The year that was has made its artistic judgments. Mostly. The world of film declared Anora as Best Picture. Music selected Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter as Album of the Year. Now, finally, on May 5th, book world gets its big moment. On Monday, at 3:00 p.m. EST, the award ceremony will be live streamed here. Pulitzer time is here!
As most of us book-loving folks know, there are a lot of book awards. The Pulitzer, however, is the one that seems to get the most attention. For a brief moment, with the announcement fresh, it’s like the world takes a break and celebrates books. For me, that kind of literary attention is a definite good thing—well, a definite great thing.
Certain years bring total surprises that few could have predicted. For example, 2012 offered the huge shock of the winner being no one. Seriously, what a day that was. And, very recently–just in 2023—who predicted we would have two winners, Hernan Diaz’s Trustand Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead?
While it’s challenging to predict the annual Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, it’s honestly a lot of fun.
Per my usual, in compiling this prediction list, I’ve tried my best to stay away from my own opinions in determining 2024’s literary bests, which is why you won’t see my personal favorite fiction books of the year—Grey Wolfe LaJoie’s Little Ones, Marguerite Sheffer’s The Man in the Banana Trees, Jen Fawkes’ Daughters of Chaos, Patrick Thomas Henry’s Practice for Becoming a Ghost, or Simon Van Booy’s Sipsworth–included below. Instead, I stick to previous awards, critics’ thoughts, buzz, and good old Bradley Sides intuition in guiding these predictions.
In order from long shots to shoe-ins, below are my predictions for the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction:
Kushner’s latest is a spy novel with a nice dose of humor. That description might not sound like the usual kind of thing the Pulitzer folks go for, but don’t be surprised if Creation Lake shows up on announcement day. Kushner is brilliant, and this novel has already been shortlisted for the Booker and longlisted for the National Book Award. Plus, it’s on numerous “best of” lists.
2009 was the last time a short story collection won, but another one has to take home the Prize at some point, and speculative titles seem to be getting more and more attention these days with literary awards. Maybe now is the time… Lima’s delightful and creative debut collection had a breakout kind of year (and was excerpted in Recommended Reading!). Kelly Link praised it, and the book received glowing recommendations from The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and more.
Bertino’s novel about home and belonging hit shelves soon after 2024 began, and it’s stayed a popular title since then, which proves just how much readers love it. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and it made “best of” lists at Literary Hub, Book Riot, The New York Times, and more. It was also excerpted in Recommended Reading!
Orange was a finalist for the Pulitzer in 2019 with his debut There There. Now, he’s back in major contention again with Wandering Stars, a book that follows the legacy of trauma. Orange’s novel packs incredible power, and it’s an important one. It’s received wide, wide praise from critics and readers alike. Among other accolades, it was longlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize, and it was shortlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize.
A time-spanning book of stories, The History of Sound is one of the most-loved collections of 2024. It recently won The Story Prize Spotlight Award, was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and received recognition from NPR, Kirkus, and more.
While there are three story collections on my list, There is a Rio Grande in Heaven is the one that is most likely to go all the way. The stories here are fantastic and fantastical, and there’s so much emotion in these pages. It’s the kind of collection you put away and find yourself going back to. The book has received much recognition, including being longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award. It was also a finalist for The Story Prize.
Matar won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography for The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land in Between, and he is in absolute contention for the Prize in this year’s Fiction category. My Friends explores family and friendship, and the novel has received many accolades, including being a finalist for the National Book Award and winning the National Book Critics Circle Award.
I know I said I try to keep my own opinions out of my list, but I can’t help myself with this one. Two-Step Devil is utterly brilliant and BOLD in regard to prose and in story, taking on issues such as God, loss, and mental illness. Quatro would have been a deserving winner already with either of her two previous books, but she’s at her best in her latest Southern Gothic masterpiece. The book won the Willie Morris Award for Southern Writing (Fiction) and has received praise from, among others, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Atlanta Journal Constitution. It’s hard to imagine Quatro not showing up as a finalist.
Martyr is one of those novels that everyone seems to be talking about. It’s a special one, indeed. Full of love and humor and hurt, it’s received wide praise and would make a fantastic Pulitzer winner. It’s already been shortlisted for the National Book Award and been recognized by Time, The New York Times, and many (many, many) more. You can get a taste by reading an excerpted in Recommended Reading! I would say this one is our most likely winner, but there’s one other book you might’ve heard of…
Everett certainly had a memorable year with James, a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’sAdventures of Huckleberry Finn. This book has been everywhere! And I mean it. It won the National Book Award. It won the Kirkus Prize. Barnes & Noble picked it as 2024’s best. It won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. It took home the Rooster in this year’s Tournament of Books. It was shortlisted for the Booker. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. It made countless “best of” lists. Readers and critics love it. James seems like our winner. We’ll know for sure very soon…
Roohi Choudhry’s bold yet tender debut novel, Outside Women, follows two “outside women” who live a century apart. Hajra, a graduate student fleeing extremist violence in Pakistan, settles in New York just before 9/11. She begins to research the obscure histories of indentured Indian female laborers in the British empire, a project that takes her all the way to Durban, South Africa. Interwoven with her narrative is the story of Sita, one such laborer who in the 1890s arrives in Durban from India. Driven by poverty and desperation, as well as a fierce desire for independence, Sita becomes an ayah (nanny) in a white English plantation-owning family.
The two women’s lives are shaped and twisted by the political forces of their day: Sita’s by oppressive British colonial rule in India and South Africa, Hajra’s by religious nationalism and patriarchal social expectations in Pakistan. When each woman leaves the faltering shelter of her family, she faces real physical and emotional danger. As a peace activist in college, Hajra narrowly escapes a vicious street attack by religious extremists whom her own brother is involved with. Sita is at the mercy of both the plantation owner’s advances and his wife’s bullying outbursts. Though living centuries apart, both Hajra and Sita must decide if they are willing to stand up publicly and speak truth to power in order to protect the vulnerable women in their midst. Outside Women is about resilience, solidarity and the importance of bearing witness. It is also about finding joy and hope in asserting one’s agency and desires.
I spoke with Roohi Choudhry over Zoom about what drew her to write about two very different “outside women,” the kinship and community that Hajra and Sita find with others in dire circumstances, and the invisible yet powerful connections that connect the two women across time.
Yu-Mei Balasingamchow: In the first chapter of Outside Women, Hajra is intrigued by historical photographs of indentured women laborers from India. This prompts her to go to Durban, South Africa to research them. That’s the seed in the novel for what Hajra is doing. What was the seed of an idea that set you down the path to writing the novel? Was there also a photograph?
Roohi Choudhry: My family moved to Durban when I was about thirteen. At the time it was the city with the largest concentration of Indians outside India. I don’t know if that’s still true, but at thirteen I had a visceral feeling of being surrounded by people who looked like me but whose life histories and ancestral stories were different. I was immediately curious about those histories.
Much later, when I wanted to switch to longform writing, I wanted to reflect on that history, and the character of Hajra came to me. That took me back to Durban for research, and one day I was trying to find Phoenix House, where Gandhi and his wife used to live. I couldn’t find it, which was frustrating, and I ended up at the Old Courthouse, which is now a museum. I was demoralized—the place had nothing to do with what I was interested in—but there I came face to face with a photo of women in saris holding up a banner and one woman was laughing. It’s not the photo in my novel, it’s anti-apartheid activists from a different time. But something about the image stayed with me. It seemed incongruous but was also really interesting. It was a seed, in a way.
YB: It’s marrying fiction and real life. The photo you saw, and the weight of history and what that sparked in you. The laugh makes the photo in your novel mysterious and entrancing. The reader wonders, who is this person who’s undertaking a serious political act—a dangerous act—while laughing?
RC: In the revision process, when I was thinking about what it means to be an “outside woman,” I heard a podcast episode about laughter and how it’s closer to animal sounds than to most human language. They played a bunch of laughs on the podcast, and when they’re not associated with language, they sound so weird! I was also influenced by the book, Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés. I was trying to make connections between being outside institutions and also being in the great outdoors. I wanted to communicate what it means to be an outsider and how that’s closer to the wild side of ourselves. Learning about laughter felt like a really cool and maybe not totally obvious way of communicating that. Laughing in that moment is like being an original wild self, rather than the way that we often are.
YB: Let’s talk about Sita, one of the “outside women” in the novel. The stories of indentured women laborers have not really been recorded, yet you’ve created a complex, full character. Sita dreams about leading an independent life despite her circumstances. How did you find your way into her?
RC: I’m indebted to the researchers who resurrected those stories. Most people in the U.S. know Coolie Woman by Gaiutra Bahadur. Before that book came out, I was relying on South African scholars and doing archival work. I felt I had to be faithful to the facts and the history, and Sita felt like she was from a distant historical period. That made it hard to write something that was alive and compelling. When I showed early chapters to my professor, Eileen Pollack, she told me about a well-known writer of the antebellum South. Many scholars thought his novel, which I really admire, was based on huge amounts of research because it was rich and detailed. He burst their bubble by saying, “Yeah, I didn’t do any research.” My professor used that example to say, it’s not as if he didn’t do the research. This is a subject he cares about and has been reading about. She showed me some passages from the novel where a character is sweeping the porch, and it doesn’t say what the character is wearing or what the broomstick or the porch looks like. It’s just creating that sense of a world and a person. Our minds are doing the rest.
So I put away the research and trusted that I would come back to verify things later (which I did). That’s when I really started to get to know Sita. I wrote what is now the first scene of her narrative, when she’s a child at the river with her family. She’s tall and strong and likes to climb trees. Learning those physical details gave me insight into her humanity.
YB: It sounds like a journey of getting to know her and also getting to know your process. What about the underground network of activists in Durban who are trying to help the indentured women? How much of that was research, and how much was you wanting the reader to see a person with a broom on a porch?
RC: When I first had the idea for my novel, I was interested in linking it to Gandhi. He arrived in Durban as a lawyer and became an activist when he saw how indentured laborers were treated. I’m also thinking now about one of the questions you sent before this interview, about how I changed as I was writing and decolonized who I was writing for and the way I was telling this story. When I showed early versions of the chapters about Durban activists to my MFA classmates, they were excited to read about Gandhi because it was something familiar to them. Later, I wondered if that was leading me to want to write for a white audience and include Gandhi’s story when I wasn’t that interested in it. With many activism movements around the world, one person—and it’s almost always a he—becomes the figurehead of the movement. The other people who did the work aren’t given their due. They were the ones I was interested in. I also loved thinking about women being part of it, women who were prominent and had privileges that Sita might not have had, and I created the character of Meera Iyer in the novel.
I put away the research…That’s when I really started to get to know Sita.
YB: The activists in Durban are compelling because their work echoes other pockets of resistance in Sita’s story. When she’s traveling to South Africa with other women laborers, she finds an ally, Tulsi, and they find small ways to sneak off and explore.
RC: I was following my instinct in the writing process. The parts that you’re pointing to, sneaking off at the Madras port and in Durban, it was something I felt these characters would do. I liked the idea of them getting away with some things and for us to be able to see them as real people through those small freedoms.
YB: Let’s talk about Hajra. At the beginning of the novel, she’s a graduate student in New York. There are also sections when she’s an undergraduate in the 1990s in Peshawar. Like Sita, she’s trying to negotiate her escape from oppressive forces. How did you land on Hajra as the other linchpin for your novel?
RC: Initially, I had a different character who had more in common with my life experiences as a child of diaspora and a lot more privilege than Hajra. Juxtaposing that character with Sita, who was a historical character set against a grand canvas, the contemporary story seemed small and less important. The novel wasn’t working at all. Still, I wanted to have two narratives. I became interested in the story of someone who was not of the diaspora, who was in Pakistan and whose experiences were shaped by that. My mom grew up in Peshawar (I was born there too). Her stories informed the texture of Hajra’s daily life. Also, Hajra’s parents are refugees from India, like my grandparents—that was really important.
Like Sita, Hajra took on a life of her own. She’s this really bookish, sort of messy person. I identify with that very much. That’s not like my mom, actually! Then Hajra steps outside of that to put her body on the line with her activism. I was interested in how that transition happens and can be a source of power, although it’s scary for her to have to keep doing that.
YB: Hajra and Sita are both “outside women” whose lives don’t directly intersect or overlap. There are many points of contact, though, in the challenges they face from brothers, family, the demands of the world they’re growing up in, the kinds of bullies they encounter in different forms. We join the dots between what Sita experiences and what resonates a century later for Hajra.
RC: I think the writing process was me trying to answer certain questions for myself: I felt really sure about telling two stories together, but why? Why not just choose one or do it in a different way that’s less dependent on the braiding? I realized that writing only one narrative would not have scratched the itch for myself as a writer who wonders, why do I feel a sense of kinship with women who came before me, with people who have very different life experiences from me? Is it just a matter of being migrants, or is there something else? I want to show how people who are not related by blood can be family, how you can find and choose your own ancestors. It was really important to make that work.
YB: I think the deep connection between the two narratives comes from seeing Hajra investing energy in the research and trying to find out about the laughing woman in the photograph. To her, the search is worthwhile even though it initially seems futile. It’s pure curiosity, plus something deeper, perhaps an emotional connection passing to her through the air.
RC: When I was doing my final revision a year ago, I watched 32 Sounds, a documentary about sound. I learned about a nineteenth-century philosopher who had a theory that all the sounds that have ever been made are around us at every moment, and if we invented a certain kind of machine, we could hear them. That captured my imagination in terms of how we think about echoes of history. What if those were real echoes around us, and we’re hearing but also not hearing them? I’m not saying this is or isn’t the case. I just tried to work into the novel the idea that other people’s lives are around us all the time and continue to influence our bodies in space.
One novel that really inspired me was Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being. I was revising my novel and struggling with the question of whether Hajra’s and Sita’s stories belong together. A Tale for the Time Being has two narratives as well. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say you know right away that its characters are inhabiting different places and times. It’s not the only novel that does this, but it’s one of the few where they’re not related though they share something. I returned to that book often to ask, why does the fact that they’re not related work well? What is it about the way Ozeki is doing it? We don’t usually use the term “magical realism” for her writing, but there’s a sense of connection between people in that novel that is not of the corporeal world. I kept thinking about what that meant for my characters.
YB: What other expectations about novels or historical novels were you trying to subvert or reinvent as you were writing your novel?
RC: You referred in one of your other questions to the cultural tour guide thing—
YB: Which was from your interview with Nawaaz Ahmed—
RC: It was a quote from a Sanjana Sathian essay. I do think that there can be an expectation for a writer to be a teacher, if not tour guide. I remember getting that feedback from writing groups, which were primarily white. One person said, “Oh, I always learn so much from your stories, Roohi,” This was when I was in my twenties. I was annoyed, though I hadn’t yet figured out what rubbed me the wrong way. Embedded there is the expectation that fiction is an educational tool for people who do not share the characters’ experiences. It’s a very earnest, white liberal type of thing. That’s not the kind of writing I do or want to do. It might be a compliment for someone else. But I want to come from a place of empathy and heart, a place of feeling, an emotional resonance that’s not about teaching.
I wanted to steer clear of using my characters as puppets to teach white readers something. In a way, that’s an injustice to the real historical people, that their only role would be to teach us something. In my novel, Vasanthi, another woman laborer, says to Sita, “Your story? You don’t have one anymore. No one will tell about you. No one will remember you. You’re just ayah in their story.” This is the reality in most archives and books that I wanted to move away from.
YB: Let’s talk about a different historical moment. You decided to have Hajra move to New York just before 9/11. She’s there on the cusp of everything that’s about to happen.
I wanted to steer clear of using my characters as puppets to teach white readers something.
RC: I moved to New York right before 9/11 too. I wrote that scene fairly early, well before I had finished the first draft, then I wondered, what is this doing here? It wasn’t until the very end of the writing that I understood why it had to be there. Hajra’s relationship with Islam and religiosity is an important throughline in her narrative. But there was always a risk of it being simplistic and angry at extremist ideologies or Islam. That would be an unfortunate simplification of her experience and the experiences of a lot of people like her. I tried to complicate that and make it more universal, in that there are people everywhere who use religion to exploit people’s emotions and get them to hurt other people. That’s not about the religion itself. The short chapter on 9/11 closes that circle for Hajra. She leaves Pakistan because of the way religion has been used against her. She might think of herself as leaving because of religion itself. When 9/11 happens, however, that complicates her understanding because religion was used as an excuse for violence. Then 9/11 itself is used as an excuse to commit violence against Muslims in America. Hajra is no longer able to rely on the simplistic kind of anger she might have felt in Pakistan.
YB: That sounds true to how Outside Women avoids neat conclusions. By the end, we sense that so much is going on below the surface, not just individual human emotions but also the social and political currents that are pulling characters in different directions. Most of the characters are in a gray area too, even the ones who are trying to do good. Everyone seems very human and flawed.
RC: In an early draft, Hajra’s brother was just a cardboard villain. A lot of righteous indignation fueled my writing and made its way onto the page. I worked really hard at removing some of that. I needed to come to terms with it, to explain to myself that there are ways to use anything good, including religion, to exploit other humans. Those humans being exploited can be really harmful, but it’s limiting to paint them as villains. I’m glad it’s coming across that people are imperfect. They’re shaped by the forces around them, but they’re also capable of being something better.
April is Autism Acceptance Month. This may not be on your calendar, but it’s especially important in the literary community. The world didn’t see an autistic author for a long time; not because they didn’t exist, but because they lived in a world that believed they couldn’t.
Autism acceptance is at an all time high, but there is still so much damage that has been done by decades of misinformation. The underdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, and stigmatization of autism makes it truly impossible to understand how many authors are on the spectrum. We need autistic representation in all fields, but autism has been condemned by society for as long as we’ve had a name for it; even those who are able to receive a diagnosis may choose not to share it publicly, knowing it can come with a cost.
As an autistic writer and editor, I have been confronted with the reality that our current literary spaces value the narratives of allistic writers over their autistic peers, forcing us to conform to literary standards set by a predominantly allistic community. Despite the barriers that had been enforced against authentic autistic voices, the growing number of acclaimed and openly autistic writers have been revolutionizing narrative and storytelling across genres. They are restructuring the world of literature.
These seven novels celebrate authentic autistic storytellers and their divergence from allistic archetypes:
With the entire novel taking place within twenty-four hours, A Room Called Earth follows an unnamed autistic woman before, during, and after a party. Throughout the novel, the protagonist reckons with the communication barrier between herself and the non-autistic people she interacts with. That is until she is able to finally connect with a person and feel understood by someone else. What’s especially fascinating about Ryan’s debut novel is her ability to capture the imperfect character. Her character contradicts herself, passes judgement easily, and is a bit out of touch at times. But in Ryan’s hands, the protagonist feels deeply human—a fully fleshed-out autistic woman who, despite her flaws, breaks free from the stereotypes that have been thrust upon autistic people. She is multi-dimensional, created with the purpose of forcing the reader to reconsider the way they think about the world.
An effortlessly witty novel exploring a queer love triangle set in Hong Kong, this novel follows Ava, a cynical TEFL teacher originally from Ireland, and her messy relationships with Julian, a successful and emotionally unavailable banker, and Edith, a kind lawyer born in Hong Kong. Exciting Times dives into the intricacies of unhealthy relationships and issues of class disparity with cutting and calculated prose. Divided into three parts, the narrative transforms and ultimately rejects both the cliches associated with love triangles in media and its own earlier cynicism, making for an interesting read.
Rivers Solomon has recently taken the literary scene by storm with their most recent novel, Model Home, but it was An Unkindness of Ghosts that first caughtmy attention. Thiswas the first novel I’d ever read that accurately portrayed both a neurodivergent and gender nonconforming protagonist.
Set in a science fiction version of the Antebellum period, the novel takes place on a plantation on a ship among the stars. Following Aster, a neurodiverse, gender nonconforming, and biracial healer, we get a look inside a young person’s struggle for liberation amidst systemic violence and oppression. Solomon uses this time and space not to rehash history, but to slash away at centuries-long stereotypes.
Despite its genuinely painful plot, Solomon’s poetic prose spurs some sincere moments of beauty, specifically in their descriptions of Aster’s unrelenting kindness and fierce love.
Matt Haig’s most recent novel is what one may call a “feel good” philosophical work, but don’t let that categorization fool you; it is far from the dull theory taught in Philosophy 101. Much like his New York Times Bestseller, The Midnight Library, Haig interweaves philosophical quandaries throughout the book, but this time, it’s an active contemplation on grief. The narrative follows a middle aged woman named Christina who’s recently been widowed and has long been burdened by guilt after the death of her child. She tries to avoid grief around every corner, until a friend mysteriously dies and leaves Christina her house in her will.
The healing process isn’t linear, an idea that Haig fully dissects within the novel. While the beginning of The Life Impossible can neatly be defined as literary fiction, there is a drastic shift in tone and genre near the midway point, when the cause of the friend’s death begins to pose imminent danger to the island. By turning grief and loss into something magical and surreal, Haig creates an environment in which we can find purpose in our pain and make sense of the senseless.
Young autistic people have a tendency to resonate with the outcasts of society, and Addie, the protagonist of A Kind of Spark, is no exception. As a young girl living in Scotland, she discovers that her hometown was once the site of a witch trial. And just like that, she’s on a mission to preserve and honor these women’s memories.
This touching coming-of-age is not just about the witch trials, at least as it pertains to their memorialization. Addie’s strong sense of justice is rooted in her deep identification with the condemned women. She feels misunderstood by the people in her community, just as the witches had been. A Kind of Spark takes misconceptions and creates an accessible narrative for education, a task that is no small feat. Although this novel may be written for a younger audience, its unique and charming plotline make it enjoyable for all ages.
I’ve recently come across the work of Caitlin Starling and I immediately fell in love with her prose style. Her writing is precise, but still incredibly eloquent and flowing despite the more gruesome themes of the novel. This dichotomy works perfectly for The Death of Jane Lawrence; although it’s a historical horror, it’s also a romance. Following the story of Jane Lawrence, this riveting novel takes place in a fictional post-war Britain. Jane, orphaned by the recent war, looks for marriage for no other reason other than housing, which leads her to Doctor Augustine Lawrence. He agrees to marry her if she agrees to follow his rule; she cannot visit Lindridge Hall after dark. She agrees and follows this rule until unforeseen circumstances show her the real terror that lies within.
Starling’s novel fits perfectly into the modern Gothic category, hitting most, if not all, the key markers of the genre. It has everything from a Gothic novel you could ever want: hauntings, a deteriorating manor that the protagonist is forbidden from entering, a marriage of convenience, and a possible murder. But readers be warned; modern Gothic, specifically Starling’s portfolio, is quite gory. This is not your grandparents’ Gothic novel.
All the Little Bird-Hearts focuses on the abusive relationships and ableism that autistic people face in a society that isn’t built for them. This devastating novel follows Sunday, an autistic single mother in the wake of a friend’s betrayal. Despite its difficult themes, it makes an excellent read for allistic readers trying to learn more about living as an autistic person in an allistic society. Lloyd-Barlow gives readers full access to the inner workings of Sunday’s thoughts. The close focus on introspection makes for an accurate, clear representation of autism in women, and creates a narrative in which readers, whether autistic or allistic, can identify with Sunday as they watch her character unravel throughout the novel—all of her trauma, her scars, her relationships. Sunday has to contend for her daughter’s attention while her friend offers a more glamorous and neurotypical lifestyle, leaving us to reckon with the reality of ableism being perpetuated by everyone, even the people we love and trust the most.
My dad was cremated in Birkenstocks. He wanted his toes to breathe. The sandals were brown, size nine, shaped after his stride. Many years later, I picked out a pair—to find my steps without him.
I can still smell him on me. Manuel, Mané, dad. I remember him well, or at least I think I do. My memories and home videos look the same; I don’t know if the footage is from my head or from the tape. Records of our life were important to my parents because their own undocumented childhood lacked evidence of their existence. Writing our heights on the walls, keeping letters, hanging our little drawings around the house. We were modern cavemen leaving our marks in a twenty-story flat apartment in São Paulo. It felt important at the time.
As a family, we adored having our picture taken; it was fun. It wasn’t just special dates, birthdays, and parties—my parents liked filming our day to day and, later on, so did I. When I was six, dad hesitantly handed me a camera the size of my face. I filmed my parents dancing; dad asked if he could kiss my mum and, with a giggle, I allowed it. “I want to film everything,” I said.
He looked well then. I remember combing his full, oily hair, admiring the shades of white and grey. I enjoyed giving him a massage after a long day’s work; I am not sure I ever did a very good job at that, with my tiny hands, but he seemed to see the benefits of it. Everything I did seemed to please him.
It was a big flat for a small family. We were upper-middle class then, later demoted to middle-class after we were left in debt. However, in the early nineties, my dad finally had the money to buy a big flat; he didn’t have the time to decorate it though, working forty-hour weeks and weekends. And since my mum would rather read The Iliad than Home Digest, our flat was mostly bare.
We lived on the fifth floor, a strategic choice. “We can still walk up the stairs if there is a power cut, it’s not that high up,” my dad said. Practicality wasn’t very much like him, but when it came to us, he had come to think differently.
It was our own private gallery, our playground, our stage. My brother and I would put on shows; I distinctly recall our own version of Hansel and Gretel in reversed roles. My dad had done his fair share of street theatre and painted his face with sticky makeup. He’d gone out to celebrate Carnival, wearing feathers above his head. He was a moving party, taking people with him wherever he went. When I find myself on the dance floor, I think of him and the moves that found their way through my veins.
He was curious about the world, the people living in it, about art and food. Once, he brought home microwave popcorn so we could try this new culinary invention, fresh from the supermarket shelves. We didn’t have a microwave at the time. The package just sat there, unpopped, as evidence of his enthusiasm for novelty.
When I came around, the father-daughter relationship was completely new to him, and he was determined to excel at it.“He was crazy about you,” my mum said, “You were his princess, his world.” My mum tells me it was a different story with my brother Gui; he had a mental breakdown when she was pregnant with him. My dad never had the best relationship with his father, and he was terrified of failing his own son.
My dad was a storyteller and he made sure he’d narrate a better life for his children.
He never got to meet the man Gui grew up to be. My dad was everything his own dad wasn’t to him, and if there is anything as too much love, he was guilty of it. Because, like the paltry food on his plate growing up, affection had been scarce.My dad was a storyteller and he made sure he’d narrate a better life for his children.
“Papai,” dad, was my first word—possibly as a result of my mum repeating it all the time: “dad will be home soon” and “here is daddy.” I don’t know what my brother’s first word was, but I hope it was “mum”—you know, to make things fair. But life is not fair, I learned at ten. João Manuel was many things: a son, a brother, a dad, a partner, a friend. He was sick. He had no idea then.
It must have been 1998, not even fifty at the time, and one day, he fell flat on his face. He was jumping over a rope in the garage and his foot didn’t move; it stayed there, against his will. Rebel leg, his body was organizing a coup against him. He thought “cancer” because dad always thought things were cancer. He got a cold, it could be cancer, sore throat, it must be cancer. His older brother had died of cancer, his father figure, his best friend. The man who registered him at school in Brazil when he was twelve years old, he owed his education, his life to him. He passed before I was born; I never met my uncle, the man who helped my dad become the man he always wanted to be.
My dad’s leg started shaking and he couldn’t hold on, he was losing his grip on things—and on reality amongst them. It was cancer—it had to be—because he knew cancer and you can’t predict what you don’t have a word for, what you haven’t heard of before. Once you have a name you have a meaning, the world around you makes sense. Even if the news is bad, you want to know what to expect. The unknown is too scary to bear.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. My parents hadn’t heard of it; most people hadn’t.
Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. My parents hadn’t heard of it; most people hadn’t.What did it have to do with his leg? In a pre-internet world, it was a lonely fight. There were no forums or chat rooms then; we didn’t know anyone else who suffered from ALS, nobody was raising awareness for it, there was no ice bucket challenge.
“He had what Stephen Hawking had,” I would later tell my friends. And now that Stephen Hawking is dead, I wonder if I’ll stop having a shortcut to describe what my dad had. Because I could see in people’s faces as soon as I mentioned the scientist’s name, that they knew what it meant to have ALS. At least they knew what it might look like; I could place a visual in their head just like that. I never meant to cause distress to anyone, but that mental picture helped them understand my state growing up.
They were told he didn’t have much time, that it moves fast; he wanted to find a stop sign—he wasn’t ready for our life together to end. He started making plans. The lessons he wanted to teach us, the things we should do, the places he wanted us to see with him before it was too late, before he couldn’t follow us where we needed to be. The hourglass had been turned and I could see time trickling down; the grains were falling too fast.
A year into the disease, he decided we were going on a holiday; he knew it would be the last. Growing up in Brazil, we were used to going to the beach on summer breaks. We’d make sandcastles, eat ice cream. I remember sitting on wet sand, picking up the heavy liquid with my hands and pilling the blobs like blocks. We’d make them close to the water, to get the perfect consistency for our project. As the day went on, the sea would get closer to us and the waves would take our work away, returning it to the ocean, its original place.
The island my dad came from was made of rocks, the ones that you struggle to walk on. In Brazil, he liked feeling the sand touch his feet, “natural physiotherapy,” he used to joke, instructing us to take off our flip flops and feel the ground beneath our feet.
Me and my brother would go in the sea with my dad, as my mum watched us, waving back. She didn’t know how to swim, never has. She signed us up for swimming classes from an early age, “I won’t be able to rescue you, we’ll all drown if I jump in. You need to learn how to fend for yourselves.”
I remember when my dad taught me how to float, he put his hands under my back, and I looked up at the clouds, mesmerized, like something magical was happening inside. And before I realized, he had taken his hands away and I was floating on my own, looking at a changed sky.
We went to Florianópolis in 1998 when I was 10—my brother and I had never been on a plane. I looked down as São Paulo became a blur and the people turned into ants; everything seemed so small; I wanted to be small like that.
I had never been to the south. I inhaled the breeze; I didn’t know you could be cold at the beach. We moved, leaving our footprints in the sand; he held his arm without looking behind, not wanting to glance at the past.
Having been born on an island, the beach felt like his natural habitat, the taste of salt that permeates everything. The beach felt like home to him, and he wanted to experience that with us, even if we were too young to understand the complexity of the experience.
All that water in between was what united his two homes, us and him. Now he was preparing for a crossing—the final one. He always carried change in his pockets, maybe it was to pay Charon his fee.
On that trip, we went to an “all you can eat shrimp” restaurant. My brother was addicted to those things—we had grown up on seafood. By that stage, my dad had already started struggling with the cutlery. He got his money’s worth and spent the night with a stomachache.
Was he thinking of his last meal, when he’d stop being able to eat solid food, being fed via a tube? He had grown up poor and ate mostly potatoes. Now he was memorizing textures and tastes, saying goodbye to them like old friends.
There is a picture of us with my dad on that trip, fighting the wind on the bottom of the dunes. You can see my dad’s hand at a weird angle, because he had already lost most of its movement by then. We seem to be having fun, trying to move forwards as the wind blows us in the other direction. We fought so hard, for so long.
My dad is posing in a way—almost upright, but not quite. His left arm hangs limp, like an anchor at his side. He wears sunglasses, protecting him from the sand being blown into his face. His mouth is agape, shouting something at the camera—words flying like grains of sand in the air. He is aware of the frame, aware that this will be amongst the last pictures of him standing on his feet. He wanted it to be light and fun, like he was. He wanted that image to tell a story, and it does. It tells the story of a man who loved his family so much he crossed an ocean to be with them; not the family who raised him, the family he raised himself.
We walked up the dunes afterwards, my mum, my brother and me; dad stayed behind, it was too steep. It was just the three of us and that’s how it would be for many years to come; we might as well get used to it. From the dunes, I could see him waving at us from down below and I wondered if, when this was all over, he’d be looking down on us.
That day, my mum lost the car keys in the sand, and we had to wait around for a spare one. It was funny, no one was mad, we were just happy to be there—we didn’t want it to end. We’d get used to waiting in the long run, waiting for a cure, waiting for a treatment, waiting for an answer, waiting for death. We didn’t want the keys to arrive; we wanted to stay there; we wanted to keep him longer with us. I left part of me on that patch of sand.
We ran around; we ate ice cream; we touched the water with the tip of our toes. It was too cold for a swim. But we would jump the waves whenever they approached us, making a wish every time they came near, like we did on New Year’s Eve. I knew what I was wishing for every time my feet left the ground.
I believed in everything at the time, in all the Gods and rituals one could think of. Not believing meant giving up. And that’s how I was brought up—we don’t give up on those we love.
It was bittersweet when the keys arrived; we all wanted to go home, but home was slowing leaving us, like the ocean retreating. We saw the sky turn a shade of orange, then pink, fading into a light blue and then dark. Pitch black. We could see the stars like that, shining so bright.
As a family, we had a habit of saying goodbye when leaving a place: goodbye, sea; goodbye, tree; goodbye, sand. My parents wanted us to acknowledge the experience, to cherish it. My mum was always very good at letting us know when to say goodbye, so we wouldn’t regret not taking the time. Goodbye, Florianópolis, I said, waving goodbye; waving at him from inside.
Not long after we came back, his appetite started to fade, and the ability to eat and the shape that comes with it. The slurring of the words, the slow pace. His routine started to move in slow motion as the disease progressed. I looked at him on his chair, a skeleton of a man—how did we get there? He refused to spend the day in bed. He preferred the commute, from bed to chair. I think he thought it was too early for that, to spend the day lying down; he wasn’t dead yet.
His olive skin started to gain a new shade of white, with sickly splashes of yellow. He’d look at the sun—he loved it so much. The sun had been a constant in his life; in Madeira, it was always there, warm on his face while he stepped on grapes to make wine. He hadn’t lost it when he moved to Brazil, where it is twenty-five degrees for most of the year. And now he looked at it outside and he couldn’t walk up to it. Most of his days had turned into that, just staring at the things around him, out of reach.
When I touched his arm, a shiver went down my spine, the elasticity of the muscle gone; all that was left was flesh, fighting to hold on to his bones. I could see the ribs under his chest, sometimes even sticking out from under his shirt. Were they trying to flee? His body was not a hospitable environment anymore; his limbs must have felt foreign to him, an unrecognizable shape. Never had I witnessed body and mind detached like that; both parts were my dad, but I found them hard to reconcile. The man on the chair was not the man I had grown up with, but I knew he was there—perhaps locked inside his own mind. I was only 11 as he got sicker and sicker, but kids learn fast how to adapt. Eventually, I got used to his new shape and the sounds he would make; I would mimic them, trying to communicate. I’d open my mouth and say, “aaaaaa,” and we would laugh.
Who was supposed to guide me now?
I remember kissing his head and not recognising the man I had met, the man who raised me. I remember dancing on his feet, moving from left to right. It had been long since I had last stepped on them. Who was supposed to guide me now?
He’d shrunk in those two years; the disease was overtaking him. And it was our job to remember how we used to be. His essence never left, and only now can I acknowledge that, because back then, it was easier to split him in two—before and after his illness. Perhaps it was more palatable to feel like I was losing him in installments; that I could say goodbye to each part as they left. Bye, legs; bye, feet; bye voice. Stalling for as much as I could, dragging my feet, like him.
His white t-shirt was constantly covered in food while he could still eat it. I can’t even remember how often my mum had to change him; I know it was an arduous process. To be fair, everything had become some sort of enterprise, actions that we take for granted due to our functioning bodies had been outsourced to my mum, my grandma, and a nurse. They were in charge of his bladder and his stomach. When my parents got married, he’d promised to give my mum his heart; she took all his organs onboard. She would never have said “no,” to him.
“Elvira,” I’d hear him say under his breath, calling for my mum. I don’t know when he stopped calling her by “Virinha,” her nickname. I don’t remember when he stopped calling her altogether; the movement in his eyes replacing those words. Can you imagine never again hearing your name being called in your soulmate’s voice? Silence echoing love. Because I think that’s what my parents were, each other’s soulmates. It has always been a choice; love had not been bestowed upon them. They woke up to next to each other every day and decided to stay.
“Yes,” “No,” “water,” “move”—he blinked with his eyes. The doctors showed us a system, a cardboard paper with all the letters and key sentences; mum would patiently write it down, to make sense of his needs. He had studied journalism at university, but now his life was reduced to key words. That board full of letters with hidden sentences that he could hardly put together. His eyes did all the work, his body immobile, his mind at full speed.
My mum told me once he was alive because of us, because he loved us so much. I cried because I wanted him dead, because I wanted the pain to stop, because I loved him back. Eleven years before, she had said, “Till death us do part,” and it did.
One day, he stayed in bed; he didn’t want to go to his chair, whatever force of will he still had in him had left. We went to see him in hospital for the first time, even though he’d been there before, many times. My mum wanted to shelter us from that experience, from seeing our dad in a hospital bed, plugged to tubes, the smell of morphine everywhere. She had spared us the sight of that, but we were there now, for the first time, and the last.
We sat near his bed and told him about our days; he wanted to know how it went. We talked about plain things because everything else was too big, because plainness is the fabric of life. “How was school?” he asked using his eyes.
I can’t remember saying “I love you” when I left, but my mum told me later that I had. I hope that’s the case; if not, I also know he knew I loved him anyway. There is a type of love that doesn’t need to be said; I didn’t need a piece of cardboard for that.
I remember my mum and my aunt taking us into the living room, knowing that the minute we sat down, it would be the end. “He is gone,” my mum said, and my aunt started crying beside her. My mum told us how much he loved us but that he couldn’t go on, and the stone that was bringing me down was lifted somehow. They gave us some space and we went into our separate rooms. I didn’t want to talk—I wanted to move. I found my swimsuit buried inside my wardrobe; the smell of chlorine ingrained in it. How do children grieve? They swim, I suppose—upstream.
The pool had been our happy place, and I don’t remember visiting it much while he was ill. Perhaps I thought it’d be disrespectful towards him, to inhabit a past he could no longer access. Every day, as I walked past that swimming pool, I was reminded of what we once had.
There is a video of us, from when I was seven or eight; we are in the pool with my dad doing flips, swimming to him and back. He’d instruct us on how to float; he would offer his hand. He’d push us like that, convincing us to do what we were afraid of; making sure that we knew that we could do it on our own—that we wouldn’t drown without him there.
My dad died on a Thursday. It was the 12th of October—Children’s Day in Brazil—and kids all over the country would be receiving presents from their parents. Even at that age, we couldn’t ignore the irony of the event—what had been our “gift.” Childhood slowly drifting away.
Holding a towel, I knocked on my brother’s door. He didn’t need much convincing; he too was lost. We had waited in that in-between place for so long that pain had become our identity; by the time we left it, we’d forgotten who we were.
The pool was empty, most kids were still in school, and we wouldn’t have to share that square. We moved around in calm and warm waters, unlike the ones we actually lived in. We had to keep swimming; that’s how we’d survive, the ones left behind, otherwise we’d drown.
I dipped my toes—the water was warm—and I slowed myself down. I felt like a tea bag, my flavor dissolving, thoughts leaving my head so that the water could hold them. I did underwater handstands; I swam from one side to the next. I wanted to be physically tired—I wanted my body to match my head. I observed the wrinkles on my fingers: the passage of time.
I let my body sink, holding my breath for as long as I could. I opened my eyes under water and saw the world underneath—blurry, green. With empty lungs, I came up for air. My eyes stung; it wasn’t the chlorine that made them red.
Exhausted, I let go, allowing my back to reach the surface of the water. Floating felt like being on the cusp of something—like life and death. Not quite water, not quite air. The densities being almost a match.
That day, swimming in the pool, I felt my dad’s hand leaving my back; I had to float by myself now. And I managed, somehow, because he taught me how. My mum looked down at us from the fifth floor, the one my dad had long lost the legs to climb to. She waved and we waved back—at her, at the sky above our heads.
Big houses are a feature of Ireland: our countryside is dotted with these mansions—or at the least their ruined remains. The role of the Big House—a specifically Irish term meaning a rural country mansion—charts a history beginning in the 16th century when the Protestant ascendancy began building these grand houses and through to their decline around the time of Irish independence. They were literally ‘big’ but also as Elizabeth Bowen writes, “have they been called ‘big’ with a slight inflection—that of hostility, irony? One may call a man ‘big’ with just that inflection because he seems to think the hell of himself.” These houses demonstrated the clear separation between the Anglo-Irish who lived in them and the Irish Catholics who worked the land.
In my novel, Fair Play, a group of friends are celebrating their friend Benjamin’s birthday. They are staying in a grand house in the Irish countryside—one that has been allowed to go to wrack and ruin because of the financial status of the original owners but which has now been renovated and turned into that most modern of properties: an Airbnb. They spend the night eating, drinking and playing a murder mystery game devised by Benjamin’s sister Abigail. In the night, something happens: the house shape-shifts around them so that it now resembles something straight out of a Golden Age detective novel.
The Big House also became a feature of Irish writing: in the early days of the genre, these novels were written by people who were living on grand estates. Their authors were predominantly women and included Maria Edgeworth and the writing duo Somerville and Ross. In the twentieth century, writers began to write more about the precarious position of the Big House as significant political and social changes were being made in Ireland. Society was moving on and the occupants of these houses found themselves suddenly out of step with contemporary feeling. More recently, Big House novels or subversions of them are being written by people who have no personal connection to that culture. Here is a selection.
Widely regarded as the first Big House novel, Castle Rackrent was published anonymously in 1800. It is presented as the memoir of Thady Quirk, the loyal steward to the Rackrent family, and charts the decline of four generations of heirs. It is a sharp satire of the absentee landlord system and the mismanagement of grand estates. Maria Edgeworth spent most of her life in Edgeworthstown, County Longford and this book was influenced both by her own family history and her experience of assisting her father in the management of their estate.
Elizabeth Bowen was also raised in a historic country house and her novel The Last September is set in a similar mansion to her own in County Cork and set during the Irish War of Independence. During this time, many manor houses were being burnt down by the IRA—a great fear of Bowen’s at the time. The story centres on Lois Farquar, whose romantic entanglements and personal growth are intertwined with the larger political turmoil surrounding her. The novel explores themes of loss, identity, and the inevitable decline of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
Inspired by his own Catholic landed gentry background, Langrishe Goes Down is Aidan Higgins’ modernist take on the Big House novel. The story follows the fates of the remaining members of the Langrishe family—three sisters who continue to live together in the decaying family home. The majority of the novel focuses on Imogen and her past affair with a German student named Otto Beck.
The story is narrated by Aroon St. Charles, who reflects on her childhood and the deteriorating social world of her aristocratic family. The book’s exploration of societal expectations, complex family relationship and the decline of the Anglo-Irish gentry reflect Molly Keane’s own upbringing on a decaying grand estate with a domineering mother. Keane was away at school when her family’s Big House was burnt down in 1921. Good Behaviour is a darkly comedic novel and Keane’s publisher of decades initially refused to publish it on the basis that it was too nasty.
Detective Inspector St John Strafford is called out to investigate a murder at Ballyglass House, County Wexford, where the local Catholic priest has been found brutally murdered. The crime causes, or exacerbates, a divide between the Protestant occupants of the Big House and the wider Catholic community. As St John Strafford, himself a Protestant, digs deeper into the case, he uncovers layers of family secrets, political intrigue, and religious tensions, all set against the backdrop of the divided local community.
Paul Murray’s debut is a modern and darkly comic take on the classic Big House novel. 24-year-old Charles Hythloday enjoys lazing about his family’s mansion squandering his inheritance. But the bills start to pile up, his sister Bel’s new boyfriend is clearly casing the joint, and his alcoholic mother returns from a stint rehab determined that he should get a job. A story of a man living in denial.
The Likeness is a psychological mystery that follows Detective Cassie Maddox as she investigates a murder. Detective Maddox is called to a crime scene where a woman has been found dead, and shockingly, the victim looks almost exactly like her. The deceased had been living amongst a group of students in a dilapidated mansion called Whitethorn House which they were in the process of restoring. Cassie joins the group to try and uncover the truth behind Lexie’s death, but as she immerses herself in the lives of the students, Cassie finds herself drawn to them, blurring the lines between her investigation and her own emotions.
This novel opens in India in 1920 where we meet star-crossed lovers, Irish solider Michael Flaherty and the Anglo-Indian Rose Twomey. We then fast forward to the 1980s where we are introduced to Rose’s grandchild and her husband, a scion of a Big House in Co. Kildare. The novel deals with the complexities of post-colonial identity: the Anglo-Irish who will never be Irish enough, the Anglo-Indians who pine for a home which will never accept them and the Irish members of the British Army who found themselves ostracised on their return to Ireland after the war.
When our thirteen-year-old son finds my husband’s wedding band from his first marriage, I am unprepared. This piece of my husband’s history had yet to find its rightful place in our lives together; a piece that, after fifteen years, I was still reckoning with.
We hadn’t told our children about their father’s past, that before we met, he had been married, living in a small ranch house in the suburbs of New Jersey, when his wife at age twenty-nine died from a heart attack. It was my husband’s story, one belonging to the before. We existed in the after.
My son sits on the rug holding a shoebox he discovered on the top shelf of the den closet, among old photo albums and DVDs nobody watches. It startles me, seeing the ring. I didn’t know it was there. His eyes spark with excitement, thinking he’s discovered an heirloom. This, for him, is treasure.
“Whoa!” he says, hunched over the ring. “What is this?” He examines the band, the thick brushed silver with its shiny rolled edges. All the nerve endings in my body feel exposed. I resist the urge to grab it from him, hide it.
“Uh . . . it’s Dad’s,” I falter.
He slips the ring on his finger. The band wobbles loosely.
My hands turn to bricks in my lap.
I can hear my husband’s muffled voice through the ceiling on a work call.
“Put it away,” I say. “You can ask Dad about it later.”
He drops the ring into his palm, mesmerized.
Then he finds the inscription.
“Who’s Judy?” he asks, looking up at me.
When I first met my husband, he was a thirty-three-year-old widower, and I needed instructions. It was the beginning of the 21st century, and I waited through the buzz and hum of my phone jack working its magic until I was connected to the world’s largest card catalogue. I typed my trouble into the search engine: what to do if you’re jealous of a dead person; how to date someone who lost a spouse; my boyfriend’s wife died . . . I waited for an answer, but all the advice that eventually loaded was about divorce, getting over betrayal, anger at an ex; everything dealt with Choice. But how could you fall in love with someone who had never chosen to end their previous relationship? How could a person fall in love when they never fell out of love?
Despite my best efforts to protect myself from a “complicated relationship,” I found myself stumbling into love, meanwhile constructing a faulty set of instructions on how to love a widower:
Deny: Despite the ring he still wears on his right hand. Despite the photos you’ve peeked at from their honeymoon. Tell yourself, everyone’s happy at twenty-nine; everyone looks blissful in Aruba. Tell yourself, New Jersey, as if somehow that gauges the potential for happiness in a marriage. Tell yourself, not that long, as if significance can be measured in time. Believe all the love songs—never loved anyone like you before . . . . Tell yourself they are singing about you.
Compete: Believe the lyrics again. You are the most . . . the only . . . the one . . . . Of course, they are singing about you. Weigh time together as if collecting points, each year a bonus round! Ignore the fact that there is no medal to be won. Forget you are competing with a ghost.
Repeat: Other people will need convincing, too.
Finally, submit yourself to second place. Second choice. Get comfortable there. There is no sine qua non. That would make you a monster.
When my husband and I started dating in New York, we liked to walk the city streets without a plan. He’d ride the bus into Port Authority, and I’d meet him off the subway from my studio apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. It was my last year of graduate school, the last year of my twenties. My friends convinced me to try Match.com, and I thought of it as Research, the perfect combination of low-risk, non-committal, and adventurous; I was putting myself out there, into the lives of strangers. If anything, it was something to do to feel less lonely in a city with over eight-million people living wall-to-wall between them. I’d stay up late listening to my modem loading potential boyfriends onto my laptop while millions of people fell in and out of love.
His relationship status read: tell you later. A freelance web designer and drummer, he had an East Coast sarcasm that was foreign to my midwestern sensibility. Despite our differences, we had surprising facts in common: our birthdays a few days apart; left-handed; older sisters with the same name; raised by Jewish mothers and Mediterranean fathers; my father and his mother died a month apart. We took it as a sign and decided to meet for coffee at The Grey Dog in the West Village. We talked about our families, music, travels. He made me laugh. I liked his hiking boots. He offered me his brownie, which I declined, and then his umbrella when we stepped out into the rain, which we shared.
On our second date, at a Mexican restaurant on the Lower East Side, he revealed over his bowl of chicken tortilla soup the meaning of his relationship status. I told him I was sorry. He said he wanted to love again.
I had an idea about love—that it was singular, finite, that in each of our romantic luscious hearts, there is a space reserved for that mysterious one and only. A perfect missing piece to a puzzle. Maybe I can blame the love songs. I blame all the love songs. I wanted a first wedding. A first first dance. And yet, something kept drawing us closer together. He held my hand with his left. I tried to ignore the ring he still wore on his right.
After my husband and I had our son, we talked about whether we’d tell him about our pasts, about his first marriage. Maybe when our son got older, my husband decided. An ancient fear stirred in me. Would our son question the legitimacy of our marriage? Put into his mind the same insecurities that I had wrestled with when we first met? Would it make him wonder whether his father truly loved his mother? My husband looked at me like a man who sees his wife struggling to concoct reason from lunacy. I flailed about in a battle in which the only opponent was myself.
An unspoken addendum revealed itself:
Don’t tell the kids.
Now, my son is looking between the inscription on the ring and me, asking again, “Who’s Judy?”
He’s waiting for an answer. I don’t know what to do. The moment tips toward me. I steal what does not belong to me.
“There’s something you don’t know.” I want to shut it down, start over. But he is perched, waiting, holding the ring, and I am holding a bomb.
“Before I knew Dad, he was married,” I say in one breath, as though trying to protect him from the impact.
My son’s eyes grow large. “Really? What happened?”
“She died suddenly. A year before I met Dad.”
“Whoa.” He sets the ring carefully back into its box. “Her name was Judy?” he asks and the tenderness in his voice moves me.
I nod. “Ask Dad about it. He’ll tell you more.”
I wait for the aftershock, but he asks no more questions. I am struck by the fact that we are still here, sitting together in the den, the roof intact, the house still standing.
“Are you OK?” I ask.
“Yeah, why?” He puts the shoebox away. “Can I go play basketball?” he says, already out the door, running off to find his friend.
I sit alone in the aftermath.
I text my husband from downstairs. T. found your wedding band. I told him briefly. He will ask you more later.
I hear my husband’s voice upstairs pause in the middle of his work call, then keep going.
Later, we talk about it. My husband and I sit on the den couch, knee to knee, like we’re kids at a sleepover, divulging secrets. “I’m so sorry,” I tell him. “I didn’t know what to do.” But he seems happy, relaxed. Says our son didn’t seem fazed by it or have many questions when they finally talked, that he was glad our son knew.
Then he talks about the night Judy died. How he drove to the hospital, but never got to say goodbye. We tread carefully, though it’s not our first time, but it is different now. As I listen, I feel something physical shifting inside of me, making space. I move over, make room for her. He touches my knee. I lean toward him.
A few months later, when my lifelong friend dies, I call my other friends every time I miss her voice. But nothing makes the loss more bearable. The contours and edges of her absence are in the specific shape of her. Nobody can take her place.
It seems so simple, so obvious now. Everyone inhabits their own space. I wonder why it took me so many years to understand.
My husband keeps the ring in its box in the closet. We talk about the past more freely now, his first marriage, and I like the way it weaves into and out of our present. It is part of the fabric that makes him whole. There is no first choice, second choice. Neither negates the other. In a sense, we’re all sine qua non. The ghosts of our pasts guide us as we wrap our arms around each other.
Finally, I realize the love songs are right. They were right all along. They are singing about me.
Becoming a mother is a deeply transformational experience that shifts every aspect of identity. This metamorphosis is often overlooked as much of the focus in society is placed on the baby and the baby’s development. The oversimplified narratives that demand mothers to hide the complexities of their own journey leave little room for women to embrace the full spectrum of what it means to become a mother in all wonder and torment.
In recent years, there has been an explosion of graphic memoirs about motherhood. The mix of illustrations and words can help to show the fluidity of maternal identity and all the dualities that come along with it in a way that words alone cannot fully capture. Mothers can find joy in a new life, while at the same time grieve parts of themselves they’ve lost. Mothers can love intensely, but that intensity comes with the cost of exhaustion. Newfound power and strength coexist with vulnerability and fear. Motherhood transforms how we exist in the world, but it also changes both the world around us.
For me, early motherhood inspired a creative transformation. I drew whenever I got the chance about the oddness, tragedy, and ecstasy of becoming a mother. My book The Motheris about constant push and pull. I desperately wanted a baby, yet I was terrified of actually being pregnant and having one. I lurched into a new identity and grieved my old self. When she was born, I loved my baby fiercely, but yearned for my previous relationship with my partner. The Mother is also about struggling with some of my early childhood experiences in order to be able to love and care for my own child.
These graphic memoirs below explore the emotional, psychological, and physical transformation of motherhood. These writers offer diverse perspectives on how this role shapes not just mothers, but also the relationships we have with our children and the people around us.
Lucy Knisley has dreamt of being a mother her whole life. But when it was finally the perfect time, conceiving turned out to be far more challenging than anything she’s ever faced. In Kid Gloves, Knisley opens up about her struggle with fertility, including multiple miscarriages. When finally she has a pregnancy that lasts, she encounters unexpected health complications, including misdiagnoses and a near-death experience while in labor. Alongside her personal journal, Kniselydelves into the weird and shocking history of reproductive health. Her illustrations illuminate the often-spoken struggles surrounding fertility, the intricate workings of the body, and the painful, messy, and sometimes traumatic experiences that can come with trying to become pregnant.
Dear Scarlet is written as a letter from the author to her daughter as she reveals the difficult and painful experience of postpartum depression following her daughter’s birth. In black and white drawings, Wong describes how she wrestles with constant negative thoughts about her inadequacy as a mother, her overwhelming sadness, and her desire to disappear. She feels constantly tired and alone, burdened by a darkness that clouds her every thought. It is only when she receives a diagnosis that she starts to feel some relief, recognizing that the darkness she feels isn’t just a personal failing, but something that can be treated. The honest and funny graphic memoir is a poignant reflection of mental health and the journey toward healing.
Shadowlife follows Kumiko, a headstrong and wilful elderly woman who refuses to follow the end-of-life care plans her daughters have laid out for her. Determined to be independent, she finds an apartment on her own where she battles the spirits of death and reconnects with a past love. As she approaches the end, Kumiko wrestles with letting go of her identity as a mother and the maternal responsibilities to her daughters that she’s carried for so long, turning to a newfound sense of childlike joy and curiosity of life, despite her failing body.
Bechdel, who found success as a writer withFun Home—her acclaimed graphic memoir about her relationship with her deceased father, a closeted gay man—turns her gaze to her mother in this follow-up. Are You My Mother? uses psychoanalysis as a lens to examine Bechdel’s complicated feelings about her mother, an emotionally withholding woman who expressed disapproval about the way Bechdel has written about their family. The book jumps back and forth through time, in and out of dreams, as she deciphers her thoughts and fears using insights from child psychoanalyst, Donald Winnicott. Bechdel clearly feels catharsis in her writing as she explores parenting, identity, sexuality and queerness, and recognizing her patterns of looking for maternal surrogates in her therapists, girlfriends, and in the works of famous women writers.
The Best We Could Do tells the story of Thi Bui’s family as they escape the Vietnam war by boat to a refugee camp in Malaysia, before eventually resettling in the United States. The story starts in New York City with Thi Bui as a new mother to a baby boy, before traveling to the past as she recounts her parents’ pain, dreams, and loss through the eyes of her childhood self. A beautiful poignant exploration of family history, sacrifice, and starting anew.
In Good Talk, Mira Jacob takes readers through her intimate conversations with her son, partner, friends and family about race in America. Her six-year-old asks her difficult questions about race in America. She answers with as much honesty as she can, using these moments to explore what it means to be a mother of color raising a half-Jewish, half-Indian child in America. The conversations in this book are vulnerable, moving, uncomfortable, and deeply funny.
Dedicated to her former step mother, It Won’t Always Be Like This is a touching and beautifully illustrated story about Malaka Gharib’s relationships with her family in Egypt. When she’s nine, Malaka goes to her father’s homeland for her annual summer vacation and learns that her father has remarried. The story unfolds over the following summers as she grows closer to her stepmother, navigates the ebbs and flows of her relationship with her father and her step-siblings. A beautiful ode to stepmothers.
I’ve worked in a wide range of jobs in a wide range of buildings: pubs, malls, posh houses, offices, small individual stores. My CV is frankly, bizarre. It is only really looking back on my time clocking in shifts in the vast, open plan offices or the seemingly endless, run down malls that I can realistically call those moments of my professional life gothic. At the time, I wasn’t looking for ghosts or monsters, nor becoming either of those things. I was getting on with it, taking home the terrible pay, dreaming of some other life, inching my way towards it. Placing a new face over mine, and asking customers if I can get them anything else with that.
In the great tradition of gothic literature, the place in which the drama unfolds becomes a metaphor in itself—this we know, the haunted house chief amongst them. When I was writingEat The Ones You Love, I gave a lot of time to looking back at my time working in suburban shopping centers. How much growing up I did in them, even if it felt like they were keeping me frozen in time. The novel is set in an amalgam of the long, weird halls I once worked in: the books loves these places like I love them, but treats them as what I now truly believe they are: terrifying.
These shopping centers weren’t exactly thriving back then, but now, in the long and strange shadow of the internet, they are not only dying, but they are heaving their final breaths. They are not haunted by a heart thumping under the floorboards, or the oppressive secrets of a complicated family, or the beloved, deceased, and utterly irreplaceable wife of the man of the house, but the mall as it is today is more Manderlay than may at first meet the eye. It is instead haunted by the day-to-day of the waning collective. By an ordinary past that is no longer necessary. By dust-filled deadstock shops. By weird vape emporiums. By shuttered concessions, empty fountains. I noticed recently, in a shopping centre where my mother would drop me off at the in-house crèche while she ran errands, that the space that had once been a vibrant children’s play centre was now, inexplicably, an oratory. If that isn’t gothic, I do not know what is.
My time in offices was short lived: I made a good receptionist, but a very, very bad and easily distracted copywriter. I had no idea how to behave in these spaces—offices are governed by invisible, strict social rules that I lacked the maturity and frankly, basic people skills to understand. Stephen King notes in On Writing that the origin of the word ‘haunting’ comes from ‘haunt’—a place where animals go to feed. There is no feeding like that which we see in offices—most specifically in the tech space. The feed is on scraps of power, of status. There is aggressive performance at every turn. There is such pure want in the air. Here is where we find ghosts. Here is where we find monsters.
I never knew how to manage it. I remember so clearly a Sunday before going in to one contract job I acquired during my time living in San Francisco—a content writing job at a start-up—I sat at a party looking at the clock, realizing there were only twelve hours before I had to be back at my desk, and it felt as though my blood was turning to concrete. Here, again, a kind of horror. At what, I still don’t know. The feel of the place, more than anything. But still. I showed up until my contract ran out. I went to work every day, even as it ate me, as we all do. And it is this forced commitment, this sense of being trapped, that I think makes the workplace the perfect site for exploring and unfolding the gothic. If we tilt the way we read books about work ever so slightly, they can become horror in our hands.
In the way that Dark Academia romanticizes and escalates and enriches the relative mundanity of the world of education, I posit that there is a whole hidden genre of books about work that already lean firmly to the side of the gothic.
There is no denying the almost prophetic nature of element of some of Ling Ma’s 2018 dystopian parable, but where the gothic employment energy hits is truly the fact of our protagonist finding sustainable employment (in the Bible department of a publishing company) while the world succumbs to a devastating virus. Worse, how good remaining open in a crisis looks for the company’s image—and worse again, how one can show up to work even when there is nobody left to work for.
This, to me, is a tender and elegant novel about being at odds with the world, but also, with a tilt, the convenience store could read as a strange prison. These identical spaces, these machines for life, this realm where Keiko, our utterly singular protagonist, can function well—though the rest of the world is difficult. Without the convenience store, Keiko cannot cope. She returns, as though drawn by something unspeakable. Is this not a kind of a ghost story? A story of possession? There is no specter or ghoul at its heart, just the inescapable halogen glow of the conbini.
Published in 1995, there is something of the dark oracle about Microserfs. A group of tech employees work for a software giant, and live in a house together before absconding to work on a new project in Silicon Valley. One character eats only two dimensional foods and is addicted to cough syrup. Another has an eating disorder, another is plagued by problems with his skin, others are addicted to exercise. The treatment of the body is so confronting here, in contrast with the early look at what would become the most powerful sector in the world, and the damning, all-consuming expectations of the staff that make the machines work. At the time, Microserfs was satire. Now, it reads like a warning.
Promising Young Women by Caroline O’Donoghue
What begins as a sharp, funny story about a sometime anonymous online agony aunt who throws herself into an affair with her boss, at some point, takes the reader by total surprise and turns from office drama into something much darker. Jane, who is almost without reservation shagging her older boss, begins to quite literally decay. She slowly loses touch with reality as his manipulation escalates, and her lies become harder to maintain. Once the trapdoor of this novel opens, we are no longer just in a flashy London office or in clandestine hotel rooms, and instead somewhere much stranger, and somewhere much worse.
Hard Copy by Fien Veldman, translated by Hester Velmans
Love can be the salve of all terrible jobs, surely. Love is what buoys is through the worst seasons of our employment. In Hard Copy, though, the love is taboo—our protagonist’s paramour is a photocopier. The tight, earnest prose brings the reader right onto her side, even if her tastes are a little unconventional. Is it not gothic to have one’s heart trapped by something that can never really offer you a future, instead, only a life of shame and secrecy? Is it not a horror to love a machine?
I do feel there should be a sub-category within the Gothic Employment that handles tech, specifically, because there is a growing darkness to every novel written about tech as each year passes. Egan’s novel is a set of beautifully interlinking short stories—and a sequel toA Visit From The Goon Squad—many of which orbit a company called Mandela, which externalizes memories. Lives. Characters upload themselves, or wrestle with the nature of what it is to do so. They willingly make ghosts of themselves, permanent digital monuments. This is a vast digital graveyard in the making—and the consequences of that are complicated, and heavy, as are all dealings with life after death.
The workplace here is no office, no shopfront, no sprawling tech campus. Instead it is an unknowable and labyrinthine House, to which our protagonist, Piranesi, is in endless service to. His employment is the study of the tides, the gradual cataloguing and exploration of the House. His boss? Well, his captor, The Other, visits him from time to time. I think about this book every day, in my own work, my own obsession with my job. Piranesi is peak Gothic Employment: but unlike the other titles in this list, it is first gothic, employment second. This is a novel about a kind if psychic indentured servitude, about dedication to the place in which one ‘works’ at all cost. About how easy it is to become lost.
In the final days of her first pregnancy, Samina Ali felt that something was not right in her body. She and her then-husband suspected she had preeclampsia, an alarmingly common, life-threatening pregnancy complication, as well as cholestasis, a liver condition that can be caused by pregnancy. Her OB-GYN was skeptical, but when Ali went into labor, she began experiencing intense pain in her head and her chest. “I’d never experienced such debilitating pain before,” Ali writes in her memoir Pieces You’ll Never Get Back. “I couldn’t keep my eyes open.” Yet the doctor delivering her baby wouldn’t meet her eyes and recommended she take an Alka-Seltzer.
After giving birth, Ali’s blood pressure skyrocketed, and she had a grand mal seizure. She and her husband had correctly diagnosed both of her conditions. Later, she learned that the pain she had felt in her chest had been a heart attack, and “the head pain the doctor had insisted was me being dramatic … was the result of ischemia, [a] cascade of minor strokes.” After her seizure, she fell into a coma for days, which doctors predicted would result in her death. When she instead woke up, still alive, she was pronounced the hospital’s Miracle Girl. (Simultaneously, she and her family weren’t allowed to speak to the doctor who had overseen her delivery, for fear that they would sue.) But the extensive damage to her brain meant she suffered severe memory loss, aphasia (loss of language), and struggled to bond with her son. Initially, she could not grasp that anything was wrong with her at all.
In Pieces You’ll Never Get Back, Ali vividly recreates her state of mind through the slow process of recovery. This fragmented, elliptical memoir jumps back and forth between her childhood, her alienated experience of brain damage, and her later reflections on her experience. Despite her neurologist’s skepticism when she urgently asked him when she would be able to write again, she persisted in writing her novel Madras on Rainy Days (2004) while still suffering from serious aphasia. Although her initial attempts were unreadable, her grasp on language still incomplete, she attributes her recovery in large part to writing. “For months and then for years,” she writes, “each day I sat down at the computer, I pushed my brain to create new connections.”
In our conversation, conducted over Zoom, Ali and I discussed how writing affected her recovery, her decision to write this memoir so many years after her experience, how medical misogyny and racism affects maternal care, and more.
Morgan Leigh Davies: You’ve spoken about wanting to mirror the structure of brain trauma in the structure of the book. How did you write about an experience that is beyond language in so many ways?
Samina Ali: It was so difficult to do. I joke that the book was as difficult for me to write as it was for me to give birth to my son. It was just such a long process with so many different iterations.
I’m trained as a fiction writer, and so the first time around, I kept finding myself trying to bring in dialogue, trying to do all of these things that you do with fictional craft. I kept falling into that trap. I wasn’t really talking about what had actually happened with the brain damage. I was more trying to create scenes; and I think, looking back, that it was a way for me to move into this story slowly, because emotionally it might have shattered me to just begin talking about it.
So I think of it as kind of like a shark, circling and circling until you get the prey. That was the first iteration. After that, I absolutely had to deal with exactly what you’re talking about, which is: How do you get this across? How do you explain to people what it’s really like to view the world from a broken brain?
Once again, I struggled with the language, but then I realized, we take ideas from Buddhism and different spiritual traditions, and we make them commonplace—you know, We should have a beginner’s mind. We should all see the world as though we’re seeing it for the first time. We should be able to quiet the chatter in our brain. I started to realize that one of the things I could do is take on these common misconceptions simply because I’ve been there now with my brain. I started to realize that I could talk about what that actually means outside of these commercialized spiritual values.
MLD: One of the things that really struck me about your book was your ability to both write about religion and spirituality in a very sincere and meaningful way, but also to confront some of these tropes. You lay bare a lot of the myths or misconceptions we have about so much that is innate to human life. If the brain isn’t working, that stuff isn’t there, right?
SA: That is one of the most important messages of the book. Our concept of the afterlife, our concept of God, our concept that we have a soul that will somehow move on after we die: These are all stories that we’ve passed down. I trace how we came upon those stories, all the way back to the ancient Egyptians. Over the centuries, the stories of some sort of soul moving on to a higher place, a better place than what we have on this earth, start to become more and more complicated. Suddenly it’s not just a different version of earth, like the ancient Egyptians thought; suddenly, we create an all-powerful being, we create souls, we create heaven with pearly gates, we create the concept of angels, we create the concept of there being multiple levels of heaven.
Our brain is unable to perceive the end of life. It is unable to see that at some point the brain will simply turn off and we will no longer be here, thinking and imagining and doing all of the things that we’re doing right now. So our brain dreams, and it dreams that it will live on in some sort of afterlife. It’s part of the process of having a brain. I trace it through different world religions and show how each monotheistic faith borrows from other faiths and continues these ideas. All of these faiths, we think of them as being so different, but they’re so interconnected and linked; if all of the different faiths are different branches of the tree, they all go back to the same trunk and the same roots.
MLD: I’m curious about living with this enormous narrative, whether there’s a temptation to push that away so that it isn’t defining. But also how to acknowledge that your story isn’t about how everything miraculously got better.
SA: You never recover. I still deal with aphasia; I still find words, whether it’s in my email or even when I was writing this book, that I don’t notice the first time around, that only during revision, I’m like, Oh, where did that come from? I still have memory issues. I still haven’t fully recovered all my memories from the past. There’s a lot of little things that people don’t actually pick up on, unless they’re living with me.
I’m hoping that people understand that the book is really a hopeful message where I’m saying: Yes, I did recover, and we, as humans, have the ability to confront struggles and things that might hold us back. That we can dig into ourselves, whether it’s by finding faith or finding some sort of resilience; that we have the ability, as humans, to overcome our adversities, our struggles, and to become better for it. At the same time, I will say that for many, many people in my life, they didn’t know that I went through this, and so they’re finding out now. The book has come out, and I have been getting messages from friends left and right, going, Well, I didn’t know this about you, I didn’t know what this about you, and I can sense that there is a level of betrayal that they feel because they’re like, Was I just not close enough? Why didn’t you tell me?
Our society just doesn’t know how to handle illness.
But in fact, our society just doesn’t know how to handle illness. We don’t know how to talk to people when they’re dealing with illness. When we hear that someone has passed away, our first thought is not to give condolences. Our first thought is, Oh my God, what? How do I say the right thing? It’s about us. Even when people heard initially, when I did tell a couple of people about what I went through, you could tell how uncomfortable people get. They look away or they grow silent or they change the subject right away, or in extreme cases they just say, I don’t want to talk about this.
I think, as a culture, we have to get to a place where we can talk about our grief and our losses and our illnesses and what we’re coping with. I think we have to get to a place where we aren’t just expected to be super healthy 30-year-olds. As humans, we’re going to face different challenges in life. How do we talk about those things and how do we give comfort to one another and how do we create a circle where we can provide solace? So one of the main reasons I stayed silent was not because of me. It was because I was trying to protect other people from my story.
MLD: You’ve said that you started working on this in some form when you were pregnant with your daughter. What was the decision like to have this document, both as a thing for yourself but also as part of a part of your public life?
SA: When I went in three-and-a-half years after I delivered my son for what became my final follow-up exam with my neurologist, he was the one who, at that point, encouraged me to write a book. He said that as doctors, they can look at a patient from the outside and tell a patient, this is what you’re going through based on medical textbooks, but that as someone who had recovered, I could really give some insight on what happens inside the brain. And I remember walking away from that and thinking, hell no, I’m not going to go back and revisit this story.
When I became pregnant with my daughter, my son was about eight, and I had remarried. I went back to the same hospital where I delivered my son, because they had all my charts. This time, I went to the chair of OB-GYN, who was a woman, and I said, You have all my medical information, can you safely take me to the end of this? And she did a careful review and she said, Yes, I am willing to do that. But the first time around I’d been 29. I’d never had any sort of medical emergency. All of that helped in my recovery, but this time around I didn’t have those [advantages], and it really could mean that I didn’t make it.
So the idea that this growing fetus was a ticking time bomb was very painful and scary. I was frightened throughout my pregnancy, and the only way I could deal with the fears was by journaling, and I wanted to leave a record for my son. So that was the first iteration of it, and then it still took me a while to go back to it after that. When I did eventually go back to it and realize it had to be written as a memoir, I knew right away that it couldn’t just be a story of recovery. I mean, who cares? It’s just my personal story. It had to have meaning for other people, meaning that they could take from it that was larger than me.
MLD: So obviously you had a competent professional team for your second pregnancy, thank God, compared to the tremendous amount of medical neglect you experienced in your first pregnancy. But all these years later, preeclampsia remains a very common condition.
Women have been giving birth since the dawn of time, and women have been dying giving birth since the dawn of time.
SA: I think that’s another myth in our culture, that [since] women have been giving birth since the dawn of time, there should be no issues, you know? Women have been giving birth since the dawn of time, and women have been dying giving birth since the dawn of time.I remember when I was interviewing several OB-GYNs at UCSF when I was writing the book, one of them—this didn’t end up in the book—said that whenever a patient comes in early after they’ve just discovered they’re pregnant, they come in and they’re all giddy, and she said she has to watch herself because her immediate instinct is to say, Pregnancy is a sickness! Because the fact is that the U.S. is the only developed nation in the world where maternal mortality and maternal morbidity are on the rise. It’s crazy. There are places in the U.S., cities and little towns, where our maternal mortality rates are equivalent to those in sub-Saharan Africa.
It is that bad, and a lot of it has to do with doctors not being well-educated enough to understand and see the signs, and also, I think, unfortunately, women are just dismissed. We’re dismissed all the time. There is a sense that we’re being overly dramatic, that we don’t really know our bodies as well as the doctor somehow knows our bodies. These things contribute to women having to go home and suffer, just as I suffered.
I think the common rage that we are feeling as Americans right now against the health industry is legitimate. It’s very legitimate. We do need to overhaul the medical insurance industry. Why is it a profit industry? It makes no sense. We have to make sure that doctors are aware that even preeclampsia, which is the most common complication of pregnancy, comes in different forms, that it doesn’t always manifest as high blood pressure and protein in the urine. Mine certainly didn’t. We’ve just got to start changing things, but until then, I think that we, as women, have to educate ourselves. We have to feel comfortable pushing, and we have to be comfortable with words like, Oh, she’s nagging; Oh, she’s a bitch; Oh, she’s loud; Oh, she’s coming back again; Oh, she’s persistent. Let them call it that.
MLD: I was really struck reading the book that you and your then husband had correctly diagnosed multiple conditions and were completely dismissed. I think that’s really common, frankly.
SA: Unfortunately. Obviously it doesn’t always lead to such a horrible outcome, but sometimes it does. Women who go into the ER because they’re having indigestion, and it’s a sign for women that they’re having a heart attack, but because she’s not having numbness in her left arm like men, she’ll get turned away and go home and die.
MLD: It’s really hard to stand up against authority figures, including medical professionals, especially if you’re in labor, which you know.
SA: It’s a place where two different things start meeting. So it’s the place where the racism and misogyny in the medical system intersect with how women are taught to behave in society. We’re supposed to be polite, we’re supposed to be quiet, we’re not supposed to speak up, and so it’s this intersection where, wait a minute, I have to actually speak up, I have to do the very things I’ve been taught all my life I can’t do, and it’s really unfortunate.
MLD: I want to go back to the role of language in this book. You partially retrain your brain by writing, and writing and language are threaded throughout the book. I’m curious about that experience and the role of language throughout these experiences.
SA: It goes back to that same idea of gaining as you’re losing, and the sense of everything being so bittersweet. Because when I wrote Madras on Rainy Days during the brain damage, when I was experiencing such severe aphasia and experiencing so much loss, what happened is that I would hear everything in Urdu. So I was hearing the narrator speaking in Urdu, I was hearing my characters, obviously, in Urdu; it was in India. What I would do is, I would have to then translate the Urdu into English and then transcribe it onto the page.
One of the ways that I had to force myself to relearn English was to begin to use it in my everyday life, not just when I was writing or not just when I was speaking to people around me in the U.S. I had to start really learning to think in English. And then I had to make the conscious decision to speak to my son in English, which for me, for many, many years, was one of the biggest losses imaginable, that he could not speak to me in my own native tongue.
We are different people in different languages.
Interestingly, when he was in college he got this Boren Fellowship through the Department of Defense, and they trained him in Urdu. And when we could speak in Urdu to one another, he suddenly said to me, Mom, it feels like a whole new side of you has opened up. I never knew this part of you. We are different people in different languages.
So I think for me, the biggest loss has been that Urdu now has become in some ways my second language, only because it’s not the language I think in anymore. It’s not the language I use with my children. I use it only when I’m speaking to my parents or my relatives in India. Sometimes I will miss it so much that I will actually put on Bollywood movies just to hear the language. It’s so interesting, isn’t it, how language is so much a part of our identity.
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