Finally, a Novel That Understands the Raw Sex Appeal of Airplanes

Posted on by EL Assistant2

It wouldn’t be wrong to call Kate Folk’s debut novel Sky Daddy a marriage plot. The protagonist, Linda, has had numerous lovers, but she wants to settle down. She’s looking for a “fine gentleman” who’s sleek, strong, and ready to commit, and she already has her dream wedding planned: hurtling to her death in the “aluminum embrace” of her beloved.

Linda is sexually attracted exclusively to aircraft. The lovers she seeks out every month are planes, and she yearns for a soulmate airplane to claim her as his bride in a crash that will “meld [their] souls for eternity.”

Sky Daddy is a zany, charming, and unexpectedly poignant portrait of a woman who feels herself to be unassimilable to the world of normal people. Linda’s sexual obsession with planes is her sole source of pleasure, and it’s also her biggest secret. When her coworker starts inviting her to quarterly Vision Board Brunches, Linda wonders how to manifest her soulmate without revealing the true nature of her wish. 

I interviewed Kate Folk over Zoom at the end of January. We talked about Moby-Dick, manifestation, and wanting things that are bad for you. 

Angela Hui: Linda wants to die in a plane crash so that she can be united with her soulmate airplane forever. Several of the short stories in your collection Out There also feature characters whose desires are dangerous to themselves or others—they want to get shot by hunters or lobotomize their lovers. Why, in your writing, is love so dangerous?

Kate Folk: I don’t know, it’s one of those things in my writing where I wouldn’t have realized it was a concern of mine until it started popping up across different stories. I think it’s a theme I’m drawn to because it encompasses so much more than just romantic obsession. It’s this impulse toward self-destruction and self-sabotage—feeling like something bad is going to happen and wanting to hasten the process and have it on our own terms, which is an interesting part of human nature. Maybe it’s been heightened by the internet and how so much of our lives are mediated by tech: there’s this desire to have something happen with the physical body in the real world.

AH: You published a piece a few years ago about how your daily journaling practice helps you write fiction, and there’s an excerpt of a journal entry where you describe being on a turbulent flight and thinking you’re about to die. Did you draw on that experience while writing Sky Daddy?

KF: Maybe, I’m trying to remember when I wrote that entry. It was probably around the same time I started working on the book in 2019. I think the line was something like, “I’m going to die drinking a Diet Coke I didn’t even want.” I was flying out of Iowa City after spending the holidays there. There was bad weather, and it was a really shaky little regional plane.

I actually got the idea for the book when a friend texted me a link to a YouTube video from a channel called TheFlightChannel, which creates simulations of actual aviation incidents. The graphics are very bland, and it looks almost like a video game. And then there’s descriptions of what’s happening at every stage of the flight where something goes wrong. It just has a really eerie feeling to it. They don’t show people inside the plane; the cockpit’s empty. So I was imagining the plane as a sentient being of its own, and from there I started thinking about a character who has a connection with planes and falls in love with them.

I’m afraid of flying, but I feel like writing the book has actually helped me to be less afraid.

I’m afraid of flying, but I feel like writing the book has actually helped me to be less afraid. Linda would think turbulence is fun and know that it isn’t a threat to the plane. But it’s still really hard for me not to be terrified in the moment.

AH: I’m curious about the theme of religion and spirituality in the book: the phrase “sky daddy” is a snarky way to refer to God, Catholicism comes up a few times, and Linda refers to her airplane fetish as her “personal religion, access point to the eternal sublime.” When you started writing this book, did you know that spirituality would play an important role?

KF: No, that was something that became more prominent as I drafted it and the story took more shape. Linda has a kind of secular religion of feeling like she’s bound by fate and destiny. I thought it would be interesting to compliment that with other characters’ more traditional religious beliefs and how they’re all coming from the same place of wanting to connect to something bigger and wanting their lives to have meaning outside of themselves.

I was also thinking about my own experiences flying and being afraid of flying. I’m not a religious person, but I will pray when I’m on a plane and there’s turbulence. There’s that joke about how there are no atheists on a turbulent plane. It seems like one of these moments where our lives really are in the power of something that we have no control over, so people turn to a higher power.

The title came much later. For most of the time I was writing the book, I called it Moderation, which refers to Linda’s job as a content moderator as well as the overall theme of moderation—trying to moderate her impulses and that kind of thing. I always knew that was more of a working title. When my editor and I brainstormed ideas for titles, Sky Daddy was the most eye-catching one, and I like how it has that double meaning: the term for God, and also, obviously, planes are the sky daddies above us.

AH: Spirituality also comes up in the Vision Board Brunches Linda attends in order to manifest the life (or death) she wants. What do you think makes manifestation appealing to Linda and to people in real life?

I think it’s really empowering to have a clear vision of the things I want in life.

KF: Linda takes the vision boards so literally, which is part of the humor of it – the idea that if she just pastes these images on the board, they’re literally going to come true. But I feel like there is great value in doing things like that. I’ve never actually made a vision board myself, but I’ve written things that I would like to do or that I would like to have happen. I think it’s really empowering to have a clear vision of the things I want in life.

For Linda, the appeal of the Vision Board Brunch also comes from being drawn into a community of women that she feels she was always ostracized from growing up, because she was a weird kid and was always fixated on the sky. Linda has to be on her best behavior and present herself as one of them, these women she sees as normal people with good jobs and relationships. That’s one of the tensions in the book: Linda wanting to reveal herself but knowing that she can’t fully do so, or being afraid that if she does reveal herself then other people won’t like her and her goals will somehow be hindered.

AH: It’s interesting to see Rhonda Byrne-style manifestation in a work of fiction because it’s like the character is trying to become the author of the story they’re in. Is that how it felt when you were writing?

KF: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Earlier drafts of the book didn’t have as much of a shape or sense of momentum, and I felt like the Vision Board Brunches were a nice way to take the story into another gear. There’s a sense that maybe the vision boards really do work, and Linda’s found a way to manipulate the strings of fate a bit – I definitely wanted it to be ambiguous. Whether or not things really are being manifested, Linda believes that they are, so there’s an internal engine to the story that’s driving things forward. 

AH: You’ve said that Sky Daddy is in “casual conversation” with Moby-Dick. Obviously, marrying a plane is Linda’s white whale. How else do you see the two books being in conversation?

KF: Zadie Smith gave a lecture that was then published as an essay in the Believer, and she talks about using scaffolding devices when she’s drafting a novel. When I wrote the first draft of Sky Daddy, it was useful to have Moby-Dick as a scaffold. 

Writing a novel is just so difficult and daunting, especially at the beginning. I tried all these different ways to get into the story, but the voice was never quite right. Then I happened to start reading Moby-Dick in the fall of 2019, and right away I loved the voice in that book. The voice of Ishmael is so playful and full of life, and it combines all these different registers and literary allusions.

Planes are the white whales of the sky.

Once I started thinking of Sky Daddy in the mode of Moby-Dick, I saw all sorts of connections popping up, and it felt like I was really onto something. Planes are the white whales of the sky, and Ahab’s monomaniacal obsession with Moby-Dick makes him believe it’s his destiny to kill this whale even if it kills him in the process.

There was also a similarity in that whales were pursued for their oil, and planes are full of oil in the form of jet fuel. I was thinking about flying as this carbon-intensive activity that’s bad for the environment and potentially will become taboo as climate change accelerates. Linda is pursuing this thing that she wants to kill her, literally, but also that is killing us all; we’re all addicted to lifestyles that are leading to catastrophe for humanity.

At first, I tried really mapping the story onto Moby-Dick. I made an outline of every chapter in Moby-Dick, and then I tried to figure out equivalent events that could happen in my story. Eventually I let go of that, because it wasn’t leading to writing my own book, so I had to start over and write it my own way. But some of the DNA of that process of experimentation is still in there, especially in the voice.

AH: Sky Daddy is your debut novel. Was it also the first novel you ever wrote?

KF: No, it definitely wasn’t. I’d written three or four novels before this that were never published, one of them when I was in an MFA program and then a few others, including one that we took on submission but didn’t sell. I think all of that was important in figuring out how to write novels. It’s really difficult to know how to do it other than by doing it. That’s the advice that novelists always give, which is very annoying – it’s both insufficient and completely true.

I spent a full year just generating. I wrote a thousand words a day in Linda’s voice, just to see where it went, and I had Linda do all kinds of stuff that didn’t make it into the final version. I felt like that helped me really explore the possibilities for the story.

AH: Are there any darlings you had to kill that you would be willing to share?

KF: Yeah, there were a lot of chapters directly inspired by chapters of Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick, there’s a chapter called “Cetology,” and there’s all these chapters about whales that aren’t tied to the actual story – it’s just like, here’s some facts about whales. And they’re not even really true facts. That was a great source of inspiration, because Melville refers to the whales as gentlemen, and he’s very sassy about it, and he’s really opinionated about what counts as a whale and what doesn’t, and what the good whales are.

I thought that was really funny, so I had a chapter similar to “Cetology” called “Aeronautics,” where Linda classifies interesting types of planes and has a lot of opinions about them, like she hates the Concorde and thinks it’s an abomination, and she thinks that some of the jumbo jets, like the 747 and the A380, are very snobby and aloof. Those are parts that ultimately didn’t fit in the story, and they were probably too literally inspired by Moby-Dick, because I didn’t want the book to be primarily an homage to Moby-Dick.

AH: What other works inspired or influenced Sky Daddy?

KF: I was partly inspired by Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, which I love. The main character works at a convenience store, and everyone is asking her when she’s going to get a better job or get a boyfriend and get married, but she’s perfectly content working at the convenience store. I wanted Linda to be a similar type of character, where everyone else looks down on her lifestyle and her job as a content moderator, but she’s actually quite content with it – except, of course, that she wants her fate to be realized on a flight.

Another inspiration was J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash and the Cronenberg film that was adapted from it, especially when I started thinking more about the plane crash angle. I was also thinking about the genre of “sad girl books”—Melissa Broder’s novel The Pisces was an inspiration as well. But Linda is a little different, because she’s not sad; she’s actually very glad to be pursuing this goal in her life, even though most people would say it’s a bad goal.

AH: Tell me more about the idea of “sad girl books.” How do you see your work fitting or not fitting into that genre?

KF: It’s a category you see on TikTok, along with “hot girl books” or whatever. I don’t really like the way those books are talked about. But I think about writers like Ottessa Moshfegh or Halle Butler – I love their books, and I’ll read anything they write. Those are potentially in that genre we’re talking about, books about women who are kind of dirtbags, which is a genre I really love, because I love unlikable female characters. A lot of the stories in Out There have a similar vibe, with women who are complicated, who aren’t necessarily girl boss types, who are maybe pursuing things that aren’t good for them. I can relate a lot to that type of character and find them really interesting.

AH: One of the few things Linda does other than think about planes is work as a content moderator for a tech company. Why did you choose that job for her?

KF: When I started writing the book, I was also writing a short story about content moderators because I had listened to an NPR segment and read some articles about it and found it so interesting. It’s this huge sector of the tech world that’s hidden, and it’s not illustrious like other tech jobs; a lot of it is outsourced to other countries and much more low-paying. 

Linda uses the internet to watch flight simulations and research famous incidents, and to keep track of her “lovers” with the flight tracking app on her phone, and I think the internet might also have pushed Linda into wanting this darker thing and desensitized her to images of death. So it’s made her the ideal candidate for that kind of job. Her character is part of a generation that’s grown up with the internet and has access to all types of disturbing content.

AH: This book made me realize how much overlap there is between the sexual fetish and the objective correlative. Does a character’s fetish always reveal something about their psychological state? Is a kink ever just a kink, or is it always a symbol for something else?

KF: I wanted it to be both, in a way. I didn’t want there to be some formative incident in Linda’s childhood that definitively explained why she’s into planes. I wanted it to be just sort of who she is. Also, I kind of get it—her kink, or whatever. I don’t share it, but I can see how planes have that raw power and sexiness, and they’re amazing machines. Once I started thinking from Linda’s point of view, it didn’t actually seem like that much of a stretch.

At the same time, I definitely want there to be potential within the book for those connections to be made. There’s such a sense of power and freedom in a plane, because it can travel across the world, and it also has the power to kill people. It’s something that can be feared but also revered. Linda has been disempowered in her life in various ways, and the plane is a way for her to latch onto this very powerful symbol. 

AH: Did you do any research on obscure fetishes?

KF: Yeah, that was another source of inspiration. I saw a documentary on Youtube years ago about people with objectum sexuality who are in relationships with objects. That was part of what inspired me to have Linda refer to planes with male pronouns and think of them as masculine, because one of the women in the documentary referred to her love object as “he” and thought it was really important not to say “it.”

But I also didn’t want Linda to represent a sexuality or to be reduced to a diagnosis. I wanted her to be very much a singular character who isn’t meant to stand in for a real type of person in the world.

AH: Right, and she wants to be singular. She doesn’t even want to know if other people are hot for planes, because she’s a “jealous lover.” She’s so alone in her obsession.

KF: Yeah, that’s part of the romance of it. She doesn’t want to share it with anyone else, because it’s her private thing with the planes.

Dean Spade’s Love Letter to the Gay, Horny, and Confused

Posted on by Social Media Editor

I think often about the fact that I am a first-generation lover. By this I mean that I am the first woman in my family to love entirely as I choose, the product of generations of arranged marriages for women – girls, some of them – in a South Asian culture preoccupied with enforcing rigid boundaries of caste. Love, to us, is a transgressive, abstract, Western thing, only tangentially related to the everyday work of marriage – in fact, we distinguish arranged marriages, the norm, from “love marriages,” in our everyday speech. “Love,” in this case, is a synonym for intercaste, or interreligious, spoken in a tone of hushed warning – we grew up with cautionary tales of love marriages gone awry, women and men who chose to love on their own terms and alienated their communities in the process. As a first-generation lover, I swing from feeling incredibly lucky to deeply confused. And as a novelist, I find myself obsessed with the texture and significance of relationships between women: friends, lovers, mothers, daughters. I am also gay, which to me is less of a sexual orientation than an existential condition of questioning, wondering, Is there another way? 

I won the strangest jackpot of history to be born in America, during an era of unprecedented cultural representation for people who look and love as I do. I live in Lesbian Mecca, also known as Brooklyn, where I’ve fallen head-first into queer community, a boisterous network of dear friends and lovers, continually colliding. My friends and I will often send each other voice memos with date recaps, sex play-by-plays, new loves and letdowns, all of us trying our best to love in accordance with our principles, again and again, as Charli XCX put it. Sometimes it feels like the blind leading the blind; other times it feels like we, in our collective brain trust, have experienced the entire pageant of human emotions. It is a privileged, historically unimaginable existence. It feels like I am joining the party at a high, but possibly also at last call – the world is getting actively worse around us. My same phone that pings with messages from my friends, my girls, brings ever-accelerating news of genocide, our slow descent into fascism. What is the point of being gay when polar icecaps are melting? I look to writers, to queer elders for advice. And so, when I saw online that a new Dean Spade was dropping, I thought, Thank God.

Dean Spade is a veteran of queer movements for justice, your favorite queer writer’s favorite queer writer. He is best known for his book Mutual Aid, an action-oriented handbook to organizing local communities, and for founding the Sylvia Rivera Law Project. He’s also brilliantly, eminently online, someone I’d look for as a green flag on a crush’s Instagram “following” list. Online, he leads workshops on relationships, films advice videos, and shares resources and calls-to-action. He is a man of the people, and he sees his people are struggling – on dating apps, in doomed situationships, in messy friend groups and incestuous political collectives. Love in a F*cked Up World is his response: a love letter to the gay, horny, and confused. 

It feels like I am joining the party at a high, but possibly also at last call – the world is getting actively worse around us.

Love in a Fucked Up World styles itself as a self-help book, a choice that is both earnest and subversive. The self-help genre can be mired in heterosexual or regressive advice, telling readers to “lean in” or put up with bullshit or generally hyper-fixate on improving themselves as individuals without acknowledging the social forces that shape them. What’s more, Spade roots his authority not in psychology credentials, but in his experience as a “lifelong participant and student of social movements,” a person on a lifelong quest to improve his relationships. Spade opens with a frank analysis of our situation – it’s dire. “We live in a time of intense conditions. We are told we are freer and more connected than ever because of technology, but every day we confront skyrocketing inequality, terrifying ecological crisis, and endless war,” he asserts. “How can we hold on to each other in these hard times, take the brave and bold actions required of us, and become better able to love each other through it all?” 

Spade’s commitment to situating our everyday romantic struggles within The Biggest Struggle of All Times – maintaining our dignity and resilience under late-stage capitalism –  takes its cues from his feminist predecessors, particularly Black feminists who insisted that “the personal is political.” His approach is also really, quintessentially, gay. If queer people generally have the sharpest read on societal norms due to our outsider perspectives, Spade’s trans activist lens questions everything. Spade takes aim at the big myths of heterosexual society: the book opens with a takedown of the dangerous “Romance Myth,” or the idea that “relationships should be exclusive, long-lasting, and follow a predetermined pattern of escalation.” But he also questions behaviors that are normalized, or even valorized, within the queer community, such as having a lot of hookups (he gently asks whether we are actually “numbing out” by chasing sex on dating apps). Or whether our well-meaning fixation with boundaries – setting up hard, automatic rules against other people – keeps us from interrogating the roots of our desires, the varied circumstances in which we say “yes” and “no.” Sometimes Spade is preaching to the choir; other times he’s subtweeting. 

Spade gets away with it because of his tone: measured, questioning, constructive, like a voice memo from your stablest friend. LOVE sweeps from the existential to the specific, demystifying the steps of initiating, tending to, and sometimes ending your relationships. Chapters cover topics such as conflict and apologies, choosing when and how to break up, and regulating your emotions through the rollercoaster of dating – what my friends and I call “being on the streets.”

Sometimes Spade is preaching to the choir; other times he’s subtweeting. 

I wondered whether Spade would draw from his own personal experiences; generally, he doesn’t. In this way, Spade avoids the trapdoor of confession, of using his own marginalization as the basis for moral authority, which often afflicts marginalized writers trying to theorize about the world. But Spade also doesn’t maintain the rigid, impersonal boundaries of a therapist, for he understands that trust and collective wisdom comes from shared stories. In LOVE, Dean includes fictional case studies,” short third-person stories about characters in complicated situations. One case study follows Denise and Kila, whose relationship ends because of jealousy in an open relationship. Or Mei and Honey, best friends who used to date, and maintain connection by co-hosting an annual Lunar New Year party. 

It’s not surprising that LOVE was developed from online workshops Spade teaches; it is a book that knows its audience. Many words in his book – “polyamory,” “bodywork,” “attachments” – do not appear in the Bible, as the saying goes, but could be transcripts from your group chats. LOVE is interspersed with worksheets and charts (“Seven Steps for De-Escalating a Crush”), very screen-shottable, one of which I texted to a friend in a sticky romantic situation: maybe helpful for you?! She laughed. It felt like LOVE had been eavesdropping on our voice memos. 

Spade is invested in helping readers live their lives on purpose. He is unflinching in his diagnoses of common “cognitive myths,” which he calls “distortions,” such as the romance myth, or disposability culture, or individualism. But beyond his diagnoses, Spade is pragmatic and intentional about offering solutions, concrete ways to revise our patterns of thought and action. He did, after all, write a self-help book instead of a novel.

This is a joke I can make as a novelist, but also because the fiction I’m drawn to write and read shares overlapping concerns with LOVE: how to build relationships in late-stage capitalism, across significant power and identity barriers, and persist amid horrors. This is a large, vibrant, interdisciplinary literary project. The novelist Miranda July recently shouted out LOVE as a recommendation for readers of her bestseller ALL FOURS. I thought this was a lovely suggestion, to read LOVE as a nonfiction companion to, or debrief after, her fiction, which follows a menopausal woman’s riotous sexual awakening. I work in a genre of contemporary fiction about women and queer people in transgressive, damaging, revelatory relationships; I derive continual comfort knowing that all of my romantic experiences have already been described in totalizing detail by gender-marginalized writers before me. Fiction can use sex to physicalize otherwise invisible, private feelings of powerlessness or alienation in the world. What I encounter less often is an interest in unfurling how relationships are made to work, what they look like when they are healthy and functional. That might make for less sexy fiction. Indeed, Spade calls out the cultural narratives around us that romanticize relationships that are dramatic, driven by “subterranean wounds,” making stable relationships seem less exciting. His intervention, then, is to translate the raw experience of life, the reality refracted and theorized by fiction, and illustrated by his “case studies,” into something we can hold: he synthesizes it into action. 

“A core idea in this book is that awareness is key to liberation,” Spade writes of the internal romance narratives that guide us. “Noticing allows us to catch the patterned cultural norms and scripts so we can say, ‘Hey, that’s not me, that’s not mine!’ and make conscious choices.” These choices, to Spade, make all the difference.

The world that Spade urges his readers towards has its seeds in the world we currently live in. By we, I mean his readers – I’m imagining queer people living in urban centers with rich histories of activism, beating hearts connected by arteries of public transportation and walkability. Material things, like trains and bars and bookshops – I’m thinking of Brooklyn, my gay utopia. But when I think of the state of American dating more broadly, I feel less hopeful. My generation, Gen Z, is in the middle of a loneliness epidemic. Many of us live at home, since we cannot afford rent in the kinds of cities that foster human connection. Only 4 percent of American attends a social function on a given weekend – and can you blame anyone? My friends and I often joke that it costs twenty dollars to stick your foot out of the house. We are still seeing the psychological fall-out from Covid, which prematurely stunted our social development as teens. Our boys have been slingshotted into an internet rabbit hole of incelhood. I believe in the world Spade prescribes, but I could not lend his book to a straight friend. The worlds in which we live, and love, would not be the same.

What I encounter less often is an interest in unfurling how relationships are made to work, what they look like when they are healthy and functional.

While I find dating revelatory, an opportunity to learn and practice my principles, most straight women I know find it demoralizing, degrading, or straight-up terrifying. Stories of violence against women regularly make headlines, slow-cooking the nervous systems of those who date men. Queer dating isn’t utopic, but queerness, the framework of Spade’s book, operates in a world much freer of violence. Amid the violences of capitalism and war that trammel us all, Spade assumes that within his readers’ relationships, nobody is trying to hurt the other, that the relationships themselves are not inherently exploitative or unfree. After the second Trump election, Gen Z American women took to TikTok to call for a 4B movement, not to practice accountability with men. For lovers to be equal, engaged partners in Spade’s prescribed work of managing relationships, there must be minimal power differentials between them – and I fear that is rarely the case. 

Coming from Spade, this doesn’t feel like an oversight, but rather optimism. Spade, a longtime veteran of movements against criminalization and shame, is choosing against throwing any of his readers under the bus, especially men. Expressions like “toxic masculinity,” for example, which have become shorthand in our culture for a range of unpleasant male behaviors, rarely come up in the book – even if they could help analyze certain patterns of control or dominance that cause relationship dysfunction. Similarly, phrases like “white privilege” or “cis privilege,” seldom come up. Instead, Spade moves away from a suffocating, unequal world of one-on-one romantic relationships, and into a different relationship terrain altogether: friendships, where we come up for air. 

Liberation, in Spade’s imagination, comes in the form of friendships. In my own relationships as a young person post-Covid, friendship is a truth I have settled in over and over again, each time with a fresh sigh of relief. “Romantic and sexual relationships are rarely this free. Family relationships are bogged down in prescribed roles, and work and school relationships are often hierarchical and oppressive. From what I have seen, friendship is the closest most people get to each other,” Spade writes in his final, strongest chapter, Revolutionary Promiscuity. Here, Spade is not calling for sluttiness, exactly, but rather a generosity and outpouring of effort and love into our friendships and broader community networks, instead of chasing a single romantic partner. Friendship, to Spade, is a “refuge for freer relational practices that thrive outside the confines of romantic love and family. Increasing the significance of our friendships leads to more of the liberated connection we need to survive these harrowing times.” 

Liberation, in Spade’s imagination, comes in the form of friendships.

Spade’s conception of “promiscuity” was a breakthrough for me, putting language to the rising tide of love I have found, attracted, and cultivated in my own life. I am an active thrower of house parties and suppers, park hangs. My goal is for people to find love at one of my functions; so far, a few people have hooked up, which is a promising start. Love, to me, is an offer to cook lunch for a friend — restaurants are expensive — or run errands together, or buddy-read a book; sex is good, but have you ever had your best friend offer to wash your dishes for you? Friendship, Spade reminds us, is not the answer in itself: it is the base organizational unit, the loving nucleus around which we can build larger community projects, even resistance movements. These are movements where I feel I have more than enough. 

Therapy Is Not a Cure for Climate Disaster

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“Therapist” by Lydia Millet

“That’s just the new normal, folks,” said a radio host.

She heard it constantly. Everything bad was referred to, with a jocular glibness, as the new normal.

ADHD. OCD. Depression. Agoraphobia. Xenophobia. Paranoia. Antisocial personality disorder. Most of the diagnoses in the DSM-­5. Albeit often at a subclinical level.

Abnormality was the new normal.

“You know what it is?” said Stephanie over breakfast. “It’s a long, collective moment of TI. Tonic immobility. A state of body paralysis induced by stress. A stress adaptation.”

“I’m familiar with TI,” Anne told her.

In humans, it was brought on by war. And rape.

“With some species,” said Stephanie, forking up scrambled eggs, “it happens when they’re about to be eaten by a predator. They may be simulating death as a defense mechanism. If the predator in question prefers live prey. Or they may be submitting. A neurological shutdown. Possibly for pain avoidance. I haven’t read the scholarship. I’m just spitballing here.”

“Really? But what’s the evolutionary advantage of submitting to your own death?”

She struggled to chew a bite of slimy egg. Stephanie liked to under­cook them.

“Passivity’s kind of a stress adaptation, too. Right? Cynicism. Denial. Even despair. As a biologist, if I were observing a particular organism or population, I’d look at the behavior. And I’d see certain behaviors as a response to a survival threat. Maladaptive, in some cases. Such as the group behavioral response to global warming. The response, so far, is maladaptive. It won’t prolong survival.”

“So the culture’s like a prey animal. In its death throes.”

“Well, I mean, the animal does escape, sometimes. Occasionally the TI strategy works.”

“But it won’t work. In this case.”

“Yeah, no. This is a fight-­or-­flight situation. With the climate. And there’s no possibility of flight.”

Anne pushed her eggs around on her plate.

“They’re too wet. Aren’t they.”

“Kind of.”

“I’ll eat them. You want a slice of sourdough?”

In her practice she’d offer up coping techniques. When other interventions weren’t called for or agreed to. Rituals of self-­care. Open the window. Take deep breaths. Put on music.

But lately she’d lie in bed, unable to fall asleep, thinking of crowds. The patients in their great ranks, like a sad army.

Clients, she was supposed to call them, but she preferred the word patient. Always had. It wasn’t that she wanted to position herself as an MD. More that client sounded transactional. Applied to tax-­preparation customers and real-­estate buyers alike.

While patient was a good word. Since it also meant forbearing. Forgiving, even. Therapy took time.

She saw them in hospital gowns, staring toward the horizon. The patients everywhere. In institutions and outside them.

Maladaptive.

Because if you multiplied that prescription, for acceptance and accommodation, and made it into policy, you’d have systemic failure. On the macro level, acceptance of the normal would mean death.

It had started to seem to her that, as she counseled her patients on how to live better within that new normal—­or the abnormality that passed for normal—­she was delivering therapeutic euthanasia.

With her head on the pillow, feeling the warm air sweep over her skin as it moved the curtains, she pictured herself walking along the rows of patients. Who stood watching and waiting and never moved. Dosing each one with a sedative and a painkiller.

Palliative care.

Stephanie tried to make her feel better.

“You know the drill,” she said as they lay there. “Your job isn’t about systems. It’s about individuals. Helping them know what they can control and what they can’t.”

“But it isn’t just my job. It’s everyone’s job. Is how it feels to me these days. Everyone’s going around saying, Feel better. And here’s how to do it. Surrender your agency. Be at peace with catastrophe.”

“Listen,” said Stephanie, swiveling onto an elbow. Propping her head on her hand. “Do you have any idea where this is coming from? I only ask because historically, when you’ve been distressed like this, it’s usually been transferred to you by a patient. Where your clinical detachment has partially failed. No offense meant.”

Anne shook her head. “It’s ambient. It’s obvious.”

But after Stephanie turned onto her other side and started snoring, she went back over her patient interactions. There was someone. A kid. Well, a young man. His bleakness was persuasive. The fear, he said, was common sense.

It shouldn’t be healed, he argued. It shouldn’t be erased.

The compulsion to normalize, he said, was the real pathology. Being enacted on a grand scale. A sociopolitical scale.

She’d sent him to Stegman for an SSRI.

In their last session he’d told her about a dinner he’d been to at his girlfriend’s house where one of the other guests seemed to be made of plastic.

Uh-­oh, she’d thought. For a second her association was Capgras. Impostor syndrome. She’d had an elderly patient who believed her husband had been replaced by a copy. And the copy was a murderous android.

Janet, had been the patient’s name. Sweet woman. Far too eager to please.

She wondered if Janet was still alive. It had been years.

Here, though, it turned out to be a metaphor.

“And the thing is, I used to have a crush on his girlfriend,” he said. “Back in high school. She’s the older sister of my girlfriend now. Smart and attractive. But, so, maybe you’re thinking, I had a vested interest in not liking the guy. Territorial. But it wasn’t that. He just, all he could do, in the conversation, was recycle these stale talking points. These pieces of pat received wisdom from business school. He has this smug certainty that all the systems will keep functioning. Systems of wealth and power. The way they always have.”

“Maybe they will. And that was what threatened you.”

He was silent. In the Zoom window, she watched him pick up a thermos and drink from it. Hoped it was water.

When he set it down he nodded. “It does threaten me. But it also threatens you. It threatens us all. And everyone after.”

“When you say it,” she said, “what does that mean?”

“The complacency. The pretense. That all this climate and mass extinction shit isn’t a five-­alarm emergency. That what we need isn’t a worldwide revolution. Yesterday.”

She sat with that a minute. Her turn to be silent.

“Let’s get back to this guest. Your feelings about him.”

“Sure. Let’s get back to talking about a dinner party.”

“You were the one who brought it up. Isn’t there more to unpack there?”

“This is what I’m referring to. The dinner’s trivial. My feelings about it are trivial. They just don’t matter, Anne.”

“So everything has to be about the need for a revolution?”

“There you go! Unpacked! That’s what I’m saying. Everything, everything, everything. Should be about that. From now till 2050. And beyond.”

“OK, then. If that’s how you feel, why are you spending your time working at a bar? Helping your customers self-­medicate?”

“Uh . . . because I need a job? And I’m no one?”

“You’re no one?”

He sat back in his chair. Threw up his hands.

“You know what I mean.”

“But you’re not no one.”

“I am. And, sorry, so are you.”

“You’re saying we’re similarly powerless.”

“You’ve got a career and I don’t have anything, but we both listen to people complain all day. And we both drug them, too.”

We both listen to people complain all day. And we both drug them, too.

Behind him was a poster of a pretty actress wearing a vest that looked like armor. Her long hair flowed around her wildly. Like Medusa’s snakes.

She felt like saying, It’s hard to take you seriously. With Xena the Warrior Princess in the background. Or whoever.

She didn’t say it, of course.

Anyway, they’d already gone over fifty minutes.

Radicalized. That was another term she heard all the time that she didn’t remember hearing so much when she was younger. It had been used in the sixties—­mostly around Vietnam protesters, if she recalled right from her reading, and maybe Malcolm X—­but then it seemed to recede until 9/11. When it turned into a radio and TV staple.

And it was never a positive. Back in the Vietnam era, you could be a radical for peace. Or justice. Now a radical was only a terrorist. It was Al Qaeda, the Taliban, the white supremacists who stormed the Capitol. The violent extremists.

She read practitioners who specialized in radicalization. There were networks. Radicalized youth were spread across the demographic spectrum, rich and poor, single and in relationships.

But neglect, psychological abuse, and abandonment were strong predictors.

On those fronts Nick was a piss-­poor candidate, in her opinion.

Still. You never knew. A worldwide revolution, he had said.

Red flag? Or standard existential angst?

He wasn’t talking about taking up arms. No history of violence. No suicidal ideation, as far as she knew. He wasn’t socially isolated. But then again, it often seemed to come out of nowhere.

“I’m not sure how to help him,” she said to Stegman on the phone.

They were both in their kitchens. Making dinner.

“Sounds like you’re pretty enmeshed,” said Stegman. She could hear the pop of his bourbon cork. For a neuropsychiatrist, he had some old-­school vices. “In his rationalizations.”

“I guess so.”

“When in doubt, take a step back. Go to trauma and repression. Have you spent enough time on ECD?”

“His childhood was uneventful. Is how it sounded to me.”

“Impossible.”

She heard cracking—­a tray of ice cubes being twisted, that was it. And then the glug-­glug-­glug of him pouring the whiskey.

“Come on, Lou. Can we get real? Relatively. Stable, protected, no upheavals. He’s got married parents who’ve lived in the same upper-­middle-­class neighborhood for more than twenty years. He was never bullied, molested, or sidelined by his peers. First sexual experience at age sixteen. No issues of gender or sexual identity. Academically, and in sports, some moderate successes with a few minor failures. A decent balance for resiliency. He does some pot. That’s it.”

“Don’t be reductive. Dig deeper.”

He sipped.

His earbuds captured ambient sound too well.

Nick wasn’t resistant to talking about his childhood—­he enjoyed it. Got caught up in the narratives. A bike he once had with a banana seat. It had been his father’s before it was his. In the seventies. A cousin teaching him to ski at Big Bear, all expert and condescending, then falling flat on his face. His little sister hiding his underwear. When the school bus was already moving along their block. His mom giving him bowl cuts in fifth grade because he refused to go to the barber. Didn’t like how it smelled in there.

The barber had halitosis.

“No repressed trauma,” he said near the end of a session. “Except for, maybe, that barber. Man. Someone should have told him. His breath was a biohazard. And that was way before COVID.”

“You were a golden boy.”

He smiled. “No. I just had a golden life.”

“But, somehow, you’re not a golden man.”

The smile vanished.

“The guy at the dinner, say. Is that what a golden man looks like?”

He made a grunt of irritation. “I wish I’d never mentioned it.”

“But you did. There must have been a reason.”

“Sure, yeah. In the eyes of MAGA voters who refused to wear a face mask or get vaccinated, and vote against solar and wind, that man would probably look golden.”

“What about your parents? Who gave you that golden childhood and sent you to a golden university? Would he seem golden to them?”

He sighed. “I doubt it. They’re registered Democrats.”

“So what would golden look like for them?”

He cocked his head. Fiddled with a pen. “Maybe Luis. My brother-­in-law. He’s DACA and studying to be an immigration lawyer. From a Guatemalan family who were refugees but never got citizenship. His father’s a farmworker in the Central Valley. Probably has off-­the-­charts chemical exposure. His mother works at a bakery. Luis is a good guy. He’s, like, pursuing the American dream.”

“But you’re not pursuing that dream. You used to be, but you’re not anymore. So your parents are disappoint­ed in you.”

The poster of the warrior princess, she noticed, had been taken down. Either that or he was Zooming in from a different room.

“I had the dream,” he said quietly. “Then I woke up.”

“And now you can’t remember it.”

“Not true. I remember it perfectly.”

“But it doesn’t motivate you anymore.”

“Anne. It was never real life. It was only a dream.”

His monologues had a youthful poignance. They stayed with her for their earnestness.

A dream gets implanted in you, he’d told her in an early session. A dream of the heroic individual, tall and powerful as a god. The monomyth! A dream of infinite selfishness. But instead of liberating you, it binds you to the wheel. The great wheel moves the plow. And the plow tills the field.

“And far away,” he said, “always ahead of you but never reached, there’s a shimmering mirage. That they call happiness.”

She agreed to go on a field trip. Over a weekend. It wasn’t Stephanie’s own study but the project of a new colleague that she’d been invited to observe. Had to do with insects and the waterbirds that ate them.

“We could do a hike, right?” said Stephanie. “It’s been a while.”

“A hike-­hike?” asked Anne. “One of those death marches that call for trekking poles and a heavy pack? Or a pleasant, relaxing walk? With an elevation gain under a thousand feet?”

“Huh. I wonder what your vote is?”

“I’m not in the mood for a death march.”

“It’s a wetland. Like elevation gain is maybe two feet.”

“But with mosquitoes.”

“I hope so. No mosquitoes would be a bad sign. For the study.”

“And we’re not allowed DEET. Because it’s so toxic.”

“Correct.”

So they drove out of the city. Across the state line, into Nevada. It was a rare kind of wetland they were headed to, said Stephanie: a wetland in the desert. Shrinking every year.

Along the freeway they drove, past car dealerships and outlet malls and onto smaller roads. They passed a ranch flying a Trump flag almost as big as the farmhouse itself.

“Are you supposed to have a flag with, like, a person’s name on it?” she asked Stephanie.

“You’re the shrink,” said Stephanie. “You tell me.”

On the barn was painted America First. Just to be clear.

A few miles on they picked out another sign, tiny and barely visible in a brushy patch of wildflowers. Black Lives Matter. On a rainbow background faded by the sun.

“In the war of the signs, I guess we know who’s winning,” said Stephanie.

They stopped at a modest, low building, the refuge headquarters. Stephanie talked to a ranger while Anne used the restroom. She didn’t like to pee behind bushes.

For Stephanie it was an occupational hazard. Not for her. She’d picked a job with flush toilets.

“He was wearing a hat like Smokey the Bear’s,” she said as they got back into the car.

It made her think of a bygone era, when the park rangers were everyone’s friends. And no outlaw ranchers faced them down with armed militias.

“Smokey was a real bear,” said Stephanie. “Did you know that? There’s a museum to him. Next to his grave. Near Lincoln National Forest. I went there once on a road trip.”

“I thought he was invented in World War II,” said Anne. “So people wouldn’t leave their campfires burning and destroy the lumber supply.”

“Yeah but a few years later they found a baby bear in a tree. Badly burned from a fire. They called him Hotfoot first but then changed his name to Smokey and sent him to live at a zoo in DC. With Ham the space chimp. When he died they sent the body back to New Mexico. To be buried in his old forest home.”

“Sweet.”

“There was another Smokey after him. Smokey II. But he wasn’t as popular. When he died they burned him.”

After a while on a bumpy dirt road they came to a place where the road got wet. Reeds all around them, rustling and scraping against the car when the road was narrow. She heard mud spattering into the car’s wheel wells.

“He said we’d see the survey flags.”

“Like, Day-­Glo pink?”

“You see one? OK. Look for a pullout on the left.”

A Jeep was parked. And a pickup truck.

A woman in waders and an orange vest approached as they were getting out their hats and water bottles. “Steph! Hi! You found us!”

They started discussing the fieldwork. Something with plots and water samples.

“Inverts,” the colleague kept saying.

Association: Krafft-­Ebing. The sexologists who used to call gay people inverts. Gay men had a feminine soul in a man’s body, they had suggested. Lesbians had the reverse.

But the colleague was referring to invertebrates.

“It’s looking grim,” she told Stephanie. “The densities are even lower than we expected.”

Drought was a factor. Water withdrawals from the nearby river. But pesticide-­spraying was also a likely culprit.

“They spray pesticides? On a wildlife refuge?” asked Anne.

“Oh, absolutely,” said the colleague. “To subsidize the farmers.”

Stephanie’d forgotten to introduce them. She wasn’t always on top of the niceties.

The colleague offered to take them both into the swampy water—­she’d brought some extra pairs of waders—but Anne demurred.

“I’ll just go look around with her a bit,” said Stephanie. “Maybe for half an hour. We can do the hike after. OK?”

“If you stand in the bed of the truck, you’ll be able to see us,” said the colleague. “There’s a cooler with water and beer. And lemonade.”

“I’m Anne, by the way,” said Anne.

“Nice to meet you,” said the colleague.

Still no name.

Task-­oriented. And far more interested in arthropods than people. Stephanie was an outlier in her department—­focused on the big picture. Commonalities among lifeforms. Most of the rest of them saw the world through smaller windows. Shied away from anything they thought might be viewed as anthropomorphic.

We were us, to the biologists, and the others were the others.

Not so different from shrinks, actually.

But the colleague was considerate. She set up a folding chair for Anne in the pickup bed. The ground was too muddy, she explained. Its legs would sink in. She spun it over the tailgate one-­handed, then flicked her wrist to open it. Deft.

Stephanie pulled on the waders and a vest and the two of them went forging off into the reeds. Anne popped the tab on a beer and tried sitting in the chair. But sitting down, she couldn’t see anything but the pale-­green grasses.

So she perched on the cab of the truck instead. Cross-­legged and sipping. Looked for the high-­vis vests and made out five of them.

They were counting insects. And she was counting people.

They were counting insects. And she was counting people.

They bent over, moving forward a few shuffles at a time. The work was painstaking. Slow and painstaking. Someone wearing a bug net over his face, not too far from the truck, lifted a container of yellowish water up to the light.

When there was a light breeze, it was pleasant up there on the truck cab. A sea of grasses waving before her. Here and there, a stretch of glittering water.

Far above, sometimes a plane.

But when it was still it was stifling. She almost felt claustrophobic. Though surrounded by air.

Mosquitoes began to descend. She slapped at them. Mosquitoes had always been drawn to her. Stephanie they ignored.

She wished Stephanie would come back.

The longer she waited, the more she thought about her patients. Still Nick, but also Brent and Helen. All three of them preoccupied by the looming state of emergency.

If they were here, would they be comforted by the sight of those orange vests? Moving through the muddy water, dedicated to the granular detail of insects? Performing their careful measurements?

Maybe Helen. She believed in science and hope. Local solutions. Resistance.

But not Brent. Brent was a hardened cynic when it came to his fellow humans. On the spectrum, plus OCD. He said the summer sea ice in the Arctic was already a ghost. A foregone conclusion. Only a handful of years more. And as went the Arctic, he said—­bobbing his head in a constant rhythm—­so went Greenland. When Greenland melted, he told her, that would be about 23 feet right there. Sea-­level wise. And it was melting fast. Faster than previous projections. So, there went the coastal cities. Antarctica would lag, but still melt too. On down the road.

230 feet, he said. When all the ice was gone.

He had no children. Would never have any.

A sound decision, certainly. Though not a sociopath, he exhibited low empathy. To him the future was of little personal interest. It was a problem for others to deal with.

He did regret how it would end up for the animals. And the plants and trees. He had a soft spot for those who didn’t speak and kept a spreadsheet of confirmed extinctions. Sometimes he’d use up a whole session discussing a tree frog or a butterfly. The last attested sightings. The animals’ natural history.

During a frenzied OCD episode, he’d text her dozens of pictures of Hawaiian snails. Or mussels in Appalachia.

Rest in peace, brothers and sisters, he would text.

RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP. RIP.

She’d noticed clouds but hadn’t paid much attention. The forecast had said cloudy, but no rain. By the time it started she’d been reduced to propping her sunglasses on top of her head and playing a game on her phone. No signal, so she couldn’t read the news.

The game was so basic Stephanie made fun of her for playing it.

“Mindless,” Stephanie would say.

“Exactly. It’s a form of meditation,” she’d claim.

You sorted panels of color into vials. That was it. She was on level 1,228.

Recently, she reflected, Nick’s affect had shifted for the better. Partly the Lexapro, no doubt, but also the girlfriend. She situated him in his life. It was a good match—­the bond was surprisingly strong.

To her, he was golden.

Anne’s guess was he would go, eventually, the way most upper-middle-­class people went. Toward the domestic. Ensconce himself in a smaller world he could control.

Maybe he’d stay on the Lexapro long-­term. It was possible.

And go forward, like so many, with despair held at bay by comfort. Nestled in affection.

The first drop she saw was on the screen. Then, rapidly, rain was beating down on the truck. Hollow, tinny pings on the metal. Far off, a spidery bolt of lightning.

She gazed out over the sea of reeds. Were the biologists coming in? Or would they keep on working?

She saw the orange vests draw closer to each other. She couldn’t tell which one was Stephanie. Faintly, she heard their voices.

She thought of signaling to them. Waving her arms.

But what would she be signaling? It’s raining? And I’m here?

Stephanie already knew these things.

With the lightning, she should get down from the truck. The bed was slick with water.

She picked her way across it, folded the camp chair and propped it on its side, and stepped over the tailgate. Down into the slippery mud.

Oh! But the car was locked. The keys were in Stephanie’s pocket. No reason to lock it, out here, but the car locked itself if you left it unattended.

“Dammit,” she said.

The rain was coming harder. She was getting soaked.

She leaned against the side of the car, folding her arms. Her fault, too. She could have asked for the keys. It hadn’t occurred to her.

Her clothes were sodden and her hair was plastered to her scalp, dripping down her face and onto her shoulders. She wiped a tickling drip off the back of her neck.

Around her the rain made a vast pattering sound in the reeds. So many small sounds she couldn’t track them.

So you’re wet, she told herself. Big deal. That’s done. At some point, you’ll be dry again. Just listen, why don’t you.

The sounds went on and on. Spread about her in their inseparable millions. A symphony of water and plants. If she listened without resistance, the sounds would take her beyond the shivering.

Beyond the inconvenience. Into the elemental.

It was hard to believe the elements would fail us, she thought.

Less hard to believe we would fail them.

All around, all around, all around.

The rain is coming down, she said to herself.

She raised her face and closed her eyes.

Let me be liquid. Bathed in the clouds.

Right now, here in the home that made us, we still have the rain.

8 Powerful Memoirs About Being Mixed-Race

Posted on by EL Assistant2

As American families have grown more racially and culturally mixed, so too have their stories. These stories, more common than ever, are captured in memoirs by multiracial authors who delve into the complexities of the mixed-race experience. Many of these memoirs follow authors as they navigate their identities within families, communities, and cultures that struggle to fully embrace every part of their heritage.

My own family called me “pale-faced or mixed race.” Some referred to me as “light, bright, almost white.” But most of the time I was known as “high yella.” That’s because I was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family. The journey to reconcile my identity within my Black family was complicated by struggles with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. 

My memoir, High Yella, is my account of how I had to leave my troubled Black family behind in search of a new identity. Ironically, it was only when I returned to them that I began to fully understand my true self as a parent of color after my husband and I adopted two Black daughters. Our efforts to guide our children to find their place in the world were rooted in the significance of where they—and I—came from.

There are many powerful mixed-race memoirs about love, family, and identity. Here are 8 that stand out, each capturing the unique journey of the mixed-race experience.

Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away by June Cross

June Cross was born in the 1950s—at a time when interracial relationships were illegal and deeply taboo—to a white up-and-coming actress and a Black comedian. To protect June, her mother decides to have her be raised by a Black family, all while maintaining a complicated, secret relationship with her daughter. Her memoir explores the heartbreaking sacrifices of time where love across color lines was forbidden.


The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother by James McBride

Award-winning novelist and musician James McBride intertwines his own coming-of-age journey with the story of his mother, Ruth, a white Jewish woman who married a Black man and raised twelve children in a racially segregated America. As he grows up, McBride struggles with his racial identity, often questioning why his mother refuses to discuss her past. Eventually, he uncovers her history and her decision to embrace Black identity and Christianity. 

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

Comedian Trevor Noah was born in apartheid South Africa to a Black mother and white Swiss father, during a time when miscegenation was illegal. In fact, his very existence was “born a crime.” Noah tells humorous and sometimes harrowing stories of his youth, from growing up in poverty to being hidden indoors to avoid detection to hustling CDs in the streets, and finally the freedom that came with the fall of the apartheid regime. At the heart of his memoir is another fierce, independent mother, whose determination and faith shape his resilience.  

When I Was White: A Memoir by Sarah Valentine

Sarah Valentine grows up believing she is white because she is raised in a white suburban middle-class family in Pittsburgh that never talked about race. As a young adult, she discovers that her biological father is Black, and the revelation shatters her sense of self. Valentine’s memoir explores the psychological and emotional toll of being denied one’s true heritage and how she embraced her identity as a Black woman, after spending her life living as a white woman. 

Mixed: My Life in Black and White by Angela Nissel

Angela Nissel’s memoir chronicles growing up in Philadelphia, where she constantly feels like she exists between two worlds. In predominantly Black spaces, she is sometimes seen as too light-skinned and talking “too white”, while in white spaces, she is viewed as an exotic outsider. Her journey sees her dabbling in Black activism, working as a stripper, briefly hospitalized for clinical depression, before finally finding herself on the West Coast. Mixed is a witty examination of what it means to fit in, told through a lifetime of fascinating and colorful anecdotes. 

Heart Radical: A Search for Language, Love, and Belonging by Anne Liu Kellor

Anne Liu Kellor’s memoir follows her journey across China as she searches for a deeper connection to her heritage and herself. Raised in the U.S. by a Chinese mother and white father, Kellor wrestles with questions of identity, language, and belonging as she moves from L.A. to immerse herself in Mandarin and Chinese culture in Chengdu. Heart Radical is a meditation on how language shapes identity and how one woman pieces together a life from the fragments of two cultures.

On Gold Mountain by Lisa See

Lisa See traces the sweeping history of her Chinese American family, beginning with her great-great-grandfather Fong See, who immigrated to the U.S. in the late 19th century at the tail end of the Chinese Exclusion Act. His son Fong See built a successful business in Los Angeles despite being a second-class citizen facing rampant racism and xenophobia and married a white woman at a time when interracial relationships were against the law. On Gold Mountain blends personal narrative with historical insight, shedding light on the challenges of building a new life in a country that doesn’t want you and the enduring strength of family bonds. 

Where Did You Sleep Last Night? by Danzy Senna

Novelist and essayist Danzy Senna’s personal investigation into her family’s past uncovers the complex and often painful history of race, class, and identity that shaped her upbringing. Senna is the daughter of two American writers from completely different backgrounds, her mother, a white woman from a prominent Boston family, and her father, a Black man from a struggling single-mother household. The marriage was tumultuous and her search to understand herself and her parents takes her through generations of Black and white ancestors, revealing hidden truths and uncomfortable realities.  

Announcing the Winner of March Gradness

Posted on by Katie

After an exciting week and a half of voting, March Gradness has officially come to a close. There were some heavy hitters in this year’s bracket, but only one book can rule them all. Before we announce the winner, let’s take a look at how our bracket predictions played out.

Those who have been following this competition over the years may recall that last year, our staff brackets went poorly, to say the least. Every one of us completely biffed it. This year didn’t go much better. Out of a maximum of 120 points, our winner was Associate Editor Preety Sidhu, who scored a total of 70. Last year’s winner didn’t even crest the halfway point, so at least we can say we’re improving!

From there, it only gets worse. Managing Editor Wynter K. Miller came in second with 66 and Senior Editor Katie Henken Robinson clocked in third place with 57. Our lowest score went to Executive Director Halimah Marcus, whose total came to a staggering 47, losing even to Commuter Editor Kelly Luce, who failed to fill out her bracket to completion. Halimah has retroactively claimed this poor performance was a “leadership strategy” to make the rest of the team “feel successful”…but we have our doubts.

We also asked for our readers to fill out brackets, and for the most part, these went about as well as ours did. It’s harder than it looks to predict these book competitions! Our winner was Lauren Hutton, a former intern here at EL, who beat all of us total of 77 points. Congratulations, Lauren!

Now, without further ado, the title of Best Campus Novel goes to (drumroll please)…Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou!

This campus novel won some very difficult battles along the way, beating out major contender The Idiot and predicted winner The Secret History. And it wasn’t even close! Disorientation didn’t just win, it destroyed the competition in the finals.

For those who have been following along, here’s how the full bracket played out:

Thanks to everyone who played! We can’t wait to do it again next year with yet another pun-based bracket.

8 Debut Poetry Collections by Poets over 40

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

There are times when everything, including poetry, feels like a young person’s game. And it’s undeniably impressive when a poet in their twenties—or even younger—lands a poem in a prestigious journal or publishes their first book. But this list celebrates debut collections published when their authors were over 40, some much older. Publishing a first book later in life is a distinctive achievement, celebrated by contests both longstanding (like American Poetry Review’s Stern Prize) and more recent (like Two Sylvias Press’s Wilder Series and Wesleyan University Press’s Cardinal Poetry Prize). 

None of these books could have been written by a twenty-year-old. While, like any debut, the books introduce the concerns and voices of their poets as ars poeticas, they have clearly been constructed over time. They’re reflective and meditative, and dive deeply into subjects like the aging body (menopause, illness, hysterectomies) and experiences more common to middle life like losing one’s parents. 

When my debut full-length poetry collection, Law of the Letter, is published this spring, I’ll be 42. If you’d told me this when I was twenty-two, I would have been devastated. But while I kept writing throughout my twenties and thirties, I didn’t pursue or really even understand the mechanisms of publishing, MFAs, or self-promotion. After I started to apprehend how things worked (mostly due to the community and low-cost, low-time commitment opportunities I found through Women Who Submit and the AWP Writer to Writer mentoring program), it still took me years to assemble a manuscript and find it a home with Inlandia Books. And while the book does contain one (revised) poem from my senior thesis, it is not a book I could have written twenty years ago. 

These collections, all debuts from poets over 40, stand apart from those written earlier in life, carrying the depth, reflection, and perspective that come with time. They’re a testament to the fact that creativity has no expiration date—and that some of the most remarkable voices gain recognition later in life, along with the insight that comes with time.

Sister Tongue زبان خواهر  by Farnaz Fatemi

In Sister Tongue, selected by Tracy K. Smith for The Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, Farnaz Fatemi reflects on and integrates years of experiences about language and inheritance, about what can be translated and what cannot. Fatemi looks at multiple facets of these subjects from many angles, sifting new meaning from each. In between poems about language, family, and femininity, she chronicles a journey to Iran, filled with the subtleties of a child of immigrants returning to the motherland: “I am trying to explain what it feels like to have not come from a place and to have come from the very same place.” The feeling she evokes is so familiar—like straining to hear words coming from another room and not quite catching them. Trying carefully to use the right words in another language, but knowing you will never be truly fluent. The story that unfolds in many tongues, both physical and metaphorical, is about the lifelong attempt to understand oneself in the context of family and culture. As Fatemi writes: ”I want the foreigner in me / to meet the foreigner in me.”

Things I Didn’t Do With This Body by Amanda Gunn

Amanda Gunn’s debut collection also takes a long view, starting with a section of family portraits, and moving into a series of poems about Harriet Tubman. Ancestry and inheritance root this collection in such specific and tender ways. Relationships are captured with striking and resonant detail—“She was eleven years old / too old to measure her worship with the span of her arms, / to say, I love you this much, / but still aching to.” These lines represent the very much embodied nature of Gunn’s poems, also reflected in the book’s title. Gunn draws skillfully on taste and smell, which of course are the senses linked most strongly with memory, to evoke places and people—Shalimar and Oscar de la Renta perfumes, the sensory details of baking. Form-wise, Gunn leaps expertly from prose poem to syllabic stanzas to sonnets I didn’t realize at first were sonnets because of their subtle rhymes, and the incorporation into iambic pentameter of words like fritillary. In the title poem and others, Gunn reflects on a body that has experienced a seasoned spectrum of experiences, from loss and disappointment to sexiness and danger. 

I Was a Bell by M. Soledad Caballero

“It’s going to take bodies; it always does.” This opening line of M. Soledad Caballero’s poem “What It Takes” lies at the intersection of several of the themes of her collection I Was a Bell: migration from the terror of Pinochet’s rule in Chile, the ravages of cancer, and the sometimes grueling process of simply living. Like all good poets, Caballero approaches these topics from bracingly original angles; there’s nothing maudlin or self-pitying here. There is instead a gallows sensibility—sometimes humor, but more often a clear-eyed, Dickinsonian acknowledgement that death (of humans, animals, empires) is always around the corner. The speakers in these poems imagine and experience worst-case scenarios while the world continues—elections unfold, hair is lost to chemotherapy, and birds travel throughout the book while the poet watches and names them. The title poem, which unfolds in four searing sections, considers a specific female body, how the perceptions of it by both its owner and others change over time and through disease. “You were a musician. / I was a bell” is one in a list of equally powerful images, rendered unblinkingly.

Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer

Two intertwined subjects constitute many of the poems in Abbie Kiefer’s collection: the death of the speaker’s mother, and the speaker’s hometown in Maine. Kiefer uses them to deftly illuminate each other, describing place and grief intimately and specifically, and reminding us that  nothing ever remains the same. The word “certain” in the title emphasizes the only certainties in life: death and the passage of time. Time is a an integral mechanism of Certain Shelter’s progression: “When My Mom Has Been Dead Eight Months, They Tear Down Lucky Candlepin” appears early in the book, and then, later: “When My Mom Has Been Dead Two Years, the Old Bowling Alley Lot Is Still Empty.” Several poems describe revitalization efforts that make it further than the bowling alley, but can’t compare to what once was; the image that stirs the most hope in the speaker is a bonfire made of industrial remnants. Kiefer writes: “I’m so tired / of writing all these sad, sad poems. / As if my life is only a meditation on its own end.” But poets have always written about grief and death, and these are powerful meditations on both. 

Susto by Tommy Archuleta

In the afterword to Susto, Tommy Archuleta reveals the stimulus for the collection: a homemade book of curanderismo found among his mother’s possessions after she died. Interspersed throughout Susto are remedies that could be found there: rituals to call a soul back from the dead, to contact the dead, to ward off unwelcomed visions. Their pace and sequencing parallel the flow of grief in stages, in waves. The rest of Archuleta’s book is made up mostly of short, untitled poems that read like compact sonnets with devastating voltas, like this one about a soldier: “He’s home now / for good / says his mother / Yes home now / for good / say the wolves.” The poems are full of ghosts and talismans, of disquiet over who will honor the dead and how. The book’s epigraph comes from another book about curanderismo and defines “sus” as 1) shock and 2) magical fright. In Susto, Archuleta illuminates the ways that both of these ideas permeate and shape grief.

The Edge of Known Things by Kelly Madigan

“Sometimes you won’t see a person for miles,” Kelly Madigan writes in The Edge of Known Things. It’s true of that poem but also of this collection, in which the natural world is the only truly knowable world. Where humanity does show up to intersect with nature, there is often violence, conveyed in startling images and sharp language—young boys poking a possum with a stick, the shape of a tarantula’s heart. The realms of memory and perception are much less reliable in Madigan’s poems. There’s something just off-balance about every attempt to remember or sense—a feeling particularly striking in the poem “Memory as Lighthouse, Memory as Bomb” and in the final poem, “Reliquary,” which imagines other forms death might take besides a tunnel of light. Lines repeat in different poems throughout the collection, creating a sense of disorientation. It’s not an unpleasant sensation, but an invigorating one.

The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt

The Kingfisher, the first of five collections published during Amy Clampitt’s lifetime, came out when she was 63. The poems are incredibly meticulous; part of the marvel of reading them is discovering their inventive rhyme schemes and compact sonnet or sonnet-like forms. Clampitt rolls out phrase after chewy phrase without being too precious about their cleverness: “carnivorous rubies,” “shuddering orifices of summer,” “rancor of cypresses,” “castles’ elephantine hooves.” A longtime reference librarian at the Audubon Society, her details (whether domestic or natural) are intensely observed. The book’s epigraph is from Hopkins, while Marianne Moore is named in the first poem, and Clampitt clearly draws from their exuberance and precision, respectively. What struck me on this reading, though, is the central character of time. Time prevents the speaker from reintegrating into the Midwest of her childhood, from observing firsthand the centuries required to make sea glass. Clampitt ends the poem “A Procession at Candlemas” with the heart-piercing line “the sorrow / of things moving back to where they came from.” 

Voyage of the Sable Venus by Robin Coste Lewis

You probably don’t need anyone to tell you about Voyage of the Sable Venus, the first debut by a Black author to win the National Book Award for poetry. But in case you’ve never read it: the book is anchored by the title poem, a long assemblage whose lines are made up entirely of the titles of art and artifacts that depict, or are created by, Black women. Lewis leads into the poem by describing the rules she used to choose the titles. The poem represents a mind-boggling amount of labor and art, using repetition and forced proximity, among other techniques, to yield such gems as “measuring and pacing Playland–Comrades! / The Sun God and the Poet / swinging in the park.”  In the first section of two that bookend the central poem, Lewis meditates on ancestry, beauty, and history in specific, embodied ways. It’s formally adventurous, some poems using rearrangement or cento-like forms, but there are also sonnets, tercets, and an ekphrastic series about The Wiz. The last section plumbs nearly-unspeakable depths of trauma, and how childhood educations (formal and informal) shaped the poet’s ideas about family, violence, and text. In “Art & Craft,” for example, Lewis hits us with: “A B was good, but an A was too good.  They’d kick your ass, call your big sister/ slow, then stare over your desk, as if you’d // snaked out of a different hole.” It’s a momentous book, one that warrants several re-reads. 

8 Books Featuring Cats as Characters

Posted on by Jo Lou

Have you noticed the cats-on-book-covers trend lately? I sure have. Clearly, someone in publishing has decided that cats on covers sell books. Today, there are approximately 600 million cats in the world, and in the United States, 25% of households have cats. So maybe this publishing trend is actually onto something. 

As a diehard cat lover, I will pretty much buy anything and everything emblazoned with a cute cat design—household items, clothing, accessories, books and whatnot. Yup, I’m a sucker. So, I cannot stress how disappointing it is to purchase a new book with an adorable cat on the cover, only to find out there are no actual cats in the story. Zero, zilch, none whatsoever. What a total letdown—the same kind of letdown a hungry (or not-so-hungry) cat experiences when staring down at an empty food bowl.

 It’s one of the reasons I was compelled to write my debut adult fiction book, Cat’s People—a story for, and about cat people. Not only does my book have a cat-emblazoned cover in the loveliest shade of pink, but in its pages you will also find six points of view filled with heart, love, humor and kindness, one of which is a stray cat named Cat.

This reading list captures the full spectrum of catness, from mischievous troublemakers to wise companions, and everything in between. Whether you’re looking for a heartwarming or heartbreaking tale, a bit of mystery, a rollicking adventure, or even a little romance, these books celebrate cats in all their furry glory. So, if you’re tired of being duped by cat-covered books that have nothing to do with actual cats, this list of memorable feline characters is for you.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

Many of you have likely read this extremely popular novel by Backman, but for those who haven’t, it combines two of my favorite tropes: grumpy old man with a heart of gold, and cat hater who begrudgingly transforms into cat lover. The cover is also pitch-perfect, allowing you a glimpse into the story about an old man with his back to the world and a scruffy-looking cat in need of a home Velcro-ed to his legs. As the central character Ove reluctantly allows the world back into his cold, deadened heart, his disdain for the stray creature he fondly calls Cat Annoyance is eventually replaced with care and affection, allowing Ove to fully evolve into the feline servant he was meant to be. Make sure to keep a box of tissues nearby, because I guarantee you will need them. 

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

Over the last decade or so, Japanese authors seem to have cornered the market on ultra-cozy books featuring cats. It’s not all that surprising since cats have long been revered in Japan due to the belief that cats bring good luck and fortune. Who am I to argue with that? In fact, there are so many translations of Japanese cat-centric novels that I could have probably written this entire article about them. For the sake of variety, though, I have chosen to feature my favorite of the bunch. To me, The Travelling Cat Chronicles has it all—a main character named Satoru who is kind, in touch with his emotions, and overall the kind of human being you would want to be lifelong friends with; a cat narrator named Nana, who is funny, full of snark, observant, curious and somewhat in denial of his attachment to his human; a scenic road trip across Japan in a silver van; and a bittersweet ending that will have you once again reaching for that box of tissues. I promise, not all of the books on this list will make you bawl your eyes out. 

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman and The Conrad the Cat Detective Series by L.T. Shearer

We all know the saying, “curiosity killed the cat,” so it seems logical that cats and mysteries should go hand-in-hand. Except, in these cozy mysteries full of humor and heart, it isn’t the cats who are killed (thank goodness!). In the case of We Solve Murders, the new series by beloved author Richard Osman, Trouble the cat plays more of a supporting, therapeutic role for his human Steve Wheeler, a retired police officer. Steve, a homebody at heart, yearns for a quiet life where he can spend time at home with Trouble, watching TV, attending weekly pub quizzes with friends, and taking strolls around the picturesque village where he lives. When his daughter-in-law, Amy, is framed for the murders of her former high-profile clients, Steve must leave the creature comforts of home, and Trouble, to help her. As a cat lover, I know how very hard it is to leave my cats for extended periods of time. So it comes as no surprise that Steve will have to solve this mystery in a jiff so he can hurry home to his beloved Trouble. 

In the Conrad the Cat series by L.T. Shearer, the first of the series being The Cat Who Caught a Killer, the cat character named Conrad is a former stray who plays a more central role in the mysteries. Conrad spends his days assisting his human, Lulu Lewis, also a retired police officer, as she solves murders. And when I say assist, I mean it in the most hands-on sense, or rather, paws-on sense. Because Conrad is a very special cat, one who can actually talk. Although he only chooses to converse with Lulu. Some readers might find it hard to suspend their disbelief with regards to a cat who can actually talk out loud. But that’s what makes this series so much fun. Haven’t we all looked at our cats or dogs at home and wished they could sometimes speak to us?

Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert and Crazy Stupid Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams

Romance lovers rejoice! It turns out that romance and cats are quite the winning combination. And if you’re a cat lover, the idea of strangers meeting and chatting about their mutual affection for cats, or one trying to convince the other that cats are not to be disdained, is likely a familiar scenario. I can’t tell you how often I’ve been in situations from my day-to-day life where I’ve struck up conversations with total strangers about cats. It’s a known fact, really, that cat people have a knack for finding one another. This, of course, creates the optimal condition for a meet-cute.

And a meet-cute is exactly how Get a Life, Chloe Brown by Talia Hibbert gets started. In the first scene between the protagonists, Chloe is failing miserably at convincing a stray cat to come down from a tree. She climbs up, and of course, gets stuck. Then along comes Red, not only to help Chloe rescue the cat, but to rescue her as well. It’s the absolute perfect start to this grumpy and sunshine romance.

Crazy Stupid Bromance by Lyssa Kay Adams, a friends-to-lovers romance, features Alexis Carlisle, a main character who is indeed mad about cats. So much so, that she has opened ToeBeans, a cat cafe that becomes a refuge not only to rescue cats, but to survivors of sexual violence as well. Unlike Chloe, Alexis doesn’t have a handsome stranger swoop in to rescue her. Instead, it’s her friend Noah who stands by her side. Except, well, he has been secretly in love with her for a long time—so in love that he has to pretend he isn’t scared of her somewhat deranged cat, Beefcake. The scenes between Noah and Beefcake are the absolute best. This line from the book pretty much sums it up: “Beefcake opened his mouth and dropped the remains of a dead mouse on his chest.”  

Starter Villain by John Scalzi and Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

If action is more your thing, boy, do I have some recommendations for you. Let’s start with Starter Villain, a wholly original, satirical sci-fi romp by the prolific John Scalzi. This book may just have the best cat-themed cover ever. Have you ever imagined your cat as an evil villain secretly plotting to take over the world? Well, that’s pretty much the vibes of the artwork here. And the plot is exactly that. The narrator, Charlie Fitzer, is a substitute teacher living in his childhood home with a cat named Hera, and another recent kitten rescue he names Persephone. One day, he suddenly inherits a supervillain empire from his recently deceased uncle. He is then whisked off to the volcano lair headquarters, because what is a supervillain empire without its volcano lair? Soon, Charlie will find out who really runs the show—a group of sentient genetically enhanced cats who unbeknownst to him, have been manipulating his entire life. If you’re a fan of the Austin Powers film franchise and popcorn books, this one is definitely for you. 

Speaking of popcorn books, the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is definitely worthy of a big bowl of buttery popcorn. It features a unique, humorous and action-packed story set in an end-of-the-world scenario, after an alien invasion kills almost the entire human population. The survivors are left with two choices—to try and live on whatever is left on the planet, or to join a cruel and deadly intergalactic reality show. That’s when we meet Carl, a Coast Guard veteran, who was clumsily trying to rescue his ex-girlfriend’s show cat, Princess Donut from a tree when the world annihilating event happened. Half-naked, and wearing a pair of Crocs several sizes too small, he makes the split-second decision to join the games. Needless to say, Princess Donut is the real star of the reality show, with her supremely indifferent attitude and unexpected heroics. 

Exclusive Cover Reveal of “Lightbreakers” by Aja Gabel

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel, which will be published by Riverhead Books on November 4, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.

In the beginning, there was happiness. Maya, an artist obsessed with the nature of beauty, and Noah, a quantum physicist preoccupied by the mysteries of the universe, found in each other a shared curiosity about the world. But beneath the surface of their happy marriage is a third rail: Serena, the lost child that Noah had with his ex-wife, Eileen.

One day Noah gets a call from an eccentric billionaire, asking him to participate in a clandestine project aiming to unravel the secrets of time and consciousness. The couple agrees to relocate to the Janus Lab, deep in the desert, where Noah finds himself drawn into a dangerous kind of time travel that could result in seeing Serena again.

As Noah delves into this groundbreaking, fringe work, his past begins to overtake him. And when his ex-wife, Eileen, joins the project, Maya embarks on a journey back to her own past, one that takes her to Japan, to her family, and to a formative lover who once shattered her heart. As Noah, Maya, and Eileen grapple with the balance between holding on and letting go, new information emerges that the Janus Lab might not be exactly what it seems.  

A heart-achingly moving novel, Lightbreakers plumbs the mysteries of human connection, and explores how to love in a world where time is both a healer and a thief.

Here is the cover, designed by Sara Wood.

Aja Gabel: “My book is about grief, but it isn’t a sad book. It is about living: how to breathe in the wake of loss, how to love someone who has been changed by tragedy, and how to move between versions of yourself. So when it came to the cover, I wasn’t sure how we would find a way to communicate that balance between loss and love. But this cover achieves that beyond what I could have imagined. The design is viscerally alive with vibrant, warm colors, the shades of a sun either just rising or about to set. The graphic elements—the vultures, the man and the woman, the cactus—all have movement and shape, even as they exist on separate planes, in search of each other. And hands down my favorite part of the cover is the orange and pink pattern. For me it represents the speculative elements of Lightbreakers by making visual the idea of a time portal, of shifting between memories and possible lives, while also exuding warmth and hope. 

There’s something else about the cover that feels personal to me. When I was a preteen, I found in my parents’ book collection a mid-70s edition of Walter Tevis’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, about an alien who comes to Earth in the form of a human, looking for a way to bring his people with him. I immediately read it and then read it again, and it was pivotal to my early love of speculative fiction. The cover featured David Bowie’s profile (he played the alien in the movie adaptation) in an upside down triangle set against a burnt orange planet, with lettering that was somehow both futuristic and antiquated. When I saw the Lightbreakers cover, I instantly thought of The Man Who Fell to Earth. In an almost Easter egg way, it subtly recalls those retro sci-fi book covers with its saturated graphics, a focus on geometric shapes, and an elongated mid-century font. I like to think of the resonance as a nod to that younger version of me who was first electrified by the idea of the impossible woven into the fabric of our reality, only visible if you had a flexible imagination and a borderless heart.”

Sara Wood: “For this cover I wanted to capture the shared and disparate journeys of Noah and Maya as they reach into their individual pasts. The pattern of repeated, overlapping circles represents the ‘episodic fold’ experiments conducted at Janus Labs, as well as the natural accumulations of human memory. You can see Noah and Maya each walking into this pattern, with the looming prickly pear cactus—a staple of the West Texan high desert—standing between them. Ominous turkey vultures—a persistent artistic symbol for Maya—circle above, signaling a passage from one life phase to the next. As much as these characters struggle with the push/pull of their quantum entanglement, there is so much warmth and beauty throughout this story, and I definitely had that feeling in mind when selecting the cover’s color palette.”

There’s Something Unsettling About the Neighbors

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

An excerpt from Human/Animal by Amie Souza Reilly

I. What Happened

to badger/to ape

In late August 2014, we moved into an old white house with green shutters. It was within walking distance to the station where I and my husband would catch our daily trains. The middle school my six-year-old would someday attend was also down the street, a selling point that back then seemed like a far-off future, but now that he is older seems like an impossible past. This house has hardwood floors and leaded glass windows. The ropes inside the windows snapped ages ago, so we hold them open with thick sticks. You can feel the horsehair in the plaster walls if you run your hand over certain spots. There is a bedroom at either end of the hallway upstairs, and a tiny office with a pull-string light. Outside, a patio laid from old bricks and two walnut trees held up a hammock. The beach is nearby, only a very long walk or a moderate bike ride away. In The Sea Around Us, Rachel Carson writes, “Beginnings are apt to be shadowy.” I had just gotten remarried and was about to start graduate school. For the first three years we lived here, we were stalked. The men following us were brothers. They had grown up in and still owned, though no longer lived in, the little yellow house with which we shared a driveway. Jim spoke slowly and deliberately and wore gray-tinted glasses. Wes had a ponytail curling out from beneath a dark blue baseball hat. He spoke in chaos—repetitive, jumpy, and self-congratulatory. Both were White, tall, and in their sixties. They drove a silver Buick Century. 

We were returning from a walk the first time we caught them in our driveway, standing close to our house, arms crossed and waiting for us as if we’d broken curfew. Days before, in a lawyer’s office, after we’d signed the papers and held the keys to our new house, our real estate agent told us these neighbors were nosy, but mostly harmless. Did she emphasize mostly? In our driveway, they introduced themselves with their hands out, walking closer and closer to us. Wes pointed at their yellow house and said, This is the house that was built for us, then Jim followed with, We know all the families who’ve ever lived in your house, and then one of them said, We gave Jerry that statue in your backyard. I didn’t realize we’d been walking backward. By the time they stopped talking, they had backed us up against our door. I am a woman who often feels afraid around men. My fear is gut-deep, learned through culture and history and also from my mother. I anticipate feeling afraid, or at least wary, in meeting rooms and in bars and on elevators and in parking garages because these are places where I have been shouted at, leered at, groped, and followed. But I did not expect to feel this kind of fear in my new house with my new husband. This house is on a street I had driven down countless times before, in a town I had already lived in for fifteen years. My husband had been my boyfriend for several years before we’d married. The familiarity of city, street, and partner were a comfort. The familiarity of fear, though familiar, was unexpected. “Fluency in fear—and making us police ourselves—is how women are kept in check,” writes Pumla Dineo Gqola.1 Even with my back against our house, as Matt opened the door and hurriedly let us in, I smiled at the brothers, nodded, and said, It is so nice to meet you.

Badger: v. To haggle, drive a bargain. Also, to pester, to bother, to ply with repeated and irritating requests to do something. Probably an allusion to the baiting of badgers by humans. (See also fish, also clam.) Uses of badger in the seventeenth century allude to the supposed tenacity of the animal’s bite, gripping so hard its teeth meet.

Our house is nearly 150 years old. This means it wasn’t possible for Wes and Jim to have known all the families who’d lived here before us. As they backed us into our door, Wes told us they also knew where we had lived before. The way you decorated, he said, we can tell you are good people. (I would have thought, There is too much subjectivity to correlate a person’s “goodness” with their art, but they were standing so close to me.) We realized, after we told them we had to go, after we opened the door enough to get inside, after we closed and locked ourselves in, that this was another impossible claim. We had not lived together before. Whose house had they seen? Whether it was Matt’s house or mine, in order for the brothers to have seen the rooms we’d lived in, they could have come to an open house. Or worse, they peered in the windows. Imagine two faces pressed against locked glass. The boldness of daytime voyeurism.

Our real estate agent told us these neighbors were nosy, but mostly harmless.

I am not guiltless in the act of snooping. I have scrolled strangers’ social media accounts, have googled the names of people I am about to meet, or have recently met, or would like to someday meet. I’ve peeked through cracks in doors, pressed my ear against a wall to hear private conversations. The difference between their voyeurism and mine is I never told those I spied on what I had done. I knew to keep my acts a secret. Nosy, but mostly harmless. But Wes and Jim told us they had seen inside one of our houses, had copped to their nosiness. That could only mean they wanted us to know they had been looking.

In her book Staring: How We Look, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson writes “…staring at once provokes and paralyzes its object, eliciting both anger and anxiety.”2 Once inside our house, my fists clenched and ready, I wanted to hit them. For the rest of the evening, I worried over curtains—we hadn’t bought any yet. We rifled through unpacked boxes, found towels, a few blankets, some nails, and a hammer and covered up all the windows.

Garland-Thomson goes on to write about staring as an act of dominance, enforcing social hierarchies and regulating access to resources. Here is a conversation I dismissed when it first happened: Just after we put in the offer to buy this house, before we received word the sellers accepted, our real estate agent called. She said another bid had come in, higher, and in cash. We could not offer more money and did not have that kind of cash. We were nervous. We did not have a backup plan. And then, overnight, we got the all clear. The current homeowners are not interested in selling to anyone else. We mistook this as a sign of good luck. In our gratitude, we did not ask questions.

The day after our neighbors’ forceful introduction, they came back. I saw them in the yard when I left to catch my train. It was shortly after lunch. My classes all happened in the evenings, in the Bronx, a two-hour train ride away. I waved to them but quickened my steps. Wes shouted at my back as I walked away. We offered Jerry more money for that house, you know. And we offered him cash. He paused, waited for me to react, but I did not turn around. For a moment, I did not move at all; no fight or flight, only freeze. But they didn’t like us. They said they like you better. The brothers’ first attempt to own this house was to buy us out, and though it failed, it was quickly clear they were not ready to give up. I didn’t know how to respond to Wes, so I left. I got on my train and went to class. When I returned home, I found a note from them in our mailbox taped to a small gift bag. Inside the bag, a candleholder from IKEA. Inside the card, they had written: Congratulations Reilly family! May God bless your home. I threw it all away.

We didn’t see them every day. Mostly they lived in another town. In a house like yours. But bigger. Much bigger, they told us. Another flex of strength. (Did I look it up? Of course. I saw on Google Street View that it was a very large colonial, new construction. White like ours, but without shutters. Dozens of small American flags lined the garden and the walkway.) But at least once a week, they arrived next door. Several times, we caught them walking the perimeter of our backyard. Once, they lifted the lid and poked through our compost bin. During every visit, I watched them pluck at invisible tufts of grass in their front lawn until their plastic solar lights flicked on. After the grass, they picked up sticks, from their yard and ours, and then dumped the small twig—piles across the street, beneath a tree at the end of another neighbor’s driveway. 

They wanted us to know they had been looking.

They learned our schedules quickly and pulled into their driveway twice a week at the same time I left to walk to the bus stop at the end of my son’s school day. When I started picking him up at school instead, I saw their silver Buick drive past us as we pulled into the doughnut shop. At home in our living room, whenever something cut across the outside light and cast a shadow on the porch, we froze, hair on end, eyes widened, and listened.

Their car’s loose muffler rumbled. I could hear when it crested the hill—a warning, and so my ears stayed tuned. Here’s Gqola again, on female fear: “This heightened vigilance requires that women consider how they will fight back, or modify their behaviour, to try and remain safe.” Running up to our attic, where the air was hot and dusty with exposed insulation, I watched them, unseen, from a small window. As I looked down, I questioned what they were capable of, worried whether we were safe. Mostly harmless, the real estate agent had said. They are a little odd, the previous owners told us. But if that’s all they were, then why did my skin go slick whenever I heard them pull up?

For the nine hundred forty-three days we lived next to them, I was always waiting for them to arrive. As I waited, I imagined what it would feel like to close Wes’s hands in my car door or hit him with sacks of oranges. I thought about running them over, or spraying their driveway with water and letting it freeze so Jim would slip and fall. Even though I have always hated guns, one night, I sat on our couch and started a whisper-debate with my husband about getting one, just in case.

I felt afraid, though for the first few months we lived here the reason for my fear was hard to pinpoint. In the beginning, there were no overt threats, but they stood too close, said peculiar things, stood in our yard uninvited and stared. Back then, I felt I should be able to dismiss these behaviors, that though I felt something off, I could have been overreacting. But the language in those warnings from the agent and Jerry felt coded, couched; mostly harmless, a little strange.

Even if I wasn’t immediately certain why I was afraid of them, I recognized my physical reactions to them. I hesitated to say hello, felt a yawning pit in my gut when I saw them. I always wanted to know when they were outside and then, when they did arrive, I’d shut all the windows. These were feelings I’d had before, moves I’d made in other situations in order to avoid men I’d perceived to be threatening. From Gqola: “Patriarchy runs on fear, fear of being an outsider, fear of being brutalized, fear of being too much, too inadequate, too vocal, or too different.”3

The hold they had over me was recognizable because it was familiar. And the more I watched them, it became clear that they saw themselves as a team—the two of them against the neighborhood, perhaps even me, specifically. The smirks, the repetitive door slamming, the dumped yard waste, the positions of their bodies as they stood in our yard and stared appeared to be strategic moves, as if they came here to play a game where only they knew the rules. French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes wrote that the exclusion of women’s bodies is the foundation masculinity is built upon, because it is in such moments “that their famous male bonding takes place.”4 Men together hold more potential for violence than a man alone.

When bell hooks wrote about a group of White men she observed walking in front of her in New Haven, she noticed how they become louder and stronger in a group. As she listened to them talk and categorize the women they had sex with, she also noticed how they “claim the body of the colored Other instrumentally, as unexplored terrain, a symbolic frontier that will be fertile ground for their reconstruction of the masculine norm.”5 Not only a game of exclusion, but conquest. hooks’ language evokes images of westward-driving settler colonizers. The women those young men were talking about rendered not as human beings, but as property, like land to be stood upon, claimed, owned. They hadn’t even noticed bell hooks walking behind them. Racism and sexism, as well as classism and ableism, intersect to perpetuate the power dynamics implicit in the brotherhood Despentes and hooks describe. Anyone outside of that brotherhood of straight, White, able-bodied men of some financial comfort becomes feminized, mocked, dominated, dubbed as Other. Before seeing us, Jim and Wes assumed economic superiority, tried to outbid us on our house. A year later, Wes tried to embarrass my husband with homophobic taunts. When they learned of my previous divorce, they repeatedly mentioned it as a failure of my character. In 2019, in a tweet echoing the ways men have been calling women hysterical, Donald Trump told teen climate activist Greta Thunberg to “work on her anger management problem” after she won Time Magazine’s Person of the Year award.6 In 2022, Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell voted against legislation that would protect interracial marriage.7 In August 2023, Texas governor Greg Abbott placed a row of buoys affixed with sawblades into the Rio Grande to maim anyone attempting to climb over the border.8 There is a comradery in cruelty.

There is a comradery in cruelty.

Whenever the brothers arrived, they brought stuff—boxes of Entenmann’s baked goods, stacks of newspapers and magazines. Once, I came home from the post office and there was a three-foot- tall stuffed banana propped against their garage. Each holiday, they put a new wreath on the door and a new garland on the railing. Nothing ever came back out of their house. I am reminded of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch off the coast of California, that floating tangle of plastic that will never go away, large enough to be seen from space. They never rolled out the bins on trash night, never moved the filthy car parked in their garage out into the light.Even though I watched them carry brown paper bags and canvas totes up their three front steps and inside their front door while thinking of and planning their deaths, (if not oranges, then perhaps a sock filled with loose change) I had also tried, we had also tried, to show them kindness. As if good deeds might work as a shield. The first winter we lived here, we cleared the snow from their driveway. I waved when I saw them outside, though averted my eyes from theirs. We said hellohowareyou quickly when they walked past us with fists full of sticks. All acts of self-preservation, kindnesses like stiffened elbows to keep them at arm’s length. But if we were only pretending to be nice to avoid getting yelled at, does that diminish our acts?

Ape: v. To imitate, to mimic (pretentiously, irrationally, or absurdly). To mimic the reality. (See also parrot.)

It is strange to write about feeling trapped in my house, afraid of our neighbors, given that we are living with a virus that had, when it began, kept us sequestered inside for so long, afraid of everyone. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as my family tried to adjust to endless time indoors, I grew feral with worry. When we could, we bought groceries in bulk, wiped them down with hand sanitizer and put them in empty coolers in the basement. We were squirreling away food. Upstairs, in an attempt to make us feel safe even if we weren’t, I piled the living room couch with blankets and pillows. Like a nest. It was during those first bleak days when I began making a list of all the animal names we use as verbs.9 The list became our family game. In the middle of eating dinner, or watching television, or taking a masked walk around the block, someone would shout out Peacock! Ferret! Upstairs, in our shared office, I looked up each animal in my OED, taking notes in the order we thought of them. And then I noticed something. Almost every animal, when reconsidered into its verb form, defines an act of violence, labor, or motherhood.

The violence of these verbs is, at times, overt. To bat, to ram, and to slug are all verbs connected to hitting. There is also to goose, which means to grab someone, likely in the rear, likely without consent. These are verbs of attack.

Then there are verbs like to fish and to hawk, which are verbs tied to labor. These are words of work. Additionally, the verb forms of these animal names often mean the hunting of themselves. We can see this not only in to fish, but also to clam and to louse. How often, especially under our American capitalism, is labor an act of violence? To hawk used to mean to hunt with falcons, but more commonly we use it to mean to sell. We also use to squirrel with away as a way of saying to store. Other verbs, like to hog, to wolf, and to swallow are connected to the act of eating, and therefore consumption, which brings us right back to labor and violence.

Labor is also connected to motherhood, both in the birth processes we call labor, and in the invisible work of mothering. The word labor itself means to work and to endure pain or suffer. Verbs like to bear are often used to describe childbirth, as in to bear a child, but we also use to bear in relation to guns, as in to bear arms. Nowadays, to pig is mostly used with out, as in to pig out, which we use to mean to gorge oneself, but to pig once also meant to give birth, though it was used derogatorily. There is violence in these mother-verbs, too, not just because of the inherent blood and pain of birth, but also in the statistics. According to a 2023 PBS News Hour podcast, the maternal mortality rate among Black women in America in the same year was nearly 70 deaths for every 100,000 live births, which is 2.6 times the rate for White women, regardless of income or education.10 America is a country without maternal leave or universal health care, but with endlessly increasing costs for childcare. More recently and with growing frequency, motherhood is a value signifier; politicians argue that a woman’s purpose is tied to motherhood and stay-at-home moms with seemingly endless wealth become social media influencers, while the right to abortion in many states has been restricted or banned.11

Taken collectively, these verbs become metaphors. Although the use of animals in language—as metaphors, dual noun/verbs, and idioms—isn’t unique to English, as I look up each of these words in the OED, I can’t help but think about how the British came here and spread their white violence everywhere. The language I speak is the language of violent power. These animal verbs seem to be a perfect representation of that power.

This is also how I see my neighbors.

Though at first I wasn’t sure why I was afraid, their behavior escalated to more overt acts of violence, of invasion and boundary crossing. My fear was validated, even when I called it into question. And as they threatened, stalked, and shouted at us, something else became clear—their behavior, though troubling, scary even, was not unique. They are just like many other neighbors throughout history and in other American suburbs.

Copyright Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2025.

  1. Gqola, Female Fear Factory, xviii. ↩︎
  2. Garland-Thomson, Staring, 39. ↩︎
  3. Gqola, Female Fear Factory, 67. ↩︎
  4. Despentes, King Kong Theory, 28. ↩︎
  5. hooks, “Eating the Other,” 368. ↩︎
  6. Donald Trump (@realDonalTrump), Twitter (now X), December 12, 2019, 7:22 a.m., https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1205100602025545730?lang=en. ↩︎
  7. Senator Mitch McConnell is married to an Asian American woman. ↩︎
  8. Khaleda Rahman. “Close-Up Video Shows Texas Floating Barrier Has Circular Saws.” Newsweek, August 9, 2023. ↩︎
  9. Grammarians call the verbing of a noun denominalization. ↩︎
  10. PBS NewsHour, “American Black women,” June 28, 2023. ↩︎
  11. In late summer, 2024, fourteen US states have total abortion bans. These states are: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia. ↩︎

In “Freakslaw,” the Carnival Is Where Freaks Take Power and Pleasure Reigns

Posted on by Jo Lou

It’s just another grim and grimy summer in the small Scottish town of Pitlaw when a thrillingly deviant funfair pitches its tents at the town’s edge. It doesn’t take long for the neon charms and colorful company of the Freakslaw, which includes a contortionist witch and her fortune teller mother, a luxuriously sensual fat lady, and a variety of self-professed gender pests and agents of chaos, to begin working on the repressed town’s residents. The menfolk are dangerously riled and the teenagers seduced. The funfair works like one of its own warped mirrors, offering the townsfolk alternate visions of themselves: studious Ruth sees a future beyond the straight path to university, bi-curious Derek glimpses freedom from his violent father.

Not quite a horror or a fantasy novel, Jane Flett’s debut Freakslaw is delightfully dark and experimental, a celebration of the wild pleasures of living in the world and in every variety of human body. Populated by a dazzling cast of characters, the book delves into group dynamics and social mores, community and mass hysteria. In a deeply satisfying build of sex, violence, and mayhem, the novel descends into a kind of spiritual war between our animal—perhaps even magical—natures and the strictures placed upon them by society and the self. 

I spoke with Flett in Berlin about witches, performance, and escape, and why we feel so bad about feeling good, and how good being bad can feel.

Olivia Parkes: What draws you aesthetically and emotionally to the funfair or amusement park? Why did you start there?

Jane Flett: Funfairs are purely based around the idea of pleasure. It’s right there in the name: fun. I love the idea that engineers and performers have worked together to make these rides that fly your body through the air and to give you overloaded sensorial experiences that bring joy or excitement. Entertainment, in that sense, is deeply wonderful to me, and is something I’ve always been drawn to. I become such a child in the space of the funfair, the colors and the neon, the brightness and movement, a giddy, joyful creature, dragging all of my friends to go on terrifying rides until they throw up. I understood over the course of writing the book that this was also about Scotland and the past, and my relationship to it. The amusement park seemed like such a perfect and explicit foil to this lingering Calvinist dourness that I grew up with, to the promotion of suffering as a moral good. It’s a space where instead pleasure and hedonism are explicit aims. 

OP: You grew up in a small Scottish town and have lived now for many years in Berlin, a famously queer city in which communities play a major role. Freakslaw is a story of a clash between worlds. It’s not focused on its individual characters in the way we’ve come to expect from the novel. What made you want to write that kind of story?

The amusement park is a space where instead pleasure and hedonism are explicit aims.

JF: I’m deeply interested in group dynamics and in community, which I think aren’t explored enough in novels. I’m fascinated by how groups operate as places for people to find release and family and community, as well as in how group dynamics can work in the direction of mass hysteria: the ways in which ideas and mentalities can become contagious once you’re within the group. Of course, Berlin is really wonderful in being a kind of queer, magical wonderland, but I had some experience of this already in Scotland, when I first moved to Edinburgh, the big city. I got very involved in arts organizations there, in particular with the Forest Cafe, an alternative space where we ran lots of free events in literature, art, and music. I remember this feeling in my early twenties, of finding these other weirdos who also wanted to make a life around art. It’s being in a group of other people wanting the same thing that makes it feel like an option.

OP: The individual characters who are most important for the action of the book are in fact teenagers: Ruth and Derek from the town, Zed and Nancy from the carnival. What were the pleasures and opportunities of writing about that time of life?

JF: As a teenager, I was really interested in the idea of escape. It was the time when I personally felt the most trapped in my life, but also had the most imagination, a wideness of ideas, a sense of how things might be otherwise. This combination of a total lack of agency while being hyper aware of other possibilities is really interesting to me. I was listening to all of the punk music and reading all of the novels, but at the same time I had very little of my own money and was living with my parents in a small town. The gap between the life I wanted to be living and the life that was in fact living was larger than it has been at any other point in my life. And in some ways, that’s really exciting. I wanted to capture the feeling of the last summer before you leave school and everything is building up to this fever pitch. That feeling of pressure really increased what I was able to do with these teenage characters. There are a lot of external factors keeping them where they are, but at the same time, these rich internal feelings of opportunity, the sense that everything is about to be cracked open. 

OP: The book is set in the late ’90s, when you yourself were a teen. It made me reflect on the ways in which the discussion now around gender identity and queerness is fairly different, but many of the social issues we’ve faced in those areas haven’t progressed much over 30 years. Why did you position the story in that time? 

JF: On a practical level, there are so many more opportunities for stories when you don’t have phones. The way in which fate unfolds when you can’t contact people is completely different: you showed up at this place, you ran into this person. I didn’t realize this until after I wrote the book, but 1997, the year the action takes place, was a really interesting year in the U.K. It was the year Diana died, and the year that Labour won this massive landslide election and came into power, and there was this real sense of Britain under a force of change, as well as this pressure cooker of grief and emotion. And ultimately it led to nothing. I think that was also subconsciously behind that choice. That ‘97 is this year of potential and change and contains this hopefulness for something different, but also the pressure of everything remaining the same. Also, I wanted it to be 400 years since one of the great witchcraft panics in the northeast of Scotland, which was in 1597.

OP: I also felt that the kind of grimy, post-Thatcher vibe worked really well in conjuring the contrast between this small northern town and the colorful Freakslaw. The Freakslaw carnival does in fact center some “classic” freak show acts: you’ve got the pin girl, and Werewolf Louie, a man with hirsutism; you’ve got conjoined twins, and the fat lady, along with various types of queerness and otherness. The book gives us this joyful embrace of, to use its own term, freakery, but there is of course a real history of freak shows to contend with, which profited on the spectacle of other bodies. What tropes were you conscious of working with and against?

JF: That celebration was really the biggest thing that I wanted to come through. I can’t speak for physical disability or some of the other identities within the freak show depicted here, but it started for me from the point of queerness. For such a long time, queer literature occupied the position that being gay is awful and a thing of great suffering: You come out, and it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened. You admit your terrible defect to the world and are rejected for it. There’s the undergirding assumption that obviously you would be heterosexual if you could. And that’s just so far from the reality of the queer people I know. Queerness is the thing that has brought me all the joy and all the good things and all the good people. And I wanted to have that sense in the book, but also to have it around other forms of difference that have been considered to be “defects” or difficulties that imposed suffering. At no point do any of these characters say: Oh, I wish I was more normal. 

I was also thinking a lot about the idea of performance and entertainment, and where the power is held in that dynamic: A performer does something for an audience, gives them something. In the inherited ideas around freak shows that can be seen as a disempowering act: You are a spectacle to be looked at, and people take something from you by looking at you. I was really trying to separate those ideas, to say that by putting yourself forward without shame, saying, this is me, and this otherness is the source of my power, my brilliance. You may come and you may give me your money, and I am getting something from you. I wanted to write a story that put the power into the hands of the performers, who are also like a family and who share and reinforce that power for each other.

OP: We haven’t talked about witches. One of the most unforgettable characters in the book is Nancy, a teen contortionist witch. She’s in some ways quite an ambivalent character, boundary pushing almost to the point of nihilism, but full of passion. We also discover that the town of Pitlaw has a history of burning witches. 

If the revolution and what comes after doesn’t include pleasure, happiness, and happy endings, then that doesn’t feel like the fight I want to be having.

JF: I’m glad you brought up Nancy, because she is my favorite. I find that a lot of readers don’t like her, or they really love her. I’m fascinated by the way people judge books based on whether or not they like the main character, on that as a metric for literary merit. I mean I’ve had reviews in a major Scottish newspaper saying, well, this book is terrible, because this person, this character, Nancy, is bad, and she doesn’t learn any lessons.

OP: I would hate for Nancy to learn anything! 

JF: I’m very drawn to “misbehavior,” to characters that don’t have to be good, characters who make up their own rules, especially when those rules are kind of chaotic. I wish I could embody Nancy’s total chaotic energy. And thinking about witches—that for me comes back to power and agency, and who holds it and who tries to take it away. Many “witches” were women with knowledge of herbal medicine, and they were persecuted because the power of medicine became questionable when it was in the hands of women. I’m also particularly interested in witchcraft in the context of Scotland, in that Scotland often views itself as this marginalized, maligned country who had terrible things done to it: We’re innocent, England did all the terrible things. But Scotland has a brutal history in terms of witchcraft—I think we killed like 15 times more people per capita than England did. 

OP: I was struck by the fact that while the story does contain these supernatural elements, they’re also kind of incidental. It’s not a fantasy book. At the heart, it’s a story about social mores and social power. I got the sense that the actual “magic” in the book is a natural force that people contain within themselves and can either repress or allow to flourish. How did you see the magic operating? 

JF: A bit like a Rorschach test, in that depending on where you’re coming from, you can see it either as a delusion or as a real phenomenon. There’s a scientific explanation for everything that happens in the book, and there are also levels of group hysteria. You can read Gloria, the fortune teller (and Nancy’s mother), as making up some weird ideas about what’s happening, or simply being more conscious of forces that aren’t visible but are present. I’m interested in places where these two kinds of belief come together. My own feeling is that they’re not so different. When you get down to the level of things happening in quantum mechanics, yeah, observation can change how an electron operates. If we’re saying that consciousness can change subatomic matter in the physical world, why then do you not believe that intentions can have an effect? I’m not really interested in magic as a fantastical force that comes in and solves or creates problems, but rather: what happens when people have focused intentions or different views of what even can happen? How can that push up against the world to create either chaos or transformation or both?

OP: Another big thread in this book is, I suppose, hedonism, but of a conscious kind: there’s a conscious embrace within the Freakslaw of desire in all its forms, as well as of ideas. There’s a sense in the book that some of the barriers placed on human freedom and experience are social, but some of them are self-imposed. How were you were thinking about the limits placed on pleasure?

JF: Embracing pleasure is not something that comes naturally to people in Scotland. We have a landscape of suffering and a history of valorizing that kind of suffering. That’s also something I feel in my own life. I can veer endlessly between hedonism and masochism and I’m really interested in those two aspects of sensation or behavior. I’m not really interested in comfort as a place to dwell: I would much rather go out for the long hike in the driving rain, and then come back soaked and sit by the pub fire and feel pleasure because the last thing was so bad. 

I wanted to write about the complicated fight that so many people seem to have with pleasure, the permission they need to feel it. There’s immense guilt attached to “pure” pleasure-seeking: Even if these activities don’t hurt anyone else, if they don’t have a secondary moral impact—they’re not doing something to “improve” ourselves or for the good of the world—then they’re bad. I have a strong belief in tending to our own pleasure and making life a pleasurable experience, that our own personal pleasures are not negligible. I’ve come to think that enjoying moments does in fact makes the world better, not least because we then have more capacity to take actions that make it so. 

OP: And there’s no pleasure without the body. The language around the body in this book is so varied and sticky and lushly weird and beautiful. Attention is drawn to all its difference and possibility as a carrier of pleasure, but also to its animal nature. What do you want to bring through in writing about the body?

JF: I’m always interested in disgust and desire and how they operate together. Disgust is so interesting to me, and the ways in which bodies are disgusting, and how that is key to the pleasure of them. I’m completely uninterested in the sanitized version of our bodies, how polished they’re supposed to be. I want instead to get into the sensation and the feeling, the open bits and the wet bits and the stuff that’s inside them that comes out of them.

OP: In some ways, this a very dark book: it’s a kind of horror story. But the sense I was left with, at the end, was of having read a romance. There’s also a lot of romance in it the book, and I mean true, sappy happy ending kind. What lingered for me were the love stories, Werewolf Louie and the local hairdresser, Derek and Zed. 

JF: Yeah, I love joy. I am such an essentially cheesy person, all the way down. When we talk about endings in the classes I teach, I’ll sometimes ask what kinds of endings people like, and many of them say: ambiguous ones that are a little bit sad. And I’m like, No. I want to end at this point of pure joy. I think especially talking about queer people, talking about marginalized people—I want there to be hope. I want there to be resistance and power and anger against injustice, but the fighting isn’t worth anything if you don’t have the positive vision that you build in the place of that fight, and what you build in place of it has to be based in joy. If the revolution and what comes after doesn’t include pleasure and happiness and happy endings and all the good stuff, then that doesn’t feel like the fight I want to be having.