Trauma, Storytelling, and Time Travel

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A writer questions the reliability of witnessing her own experience and the faithfulness of narrative

Paris Theater, Manhattan. Photo: Leslie Kendall Dye

“I live on West 76th Street, near Broadway,” said the mother on the playground, as we watched our girls romp on the jungle gym.

I hesitated. Then I replied that I had a friend who had jumped out a window on that block many years ago. “That man was a friend of yours?” she asked. I was taken aback; evidently the story had traveled the neighborhood and was a frequent anecdote. I thought of Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. “My, you do like a good story, dontcha?” she asks Sweeney suggestively.

Who doesn’t?

I have my three-year-old in the stroller a few days later; we are headed to another playground in Riverside Park, which is perched above the waters of the Hudson. The sun shines brightly but the wind is sharp.

We frequently walk up and down Broadway, my toddler and I. We arrive — it seems — quite suddenly at the corner of West 76th Street.

On most days, this is just another bustling corner of Manhattan. Today I decide it isn’t.

I pause — just for a moment, because my child is not the sort to appreciate a break in momentum. Then I turn onto 76th.

I used to live on this block. I used to live there with a man named Joe.

Eleven years ago, the doorman found Joe’s body below the window of the apartment we’d shared. The doorman had gone to sweep leaves from the previous night’s storm and there was Joe — rain soaked, crumpled — in the middle of the courtyard. He had jumped in the night.

Eleven years ago, the doorman found Joe’s body below the window of the apartment we’d shared.

Joe didn’t leave a note.

I point to the maroon awning.

“Mommy used to live there,” I tell my daughter. The man at the newsstand remembers me and waves when I pass, even now, a decade later. Joe used to buy me magazines and candy at this newsstand. He loved to bring provisions — to sneak luxuries into the tower, to comfort the prisoner. One day he found me watching Fatal Attraction on cable; he laughed raucously.

“Mommy used to live there,” I say again. “Let’s go inside.” I roll the stroller into the building.

I see the doorman who found Joe’s body; he’s on duty today. Jeanne smiles at me to demonstrate that he remembers me. He called the police a lot when we lived there — either to keep me safe or to appease neighbors annoyed by the noise.

“Is this your little girl?” Jeanne asks. She looks just like you!”

Is he wondering if I’ll bring it up?

“How old are you?” he asks my little girl, trying to win her with a smile.

When a man asks my daughter about herself, I don’t like it.

“She is three,” I tell him.

Joe had me followed by a private investigator. He put software on my keyboard so he could read everything I wrote and sent. He woke me to berate me — nothing could wait until morning. Once, after reading my diary, he tossed me like a rag doll onto the doorstep, in my nightgown; then he slammed and locked the door.

My daughter escapes her stroller and jumps up the steps leading to the elevator.

Do I only think I remember the red and gold pattern swirling on the carpet below me? I see myself walking across that carpet twelve years ago — the day I moved in. Joe had just given me a small diamond ring. He’d taken me to Fifth Avenue and I’d sleepwalked up the aisles of Tiffany with him, listening to him ask questions about cut and clarity. He gripped my hand.

Do I only think I remember the red and gold pattern swirling on the carpet below me?

I wanted to vanish and reappear inside my father’s dusty study in California, to be a child again, running my fingers along the edges of his books. Or, better yet, to hear my mother’s voice meting out advice — advice that I must have missed. Or did I? Did she advise me about these things? Or would she have been unable to imagine her daughter in this predicament?

I found the restroom — Tiffany has many floors and the elevator took a while so when I got there the impulse to vomit had passed. I sat on the plush couch in the ladies’ lounge room and waited for Joe to forget I was there. But he was just outside the door when I emerged; he was pacing, sweating. What, he asked, had taken so long? He took my hand again and returned me to the diamond counter. On the way, he shoved the small of my back and when I stumbled, he smiled and caught me just before I fell.

Joe was once profiled in GQ; he was not famous but he caught a photographer’s eye as he walked down the street one day. He used to say it was silly; he was not handsome; he was a PR executive, not a model. It’s true, he was not handsome. His bright blue eyes gleamed with feral rage, he twitched anxiously and smoked compulsively. He could not go long without a cigarette and the deep lines in his face revealed a body ill-cared for, shrouded in paranoia and agitated depression. The GQ spread was framed on his wall, which amused me considering how disdainful he claimed to be of the whole enterprise. How easily our hypocrisy shows! It might have been lovable or charming had he been a nice guy; everyone hides things and everyone displays other things that misrepresent. Everyone engages in faux modesty and subtle half-truths at times. Whether we are charmed or repelled by a person’s inconsistencies is merely a question of what it is that a person is hiding.

Sometimes I’m on a bus and I see Joe getting on at a later stop — I’m certain of it. I get off at the next stop and I don’t make eye contact. He is dead twelve years but sometimes he boards buses I’m riding.

Jeanne the doorman studies me. “I’m glad you are okay,” he says. That’s as much as we’ll talk about it. I’m certain Jeanne was thrilled to find Joe in the courtyard that rainy night. He hated Joe, but that’s not the reason he’d be pleased. It made for a great story. I know how Jeanne felt. I used to say: “I drove my boyfriend up the wall — and eventually out the window!” And people would laugh and then I would say, “No, really!”

Everyone engages in faux modesty and subtle half-truths at times. Whether we are charmed or repelled by a person’s inconsistencies is merely a question of what it is that a person is hiding.

Today, I’d wanted to show Jeanne my child. I’m a mother now. I am all the things I was before — an actress, a dancer, a person, but I stand up straight when I speak now. I’ve made sure Jeanne sees this so that I can leave our brief reunion triumphant.

The first time Jeanne called for the police, one of them said something about how common the whole scene was — a large apartment in a pretty neighborhood, and look what goes on behind closed doors. How ordinary, how routine we are, I thought. If anger and harsh words are common, I thought, if some degree of dysfunction is the norm, then happy couples must be fascinating.

Filling out paperwork for a restraining order is tedious. Taking photos at the precinct is a nightmare. I joked that fluorescent lighting is an actor’s kryptonite; it makes bruises darker, more purple, and it exaggerates swelling. “This isn’t a joke,” my mother scolded.

The last fight Joe and I had was over an actor who worked at the pottery shop at which I earned a meager wage. Joe thought I had seduced him. “When would I have done that?” I asked. I locked myself in the bathroom. I moved out two days later, packing a few things in secret, running toward the Broadway bus late at night. Perhaps I heard the clock ticking — counting the seconds before Joe detonated.

I went to free PTSD therapy after Joe jumped — Mount Sinai Hospital was doing a study. My counselor was pregnant. I filled out questionnaires but grew distracted by her belly. Surely I was not destined to have a husband or a pretty pregnant belly draped in a silk blouse.

We see this all the time, the policeman had said.

“No points for originality, then?” I had asked.

“This isn’t funny,” the cop said.

Not even morbidly so? I asked, but not out loud.

When I moved out, Joe came to my mother’s apartment, where I’d sought refuge, at two AM. My mother was out of town for the summer; I hung tough as he rang the bell and whispered at the lock. I sat frozen, wrapped in a quilt I’d won in a lottery at work. The quilt was exquisitely soft; its faded green flowers were meant to look vintage. It suggested a meadow, fresh air, homespun wisdom. It was my “new life” quilt. Someday it would be on a bed in a sunny room in a cozy apartment in some other Manhattan. I would find this other Manhattan — this is what I promised myself. I would make a new life. I didn’t answer the door. He rang the bell for over an hour, but I did not answer it. A few days later, he would plunge to his death — alone.

A police officer took me to dinner a few days after I’d moved out and before Joe jumped. He’d met me at the precinct, when I’d had the photos taken. He leaned in and advised me on how to tell if I was being followed. He’d done a sweep of the restaurant, he told me, before we sat down.

It was meant to turn me on. I asked him not to call me again — just because of timing, I told him. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He had a gun.

Three months after Joe died, I met my future husband. He asked me on a date and on the first night of December we saw a movie at The Paris Theatre.

Christmas lights flooded Fifth Avenue. Horses clopped by, leading carriages. If you squint on Fifth Avenue on a dark winter’s night, you can see top coats and bowler hats. You can see 19th Century passersby navigating a snowy thoroughfare. You can see Zelda Fitzgerald jumping in the Plaza Hotel’s fountain, or Eloise peeking from behind the curtains of the penthouse. You can see the other Manhattan of your dreams.

On our date, we didn’t pretend to be calm — we both felt nervous and shy. Still, I took off my shoes and crossed my legs when we’d settled into our seats in the theater’s lavish balcony. I trusted him.

On our date, we didn’t pretend to be calm — we both felt nervous and shy.

I had met Joe in an elevator. We’d only exchanged a few words before he reached over and pulled up my sweater, warning me that it was cut too low. He wanted to protect me, he said. I wore the same sweater to The Paris Theatre. My future husband didn’t touch my sweater; instead, he placed his hand just above mine, asking silently for my permission.I grazed my finger against his palm, giving him my answer.

Nothing Comes Back from the Dump

Our daughter looks like both of us. On this brisk spring day, we say “goodbye” to Jeanne and leave The Colorado. We buy a baguette at Maison Kayser — a French bakery on the corner of 76th that has replaced a previously bustling Greek restaurant called Nikko’s. There were rumors of money laundering at Nikko’s — something about how they moved on every few years to evade inquiry. No newspaper ever wrote up a story; it was merely whispers.

My daughter and I sit on a brownstone stoop and scoop out the baguette’s spongy interior. We watch New Yorkers departing their homes, checking cell phones, racing toward the subway.

Who wants to know a story like that about her mother? Not every “good” story should be told.

“Did you know Mommy used to live in that building?” I ask my toddler again. I don’t expect a response; the question is boring. Perhaps it will be a story for another day — a day many years in the future. Perhaps not. Who wants to know a story like that about her mother? Not every “good” story should be told. And is it a good story? In it, someone dies a lonely death. Still — in it, someone survives, escapes,and begins again. But who is to say if I’m telling the truth? More than a decade has passed and I can’t be sure I have everything right. No one can be sure she has everything right. And Joe isn’t here to defend himself. At least I haven’t used his real name.

My daughter and I stand up and stretch, and I gaze at the street I once lived on with a man I now call “Joe.” The Cerulean blue of the springtime sky electrifies 76th Street. I could stare at it all day.

“Mommy?”

“Mmm?”

“Can we please go to the playground now?”

A note from the author:

Two years ago, I found myself passing the same street nearly every day. I was always with my young child; she consumed my days, as toddlers do. As my daughter ran gleefully past this particular intersection, in a busy area of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, I was struck by the embodiment of my present day — my child — racing by a street that in my past had become endowed with darkness. For me it was not just an intersection in space, it was an intersection of two time periods. I used to live on that street, and a few things happened there, in a building just beyond the corner. Perhaps I had never sorted through those events properly, and as a result, I was compelled to revisit the street, not just in my mind, but on foot.

My child rooted me solidly in the present day, but if we strode up the street, could we slip through a portal to an earlier time?I thought a lot about the book Time and Again, by Jack Finney, as I began to write this story up. If we spend enough time in an old neighborhood or building, might we also travel in time? Might we sweep together the particles of the past and recreate the events that occurred there? Could we witness those events anew, could we see the old characters walking right by — so close you could hear them and smell them and touch them? It became an exercise in imaginative power — but was I summoning the past accurately or recreating it? And what, exactly, is the difference? The great acting teacher Uta Hagen said that we tell stories for reasons, we don’t simply re-live an experience for its own sake, and that when we re-tell a story, whatever compels us to do so shapes the way in which we tell it.

What, then, was my reason for telling this story?

My mother used to refer to a type of behavior she called “approach-avoidance.” The term perfectly describes my frame of mind when I wrote this. The subject matter disturbed me greatly but the exploration of a physical space that no longer held any danger fascinated me. I am a rational person, but I enjoy the idea of ghosts. Remnants of people and events remain in the machinery of the brain — they may fade but they never disappear altogether. If you seek out a ghost, if you name a fear, does it lose its power? I recently read that this is sometimes called The “Rumpelstiltskin effect.”

I approached a scary topic by circling the periphery, feeling around in the dark for sense memory rather than trying to face it head on. And so the essay came to be about things peripheral to the experience — it came to be about stories, and the game of telephone through which our stories pass on the streets of New York City, onto playgrounds, among strangers, and it also came to be about the side players in our stories — the witnesses — and the bits of wisdom they dole out, wanted or not.

Am I reliable?

Last night, I walked past the building again. I noticed that the lobby’s carpet is a dull beige — in my essay it is a swirling nightmare of red and gold. Did I remember wrong, conflating my anxiety at that time in my life with the color of the lobby’s rug? Maybe, maybe not. I visited the lobby with my toddler two years ago; maybe the rug has since been replaced.

Why Do We Still Crave Epiphanies?

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David Burr Gerrard on insecurities, the dream of radical transformation, and the enduring power of epiphanies

David Burr Gerrard’s second novel, The Epiphany Machine (Putnam), opens with a user’s manual, a promotional pamphlet of sorts. It is meant to entice and intrigue, to obfuscate and dissuade. Dissuade who? Well, you and me, of course. Like the best paper collateral (and the best openings of novels), there’s a friendly pull and push at work in these first pages. It’s impossible not to keep going and find out what happens next.

The subject here is the book’s eponymous artifact, a tool that looks like a sewing machine and functions like a prophet. The epiphany machine is an antique device that exists for the sole purpose of tattooing epiphanies on the arms of its clientele. ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST is an example of one. Or, SHOULD NEVER BECOME A FATHER. Beware of easy answers, promises, and fortunes: “An epiphany is not a parachute,” the pamphlet warns. It’s almost never a blessing. We follow the machine on its circuitous path through the annals of history, through the tattooed forearms of its detractors and devotees, and into the life of Venter, the protagonist and central figure of the novel. How and why and when the epiphany machine comes to shape Venter’s life is the epiphany we are waiting for, the momentum that keeps this lively novel moving forward.

At its best and its darkest, Gerrard is interrogating the nature of human interaction and human inaction with aplomb. The book, at its heart, is an examination of why people do the things they do, and don’t do the things they don’t, how knowing and not knowing can change the course of a life. “My father did the best he could,” Venter says, “which as a description of human behavior sounds like a tautology but is actually true of very few people.” The people of Gerrard’s novel are doing their best and their worst, and the epiphany of their behavior is the very best kind: the dawning of someone hoisting themselves over the horizon of our expectations. The Epiphany Machine is a tapestry of tattooed souls; the words on their arms become a refrain, a chorus, the twenty-four-hour ticking chyron of lived experience.

I recently spoke with David Burr Gerrard. Over sushi and diet cokes, we discussed writing workshops, John Lennon, and social media. He even prescribed some brand-new epiphany tattoos for a few people who are in urgent need of self-reflection.

Hilary Leichter: When Venter, the protagonist of your book, starts taking testimonials from people who are receiving epiphanies, he gets some advice on giving an interview from a writer named Catherine Pearson: “The only way to get people to talk about something important is to leave them with no other option.” So, this is our interview! This is your testimonial. Tell me something important about this book. What was the epiphany that led to The Epiphany Machine?

David Burr Gerrard: The Epiphany Machine started when I was in grad school, which is now more than ten years ago. I first wrote a short story called “The Epiphany Machine” in spring of 2006, for a workshop in Ben Marcus’s class. I had absorbed the idea that short stories were supposed to have some kind of epiphany, even though actually my professors really never told me that, and I had no idea how to write with epiphanies. On the one hand, I wanted to write stories that had epiphanies, on the other hand I thought it was clichéd and reduced human experience to slogans. On the one hand I thought I was too good for epiphanies, on the other hand I thought I wasn’t good enough for epiphanies. I worried that I didn’t really have any kind of wisdom to share. I couldn’t distill life into that kind of essence. I started wishing for an epiphany machine that would dispense wisdom for me, and then I had the epiphany that I could just write about the machine. I also came up with the idea that the epiphanies would be dispensed by something that looked like a sewing machine, largely because I love Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” and I wanted to use a needle.

In my original story, the epiphanies were just written on a piece of wood. And it didn’t occur to me until much later to actually make them written on the body in the way that the judgments are written in “In the Penal Colony.” The story was received well in my workshop, and I thought, this is great! I’m going to turn this into a novel, and I’ll be done with it in about a year or so. And that led to the very painful and protracted epiphany that it was going to be much more difficult than that. I wrote many, many, many drafts that went nowhere, and I had what I thought was my final epiphany over and over again, which was that I was a terrible writer and it was never going to work. Finally, I put it down and went back to this novel I’d written in grad school, Short Century, revised that, had that published. I was very nervous about going back to The Epiphany Machine. Because I thought okay, this is just a trap that’s going to lead to me wasting my life and my writing career.

HL: I have this theory that the longer you have an idea you’re excited about, and you don’t write it, the more it becomes the weight that you wear around your neck.

DBG: It’s totally true. I think in general that’s very good advice. I think the best advice that I could’ve gotten in 2009 or 2010 would have been to stop writing this book and never think about it again. But now I’m glad I didn’t take what would’ve been good advice.

HL: I’m glad, too!

DBG: The fact that good advice is not always good advice is also a big part of this book.

HL: It didn’t occur to me when I was reading, but there is some similarity between the process of a writing workshop and the process of getting the epiphany tattooed on your arm. Waiting to hear people’s critique of your work, and waiting to hear this machine’s critique of your life. And the pain! Waiting to hear while you’re in so much pain! So, it’s interesting to me that when you were writing this, the epiphanies didn’t start out on the skin, on the actual arm, because there was so much about that in the book that brought to mind other things. It made me think of Shelley Jackson’s Skin Project, and how when you’re an artist you’re always told that you should have a “thick skin.” I thought your book was an interesting play on that idea. But what is the relationship, for you, between words and skin?

David Burr Gerrard

DBG: I always feel like brutally negative judgments about myself, whether they come from me or from someone else, kind of dig their way into my body. Not in tattoos, and not necessarily in a bunch of words, but certainly on my face. I’ve never had a really good poker face. I sit around worrying about some dumb thing I said at a party a few days ago —

HL: — and everyone can tell that you’re upset?

DBG: Exactly. Or rather, I imagine that everybody can tell. Because really, nobody else cares about you that much. Realistically, somebody sees a tattoo on your arm, in the world of this book, and they might think, “Oh, he’s a weirdo who got an epiphany tattoo.” But nobody really cares. You see a strange tattoo on somebody, in our world, on the subway, and you might think, “Oh, that’s a little weird,” and you don’t think about it again. We really don’t care about anybody else’s interior life.

HL: Why did you choose the forearm as the given spot for an epiphany tattoo?

DBG: That’s a good question — it just seemed to be a place that was both conspicuous, but also concealable. For a while I had them on the face, and it just seemed like too much. A face tattoo is a lot. And it would be really difficult to sort of go through your daily life with a face tattoo. With a forearm tattoo, it’s hard to hide it all the time, but it’s easy to hide it a lot of the time.

HL: The world of the book is so well-built. I really believed that the epiphany machine was a part of the culture, even if it’s a cult-culture. It’s a point of reference in everyone’s life, and that was interesting to me. It’s also a kind of antithetical social media that we don’t have in our world. Instead we have 140 characters that do the opposite of what these forearm tattoos do, concealing instead of revealing who we really are. Can you talk a bit about the relationship between epiphany tattoos and social media?

DBG: It’s so interesting because I started this book in 2006. It was very different. I had Friendster at the time!

HL: That was a thing!

DBG: It was a thing! But I wasn’t really thinking about social media. It didn’t seem that important. And then a couple of years later, I joined Facebook, and I would still say as I was writing these drafts, it didn’t really occur to me that there was much connection between Facebook and what I was writing. That may flatten the way I was thinking, because another thing you do in interviews is you try and create a story about process. So, I probably did, at certain points, think “Oh, okay, obviously on Facebook there’s a certain kind of self-presentation that’s related in a complicated way to the self-presentation in deciding to get an epiphany tattoo.” Once Twitter became so dominant, in maybe 2011 or 2012, it absolutely did become very important to how I was thinking about this book. And that’s part of why I ended it the way I did, with a new device that’s keyed into your internet history. With social media, you’re trying to curate your presentation. But at the same time, I feel that there’s an inevitable failure in that presentation. People can see through what you’re doing. I see people all the time trying to make themselves seem happy, and I don’t buy it. Then again, what do I know!

HL: There’s a character in your book who provides imitation epiphany tattoos. He says that when someone comes and asks him for a certain tattoo, it nevertheless reveals an opposite thing, the real thing that they fear or loathe about themselves. A Facebook post about extreme happiness can maybe leave the viewer feeling an opposite emotion about that post.

DBG: Even if you don’t use social media, we live in a world where everything you do on the internet is widely visible. We are exposed to the world in a way that we perhaps weren’t even when I started writing the book.

Double Take: ‘The Epiphany Machine’ Takes Tragicomedy Into Terrifying New Corners

HL: The moments from history that you brought into the book were very powerful — particularly moments of violence, moments of war, genocide, slavery — moments where people are committing either emotional or physical violence against each other. And you found a way to insert the epiphany machine into each of those experiences, creating a hidden history for our world. I was wondering what your research process looked like, and how you decided which real historical moments to include, versus invented ones.

DBG: We’re all thrusting through a very long and very violent history, of which we only know a tiny fraction. I was interested in throwing in this device, and changing things a little bit. Because of that, I don’t think anyone would go to this book for history, at least they certainly shouldn’t. I decided to give myself free rein in terms of making stuff up. I would consult books as a last resort, if I were stuck as to how to do a certain thing. These are very clearly fictional fictions, and I wanted to get at how certain preconceptions about history kind of float around and get turned around in our heads, and integrated into our sense of self.

HL: John Lennon features prominently in the book — why John Lennon?

DBG: Well let me turn that back around on you. Why do you think John Lennon?

HL: If we’re still talking about these cultural moments that are punctuated by violence, then that’s a big one. And he’s more than just a singer/songwriter. He’s a touchstone for people. He’s a slogan! He’s an icon on a shirt.

DBG: He’s a big part of walking through the more touristy areas of New York. And he’s part of the mythology of New York in a way that I really liked, and that I wanted to interrogate. Because there are a lot of things about him that are terrible. At the same time, I do admire him for his art. And his art changed so dramatically over a very short period of time, and that interested me as well. That dream of radical transformation that’s so important to the epiphany machine, seemed to be an important part of his life and career. And also, the way that radical transformation was unsatisfying to him, and to others.

HL: I think you probably knew this was coming: if you had an epiphany tattoo, do you know what it would be?

DBG: I’ve had a long time to think about this answer. And to be honest, I think there’s no way for me to know because the essence of an epiphany tattoo is that you both know what it is and least expected it.

HL: It’s a blind spot.

DBG: Exactly — it’s something I think about all the time without knowing that I think about it. That being said, I gave Venter the DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS tattoo because that’s what I’m most afraid of in myself. I am terrified it would be my epiphany tattoo. And when I was thinking about what Venter’s tattoo was going to be, that’s really how I got there. Because I do find that even my opinion of this book can veer wildly depending on how recently I’ve refreshed Goodreads.

HL: This book is your epiphany tattoo! It’s the thing you wear into the world for people to comment on, or not care about, or love.

DBG: In general, I do find myself being convinced fairly easily by other people. And I think that’s something that’s true for a lot of us. I think we try and deny that, because everyone wants to say, “I think for myself. I give zero fucks.” I see this all the time: some article gets attacked [on social media] and there’s a huge pile-on. And I think, well if the first few people who read it had the opposite opinion, then would all of these other people have the opposite opinion?

I hope that writing the book has made me more aware of this. I do find that sometimes I start to get swayed by what someone is saying, and then I think, “There you go, David. You’re DEPENDENT ON THE OPINION OF OTHERS.” Being aware of that dependency to has to some extent freed me of that dependency, which is how epiphany tattoos ideally are supposed to work. But as you see in the novel, things can always get turned around.

HL: Since you are the literal inventor of the epiphany machine, and since I fear that questions of truth are very relevant right now in a dire way, I was hoping that you would be willing to prescribe some epiphanies for other people?

DBG: Right. Okay.

HL: Donald Trump.

DBG: I think that there’s nobody who is more abundantly and accurately characterized than Donald Trump. I don’t think I have much in the way of original commentary! The general Google diagnosis of him is as a child who thinks only of himself and thinks only of what he wants at any given moment, and I think it’s an accurate one. That might as well be tattooed all over his body. You can see it in everything he does.

HL: I would think that maybe he’d get the very common epiphany tattoo, CLOSED OFF.

DBG: Most politicians are CLOSED OFF, and closed off to that particular aspect of themselves as well. I think this is key to both Trump’s popularity, and to people like us who hate him and nevertheless can’t stop looking at him. I think he reflects something back in all of us. So, he’s sort of an epiphany tattoo for America. We’re all like him, to a degree. We’re all children who want what we want, and want praise all the time, and instant gratification, constant validation. We don’t want to think about how our actions are going to affect other people. I think that is both appealing and repellent, to a degree that it allowed him to command enough attention to get into the White House.

HL: What about Ivanka’s tattoo?

DBG: Ivanka is a much more interesting case, and I do think that she is very contradictory in many ways. And so, she might be a prime candidate for an epiphany tattoo, because the sense that I get is that she knows the truth about herself, but she doesn’t want to admit it. I think she knows that she helped a fascist become President of the United States. And yet she wants to believe that she is advocating for good policies within the fascism, even though that fascism wouldn’t have been as successful without her apparent normalcy, which I think helped convince people, “Oh, he can’t be that bad if Ivanka loves him.” So, I think her role is really as a cloak of normalcy that her father can wear when he feels like it, but has no actual consequences as to what he does. And I think she knows that’s her role.

HL: So maybe her tattoo is something like, PROTECTS FATHER?

DBG: PROTECTS FATHER AND PROTECTS SELF.

HL: What about Kafka?

DBG: I feel like every sentence that Kafka wrote was an epiphany tattoo for me. I don’t feel worthy of turning it around. The one tattoo that comes to mind for Kafka is, DIDN’T WANT MAX BROD TO BURN HIS MANUSCRIPTS. I think he asked Max Brod because he knew that Brod wouldn’t do it. To generalize: he actually wanted the fame. I’m sure there will be many Kafka enthusiasts who will yell at me for that.

HL: Yes. On the message boards.

DBG: On the Kafka message boards.

A Hidden World

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Continue reading Episode 7: A Conclusion in the Caves
Previous Episode: Episode 5: The Monster of the Green Lake

1. Shelley looked up and saw a ghostly shape sitting a few feet away on a limestone slab, the form of some hulking man who was upset or lost. It appeared that the person was crying, as several short, muffled exhalations were coming from its direction. Before she backed away, she took in the figure of the specter, its outline — the enormous, sloping shoulders, the outsized, frayed coat, the dime store Halloween mask in the shape of Casper the ghost, and got her breath back. She held the empty shoe in her hand and put the other out toward the gate to steady herself.

The man was Norris Ambley, who often wandered town dressed in different Halloween masks. On some days it was Donald Duck, other days He-man from the eighties cartoon, and during the holidays, a worn and dented version of Santa himself. Each of the masks he wore were thin, molded plastic that barely obscured his wide face. He was well over six-and-a-half feet and had to be several hundred pounds. Shelley had never heard the man speak, only knew him to communicate by claps and whistles.

On the way to work, or even out wandering by the lake, she had seen him appear, startling her for a moment, before vanishing into the woods, cigar box in hand again.

She had watched him at the diner every Saturday, arriving with his elderly uncle who was his caretaker. Though it was hard to tell his age — somewhere in his mid-fifties — whenever he raised one of his masks to eat a double order of chocolate chip pancakes, there was something oddly youthful about his face. She had seen men like him once when her grandmother had gotten her hip replaced. Wandering around on the wrong floor of a rehabilitation hospital in Springfield, she had come across a television room full of the lobotomized and developmentally delayed. This man, Norris, usually had the same peaceful, vacant kind of expression. But tonight it seemed he had been crying.

The man looked up, noticing her.

She raised an unsure hand and when she thought she was safe, took a seat beside the mournful giant.

“Norris, is that you? What are you doing out here alone this late?”

The ghost looked away regretfully.

“Everyone has got some story about you, and your mother and father, and how come you stopped talking. One of them said you found out your mother and father had been killed in a train wreck and you didn’t say another word after that. I guess you were so sad, you didn’t have any use for words.”

The man shuddered and looked down at the cigar box that was sitting in his lap. Shelley had seen him carrying it everywhere with him for as long as she had known him.

“What do you got there?” Shelley asked. “Your treasure?”

The ghost tipped his head forward.

“Everybody’s got all kinds of stories about what’s inside that box. But you never open it in front of anybody, do you?”

The man shook his head. Shelley could feel his eyes moving behind the mask, studying her face.

“I understand. There’s nothing in this world more important than having a secret. Having something small that belongs to you.”

The man seemed to consider this. Several seconds later he held out the box, and gently lifted the paper- and wood-covered lid.

Inside were several black and white photographs, and an odd number of Polaroids — faces and frowns, an entire family history, a town unto itself in faded film and colors.

“Is that Mrs. Cooper, Norris? And this one, is that your father? And Mr. Dart? You got most of the town here. Mrs. Divan and Mrs. Plimpton. You got almost everybody in town in here.”

The man took a picture of his father out of the box and pointed up to the sky. Overhead the clouds had become sparse. Shelley felt her face go flat, tight. “They’re all dead. They’re all dead, aren’t they, Norris? You got a collection of everybody in town who’s dead?”

The ghost dipped its head forward.

“Who else do you have? Mrs. Pauley. And Dwight Sprue. And who’s that?” There was a photograph of a girl, cut from an old newspaper. Shelley read the caption. Abigail Farnum. “Is that Deputy Will’s sister? Look at how pretty she was. Back before I was even born.”

The ghost did not move.

“How come? What’s it all for?” the girl asked.

The man placed his fingers over his heart and then the eyes of the mask.

“To look at?”

The mask shook gently.

“To remember?”

The mask shook its head again.

“To watch over them?”

The mask nodded.

“You’re watching over them, huh? An entire town of your own. I’m glad to know you’re watching over them. It’s beautiful. It really is.”

The mask did not move.

“So how come you’re out here crying?”

The man pointed at the pair of train tracks that ran parallel to the cemetery gates. Behind the mask, Norris offered up an off-key whistle.

“What? The train? The train came by?”

The ghost turned his large palms upwards, signifying his fright.

“And then you got scared?”

The mask nodded solemnly once again.

“How long have you been sitting out here?”

One gesture of the mask tilting forward was enough for her to realize it could have been several hours. “Better get you home,” Shelley said, checking her watch. “It’s past eleven already. Strange things are happening tonight.”

Norris gave a low whistle and stood. The girl saw how enormous, how physically intimidating he was, but the youngster-sized mask and the small cigar box gave her the feeling of being in the presence of a child.

It was then that the man seemed to notice the small white shoe Shelley had been holding. He put his hand out and Shelley, without thinking, gave it to him. “It’s Jamie Fay’s. She was the queen at the Founder’s Day parade last year. You know Jamie, don’t you? She’s missing.”

Norris lifted up the mask and stared down at the shoe seriously, his far-off eyes a shade of blue the girl had never noticed before.

“Did you see her out here tonight, Norris? Do you have any idea where she might be?”

The giant took hold of the shoe and quickly began moving off toward the woods.

“Norris? Norris, where are you going?”

But he was already stalking off and Shelley had no choice but to follow.

2. Before Shelley could take in the height of the failing wire fence, she knew they had come to the Doves’ property. There was the faint smell of sulfur and gasoline, and something much more caustic which she could not place. Though the rumor was the eldest Dove, Raymond, had been known to cook and distribute methamphetamines, she thought it was something closer to burnt hair or clothing.

The giant stood, pointing to a large hole in the rusty wire fence.

“In there? You saw Jamie Fay go through there? When?”

He held up a finger and pointed at his large, open palm.

“Tonight?”

The giant signaled to a part of the fence where the shoe’s mate had been caught. Shelley reached out and touched the second shoe, seeing the initials scrawled along the instep.

“You saw her?”

Norris did not move, but suggested by his absolute stillness that he’d seen the girl.

“Was she alone?”

The man slowly shook his head.

“Was someone after her?”

He did a series of signs with his large hands, which Shelley did not understand. “Did you see her go in there?”

The man pointed seriously.

“Okay, I’ll go. But will you wait for me?”

The giant slowly shook his head. It seemed to Shelley that he was afraid to step any closer to the fence. The girl looked beyond the opening, between the trees and saw three or four trailers, each of which was moldering with rust, sitting uneven on concrete blocks, with power-lines running in knots from one to the other. When she turned back, the giant had gone.

“Okay,” she said to herself. “You can do this. You can do this for Jamie.”

Once she had seen the eldest brother, Raymond Dove, at the diner, having been recently released from jail up in Pontiac, cleaning his teeth with the edge of a serrated pocket knife. Something about the gesture felt vulgar and overwhelming, more prognostication than threat.

“All you have to do is walk through the hole in the fence. You can do that. Just think of Jamie Fay, and wherever she is.”

She put a hand out and began to walk through.

Once upon a time, there was a fox. There was a fox who could play the fiddle, she muttered.

Before she made it ten paces, she heard the dogs. It was what she had smelled, the wet, patchy fur, the tang of their metal collars.

One moment later they were upon her. Shelley could not count them at first, and then did, three, tangled in their chains together like some mythological beast from a book she had once read to Jamie, the two of them hidden beneath a blanket fort they had made. A light went on in one of the trailers, the door jerking open as the girl tried to back away, and fell to her knees.

Mrs. Dove appeared in the weak light in a dirty housedress faded to rags, and a moldy-looking bandage over one eye. There was nothing she reminded Shelley of other than a witch.

“Maggie! Tizzy! Allie! Stop that fucking noise!”

The dogs continued to howl. Mrs. Dove reached over and picked up a hammer and began banging it against a misshapen frying pan.

“I said cut all that fucking noise and get inside the fucking house!” Quickly the dogs obeyed, dragging their chains with them. The old woman unchained each and peered into the dark with her one good eye and said, “Who’s out there?”

Shelley stepped forward, knees dirtied with mud again. “Mrs. Dove?”

“Who’s out there?”

“Shelley. Shelley George. From the diner. We used to see you at church. I was in school with your youngest.”

“I don’t care who you are. Don’t you know whose property you’re on? What are you doing in my woods in the middle of the night?”

“I came because…I’m looking…I heard Jamie Fay might be out here. She’s missing. Her parents, the Sheriff, everyone’s looking for her.”

“That ain’t got nothing to do with me. I ain’t seen that girl. You got no business on this property.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know. But are you sure she’s not out here?”

“I told you. That’s none of my business. Now you clear out before I call out those dogs again.”

Pleading, Shelley said, “Please, Mrs. Dove, I’ve…I’ve looked everywhere. Someone told me thought she was out here. Are you sure you haven’t seen her?”

“Are you going to go, or do I have to call Raymond to carry you off?”

Shelley began to cry a little, shaking her head, but still she did not move. The shadow in the door disappeared, and ten seconds later another shadow appeared, angular, wiry, mean.

In a second, she could see Raymond Dove, the eldest, in a sleeveless white t-shirt spotted with oil and blood. There was his wide face and misshapen left arm, smaller than the other, cradled across his chest as if in a sling.

Before she knew it, he had gotten his one hand under her armpit, had his greasy hand over her mouth and was shoving her back toward the fence. The door to the trailer closed with a bang and all light went with it.

Because she could not scream, because she knew she would not be heard, she began to bite and fuss, but the man kept shoving her further into the woods.

She fell once but got dragged her to her feet, once more, the man covering her mouth.

“Be quiet now. Go on. Hush up. I’m going to show you something.”

“No. Please,” she was able to mutter.

“Just be quiet and I’ll show you.”

She pushed his hand away and the man spoke, his t-shirt appearing translucent in the dark, revealing the jailhouse tattoos beneath: “Do you want to find that girl or not?”

He pointed, and once again Shelley saw a loop of pink and white string hanging from a tree, a God’s eye momentarily divisible from the branches.

3. Beneath the underpass that crossed the highway one half mile from the Doves’ property, there was a small moth-eaten mattress full of beige and black holes, surrounded by stuffed animals, children’s drawings, and other pieces of broken furniture, all of it pink and white and red.

Shelley stood, disbelieving.

“That girl. The one that’s gone missing,” Raymond Dove began. “She dragged all this stuff down from those old piles at the back of our place. I watched her do it. She dragged that mattress all the way from the dump across the highway by herself. Almost got herself killed but she did it. Worked on it all summer.”

Shelley began to look around, inspecting the wet stuffed animals, the dolls missing limbs, the almost invisible, secret world Jamie Fay built for herself. Shelley leaned over and found a drawing of a forest of intersecting pink and white lines hung up on a strand of pink yarn.

It was like stepping right into a twelve-year-old girl’s feelings and mind, the colors, fragments, the collision of fairytale pictures, aged paperback novels, and cut-out photos of teen idols from worn celebrity magazines.

“She made all this? It’s perfect. A perfect world. A perfect, secret world of her own.”

The man cleared his throat and said, “I come down here sometimes. When she’s not around. It’s pretty. I like to pretend that I’m a kid again. I pretend to be someone different, like I can start over, like I’m that girl, with a whole future ahead of me.”

She nodded, kneeling down, paging through a sketchbook of drawings, most of which were pink maps of castles and magic forests. Beneath the sketchbook was a small pink music box, which had been locked. Shelley tried to force it open, but was unable. Then she remembered the key. Digging into her pocket, she found the small silver key and slipped it inside the opening. The music box quickly sprung to life, playing a toy piano version of “Claire de Lune.” The girl smiled, finding a gold necklace on top of a pile of small, folded notes.

“What did you find?” the man asked.

“It’s a necklace. It’s got a locket on it of some kind. It’s pretty.”

“It looks old.”

The girl tried a few times to unclasp it but the locket had rusted closed.

Without a word, the man handed her his pocket knife. Carefully, Shelley opened the serrated blade and slipped the edge into the clasp. The locket sprung open. She turned and handed the knife back to Raymond Dove.

“Look here. It says Abigail. Why would Jamie have that?”

She lifted one of the notes out of the music box and began to page through them.

“What are those?” Raymond Dove asked.

“Look like love notes. From some boy. I don’t know who. It’s just an initial. Somebody named W.”

Shelley unfolded one of the notes and began to read:

You are as bright as a rainbow. I see everything through your eyes and everything seems good. You’re also a true friend and good listener.

She opened another and read:

Don’t let anyone ever tell you what you can and can’t do.

Everything good is eternal and unchanging, your name and age, everything about you.

She folded up the note and searched through the box again, and found, at the bottom, a golden pin. “What’s that?” Raymond Dove asked.

Shelley turned the pin over in the half-light from the highway and saw it for what it was. A pin, in the shape of a star, with a circle in the middle. Jus. Fidus. Libertatum.

“Oh my God. I know who it’s from,” she said.

Continue reading Episode 7, the finale: A Conclusion in the Caves

Family History, Preserved in a Hole in the Ground

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Things go missing all the time in our house. It is evening when we sit on the bench behind the house facing the field of tall grass that extends for a number of miles ahead of us. It is just me and my little brother Kaito and the smell of dinner is heavy in the air around us. Our mother would be calling us in for supper soon but we have to finish our game, this game we play every other evening.

The rules of the game are simple; grab something and throw it as far as possible into the bush in front of us. We observe the trajectory of the projectile and in turn determine the winner. This has been the only rule until this evening. The things we throw are usually the things we do not like seeing in the house anymore, like the cane my father used on us, or the cigarette packets my mother hid in her panties drawer. This is the reason things go missing all the time in our house. As we stand there, throwing all we can lay our hands on, I think Kaito gets carried away. I do not see it before he throws it but as soon as I look up to note the trajectory of his missile and declare myself winner — because I always win, he has weak arms and doesn’t throw so well — I notice that his missile is my Russian nesting doll. A gift from my father, from a time when he used to travel, a time before he lost his job and started drinking and beating me and our mother, a time before Kaito could speak.

“Why did you throw it?” The rage in my voice is not the shy type, it feels hot in my throat.

“But you said I could throw anything…” The confusion on his face tells me that he too does not understand why I am angry, because I had not mentioned it in the rules.

“Go and pick it right now, go into the bush,” I say to him as I point my index finger in the direction of the tall grass.

I watch him walk toward the grass slowly and soon I do not see him again, his bright red cap and orange jacket are swallowed in the green and brown of the swaying tall grass.

“Rumi, there is a hole,” he starts. “The things we’ve thrown are all here. Come see.” His words are laced with glee.

I hesitate but soon I start to move in the direction of his voice, he is giggling now as I draw closer. I get to the place where I am certain his voice had been and there is a clearing where no grass grows. I look around for him because I start to hear my mother call for us. I call his name and hear a faint response. It is coming from the clearing, from a small hole in the ground.

How to Write About Love and Atonement in the Midst of a Humanitarian Crisis

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Jenny D. Williams discusses aid work in Uganda and South Sudan and the long road to a novel set within a misunderstood crisis

Kitgum, Uganda (2009) Photo by Jason Nolte, via Flickr.

I first met Jenny D. Williams in 2009. We were in the same class at the MFA program at Brooklyn College. Shortly after arriving, I found out that we’d been at the same high school at the same time — which felt like a pretty big coincidence, considering the small (15 people) size of our program. As the two years progressed, I always looked forward to reading Williams’ work. Her writing had a lyrical precision to it, and a sense of pacing that felt unusual for an MFA student, where most writers are still finding their footing. She had traveled widely, and it was always refreshing to read about her fictionalized experiences in places that mostly only existed on maps for me, and she’d spent enough time in them that the work felt truly rooted in the locations, rather than the experiences of a thrill-seeking tourist.

Her first novel, The Atlas of Forgotten Places, is an extension of that writer from eight years ago — lyrical sentences, an empathy for both the places and people in her novel, and a pacing that makes the book hard to put down. She’s managed to make one of those rare gems — the smart, well-written page-turner, an escapist read that is far too nuanced to be a guilty pleasure.

Juliet Escoria: I know that this book was not a straight shot from writing to publication, and that there was a point where you thought it might be shelved altogether. What were some of the obstacles and blocks you had to go through before the book found a publisher?

Jenny D. Williams: I’ve heard writers talk about how difficult it was for them to find an agent, but once they did, their book sold really fast. I had the opposite experience. I queried three agents with an unfinished manuscript in early 2012 and signed with one almost right away. I finished writing that draft the same year, and it went on sub and got some very encouraging rejections, including a revise-and-resubmit. But I had a kind of revelation, where I felt like — I don’t want to just revise. I wanted to widen the scope of the story in a radical way. So I set that manuscript aside and started from scratch. Strangely, I felt energized by this decision rather than discouraged. I had this feeling that I couldn’t “break” the novel; the only way to fail was to not try at all.

When I finished the second version and my agent sent it on submission in early 2014, we both felt that the wait was worth it. Three days later, my agent called me and said, “Have you seen today’s New York Times book review?” There was a terrific, lengthy review of Susan Minot’s new novel, Thirty Girls, which was eerily similar to mine: both set in northern Uganda centering on the LRA, both with dual narratives following a Ugandan protagonist and a Western one. I had no idea her book was coming out. It was a tough blow for my novel. Editors were unlikely to take a chance on a debut writer covering territory already explored by a seasoned novelist. My agent and I decided to put Atlas on hold for a while.

“A while” turned into a year and a half. And then more rounds of submissions, and more rejections. At a certain point I accepted that the novel might never find its way into the world. I began to make peace with that. Then I came across Quressa Robinson’s profile on Manuscript Wishlist; she said she was interested in untold stories from Africa featuring strong women protagonists. (At that time she was an editor with Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s Press; she’s now an agent at D4EO.) I thought, “If she doesn’t want this novel, no one will.” Happily, she loved the book. The offer came five months later.

Altogether it took four and a half years from the time I got my agent to the time we got the offer, and another year-plus for the book to be published. And that doesn’t include the five years I’d spent researching and writing “around” the novel before that, or the year and a half between offer and publication. When we’re starting out as writers, we hear these “horror” stories of books being a decade or more in the making — we hear about writers throwing out hundreds of pages, years of work — and we think, “That’ll never be me.” And then it is, and it’s OK. It’s maybe even better this way.

JE: I love that story. It seems helpful to other writers — to know that good things come in their own time — and it also has a happy ending. I’m curious what the earlier version of the book, and the writing you did “around” the novel looked like.

JW: My experience could have just as easily ended up without a happy ending — that’s also important to remember. Really, there’s nothing separating me from any other writer with a manuscript that hasn’t found an agent or an editor, except that my pages managed to make their way to the right person at the right time. There’s so much in this process that’s subjective, and so much more that’s just plain luck. Of course, Atlas would never have been read by Quressa if we’d stopped submitting one round earlier. Maybe the lesson is to be stubbornly persistent until fortune falls your way. It’s not a very romantic way of looking at it! But I think the magic has to be in the writing itself. Publishing is a business. Writing can be whatever you make it.

“Publishing is a business. Writing can be whatever you make it.”

As for writing “around” the novel, I spent five years or so after leaving Uganda trying to find a way into the material. I wrote a handful of short stories set in northern Uganda and East Africa more generally. I wrote a few bad poems, had a micro-essay published in The Sun, and created a “graphic novel”-style illustrated memoir about volunteering in South Sudan. Instead of feeling satisfied with these smaller pieces, I felt like the stories I was interested in kept getting bigger and bigger. I needed more space to explore them.

Finally, when I moved to Germany, I gave myself a year to draft a full novel. That was the first version, which I was calling “Birds of Africa.” Most significantly, that version is structured as a diptych, with the two perspectives (Western and Ugandan) “facing” each other instead of braided. The aid worker protagonist leaves Uganda because of a failed love affair; the Ugandan protagonist is a young, male Internet cafe owner. There’s no disappearance, not a single mention of the word ivory. So many divergences! The only thing that survived in the second version was the swan scene from the opening chapter.

JE: That swan scene was one that has really stuck with me, and also seemed to be a metaphor for so many things in the book, but not in an overt or forced way. Was that something you saw in Germany?

JW: Pure invention, I’m afraid. My husband told me stories about how firemen in his hometown of Aachen would go around the city in the winter rescuing birds stuck in the ice. I found the image so compelling that I knew I wanted to find a way to put it into the novel. The beginning seemed like the right place for it — I think if it had come later, it would have felt too obvious.

10 Great Novels of Exile and Dislocation

JE: One thing I really admire about the book is the care you took to tackle the potentially “problematic” aspects that might come from a book written by a white American woman about African issues. You don’t paint aid work as some sort of perfect crusading force. Rose, a Ugandan woman, is a central character, and rather than having her be some sort of stereo- or archetype, she’s dealing with the complex social and physical repercussions of a civil war. I assume these decisions were intentional, right? What sort of research did you do to ensure that you weren’t going the way of exclusion or stereotypes?

JW: I first began thinking about this novel in 2006 while I was a long-term volunteer for an aid organization in Uganda and South Sudan. I came into aid work already disillusioned — I’d read The Road to Hell and Lords of Poverty and The White Man’s Burden — but I was also moved by the stories I heard and the people I met, especially in northern Uganda. The experience surfaced a lot of difficult questions about my role there — broadly, as a representative of the West’s development agenda, and specifically, as a person cognizant of my intrinsic complicity, yet also hopeful that there were ways to respond to humanitarian crises with understanding and compassion.

Fiction has always been a way for me explore things I don’t understand — I love what Jacqueline Woodson has said: “I write because I have questions, not because I have answers” — and so I began to envision a novel that would purposefully expose those questions. A dual narrative presented the most interesting possibilities to do that.

For research, I read a lot of nonfiction — academic publications, NGO and governmental reports, journalism, local newspapers, accounts of formerly abducted children — and fiction, poetry, and memoirs by Ugandan authors and writers from across the African continent. I had my personal experience to draw from as well; during my time in Uganda I’d interviewed and worked closely alongside Ugandans who had been directly affected by the LRA. I returned to northern Uganda twice after 2006: once in 2010, when I ended up in Kampala during the World Cup bombings, and again in 2013, when I got a grant that enabled me to cross the border into the Democratic Republic of the Congo and visit Garamba National Park, an LRA stronghold. I also had friends and acquaintances — both Western and Ugandan — read the novel at different stages to keep me honest.

All of these things helped provide a structure for creating characters who would feel authentic. But it still required a leap of invention to write Rose, specifically, and not just any Ugandan woman with a particular set of experiences. That’s where I had to step away from the facts of research and slip into the fiction of an imagined life. I’ve tried to do so with curiosity and empathy, as I do for any character I’m getting to know. In the end, I hope that readers don’t just see this as a Ugandan story or a story about aid work — but instead as a story of family and atonement and love. And perhaps it will encourage them to sit with the same questions, and engage in more self-examination around activism and humanitarianism. The questions are messy and deeply personal, and I think that’s a good thing.

JE: All the work you did behind the scenes really shows. That’s amazing that you were able to travel to DRC. I’m jealous. I was Google Earth searching the various locations in the book as I read it, and from my barely-ever-left-the-US perspective, it seems crazy that it would be possible for an American to go to those places. What was that trip like? What was the ratio of “scared” to “excited”?

JW: I kind of feel like “scared” and “excited” are different interpretations of the same fundamental state — “anticipating the unknown.” When we expect the unknown to go badly, we’re scared; when we expect it to go well, we’re excited.

When I was planning my trip to the DRC, I’d just spent months immersed in research about the horrifying atrocities committed by the LRA in exactly the places I was traveling to, so my expectations were definitely infused with a strong dose of fear. At the same time, I’d traveled to “dangerous” places before — South Sudan in 2006, Haiti in 2010 — and I knew that while risk is real, it’s also rare. For every story of violence and terror that gets broadcast to the world, there are many more stories of people going about their lives: bickering with siblings and falling in love and haggling over the price of a tomato and laughing in the streets. The opportunity to experience the latter in a place so central to my novel outweighed any misgivings.

“For every story of violence and terror that gets broadcast to the world, there are many more stories of people going about their lives: bickering with siblings and falling in love and haggling over the price of a tomato and laughing in the streets.”

JE: What are some Ugandan writers or works you’d recommend?

JW: Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit by Moses Isegawa, Tropical Fish by Doreen Baingana, Song of Lawino by Okot p’Bitek, Waiting by Goretti Kyomuhendo, and Kintu by Jennifer Nansubunga Makumbi (which has been getting lots of press lately!) are all fantastic. Monica Arac de Nyeko, an Acholi writer, has published several excellent stories in AGNI and elsewhere; I’d love to read a novel by her if that’s the direction her writing takes her. The Caine Prize for African Writing publishes a collection every year, which is a great introduction to lots of upcoming writers.

For nonfiction about the LRA, I Am Evelyn Amony is the memoir of one of Joseph Kony’s wives; When the Walking Defeats You is the story of one of his bodyguards. Both are gripping, powerful accounts. Atlas was already written by the time they were published — I wish I’d been able to use them much earlier in my research. But that’s the nature of the process, too. At a certain point you have to let the work be done.

Literature’s Great Swimming Pools

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The sea is an image endlessly described in literature — an ineffable, uncontrollable mass looming just beyond our hometowns and our imaginations. Pools, on the other hand, offer us something different. Yes, they may be giant contaminated vats of bodies, germs, and definitely urine, but they’re also staples of summer and a reminder of the season’s possibilities. The presence of a pool is never a simple matter. If Jung’s theories have any merit, bodies of water, especially the artificial constructions that are part of our homes, offer great insight into the psyches and unconsciouses of people in and around them. For some, they are embodiments of order, structure, even control. For others, class symbols. Without a doubt they’re the backdrop for a fair share of literature’s steamiest, most memorable scenes. And always, pools conjure up the glories of a season full of sweat, splashing, sleeping in, a season of perpetual youth.

So, if you’re slowly cooking in the relentless summer heat, here’s a list of books and short stories featuring swimming pools in all their evocative glory, in hopes that even the descriptions offer a little bit of a cool-down.

Burt Lancaster in ‘The Swimmer’ (1968)

1. “The Swimmer” by John Cheever

John Cheever’s short story begins on a summer Sunday afternoon as everyone laments the poor drinking choices they made the night before. The main figure of the story, Ned, decides he will swim home via his neighbors’ swimming pools. In the beginning of his “journey,” his mood is vibrant and happy. However, with each passing pool darkness looms and Ned’s sense of self wavers. The story takes readers on an emotional roller-coaster that is as temperamental as the summer weather.

2. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Picture this: a limp body floating in in the pool, surrounded by a growing red cloud, slowly threatening to sink to the bottom. Sound familiar? It’s a classic murder scene in books and movies alike. Ditto for The Great Gatsby. But, Gatsby’s pool is more than just the bearer of his body after he is brutally shot; it’s also a class symbol and the embodiment of all that has happened in the novel (especially between him and Daisy) — it is the summer.

3. High Dive by Jonathan Lee

As can be garnered from the title, a swimming pool plays a pivotal role in High Dive. But how is swimming in any way related to a book focused around a plot to kill Margaret Thatcher? Well, it refers to the once vibrant diving career of one of the book’s characters, a man who is now out of shape and on the cusp of crisis. He decides to attempt a dive while at his local swimming pool, and well, it doesn’t end great. In the book, diving through the air into a swimming pool — a moment of vulnerability and possibility — is both a physical sensation and a mental, metaphorical image of possible despair.

4. The White Album by Joan Didion

In her book of essays, Didion discusses swimming pools a number of times. She expresses her consistent desire to own a swimming pool, especially as a Californian suffering through the drought. She posits that pools are wrongly thought to be symbols of wealth and hedonism. “A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye,” she writes. Towards the end of the novel, there is a powerful image of Didion sitting at the shallow end of her sister-in-law’s pool when they get a call from a friend telling them about the murders of actress Sharon Tate Polanski.

5. The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis

The cautionary Greek myth of Narcissus runs between the lines of this novel. The Pregnant Widow’s pivotal image is a group of young university students sitting around a pool in Italy, looking at themselves and each other, observing changes in the world around them. It takes place in 1970, and there sure was a lot shifting back then, especially in gender dynamics.

6. The Secret of Evil by Roberto Bolaño

“I Can’t Read,” a short story in Bolaño’s collection of stories, features a classic case of peeing in the pool: “urinating, not in the pool, underwater, as almost all kids do, but from the edge, for everyone to see.” The act, although an embarrassing one, means so much more than that; it’s a representation of the characters’ friendship and one’s existence within the world. Deep, I know.

7. The Diving Pool by Yōko Ogawa

In Ogawa’s novel, romance blossoms at the local pool, where teenage Aya is enamored of Jun — and his diving. Their situation is complicated by the fact that he is her foster brother, and she just can’t stop looking at his muscles: “warm and soften like silk floss.” Sounds steamy.

8. “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace uses imagery about a pool to talk about a boy’s growing up and all of the unglamorous bodily changes that accompany it. A boy standing at the edge of a diving board contemplates the question some of us ask ourselves every day: what am I going to do with my life? Realizing that the pool is a “system of movement,” the 13-year old boy has the courage to “step into the skin and disappear.”

10. “Hello Everybody” by AM Holmes

This story talks about a type of people that we all know, or at least have heard of: “pool people.” They live in LA, avoid getting wet to preserve their constantly new hairdos (yet wear bathing suits all year-long), love AC, and are terrified of old things. Generally, a pretty chilling image.

11. “Man Boob Summer” by David Gordon

In “Man Boob Summer,” David Gordon describes the assortment of characters that can be found at pretty much any pool. Screaming kid, old man exposing WAY too much in a speedo, an attractive lifeguard…This story has got it all.

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

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★★☆☆☆

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

When a young man named Fresh Prince is sent away by a mother who no longer wants to care for him, she offers only the flimsiest of excuses — that it’s for his own safety. (She works for the post office, an agency with offices in literally almost every town. She could have moved with him anywhere if she truly loved him.)

Fresh is handed off like a hot potato to live with his extended family, a family so rich they live in a mansion with a butler, yet can’t be bothered to greet Fresh when he lands at the airport, and he’s forced to take a 45-minute taxi ride. This is the premise of a television show called The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

Fresh uses humor to mask the grief he feels over his mother’s rejection. On the outside he is happy and irreverent, but knowing his backstory makes his jokes reek of desperation and a desire to be loved, just like Carrot Top or the late Johnny Carson.

It seems that Fresh’s zany personality is the reason he doesn’t fit in with this family, but at its heart this is a tale of classism. These one-percenters want nothing to do with a poor, young man from a dangerous neighborhood, but are forced to take him in for unexplained reasons. Fresh’s mother must have some real dirt on his aunt.

Fresh manages to make only one close friend on the show, another young man named Jazz. Jazz is as unlikable as Fresh believes himself to be, but smaller and for some reason always wearing sunglasses. I assumed he was blind but he doesn’t seem to be. He may just have ugly eyes.

Fresh’s mother could easily have abandoned him at a fire station — there’s no age limit on that — but she clearly wanted him as far away as possible. Eventually guilt must take over because she begrudgingly manages to visit him a couple of times over the six-year run of the show.

To be honest, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air rarely held my interest but not because I’m racist. I don’t relate to the super rich characters portrayed in this show. I mean they had a butler! The closest I’ve ever had to that is when I order a pizza and a man drives it to my house.

I wrote several letters to the producers of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air suggesting they have a crossover starring ALF in order to attract more viewers. They never responded to my letters or implemented my idea. Not surprisingly, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was cancelled.

BEST FEATURE: The catchy theme song.
WORST FEATURE: Fresh Prince never returns home to live with his mom.

Please join me next week for a special edition of Ted Wilson Reviews the World.

A Good Short Story Is “A Pill That Lets Us See the Real”

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Sarah Hall’s career has been rich in recognition, going back to her debut novel, Haweswater, which won the 2003 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. The British author went onto be named to Granta’s coveted “20 Under 40” list, and in 2013, she won the BBC National Short Story Award for “Mrs. Fox” — which also happens to be the first story in her latest collection, Madame Zero, arriving on US book stands this week. In Madame Zero, Hall uses rich observations to explore the female experience in wholly original, thoughtful, and enticing stories. Throughout the collection, she weaves themes of resilience, finding your true self, and discovering how truth shifts over time.

We corresponded via email about what short stories offer that novels cannot, how ideas stand out and stick, as well as what we can learn from reading short fiction.

Sarah Hall

Adam Vitcavage: As a writer, what do you get from short stories that you can’t get in a novel?

Sarah Hall: Short stories are such a different exercise, and testing in their own unique way. It’s not that stamina isn’t required — drafting and editing a story may take years — but they seem to have a different barometric pressure internally. The challenges are more about condensing a world and creating potency, creating consistency and purity across a narrative, and the drama is perhaps like a flash storm rather than the seasonal moods of long form. Sorry for the weather analogy — how English of me! Let me try sport instead…! The satisfaction of feeling you’ve written a successful short piece is a different kind of performance pride to the exhausted post-marathon elation (or sickness) of completing a novel. It feels a more schematic gymnastic enterprise. Short stories are an exacting, less forgiving art form, where, ideally, huge metaphysical references and questions are posed within a restrictive zone. It’s harder to feel you’ve perfected a short story, but in the end they can feel more perfect, meaningful and resonant than a novel.

Vitcavage: What about as a reader?

Hall: This is where I feel short stories have huge appeal and value. Novels can make inquiries into subject matters and can illuminate subjects; they can feel like human journeys or journeys to other worlds, and they can offer extended reading intrigue and pleasure. Stories do that too, to an extent, but their peculiar quality of disquiet, of discombobulation, requires a reader to puzzle about the given-ness of what they believe to be true or right. We try so hard to order and create stability, but life is mutable, and the world is chaotic and vexing. I know no other form that so naturally seeks to challenge given-ness. How? Why? Maybe it’s something to do with void, inference and microcosm-ing — the gap created, of what isn’t there, what isn’t explained, so even small, strange events can knock a reader for six. We have to interpret and bring to the experience all those unsaid but imaginable things, all those uncomfortable suspicions that we aren’t in control. We must test our preconceptions and expectations and sense of security. I suppose I feel that short stories, even though they might seem to create an uncanny matrix, are like a pill that lets us see the real.

“I feel that short stories, even though they might seem to create an uncanny matrix, are like a pill that lets us see the real.”

Vitcavage: I found the variety and scope of this collection to be intoxicating. Every story feels tethered together but completely fresh. Was this a conscious effort, or how did these stories come together?

Hall: Thank you. I think ultimately that’s just how I work. Whatever I’m writing, I have to feel something is a new and separate and entire idea, even if the themes are similar to previous works. Without wanting to sound overblown, I also really try to create an artistic piece each time I write, that contains within it as much as possible (either actually or allusively). It’s not to everyone’s taste, such distinctively different pieces, and I admire writers like Díaz, Saunders, and Tessa Hadley, who create collections with more of a running DNA through the stories, because something greater than the component parts can be constructed overall. Madame Zero is the work of 5 years or so and over that time there have been preoccupations which I think moor the pieces together, albeit slackly.

Vitcavage: Numerous stories stood out to me, but I want to focus on the genesis and creative process of one (or two if you’re willing). “Case Study 2” was stylistically refreshing and “Goodnight Nobody” felt like a story I needed in my life for years. Where did these ideas originally come from?

Hall: Thank you again. “Case Study 2” stemmed from my interest in psychology, particularly an interest in enmeshment within families and communities and how this might effect individuals, and might go on to define how successfully or unsuccessfully people form relationships in the wider world, outside the system that was formative. I think sometimes short story writing (any writing) can place an author through the looking glass. I had a happy rural upbringing — that wild kid on the moors with the snails and the geological knowledge is/was me, but Christopher isn’t me, he’s in another un-boundaried Cumbrian world, of neglect and chaos. With this story I also wanted to challenge myself stylistically. Case studies in psychology or medicine can often read like stories, and I was very interested in attempting the ‘found poem/found document’ model. The real challenge is making something ‘told’ feel activated on the page. And the genogram was hard as I’m completely technologically useless!

“Goodnight Nobody.” This seems like one of the softer stories in the collection to me, which is odd because it comes directly out of a very turbulent patch of my life. My mum was diagnosed with a terminal illness when my daughter was 4 months old, and she died a year later. A few months after that, I became a single parent. The emotional storm of human incoming and outgoing and of personal redefinitions was pretty intense. So this piece is probably about me very gently (gingerly might be a better word) trying to find a way through all that trauma, loss and gain, which isn’t to say I think writing is therapy — I really don’t. There’s a lot of negative space and unknowns and voids in the story, and really the catalyst for its writing can be found in the title. I was reading Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to my daughter for the first time, and I hit that empty page with ‘Goodnight Nobody’ on it. Cue a total What-The-Fuck moment for me. Something coalesced, some kind of existential non-understanding, that I don’t think I’ll ever resolve, just like that page will never really make sense. And of course short stories trade so well in irresolution.

“I was reading Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown to my daughter for the first time, and I hit that empty page with ‘Goodnight Nobody’ on it. Cue a total What-The-Fuck moment for me.”

Vitcavage: The short story writing and editing process is obviously different than a novel. How do you go about the lifecycle of a story?

Hall: Apologies, I’m very bad at describing my process. But I think I know when an idea has the potential shape to be a short story, so I usually set off with more of an idea of what it will ultimately be or become than I do with a novel. Generally a first draft has to be fairly ‘clean-feeling’ and ‘true-feeling’ for a story to go on and be a success, with a lot of up-front editing in the brain, as well as on the page. I tend not to leave anything lingering in unfinished states too long or it dies a death.

Vitcavage :In an interview with the Telegraph in 2015, you spoke about how you want your work to speak to more than just women. I, for one, love learning a different perspective. What do you hope readers — both female and male, young and old — can learn from your writing?

Hall: Oh, I don’t know. It’s not for me to say really what others might take from the work, and I’m certainly not trying to educate. I just hope readers will be transported, be moved, and maybe will be left thinking over a subject. I feel like I’m on a journey of exploration when I write, and I can only hope that whoever — anyone, someone — feels companionability with that journey, because they’re also interested in that subject, and are asking similar questions. I’ve never felt limited by age or gender, even as age and gender have helped form me, so I’ve never felt the work is directed towards a particular group. The one caveat there is I hope women readers especially find my women characters exhilarating and interesting, and I hope they recognise the wide spectrum of female capability and ambition. I know I would like to encounter more of that feeling as a reader!

Vitcavage: Many of your previous works have been held in such high regard. Can you give any insight into your next project?

Hall: A new novel is next. It’s something a bit bonkers, if I can pull it off, but I’m in the early stages so trying to describe anything is probably unwise. And I’m writing more short stories. The form makes a lot of sense to me just now.

We Need Stories of Dystopia Without Apocalypse

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Let’s start with a thought experiment.

Think about the numbers 2 and 3. Now think about 72 and 73.

Did the difference between 2 and 3 feel more significant than 72 and 73? To most of us it does, even though we were taught in first grade that every unit of the number line is the same.

This sense that the distance between values decreases as they get larger is rooted in our biology. Cognitive neuroscientists have identified two systems in the brain for understanding quantity. The first allows us to instantly recognize small quantities: 1, 2, 3, sometimes 4 or 5. The other system detects relative proportions and is about as good at seeing the relative amounts of 10 and 15 or 50 and 75.

This makes a certain amount of intuitive sense if we think in terms of evolution. It’s important for survival to be able to measure small quantities — how many young are you looking after? how many predators just ran past? — and to be able to tell whether one source of food is significantly more plentiful than another. But when we’re asked to choose between a bush with 72 berries or a bush with 73, our brains fail us. To tell the difference, we have to count, and slowly. Quickly processing exact quantities at large scale has never been necessary for our survival as a species.

Quickly processing exact quantities at large scale has never been necessary for our survival as a species.

That was the case before climate change. Now our inability to imagine large quantities — or distant futures — in concrete terms may doom us all.

In 2006, a group of political science researchers from the Universities of Tennessee and Michigan conducted a survey in twenty-four countries exploring the human ability to imagine the distant future. Survey questions included, “‘When you hear someone use the word future, approximately how many years into the future does this mean to you?’’ Researchers found that respondents interpreted “future” to mean only about fifteen years from now — and that the imagination “goes dark” fifteen to twenty years into the future. Most relevant for climate change, “individuals’ ability to imagine the future decreases as the time frame increases.” Human difficulty in imagining the future may help explain our inattention to the long-term consequences of climate change. Individual storms and “natural disasters” receive our immediate attention given their spectacular — and newsworthy — nature. But threats that ocean levels will rise in thirty or fifty or a hundred years or that temperatures will be dramatically higher by the next century just aren’t within our temporal grasp.

Human difficulty in imagining the future may help explain our inattention to the long-term consequences of climate change.

A whole body of psychology research affirms that humans have different relationships to the present and to the future. Would you rather have five dollars today or eight dollars a month from now? Experiments asking these kinds of questions, with variations in amounts of money and lengths of time, have contributed to the theory of temporal discounting. Essentially, effort, money, and time are perceived as having more value to us today than they have in the future. Five dollars is worth more to us now than in a month — and maybe worth more than six dollars in a month. Similarly, saving millions of dollars by not building a sea wall feels more valuable today than having to spend even more in the future to rebuild towns damaged by rising water.

If the future becomes less valuable as it grows more distant, the demands of future tasks are perceived as less banal than today’s efforts. The vague chore of rebuilding a town seems easier than the rigamarole of paperwork and contractors and details of building that sea wall. Studies of temporal construal show that near-future events are imagined in “low level” concrete details, while distant-future events are conceived of in “high level” abstract features. Goals that seem abstractly valuable in the long-term like dramatically reducing carbon outputs are perceived radically differently than the immediate and challenging realities of living without air travel, cattle ranching, and other sources of emissions. Even those who believe in the urgency of climate change are likely to put off the hardest lifestyle changes for later.

Even those who believe in the urgency of climate change are likely to put off the hardest lifestyle changes for later.

Elke Weber, Co-Director of Columbia University’s Center for Research on Environmental Decisions and the Center for Decision Sciences, explores human responses to climate change. In a 2006 paper, she describes two systems for human risk processing that rely on different neural mechanisms: an associative system that responds intuitively and emotionally and an analytical system that responds consciously and explicitly. These two systems can act in isolation or in unison, but the strongest reactions are triggered by recent, personal, or unfamiliar threats. Weber makes the case that because scientific presentations of climate change tend to be impersonal and distant, environmental threats are likely processed by only the analytical system. How many people reacted with fear to the recent graphs showing the decrease in sea ice over time? How much urgency do predictions about fractions of a degree generate on a daily basis? Humans are biased toward information that is simple and emotionally relevant, terms that rarely describe climate change. Weber writes, “without intervention, the risks of global warming will fail to evoke visceral reactions, thus predicting that we will fail to allocate attention and material resources.”

Some journalists and activists attempt to play directly to our emotional responses; in his recent article provocatively titled The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells begins by promising his readers that with regard to climate change, “it is worse than you think.” Reactions to his comprehensive forecast of the nightmarish potential of climate change have certainly been emotional. The question remains whether, as alarm passes, readers slip back into paralysis because the challenges ahead seem either implausible or insurmountable.

It may be that raw information can’t overcome our struggle to conceive of 2035 or 2075 in concrete realities of climate change that are expensive and challenging and emotional enough to inspire us to take action now, today. Should we just give up?

Research says: maybe not.

Researchers in the United Kingdom and Germany have explored whether it’s possible to reduce our temporal discounting so that we’re more motivated to act now to mitigate climate change. In one study, Sabine Pahl and Judith Bauer created future scenarios with stories and images about a young woman living in 2105 and experiencing the negative effects of environmental change. Participants in the study were asked either to imagine themselves in the woman’s place or to analyze her experiences. Afterward, those who imagined the woman’s perspective and the concrete details of her life spent more time looking at educational materials about climate change and took more materials with them than those who remained analytical. If this effort to imagine other people’s perspectives inspires emotional rather than analytical processing, perhaps we have hope to overcome the difficult abstraction of considering distant futures. The authors conclude that this approach might be even more effective if participants could choose stories of climate change about people similar to themselves from a range of narratives.

Another group of researchers, including Elke Weber, tested whether they could diminish psychological distance by inspiring a desire to leave a positive legacy for future generations. In an online experiment, some of the three hundred twelve participants were asked to write a short essay “describing what they want to be remembered by for future generations” and were then asked a series of questions about their beliefs and willingness to take action on climate change; participants could also donate some or all of their compensation from the study to environmental causes. Those who had been asked to think about their legacy identified stronger beliefs, were more willing to act, and donated at higher rates toward climate causes. The authors suggest that this provocation to think about legacy may be a key strategy to motivating climate action.

Taken together, these strategies for considering future perspectives and our own legacy could spark greater climate consciousness and action. But after any study of an intervention finds an effect on behavior or health, we’re left with a similar set of questions: How long did the effect last — a week? a month? How much did the effect depend on where and when the intervention was carried out or on the people running the experiment? How specific is the effect to the gender or age or education level of the participants? What minimum dose of the intervention is necessary to have an effect? And most critically: if the intervention works and has long-term effects for many people, could we ever afford to bring it to scale and reach everyone?

Fortunately our species has spent thousands of years developing the intervention we need: literature.

Emanuele Castano and David Kidd at The New School conducted a remarkable study in 2013 on reading and Theory of Mind. In the study, participants were asked to read excerpts of literary fiction, genre fiction, nonfiction, or nothing. Then they were assessed for their ability to imagine another person’s emotional and psychological reality. The participants who read literary fiction showed a markedly greater Theory of Mind — what’s more commonly thought of as empathy. While there’s surely grounds for debate in the literary community about the exact reading assignments given in the experiment and for further research about whether some genre fiction or nonfiction can also cultivate empathy, this research confirms that literary fiction could be the tool we need.

Empathy is at the heart of imagining the daily suffering of some future human and how our own legacy might affect them.

Empathy is at the heart of imagining the daily suffering of some future human and how our own legacy might affect them. It even holds the power to affect our choices and behavior. The Theory of Mind study leaves us with the same kinds of questions about how long the participants showed increased empathy and how much reading is necessary for lasting effects, but intensity and dosage and time are the great experiment of literature.

Reading could save us from climate change — if we read (and write) the right things.

The Self at the Bottom of the Toilet Bowl

The term “Climate Fiction” is only about a decade old, but it has already been used for a wide range of novels. Among them are Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise, Claire Vaye Watkins’s Gold Fame Citrus, and many others that are set in a near-future or slightly parallel version of our own world. Such novels are often described as being “dystopian” or “post-apocalyptic” — two terms that are necessary to untangle as we think about what kinds of stories might actually change human attitudes and behaviors toward our environment.

In simple terms, an apocalypse is an end of days event — in climate fiction often a storm or a meteor or a similar ‘act of God.’ In those kinds of climate narratives, the dystopia is what follows. Depictions of apocalypse and the dark days afterward abound in modern culture, filling up every corner of our media from movies like Armageddon to the Dr. Seuss classic The Lorax. At their best these narratives are compelling and emotional, creating a moment of empathy for the characters and their trials. But for the purpose of inspiring action against environmental degradation and climate change, research suggests they may undermine their own intentions.

For the purpose of inspiring action against environmental degradation and climate change, research suggests these narratives may undermine their own intentions.

Mike Hulme, a Professor of Climate and Culture at King’s College London, offers a definition of climate as “an idea which mediates between the human experience of ephemeral weather and the cultural ways of living which are animated by this experience,” and explains that we find stability in our conception of the overarching climate and how our culture deals with it. In New England, we have snow boots for December and rain boots for April, and if we pull them out of the closet a few days early or late, we shrug off any disruption in our expectations. Hulme argues that gradual changes in weather occur in patterns too large to be easily grasped; when they are understood, those changes can be destabilizing.

Further complicating this idea, Nico Stehr, a sociologist and the Founding Director of the European Center for Sustainability Research, argues that our conceptions of climate not only set our expectations but weather events that deviate from these conceptions actually affirm our trust in climate. For one thing, “images that express fear, risk, vulnerability and danger can lead to ‘denial and paralysis.’” Even worse, when violent crises seem to have “natural” origins we stop thinking about the human contributions to climate change and the politics and policies that have contributed to the disaster — which undermines our ability to prevent such disasters for the future.

If extreme weather events only affirm our trust in our expectations of climate, what does that mean for the role of the apocalypse in climate fiction? Some authors may guide our attention to the cultural and political implications of fictional natural disasters, but even these might restore our faith in our real-world concepts of climate. Critically, while there will be natural disasters, the threat of climate change won’t arrive as a singularity, a sudden cataclysm that destroys our way of life. Instead things will change slowly — flooding here, intense storms there, drought and wildfires becoming the norm — too slowly for some of us to process, or even believe in.

Some authors may guide our attention to the cultural and political implications of fictional natural disasters, but even these might restore our faith in our real-world concepts of climate.

There’s a narrow path between the pitfalls suggested by the psychological and sociological research about climate change. As humans, we need stories to help us make sense of our world and empathize with the future. At this moment, we need stories that make the realities of climate change concrete and pervasive and of human origin, as well as viscerally emotional when it comes to the struggles of our descendants. We need stories of dystopia, but not apocalypse.

Some novels that employ these strategies to help us reckon with climate change are already being written under the climate fiction banner, but literary fiction is also beginning to take on the challenge. In Golden Age, the final volume of her Last Hundred Years trilogy, Jane Smiley writes of her character Jesse Langdon:

“[Jesse’s] attitudes toward global warming had been shaped by a movie he’d seen with [his children] Perky and Felicity early in the summer, The Day After Tomorrow. They had been eating popcorn and gaping, just like everyone else in the audience, and thinking what if what if, and then, apparently, New York City froze solid in the space of about five minutes, and Jesse wasn’t the only person in the audience who laughed out loud.”

When Jesse’s daughter tells him about the 2011 tsunami in Japan, Jesse finds “he wasn’t devastated. He had gotten so small-minded, he thought, that he was mostly grateful that this one disaster, at least, was far away.”

Smiley’s explorations of Jesse and his reactions to natural disasters wink at Stehr’s research. Her trilogy as a whole chronicles the history of an Iowa farm family, the Langdons, as they sprawl across the American landscape and entangle themselves with history over the years from 1920 to 2019. The structure of her work alone does something important: every chapter is another year of the century, plodding along, taking us back to first grade and reminding us that every unit on the number line is equally long and equally real to those living it. The books are about the dramas any family contains, but in the background the gradual reality of climate change is revealed from many points of view. We witness the transformation of the agricultural industry from small family farms to giant agribusinesses. We empathize with Felicity’s final trip to the family farm, when she finds that the soil is nearly gone and that the company that owns the land now has covered the ground with plastic sheeting so the earth doesn’t blow away. We consider patriarch Walter Langdon’s legacy — and our own.

Annie Proulx’s Barkskins takes a similar and even more explicit approach. Barkskins tells the story of two men who leave France in 1693 to travel to what will eventually be Canada, to work as indentured laborers until they’ve paid off their bonds. They’re set to chopping down trees, clearing land for farming in the middle of what seems an endless forest. Both men’s family trees mingle First Nations and European roots as the novel follows six generations of their descendants as they take up logging, ax-grinding, corporate leadership, and environmental conservation at different turns. Much like Smiley, Proulx is conscious to give readers a wide range of perspectives to empathize with and a sense that the opportunities and constraints of a life felt as real to inhabitants of the seventeenth or nineteenth centuries as they do to us today. And in the background we see the self-serving and brutal decisions made by people like us to further human domination of the North American landscape. In the last pages, one character becomes Proulx’s final mouthpiece: “It will take thousands of years for great ancient forests to return. None of us here will see the mature results of our work, but we must try.”

Both Smiley and Proulx are known for their writing of place and environment, but these novels are a quintessential model for the new climate fiction we need. As we set them down our attention is directed from the many generations behind us to those ahead, to the legacies we’re forced to imagine because the effects of human activity and climate change are already concrete and clear, as real as the personal drama that occurs alongside them that usually fills our range of vision on its own.

The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that as of 2016, 70% of American adults believe global warming is happening and will harm future generations — but only 33% discuss global warming “at least occasionally.” A mere 18% of American adults are classified by researchers as “alarmed,” meaning they’ve moved from worrying about to actively responding to climate change.

Perhaps our best first step is to acknowledge the realities of our brains: we are capable of clear-cutting rainforests for a sliver of profit, we can inspire empathy with symbols on paper, but we can’t fully imagine the future. Worrying about 2060 or 2061 or 2062 feels like a distant blur compared to worrying about 2018 or 2019 or 2020. Yet we’ll get there, or our children will. What we need in the meantime are stories that remind us viscerally, emotionally, of the truth: our legacies will be real whether we can imagine them or not. What we need from fiction is empathy, not apocalypse.

Unfinished Business: F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Love of the Last Tycoon

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Each month “Unfinished Business” will examine an unfinished work left behind by one of our greatest authors. What might have been genius, and what might have been better left locked in the drawer? How and why do we read these final words from our favorite writers — and what would they have to say about it? We’ll piece together the rumors and fragments and notes, to find the real story.

In 1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald died at the age of 44 from a heart attack just off Sunset Boulevard. He was survived by his wife, Zelda, their daughter Frances (a.k.a. “Scotty”) and around a hundred pages of a novel-in-progress titled The Last Tycoon.

At least that’s the title Edmund Wilson gave it when he edited the drafts into book form the following year. Its only surviving title page declares it to be Stahr: A Romance. But in a letter to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner, Fitzgerald’s companion Sheilah Graham explained that just three weeks before his passing, he’d decided to change the name to The Love of the Last Tycoon.

This is the title it goes by today after biographer Matthew Bruccoli reissued the book in the 90s along with a slew of Fitzgerald’s working notes. Bruccoli points a page of these notes that says “Title” at the top. Beneath it are some cringeworthy options, all crossed out, including “The State of Metro” and “The Lumiere Man.”

“The Last Tycoon” is there, but scribbled out. Over “The Love of the Last Tycoon” there’s a checkmark — or a slash? Nearby a small note says, “This is the familiar Fitzgerald formula but the boy grows tired.”

That’s crossed out too.

It’s disconcerting there’d be this much ambiguity surrounding just the title of an unfinished novel, let alone what’s on the pages themselves. Yet almost inevitably after the passing of a great author, their last incomplete project is dolled up and presented to the grieving readers this way.

An unfinished manuscript becomes a kind of parting gift and a glimpse at what might have been. Sometimes it is presented like a real, completed work, instead of some mixture of masterpiece and mess. Often, it has been reorganized or revised by editors or executors. There’s little certainty if the author would have wanted the final product to look as it does, or if they would even want it to be read. In fact, sometimes we know for a fact that they wanted it killed with fire.

It’s disconcerting there’d be this much ambiguity surrounding just the title of an unfinished novel, let alone what’s on the pages themselves.

An unfinished work ends up being both a shame and a treasure. The wrongness of exposing someone’s rough draft weighs against the rare glimpse at how the sausage was made. These works both spoil our illusions of genius and remind us how human our literary heroes are, and how arduous and arbitrary the writing process is for even the very best.

As in the case of Fitzgerald, we’re often left with many open questions of what might have been if only that last work had been finished.

What exists of The Love of the Last Tycoon was not even a final draft, but a “latest working draft.” The story revolves around charismatic Monroe Stahr, a fictional 30s Hollywood producer, modeled on real-life Irving Thalberg, the “boy genius” who headed MGM from 1924 to 1936. Fitzgerald had worked for him, and notes show how impressed he was. Stahr is an idealistic melding of art and commerce, an anti-Gatsby whose success resulted from hard work, bottomless confidence, and a deep creative sensibility.

“An unfinished manuscript becomes a kind of parting gift and a glimpse at what might have been.”

Stahr runs his movie studio like a dream factory, bringing stories to life. As with The Great Gatsby and Dick Diver in Tender is the Night, Stahr is first glimpsed through the eyes of an awed outsider — a young woman named Cecilia Bradogue, who Fitzgerald describes as “a pretty, modern girl neither good nor bad, tremendously human.” The daughter of a rival producer, she starts out, in his words, as “a princess… a snob” but then crucially “evolves away from this,” as evident as she looks back on her interactions with Stahr from years later.

According to Fitzgerald’s notes and letters, the novel was meant to span a few months in 1935 and revolve around a love affair between Stahr and a woman named Thalia Taylor, tinged with Cecilia’s unrequited love for Stahr, and set against an inter-studio rivalry between Stahr and her father involving mobsters and murder-for-hire. It would end with Stahr’s death in a plane crash — representing the impending end of Hollywood’s golden age.

Matt Bomer as Monroe Stahr in Amazon’s ‘The Last Tycoon’

In concept, the novel had the potential to be equal to, if not greater than, his earlier ones. There’s a sense of his desire to write a novel with a less-flawed hero, who Bruccoli describes as “Fitzgerald’s only true professional” that might have embodied the hard-working writer Fitzgerald always was under the surface of his Jazz Age partygoing.

Love interest Thalia was not to be another beautiful, cold Daisy, or generous, wounded Nicole Diver, but “the most glamorous and sympathetic” of his heroines — a 26 year old widow who he wanted to “dower… with a little misfortune.”

An unfinished work ends up being both a shame and a treasure.

The move to the West Coast, the focus on filmmaking, and the backdrop of the Great Depression all would have been fresh territory for Fitzgerald, still widely regarded as a writer of the 20s, of elite Manhattanites and Ivy League ex-patriates in Europe.

Bruccoli calls Tycoon “the most promising — and the most disappointing — fragment in American fiction.”

Because of course, it could just as easily have been a disaster. A total train wreck. No offense to Fitz — it’s the nature of any book half-written. Part of the thrill and the misery of writing is that we’re never sure if we’ll ultimately reach the high benchmarks we set out for ourselves. Writers of even a dozen great novels might just as likely miss with the thirteenth.

As it stands, Tycoon consists of seventeen “episodes” out of an outlined thirty. These would have added up to a little more than five of nine chapters. Fitzgerald projected that he’d need to write about 60,000 words to trim to 50,000 — around the length of Gatsby. At the time of his death he’d written about 44,000 words. Two-thirds, maybe, of what he hoped the final first draft might be.

As in The Great Gatsby, the story opens in the first person, but from Cecilia’s female perspective, which he hadn’t tried in his earlier novels. It works, I think — at least what little we get of it. After a few episodes he switches the focus to Stahr, and goes into a close third person, showing us Stahr’s world, even though it is ostensibly still Cecilia recounting the events, as it “comes through” to her.

Fitzgerald wrote —

“I shall grant myself the privilege, as Conrad did, of letting her imagine the actions of the characters. Thus, I hope to get the verisimilitude of a first-person narrative, combined with a Godlike knowledge of all events that happen to my characters.”

This might have worked in time, but it remains a tangle in the hundred pages he’d drafted before his death. With Gatsby, the story coming through Nick, keeps us at an arm’s length from Gatsby, so we see the glittering façade with just occasional glimpses of the fraud beneath. In Tycoon, Fitzgerald puts right there with Stahr for dozens of pages, and his episodes have a distinctly different voice from Cecilia’s own.

There are also several large plot holes still in the notes, minor characters whose names aren’t consistent, and loads of spelling errors.

Also, I’m sorry, but the hero, working in the movie business, was really going to be named Stahr? Oh Fitz.

Would he — could he, have solved these problems?

This is what vexes and intrigues us when reading an unfinished work. If all we have is a “working draft” we can only speculate. Was Fitzgerald, at 44, a writer at the height of his abilities, ready to tackle these problems and all the other new frontiers he hoped to? Or had the boy grown tired, as he had written in his own title notes?

By then, Tender is the Night had failed to live up to the sky-high expectations of many critics, cranky after a nine-year wait. His wife Zelda had been institutionalized, again. Scotty was off at Vassar. Fitzgerald struggled with alcoholism as well as his finances, even though he’d signed a lucrative deal with MGM (and Thalberg). He’d already had two other heart attacks.

Much of what we know about Fitzgerald’s vision for The Love of the Last Tycoon comes from a long letter he sent to Collier’s a year before his death, outlining the plot and asking for a $15,000 advance so that he could get out of his screenwriting obligations and focus entirely on the novel. He starts out very confidently, assuring the editor there that he has everything about the novel completely worked out and there is “nothing that worries me in the novel, nothing that seems uncertain.”

But by the end of his long pitch he turns desperate.

“As I said, I’d rather do this for a minimum price than continue this in-and-out business with the moving pictures where the rewards are great, but the satisafction (sic) unsatisfactory and the income tax always mopping one up after the battle […] Four months of sickness has completely stripped me and until your telegram came I had counted on a build up of many months here before I could even consider beginning the novel. Once again a telegram would help tremendously, as I am naturally on my toes and” —

The rest of the letter is missing.

Collier’s asked to see a long sample. Fitzgerald sent them around half of what they asked for. They declined to give him the advance.

And yet, he did write it — or two-thirds of it, anyway, in barely fourteen months. And while it surely wasn’t The Great Gatsby at the time he died, who knows what he might have done with another year, or two?

All we can really do is hold the fragments and notes that we have together and, like Cecilia, imagine the rest to be. Maybe it would have been the comeback he wanted it to be.

Perhaps one of the most famous Fitzgerald quotes is that “there are no second acts in American lives.” It is often brought up in connection to Gatsby, or to Dick Diver, but in fact it belongs to The Love of the Last Tycoon. Or — maybe it does. Edmund Wilson found the line among the numerous pages of notes Fitzgerald left behind after his death, and included it with a series of other loose bits in the back of The Last Tycoon.

Because Fitzgerald never got to deliver the line in context, it has been interpreted to mean many things: that in America we cannot ever truly escape our pasts, or reinvent ourselves. Or did he mean that our lives leap over the steady, developing middle of a traditional film structure? We go straight from set-up to ending, always booming and busting. As a part of Tycoon, the line resonates with the plane crash that would end Stahr’s determined life. Perhaps Stahr was going to think something like it, as he went down. Or perhaps it was just a thought of Fitzgerald’s own understanding of the suddenness of death after surviving two earlier heart attacks.

One hint might be in the actual final title of the book. According to Bruccoli and Graham, it wasn’t just supposed to be The Love of the Last Tycoon, but The Love of the Last Tycoon: A Western.

I tend to think that he meant to say something about those with great ambitions, as writers often have. Those who go West, seeking fortune, making something from nothing, will always leave behind their incomplete attempts, their missing pages and cross-outs. This unfinished business is at the very heart of the dream.