated second installment, Wicked: For Good, seems to have lost the plot.

Though Chu couldn’t have known that his adaptation would coincide with a second Trump presidency, the timing of Wicked: For Good and the media coverage it has garnered is highly culturally significant, given the United States’ own worrying rise of authoritarianism. Especially in our own era, the changes made by this film are not frivolous—they are dangerously out of touch and speak to a growing habit of downplaying the stickiness of fascism’s harm. The Broadway musical is certainly a more hopeful story than Maguire’s original novel, but its ending is still somber, as Elphaba fails to rescue the Animals and flees Oz, likely never to return. Changing Wicked’s ending to an unfettered triumph of overthrowing a dictatorial regime, Wicked: For Good occupies a problematic cultural perspective, one that blissfully forgets fascism’s lingering pain and permanent damage.

As others have pointed out, Wicked and the extensive literary history of Oz itself have long been considered political. L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been suspected of being a commentary on the McKinley administration. And Maguire’s 1995, decidedly adult novel Wicked is undeniably political, with visible threads throughout of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, systemic oppression, and even state-sanctioned murder gesturing towards fascism in general, and specifically, the crimes of Nazi Germany. And at its debut in 2003, the Wicked musical cemented its own continuation of such political commentary, especially in relation to the George W. Bush presidency.

So when Chu’s Wicked premiered last year, we had no reason to doubt that this political narrative would remain, if not strengthen. Indeed, in comparison to the musical, part one of Chu’s adaptation saw a marked increase in the narrative time for the talking Animals—the population targeted and oppressed by the Wizard—no doubt due to the affordances of CGI in comparison to the limited abilities of stage productions. The film maintains the Broadway musical’s inclusion of the Cowardly Lion, the flying monkeys, and Dr. Dillamond, the Shiz University goat professor whose violent removal from his classroom as a result of anti-Animal legislation radicalizes Elphaba, who, in the film, keeps the professor’s glasses, broken during his arrest. In addition to these mainstay characters, the film adds Dulcibear, a talking bear who serves as Elphaba and her sister Nessa’s childhood nanny, alongside many other new Animal faces to strengthen their place in the narrative, and, in turn, their political significance to the overarching story.

When Chu’s Wicked premiered last year, we had no reason to doubt that this political narrative would remain, if not strengthen.

It isn’t difficult to read the novel or see the stage musical or film adaptations of Wicked without taking notice of Maguire’s intended allegory for Nazi Germany. The oppression and silencing of the Animals, including Dr. Dillamond, reflects the oppression and genocide of Jewish people and other “undesirables” during the Holocaust, including the ousting of Jewish professors and “politically unreliable” people from German universities and state positions with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. More recently, though, Dr. Dillamond’s removal compares with the removal of a Texas A&M University professor for teaching about gender identity, as well as the University of Oklahoma’s suspension and eventual firing of a graduate teaching assistant for failing a student’s paper on gender identity that cited the Bible and referred to trans people as “demonic.”

Compounding this, the second installment of Chu’s adaptation opens to a starkly different scene than audiences experienced in the first film, released in 2024. Wicked began with the Broadway musical’s well-known number “No One Mourns the Wicked,” but Chu’s Wicked: For Good opens with a scene unfamiliar to fans of the stage musical—the exacerbated state of the oppression of Oz’s Animals, set into motion during the events of the first film. In our return to the theater and Oz, audiences witness the continued construction of the yellow brick road, being built by the forced labor of Animals. We watch as an overseer whips two chained bison to keep them moving, snapping at them not to speak, as the Animals groan in pain, struggling to keep up.

It seemed, then, that Wicked: For Good was intent on creating a more visceral representation of oppression, including Wicked’s inevitable bad ending for the Animals that Elphaba tries to liberate. Yet shortly after the hard-hitting opening, this vision begins to falter. Elphaba encounters a group of Animals, including Dulcibear, hurriedly escaping through a tunnel dug into the yellow brick road and willingly venturing into the “Place Beyond Oz,” understood as a wasteland, to escape persecution.

As Dillamond’s removal from his position reflects contemporary attacks on American educators, the flight of the Animals evokes the real-world increase in “self-deportations” after the Trump administration’s threat to undocumented immigrants to “leave now” or be removed by force. Especially with the increase in ICE raids, it’s an option that was once unthinkable for those building lives in the United States, but one that many are now considering to avoid being taken from court houses, sidewalks, and schools, being held in detention centers, and being separated from their families.

When Elphaba finds the Animals escaping through the tunnel, she implores them to stay. Here, with the addition of the original song “No Place Like Home,” Wicked: For Good veers into confusing, even, dare I say, corny, territory.

In the song, Elphaba insists that “Oz is more than just a place / It’s a promise, an idea,” espousing a view similar to the “American Dream,” and, as others have noted, a liberal nationalistic perspective that prioritizes an “idea” over an actual place where the Animals are currently unable to live safely. Elphaba continues to sing, “When you feel you can’t fight anymore / just tell yourself there’s no place like home,” and “When you want to leave / discouraged and resigned / that’s what they want you to do / But think of how you will grieve / for all you leave behind / Oz belongs to you, too.”

On one hand, “No Place Like Home” can be accepted as a cheeky callback to Dorothy’s famous line in The Wizard of Oz and a musical addition to the film meant to galvanize the fleeing Animals into fighting back for their freedom. On the other hand, though it’s possible to see the sentiment behind the lyrics, “No Place Like Home” ultimately comes across as trite, even tone-deaf, given the high stakes that the Animals face. The insistence that the Animals shouldn’t be forced from their homes is a correct one, but the lyrics betray Elphaba’s idealism and feel patronizing.

Elphaba doesn’t offer supplies, routes to safehouses, or support of any kind. Rather, she asks the Animals to stay in an unsafe land with no other avenues or options for protection or shelter. While Elphaba has her magic, her undiscovered hideaway, and her mode of quick transportation when she’s in danger thanks to her broomstick, the Animals have none of this, on top of being quite easy to spot. Without real substance or promise, her words ring hollow.

Though I cringed at the lyricism of “No Place Like Home,” I was initially willing to write it off as a musical misstep, especially given the film’s apt attention to the many tools employed by authoritarian and fascist governments. Specifically, I was taken by the film’s focus on how easily orders fly off of desks and into enforceable law. Signs declaring “NO ANIMALS” go up around Oz, and travel bans are enforced for both Animals and Munchkins on the whim of Elphaba’s sister, Nessa, now mayor of Munchkinland.

Further into the film, like the stage musical, Elphaba eventually finds Dr. Dillamond again, kept in a cage and having lost the ability to speak. But unlike the stage musical, Elphaba finds far more Animals caged alongside Dillamond, driving home how widespread and systematic their disappearances have become. The Wizard, trying to win back Elphaba’s favor, tells her, “Some animals just can’t be trusted.” However, Chu’s film refuses to let us linger in this horror, undercutting the seriousness of Elphaba’s discovery by playing what comes next for comic relief.

By the end of the chaos, Morrible is launched, face-first, into the towering wedding cake, landing on the ground with a satisfying thwomp.

In her anger, Elphaba’s magic releases the Animals from their cages as she tells the Wizard: “Run.” The Animals give chase, barging through the doors and stampeding through the wedding of Glinda and Fiyero. Guests scream, scramble for cover in their over-the-top wedding guest attire and hairstyles, which adds to the absurdity. Madame Morrible, screaming, “This is the work of the Wicked Witch,” is drowned out by the noise caused by the Animals. By the end of the chaos, Morrible is launched, face-first, into the towering wedding cake, landing on the ground with a satisfying thwomp.

The Animal imprisonment quickly unravels from dark horror to a victory, and a funny one. It revises itself in real time into something lighthearted and whimsical, a distraction from the horrors of Oz’s fascist regime. The stage musical, while fun and colorful, is still meant to make audiences think hard about the pain they are witnessing. In this sense, the played-for-laughs fun of this scene arguably becomes reflective of the bubbly, fun nature of the massive marketing campaign and franchising of the Wicked films, which has developed into a narrative all its own.

Courtesy of 400+ brand partnerships, Wicked’s colorful, glittering aesthetic has been inescapable for over a year. The film’s marketing strategy and brand deals, suspected to have cost as much as the first film, have produced everything from nail polish, limited edition eye shadow pallettes, and Barbie dolls to Dawn dish spray, cereal, and even mac and cheese cups. Admittedly, I was not strong enough to resist the siren call of a Glinda-pink collapsible Swiffer sweeper, telling myself it was a practical purchase as I loaded it into my Amazon cart.

That isn’t to say this vibrant and Glinda-fied merchandising doesn’t have a connection to the story itself. Wicked has canonically had its fair share of whimsy, from elaborate set design to quirky language. But its ending has always maintained a somber tone. In the stage musical and Maguire’s novel, though the future for Animal liberation remains possible, Elphaba herself fails in her quest, and those she sought to save continue to be scapegoated by the Wizard’s administration, have their rights stripped, are silenced through cages, and even murdered. It’s a grim finality, but one that maintains a foothold in the reality of systematic oppression.

Yet Wicked: For Good takes a decidedly different approach. After Elphaba and Glinda have their emotional goodbye in “For Good,” Glinda returns to the Emerald City, demands that the Wizard remove himself from Oz via the hot air balloon he arrived in, and imprisons Madam Morrible in one of the cages she had built for Animals. The ending, like the original stage musical, returns us to the beginning with “No One Mourns the Wicked.” However, in this version, Glinda pauses the reprise, telling the crowd, “I have something more to say.”

Glinda motions for the Animals to emerge from the crowd of Ozians, gently imploring, “Come out. Wherever you are, come out.” Her prodding is akin to that of an adult encouraging children to return from a game of hide and seek, not to return from being hunted down. And given that we have, until this point, understood the Animals to have mostly been imprisoned or having fled from Oz entirely, it’s surprising to see them suddenly in the middle of the crowd, smiling up at Glinda.

Glinda continues her speech, clarifying, “I don’t see any enemies here. We’ve been through a frightening time. And there will be other times and other things that frighten us. But if you’ll let me, I’d like to try to help, to change things. I’d like to try to be… Glinda the Good.” The scene shifts quickly, showing Animals regaining their place in society, being greeted by the suddenly de-prejudiced Ozians. A wand wave, and years of persecution and fear evaporate.

The Animals who fled during “No Place Like Home” emerge again from the tunnel, Dulcibear smiling in relief. And then the kicker: the camera lands squarely on Dr. Dillamond, back in his classroom, glasses fixed, ready to teach again. His fate is magically reversed from his murder in the novel and his permanent silencing and transformation into a “real animal” in the stage musical. Instead, he resumes his career, presumably alongside the very colleagues and students who did nothing to intervene as he was dragged from his classroom.

You can’t uncast a spell. You can’t undo what has already been done.

Many have noted their immense relief that Dillamond survives, and a part of me has to agree with them. The character has always been a fan favorite, and Peter Dinklage’s talent only adds to his charm. But I also couldn’t help but feel uneasy at this change—it feels too clean, and far too simple.

The primary rule of magic that Elphaba and others in Wicked consistently repeat is that you can’t uncast a spell. You can’t undo what has already been done. In many ways, this idea points to the irreversibility of harm inflicted by fascist regimes and their implementation of systematic violence. This major change to Wicked’s ending, which sees smiling Animals with speech restored and once again accepted without question by previously prejudiced, and even violent, Ozians, is not just improbable but may even be dangerous messaging, especially given the growing levels of suspicion, propaganda, state and interpersonal violence, and heightened oppression of marginalized groups in the United States.

While injury is easily and hurriedly inflicted by powerful state entities, as we have been witnessing over the last year in particular, disentangling ourselves from that harm has been proven to be much, much more difficult. Wicked and Wicked: For Good both have a concrete understanding of how fascism operates, the delight it takes in violence, the tools it employs, and how it takes hold in the first place. What this film has trouble grappling with is how fascism is broken apart and what happens in the aftermath. Wicked: For Good’s finale shift is not merely an insistence on a happy ending for audience satisfaction. Rather, this small but significant change undercuts the real work that must be done to recover from fascist ideology. That recovery requires hope, certainly, but it must be a hope willing to hurt as it clambers after something better. It must be a hope that refuses to forget.

Building a future in the wake of fascism is never simple. It isn’t a heel click or a wand wave away. It’s a hard reckoning. It’s the beginning of a long climb. And it’s in our best interest not to pretend otherwise.

A Cruise Ship Novel Set in the Aftermath of 9/11

Posted on March 10, 2026March 10, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

In his essay entitled “Shipping Out,” David Foster Wallace writes about being subjected to 1,500 professional smiles in a single week. He confides that the greatest lie the luxury cruise industry tells is “that enough pleasure and enough pampering will quiet [the] discontented part of you . . . when in fact, all it does is up the requirement.” Jung Yun’s new novel All the World Can Hold confronts this manufactured fun and carnival loneliness with nuanced complexity: namely, numerous characters let down loved ones in pinnacle moments of manufactured fun, while an underclass of employees labors largely in the shadows. In Yun’s spectacular cruise setting, there is endless drinking, entertainment on every deck. “All the freedom, all the waste,” writes Yun.

At the heart of the novel is Franny, an estate lawyer who only days ago was present at Ground Zero in 9/11—and who has told no one about what she’s been through, not even her husband. She boards the Sonata to celebrate her mother’s chilsun, her seventieth birthday. Doug Clayton, also aboard, is a recovering actor, and someone who fans talk about as if the best parts of him are in the past. Lucy is perhaps the most alienated on the cruise; a young Black woman contending with the weight of success and making her parents proud, she has to decide between security and selfhood. In this highly public, fabricated setting of a luxury cruise, these characters are all desperately trying to hide their real selves. Thousands of miles away from home, under Yun’s brilliantly blue sky, everything comes to light—especially why destruction makes art urgent.

Jung Yun and I are colleagues at George Washington University. In our second conversation for Electric Lit, we talked about cruise culture, outliers, and what it means to be legible to those we love.

D/Annie Liontas: Much like your three main characters, you went on a cruise in 2001 in the days immediately following 9/11. Can you tell us about it?

Jung Yun: My former mother-in-law—this is my ex-husband’s mother—grew up in California in the 50s and 60s and wanted to be an actress or model, so she was sort of obsessed with a Hollywood that no longer was. I think that’s why she loved that show on ABC, The Love Boat, because every episode featured all these old-timey actors who played passengers on a cruise ship. I grew up watching that show too. I thought it was pretty fun, but I never realized it was filmed on an actual working ship.

Anyway, one day my former mother-in-law calls and says the cruise line is taking the Love Boat out of commission, and she wanted to sail on it and invited us to come. She was excited about the trip, and she bought our tickets and it was a way to spend family time together, I suppose, so my ex and I didn’t want to say no. Of course, after 9/11 happened, I thought nobody in their right mind would be going on a cruise, but I was sort of outvoted there. People have different ways of grieving, and I think for them, it was easier to get away from New York rather than stay and be in the thick of things with everyone else, which is what I would have preferred. The timing of it just seemed so surreal to me. It still does. And in real life, the cruise was actually seven days, so seven really consequential days out at sea, missing everything that happened here—I still can’t believe we did it.

D/AL: One of my favorite moments in the book is when a waiter lifts a dome lid to reveal bananas flambé, and a passenger reacts in a way that makes bananas seem “thrilling.” When Franny looks around, she sees the spectacle is happening at every table. It’s a perfect image! How did you land on bananas flambé?

JY: Most of the desserts they served on our cruise were clearly meant to have some kind of “wow” factor—the kinds of things people would never make at home. The one I have the clearest memory of was Baked Alaska, which is ice cream encased in cake and a bunch of meringue, but all they did was cut slices of it tableside. I wanted to give Johannes and the other waiters more to do, so I researched desserts that had a fire element and eventually landed on bananas flambé. Have you ever had it? It’s disgusting—it’s so sweet because of the bananas and all the added sugar—but it was showy, which is what I was going for. After watching videos of people preparing it, I learned that the combination of cinnamon and fire creates a crackling noise, which made it even more of a spectacle.

D/AL: The scene points to a particular subculture of American consumerist indulgence that is both “infantilizing” and “hollow,” yet we also feel Franny’s longing for real connection. How is a cruise an ideal setting for this tension of spectacle vs. need for connection?

Cruises are a great way to vacation if you feel obligated to spend time with people but don’t really want to talk to them.

JY: I think there’s something so performative about cruising. The crew members often come from countries where working on a cruise ship is some of the best, most lucrative employment they can get. And then they encounter passengers who come from a level of wealth and privilege they can’t even imagine. That’s usually the dynamic that exists on a cruise, no matter how expensive or cheap the fare is. The crew’s primary responsibility is to make sure their passengers are having a good time.

The three main characters—none of them really want to be on this cruise, so I think they have a heightened awareness of the sense of performance that’s going on around them. They kind of try to go with the flow, to connect and do the things they see everyone else doing, but they can’t for various reasons. And that tension exists for all three of them in slightly different ways, and it feels bad.

I mentioned to someone recently that cruises are a great way to vacation if you feel obligated to spend time with people but don’t really want to talk to them. There are so many things on a cruise to entertain you—you can be with your family and perform togetherness but not actually connect in any meaningful way if you don’t want to, or can’t.

D/AL: Following the death of her father and brother, Franny has a fraught relationship with her mother, and even with her brother who, at thirty-five, she says “still behaves like dead weight.” How does Franny understand obligation? How does she understand love? What would it take for her to open herself to it? Claim it?

JY: Franny is really, really dear to me. She’s trying so hard to do the right thing and be a good daughter, but she’s trying to be a good daughter to a parent who comes from a different culture, and I think there’s a lot of misfiring and miscommunication as a result.

Franny assumes a lot about what her mother wants and needs, and she often assumes wrong. Then she feels resentful and sad and frustrated when those efforts aren’t acknowledged or appreciated in the way that she expects. But that’s the nature of her relationship with her mom. They’re so closed off from talking to each other. And Franny constantly thinks that if she does better, works harder, tries more, and is the good adult child that her mother deserves, then there will be an opening. She wants love, but she doesn’t understand her mother’s particular kind of love. And she doesn’t know how to communicate cross-culturally about what her needs are or ask for it in terms that are legible to the people in her life.

D/AL: Legibility is such a great word for this! I would say that’s also true for Doug, who’s recovering after a lifetime of secrecy and denial. I’m wondering how a vessel like the Sonata creates someone like him, but I’m also thinking about how true intimacy cannot exist without letting others witness our suffering. What allows Doug to finally be seen?

JY: I think it kind of goes back to that last question about love. After all these years, Doug still feels such love for someone he lost. On the cruise, he starts to realize that he’d rather hold onto that feeling instead of the regret and sense of failure he’s carried around since the relationship ended. Talking about who he lost with someone like Gideon—his nephew, whom he loves and cares about—will finally let Doug be known and accepted for who he truly is. That, for him, is a big part of what being seen means. He had that once, and with Gideon, who’s probably the closest person to him now, it’s sort of his way of inviting love back into his life.

D/AL: Lucy is very much an outlier and is under such a burden to succeed and make her parents proud. She is forced to choose between her analytical work—which would bring financial security—and her love of art. You write, “Maybe this is just what adulthood is, a series of choices made in doors closed.” What is at risk for Lucy in choosing freedom?

JY: Everything is at risk for Lucy. I mean, in many ways, she’s the character who was closest to me in age and situation at the time that 9/11 happened. It’s no coincidence that Lucy got a lot of the same messages from her family that I got from mine in terms of always working and trying harder than everybody else because that’s the only way to be successful in this country. For someone who’s been raised like that, someone who sees education as a path to success and success as financial stability and a career, at the end of the book, everything is at risk for her. The life that Lucy’s been taught to want and seek and work so hard for—it’s all on the table for her in the same way that it felt like it was all on the table for me when I left New York.

Some of my early readers—they always want to know what happens to Lucy. And I’m like, well, what do you think happens to Lucy? Part of what you assume about her future after she leaves the ship is rooted in one’s sense of optimism or cynicism.

D/AL: In your very touching open letter, you tell readers that this is your most personal novel, and that these characters represent an aspect of who you were in 2001, unfulfilled by work and grappling with regret. At one point you write, “Franny didn’t survive two disasters to return to the life she had before.” How can destruction be a beginning? How is that true not just for your characters, but for you?

JY: With each of these characters, they’re in this confined space—a place they don’t want to be—with people they don’t necessarily want to be with, and they realize that once they get off the ship, everything can continue on exactly as it was before. But I think something about the timing and the close quarters and the forced comingling makes the reality of their lives very stark, in ways they can’t necessarily see in their day to day. It’s all heightened because of the environment they’re in.

D/AL: Like being trapped in a car during a fight!

JY: Exactly! Nobody can walk away. You can take a lap around the ship but you can’t leave.

Because of what happened on 9/11, these characters suddenly understand how short life is, how unpredictable and often cruel life is. And even under the best of circumstances, life is never going to be as long as people want it to be. So here they are living these lives, not fulfilled by their relationships or their work, accepting what passes for love. And I think the destruction kind of serves as a microscope, a reason to look more closely at themselves. It was certainly a microscope for me.

In my 20s, when I was in New York, I was living like I thought I was immortal. I smoked a ton and didn’t sleep and had a terrible diet and worked all the time. I was just so stubborn and so trained to live the kind of life that I was living, it took a full-scale disaster to see that my life was pretty empty. I needed to be doing something different and what was I waiting for? If anything ever happened to me, I decided that I didn’t want to go without love in my life and without people who really knew me and accepted me as I am. And I didn’t want to go without doing the kind of things that mattered to me, like writing. But that’s where I was headed, so something had to change.

D/AL: There are so many stark descriptions of 9/11. The one that stays with me, especially, is the woman whom coworkers judgmentally describe as a clothes horse, not realizing that she carries her jacket down to ground level because she is so badly burned. What did it mean to you to get so many invisible or forgotten stories onto the page, nearly 25 years later?

JY: That meant so much to me, because I got to go back and research the seven days when I was gone. Today, if I miss an issue of The New York Times, I can just go online and find it again. Back then, I couldn’t do that. For twenty-some years, I lost those seven days. So part of my research was going into the archives and actually seeing the papers as they were in 2001 and all the things I missed. I read every single Portrait of Courage in The Times and so many accounts of people who got out of the towers and stories about people who helped in ways big and small. I immersed myself in the stories of that day and the days afterward that I wasn’t around to see, because I wasn’t in a place where I could see.

I didn’t claim being an artist for a very long time.

Having a chance to go back and do that research before starting the book—it put so much into perspective. It reminded me of the strength and goodness of people, how truly kind we can be to strangers and strangers can be to us. Things got complicated afterwards in ways that the final chapter refers to, but for a moment in time, so many stories were about our shared humanity.

D/AL: Most of the novel is written in close third, but you use the omniscient when we get to Bermuda and then again when we’re back on land. Can you talk about what that opened up for you, to follow the passengers as a collective?

JY: While I wanted the book to be really close to these three characters and for readers to know them well by the time they finished their journey together, the book has always been about something bigger. And I think the final chapter in particular is meant to signal how the world changed after this event, just as individual lives did.

D/AL: Lucy recalls her father bringing her to the National Portrait Gallery and asking: Was any of this art made by people who look like us? Lucy has to decide at this moment whether or not she can pursue her dream. What was it like for you to claim being an artist?

JY: I didn’t claim being an artist for a very long time. In my teens and twenties, the path felt more uncharted than it does now. It wasn’t until in my late 20s that I started to see writers who looked like me, who wrote stories that spoke to experiences similar to my own. I was the kind of person who needed examples of people who shared my identity and “made it” as a writer. I think part of the reason why it took so long to do this work is that it felt risky. And I was brought up to avoid risk, you know, coming from an immigrant family.

My parents were all about stability. You don’t come to this country with nothing and then work like they did to take any more risks. They already did that. So my generation was about building on their efforts and seeking stability, status, wealth, et cetera. Being an artist—that didn’t seem like a good bet. For a long time, it didn’t seem like a good bet, and yet it was the thing that I wanted to do more than anything.

Now, it feels like I’m finally doing exactly what I want to be doing, that my whole adult self is acting on my own desires rather than the desires of others.

This Cocky Stranger Is Offering to Kill for Me

Posted on March 9, 2026March 5, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

An excerpt from Whidbey by T Kira Māhealani Madden

I didn’t know anything about Whidbey Island when I chose it, only that it was far. Only that it would take a great deal of work to get there, and more work to be found. When I say I closed my eyes and pointed to a map, I really mean that. I did. Red votive candle dripping over foil in the center of our dining room table, my girlfriend, Trace, sitting across from me, a full moon over north Brooklyn. Safety, we repeated, a Trace manifestation, and I hovered my hand as if feeling for heat—but when we opened our eyes to Elko, Nevada, it wasn’t exactly far enough, so I moved my finger further west to Whidbey.

One month later Trace flew me to Seattle. We bought the one-way ferry ticket online, drove to the Mukilteo terminal. Then, there was my boat pulling in. Huge and white with a green lid over the top deck windows, a monstrous face to it, the gaping garage. Cars thumped from the ramp onto the ferry as I stepped on board, and it was dark in there, between all that machinery. I rolled my suitcase between cars and cinched my shoulders for better posture, wondering if any of the passengers were wondering about me. Who’s that girl with the practical green suitcase? the faces would ask. What about her?

When I had thoughts this self-dramatizing, which was often, I imagined being hurled down a flight of stairs right after thinking them. Sometimes, knocked out by a mail truck, envelopes bursting onto a wet street. On the boat I followed passengers, and one of them—a gaunt freckled woman smeared white with sunscreen—held a door for me at the side of the garage. Thanks, I said, and trailed her and the others up the damp stairwell, like I knew where we were all going. Rather than carrying my suitcase by the handle, I let it clack-clack on each step, the sound echoing awfully. A few of the people looked back at me, just to see who, I guess. I had to commit to the choice now. I clacked all the way up.

The second door brought us to a passenger seating area, and for a moment I was back in Penn Station. For a moment, I’d never left. A white sign read Upper Deck, and windows dotted the whole perimeter, casting a greenish pale light; tables, bolted between pleather booths, collected glossy half-finished puzzles. The room wafted fried fish and cleaning products, and doors led out to a deck. Out there, the day drizzled sloppily over the parking lot and water. Late May, first breezes of summer, but still a cold that crept up shrewd. People walked past me out onto the deck, no umbrellas or anything; they just stood beneath the rain, jackets darkening. They smiled, white caps melting on the mountains behind them, phones clamped onto sticks.

I found a seat inside at the rear of the boat, and with an uneasy quiet, the glass window vibrated, woke to movement. The shoreline of Washington, the trees, Trace waving from our rented Honda Civic, they all grew smaller.

Children chased each other down the aisle between the ferry’s benches. I flinched at their sounds, their little squawks and shrieks, thump of a tripped sneaker. One child aimed a toy slingshot, and powdery glittering balls arced through the air, fell slowly. Laughter, their mouths all laughing, before a man tiptoed beside them, arms up in a playful shield.

Then he sat across from me.

I’m Rich, he said, extending his hand. He gripped mine in that firm too firm single thrust this is a professional handshake way.

He was handsome, for a man, with black seal-like eyes and a tight stern forehead, hair blown back as if in motion. He carried a plastic drugstore bag lumpy with clothes, which he twisted, then let spin around his wrist. He looked around my age, mid-twenties, Middle Eastern—from where I couldn’t tell—and a bright rope of scar ran up his forearm and into his sleeve. I wondered if he was asked about that scar a lot, maybe the reveal was a benchmark in his romantic endeavors.

Finally, I said, I’m Birdie.

I’d introduced myself with pseudonyms off and on for most of my life, names I’d lifted from films, sometimes historical figures. When forced to sign Greenpeace clipboard petitions, I was Judy Barton. My coffee orders and library books belonged to Mary Ann Zielonko. Online, hotel bookings, mail: Wilma Dean Loomis or Jacy Farrow. It’s good, sometimes, to be another person, one therapist had said, long ago. The sound of my own, true name prickled, an ash in my mouth, and already I knew I was getting away with something. Birdie Chang, I told this man.

Rich was holding a paperback copy of Animorphs, a series I’d loved as a kid. On the cover, the boy in a brown jacket transformed into an eagle in vivid, holographic layers.

Haven’t seen one of those in years, I said, pointing.

He bent the book back and forth in his hands, testing its flexibility. It made no sound. One-dollar cart at Elliott Bay, Rich said. Collected these as a kid. Guess I wanted to take a trip back in time. And you know, the story really holds up. He slapped the book with the back of his hand. There’s some serious literary merit here, he said.

I hated men. More precisely, I hated how a man like Rich could carry a book like Animorphs on a boat, unashamed, gleeful. He could slap it. Some serious literary merit—he could say something like that, and it would be considered refreshing, sweet. What a confident man, my mother, Wendy, would say, not trying to prove a thing. Another woman might note his vulnerable masculinity, of course she would, he’d asked for it. But we were all trying, all the time, I reminded myself. That’s how we become the people we are, impressionistically, chiseling lumps of selfhood off the truer, moldering form. There was always the effort to prove, though only certain people got to do so with pleasure. I tried to reel empathy from any part of myself.

I hated how a man like Rich could carry a book like Animorphs on a boat, unashamed, gleeful. He could slap it.

I used to like that story, too, I said. Same generation, I guess.

It ends sad, he said.

It had to.

Rich spun the bag of clothes again. The plastic left pale ridges across his wrist. He said, what are you, twenty? Twenty-three?

Twenty-eight, I said.

No shit?

Asian genes.

Same, he said, tilting ear to shoulder.

I must have looked confused. I said nothing. There was nothing I could think of to say. Rich waited for me to go on, then smiled. He said: You Stanford sun-hat Asians always gonna forget brown Asians.

I rolled my suitcase directly in front of me, snapped the handle down. Then I wrapped my legs around the sides of it and squeezed, remembering the book that was inside.

You don’t know anything about me, I said.

I think you’re tired, this man said. Real tired.

I am tired.

What do you have going on on the rock?

The rock?

On Whidbey? he said.

Trace and I had rehearsed several potential responses: I was visiting family (boring, no follow-up questions). I was meeting with researchers to study moss and hydrology (for this I’d googled the absolute basics). Always I could default to I don’t speak English, the quickest way to be left alone, forgotten. But Rich was frank and direct and didn’t regard me with pity; no, he didn’t have that pitying scrunch between the eyebrows, the soft tone—it wasn’t there. He knew my real name, and speaking to him felt like a challenge, one I shamefully, senselessly, wanted to pass. So I told him the truth: I’m hiding from someone. From a lot of people.

Rich fanned the corner of the book with the tip of his thumb. Back and forth, tightly, like a deck of cards. He looked right at me, unmoved, elbows on his knees.

Someone, Rich said. He hurt you, or he wants to?

He already did, I said. He’s a pedophile.

Rich didn’t budge. His big seal eyes blinked sleepily. Trace would toss me off the boat if she knew I’d shared this much. My mother would say, You have got to be joking, maybe even get uncharacteristically violent. I knew better than to spill; I knew anyone could be a friend of Calvin’s, maybe someone he’d met inside, someone with my photo and information printed and folded in their wallet. But there were so many lessons I’d never learned in my life, so many mistakes I’d continued to make, and some thrill giving up and into that person.

So you’re hiding? he asked. Why now?

Now people know about it, I said. So he’s back.

I don’t know about it.

Other people know, I said, trust me.

I thought of the book. The photo on the cover. The New York Times Bestseller stickers glinting from her cheeks on the wall display at the airport. Trace had pulled my hand to keep walking. I was supposed to spend the summer on Whidbey to reset and recalibrate unplugged, to find that safety bubble, at last. These were other peoples’ words, but I knew how to use them.

What does this guy say he wants? Rich said.

He says all kinds of stuff. Says he wants to apologize.

Does he, apologize?

Depends.

On what?

On how you see it. How you think of apologies.

So what’s your issue? he asked.

A woman pushed inside from the deck, and the wind fluttered Rich’s hair before the door snapped closed. She was yelling into her phone to someone named Joey, and she said his name a lot: Joey, I said what I said. Listen, Joey, I’m not coming to Ballard, Joey, don’t be so stupid.

The issue, I said, is he finds me. He doesn’t go away. He’s out now, and he writes me—

Words aren’t violence, Rich said. He shook his head.

This is a violent person.

Well, Rich said. You say he’s a pedophile. Why would he care about you now?

I didn’t like somebody else talking about Calvin like he knew him, coolly calling him a pedophile. It was unnerving to hear it so casually with no bulk to it; his tone ground my deliberateness and my fear to dust, the life I’d lived leading to that word of who Calvin was, and the thorned acceptance of what that made me.

You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, I said. I looked him in the eyes.

Oh, there it is, Rich said. He smiled again. There, that’s where it lives.

I looked down at my fingers as if something were stuck there, something to be addressed. My fingertips, frayed from picking. Blood dried in horseshoes around the nail beds. I tried to focus it, the swell, the heat rising inside, a crimp in the gullet. Not the crying kind—but the other feeling. There it is. I looked back up at Rich.

It’s ’cause you’re too nice, Rich said. Guys fuck with girls like you because you let them.

I’d kill him, if I could, I said. I’d shoot him in the dick.

That’s how you’d do it?

The dick, then the head.

Nah, you wouldn’t, he said. Let me guess, you sleep with a gun, right? What kind?

I said nothing. Rich leaned closer. A focused crouch, hands ready, as if dribbling a ball.

Tell me. Smith and Wesson, 38 Special? You sleep with a big boyfriend, too?

I’m a dyke, actually.

Hey, girl, I’m cool with that, he said. Then, a thought behind his face. Slightest twitch at the corner of his mouth before he said it: You’d let him do it again, before shooting him. You don’t have that in you. Guarantee.

You’d let him do it again, before shooting him.

You have no idea, I said, and we sat there for a moment, the fluorescent ticking overhead. The boat slowed. I didn’t go to Stanford, I said.

The woman screamed at Joey some more from a nearby bench. She plugged one ear as she listened to what he had to say. I thought Joey had been a boy, but now it sounded as if he had been a lousy lover and owed her money. She hung up and threw the phone into her big purse, said, Unbelievable, to the rest of us.

Where’s the bad guy live? Rich said.

Florida.

Florida Man.

Don’t shit on Florida, that’s a boring thing to do, I said.

You still live there?

No.

Exactly. So where’s he in Florida?

Do you know what a pervert park is? I said, trying to prove a lax knowledge of my own life. That’s what they call them in Florida. Where he lives. It’s called Gateway to Grace.

I work East Coast a lot—cargo ships, cruise lines, Rich said. I’m down there next week, staying through summer. I got friends in Opa-locka.

What do you do, exactly?

Rich nodded his head like he was thinking. He said: Boats. Marina stuff.

He slapped the book down next to him, then buried his face in both hands, breathing in hard. He flicked the tip of his nose with a thumb. Sniffed. Outside the glass doors of the ferry, a little girl on the deck threw pieces of bread, or crackers, at some gulls that curved down to them. Behind her, the clouds parted a Magic 8 Ball blue.

Well, Rich said, looking up at me. He looked calm, almost sedated. You want me to kill him for you?

I glared at him. His stubble, his dry knuckles. I imagined him snapping off gloves, a dirtied spade, wiping prints from a revolver with a soft, meshy cloth. Then I imagined Calvin—bound and blood battered—screaming for his life in a ditch near the Everglades. A gator would finish him. It was all ridiculous.

I can do it for you, Rich said. It’d be my honor. Even the score in this small way. For the sun-hat nice girls.

He leaned back and crossed one foot over a knee. I crossed mine too. The children in the aisle were gathered by their parents. Backpacks and strollers. Arms flung around necks.

No one would ever connect us—who could connect us? I’d have no reason to kill this guy. But I could. Easy, without a hitch, trust me I could.

What are those people eating? I said. Rich looked outside, where I pointed. The birds multiplied and the little girl screamed. Orange life buoys clung to the deck gates, quivered brightly and weakly as the boat moved.

Probably chowder bowls, he said.

They love chowder here.

It’d be fun actually, Rich said. Taking your guy away.

I liked that he wouldn’t drop it. That he was asking something of me. A permission. He needed me to play along, to assuage some want. I knew what that looked like.

I told you, I was going to kill him, I said.

You don’t have it.

I can be scary, I said. Ask anyone who knows me.

I don’t know anyone who knows you. Then, after a pause, he said, You couldn’t scare anything.

I scare.

Scare me now, Rich said. Come on. Gimme your best. Scare me good.

I looked out the window to the water, the deep blue mat studded with white. An identical ferry passing by. Mount Rainier glowing like a postcard. I once went on a date with a woman who said she’d never get serious with someone who rolled a suitcase. That it was a lazy, humiliating thing to do—to not hold a suitcase by the handle, a proper handsome Samsonite from long ago, luggage with dignity. I didn’t know how to scare this man. I never would.

Are you lying? he said.

I’m not.

You seem like a liar. I just need his name. Gateway to Grace. Give the name. After this we never met. You’ll never hear from me again.

Give me your name, I said.

Rich Amani, he said. Do you trust that I’m a good person?

Absolutely not.

I respect that, he said. That’s fair.

Do you think I’m a good person? I asked. Out of the ferry’s loudspeaker, words clanged, indecipherable. The boat slowed even more. The island: closer.

Good and nice aren’t the same, he shrugged. Does he deserve to die?

He doesn’t deserve to live.

That’s the same thing, Rich said.

I don’t think it is, actually.

Say it, Rich said. Just say it out loud. It’s good for you.

Passengers opened the doors to exit. Cold air trailed through the room, and I pulled my jacket tighter to my chest. The ride was ending, a ramp ahead lowering to the boat, bridging to the rest of my life.

I said, Every day, when I wake up, it’s the first thing I wish for. Him gone.

Well, give the name, then. If you want me to.

I stared at Rich and he stared back. A dare with our eyes, who’d break first. That Disney villain scar, his twisting bag of clothes—I smiled, caught myself, straightened back up, serious now. Scary. Something mirrored between us, but he still didn’t think I could.

Calvin Boyer, I said, and Rich stood as soon as I said it.

Well, that was easy, he said. Birdie, good for you.

He slipped the book in his back pocket and walked away toward the deck.

3 Debut Novelists on Writing the Unconscious and Unconventional

Posted on March 9, 2026March 6, 2026 by Willem Marx

For the late winter (practically spring) edition of our debut craft series, I spoke with three authors who, each in their own way, wrote about refraction and distorted reflections of self in their first novels. The novels feature complicated introspective characters and compelling relationships ranging from a late mother and her twenty-two-year-old almost-graduate daughter in a college town; a missing brother and his wayward sister in San Francisco; and a young woman and a poolside stranger in London.

In Jan Saenz’s 200 Monas, an orgasm-inducing drug wreaks havoc on the life of twenty-two-year-old Arvy. After finding the pills in her late mother’s closet and being confronted by drug dealers with an ultimatum, Arvy embarks upon a quest to sell all 200 capsules in 24 hours. Throughout the cutting prose and action-packed novel, Arvy discovers and unravels things about her mother as much as herself through flashes of memory, grief, and intoxicating entanglements with deep unavoidable emotion.

In American Han by Lisa Lee, set in the early 2000s Bay Area, Jane feels lost and on the verge of dropping out of law school. When her mother appears at her door unannounced, the surprise visit triggers a series of events that induce nostalgia, re-evaluation, and yes, refraction. The novel soon winds through family history, Korean folklore, one life-altering incident, and Jane’s evolving perceptions of her parents and her brother, Kevin, as she reaches for empathy, understanding and, ultimately, finds herself in the attempt.

Finally, refraction becomes perhaps clearest in The Body Builders by Albertine Clarke. The novel begins when Ada meets Atticus at an indoor pool in London. They have a rare, startling encounter—the kind that feels both destined and happenstance simultaneously. She recognizes him, not because he is an older prominent novelist. Instead, Ada recognizes herself in him: “Looking into his face was just like looking in the mirror. It wasn’t that they looked the same.” And through a long profound email correspondence and a trip to Greece with her mother, Ada retreats deeper and deeper into the feeling that someone else is more her than she is.

Jan Saenz, Lisa Lee, and Albertine Clarke are our debut novelists of the 2026 winter craft interview series. The three of them corresponded with me on the seeds of their novels, the artistic universe each exists in, and the potent characters that carried their weight through the many rounds of revisions and fresh drafts.

Kyla D. Walker: Did you know right away that the book would be in present tense? How did this choice affect the novel’s propulsive energy and pace?

Jan Saenz: Oh yeah. I wanted a book that felt cinematic. Positioning Arvy’s voice in present tense created a more urgent, anxious, minute-to-win-it energy, like watching a movie in real time. Likewise, I find that present tense pairs well with transgressive work because of its jarring nature. Past tense can sometimes feel nostalgic, very fond of itself. Present tense doesn’t give a fuck about all that—it hurls the ball at you and says, “Catch.”

KW: Were you intentional about genre or playing with and subverting genre conventions? There is so much humor in the narration (as well as a dark academia background) and thriller aspects with the race against the clock. Were you reading a range of books for research?

JS: Intentional about genre? Not at all. Sometimes I wonder if writing 200 Monas was simply an exercise in making sense of my eclectic taste in books and films. I look at my bookshelf: Who is this weirdo who shelves new adult novels next to transgressive fiction, Elle Kennedy’s The Deal next to Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts? Why is the Dogma screenplay next to Eugene O’Neill, Clive Barker next to Sideways Stories from Wayside School? It sounds pretentious, like I’m so well-read, but I’m actually not—I just like whatever holds my attention, and I don’t think that’s weird. I favor absurdity because, let’s be honest, life is absurd. There is so much abnormality in our normality. I don’t even know what “normal” is; I don’t think I’ve ever felt it. Boring, sure, but normal? There’s no such thing. I didn’t even know 200 Monas was weird until people started calling it weird. I thought it was the most commercial thing I’d ever written.

KW: What was your thought process behind the unique names of the characters such as Arvy and Wolf?

JS: The names came before the characters, like how a mother might name her baby in the womb before meeting the child. Names have a funny way of shaping us. I’m positive that being named “Jan” played a part in my sense of humor. It is not a serious name. I wanted something similar for Arvy—a name that felt at odds with the world, but also fun and inviting. You ever met someone who goes by their nickname? It’s charming and somewhat disarming; you instantly want to be their friend. Wolf’s name fits his character—the tousled hair, the lean, muscular build, the way he moves through campus. It’s fun to imagine Wolf’s name was inspired by Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a feminist text, like maybe his feminist mother was reading it while pregnant.

KW: What was your favorite part of the writing process for 200 Monas? How long did it take from start to finish?

JS: 200 Monas took seven years to write. I’m thankful it took that long because time is one’s greatest revision tool—time brings wisdom, and if you’re lucky, that wisdom will find its way into the manuscript. For example, my favorite scenes to write were not the funny or over-the-top sex scenes, but rather the sweet scenes between Arvy and Wolf. To me, those were the scenes that made the book sexy. Time taught me that sexy isn’t really sexy, not on its own, not without irony. It must be sexy yet tender. Sexy yet flustered. Sexy yet weird. I don’t know if I would have come to that conclusion had I not spent so much time on the novel. In the end, it was irony that made the book sexy: Arvy and Wolf’s sweet, unlikely friendship against the backdrop of a hyper-sexual world.

Kyla D. Walker: When was the moment you felt ready to begin drafting American Han? And what was that initial spark—such as a specific sentence, scene, or possibly the end—that kicked off the writing?

Lisa Lee: I was already writing my PhD dissertation titled Korean American Han when I started writing my novel. I knew I wanted to explore the feeling of han in my book, but I had no intention of naming or defining it. I just wanted to capture the feeling. A couple years earlier, I had presented a paper on han at a conference in Seoul, where I was angrily shouted down by several male Korean professors who insisted that han was a thing of the past, no longer culturally relevant. This may have been true in Korea, but it didn’t match my American experience. I realized that even if han had receded from the Korean psyche by the 90s, it had come to America with my parents’ generation and been passed down, taking a new form, combined with the trauma of immigration and American racism and the pressure to assimilate and forget about the past, and it remains very much alive here.

When I was writing the book, I was trying to understand the anger that had run through my family and myself our whole lives. At home, this anger was so constant it was invisible, but when I expressed it outside of my house I was often shamed for it. Because it was forbidden, I had to understand it.

KW: On that note of home, how did the setting of the Bay Area in the early 2000s help shape the story or the voices that flowed through it?

LL: I grew up in the Bay Area and my identity was formed in the early 2000s. It’s where and when I figured out who I was and who I wasn’t. It was a uniquely misogynistic time, characterized by a backlash to third-wave feminism. For women of color, all this misogyny was compounded by the racism we had faced since forever. It was also the beginning of what would become a lasting transformation of San Francisco because of the influx of tech money. At the beginning of the novel, Jane’s mother is looking for a house but finds that everything is just out of her reach. What she’s seeing is the beginning of a problem that would only get exponentially worse in the coming years. In looking at Jane’s life in that time period, I’m looking back at a world I lived in but can never go back to because it doesn’t exist anymore.

KW: Jane and Kevin’s mother, Mrs. Kim, is such a magnetic character. She plays a poignant role in the novel, perhaps partly because a natural comparison is established between mother and daughter. But she is explained to the reader through Jane’s perception, which is sharp, critical, insightful, and yet naturally limited. What were some of the things you did to capture Mrs. Kim’s voice, desires, and actions on the page in relation to Jane’s?

LL: Jane and her mother are presented as opposites. Jane has built her identity on being nothing like her mother, whom she sees as a narcissistic bully. But Jane begins to see the ways in which they’re similar, and how her mother is trapped by the patriarchy that she tries to force on Jane. While Jane is finding her way out, she feels guilty for leaving her mother behind.

When I created Jane’s mother, I tried to show how lost she was and how much hope and desire she had to get back the life she felt she’d missed out on, and I tried to get that on the page before Jane recognizes it and empathizes with her. Of course, I wanted the reader to understand where Jane was coming from and the damage her mother had done to her, but I also wanted her mother to be understood too.

KW: What did revision look like for American Han? And what was your favorite part of the overall writing process?

LL: I’ve lost count of how many times I revised this book. I don’t even know where to start counting. The first drafts of different stories I wrote while avoiding writing this one? Or the early seeds of what turned into American Han? Were those other stories the early seeds? At one point, I wrote a Harold & Kumar adventure starring Jane Kim and Margaret Cho’s mother. It was meant to be a comedy of errors, but it wasn’t funny. Early revision was about throwing out entire drafts and starting over. Eventually, I figured out that I had to write about what I didn’t want to write about—the sources of the anger in myself and my family—and that’s when the characters came to life.

My favorite part of the writing process is not the beginning when it’s new, and definitely not the end with all the rounds of editing. I like the middle, when I know the characters and I know where I’m going. At that point, I’m cutting a lot and filling in a lot, polishing scenes, adding detail to the characters and their motivations. It’s when I feel most confident and productive.

Kyla D. Walker: When was the moment you felt ready to begin drafting The Body Builders? And what was that initial spark—such as a specific sentence, scene, or possibly the end—that kicked off the writing?

Albertine Clarke: I had been living in Florida for about six months (having moved from London for my MFA) when I began the novel. I think the distance from my home gave me space to analyze it—certain experiences I’d had in my early twenties were suddenly framed by the past. I was sitting at my kitchen table, so lonely and so homesick, bored, at a loss, totally alienated in a new environment. I spent a lot of time reminiscing, and out of this I started writing a little short story about a young girl who thinks she’s a middle-aged man, but the man she thinks she is, has also been grooming her. The image was so powerful, like a jolt of electricity. I’d struck on a metaphor which allowed me to talk about experiences I’d had in a way that allowed for the full complexity and confusion to come through. What began as a story about abuse transformed into something more open and more empathetic, but it definitely started with anger.

KW: Were you intentional about genre or subverting genre conventions? There is so much play between surrealism and the slipperiness of the self through the act of reflection (along with symbols of swimming pools and islands).

AC: The genre-melding is possibly the only part of the novel that was completely intentional. Philip K. Dick was my inspiration, specifically Valis, the novel he wrote about his experience with schizophrenia. What I like about that book is that he flips himself inside out, imagining a world where his delusions become truth. That’s exactly what I wanted to do with The Body Builders. What if the things I felt were materially real? What if by feeling them, I made them real? Speculative fiction felt like the only place I could explore those possibilities.

More than any books, my inspiration was psychotherapy. As the book developed, I became obsessed by the relationship between literature and the logic, or structure, of the unconscious mind. The genre I was working in became a way for me to follow a self-directed dreamlike formula, where Ada is, in a sense, living inside her own head. The world warps and bends to the way she feels about it. I like this because it allowed me to keep images completely intact, without reconstruction or explanation. My ultimate goal became to imprint my own unconscious, as directly as I could, onto the page, as if it was a dream.

KW: What was the significance of the names Ada and Atticus?

AC: Ada is palindromic, which is important to me because she is so elliptical. Her mother and father read her from opposite directions, getting opposite sides of the same coin. Atticus I liked because it’s Greek, which linked to the Greek section of the novel. I liked drawing these lines between Ada and Atticus, keeping them connected.

KW: Which novels or films do you feel The Body Builders is most in dialogue with?

AC: If Philip K. Dick is my literary father, then Natalia Ginzburg is my mother. Her novella The Dry Heart maps quite directly onto the first half of The Body Builders. She has a way of keeping her characters in utter confusion as to their own motivations, while showing those same motivations clearly to the audience. And, if they are my parents, Kurt Vonnegut is my grandfather. Slaughterhouse-Five does exactly what I wanted to do.

In terms of cinema, I mostly watch sci fi and action movies. Aesthetically films like Minority Report, Blade Runner, The Matrix, and 2001: A Space Odyssey have had a huge impact, especially when it comes to depictions of futuristic technology. Implants, androids, virtual realties all strike me as potent metaphors, all of which are present in The Body Builders. There’s a satisfying dialectical opportunity in the playing out of what-if scenarios—what if my body was fake? What if everybody else is fake? What would I do? What would I learn about myself? If I take away what I think is real, what is left underneath?

Queering the Wilderness in a Debut Novel

Posted on March 6, 2026March 9, 2026 by EL Assistant2

Melissa Faliveno’s debut, Hemlock, is a queer, atmospheric novel about addiction, memory, and the ways family history embeds itself in the body. The book follows Sam, a woman in her late thirties who leaves her life in Brooklyn to spend time alone at her family’s remote cabin in the Wisconsin Northwoods. The trip is meant to be temporary and practical, a chance to prepare the cabin for sale, but isolation, landscape, and unresolved grief begin to unsettle her sense of stability.

As Sam drifts back toward drinking, the novel blurs the line between psychological unraveling and something stranger. The woods feel watchful, time becomes unreliable, and Sam’s inner life fractures into memories, bodily sensations, and moments of dissociation. Encounters with other women, some grounding, some destabilizing, offer connection but also complicate her understanding of desire, caretaking, and survival.

Moving between sobriety and relapse, past and present, Hemlock explores how addiction operates not only as a personal struggle but as an inheritance shaped by family silence, loss, and place. Rather than offering clear answers or redemption arcs, the novel sits with uncertainty, asking what it means to return home, to confront what has been avoided, and to decide moment by moment whether survival looks like escape, surrender, or transformation.

In this conversation, I spoke with Faliveno about the leap from nonfiction to fiction, the strange relief of writing “just for fun” before the market enters the room, and what it means to write addiction and desire with both tenderness and teeth. We talk about the book’s purposeful collapse of technology, the pleasures (and risks) of writing sex, the pressure to write only what you “know,” and the quiet grief of finishing a project that has been yours alone. What emerges is a portrait of a writer chasing honesty through invention and using fiction’s distance to get closer to the truth.

Samantha Mann: How was the transition from Tomboyland to Hemlock—specifically, from writing nonfiction to fiction.

Melissa Faliveno: I wasn’t planning on writing fiction. I’d dabbled, short stories, a few failed novel drafts, but nothing serious, but as I was finishing Tomboyland, two things happened. One, I was over writing about myself in such a deeply personal, vulnerable way. And two, I got this kernel of an idea for a story and started writing it. I’d received advice that really stuck with me: when your first book goes into production, make sure you’re working on something else. Hemlock became the “something else,” even before I knew what it was.

I turned in the Tomboyland manuscript, went back to New York, did a summer writing challenge, and kept going. The story started taking on its own shape, and I was having a ton of fun. I kept telling myself, “This isn’t a book. I’m just playing.” Then I suddenly had a 300-page manuscript and thought, “Okay, maybe this is something.” I sent it to my agent and said, “Give it to me straight. Is this worth pursuing, or should it go in a drawer forever?” She said, “This is great. Keep working.”

I didn’t say out loud that I was writing a novel for a long time. I kept it a secret. I didn’t want to name it and have it not happen.

SM: Hearing you talk about “having fun” is really interesting. A lot of writers I know—myself included—struggle once we start publishing. It flips from “this is enjoyable to me” to “what do people want from me?” My mind is always asking, “What’s sellable? Marketable?” How did you stay in that place of just following the fun?

I didn’t say out loud that I was writing a novel for a long time. I didn’t want to name it and have it not happen.

MF: That’s true for me too. I think the key was that I didn’t put weight on it. I genuinely wasn’t assuming it would become a book. I thought it might just be for me, something cathartic after spending ten years on Tomboyland. When I write essays, it often feels like everything is riding on them: it has to be my best work, it has to find readers, it has to do something. With the novel draft, there were no expectations. Nothing was riding on it. That’s what kept it fun.

It got harder once someone in the industry validated it, and once it became “a novel we can sell.” Then it became work. But fiction still felt liberating. I got to experiment. I loved writing dialogue and getting to know characters. I’d walk around imagining conversations between characters. It was exciting to use new craft muscles that I didn’t use in nonfiction.

SM: That feels like an important note: giving yourself permission to play, even after you’ve been publishing. That’s such a gift.

MF: It is, and I lose it all the time. I’m writing an essay right now for a low-stakes community project I love, and I’m still stressed because I want other writers I admire to think it’s great. There’s no money involved; it’s just going online. But the pressure creeps in anyway. I’m writing an essay about the Counting Crows, and I should be having fun. Instead I’m stressed.

SM: I love how you drag the publishing industry in the novel. Here is a great quote from Sam (the main character) as she sums up her time in the publishing world, “I honestly don’t know what’s good or bad, just who people like and who they don’t.” This does feel spot on about the current state of, and lack of, true literary critique at the moment. What do you think that does—good or bad—for writers and for publishing?

MF: I worked for a small publisher in Wisconsin for a couple years, and then I worked at Poets & Writers magazine for about eight years, so I got an education, good and bad. On one hand, there’s not much actual criticism anymore. I never really know what’s good or not in a critical sense, and I don’t trust that people are telling me what they truly think about my work. That’s a problem. On the other hand, when those one-off drags of authors do happen, I’m like, “Why did you do that? What was the point?” Sometimes it makes sense when it’s aimed at a massive bestseller and the author is making millions. But when it hits a new or emerging writer, I wonder about the point.

SM: You’re highlighting the difference between real critique and bad-faith reviews, which is more common, and I think writers are increasingly nervous about these bad-faith readings. Did you worry about that with Hemlock? Did you find yourself pre-editing because you could imagine people misinterpreting pieces of the novel on purpose?

MF: I was less worried about people misreading on purpose and more worried about whether I’d written something . . . bad. As it went into production, that anxiety spiked: “Did I write a piece of crap?” There’s a talking animal in the novel, was that a cliché? Isn’t that a rule you’re not supposed to break? I also worried about writing about addiction and relapse “right.” I’m not someone who’s been in recovery programs my whole life, so I was writing from a newer, more alive part of my own relationship to alcohol while also writing about inheritance and history, which I do feel like an expert on. I was afraid of not getting it right. But the more people I talked to, the more I realized there isn’t one “right” way to be an addict, be sober, relapse, or struggle. There are so many versions.

SM: That reminds me of something Zadie Smith speaks about during her Fresh Air interview, the current pressure in fiction to write from your experience. This idea that people should “stay in their lane.” Do you feel that pressure? Or do you still feel creative openness?

MF: I go back and forth. For my first real go at fiction, it mattered to me that the main character shared aspects of my experience like queerness, body stuff, place, and some proximity to substance use. But there are other characters beyond my identity. Writing Lou-Ann, who is Ojibwe, was something I took really seriously. I know Ojibwe people; they’re friends, but I still stressed: “Am I getting her right? Am I giving her space to be fully alive on the page, not just in service of Sam’s growth?” That mattered a lot.

Am I queer enough to write these queer characters?

I had moments where I thought, “It’s not my story to tell.” But talking to my students helped. Some of them feel like they can’t write beyond their identity. And I’m like, “Of course you can, you just have to do it well.” I tell them that, and then I wrestle with the same question. Saying it aloud to young writers made me go, “Okay. I need to believe this too, and hold myself to doing it well.”

SM: Without spoiling too much, I was surprised, and delighted, at how you queered up the already queer sex scene. How was it writing the sex scene? I imagine it as awkward and difficult to pull off.

MF: I was nervous writing it. And some of that is internalized: “Am I queer enough to write these queer characters?” But writing desire and flirtation was so fun, all the little details, the brush of skin, heat off someone’s body. There’s a jukebox scene that felt really sexy to write. And I needed validation. Melissa Febos called it sexy in her blurb, and I also had queer friends tell me it felt sexy, so that helped.

SM: It’s such a vulnerable act. If you write a bad paragraph about your main character Sam alone in the woods, the reader moves on, but if you write bad sex, it will haunt you.

MF: Exactly.

SM: Hard pivot: I loved the near-total collapse of technology in the book. It was so freeing! Sam’s phone is dead or almost never works and she can’t call anyone. How intentional was that?

MF: Very intentional, and based on real experience. When I was finishing Tomboyland in the woods of Wisconsin, I stayed alone in a cabin with no Wi-Fi and almost no cell service. And then, inexplicably, the cell service would disappear at night. No one really knows why; it’s always been like that. It was terrifying, especially at night, knowing if something happens, no one will hear me scream, and I can’t call anyone. But during the day it was also liberating. No email, no social media, just me and my work and the natural world. I wanted that mix: fear and freedom, two sides of the same coin.

SM: That detail about the cell service magically switching off at night being a part of your true experience is so wild. It is the part that sounds made up to fit nicely in the story. That is why I’ll forever be a nonfiction girl.

MF: Totally true. They’ve since installed Wi-Fi and I was devastated. Like, great, now we can’t fully go off the grid even in a remote place.

SM: Throughout the book, Sam has these moments where a specific word or phrase drops into her mind and pulls her somewhere—into memory, into meaning, sometimes it helps her discover a new piece of herself. How did that develop? Was it a device?

MF: It wasn’t until deep revisions that I realized how central language is—names, naming, definitions. Early on, Sam’s dad says something like: if you build something or love something, you have to give it a name. They name the cabin Hemlock. Hemlock itself has multiple meanings: the poison plant, but also the hemlock tree species which are threatened in parts of the U.S. That mattered to me. Sam isn’t “endangered” yet, but she’s threatened. If something doesn’t change, she could become endangered.

There are also lines of poems that return to her. Part of it is that her past is a void because of drinking, trauma, and not looking at it. But in the liminal state of being drunk, hungover, and in-between she can access threads of herself she’s lost like underlining text in a book, a poem line, a word fragment.

I was also interested in the threshold between light and dark, staying in the clearing versus stepping into the woods. Overall I was interested in multiplicity: that words, bodies, experiences, places don’t have one meaning.

SM: That seems to connect to the larger themes of sexuality, sobriety, family, and home, in which by the end of the book you offer multiple ways to hold them, but you don’t resolve any of them into one “answer.”

In essays, I’m not trying to give answers. I’m trying to ask more complicated questions. I wanted the novel to do that too.

MF: That was the point. That’s where my nonfiction and fiction intersect most. In essays, I’m not trying to give answers. I’m trying to ask more complicated questions. I wanted the novel to do that too. And yes, some readers will be frustrated, especially if they go in expecting a thriller. People keep calling it a thriller and I’m like, “Guys, you’re not going to be thrilled.”

SM: I was intellectually thrilled! What books were you reading that felt important while working on Hemlock?

MF: My weird North Star was Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. I love that book, the addiction, self-harm, the unreliable narrator, the dread, the “going home where the trauma lives.” And it has this Midwestern/Southern Gothic atmosphere. I wanted to write a Midwestern Gothic. Also: Liz Moore’s Long Bright River. Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues. I read it for the first time while revising and felt like, “I wish I’d found it sooner, but I’m glad I found it exactly now.” The way Feinberg writes about class, body, butchness, rural vs. city it’s all in Hemlock. I read Louise Erdrich’s novels, especially The Round House. And Richard Powers’ The Overstory, which is this epic novel about trees.

SM: This book tackles the impossible task of processing grief, and putting a book out into the world after you’ve spent so much time in a non-public space with it could be its own moment of grieving. It had me thinking about that Nora Ephron list, “What I’ll Miss and What I Won’t.” What will you miss about actively working on this novel, and what won’t you miss?

MF: What I’ll miss is being completely alone with it. How it felt like mine and mine alone, almost secret. Unlike previous work, no one was reading it as I went. I wasn’t sending it to friends. It was just me and the story and the characters. It was lovely to have something untouched by anyone else’s opinions. And I’ll miss returning, in my mind, to that place, those woods, and re-embodying my relationship to Wisconsin and the North Woods. It felt spiritual in a way writing hasn’t always felt for me.

What I won’t miss is reentering grief and trauma both mine and other people’s. Some story elements were inspired by real stories. Revisiting certain emotional spaces was hard. And I think the book forced me to confront my relationship with alcohol. I didn’t start writing it thinking it was about me in that way. But as I wrote Sam, things became clear. There were moments of revelation. Also, during revisions, someone close to me died. He struggled with addiction for a long time. It ended up taking him, and he killed himself. When that happened, I had this epiphany: this could have been my future too. That was a brutal realization, but also useful. It’s part of what made me think, “Maybe I should take a break from drinking.”

In many ways, fiction gave me space to access truths I hadn’t been able to access in nonfiction. It was like looking at another person’s life, and then realizing how much of that past was mine. It mattered for me as a writer and as a person.

7 Poetry Books That Expand What an Elegy Can Look Like

Posted on March 6, 2026March 5, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

An elegy, D. A. Powell writes in an essay titled “Structures of the Elegy,” is a “paradise of remembering.” Twelve years after my mother passed, as I began work on my book, Fifty Mothers, I kept asking myself, how could I converse with her through poems? How could I remember her, not just to mourn, but to show her the everything of our world: how we still go to the movies, get on airplanes, share a plate of vada sambar, with her voice urging us on, teasing us, keeping us rooted in the living.

My first book, Mother Tongue Apologize, contained poems that were tightly tied to the moment of my mother’s passing. Those poems felt raw, hot, and urgent to write. Growing from that suite, with the urge to resurrect a mother speaker’s voice, I wondered how my grief had transformed with the passage of time, with the thawing of anger. My poems became interested in grief not as an incident but experience. Working on Fifty Mothers, I sought other contemporary works that explore how the lens of time shifts the nature of grief, especially in the context of familial relationships and the physical body. I was trying to find ways to blend memoir into elegy, flow between narrative and lyric. I wondered how other poets balanced the joys of the living world while honoring the gone. How did they write about their family members, rendering each person they wrote about not only as their relationship to the dead, but in their full humanity?

The books that inspired me constantly, included in this list, blew open the possibilities of what an elegy can sound and look like. Whether the poets wrote into personal or communal grief, grief of family or nation or historical systems of oppression, I was inspired by these poets’ commitment to voice, to form, to play, to blend levity with seriousness, to be direct while being tender.

Rooms Are Never Finished by Agha Shahid Ali

In perhaps his most personal collection, Rooms Are Never Finished, the brilliant and gone-too-soon poet Agha Shahid Ali wrote about the death of his mother and the journey of bringing her deceased body back from America to a violence-torn Kashmir. In this volume, as in a lot of his work, he explored the interwovenness of grief and exile, illuminating the strong connection between his mother and his homeland. Ali writes, “For whatever city I fly to, even/that of my birth, you//aren’t there to welcome me. And any city/I am leaving— even if one you’ve never/seen— my parting words are for you alone. For/ where there is farewell, /you are there.”

Obit by Victoria Chang

After her mother died, poet Victoria Chang refused to write elegies. Rather, she distilled her grief in two weeks by writing poems as obituaries for all she had lost in the world. She wrote obituaries for home, form, music, appetite, memory. The obituaries become a conduit for self-expression in the face of loss. I was fascinated by this new form to meditate over sorrow. The poems with their lyrical wit reminded me to expand my energies beyond fixating on the moment of death, and towards witnessing the living. She writes, “My/memory of my mother’s death can’t be/ a memory but is an imagination, each time the wind blows, leaves unfurl a/ little differently.” The book became my guide in exploring the kaleidoscopic potentials of love and loss.

Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s 2007 poetry collection, chronicles the year after her son’s passing from an accidental drug overdose. With deft soundwork and strange images, she expresses this profound grief through sixty-four lyrics that investigate how memory of the departed haunts the living. “You/A child, then a man, now a feather/Passing through a furious fire/Called time.” To get closer to the gone son, Bang apostrophizes him repeatedly, desperate for closeness, yet the poems point to the inadequacy of language itself in transcribing the depth and fullness of grief. “Words keep slipping away, so many / Ice blocks in a scene of whiteness.” Hopefulness and resignation reside side by side, creating a tapestry of loss and love.

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen is an exploration of family, identity, and the shapeshifting nature of grief. It centers the devastating disappearance of a brother, gone by suicide. She explores the aftermath of loss, especially absence, through family photos from which her late brother had cut himself out. The shape of his excised body ghosts throughout the poems, sometimes cutting through the text, sometimes containing the poems. The text fractures, spills, wraps around, duplicates, begins again, embodying the everlasting ceaselessness of grief. “There is a house in me. It is empty. I empty it. / Negative space: the only native emptiness there is.” Even if the remembering is painful and urgent, her voice is bold and compassionate.

Book of Hours by Kevin Young

Kevin Young’s Book of Hours is a profound and musical exploration of grief and endurance. A decade after the sudden loss of the poet’s father, we witness the unfolding of his grief. “In the night I brush / my teeth with a razor,” he writes, in a cutting two-line poem. I’ve long admired Young’s brevity and sharpness to express emotional tension. What I was swept by in this book was its chronicling of the poet’s father’s death alongside the bewildering joy of a child’s birth. It showed me how love and joy can be pondered within one poem, within one book. These poems reckon with recognizing loss even in the happiest moments.

My Baby First Birthday by Jenny Zhang

Instead of death, the poems in Jenny Zhang’s My Baby First Birthday elegize how one has no choice in their birth. They center the acceptance of pain that comes with motherhood and girlhood. Using what may be considered by some as profane and vulgar imagery, the poems shock and devastate and make you laugh and introspect. The voice is irreverent and prolific through an abundance of registers. Zhang writes, “my mother had two vaginas/one to birth me and one to keep me.” And, “my cunt gets leashed to a tree / and waves hello to everyone / like hi like hi like hi hi hi.” The poems question the way we feminize and racialize nurturing, and live in service of other people’s dreams. They reveal how we fetishize womanhood and reduce women to their violations, traumas, and body parts. It urged me to think about the epidemic of patriarchal fear in my own matrilineage, especially as pertaining to chronic illness and physical beauty.

The Dead and the Living by Sharon Olds

I love the moment in a poem when narrative transforms to lyric. Acute observation to horizonless devotion. Sharon Olds is magnificent at this sorcery. As The Dead and the Living explores life, death, family trauma, and love, she honors both the deceased and the vitality of the living bodies. In a poem talking about the speaker’s daughter’s pajamas, she writes, “the fine material/gathered in rumples like skin the caterpillar/ramped out of and left to shrivel.” Olds’s work, with its keenly observed images and unmissable music, invites me to pay attention to commonplace objects as sources that ignite manifestos of growth, and of love.

Masking My Autism Made Me Sick

Posted on March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

My Missing Words by Sarah Jane Cody

“I feel too much,” I confessed to Noel early on in our relationship. I had no other words for it, but it felt important, like maybe I should try to warn him. Shortly after we began dating, I lay down on the ground outside a coffee shop unable to explain the intense, dizzying sensations that overwhelmed me.

I had felt cramped and pressed-upon inside, the lights too bright, the espresso machine too loud, the people too—well, too much. Besides that, we were having a disagreement. A passionate debate about existential philosophy—you know, ordinary couple stuff. From Noel’s perspective, the situation appeared odd, even slightly suspect: What kind of girl lies down in a parking lot because she’s upset about ideas?

It did not register to either of us as a medical episode. But I had temporarily lost the ability to speak, and so, I did not respond as he pleaded for me to, please, get up.

“I’m sorry,” I managed, after a while. “I just . . . need a minute . . . I don’t feel well.”

Similar instances of dizziness, wordlessness, or other physical symptoms in combination with my emotional distress had mostly only occurred with my family before and had, easily enough, been brushed off. It’s not like my parents didn’t worry about me—they were loving and attentive—but they were as much at a loss to understand my behavior as I was. My embarrassment and confusion at how out of control I felt meant I made little attempt to explain myself. I think the familiar narrative of a kid acting out—being “dramatic”—gave my parents at least some comfort, the possibility that this was normal, a phase, and would therefore pass.

I could tell Noel none of this, given my difficulty speaking. I only knew that if I rested, I would recover. Graciously, he stayed by my side. He didn’t understand, but he stayed.

Even at 19, his genuine willingness to understand set him apart from other people. I’d never had a boyfriend before. I learned from an early age to attempt to hide my differences and was terrified of letting anyone in.

One of the few journal entries that survived my shame-filled purges reveals my overbearing sense of responsibility as I debated whether or not I could “allow” myself to date him:

I really like Noel, but I can’t put my burdens on him.

I hurt without meaning to.

For almost four years, I had also battled a chronic illness that evaded medical diagnosis. Persistent pains, continual fatigue, nausea, and a variety of mysterious, hard-to-explain symptoms vied for dominance of my body. After countless tests in which my body was probed like an alien’s resulted in nothing, my doctors had one-by-one given up, dubbing me “overly sensitive,” as if I was merely imagining my symptoms. Or worse: as if it was my fault.

During that period, I became prone to wild meltdowns and panic attacks—though I did not know to use either of those words back then. I felt wholly responsible for the toll on my family, but I continued to beg them for help because I didn’t know where else to turn. My need for help exhausted them.

In between journaling my anxieties about Noel, I jotted a date I desperately awaited to see a distinguished specialist.

Have hope.

My mom, who had picked up on my feelings for Noel and knew how rigid I could be, counseled me: “You’re just deciding to date, not getting married.”

I only knew that if I rested, I would recover.

Well, Mom, we did get married, I think now, feeling secretly proud that I was so discerning.

But the truth is, it sometimes frightens me that I was so cautious I nearly missed my chance at a love that is beautiful beyond what I could’ve imagined.

“Wait,” I say, rousing from a nightmarish daydream imagining all the possible me’s who never made it to where I am now, the me’s who maybe didn’t make it at all, the me’s who never found out the truth.

The lie that I am too sensitive has been told to me for my entire life. The implication is: If I would simply stop being so sensitive, I would be fine. There is a contradiction herein: the claim that there is both something innately wrong with me, and nothing is wrong at all. I am the cause of my own wrongness.

I never cared much about fitting in as a little girl. When kids my age came to my house asking to play with me, I would often sigh and ask my mom, “Do I have to?” I found most other children to be frustrating, bewildering, and loud, and I often preferred to be alone, though I did love my two siblings. During grade-school recess, I liked to sit quietly on the lone picnic bench near the teachers, until the teachers told me I was no longer allowed to sit during time meant for activity. I proceeded to spend the time walking in circles around the fenced perimeter of the play yard, avoiding the central chaos. When the teachers, performing rescue, found another quiet, bookish girl to be my friend, I embraced her as one of my own kind; we walked circles together.

What I cared about was being good. I cared about staying safe. Seemingly a million invisible rules governed how a child should behave, some of which I had managed to pick up on, but others I sensed I had not. These rules lay in wait to suddenly be wielded, usually by an adult, but sometimes by other children, with punishing tones. Worse, the rules made no sense.

Looking back, adults in particular have a terrible habit of labeling as “good” what is merely convenient for them, of painting as “good” what is really just their standard for normal. The rules dictated that I hide. Not just my sensitivity, but my essential being in the world, the strangeness of my mind and social bearing, how my body wanted to move in space, the songs ever brimming in my throat. I hide so automatically that even now it pains me to write these words. My first clear memory is of hiding.

The circumstances of the memory—the house we lived in, and my awareness that the neighbors recently moved away—put me at age four. I am squeezed into the nook between my bed and the wall, rocking and biting my arms. It’s important that you understand I am not biting out of a desire to harm myself but, rather, because the sharp of my teeth pressing into my flesh is soothing, and I’m feeling a terrible kind of pain, a pain I will only many years later identify as sadness. I know, though I don’t entirely understand why, that I must not let anyone see my behavior.

Throughout my life, I have often lifted this memory from my trove and wondered at it. Why, of all the things my brain might have latched, did it keep this one? Why did it feel so important?

I had no fear of anyone walking in and discovering me, seeing as I was well-concealed. If one of my parents were to open the door, I would have had time to compose myself before coming out from behind the bed.

How does a four-year-old learn to compose herself?

My parents never meant to teach me this hiding; I know that. But the world teaches a child, especially a highly observant child like I was. And my parents, too, have their own ways of concealing things, especially when they believe doing so can keep the people they love safe. (Mom’s lymphoma treatment—made to seem so benign that her friend later mistakenly remarked, “You were never sick!” The deaths Dad undoubtedly witnessed working at the hospital.)

As I grew up, my hiding became increasingly difficult. It was the neuropsychiatrist who diagnosed me with autism in my early thirties who pointed out that it’s no coincidence that my illness began when I was a teenager, a time of dramatically heightened social pressure. I both wanted to live in the world of my peers and didn’t. I wanted to be someone who could succeed in the adult world, fall in love—but to do that, I seemed to have to pretend.

There’s a word for my special kind of hiding—masking, or the ability to conceal one’s autistic traits to get by in typical society. It takes an enormous amount of energy, tamping myself down all the time, trying to hold myself in, within the erasing dark of my interior, where no one will see the unacceptability of me. Masking also required me to deny what were and are very real needs. But for almost two more decades, I wouldn’t know.

Back to age 19.

Noel didn’t need a label to make sense out of me. He recognized that the girl who wrote poetry about the profundity of the wind and danced along to music only she could hear was inseparable from the one who seemed to be deeply and easily wounded by the ordinary things of the world. He told me he loved that I felt things so immensely, though he wished I didn’t have to suffer. He assured me that loving me meant all of the parts of me, including when I was hurting.

I felt as if I had spent my whole standing on one side of an impassable gap—with the rest of the world standing across the way—and suddenly, there Noel was, standing in the same place as me. It wasn’t because Noel was like me, but because he had done what no one else did: crossed the distance.

Slowly, despite my resistance, I began to reveal my secrets to him. We spent hours wandering the empty starlit college campus, discussing the mechanics of time and the universe. He grew accustomed to me getting sick, needing quiet, and disappearing into a blanket cocoon. He knew my code: “I don’t feel well,” which could either mean that I was ill or else feeling “too much.”

What I cared about was being good. I cared about staying safe.

Still, I worried I would eventually reveal something that would be too much for even him to handle.

Some revelations were relatively innocuous, such as my tendency to comically seal myself within numerous blankets, robes, sashes tied tight, etc., whenever I’m not in public; see also, my conviction that he is attempting to go to war with me if he turns on any fans.

Others could be scary, like the time I ran, heedless of the trees that I crashed into, so far into the woods behind our college campus that I became lost and had to locate landmarks to figure out where I was.

With Noel beside me, something remarkable happened. My health improved. Not completely. I continued to deal with chronic pain and was sick—a catchall term—off and on. But the intensity and frequency of my symptoms lessened significantly.

What was this magic? Did love save the woman? At the time, I was so relieved that I didn’t question it.

I am not such a mystery. With Noel, I was unmasking. Even if I was just doing so with one person, it enabled me to heal parts of myself and be stronger.

I am part of what is known within the autism community as the lost generation.

Because we were missed—some as kids and others for their entire lives. We lacked potentially life-saving knowledge about ourselves.

The seemingly sudden increase in recent autism diagnoses is directly tied to changes in diagnostic criteria and better identification; efforts indented to capture people like me, people for whom a diagnosis offers not only vital awareness but also the potential for better care and access to resources (although adequate support for autistic people remains lacking, one major source of support I’ve found is the autistic community itself.)

I can only speak for myself, but what is within that loss goes deep. Loss dwells not only in the past but also in the future. The unanswerable question: If I had only known, what then . . . ?

And yet to know enables hope. I look back so that I look again with hope.

If I had known . . . could I have spared us the hurt?

There is a period Noel and I refer to as “a difficult time,” in the hushed tones of people wary of summoning a ghost. There is no clean chronology of events leading up to it, but first, with the optimistic abandon of two young people in love, we graduated college, got married, and moved, all within three months, to New York City, a place I’d never seen and would have never imagined living in were it not for my trust in Noel.

At the worst of it, I experienced a profound loss of language—loss of my ability to write.

“You must really love each other,” snarked the realtor when we signed the lease to inhabit 175 square feet together. I almost never opened the curtains in that first crummy apartment—too overwhelming outside. I listened to the same atmospheric song on repeat to block out the street noise.

But the City was magic too. I felt free to dance in the daytime along the sidewalks, glad for the anonymity. On nights in dingy, smelly bars, I danced and sang onstage alongside the electric pulse of Noel’s synth keyboard. We held “philosophy parties” on the floor with a couple of friends passing around a bottle of Two Buck Chuck while rhapsodizing about our favorite artists and thinkers and our dreams that we, too, might unleash a little bit more beauty within the wounded world. The city was legendary, a hub of art and culture, a bubble of seeming acceptance as long as we stuck to certain crowds, but also a war between flagrant excess and brutal scarcity. Its unlivability lent us a kind of badge-wearer’s pride: Here we were, among so many others, living despite.

In retrospect, I also consider these things: The evenings I spent pressed to the cool porcelain of the bathtub, fully dry, feeling that I could not rise. How I kept needing to escape into the bathroom at work due to stomach pain. How my office job mystified me compared to school. The difference was that school had clear rules. As long as I followed the requirements for each subject and put in the work, I made top marks every time. This made school relatively easy and completely unlike life.

It’s worth noting that I did not consider the social element to be part of school, but, rather, a distraction. An accident of all of us students having to be in the same place together in order to achieve school’s true aim—that we learn and perform on exams. The politics of work, however, were largely social.

On my arrival at slim bookstore cafes for an event or to meet a friend, people often asked me what was wrong. “Nothing,” I would say. “I’m just recovering.” Don’t you also have to wear a kind of armor just to get through this place?

Three years into our marriage, I descended into a profoundly disabling bout of illness. I spent months mostly bed-bound, unable to work or do much of anything, fighting back confusing pains, horrific nausea, and extreme anxiety. At the worst of it, I experienced a profound loss of language—loss of my ability to write. To string words into a complete sentence producing meaning, beyond what ordinary language I used (less since I was in bed) for mundane daily speech, seemed an impossible task.

Cue again the endless doctors and medical professionals. It seemed they all shrugged. Even the fact of my recent medication change, which I now believe had a major detrimental effect, was viewed dubiously and handled with carelessness.

Here is some of what they missed:

There was the therapist who laughed at me because I liked to sit with my heavy backpack squashed against my body in the chair while I jotted down everything he said in a notebook, because writing things down helps me process spoken information. When he took my notebook away, because he believed I was “neurotic,” that my writing was part of whatever must be wrong with me, I felt so terrible—robbed of the ability to think and communicate—that I lay down on the carpeted floor for the rest of the session, unable to speak.

Here is a word I now know: shutdown.

There was another therapist who declared that I was completely out of touch with my emotions and only knew how to approach my feelings through logic. She didn’t offer any hypotheses as to why. Or much help.

A word I now know: alexithymia. Difficulty recognizing, experiencing, or expressing one’s feelings. Linked to this is also my tendency to confuse my emotions with bodily sensations. Hunger arrives as sadness. Anxiety is instead chest pain.

There was the psychiatrist who, when I asked, “But why do I feel better when I hum,” glared at me with what I can only call a sick-of-dealing-with-crazy-people expression. “I have no idea,” he said. “Now, which medication do you want to try?” He meant benzodiazepines or SSRIs. Apparently, the choice was up to me, a young woman who knew next to nothing about the drugs.

Word: stimming. (My humming).

I don’t blame most of the doctors. Some, like the above, were clearly irresponsible, but others really tried. What I was up against, in one way of looking at it, was time. I was of the lost generation.

I pieced together the fragments of the girl and woman I was with this new word, autism, and I saw.

My dad is a doctor, a radiologist, which if you don’t know, means handling a great deal of X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs—the physical evidence of the body. Dad was quite good at his job until he retired at 66, known to friends for having been able to unofficially but accurately and precisely diagnose broken bones and other conditions given a list of symptoms over the phone. That he could not figure out his own daughter was devastating.

“I used to wish I could put myself inside what you were feeling,” he told me once. “Then maybe I would be able to figure it out.”

Only in looking back can we see.

I was now in my mid-twenties, and I felt skinless.

Having pulled through my latest medical hell, I was left trying to reassemble a self. The idea that I was skinless explained to me why it was that I felt too much compared to other people, like I was missing an essential barrier that other people naturally have. It was the fundamental problem of me, the cause of everything that had gone wrong.

Naturally, I began writing a novel. Writing has always been my foremost means of understanding and expression. Before I learned to write in words, I loved to lie for hours within the tent of my bedsheets while imagining vibrant stories.

However, I felt that I could not write about myself. If I’d ever had words for myself—which I questioned—I felt that the words had been forcefully taken from me. The doctors and their belittlements, together with a society that denied me, had left me questioning my own authority. I no longer felt that I had claim to my own experiences.

Instead, I wrote fiction. I created a fictional skinless woman. Because she wasn’t me, she could be literally missing her skin—or so she has reason to believe—thereby giving her hypersensitivity and strangeness a clear outlet. Because she wasn’t me, she could testify to having lived what I could not. Writing her, the missing words poured from me. Ta-da! How sneaky of me to summon an imaginary person into being so that she could say what I couldn’t. It was a magic trick that now seems naïve.

Let’s just say that at some point in the process, my little gimmick stopped working. The protective chasm between me and the character I’d created slammed shut, and I could no longer pretend.

What I saw on the page troubled me. She’s not normal, I kept thinking. Which meant: I’m not normal. I had always known this in a way, but when you’ve been hiding for so very long, you might not really know what it is you’re hiding.

I suspected it might have a name. Only, I didn’t know the name.

It so happened that I had a haircut scheduled. This bit of chance would change everything. When J. asked how I was, I did something unlike myself and, instead of giving the standard acceptable response, answered honestly.

I think it was the circumscribed nature of the interaction that enabled me to talk, plus the fact that I only go in once or twice a year. But I’m not giving enough credit to J., who is gentle and genuine, able to put me at an almost-ease in the swivel chair with scissors and a hot fan droning horribly beside my head. I told her about my writing, that I was being haunted by the child I had been, and I told her about some of the memories.

“You sound like my son,” J. said kindly. “My son has ASD.”

Six months later, when I received a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, I was surprised. I wondered if I had made a mistake somewhere in the lengthy, two-day evaluation process, which luckily my insurance paid for thanks to my doctor’s appeal that it was medically necessary. I didn’t understand yet.

Then, I began to. I pieced together the fragments of the girl and woman I was with this new word, autism, and I saw. More clearly than I ever had. I saw in high definition. A whole girl. A girl who made complete sense. Only no one had been able to see it before—what bound her together. What made her story true.

The problem was never me. It was one of other people’s imaginations. Of the necessary capacity and willingness to imagine beyond what, in one’s own perception, the world is like. To accept that another reality is possible. To—having lived one’s life with skin and never thought twice about it—consider the experience of someone who is skinless.

It strikes me, too, that much of the language I am now given for myself is clinical, meaning it is based on an assumption of me as someone who is lacking. Someone who needs to be fixed. I no longer believe that.

Instead, I seek my own language. I write again into the gap, asking whoever is on the other side to be willing to cross the distance.

At first, I only told Noel. “I’m so happy for you. Now you can understand the woman I love better,” he said, movie-perfect.

I was afraid to tell my parents. I thought they would want me to hide, that they’d think I’d be safer that way. But seeing as I kept accidentally writing about myself, and these were things I hoped to publish, I realized there was a chance my parents might eventually hear from someone else. I wanted to be the one.

“I need to know it’s okay,” I told Mom over the phone, meaning the new words I was using to identify myself. I knew she would tell Dad, and I’d be saved from having to have the conversation twice.

“You can use any words you need to talk about yourself, honey.” She and Dad would be proud to see my words, she said.

The power she gave me. It felt like the giving back of all that had been taken.

Then, she asked me not to blame them. This made me sad. Didn’t she know, after everything we’d been through together, that I did not blame them?

“There were so many times you helped save me.”

My parents didn’t take my words away, I know that. Nor you, dear reader. But do you know? You do not have to take a thing away from someone in order to give it back.

Finding Our Political Future in Poetry

Posted on March 5, 2026March 4, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Everyone agrees we need a revolution but no one can agree on how it is to start. In her new book, Let the Poets Govern: A Declaration of Freedom, writer Camonghne Felix argues it should begin with poetry. “Poetry facilitates the imaginative work that becomes what Chris Dixon calls ‘another politics,’” she writes. Dixon’s framework offered a name for an emerging 21st century anti-authoritarian political current consisting of the cumulative efforts of activists and organizers to transform the world with radical thinking and action. As her contribution to this radical thinking, Bronx-born Felix offers a lyrical manifesto that blends memoir and nonfiction to avow poetry’s transformative promise. Let the Poets Govern declares poetry a requisite teacher for both imagining and ensuring a brighter future.

Felix is currently a professor of creative writing at The New School. Her debut poetry collection, Build Yourself a Boat, which explored multiple layers of trauma—sexual, cultural, generational—was long-listed for the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry. It was lauded for being formally inventive, with one poem that unfolds across Google search queries and others experimenting with footnotes. In Let the Poets Govern, Felix again challenges the parameters of the poetic form, this time playing with expurgation. In the book, five poems spawn from historic legal documents and remarks—among them a June 1922 British White Paper on Palestine and an excerpt from The South Carolina Slave Code of 1740—that Felix transforms via deliberate redactions to create new works. In revising these documents, Felix upsets their grammar and offers erasure poems that are responsive, corrective, palliative. In addition, Felix considers the poetic lineage and properties of Negro folk songs, American ballads, children’s nursery rhymes, political cartoons, poems from the West Indies where her ancestors are from, and the writing and thinking of other Black poets. Among them, Nikki Giovanni and former death row prisoner Marcellus “Khalifah” Williams who wrote a poem for Palestine prior to his execution in 2024. To learn the language of poetry, her book affirms, is to learn the language of liberation.

I caught up with Felix over the phone recently to talk about how her book reflects on a life of not only writing poetry but engaging poetically with the world, and how these experiences became catalysts for a personal revolution.

Naomi Elias: A throughline of this book is the elemental power of words. When was the first time you realized language was reality-shaping?

Camonghne Felix: When I was a young protestor, I think that’s when I realized the power of words. I remember after Trayvon Martin had been killed and people were marching through New York City, just listening to the chants, “Whose streets? Our streets.” That was so moving for me and activating. I remember feeling like I was picking up steam, like I was moving faster because I was so moved and guided by that language. It shaped my understanding of what power looks and sounds like and how repetition and call and response become opportunities for power building.

NE: You cite Audre Lorde’s 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” as a guide post that helped you see poetry as an act instead of a tool. What does that distinction mean for you? How have you put that into practice?

CF: When people try to define poetry, they often get stuck in trying to describe the practice of writing poetry. I guess it depends on who you are. Either you approach that in a really romantic way or a really technical way. But we never really ask ourselves whether or not we’re doing poetry versus just writing it or trying to understand it. To me, doing poetry is walking through the world and trying to earn a perspective that is gathered and claimed through the lens of poetry. There’s a difference between saying, “I’m going to sit down and write a poem about flowers,” versus being in the world and sitting with a flower and touching a flower and recognizing its poetic and metaphorical possibilities.

When I was a young protestor, that’s when I realized the power of words.

When we use poetry, we use the idea of the poetics as a way to move people, and some might call that manipulation. We use language as a way to get people to do things. Sometimes, those things are good and sometimes those things are bad and sometimes they’re neither. But that’s the difference, right? It’s like treating poetry as a utility versus an experience of the world and of life.

NE: I generally find people are resistant to poetry nowadays. Reading of it has declined and there are frequent accusations that contemporary poetry is formless and the great works have already been written. As a poet yourself and as an educator, how do you approach people who are unreceptive to poetry?

CF: When I meet people who are frustrated with poetry, I try to explain to them that there’s a difference between a poem and the idea of poetics and of poetics. If you are studying poetry, you’re not just studying the words on the page, you’re studying the conditions and environment that created the poem. I try to just explain to people those conditions. For example, one class I’m teaching right now is a class about poetics. It takes work from a bunch of different genres, subgenres, and tries to explain and analyze them through the lens of poetry and how a poem works. We’re talking about surrealist film, post-modern painting, contemporary painting, sculpture. We’re even talking about landmarks and architecture. This week, we’re going to visit The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory as an opportunity to connect that to this book by Courtney Faye Taylor about Latasha Harlins who was murdered in L.A., which was the beginning of the L.A. riots. I try to introduce people to poetry, not as a thing that you do, but a thing that you engage with and observe.

NE: You intersperse erasure poems—poems you formulate by redacting legal documents— throughout this book. What was the impetus for that format?

CF: As I was writing this book, it felt important to provide examples of how specific documents have shaped the way that we see the world and shaped the world as it is. There’s a lot of hope in this book. Sometimes it’s hard to see, but in these redactions I’m trying to show people that even in the ugliest use of language, language still has the ability to preserve and to recreate. Text and those redactions represent the idea that we can take what is old, deconstruct it, and then approach it with new eyes that allow us to see new potential.

NE: I’m curious about the document selection process. There’s 18th century slave code, No Child Left Behind, remarks on Central America. Could you talk about that and, overall, how the process of crafting the erasure poems was different from how you’d normally write poetry?

When people try to define poetry, they often get stuck in trying to describe the practice of writing poetry.

CF: The erasure poems are really there as a way to tell us something new about history. These are documents that I have paid a lot of attention to because the language has always been really interesting to me. I selected this legislation based on where my fixation was because those fixations allowed me to be the most clear with this idea. Erasure poetry is a form. It’s most famously used in a book called Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip. The book takes these documents from a case where a bunch of slaves were thrown overboard and the owners of the ship and the people who had purchased the enslaved people basically wanted insurance money as a way to compensate for “loss.” So, that process of making erasures is not new. It’s a different kind of poetic work. Even though I’m not physically writing, I am trying to source new narratives from material that already exists in order to say something else, which is different from the way that I would write a poem on a regular basis. On a regular basis, the poem would have its own motivation, its own vehicle, whereas these poems have to come from somewhere, some prior material. The process of writing is more like a curational process where I’m looking for language and trying to reshape narrative around it.

NE: How many times would you say you read a document before erasing it?

CF: I don’t know. I read, redact, go back, read what I’ve redacted. It’s a process of going over and over again, reading some parts more times than I read other parts, just going by gut, and then reading and rereading where I feel confused or unsure.

NE: While reflecting on your political career as a speechwriter for Governor Cuomo, you mention the person who vetted you for the position told you, “Cuomo wanted his own Maya Angelou.” That made me squirm while reading. What did that look like? How did you see your poetry being used or misused in the political space?

CF: Well, first of all, I think it looked like just having a name. In order to fulfill the whole, “I want my own Maya Angelou” idea, whoever they select has to have some sort of public reputation. So first and foremost, it was a performance for show. [It] was not about having any kind of respect or reverence for poetry, but rather just wanting to be able to say that there was a Black poet in the administration. I knew that I was being flaunted around and that no one cared what I had to say. I would write speeches that I thought were progressive and generous. And like I say in the book, you write speeches with the hope that you can push your principle and that in pushing your principle that pushes the campaign or government’s narrative and changes the way that laws are working, et cetera. But in this case, it was very clear that no one was interested in listening to me about anything. In some cases that is useful. You’re young and you’re trying to pursue your writing career while having a political career. I was writing poems at work and submitting poems at work, going to school and showing up at 3:00 PM at my job to sit at my desk where I would write a speech and no one would care that it was written except my boss.

NE: You credit poetry with teaching you about the power of fugitivity, and political organizing with furthering that. Can you define what fugitivity means to you and elucidate the connection between your life as a poet and your life as an organizer?

CF: Fugitivity is not just living outside of the colonial, racist, capitalist system that is the United States or that is the state in general, but about pushing by breaking out of those systems—not necessarily to create new systems, but to liberate yourself from the requirements that force you into the conditions the state, or oppression in general, has set up. It’s about intellectually and philosophically and creatively thinking outside of the way that we’ve been told to think and living outside of those borders, which is always pursuing what feels impossible, always pursuing the imaginative. Because to do anything other than that would be to force yourself into the boxes and systems that are killing you.

How that relates to organizing [is], I think that great organizers can sell the prospect of a fugitive future to their people, they understand that in order to provide a new vision, it has to be an original, honest vision. And even if it’s not original—because we borrow from so many places and histories—our communities require that we are thinking very big about what’s possible, and we can’t do that unless we step out of the enclosure.

NE: You began writing this book during the pandemic and then that book completion timeline began overlapping with the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I felt a clear shift in tone and urgency when you wrote about that. How did Palestine shift this book and/or you?

CF: When I first started writing this, it was an entirely different book. I thought I was writing a book about how poetry could help politicians have more effective campaigns, and through having more effective campaigns be more useful in passing legislation. In the back of my head, I knew that that was bullshit, that it was an argument that facilitated more disillusion and manipulation. After the election, as we were in the pandemic, I was just watching things happen. Governments were fucking up, systems of governance were fucking up. And I realized pretty early on, things are about to get really bad. My job was to try to get ahead of it and to try and articulate what that was going to look like. But it took me longer than I thought it was going to take. Writing this book took me five years. I thought it would take me two, maybe two and a half.

Great organizers can sell the prospect of a fugitive future to their people.

In the middle of rewriting this book I went into a very deep depression after watching Israel bomb Palestine over and over again. I couldn’t sleep for days, for weeks. And I’d go back to this book and I’m trying to tell this story about my own evolution, trying to talk about where the world is right now, and I’m like, In what world could I not talk about Palestine? So, I did feel a sense of urgency. I knew that this book wasn’t about Palestine, but I knew that there was no way I was sending this book to the publisher without saying something about Palestine. It had to go in there, and it went in later than everything else, which is why you can feel that turn in urgency and that turn towards a more almost righteous language. Like you said, you can see the shift. You can feel it. I think that it brings us to a loss of continuity that might be difficult for the reader. But there was no way I could make those sections sound like the other sections because there was nothing left but this question of, “What do we do now that we are descending into a much more visible imperialist war?” I knew writing about Palestine was going to hurt me to an extent, that it would be harder to talk about the book, sell the book. But I’m not willing to look back at this moment in 10, 20, 30 years, and think to myself, “Damn, I chose to stay silent,” or, “I chose the bestsellers list.” I couldn’t survive that.

NE: There’s a trend in conservative or repressive eras of artists trying to distance their work from politics, but for you all poetry is political, right?

CF: Yes, fundamentally. And if I did anything else but what I did, I would just be lying. The premise would be completely destroyed.

NE: Do you have any suggestions for companion reading to your book?

CF: People should always read The Undercommons by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney. Another book it’s important to spend time with is Orientalism by Edward Said. Those are really excellent texts. In terms of poetry, it’s helpful for people to spend time with Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip [and] Black women poets and writers between the ’40s and now, like Gwendolyn Brooks and Octavia Butler, who people say was a witch or could read the future when really I think she was doing exactly what we’re all doing, definitely what I was trying to do, which is tell the truth about what’s happening right now, but tell it from the perspective of the future so that people understand what’s going to happen and where we are by just recognizing the patterns of the past.

My Sensible Work Pants Have Chosen Violence

Posted on March 4, 2026March 2, 2026 by Preety Sidhu

Free the Fupa

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A Novel That’s Part Manifesto, Part Unauthorized Fictional Memoir

Posted on March 4, 2026March 4, 2026 by Intern Electric Lit

Night Night Fawn is without a doubt the Marxist, trans, comedic dystopia we need in 2026. Initially conceived as nonfiction, Jordy Rosenberg’s second novel subverts form to become an inherently transgressive, unauthorized, fictional “memoir” that reads as hysterical manifesto.

Barbara Rosenberg, a character modeled loosely on Rosenberg’s own mother, is a terminally ill Jewish “yenta.” High on opioids, looking back at her origins in post-war New York—where she grew up with aspirations to be a wealthy Jew—Barbara wonders where she went wrong with her estranged trans son and her ex best friend. As Barbara takes an “unrepentant account of all her failures,” she seeks to understand how her child ended up becoming her greatest fear—queer, unrecognizable, anti-capitalist, manly. All the while, Barbara tries to convince her reader that she is justified in her actions as a parent, and can’t we see why she had no choice but to hide that beloved corduroy blazer in the closet? Entrapped in “the bitter breath of aqua net,” Barbara is delightfully acerbic: We almost forget how homophobic, transphobic, Zionist she is. “What makes you a man,” Barbara tells us, “is how you die.” Meanwhile, a woman’s body is essentially a desecrateable thing.

The book draws on influences as vast as Marxism, Hollywood, and even, perhaps, the dark satirical wit of Angela Carter, as it takes surreal leaps. Rosenberg, interrogating American Jewish culpability, writes, “The stylization and submission of catastrophe to the ethereal classiness of [Hollywood] explains the fascination of the boomer generation with Israel and colonizing Palestine.” As with Rosenberg’s first book Confessions of the Fox, the prose crackles. “With yentas,” Barbara tells us, “there’s no defense, only offense.” Barbara never lets us forget it, and neither does her author.

I spoke with Rosenberg over Zoom about films, form, and the forbidden corduroy blazer.

D/Annie Liontas: This book is so funny! I think of humor as the first tool of the defenseless, and specifically of queers, yet so often we yield the power of humor to the political right. How is humor, particularly satire, an act of cultural resistance? Why do we need it, especially in 2026?

Jordy Rosenberg: I love comedy because it’s vernacular. History is lived in the vernacular, resistance is lived in the vernacular, and bits, jokes, and satire are all part of that. So I do think of comedy as part of building a durable culture of resistance that is inviting, provocative, seductive, and a place for the release of anxiety for people who are participating in struggle. That last element—the temporary alleviation of anxiety for readers who might be overwhelmed and exhausted, despairing etc.—is something that my partner, Jasbir, helped crystallize for me as a horizon. This was especially helpful while I was engaged in the often difficult project of writing a book that is a deep dive into a world of transphobes and colonizers. I also think that the satirical mode in particular has a special affinity for focalizing anger in the direction of political action.

D/AL: This book started as a memoir, but I’ve also heard you describe the novel as “70s erotic satire, gutter schtick, and a splash of gothic menace.” Can you speak to the genre and what it means to tell this story in a mode that is uncategorizable and irreducible?

JR: Well I’m not the first person to say that, in part, I was influenced/aggravated by the Rothian school of Jewish American literature. So going back to what you asked about comedy, there’s a certain element of this novel that isn’t only about stealing back parody and satire from the right, but was also about stealing back that kind of libidinal license from a kind of liberal Jewish-American cis male tradition. In this, I would like to think I am taking part in a larger movement among trans writers who have refused respectability politics in all of these incredibly visceral, imaginative ways. This is something that’s particularly evident in the wave of authors writing in or about trans horror, like Grace Byron, Gretchen Felker-Martin, Alison Rumfitt, and Zefyr Lisowski, to name just a few. Horror and satire are incredibly proximate modes. You see that in the Scream franchise, for example, right? There, the self-awareness of horror as a genre doesn’t subtract from the horror—it often just amplifies it, or combines it with laughter. That roving, over-excited affect of terror or laughter—well, it’s kind of fungible.

All to say that, genre-wise, I did try to combine a kind of (righteously) purloined Rothian libidinal license with undercurrents of horror. And all of it, I hope, contributes something to this broader movement in trans fiction that dispenses with the stultifying and unimaginative demands of respectability politics. And then of course, there’s also a very long history of anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian satire that I’m drawing on as well. Orwell speaks about the material impact on his work of having been part of the actual “machinery of despotism.” Having grown up within a Zionist and homophobic household, and in many ways trying to expose and satirize the interiors of those spaces, Orwell’s language did resonate with me. The satiric experiments at play in authors like Emile Habibi and Roberto Bolaño were also important examples. Randa Abdel-Fattah recently had some very compelling things to say about satire on David Naimon’s wonderful Between the Covers podcast, as well.

D/AL: Barbara is intoxicating and charming on the page and yet we understand her to be extremely flawed—Zionist, transphobic—and that, to be in close proximity—to be her child—might be impossible. Is it a dialectical exercise to fictionalize her? What did it take to shape this voice, and what are you confronting with it?

I am taking part in a larger movement among trans writers who have refused respectability politics in all of these incredibly visceral, imaginative ways.

JR: Something I was thinking about quite a bit while writing was the extent to which we unconsciously, melancholically incorporate the speech of the other—even of a parent who we may have had a very difficult relationship with, and whose politics we explicitly reject. What to do about the tangled situation of subject-formation? In many ways, this book is about complicity—our inextricability from the systems we confront. That’s dialectical. And it’s why, I think, I was compelled to write this book as a satiric novel from the perspective of a transphobic, Zionist character (rather than, for example, as a memoir from the perspective of me, a person who has refused those positions). One of the things I was interested in portraying was the ubiquity and ordinariness with which colonial ideology has been normalized within diasporic American households—in depicting a character who enjoys certain forms of power, who identifies in an unconcealed way with supremacist and colonial projects. It had to be written from that character’s perspective—someone who was not going to conceal or hedge or varnish over exactly what those attachments meant.

D/AL: Barbara yearns for family, defining it at one point as “amoeba people . . . individual members making up one entity, one cell, whose limbs reach out in many directions, but all held together by an invisible membrane.” What shapes her ideas of family, especially regarding gender policing? What is Night Night Fawn illuminating about queer and trans folks who are estranged from family?

JR: There’s a certain amount of portability to this feeling of being excluded from family. Certainly, trans people know this feeling very well and have been materially subjected not just to familial estrangement, but abandonment and abuse. But the feeling of wanting an ideal family, or of wanting something from family and not being able to get it, is pretty ubiquitous. Much of this book explores Barbara’s feelings about having been, from her perspective, denied the family that she wanted. She has to share a family with a trans person and for her this is an experience of victimization.

I was interested in exploring certain aspects of a kind of pre-second wave feminist mid-20th century worldview, and how a certain ressentiment gets channeled both into anti-trans animus and, in the case of this character, an identification with a colonial project which she sees as the ultimate locus of a liberated binary gendered discourse. Maybe this is another place where the dialectical aspect gets elaborated—because this is also a character from a working class background contending with certain frustrations with the conditions of her life and labor both at home and in the workplace. But as Sophie Lewis’s book, Enemy Feminisms, and others have pointed out, there’s nothing that has historically prevented some of these rightful grievances about gendered oppression from turning toward what Lewis describes as a “restrictive pessimism” about what it is to be female. Emma Heaney describes cis-ness as “feminism’s counter-revolution,” and I’d say that Barbara is mounting an epic counter-revolution throughout this book.

D/AL: Night Night Fawn integrates film as a way to contextualize Barbara, but also define the cultural era and name Israel’s hold on the American imagination. What is the power of noir films, specifically Sunset Boulevard?

JR: Barbara the character is obsessed with both noir and with Exodus. As for the latter, Exodus was an incredibly central piece of literary and filmic propaganda for people of that generation. As the scholar Amy Kaplan has argued, it “forged the popular American identification with Israel for decades to come.” Ultimately, the film became so influential that Israel’s minister of tourism (as Kaplan notes), said “we could have thrown away all the promotional literature we printed in the last two years and just circulated Exodus.” I won’t give any spoilers, but I will say I was interested in exploring that situation fictionally.

The feeling of wanting an ideal family, or of wanting something from family and not being able to get it, is pretty ubiquitous.

As for noir, I’m interested in noir conventions and ways in which a variety of filmic identifications were coming to shape certain forms of mid-century femininity and aesthetics. Sunset Boulevard is an iconic demonstration of noir form—specifically the ways in which the eeriness of noir voiceover, the fact that we are listening to a placeless voice speaking from an unknown location, gets incorporated so naturally by the viewer. This is something I found beautifully articulated in Theodore Martin’s wonderful book, Contemporary Drift. The entire technology of voiceover means that the voice that you hear when you’re looking at the picture on the screen is coming from a different place than the picture is. In Sunset Boulevard, you realize the film is being narrated by a character who is dead, and so they’re inhabiting a place that is radically outside the frame. But filmic form is about suturing together across gaps, and the viewer incorporates this process with pleasure. The viewer does not have a problem with these contradictions. Sunset Boulevard defined an important zeitgeist for Barbara’s character, so I wanted to explore the significance of it for the character’s world. But, also, Martin’s analysis gave me license in terms of literary form and trying to take risks with contradictions, and then trusting that the reader incorporates them.

D/AL: You set Night Night Fawn in Brooklyn and Manhattan, spanning from post-war era through the 1980s. What were you thinking about when you wrote about this city as a locus of power, and as you captured New York across the decades?

JR: I love something Andrea Lawlor has said about Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, which takes place in the 90s: “Well it wasn’t historical fiction when I started writing it.” I grew up in the 80s, and in some ways I’ve been “writing” this novel in my head since then. So there’s a certain continuity, and for me it doesn’t feel like historical fiction. But to a reader, especially a younger reader, of course, it will feel like a different world. There are, for example, glimpses into very specific niches of New York City culture. Studio 54-adjacent teenage life, for example. Or the milieu of garment trucking in midtown in the 60s. Or the life of a small upper east side office workplace during the 80s. My mother, like Barbara, was an administrative assistant in a plastic surgeon’s office, so I was also very interested in capturing some elements to do with the birth and commercialization of plastic surgery. Really, the beginnings of the intensification of a gender binary that has been taken to a comical zenith now.

D/AL: Can you talk about the forbidden corduroy blazer? I think about it every time I walk past my hall closet.

JR: Who doesn’t love a corduroy blazer? There is a recurrent issue that comes up in the book around the trans character’s desire to accouter himself as he likes (in this case, in corduroy). We are talking about the relationship between a desire for gender and gendered identity. I hardly need to say much about this, as Andrea Long-Chu’s iconic essay “On Liking Women” in n+1, has already covered this ground, fearlessly breaking a certain silence around a trans desire for gender. It was such a bombshell when she wrote, “The truth is, I have never been able to differentiate liking women from wanting to be like them.” Part of the point here is that it’s not just that, against all of the medicalizing and pathologizing prohibitions, trans people actually have complex affects and desires, but that we share these complex affects and desires with cis people. And so my own book is much more invested in exposing cis desire, through Barbara, who has an enormous desire for gender—to be a woman, to be part of a gendered binary with her husband, and all of it. In the course of that quest, Barbara becomes, you could say, fetishistically and phobically obsessed with her child’s own gendered desires, which take the form—for Barbara—of a desire for a corduroy blazer.

My decision to centralize and kind of riff on this obsession of Barbara’s around the blazer throughout the novel had a lot to do with everything I just described about gender and desire. But it also had something to do, as an extended bit in the novel, with Marx and the first chapter of Capital, where he lays out the fundamentals of capitalism using the example of a coat. He’s speaking there about how a coat, which is an object, composed of certain textiles, put together by a laborer—and he’s asking how it is possible that an item mediated through human labor comes out the other side as a commodity that erases its relationship to that labor. You don’t see the labor when you look at the coat, you see the coat. How is a commodity able to take on a value that is larger than the wage the laborer gets compensated for? That’s kind of the crux of Marx’s analysis in that book. So the blazer is a Marxist bit for Marx nerds, but I guess also I’m trying to expand on the often gendered dimensions of the commodity-fetish, something which does not get remarked in Marx. So it’s a trans bit for the trans nerds. Or the trans Marxist nerds.