The 10 Best Umbrellas in Literature

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Like their real-life counterparts, umbrellas in fiction have a peculiar knack for getting lost, borrowed, stolen, and turning up in all sorts of unexpected places. They have been revered and reviled, cared for and cast aside, and used as weapons, shields, metaphors and even magic wands. Sometimes they slip into the action for a brief moment before ducking out again; other times, they are the catalyst for an entire novel. Perhaps most intriguingly, novelistic brollies frequently reflect real-world attitudes towards umbrellas, and the myriad meanings humans have invested in them over the centuries.

In researching my book Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature, I’ve traced the humble bumbershoot’s origins and eventual domination, its reputation and moral associations, and even its erotic potential. Here is a collection of some of my very favorite literary umbrellas: from the pivotal to the mundane, the intriguing to the downright bothersome.

Howards End, E.M. Forster

When Helen Schlegel absent-mindedly abducts a stranger’s umbrella one day, she can little imagine the ramifications of her thoughtlessness. Her unfortunate victim is a clerk, Leonard Bast, who possesses very little money or social standing but yearns for education, art, culture. When he retrieves his brolly from the Schlegels’ house the gulf between their classes yawns wide — they have countless umbrellas; he has just the one, and it’s in appalling condition — and still wider as the Bast and Schlegel families become ever more entangled. What follows is a sensitive yet damning exploration of class relations, social norms and women’s rights in early 20th century England — a time when, in Forster’s words, “the Angel of Democracy” proclaims that “all men are equal — all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas.”

The Umbrella Man, Roald Dahl

This short story is very Dahl, and wonderfully touches on truths that have followed umbrellas around for centuries: the sumptuousness of a well-made brolly, the class connotations attached to them, and the umbrella’s propensity to be lost, borrowed or stolen. I won’t give away the ending, but suffice it to say that, when George Borrow (an apt umbrella name if ever there was one) wrote in 1907 that “robbers never carry umbrellas” he could not have predicted the wildly inventive uses Dahl would put one (umbrella, and robber) to.

The Giant, O’Brien, Hilary Mantel

This novel is a fictionalized account of the “Irish Giant,” Charles Byrne. Fleeing the poverty of 1780s Ireland to seek fame and fortune on British shores, O’Brien and his friends arrive to a country quite different from their own, with a few novel inventions not seen in the course of their rural upbringing: staircases, and umbrellas. These “[canopies] on a stick,” as one character describes them, are in their earliest days of use in England, and Mantel deftly captures the real-world antipathy towards them with the reaction in her novel: boys like to throw stones after umbrella-carriers, and “collapse the tent on their heads, making them sopping.”

Elizabeth is Missing, Emma Healey

One of the unexpectedly pivotal characters of this novel is a woman living on the very edges of society. Driven mad by grief and trauma and shunned by her community, the woman carries an umbrella, “a shabby inky thing, half unfurled,” which she brandishes at passers-by (and occasionally hits them with). It’s an echo of a time when umbrellas were aligned, in the British imagination, with scruffy, disreputable, and decidedly lower-class characters. In fact, Healey’s “mad woman” has, in Australian author Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South, a literary sister: an Aunt Kathy who “went mad and danced Salome’s dance in her skin and an umbrella.”

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

What child, reading the first Harry Potter book for the first time, could fail to be beguiled by the image of Hagrid, the hulking hairy half-giant who makes a dramatic appearance in the earliest hours of a rain-whipped morning, finally giving readers what they have longed for — a friend and rescuer for neglected Harry, and overdue comeuppance for his bullying cousin, Dudley? Certainly not ten-year-old me, and the frilly pink umbrella Hagrid swooshes through the air to conjure a curling pink pig’s tail from the seat of Dudley’s trousers has held a special place in my heart ever since. It’s not exactly a magical umbrella… but that’s another story.

Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens

It’s hard to narrow down Dickens’ best brolly mentions because there are so many, including at least two essays (“Please to Leave Your Umbrella,” in particular, is superb) and a whole cast of memorable characters. However, the most (in)famous is undoubtedly Mrs Gamp, the self-satisfied, generally sozzled nurse of Martin Chuzzlewit, whose dubious qualifications primarily consist of eating, drinking, and snoozing beside her long-suffering patients. So memorable was Mrs Gamp’s umbrella — terrorizing coach passengers with its pointy end, catching innocent bystanders around the throat with its handle — that her very name became synonymous with the objects, and “gamp” remains part of British vernacular to this day.

Amerika, Franz Kafka

Kafka’s first, and unfinished, novel, was in part inspired by Dickens — so it is entirely appropriate that it should contain an umbrella. Sixteen-year-old Karl Rossman has been shipped to America in disgrace after being seduced by a housemaid. He is about to disembark when he realizes he has left his umbrella in his cabin. In the process of trying to recover it he befriends a stoker, who takes him to the ship’s captain, who just happens to know Karl’s long-lost uncle, who offers Karl unlooked-for friendship and hospitality (for a time, at least; it wouldn’t be Kafka otherwise). The umbrella, as far as we hear, is never recovered.

Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert

Like her future husband, I became slightly besotted with Emma when she appeared in the early pages of Madame Bovary beneath a luminous sunshade on a molten spring day. Indeed, a sunshade, or an umbrella, accompanies her through much of the novel — most tellingly when she first expresses dissatisfaction with her marriage, or begins to fall in love. It is one of the more subtle, yet striking instances of an umbrella’s delicate eroticism and its ties to the individual.

Mary Poppins, P.L. Travers

No list of literary brollies would be complete without mention of the iconic Mary Poppins, whose umbrella accompanies her on adventures, errands, and the occasional flight over Cherry Tree Lane. The Poppins of the books is far sharper than Julie Andrews’ saccharine movie counterpart — and exceedingly vain about her parrot-headed accessory.

Umbrella, Will Self

Umbrellas abound in this linguistically playful, modernist jaunt of a novel set partly in an umbrella factory — and the text is absolutely crawling with brollies. They appear in the hands of almost every character; they are sprinkled liberally throughout as metaphors; they are intertwined with sex, death, dreams, memory, hallucinations, medicine, the moon landing — they even, in one or two memorable scenes, transcend human-umbrella boundaries entirely. Ever wondered what it might feel like to turn into an umbrella? Read this, and wonder no more.

About the Author

Photo by Magda Wrzeszcz

Marion Rankine is a London-based writer and bookseller. Her work has appeared in The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian, Overland, and For Books’ Sake, among others. Her latest book is Brolliology: A History of the Umbrella in Life and Literature.

Am I Still a Real Writer If I Don’t Feel Compelled to Write?

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

Dear Blunt Instrument,

There are some (a lot?) of writers who say shit like, “I have to write, I couldn’t not write, writing saves my life” etc. etc. (like cough my ex before last whom I’ll apparently never get over). So the reason I don’t think I’m a real writer, even though I’ve been published and some writers/people I respect have told me I can write well is because I don’t feel like I have to write.

I’ve been blocked for years and avoid writing almost every day. I can only manage haikus or song parodies because they’re so short and constrained that my hatred for my words and ideas doesn’t have time to kick in. So I feel like I’m probably not a writer, compared to my stupid ex who writes everyday and has been working on a book for years, along with getting engaged. FML.

So I guess my question is, am I not a real writer if I don’t feel like I have to write?

—Am I Real

Photo by darkday

Dear AIR,

First of all, I don’t see writers versus real writers as a useful distinction unless writers includes fictional characters who write and “authors” who let ghost writers do all the work. That’s not you, so if you write sometimes and not never, you’re a “real writer.”

Now let’s unpack this assumption a little. It seems closely related to what a friend of mine calls “the ass-in-the-chair canard,” or the idea that you need to write every day if you want to be a real writer. I hate this idea — it’s both privileged (it’s a lot easier to write every day if you’re healthy, if you don’t have to work a full-time job, if you can afford to do stuff like have an office, pay for childcare, have a housekeeper, etc.) and gatekeeper-y (a way of keeping those less lucky people out of the game). It’s also a version of that uniquely American condition I think of as Productivity Madness (more is always better! Suffer! Produce!).

If you write sometimes and not never, you’re a “real writer.”

This version — the “I can’t not write” canard — is slightly different, but as a way of shaming writers who aren’t as prolific as you, I find it similarly unsavory. Probably people who feel like they “have” to write don’t actually have a compulsive disorder; probably they mean they really like writing, or they find it really helpful in some way, or that it’s a learned routine. When you do something all the time, not doing it starts to feel wrong. (If you feel like you have to eat breakfast right when you wake up, guess what — you feel starving in the morning because that’s when you usually eat, and your body has learned to prepare for the onslaught of food by lowering your blood sugar. You can unlearn that.)

I’m Almost 40 and Still Getting My Stories Rejected—Am I Running Out of Time?

In reality, writing — art-making in general — feels different for everyone. Some writers write a book a year like clockwork, others take a decade. Dorothy Parker said “I hate writing but love having written.” Woody Allen seems to keep making movies purely out of habit. As for me, I love writing! But I don’t love writing if I do it every day. To borrow a metaphor from sex, I have a long refractory period; writing releases built up tension, but it’s not very enjoyable if I don’t allow time for the tension to build.

Rather than holding yourself to an arbitrary standard, what would be useful is figuring out a process or set of habits that works well for you. Being “blocked for years” and “avoiding writing almost every day” doesn’t sound super healthy, even if it doesn’t mean you’re not a writer; it sounds like you’d like to be writing more than you are.

I would try to figure out what is keeping you from writing. Is it mostly competitive jealousy? Or just not feeling confident that your writing is good? What was different about your life when you were writing more? Did writing used to make you happy — either while you were doing it or at least afterwards? I assume it must have, on some level, or you wouldn’t be asking this question. Can you re-create those circumstances? Can you isolate the parts of writing that you find meaningful, and do them more? You don’t have to do it every day, but as noted above: you have to do it sometimes, not never.

Now, since the ass-in-chair routine is well established elsewhere, I’d like to devote a little space to the benefits of not writing every day.

1. Not writing gives you time to read. When I have too many writing deadlines I honestly feel annoyed that I don’t have more time to read. Reading is the greatest! It’s also maybe the easiest way to become a better writer.

People who have time to write and read every day are lucky jerks. If you’re not a lucky jerk, reallocate some of the time when you feel like you should be writing to reading instead. Go to the library a lot and surround yourself with books. Abandon books that don’t interest you. Read books that do interest you with a notebook and pencil and those little sticky tabs nearby. Also, light a candle, pour yourself a beverage, get into it! I like to treat reading as a luxury, and being an engaged reader always makes me want to write.

2. Not writing gives you time to have experiences. I can’t stand that thing where people are talking about something interesting in the world on social media or whatever, and some scold pops in to say, “This is a distraction/waste of time, get back to work.” As though anyone can literally work all the time and never stop to talk to humans or engage in politics and expect to make good art out of that.

You actually have to spend some of your life living and doing normal life stuff or you can’t be a good writer. Life gives you stuff to write about, plus perspective and insight and context. Too much ass-in-the-chair time and you’re not getting exposed to the actual world.

You actually have to spend some of your life living and doing normal life stuff or you can’t be a good writer. Life gives you stuff to write about.

3. Not writing gives you time to think. Even when you know exactly what you want to write about, even when you’re deep into a draft or second draft or whatever, you still need time out of the chair to think. You can think while you write, yes, but writing comes so much more easily if you’ve done some of the thinking work beforehand.

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There are tons and tons of studies that show the brain is really good at solving problems (even creative problems!) when you give it plenty of time and space to do its thing. The amazing thing is that a lot of the work gets done unconsciously! What could be easier?! When you give yourself permission to think, you can have good ideas without even trying. They’re canards too, but the take-a-shower and go-for-a-walk canards really work in my experience; they offer just enough of a distraction that your unconscious mind, which knows a lot, can get to work without your conscious mind always trying to steal the show.

Supposedly Charlie Parker, according to the art critic Jerry Saltz, once said, “If you don’t play the saxophone for a year, you get a year better.” I love this idea so much. It jibes with my experience of learning as discrete, more than continuous. Instead of steadily getting better on a curve, it feels more like we suddenly level up. It’s like all this potential learning gets stored up, and then a change of circumstances or an artistic breakthrough turns all that potential into real energy.

I say all this to say, when you’re a real writer, not writing is writing.

Help A Confused Artificial Intelligence Learn to Write the Perfect First Line

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Most of the time, research scientist Janelle Shane’s pet neural network is the most creative entity on the internet—sorry, everyone who toiled for an MFA just to be outdone by a machine! It’s generated paint colors beyond the dreams of DuPont (Stanky Bean, Grass Bat, Snowbonk), kitten names even the gentle weirdos at the rescue couldn’t imagine (Snox Boops, Big Wiggy Bool), and this year’s hottest Halloween costumes (Disco Monster, Pumpkin Picard, Grankenstein). It’s come up with a whole anthology’s worth of short story titles—including “Zombies of Florence,” “Indiscreet Maidman,” and “Swords and Batman: Summer Party?”—and tried its hand at Doctor Who episodes and Harry Potter fanfiction. It even helped write an opera. What’s the last opera YOU helped write?

Of course, we know exactly the limits of its creativity. For each of the neural network’s projects, Shane explains what she used for a database and how she set up the parameters the program uses to generate new ideas. All the AI can do is slice up its inputs, figure out how they’re made, and put them back together in highly algorithmic ways. But that’s really all the human brain can do, too—we just can’t see the gears.

The human brain is quicker and more sophisticated with its cutting and pasting, though, and its database is HUGE. (To create a true robot writer, you might first need to simulate the entire history of civilization, a la one of my favorite Stanislaw Lem stories.) This means that sometimes, the neural network runs up against a challenge that’s relatively easy for a person, but that an artificial intelligence just can’t hack. One of those challenges, apparently, is writing the first line of a novel.

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Shane fed a few hundred famous first lines into the neural network, and it tried to learn how to make them—but a few hundred data points aren’t nearly enough, and the AI balked. “The neural network proceeded to do what it usually does when faced with too little data, which is to give up on trying to understand what’s going on, and instead just try to read it back to me word for word,” Shane wrote. “Think of it like cramming for a test by memorizing instead of learning how to apply rules to solve problems.” Results included “It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except the station steps; plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of people.” You can see how things went wrong.

There were a few minor gems; I might read a book that started “It was a wrong number that struggled against the darkness.” But ultimately, like everyone other aspiring writer in the world, Shane’s AI can’t learn to write the perfect first sentence unless it reads a lot of them first. That’s where you come in.

Shane has set up a Google form to collect more first lines for the AI to read and learn from. You can add the first line of the unfinished novel that’s sitting in your drawer, or the favorite book that’s sitting on your bedside table. You can methodically go through your bookshelves and feed every first line into the database. The more first lines the neural network gets to read, the better its own writing will be. Think of it as training the robot writer who will one day replace you.

And meanwhile, congratulate yourself on being able to do something an artificial intelligence can’t do—yet.

Recommended Reading Is Open for Submissions of Translated Fiction

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As if broadening our reading horizons beyond our native tongue wasn’t impressive enough, great translators do so much more. They go further than the meaning of a text, give us access to the melody and feeling of literature from different worlds. And yet, for their almost magical service to global readers, they are often under-acknowledged.

We’d like to have a round, of sorts, for all the translators out there. So, for two weeks, from November 15th through 29th, we’re opening a special period of submissions for our weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, exclusively for translated work. If you’re in the business of language conversion, check out the guidelines and notes below.

  • Translators can submit either a sample, or a fully translated story that has not been published in English before. For full stories, per our usual length parameters we will consider pieces between 1,500 and 10,000 words.
  • In cover letters, submitters should detail who is the rights holder — themselves or the original author — as we will need to clear these for publication.
  • Upon a story’s acceptance, we will pay $100 to the translator and $100 to the original author or rights holder.
  • Note that we are looking for stories translated to English.

This period is just a special window for underrepresented work — we happily accept translated stories during any submissions opening, and if you’re a member, year-round! Check out our membership benefits here to find out more!

BoJack Horseman and Infinite Jest Are Basically The Same Story

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If you talked to me in 2015 in any capacity, chances are I would have recommended two things: BoJack Horseman and Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I was spending my days working in a movie theatre box office, and when I didn’t have lines to memorize or wasn’t trying to come up with the next great comedy bit, I was re-reading and re-annotating some of my favorite passages. I even bought a bigger purse so I could haul all 1,079 pages of it with me every day to work. When I got home, maybe just to feel something, I would go to Netflix and get a pep talk from Princess Carolyn or a nihilistic statement from Secretariat or even just watch BoJack go on a bender. The book and show became my bibles of sadness, a road map of my own neuroses and the ones I’d seen in my family for years.

In 2015, a full year after I had graduated college, I had seen few of the changes I had hoped “post-grad” life would bring. I was still working at a movie theatre, I was still pouring most of my paycheck into helping my mom buy gas and groceries, Sallie Mae was calling me almost every day demanding the money they said I must have available based on my part-time salary, and I was just stuck. I was using my theater degree to stand around wearing three layers of wool in 90 degree heat to say five lines in iambic pentameter, and I was using my English degree to write ebooks, blogs, and web content for less than $5 an hour. I was living with my mom, who after two suicide attempts in the last four years, seemed almost okay but barely surviving on the few job prospects available to women who took breaks from careers to raise children. When I wasn’t at home, I was with my dad, also still recovering from losing a job at the bank around 2008 by working as an accountant at the treasurer, a job he gained through working at a temp agency.

The book and show became my bibles of sadness, a road map of my own neuroses and the ones I’d seen in my family for years.

So, when I watched BoJack Horseman, a character obsessed with escaping through entertainment and make-believe and a couple substances, I saw myself. Whenever he had a run-in with his mother telling him about the darkness inside him, I saw my mom’s parents printing out her bank statements and demanding, in front of me, why she spent $3 on a video rental when she should be worrying about rent. Standing onstage, the air hazy from kicked-up sand, humidity, and the steam of my own sweat while I told Macbeth he was surrounded, I felt like BoJack or his character Secretariat — running after this impossible thing that made that empty feeling standing inside the box office worth it.

When I opened up Infinite Jest, I saw myself in Hal. The descriptions of his family and the way the brothers spoke to one another resonated with me so much. More than anything, it was the way the characters talked about lying. As Hal says to his brother Mario,

Boo, I think I no longer believe in monsters as faces in the floor or feral infants or vampires or whatever. I think at seventeen now I believe the only real monsters might be the type of liar where there’s simply no way to tell. The ones who give nothing away.

Hal spends a great deal of effort trying to break liars into different categories. I’ve been lied to in one way or another my whole life: that internet and hot water going to come back, that rent has been paid, that mom and dad are just working things out, that dad is attracted to mom and they’re in love, that dad is away taking care of grandma, that it’s going to be okay, and that a college degree guarantees a paying job. So watching Hal navigate the lies and deal with the world, it was cathartic to see a family not unlike my own.

I even tried to articulate it to a coworker one time in the box office. He asked about the book and I said, “Yeah, I like how it talks about sadness.” I’d made him watch BoJack, too, so maybe he put things together. “Are you sad?” he asked.

And I guess I was.

Years later, after watching the most recent season, I know now that these two pieces of media that got me through my post-grad funk have more in common than I thought.

The reasons I started reading Infinite Jest and watching BoJack Horseman weren’t far from each other. Before I got into the book I obsessively read biographies of famous comedians. I found out that Infinite Jest was the favorite book of the showrunner of Parks and Recreation Mike Schur. I wanted it because I thought it would teach me about the entertainment industry, and maybe also about writing. BoJack Horseman, something billed as a “animated comedy you might like” on Netflix, hooked me in the way it spoke about being an actor, being someone in entertainment. After spending hours in auditions, and then in rehearsals that wasted my time with hours of waiting, I got it. I got BoJack’s drive and his need to run away. I got that while being in the performing arts can feel like a way to escape your life, you keep running into the same problems. What I didn’t get was that Infinite Jest and BoJack Horseman are telling different versions of the same story.

The story: A man is talented in his field. In the back of his mind, something is eating at him. There’s something about his home life or his parents or just maybe his brain that he’s trying to get away from, that he’s trying to get past. So, he tries as hard as he can. Eventually he turns to substances to help, but they actually make it worse. Then he has a choice: either move forward or get stuck.

The story: A man is talented in his field. In the back of his mind, something is eating at him. Then he has a choice: either move forward or get stuck.

Hal is a young man at a tennis academy with nothing but a great future in front of him, but he’s addicted to pot. The more he thinks and talks to people, the more we see it turns out that his substance use is a symptom of something deeper. Whether it’s due to the horrific death of his father, the fraught relationship between his brother and his mother, or the lies nearly every member of his family tells, he can’t function and desperately wants to.

BoJack Horseman is not a young man. Years after his successful but mediocre sitcom Horsin’ Around, he’s addicted to multiple substances and desperate for a comeback. He works with a ghostwriter and has to deal with both his past and how he can change for the future. Over the course of several seasons he also intentionally sabotages the future of his roommate’s rock opera, drags a costar along on a bender that ultimately results in her death, abandons a movie project where he plays his dream role, Secretariat, to see his friend, and almost rapes her daughter. For me, the whole show revolves on the question of whether BoJack Horseman, despite the way he tends to abuse drugs and alcohol and drag people down with unhealthy behavior, can actually move forward and be a “good person.” Like Hal, he seems to want to, but ultimately always gets in his own way.

Both stories deal with the idea of entertainment and how it can consume you; in Infinite Jest people are literally killed by their addiction to escapism, while in BoJack it’s the entertainment industry that sucks them under. As BoJack’s friend Charlotte says in season 1, episode 8: “Look over there. See those tar pits? Hollywood’s a real pretty town that’s smack on top of all that black tar. By the time you realize you’re sinking, it’s too late.” But the real tar in both of these stories is the legacy of family trauma.

As Adam Piper writes in “Chained in a cage of the self”: Narcissism in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,

Parental neglect and abuse, drug and alcohol addiction, and obsession with entertainment all work to increase characters’ narcissism and self-absorption. This increased narcissism prevents characters from developing meaningful relationships, and this absence of meaningful relationships contributes to the feeling of sadness[…] Rather than confronting reality and working to overcome their sadness by attempting to form meaningful relationships, characters instead seek to escape this sadness through the various fantasies provided by drug-use and entertainment. These fantasies […] [increase] their unhappiness. Certain characters are able to break free of these narcissistic impulses by turning outwards to form meaningful relationships.

Netflix could use this as a show summary for BoJack Horseman.

Just like Hal, BoJack is raised by parents who don’t have the capacity to really care for him due to past trauma or even just ineptitude. Pain and suffering is a part of his development. As his mother, Beatrice Horseman, says to him in season 2, “You were born broken, that’s your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects. Your books and your movies and your little girlfriends but it won’t make you whole. You’re BoJack Horseman. There’s no cure for that.”

Because of that kind of upbringing, BoJack has a hard time holding on to relationships without just burning them to the ground by doing something horrible. The real difference between Hal and BoJack? Hal sinks into the tar, and at the end of this season, BoJack seems to be moving out of it.

The real difference between Hal and BoJack? Hal sinks into the tar, and at the end of this season, BoJack seems to be moving out of it.

Three quarters of the way through Infinite Jest, in “The Year of the Adult Depend Undergarment,” Hal loses control of his voice and body when he tries to communicate. What happens after Hal starts developing symptoms is unclear. He definitely does his best in school, despite what happens whenever he tries to communicate with another person. He definitely tries to go to a college interview and is subsequently hospitalized. He also attempts to dig up his father’s head in relation to a Canadian terror plot. But the book doesn’t tell us Hal’s eventual fate. Does he get better? If he doesn’t get better, what does he do? While he’s still able to be a remarkable tennis player, he is presumably never able to communicate with another person and probably becomes addicted to pot again. His whole life has been dedicated to tennis, but without the ability to communicate, he won’t be able to be on a collegiate team. He loses all agency.

BoJack, even with all of his issues, does have the ability to take action — because unlike Hal, he can recognize the patterns that are imprisoning him and dragging him down. Though BoJack goes on more substantial benders and seems to relapse more than we ever see from Hal, he actually proves that he can change for the better and get past his family trauma. The horrible experience his mother had is passed down to him affects him every day, but in this season proves he can walk away from it. He can take control and make things right and walk away from the horrors of his family’s past. Hal, on the other hand, simply can’t. When he gives up pot, he finds it so unbearable to stay vertical that he decides to be horizontal. He is also grappling with how easy it was for his best friend to lie his way out of a urine test for him and how much lying that easily scares him. So he lays on the floor, and like BoJack watching “Horsing Around” over and over, he watches every single film his father made. When he finishes his entertainment bender, he finds he has lost the ability to even speak.

The book is agnostic on why, exactly, Hal loses his power of speech — a powerful drug? Mold he had eaten as child? The ghost of his father? But at any rate, he loses everything. Hal fades into the background of a story that he started. BoJack, despite everything that has happened, is moving out of the tar, and for the better.

What allows him to succeed where Hal fails? The turning point for BoJack may be Todd’s speech in season 3, episode 10:

You can’t keep doing this. You can’t keep doing shitty things and feel bad about yourself, like that makes it okay. You need to be better […] BoJack, just stop. You are all the things that are wrong with you. Not the alcohol or the drugs or any of the shitty things that happened to you in your career or when you were a kid. It’s you. Alright? It’s you.

Before that moment, it seemed like BoJack ruining his and everyone’s lives over and over and over again was going to be the formula of the show. Every season it would get bleaker and bleaker until he destroyed himself. Instead, BoJack seems to gradually learn first how to stop living in the past, then how to stop running from his problems, then how to consider running towards something, and finally, how to stop. At the end of Season 1, we see BoJack looking over the sea, trying to reclaim his past. At the end of Season 2, we see him trying to run and that other runner telling him he has to keep running every day. At the end of Season 3, we see him almost kill himself by letting go of the wheel but then pull over to watch wild horses run together. At the end of this past season, he’s not looking to escape and he’s not running. He’s not going off to escape on a bender. He’s standing at home and he’s talking to his sister on the phone. He’s not running, but he’s moving forward.

To be a BoJack, and specifically a BoJack at the end of season 4 and not season 1, is to recognize when you’re living in a pattern. More than that, it’s to recognize that you’re not letting yourself taking control of it.

To be a BoJack, and specifically a BoJack at the end of season 4 and not season 1, is to recognize when you’re living in a pattern.

I didn’t see my pattern until July 2016. It was staggered at first. Every two years my family would have a major incident: a suicide attempt, followed by past due notices, and a big move sometimes, other times not taking enough insulin. December 2015, a little after Christmas, after a feverish night of limited mobility, I called an ambulance. A paramedic screamed at me, “Why did you wait so long? HER FOOT, IT’S LACRIMOSING!” In the car, my sister sobbed while we waited to follow the ambulance, and said “she said it was lacrimosing, does that mean it’s dead?” I remembered Latin class in high school and said: “I think that means it’s crying.”

They ended up cutting off my mom’s foot. She was able to get disability after going into rehab and got a nice apartment. That worked out for a while. It was back into the pattern: big disaster, solving the disaster, finding a new place to live, and everything’s okay again for now. The pattern repetitions got faster, though: several months later my mom started having mini-strokes and we received an eviction notice. She went to the hospital and came out again. She started staying with friends while my sister and I backed out on a roommate deal and started looking for a place. Mom went to the hospital again maybe a month later, for surgery to remove her gallbladder, apparently the trigger for the “mini-strokes.” After the surgery, her friends were worried about letting her stay. Sitting in this hospital room in the middle of this pattern accelerating and accelerating out of control, spending the night because I promised I would even though I have an opening shift as a hostess in the morning, and my mom has sobbed herself to sleep because we don’t know what to do, I realized I had a choice. I could do what we’ve always done: crawl back to my mom’s parents on our bellies and ask them for help even though I know there’s a cost, even though I know it will make me feel like shit, even though I know it will force me to swallow their poison — or I could do something different.

On July 7th, 2016, I published a GoFundMe and raised $2,825 dollars from Facebook friends. That money allowed us to stay in the Red Roof Inn for a little over a week and provided us with the down payment of the apartment we currently live in. We haven’t gotten the help of our grandparents since they stormed out of the hospital room just a few days later. I now work as a full time writer at a marketing company, which pays the rent for this apartment totally out of the pattern.

Like BoJack, I had to realize the things I was letting happen to me and my family: borrowing money, being beholden to my grandparents, not being able to pay rent, late notices, and mental health crises. I realized in that hospital room, I had to make conscious choices to make things better. I had to try something different. That’s the saving grace of BoJack this season. He tried something different and so far it’s working. Hal did make an attempt to change — he tried to quit pot, he saw that people were lying to him, but in the end, he didn’t break the pattern. He got overwhelmed with the lies people told him and didn’t change his narrative. But BoJack’s trying, and I am too.

The Secret Life of Curry

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What is a “currybook”? Canadian author Naben Ruthnum coined the term to describe a particular kind of diasporic writing that combines easy South Asian cultural touchpoints, swaths of old world nostalgia, and a vague sense of the exotic coalesce beneath a paperback cover — and is then mass-marketed towards both homesick immigrants and curious outsiders.

Growing up in a Mauritian household in sleepy Kelowna, British Columbia, Ruthnum was always unimpressed by the warm rows of these currybooks — their covers tinted orange, plum, or persimmon — that he’d find lining his parents’ bookshelves. As he got older and settled into his career as a multi-genre fiction writer, he began to question his dislike of this particular type of “immigrant as identity” diasporic writing, as well as the publishing industry’s penchant for these so-called “sari and spice” affairs. In Curry, his debut for Coach House Books, Ruthnum set out to investigate his own fraught relationship with curry — as a spice, yes, but more so as a greater symbol of his own identity. He explores how eating curry, reading other writers’ thoughts on curry, and the racialized dynamic surrounding curry play into his own identity as a brown, diasporic writer.

The book is a sort of jumble; it’s part memoir, part literary critique, part culinary history, and part rant, the sort of mashup that makes quite a lot of sense once one considers Ruthnum’s own varied writing background. He doesn’t hold back on his opinions of the more damaging or reductive tropes associated with his target, but pulls no punches when it comes to himself, either. Throughout Curry, Ruthnum grapples with his own prejudices — against currybooks, against their more exoticized, feminized counterparts (which he calls “mangobooks”), against the glut of diasporic novels that felt both too familiar and utterly foreign to his own experience. That penchant for clear-eyed self-interrogation keeps the book from feeling too polemical; instead, it makes Curry all the more accessible, steered as it is by an author who is, quite simply, working through his own shit.

Discussing big, sensitive ideas like identity, authenticity, and the immigrant experience may be a tall order, but in Curry, Ruthnum digs in with gusto.

Kim Kelly: The idea of the “currybook” and your conflicted feelings about the genre is a central theme of Curry. Could you break down what exactly a “currybook” is, and why they’ve become such a thorn in your side as a South Asian writer?

Naben Ruthnum: “Currybook” is a term I had for a certain kind of diasporic brown novel when I was a teenager: the type I didn’t want to read. The way I describe these books in Curry is as “nostalgic, authenticity-seeking reconciliation-of-present-with-past family narratives,” and that tends to spur recognition in readers who know what I’m getting at: often, these books will have drifting red silks and a braid on the cover, or a scatter of powdered spices, maybe a mango or two. And often, as I discovered when reading this book, books that happen to adhere to these rough genre guidelines are well-crafted, heartfelt works of art, not just parroting of the “sari and spice novels” (a more popular term for currybooks) that have come before them.

But the themes and relationships at the heart of these novels didn’t resonate with me as a writer — at least not across all of my work. Problem is, I did write one short story, “Cinema Rex,” that dealt with brown kids on the island of Mauritius in the 1950s and their subsequent, film-obsessed lives in the West as adults — classic ingredients for a currybook, and the first piece that garnered me any real attention from awards juries, publishers, and agents. Many of the people who liked that story were put off by the rest of my work, which ranges from thriller to literary fiction that isn’t always centered around brown protagonists. Pushing forward over the next few years as a writer, I realized that the pressure of expectation to create a literary persona and work that is recognizable as fitting into pre-existing versions of Western brownness, complete with tragic looking back, generational disconnect, and an inability to cook amma’s aloo gobi, was a real part of what was standing in the way of me getting to publish what I wanted.

Wealth and Family in the New India

KK: In the book, you talk a lot about the demands that are placed on brown writers by the publishing industry as well as the reading public — this sense of needing to either seamlessly assimilate or exoticize oneself. How do you think this way of thinking can be effectively challenged? How can the industry make more space for brown writers to be whoever they want to be?

NR: That pressure to exoticize my writing and work in a way that is, funnily enough, actually asking me to conform to a pre-existing story template that we’ve read dozens of time before, a sort of prefab exotique, has been a dominant pressure in my career. The go-to answer to this problem tends to be getting more people of color in editorial boards and agencies. But, as I say in the book, it’s not simply white audiences who gravitate toward echoing, nostalgic stories of brown identity repeatedly: it’s a significant contingent of the brown audience as well, and readers of all backgrounds. So just getting an editor of color to read your book isn’t the magical fix-it to getting stories of unique brown identity in the West out there — or the stuff that I tend to write, which is clearly informed by my racial and class background, but doesn’t often plainly foreground issues of racial and cultural identity. I think the key to getting more space for stories out there is something like a serious version of what I’m doing with this book, where I make fun of and create discomfort in readers and publishing industry operatives who have an extremely narrow internal definition of “diversity.” It has to be an ongoing, and sometimes mean, discussion.

The pressure to exoticize my writing and work is, funnily enough, actually asking me to conform to a pre-existing story template that we’ve read dozens of time before.

KK: The subject of family consistently appears throughout the book, from your own Mauritian clan to the overarching concept of “authenticity.” How did writing this book lead you to interrogate your own relationship with family? What’s the most significant thing you learned as a result?

NR: Family dynamics are so often at the heart of currybooks, good and bad, and there is a very recognizable pattern that many of these books tend to stick to, which often reflects the lived reality of their authors. You know what I’m going to write — conservative parents who don’t understand why their children are listening to rap and sometimes dating white people. I’m being wildly reductive here to get a point across, and that point is that the lived reality of some brown people in the West may fit this pattern — but bring individuality, class, education, artistic leanings, religion, isolation, generational distance from the subcontinent into it — and what you get is an incredible range of different parents and children interacting differently.

For example, the scolding aunties that I see in certain novels are a type I recognize as real, a type that resonates with young South Asian people I’ve talked to — but the closest aunt in my family lived in London, is highly progressive and independent, and was taking me to bizarre Wooster Group plays when I was in university, encouraging me to think and write exactly what I wanted. That extended-family-disapproval thing was never a part of my life, while it’s embedded in the lives of many other brown Westerners.

I did learn, as elsewhere in the process of researching this book, that my initial, childish dismissal of trope-heavy books by South Asians was immature and incorrect. There are truths about family relationships that don’t become any less true from being repeated: it’s just that there are other truths that I’d also like to read about, and they need to be published more often. There are also truths among the currybook tropes about family, nostalgia, and homecoming that are distinct, odd, and hyper-specific, that risk being lost as these books are marketed and promoted as belonging to one mass of shared experience.

KK: The concept of curry is itself rooted in sociopolitical turmoil, stretching from the earliest days of the British Raj to the racism still experienced by South Asian people. How do we decolonize curry?

NR: Pushback is embedded in curry’s recipe, I think. The chilies in Indian curries come from Portuguese traders centuries ago, planted on Indian soil to make commerce with Europe and elsewhere easier: but Indians took ownership of the spice through culinary ingenuity. Adapting the incredible variety of dishes that are classed under the curry banner to Mughal courts and the Raj afterwards expanded the definition while catering to certain palates, but there’s no sense of the colonist owning the dish — I feel that curry is a dish that has the world in it, a historical, evolving food that can’t perhaps ever be properly “decolonized,” but it can spur a discussion for just how complex and worth unpacking these terms and this insane history is. That discussion has to be about making these different historical and colonial paths to what’s on your plate known.

I feel that curry is a dish that has the world in it, a historical, evolving food that can’t perhaps ever be properly “decolonized.”

KK: Your discussion of Soniah Kamal’s essay “When My Authentic Is You Exotic” and the “mangobooks” seemed to hit a particular personal nerve, especially the idea of how diasporic brown people feel forced to police themselves to avoid falling into perceived stereotypes. What is at the root of your (and other brown writers’) professed dread of writing to “serve” white audiences?

NR: I’ll speak for myself, but it’s probably a sentiment many brown writers share — the idea of serving your own banal existence as exotic to white readers, or, even worse, inventing a sense of connection to the past, or a sense of alienation that you might not properly feel in order to create an effect in a white reader that is based on seeing your name and author photo then reading a narrative about an orphan trying to reconnect with their severed homeland — is just plainly chilling.

I certainly try not to let this get in my head too much. Despite having written this book, I do think it’s extremely important for my time spent writing fiction to take place inside my own head and in the story, as divorced from ideas of audience reception as possible. That’s part of what I was working out with Curry: exactly what it was I thought of all this stuff, and how I could find a way to have a career that didn’t involve me trying to outsmart industry expectations behind the scenes. Making my part of the discussion public seemed to be a good way to do both.

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KK: As a writer, what did you seek to accomplish by publishing this book? And now that it’s out, would you say you’ve achieved that goal?

NR: Now that the debate about diversity in literature is loud and ongoing, it’s important to have disagreement-within-ranks about what constitutes diversity, and what the various problems in the industry may be. I had to work against this obstacle personally when it came trying to get my work published, because I kept running into a tacit definition of what brown writing looked like: a definition that my work didn’t fit into. “Being accepting of diverse narratives” risks morphing into an acceptance of “being accepting of THE diverse narrative,” whatever that may be for one’s insert-cultural-group here. Of course, writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie have already precisely nailed this problem, and in part, my book was just adding to the work they’ve already done — but the other thing I wanted to do with this piece was to joke, to suggest, to discomfit people, whether they be of color or not, into thinking about these issues for themselves, and not just seizing onto a solution that I myself never arrive at, in the book or in my own career.

And I can’t forget the publishing-my-first-book part of the deal, especially because I’ve been fortunate enough to get press and reader attention for Curry. My selfishness as a writer, my desire to have books out across genres and to write for other mediums, is a motivation that I never want to underplay, and I think that’s useful in making the points I made the way I made them — in talking about the career and aims of an individual writer who is constantly confronted with a genre-cast mold of what he is supposed to writing, I’m telling to story of the racialized writer as an individual, not a type, not a category: a weird person shaped by race and class, certainly, but too many other important and trivial factors to enumerate.

How Long Is Writing Supposed to Take?

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In 2010, I was three years into writing my linked story collection when I took my first trip to Vermont to attend a writers’ conference. My workshop was a group of seven that included our instructor, Ellen Lesser. With a couch and cushioned chairs set in an oval everyone talked around me and about my story. I remained “in the box” (that is, not allowed to speak) during my classmates’ deliberations and discussions. My only additions were steady nods or pursed lips. Once I was allowed to speak, I thanked them, but bemoaned the fact that this particular piece in my collection was taking a long time. Ellen crossed her legs and met my eyes. She tucked a salt and pepper lock behind her ear and said in a kind and confident tone, “You’re acting as if writing should be an efficient process, Jennifer. It’s not.”

Six years later, I returned from yet another conference where I workshopped another story in this same collection. The instructor in this case, Tayari Jones, recognized the character, having seen a previous iteration of a story a few years earlier. Like Ellen, she gave me the tough love stare and asked, “What’s taking so long?” I had no answer.

Who, exactly, determines what “slow” means when it comes to the writing process?

Where Ellen’s comment attempted to help me reconcile the writing process. Tayari’s question pushed me to try and understand my process. I was unable to pinpoint my reasons — personal, professional, creative — for not finishing, but I also had a hard time accepting that the process is the process. Ellen’s words rang as a kind of “it is what it is” lament that has no finite answer or fix. For many of us we’re still figuring out “our process.” We tinker with methods of productivity as “process.” “Process” is not always efficient nor pretty. In fact, it is a pain in the ass.

A popular post on Electric Literature is an infographic of how long it took authors to write their most famous novels. The timing ranges from 2.5 days for The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to 16 years for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I’m unsure if these metrics provided relief or added anxiety. Did this mean that I was right on track because Victor Hugo needed 12 years in the 1800s to finish an epic novel, or that I was way behind schedule compared to the 4 years it took Audrey Niffenegger to produce The Time Traveler’s Wife? Pulitzer prize winner Donna Tartt, a notably reclusive writer, seems to publish a novel every 10 years. Another Pulitzer winner, Junot Díaz, has called himself a “slow writer,” too. Slow doesn’t keep the words from coming, yet is it a fair measurement? And who, exactly, determines what “slow” means when it comes to the writing process? Is it us writers, the business, public expectation, or the characters and stories that need time to develop?

I also work in book publishing where schedules for manuscript to final product is part of the job. We need to know how long it will take to copyedit, typeset, and print a title. I know that preparing a book for the printer can take several months, to print and bind it a few weeks. The pace of reading, meanwhile, can fluctuate due to a reader’s eagerness to turn the page or scroll further. The act of creating is in itself an immeasurable thing and yet there are barometers readily available, ones we also put on ourselves when it comes to meeting deadlines, applying for residencies and grants, and so on.

The same year I first visited Vermont, Susanna Daniel wrote about the “quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing” it took for her to complete and sell her debut, award-winning book Stiltsville. “Quiet hell” is a great description for the time it takes to hone in on what you want to do and what the work is, along with the insecurity and fear of pursuing such an endeavor, as well as the growth required to continue this bizarre act of writing. Susanna mentions a sense of “non-accomplishment” as one of the factors tempting her to ditch the pursuit. Writing is hard, she wrote, but what’s harder is not writing and not finishing. Ultimately, we return to the tortuous page because we feel that urge and need as artists.

This sense of non-accomplishment triggers anxieties: the pressures of perfection writers place on ourselves in addition to whatever expectations the outside world may push into our orbit. I recall Tayari saying as much at the Well-Read Black Girl Festival in September: Perfection can be a form of procrastination. Something is keeping us (me) from finishing. Enter the internet, which bestows a bevy of information: notifications of a sale; news of a story about an author taking a year to create what’s taken me a year to contemplate, thereby initiating an internal competition of when one “should” be done. In those moments of seeing or reading about others’ progress, I have a niggling doubt about whether or not I really am a writer. When was the last time I submitted something? When I stare at my drafts and my eyes settle on dates connected to documents I see the growth, yet it feels as though I’m barely inching away from the start of the marathon and the massive banner for the end is miles away.

The pressures of perfection make it appealing to click away from my Word document and open a web browser. It’s kind of masochistic, wondering why I’m not finished with a particular project while at the same time baking a bundt cake, editing someone else’s work, checking email I checked three minutes ago, and going on social media using the hashtag #amwriting to relay my progress even though we all know I’m not writing in that moment. Once I begin to question the words on the page, a scene’s progression, and/or my overall concept, it’s a brief reprieve to go for a bike ride rather than tackle the problem at hand. The pressure of being perfect as an artist in a world full of artists, residing in one of the most artistic cities in the world, living with characters for almost a decade, has me throw up my hands and say “I put in enough time, right?” before I log onto Twitter. (#TheStruggleIsReal.) It leads me to settle in my chaise with a book and be optimistic that I won’t be as hard on myself for the time not spent on the work. The pressure has me hope that the distance I felt growing between myself and the words on the screen isn’t as broad as I perceive it to be.

Song of the Shank author Jeffery Renard Allen told me that writers “actively seek ideas.” We may be so dogged in our pursuit that we want, or even expect, to be able to come up with the kernel of one at will and within a specific amount of time. But there’s also a level of development that needs to happen, this also takes time. Jeff was one of my instructors and my mentor as a grad student at the time he had been working on Shank — a fictional account of the prodigy Blind Tom. Eight years after I graduated, I purchased Song of the Shank at a reading at Housing Works remembering the project he’d been researching and drafting as he critiqued my own writing. “Song of the Shank taught me that we have to be patient and let the ideas find us,” he told me.

And sometimes, what feels like the finish line may be the halfway point. Bellwether Prize winner and New York Times best-selling author Heidi Durrow’s debut The Girl Who Fell From the Sky “went through at least twelve major revisions over the course of the years I worked on it and three of those were after I had a book contract,” she said. Heidi estimates she deleted 150 pages of her prize-winning manuscript and “built it back up.” The idea that the work ends once the deal is sealed is a fallacy, reflecting the constant growth and development writers go through to get their writing to a place we’re comfortable with before releasing the reins.

Michele Young-Stone, author of The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, told me that time constraints are “comical.” Michele wrote the first draft of her novel in 2004. “By March 2005,” she said, “I thought I was finished. It took four years of revision, letting the manuscript sit for months, to see the bigger picture. I sat down and rewrote the whole book in 2008.” The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors would publish in 2010, six years after Michele began.

Writers will never stop setting unrealistic timestamps to finish a story and send it out. In fact, the pressure we put on ourselves can be paralyzing in its intensity, and the feeling of non-accomplishment is a pervasive weight. I began this process thinking “oh yeah, this collection will take a couple years at most,” but the weight increased with each critique, workshop, meeting with an instructor at a conference or a friend for brunch who read it over and said there was more work to be done. “You’re getting there” is a phrase I hear often. “I see what you’re trying to do” is another. My eyes become shiny every time I hand off the latest draft to my cohort. I’m thinking, “Validate me, please. I think I finally got this right. Please tell me I’m done.”

Nowadays when this happens, the words “It takes time” echoes in my head, in Ellen’s voice. It takes time to know your characters and for them to speak to you. It takes time for the feedback to sink in and for a resolution to burst forth. There are moments I hate the people I’ve created on the page, and there are times where I love them so much I cannot bear to press the backspace button to delete a scene they appear in. There are moments when I grin at my perceived brilliance and am humbled, grateful and slack-jawed when someone says, “This works” or “You did a great job with structure” or “I love this and want to publish it.” These factors, the bits and pieces that come through, the material that’s kept and what is cut further illustrates the “inefficiency” of the process. A process that can’t always be measured, no matter how many times I hear “slow” versus “fast” or find out how long it took such-and-such award-winning writer to get their project out in the world.

I asked Susanna how she was able to persevere in her “quiet hell,” despite outside barriers as well as internal ones. She told me she “realized that writing — in the long form especially — is an act of faith and that I needed to generate that faith for myself in a prolonged way.” Jeff noted that the man he was in 2000 “was not a man capable of writing” his most recent novel. I don’t know if this made me feel better or not, but it did provide more insight than I had before. I once heard Ron Carlson say at a workshop, “stay in the room.” He meant this metaphorically and literally. In order to stay in the room, I will not think about the person who initiated this anthology at age 27 as the same person to finish it several years down the line. To stay in the room and accept my process, whatever it may be, also means not dwelling on something I cannot change. But I may have to turn off the wifi.

When ‘Good Writing’ Means ‘White Writing’

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Teaching a writing course every semester dedicated to first-generation, low-income students at CUNY, students who were once upon a time me, I always hear these words, “We have never had a professor like you before.” This makes me feel adequate, makes me feel some kind of good amidst my ever-increasing doubts over the choice I made of pursuing a Ph.D. instead of an MFA, choosing the fully-funded option so I didn’t have to hassle my underpaid, overworked, and undocumented farm-working father for money again. I know what they mean by this, though. I know what they mean when they say “they appreciate all the diverse readings on the syllabus.” I know, from my own experiences traversing these inhospitable walls we call Higher Education, that what is said openly and honestly is at the mercy of some all-knowing Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Fine Arts, both the same shade of pale. Our resistance in these spaces must be coded.

My being in the classroom and my overwhelming exclusion of those “canonical” writers like Melville, Shakespeare, Woolf, Orwell, and many others is fine and dandy. Pat on the back for representation. But is representation the end of my responsibility? Is getting there and shaking up the syllabus enough? Is my presence progress in and of itself?

At a faculty meeting geared specifically for these courses, the diversity of the faculty ranges from a Joanne with blonde hair to a Joanne with pink highlights, all of the Joannes flaunting their MFA credentials and their radical visions for pedagogical change. As the only Latinx member of the faculty, I automatically become the Debbie Downer. I tell them about a student who, after taking my class, came to me the following semester to tell me how a professor of literature told them they “needed to write their essays more intellectually.” “The student,” I tell the Joannes, “was disappointed because I had told them their style, their way of writing and thinking and speaking, was analytical, intelligent, and intellectual.” For my student, this was the story of yet another betrayal. Another moment of unexplained and inexplicable disciplining so prevalent behind our fortresses of education. I feel like I let my student down.

At a faculty meeting, the diversity of the faculty ranges from a Joanne with blonde hair to a Joanne with pink highlights.

The immediate response from the faculty: “Did you teach them about code-switching?” They speak as if I have never once encountered the words “code-switching,” as if I have never been told I should speak and behave in certain ways while in school, as if I do not include code-switching in my classes. Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera wonderfully demonstrates to my students how two languages can come together to create a genre-bending masterpiece. How one speaks to different kinds of people in different kinds of settings takes center stage for my students in Walter Dean Myer’s young adult classic Monster. Tupac and Kendrick Lamar teach my students about address, audience, and the many ways language can be put to use to do things in the world. I don’t know how to tell them any of this in the faculty meeting room. I don’t know how else to explain myself besides giving a level-headed, “I did.” My relative newness to teaching, and the fact I am still a Ph.D. student, makes me hesitate to provide a counter-argument. In this moment I feel like my students, as if I have no say in what happens to me behind these walls of white.

In their radically liberal and progressive and student-centered pedagogies, the students are the ones who have to adapt, to change according to a professor’s shifting standards. The underlying assumption beneath my colleague’s question is that my student’s use of language, with their specific ways of speaking, writing, knowing, and experiencing the world, is not of the university and the writing classroom. This implies to students that their everyday speech and their everyday forms of composing the written word is not intellectual, is not appropriate for sharing with others on the page. The words in Spanglish, the humorous inversions of logic at the end of a thought, the hard accent and emphases of a student born and raised in the South Bronx, the means of interpreting the world unique to their kind of body and their bodily history, is deemed not good enough. In that case, whose language is universal? Against whose language are we judging the quality of prose? Who are we asking them to try and become? What is this limit my student reached?

Whose language is universal? Against whose language are we judging the quality of prose? Who are we asking them to try and become?

The student concludes their testimony of betrayal with these words, “This whole thing made me even madder because she was like us.” There go the pronouns. The intimacy of a “like us,” the familiarity in the collective “we,” of being people of color in a space marked all white. Maybe that is why I omit this last portion to my colleagues — afraid this will validate some theory in the minds of these many white folks who are freedom-fighters for the downtrodden and excluded, worried this might betray any of my theories about white folks being the sole perpetrators and perpetrators of the many –isms structuring the educational system from pre-K to graduate school. I am even more terrified I have done the same thing as a professor who is “like us” to my students: judging and evaluating their writing according to what is “intellectual,” what is “good writing,” without questioning the foundations of those assumptions. In other words, failing them.

An answer, a means to more questions: the limit is the limit of sensibility. The standards and tastes which judge writing are not on the table for discussion today, nor ever. We seem to have no language available in which to discuss this matter of sensibility, style, aesthetic judgments, and their relationship to how words are formed on the page. This standardization of writing, expression, and sensibility is not found in the communities my students and I belong to. This standardization, in fact, is used against our communities, used strategically to alienate and control and to include our communities in certain kinds of ways according to certain logics. This is a standardization my colleagues do not question when they talk about diversity. Faculty and administration understand this whole thing of representation and diversity as mere presence in a classroom, in the faculty lounges, in the admissions committee, the scholarship application. Representation is happening, they will remind you, progress is on the rise, don’t worry, all a matter of time until full equality is achieved. They want more and more diverse bodies to fit into their standards of being, thinking, and writing. Progress has a limit and the example of my student is case in point. True diversity, and its nuances, its many complexities, exceed the bounds of what is understood to be appropriate and standard and quality. The diversity of my students challenges these logics of style and sensibility we take for granted.

The first day of my classes, and many subsequent classes during the semester, I preface with these cautionary words: “In this class I will be asking you to try and find your style. I want you to use your slang, your sentence structures, your poetry, your many languages, your very self in your writing. In order to be better writers, we first have to know how we relate to our writing, how our writing develops from our very bodies and lives. But know not all professors are like me. They will ask you to write a certain way, judge your work according to certain rules, and demand you speak in intellectually sophisticated ways — whatever these things even mean. Your success, the grade or the job, depends on molding yourself to the criteria and standards they give to you, unfortunately. Going forward, please be aware of this when you are in these other classroom spaces. As much as I hate to say it: it is what is — for now.”

In my final semester of coursework for my Ph.D. in English and Literature, I take a class on the notebooks, diaries, and other miscellaneous forms of writing from well-known writers. The doubts over my writing abilities because I don’t have an MFA are at a peak high. Depression and psychosis inform every writing encounter. Most days I get angry because I never even gave myself the chance to pursue an MFA, to workshop again like I enjoyed to do in those undergraduate courses, to learn the insider secrets to being a writer, to feel included in a writing community. Not to mention I feel I am a flop of a scholar, each essay idea I suggest to professors met with an oh so-courteous “mmmm, I see,” knowing this response is brought on because my ideas are too personal, too creative for a traditional academic setting. I take the notebooks and diaries class with only the most minor of interest.

One of my mentors teaches the class. As is his style, each week a text is given, no lesson plan involved, the classroom discussion goes in whatever direction it so heads in. Improvisational teaching, let’s call it. The class is not a workshop style class but each week we are to bring in a one-page nonfiction fragment in the style of a notebook entry. I submit several drafts of the same one- to two-page piece throughout the semester, each time reworked, each draft closer to that final specimen of perfection we like to call a “final draft.” This approach gives me the impression of workshopping, a continued dialogue on a piece of work, a feeling of community. The effect gives me some kind of satisfaction.

How does one come into a writing style? My professor does not tell me what to do with my writing, how to write into certain kinds of structures according to certain publishable guidelines, or how to make a more marketable style to make my writing “good.” He, instead, nudges an idea, notes thematics in use, analyzes a technique I am using that I am not even aware I am using, a sentence which moved him to feel something. He does not teach me to write but lets my writing, my re-writing, my writing practices teach me. Detection of style, not the imposition of style, is his style.

Tiny White People Took Over My Brain

I think of myself as both student and teacher in this class. This approach to writing helps me think about how I can respond to my students’ writing, how I can forge a sensibility attentive to the nuance in letters, words, sentences, paragraphs. Without an MFA, this approach teaches me writing is a process of the body; the body in writing is its own best workshop, writing what it does and does not like and able to explain why. No one told me practicing what I preach would feel so good.

Junot Díaz published “MFA vs POC” in The New Yorker in 2014 detailing his experience in an MFA program, and the systemic issues of diversity within MFA programs. I have seen this article retweeted and cited and mentioned and alluded to many times. I have read through many of the responses to Díaz’s thoughts but I can never bring myself to read the article fully. I scroll through and read random paragraphs, re-read them time and time again, reading them when I need to read them. Something about belonging and not belonging — and the fear of where I fall on that spectrum, or the fear of not belonging anywhere on this spectrum — holds me back from reading it from beginning to end. Something about knowing I might not even belong in an MFA program, might not even be welcomed in one because I am a poor writer of color, holds me back. On one run of my mad-dash scrolling, I get to this line near the end, near that point in a text you are not supposed to traverse unless you have followed the argument completely, earned the reward of conclusions, “To create in the present a fix to a past that can never be altered.” Cherry-picked brilliance, an entire essay condensed to a fifteen-word sentence that won’t leave my mind.

If the instructors in writing programs ranging from the MFA to the required freshman composition course to the primary school classroom are all Franzens and Didions and their disciples, syllabi and pedagogies and methods reflecting back writers similar to Franzen/Didion, students aspiring to produce works Franzen/Didion-like, then, inevitably, we are judging work according to a Franzen/Didion-esque sensibility. All is Franzen/Didion: from how we outline to how we draft to how we get A+ grades to how we pitch to how we publish to how we market ourselves to how we measure ourselves to how we take pleasure in writing. The measure of style, and whether a piece of writing is good or bad, sellable or not, is this sensibility.

All is Franzen/Didion: from how we outline to how we draft to how we get A+ grades to how we publish to how we measure ourselves to how we take pleasure in writing.

Those qualifiers students like mine need for a grade — “intellectual,” “articulate,” “A+ worthy” — operate according to the logic of this mass-produced sensibility. Those of us unwilling, or downright unable, to acquire an MFA due to stifling student debt or undocumented parents to care for, or denied because some diversity quota was filled or they already had their token person in the program, are still judged according to an MFA sensibility. The MFA is not just a degree that trains you in how to write but, like all degrees, trains us to write and to evaluate writing according to the rubrics of those in charge of the discipline. Good writing feels like a universal standard. We just know it when we see it. The individual in a position of power who says no and ascribes this “no” to subjective tastes — just not their style — assumes their judgment and sensibilities are cultivated in vacuums of nothingness, without cultures and beliefs and biases shaping what they deem good, their judgment endowed from some beyond of white (cishet/able bodied) universality. Subjective tastes, the reasoning behind a low grade or a rejection letter, is, for certain kinds of people, a well-disguised and acceptable form of executing one’s biases. Our idea of what is “literary” or “intellectual” derives from somewhere, has a history.

We forget that the writing of the Franzens and the Didions, like those of “diverse” writers, are created by the cultures, communities, and experiences they live.

We forget that the writing of the Franzens and the Didions, like those of “diverse” writers, are created by the cultures, communities, and experiences they live. They are not products of some universal void in white. The privilege to form, experimentation, and sensibility is rarely given to those writers living and writing in the margins. A debate about content versus form versus sensibility is not a debate at all — the three happen all at once. Our sensibilities must be allied against the MFA/Academic marketization in order to meet the needs of students trying to write from the margin, those students like my students trying to challenge the margins, those students like myself trying to write the margin itself. The revolution of our writing classrooms, as well as its radical diversification, must attend to sensibility. Inclusion is no longer enough.

Each semester there are several exercises I have my students do. For each text I ask, “What did you not like about this text?” New York City undergraduates do not play — they will give you an impassioned and elaborate and intellectually rigorous breakdown of why they did not like something. The authorial voice was too pompous, the language was unnecessarily complicated to say something they could sum up in a paragraph, the use of literary devices was too much, the organization of the essay could have been done differently to make them feel a bit more. They cite the sources to back up their arguments of dislike. To dislike is to pass judgment, to dislike is to analyze nuance, to dislike is to create a sensibility of antithesis. As a writer on the margins, a writer living in marginalization, a writer who rarely sees himself in the literature he reads, a writer who still feels sometimes he is not worthy of being a writer because he does not have an MFA, my sensibility has always been determined on what I don’t like, on where I don’t see myself, on where I don’t belong.

One of my favorite exercises I do in class is for my students to underline three sentences in an essay they wrote: a sentence they really loved, a sentence they liked, and a sentence they did not like at all. They then must explain in one paragraph for each underline why they feel this way. (I participate in the exercise with my students. I want them to know I’m learning too, that I’m not an infallible arbiter of judgment.) The best part of this exercise is to read the explanations of why my students didn’t like a sentence of theirs. I find it compelling how they can still identify beauty — the beauty of attempts made, the beauty of trying at perfection, the beauty of awareness to one’s use of language — in what they don’t like. Their evaluations instruct me on how writing is always a means of doing better, of testing and experimenting with the possibilities of what was, what is, and what can be, the exposing oneself to the unexpected that is the experiencing your own words. MFA or no MFA, they teach me that to be a writer is to be a student, to be open and willing to keep learning about what it means to write.

9 Walking Books That Let You Follow in Literary Footsteps

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My new novel The Miranda features a lead character who wants to walk around the world but doesn’t want to leave his own backyard, so he decides to walk 25,000 miles — the circumference of the earth — by doing laps around his own garden path. However, his sinister professional past proves difficult to walk away from.

I join a very long line of writers who have walked, and walkers who have written. I’m not in competition with my predecessors, either as a writer or as a walker, but here are some works by a few of my favorite literary fellow travelers. Some of these are fiction, some non-fiction—although all the fiction contains autobiographical elements, and there’s considerable invention in all the memoir.

Dublin: Ulysses, James Joyce

An obvious one to start with: the novel follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus as they spend a day wandering around Dublin, pursuing their separate, then crossed, destinies. There are endless books, guides, maps, organized walking tours to help you follow the characters’ routes in the real world. And the great thing is that any of these walks can easily be turned into a pub crawl. Ulysses also contains what I think is one of the truly great statements about walking: “We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-law. But always meeting ourselves.”

Munich to Paris: Of Walking In Ice, Werner Herzog

In the winter of 1974, Herzog walked the 500-plus miles from Munich to Paris in the firm belief that this walking pilgrimage would save the life of his friend, the film historian and critic Lotte Eisner, allegedly suffering from a serious illness. The walk was as arduous as you might expect, tramping through snow, sleeping in abandoned buildings, and Herzog is his usual heroically gloomy self. But the surprising thing is (or maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at all) — it worked. Lotte Eisner lived for another decade.

Tierra del Fuego to Panama: The Rucksack Man, Sebastian Snow

They don’t make ’em like Sebastian Snow anymore, and they never made many. Rejected from the army because of a knee injury incurred playing school sports, he became one of the twentieth century’s most relentless and eccentric world travelers. The Rucksack Man is his account of walking 8,700-miles from Tierra del Fuego to Panama, along the way getting his contact lenses fused to his eye balls, being bitten by a vampire bat, and having the amazing strength of character to refuse the many lifts he was offered.

Yorkshire moors: Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

The title is the name of an isolated farmhouse in the wilds of the Yorkshire Moors, the home of Heathcliff. It’s a long way from anywhere and yet the characters rarely think twice about walking the considerable distances there and back, and even a heavy snowfall only deters them slightly. Admittedly these journeys are sometimes necessary to further the plot, and of course the servants do at least twice as much walking as the property-owning classes.

New York: Open City, Teju Cole

Julius, a Nigerian student in New York, walks around Manhattan, explores the city, and tries to forget about the girlfriend he’s recently broken up with, observing the present while remembering his past in Nigeria and Belgium. This strikes me as one of the best aspects of walking: it requires you to pay attention to where you are and where you’re going, but because walking is also partly automatic, it leaves the walker’s mind free to set off in other directions.

London: Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf

It would be more or less possible to track the route that Clarissa Dalloway takes — Westminster, St James Park, Piccadilly, Bond Street — as she sets out to buy flowers for a party she’s having in the evening. Like Teju Cole above, she too takes the opportunity to think about her current life and the missed opportunities of her past. For those seeking to replicate Mrs. Dalloway’s ramble, however, the route may be problematic. Critic and contrarian John Sutherland suggests that she couldn’t possibly have done the walk in the time available unless she’d taken a taxi.

Vienna: Walking, Thomas Bernhard

Two men habitually go on long walks through the streets of Vienna and have intense philosophical discussions, often about the nature of walking and the nature of thinking. But since Bernhard is one of history’s greatest misanthropes, the conversation inevitably turns to the evils of the Austrian state, madness, suicide, and a hatred for children. It is, of course, a comedy.

Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London: Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin

For all-too-obvious reasons, women walk much more cautiously than men, but there are plenty of serious women walkers, and Elkin’s book could be a sacred text for them. One of my favorite parts is her description of living in Tokyo, where she didn’t have the very best time. “What bothered me most was the certainty I felt that there was a great city out there full of places I wanted to discover, but I didn’t know where to look for them … I didn’t know where to go, where to walk.” A problem all walkers sometimes have.

Los Angeles: Westward Ho, Jim Harrison

A rarity, a Los Angeles walking story, and a novella rather than a novel, about Brown Dog, a native American, who walks the 47 miles from Cucamonga to Westwood to reclaim a bearskin taken from him by a “deeply fraudulent Indian activist.” It takes him a “leisurely” thirty-six hours to cover the distance. Google maps clocks it as 51.7 miles, and although the walk looks perfectly doable, I imagine very, very few people have ever done it.

Inside the house: Voyage Around My Room, Xavier de Maistre

And here’s one for those who want to walk but can’t to go anywhere. In 1790 de Maistre, a French aristocrat and army officer, was sentenced to forty-two days under house arrest for the crime of dueling. For those forty-two days he walked the length and breadth of his own room, treating it like a strange, newly discovered land, seeing it with new eyes, and also creating a parody of travel writing that is still extremely resonant.

The Danger of Calling Her “Baby”

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“It’s a Shame About Ray”

by Lara Williams

Ray had given up answering questions. There seemed to be, he thought, too many of them. Best to just go with the flow. Be that guy; some easy-going dude, in sunglasses and a papaya print shirt. That guy didn’t hit fifty, take up jogging and have an embolism. That guy didn’t split a dick trying to find decent asparagus, ambling around puzzled; all salt and pepper hair at the Sunday farmer’s market. That guy embraced his paunch, the inescapable inevitabilities of age, the unconquerable ravages of existence, replying “whatever you say, doc!” when asked by his GP if he’d considered cutting down on salt, then went straight out for burgers. That guy was alright. That guy was, as you might say, a cool guy.

“Hey, baby,” his wife called from the nursery. They’d always called each other baby, babe, babes; it was their thing, but now they had a living, breathing baby, there was a hesitation in it, something else that needed shifting. She was perched halfway up a ladder, holding the handle, her hair pulled into some vegetal tangle. What was she doing up there? — pawing at the ceiling like a mad thing, feet over the ground, like her body was some unbreakable, undamageable object. He imagined her falling, the slap of her skin and the crack of her bones, and felt jets of adrenaline surge to his heart, a geyser of dread; then recalled his persona, his cool guy schtick. “What do you think?” she asked, fixing some paper birds, some whimsical mobile, over the cot. He held his hands up — I surrender! — shrugging his shoulders, flexing his face. The rehearsed gestures of the recently laidback. She fussed with it some more. The nursery was half-done, in flux. Vinyl wall stickers, scattered stars and half-moons, on the right, on the left, Anita Ekberg, head thrown back, breasts thrust forward, rhapsodic, in the Trevi Fountain. Oh! — it had been quite the guest room.

It would take the weekend to finish the job, the transition near complete, the house almost fully baby-proof. “We’ll soon be set,” he’d said, regretting the phrase, which jarred, summoning images of insects set in amber, jelly tough as varnish. Whatever remained in the mold, doomed to stay there, forever.

He navigated the peripheries of the room, his feet pressing tenderly against the carpet. Since the baby’s arrival, the household had changed. Changed not in the plastic bottles that were everywhere. Changed not in the breast pump that lingered to the side of the bathroom sink like a perplexing adult aid. Changed not in the used nappy containing a single brown blob, which remained on the countertop for hours; the nappy’s frilled edges the split shells of a clam, the blob an offered pearl. No. The changes were more abstract, more semiotic. He increasingly found himself bumbling around in socks and soft clothes, feeling like some senile old fool, some forgetful old pop pops, a lost guest in his own home.

“Things,” his wife said, descending the ladder, with infomercial grace. “We need things.”

Things were her latest demand. An abstract bric-a-brac she willed at random. Like the space around them was significant. Like it needed filling. It was as if she had plopped this squirming animation onto the planet and couldn’t figure out why he too could not create something from nothing. Baby, we need things. Baby, we need stuff. Baby. Baby.

“You can get all this from the supermarket,” she said. “I’ll write you a list.”

She left the room, leaving him with the baby. He looked past him with blissful incomprehension. Babies, with their smug ignorance, their swaggering oblivion. How gladly and giddily they were bewildered. He was propped in the corner, moored to his mobile, with that glazed expression Ray had trained himself not to think too much about. A squidgy, unknowable tumor. A flesh thing. With shining white eyes, roly-poly wrists and the gurgling pomp with which he filled his nappy.

He started to whimper, a soft woolen whimper, as his wife called him from downstairs. Ray froze, unable to decide who to tend to first, mother or baby, apples or oranges. She returned upstairs handing him the list, picking up the baby, who immediately settled. Babies, Ray had concluded, were mostly stupid. But this they did understand. The implicit responsibility of their mothers for them.

Ray scanned the list. It seemed straightforward. “See you later, honey,” he whistled, leaving, and she kissed him on the rough shadow of his cheek. He was trying to introduce honey into their hypocoristic vernacular. Honey was neutral. Honey had no further implications beyond sweetness.

Ray recently found supermarkets stressful. He was used to stress. Of course, he was used to stress. But it was a different kind of stress at the supermarket. Different to the scattered flotsam of swaddling on their living room floor. Other to the lockstitch zigzag of the rush hour drive. The wolfish snapping of the customers, the hummed din of the registers, unique to the shop floor. Life, Ray had decided, was exchanging one type of chaos for another.

He paced the aisles looking at all the things. The crackling packeted things. The primary-colored cardboard things. So many things. All reaching out, wanting to be chosen. He felt like the world was perennially bulleting questions at him. At every turn there was another question; semi or skimmed, paper or plastic, cash or card; another question that needed an answer. Like the whole world was made up of two lost halves of a whole, searching for each other, eternally.

Beneath the requests for wood glue and mason nails, his wife had written “one cooked chicken,” he noticed, with some relief. There wasn’t nuance in cooked chicken. There weren’t gradations. You just picked the thing; you just picked the one thing. His wife had taken to eating chicken since the birth when she’d been practically vegetarian up until then. Ray assumed it was something primitive, something lunar he didn’t understand; to do with nesting and menstruation. He, the man, sent out to score meat.

He approached the rotisserie, the chickens circling in front of him, roasting to a red gold crisp. He stared at them, entranced; the methodic spin of the rods, the earthy odor, broken, when he noticed the butcher in the background, yanking apart the legs of a pink, plucked chicken, forcing his hand inside, pulling out the giblets. Ray felt suddenly sick. He squatted, with his hands placed over his knees, the world a swirling Lazy Susan, swaying in tandem around him. He tried to forget the scene, as he had tried to forget the scene it reminded him of; his wife lying supine, her legs pulled apart, the baby dragged out of her. How they had treated her like a thing, a meat thing, to be cut up and hollowed out. It had been an awful birth. A day he would forever remember as the worst of his life. He retrieved his phone from his pocket, prodding its glassy surface, dialing home, thinking if he could just hear his wife’s voice, if she could just give him some instructions, some direction, he’d be fine. “Baby?” she said, over the thin crackle of static, the shitty supermarket reception. He had the feeling of trying to suppress a cough, that convulsing heaving panic.

“Baby?”

On the way home Ray called in for a drink. It seemed like a cool guy move; a leisurely interval before they were set; elbows resting on the gravy polish of the pine bar, a single malt whiskey cooling with two cubes of ice.

He sipped his drink, feeling the heat settle in his stomach, wondering why all comforts were thermal. The muted television flickered foreign atrocities, genocides Ray no longer felt pathos for. It was like grieving the seasons, pining the moon; it was so far away, so abstract, it seemed senseless to engage. Even the television didn’t look like a real-life television, like a television within a television, a film within a film, a dream within a dream, the way a life could feel like a life within some other life, some scripted, unknowable life, some non-linear narrative. Well flip the script, buddy! Ray thought. Spoil the ballot! Throw your homework onto the fire! — as he knocked back the last of his drink and considered asking the guy next to him whether we all saw the same colors. He ordered another drink, turning over the cocktail menu, thinking next he’d have a piña colada, easy on the piña, with a side of shrimp and fries.

He rubbed his face. The suggestion of stubble. The threat of it. Resonating a satisfying scratch. Like the ice chiming against his glass, the clack of high heels on a hardwood floor. A bar sound. One of his favorite sounds. He wandered to the jukebox, put on some music; Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Pete Seeger. Some cool guys. Some guys who got it. He returned to his seat and wiggled his glass at the waiter, the way he’d seen in movies, gesturing for another, and then another; stamping his feet in time to the songs. Dance like nobody gives a crap. Drink like you don’t have a family to go home to. Love because what else is the point. By the time last orders arrived, he was a slop; as sloppy as an old sloppy joe, slopping everywhere, slopping his keys onto the carpet, slopping spittle from his jaw. What Ray learned about drunk driving that night is that no one intervenes, no one steps in; like wildlife documentarians, they let nature take its course. And when he came to, his head pressed against the steering wheel, a pool of blood in his lap, flashes of blue from the corner of his eye, he thought, sometimes all you can wish for in life is the physical manifestation of pain.

He woke up in a hospital bed, handcuffed to the rail. It seemed unnecessary. He really wasn’t going anywhere. He lifted up his free arm, bandaged, like lazy fancy dress. His hand had gone, removed; only a white stub remained. A giant q-tip. He told the nurse when he came to he didn’t care; and he still didn’t. What was a hand, anyway? Just another thing. Just another with or without. Everything was just a thing; there was no agency, no ability to affect change. It was the curse of the modern age, options; who needed options, when everything was essentially meaningless?

He thought of his wife during the birth. How he had watched her, her chest heaving up and down, like something equestrian, like something breathing because they meant it. Wondering how so much blood could come from one tiny human person. How he held the baby, but felt like he could be holding anything, any old thing, any old rock or piece of string.

He looked up; his wife hovered over him. It was the first time he had seen her since the accident.

“Baby?” she said. “Are you alright, baby?”

She seemed like she wasn’t really there; superimposed onto the scene, like the Cottingley fairies. She had this ghostly halo of gentleness about her; it was the thing he loved most, like she was from some other planet, lingering inter-dimensionally.

“Listen,” he replied. “Can you stop fucking calling me baby?”

He couldn’t bear to hear the word again.

He couldn’t bear to say the word again.

Mother or Baby, they had asked. A simple question requiring a simple answer. Choose your own adventure. Complete your character arc. They stood facing him, mint green and masked, eyebrows expressing emergency. Like bit parts waiting for their line, waiting for their SAG card. Mother or Baby. Mother or Baby. And he had said Baby. It was instinctive. He didn’t even recognize the voice that said it as his own. Decision made. He had let her go. Let her go like she was a thing. Bon voyage, sweetheart! See you on the other side.

Hospitals, he used to joke, were where you came when your body sprang a leak.

He’d registered some hurt, but it seemed insignificant, infinitesimal; a pinprick of pain among a swarming miasma of emotion.

One thing or the other; how could you choose between one thing or the other.

“Are you okay?” she repeated.

He looked past her, wanting to answer, wanting only to say the right thing.

He stared into the half-light beyond the hospital curtain, the corners gently heaving, in the clear corridor air. The lazily bleeping heart monitors, the silent hurry, the breathless calm, experienced as stop motion, snippets staggered, partially digested. His wife flickering in and out of focus. And a thought, somewhere, papered beneath the cracks, slippery and evasive and impossible to pin down; that everywhere, maybe, is exactly the same.