The Brazilian Novelist Who Inspired Borges, Márquez, and Amado

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A few months ago, I was talking books with a Brazilian colleague when she told me that the most important book written in the Portuguese language was a story from 1881 called Memórias Póstumas de Bras Cubas, or The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, by Machado de Assis.

“How do you write a posthumous memoir?” I had asked her.

“Exactamente,” she told me.

As a reader, I sometimes have to remind myself that the written word existed in South America before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s, the renaissance that brought about many of the masterful works of Jorge Amado, Jorges Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, and Mario Vargas Llosa, among others. It’s an influence and an era that looms so large and monolithic that contemporary writers from the region can feel squeezed out by its largess, and the same can be said for the now-voiceless writers who came before: Who were the authors that inspired such an incredible outpouring of writing from an entire continent? One of them, undoubtedly, was Machado de Assis and his strange masterpiece, often translated in English as Epitaph of a Small Winner.

As a reader, I sometimes have to remind myself that the written word existed in South America before the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s.

Machado’s novel is told by its hero, Bras Cubas, from beyond the grave, starting with his descent into his feverish delirium and his eventual death from pneumonia at sixty-four years old. Only after his death does Cubas backtrack to detail the rest of his life, telling of his upbringing, his work as a bureaucrat, his few loves, and the many appearances of death to the people that Bras meets on his journey through life: a passenger on a ship, his mother, a black butterfly, his lover’s maid, and many others. This strange and humorous preoccupation with death is evident before even the first page, starting with the dedication, “To the first worm that gnawed my flesh.”

If Machado’s endeavor to write an amusing, absurd, inventive life story sounds familiar, it certainly should — in the opening lines, Cubas admits to “have adopted the free form of a Sterne or of a Xavier de Maistre,” referencing Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne and Voyage Around My Room by de Maistre. Cubas, much like Shandy, breaks through the page to engage with the reader, from taking hold of the dedication to promising to delete chapters left in the book to asking the reader to forgive him for sloppy writing. Whole pages are filled in with line drawings, entire chapters left blank in authorial distress, all amid the constant reminders that the words one is reading are not just those of a dead man, but those written by a man after he has died.

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Machado’s willingness to break open the novel as a form could itself be reason enough to read a previously obscure Brazilian author, and it’s tempting to draw a line from Bras Cubas to later, beloved heroes of the Latin American Boom. For instance, there is the first-line announcement of the premeditated death of Santiago Nasar in García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, or Quincas Berro D’Água’s sudden posthumous conversations and reanimation in Jorge Amado’s The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray. Amado, also from Brazil, certainly had Machado in mind while writing Double Death, a novel that begins with its hero dying a smiling death, and is demonstrative of the sort of gallows humor endemic to Brazilian culture.

Amado, also from Brazil, certainly had Machado in mind while writing Double Death, a novel that begins with its hero dying a smiling death, and is demonstrative of the sort of gallows humor endemic to Brazilian culture.

Machado, however, has Cubas do more than laugh at death. While Cubas is away at college in Portugal, he receives word that his mother is dying back home in Brazil, and when he arrives he is just in time to see her pass:

“The next morning, the imminence of death was inescapable. Long was her agony, long and cruel, with a minute, cold, repetitious cruelty that filled me with pain and stupefaction. It was the first time that I had seen anyone die.”

For all the humor and strangeness, Machado is able to couple it with the heartfelt woe and tragedy that comes with life in hindsight, and in that, Cubas’ lifetime feels fluid and circuitous and terribly fleeting. Near the end of his life, and the start of the memoir, Cubas has a fever dream where he meets a Mother Earth-like god named Pandora, who tells him, “‘I know; for I am not only life, I am also death, and you are soon to give me back what I loaned you.’” It’s a comfort, breaking death into an ebb and flow with life, and it’s something you can see frequently in García Márquez’s work as well. In addition to Chronicle, the opening of One Hundred Years of Solitude is a soldier remembering his childhood while facing a firing squad, and Love in the Time of Cholera’s first scene is a doctor discovering a suicide.

By having Cubas narrate from beyond the grave, Machado gives him a definite authority and irreproachable nature that mortal narrators lack:

“I do not deny that [public opinion] sometimes glances this way and examines and judges us, but we dead folk are not concerned about its judgment. You who still live, believe me, there is nothing in the world so monstrously vast as our indifference.”

While nominally a silly and jocularly styled story, the playfulness is couched in pathos and vision of a life and family in Brazil, what Cubas at one point describes as the “voluptuousness of misery.” By the simple nature of its framing, sorrow and regret are baked into the beautiful moments of a posthumous story, such as Cubas’ affair with his love, Virgilia:

Some plants bud and sprout quickly, other are slow and never reach full development. Our love was of the former type; it sprouted with such impetus and so much sap that in a short time it was the largest, the leafiest, and the most exuberant creature of the woods.

Any sort of love or triumph or beauty that occurs in Cubas’ life is terribly tinted by the foreboding truth of those first couple pages, Cubas’ coming demise.

Reading Epitaph of a Small Winner, there’s a tantalizing temptation to raise it up as some sort of anthropological “Lucy” for the explosion of beautiful and unique writing that came about in Latin America in the twentieth century, but it’s likely a false temptation. Machado wrote in Portuguese, and, in a frustrating revelation, his great work wasn’t translated into Spanish until the 1950s, eighty years after it was written, likely too late to have the sort of monumental impact and influence it largely deserves on the Spanish-dominated continent where Machado lived. While the delay of Machado’s arrival in Spanish is anomalous, it is, more importantly, isolating for a brilliant novel that is still lost in the borders of its own culture. Can a book still be beautiful and inventive if it stands alone?

While the delay of Machado’s arrival in Spanish is anomalous, it is, more importantly, isolating for a brilliant novel that is still lost in the borders of its own culture. Can a book still be beautiful and inventive if it stands alone?

By design, Cubas’ narrative is circular — at the close you are tempted to return to the beginning to see how it ends for Cubas, only to be drawn in again, an endless odyssey on the different ways to meet death. The spiraling nature of the story is itself Machado’s attempt to conquer our very mortality, a human interest and story so old it goes all the way back to Gilgamesh. While Gilgamesh sought a secret flower to bring back Enkidu, Machado’s manner of disarming death is much simpler: a quick laugh, a smile.

12 Fictional Bookstores We Wish Were Real

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When I step into a bookstore, whether it’s the smallest, most crammed second-hand shop or a glossy retail chain, I’m always overwhelmed with excitement. Every spine along the shelf is a possibility. I know there is something great hidden among the stacks, if only I can find it. As a kid, my passion for bookstores had a fantastical bent, and I’ll admit that it took me a long time to give up hope that one day, while browsing a seemingly normal bookstore, I’d discover a book of spells, or a long-forgotten mystery, or a portal to another world. When I got a little older, I realized two things: (1) the only place where this actually happens — the portal, the magic— is in the books themselves (okay, let’s be honest—also movies) and (2) I’m not alone in imagining that bookstores hold the key to some sort of fantasy or adventure. Writers of all kinds (novelists, screenplay-wrights, just about anyone who picks up a pen) love to create imaginary bookstores and to fill them with all kinds of intrigue — magic, puzzles, crime, romance, and yes, books! So for all you bookstore-connoisseurs out there, here’s a list of twelve shops where I’d happily spend an afternoon, even if it’s only via my imagination.

1. Monsieur Labisse’s bookshop from The Invention of Hugo Cabret

This children’s book by Brian Selznick takes place in a French train station that’s home to all kinds of interesting spaces, from lookouts hidden behind clock faces to a toy shop jumbled with dolls, puzzles, and parts. Monsieur Labisse’s bookshop is a bibliophile’s dream; its floor-to-ceiling shelves are crammed with beautiful books that just beg to be opened and thumbed through. In short, Labisse’s is what I long for every time I’m stuck browsing the new diet/celebrity memoir table at the Hudson News in Penn Station.

2. Sempere and Sons from The Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy

Set in Barcelona during and after the Spanish Civil War, this trilogy by Carlos Ruiz Zaffron portrays a city that’s muted and tense, and a place where art is dangerous. Within this atmosphere, the bookstore Sempere and Sons becomes a small beacon of warmth, passion, and resistance. It’s a thrilling (and powerful) idea, that selling books can be such an important, political act — one that can even get you killed.

3. Flourish and Blotts from Harry Potter

If it’s easy to spend hours in a regular bookshop, its hard to imagine ever leaving Flourish and Blotts, the magical bookshop in Diagon Alley where every Hogwarts student goes to buy their reading for school. There are thick compendiums of spells and cursed journals and text books that will bite off your finger. It really brings a new meaning to the magic of reading.

4. The Shop Around the Corner from You’ve Got Mail

This unlikely love story is also Nora Ephron’s plea to support your local retailers. Meg Ryan is trying to keep her independent Upper West Side bookshop, The Shop Around the Corner, from going under after Tom Hanks opens a big box bookstore in the neighborhood. The set producers made Ryan’s shop the platonic ideal of a charming family-owned bookstore. There is a cozy children’s nook laden with toys, quirky book displays, framed book covers on the walls, and fluttering pink striped curtains on the windows. If this shop actually existed, I’d definitely drop my children off here for story hour while I went across the street for some wine and a locally sourced cheese plate.

5. Women & Women First from Portlandia

Speaking of quintessential independent bookstores, Women & Women First is your classic West Coast progressive bookstore, where the booksellers are less concerned with selling the merchandise than with making sure you’ve joined the movement. In a meta-twist, the real Portland bookstore where the show filmed, In Other Words, ended their relationship with the show, claiming that Portlandia is “diametrically opposed to our politics and the vision of society we’re organizing to realize.”

6. (The eponymous) Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore

There are certain pokey old bookshops that look like they’re more of the owner’s passion project, or overflow closet space, than a functioning retail venue. When Clay Jannon gets fired from his tech-bot job in San Francisco, he takes a job at just such a bookstore — one that’s open 24-hours despite its serious lack of clientele. Browsing a real life bookstore at 3 a.m., especially one that has ties to a secret society, would be much more exciting than my late-night sessions on Amazon.

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7. Le Cahier Rouge from the Red Notebook

Antoine Laurain is known for capturing “la vie Parisienne,” and if his fictional bookstore Le Cahier Rouge is anything like actual Paris bookstores, then he’s succeeded in making me want to move to France. This is partially motivated by my stomach: in addition to selling books, Le Cahier Rogue is an active literary center that hosts readings with all you can drink vin chaud and savory biscuits.

8. Parnassus on Wheels by Christopher Morley

Written in 1917, Morley’s novel centers around a traveling bookshop called Parnassus. I love this idea and think that we should revive it, along with all other forms of entertainment on wheels, including circuses, fairs, and traveling theater groups.

9. Geiger’s Bookstore from The Big Sleep

The Hollywood of Raymond Chandler’s noir detective novels is hardboiled and seedy, and in The Big Sleep, even the bookstore is criminal. Private investigator Philip Marlowe discovers that Geiger’s books is a front for an illegal pornography business, making it one of the few places where gangsters and bookworms cross paths. (Okay, so there may be a few reasons why this store probably shouldn’t exist after all…)

10. Black Books from Black Books

Here’s more proof that not all great bookshops are warm, kid-friendly places. Black Books, the setting of the absurdist, hilarious British sitcom of the same name, is run by a hard-drinking, smoking, antisocial curmudgeon. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

11. Island Books from The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin

A. J. Fikry, the owner of Island Books on the Nantucket-like Alice Island, is also a bit of a curmudgeon, but he has excuses: he’s a widower, his book sales are plummeting, and his prized collection of Poe poems was just stolen. In addition to its main plot (there is the sudden arrival of an orphaned child, I’ll leave it at that), this novel is an ode to books, bookshops, and book-lovers.

12. The Travel Book Co. in Notting Hill

This reminds me of one of favorite real life speciality bookstores, Idlewild Books in New York City — there is no better place to go and get excited about the vacation you’re taking (or all the vacations you want to take.) The fictional Travel Book Co. does have a few things that Idlewild doesn’t: it’s in the dreamy London neighborhood of Notting Hill, just steps from a picturesque outdoor market, and its charmingly scruffy interior comes with a charmingly scruffy owner, played by — who else — Hugh Grant.

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Late to the Party: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar

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Note: Late to the Party is a new Electric Literature series where we ask writers to read an author that, for some reason, they’ve never read. You can read previous entries here.

Pre-Reading Impressions

Sylvia Plath is often evoked as a symbol of tragedy, depression, and a life cut short. People wonder what Plath could have accomplished had she lived past the age of thirty, for she was an ambitious and, so I’ve been told, an extremely talented writer. I blame my inability to weigh in on her writing myself as a symptom of a greater problem of mine: poetry is severely underrepresented in my reading history, and Plath is foremost a poet.

But I’ve always felt particularly embarrassed about never having read Plath— a glaring hole in my education, I presume, since her only published novel, The Bell Jar, has been cited by various publications as a seminal feminist text. It’s also been referred to as a version of The Catcher in the Rye “for girls,” which seems a bit dismissive to me, in part because The Bell Jar is a novel that even my husband, who ingests books at a much slower clip than I, has read and loved. Besides, describing anything as like a famous book by a man but “for girls” implies that women can’t fully appreciate a coming-of-age novel unless the protagonist and the author are female (and also perhaps suggests that a man would not appreciate a coming-of-age book unless he can identify completely with the lead).

It’s also been referred to as a version of The Catcher in the Rye “for girls,” which seems a bit dismissive to me.

I thought The Bell Jar might be a good place for me to start with Plath’s body of work — I’ve read a ton more novels than I’ve read poetry, and I’ve even read my fair share of J.D. Salinger, so I feel more confident forming an opinion on this work than on her poetry.

I certainly come to The Bell Jar with a lot of associations. Most of all, I can’t shake Hollywood’s infatuation with the book as not just a symbol of depression but perhaps especially the female high school teenager variety of depression. The presence of The Bell Jar in certain films seems to be shorthand for lending credibility and depth to a young woman’s inner turmoil (but of course an intelligent teenage woman would be associated with deep depression — any woman who is aware of her surroundings in the typical American high school can find plenty of things to get her down).

“I hate it when you make me laugh
Even worse when you make me cry”

I think of Julia Stiles’ serious and sarcastic character Kat reading The Bell Jar in the movie 10 Things I Hate About You, as she contemplates college and infuriating but charming Heath Ledger. In the previous decade, the movie Heathers placed the Cliffs Notes for The Bell Jar at the site of Heather Chandler’s death, which was then deemed a suicide, giving Heather a gravitas she had not earned in life. And now Kirsten Dunst is set to make her directorial debut with an adaptation of The Bell Jar starring Dakota Fanning (who, by the way, apparently grew up and turned twenty-three while I was busy blinking or something).

Sylvia Plath did kill herself, after several more pedestrian attempts with pills and whatnot, by placing her head in an oven and turning on the gas, leaving literary nerds possessing a dark sense of humor with a simple Halloween costume idea: fashion a cardboard box into an oven, and place it over your head (I know I’m not the only one who has witnessed this). If Plath’s method of successful suicide hadn’t been so unusual, perhaps her mental state wouldn’t overshadow the discussion of her writing so much?

If Plath’s method of successful suicide hadn’t been so unusual, perhaps her mental state wouldn’t overshadow the discussion of her writing so much?

Who knows, and anyway it doesn’t matter — I want to read Plath’s writing to have an opinion of her that isn’t strictly about her biography, because, it seems, the world will always be rehashing the details of her life (new letters by Plath are scheduled to be published this Fall, and there is mention of some of these letters referencing abuse she endured at the hands of her famous poet husband Ted Hughes).

All this being said, I do admit part of my interest in Plath’s writing is due to my knowledge of certain aspects of her life story. As someone who has been suffering recently with some postpartum depression myself, I’m fascinated by the fact that Plath made sure to protectively block the cracks around the bedroom doors of her sleeping infant and toddler before turning on the gas in the oven. I mean, is this not indicative of a thorough mind? Seriously, though, even when a woman is choosing to leave this world, if she is a mother, is she always compelled to think of the needs of her children first? In addition to her depression, I sympathize with the pulls both of family and of creative ambition that Plath must have struggled through.

Perhaps being in a difficult stage of my life is the worst time to read a novel by a depressed writer who drew on the details of her own experiences for the book’s plot, or perhaps it is the best time. Perhaps reading The Bell Jar would do to me what other books I love have done: make me feel less alone.

Post-Reading Impressions

I’ve been known to find humor in books concerning suicide before, so maybe it says more about me than about Plath that I found this book to be funny. But I don’t think I’m the only one who has laughed at parts of The Bell Jar. In fact, in her introduction to my Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition, Frances McCullough calls The Bell Jar “a very funny book” because of Plath’s “amazing humor.” She also cites an informal focus group of twenty-something women, all of whom loved the book, and many of whom found it “surprisingly undepressing.”

I think the reason The Bell Jar reads as funny and undepressing, despite the fact that it follows protagonist Esther Greenwood through assorted attempts to end her life and shock treatments in an asylum, is that the writing is so sharp and smart. Esther is besieged by societal expectations and pressures, from conventions of marriage and motherhood to attempted date rape, but she never truly succumbs to these pressures or thinks of herself as “less than” because she is a woman — she remains questioning of everything. Esther is not a woman who simply falls into line, which is seemingly part of the reason she is dubbed crazy and in need of treatment.

I can see why The Bell Jar is a favorite of disaffected teen girls struggling with entry into adulthood, though I still enjoyed the book as a thirty-nine-year-old. Esther is ambitious, and these ambitions are in contrast to the college girls who surround her, almost all of whom seem to be working on their MRS degrees above all. Esther considers, “I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.” Now, I don’t think that marriage and parenthood hold as many restrictions for women now as they did in Sylvia Plath’s time, but it is disturbing that this statement of Esther’s can still resonate as much as it does in 2017, as The Bell Jar was first published over fifty years ago, in 1963.

There are moments when the fact that the book was written over fifty years ago become apparent in unfortunate ways, such as Plath’s use of phrases like “yellow as a Chinaman” and “dusky as a bleached-blonde Negress.” These moments did more to take me out of the narrative than dated plot details like weekend visits from Yale boys or New York society luncheons where girls are treated like debutantes (or maybe such things still happen in New York and I’m just not aware of them).

To me, she comes across as a person who is full of strength, and society’s assessment of her as a crazy person reads as the gaslighting that drives her mad.

Mostly, I was drawn to Esther’s unique responses to traumatic events. To me, she comes across as a person who is full of strength, and society’s assessment of her as a crazy person reads as the gaslighting that drives her mad. One example: she recognizes her would-be rapist as a “woman-hater” soon after meeting him for a date, and she wears his bloody fingerprints from their fight on her cheek into the next day, on her train ride from a month-long fellowship in New York City to her mother in the suburbs. “I didn’t really see why people should look at me,” reasoned Esther. “Plenty of people looked queerer than I did.” It’s a complicated action, in that it can be interpreted as both defiant and as the sign of someone who is too exhausted to care (“It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days”).

My takeaway is that the circumstances of Esther Greenwood’s life drove her to madness, but her underlying depression would have been present regardless. As someone who is familiar with depression, I found the portrayal of Esther to be spot on. Her own silence depresses her. A hot bath, one that is hot enough to scald her, one she has to dip her body into very slowly, is often the only thing that can make her feel better. “I never feel so much myself as when I’m in a hot bath,” writes Plath. And I think, same here. In a hot bath, you are alone, and the demands of the world aren’t upon you. You can, in effect, melt away.

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I suppose the realities of Sylvia Plath’s own life do bear weight on her legacy in legitimate ways, in that they inform her writing and help to give us an honest portrayal of depression. I find it interesting that Plath chose to write a somewhat autobiographical novel instead of a memoir (though it’s possible this choice was largely about an ambition to write novels). Writing a story that is loosely her own, using a fictional character as a stand in for herself, is of a part with the disassociation that a depressed person can feel. But perhaps it is time we stop romanticizing depression and suicide, both Plath’s and others’, and instead accept depression as something that many people, and certainly not just writers, suffer through. Depression, like any part of a writer’s personality, can affect the output of her work, leading to a body of literature that is as diverse as the people who are writing it.

There is no doubt to me that The Bell Jar is a feminist text. Perhaps unsurprisingly, as a new mother myself I responded most strongly to the feminist takes on motherhood. In one notable scene, Esther witnesses childbirth with her boyfriend, Buddy Willard, who is studying to become a doctor. As Esther watches the baby being born and taken away from its exhausted mother by a team of nurses, Buddy explains that the woman giving birth is given a drug so that she won’t remember the process. “I thought it sounded just like the sort of drug a man would invent,” says Esther. “Here was a woman in terrible pain, obviously feeling every bit of it or she wouldn’t groan like that, and she would go straight home and start another baby, because the drug would make her forget how bad the pain had been, when all the time, in some secret part of her, that long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain was waiting to open up and shut her in again.”

The disassembly of the patriarchy is a painfully slow process.

Why must books like The Bell Jar (and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985) still feel so timely decades after they are written? The disassembly of the patriarchy is a painfully slow process. I believe that the time in your life in which you read a book will affect your take on the book, and I can certainly say that I read The Bell Jar very aware of the current Trumpian political climate. Parts of the book read like a rallying cry for women to take charge, and in this way I found The Bell Jar to be quite empowering (and I suppose, yes, this is evidence of my response to this novel being informed by the fact that I am a female reader).

In response to an older woman’s explanation of marriage as an institution that allows men to have a place from which to launch their lives, Esther responds, “The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from. I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”

I’m sure that a woman in her twenties, or a man, or anyone who doesn’t match my exact demographic, would find different things that speak to them in The Bell Jar. Some might react to Plath’s descriptions of sex, others might respond to Esther’s difficult relationship with her mother, still others might key in on Esther’s interactions with women her own age. But this is the sign of a great novel, I think — one that truly bears the stamp of its author, yet means something different to every reader.

In Defense of Imaginary Friends

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Midway through discussing the Billy Collins poem “On Turning Ten,” my daughter’s sixth grade teacher paused at the line It is time to say good-bye to my imaginary friends. Turning to the class with a laugh, she ad-libbed, “If you’re over ten and you still have imaginary friends, come see me.”

Pity the children of fiction writers. My daughter, stricken, recounted the comment to me hesitantly that evening — and even as I reassured her, I knew how odd my words must sound: Honey, so long as I know my imaginary people aren’t real, there’s nothing wrong with them being…real.

I’m long past ten, and I live among imaginary friends. As a novelist I spend years unearthing their secrets, their fears, their senses of humor. My characters are musicians, childcare workers, historians — anything other than fiction writers. They’re taller than I am, or smaller; less educated or — intimidatingly — more. Every scene I write through their eyes is a ticket to a different way of being in the world. What’s it like to walk down a nighttime street as a six-foot-three man, women quickening their pace with a nervous glance back at you? What does it feel like to be old; to be an immigrant; to be powerful, powerless?

The habit of inventing people prompts its share of unease. I’ve been cornered by a psychiatry student and quizzed, only half-jokingly, about my chosen profession. (You do know they’re not real, right?) More frequently I encounter skepticism about the entire enterprise of imagination. (Aren’t novelists’ characters just copied from actual people? Is there a recording device under this table?) Some writers do pilfer a great deal from life, others don’t — the sole constant is that every writer’s work is emotionally autobiographical. A short story writer looking out a bus window might glimpse an argument in progress. The bus moves on; the sidewalk scene is wrested away. But now the writer’s curiosity takes over: what might it be like to be one of those two well-dressed elderly men shouting at one another in broad daylight? Something about one of the men — perhaps his stooped form — reminds the writer of his own too-meek grandfather. Yet those men on the sidewalk were both furious. Why? Will they come to blows? If one were to back down, as the writer’s grandfather would have, what would be the consequences? And how will neighbors react to someone who allows himself to be bullied — and while we’re at it, what sort of people are those neighbors? Perhaps one, a single mother newly arrived with her infant son, has a startling response…

By the time the story is finished, that catalyzing sidewalk scene is just one element in a vibrant larger picture of whatever most urgently preoccupies the writer — be it a question roiling the great big political world, or one touching only the intimate world of a single heart. This is why pressing a novelist for the facts behind a work of fiction yields little. The nutritional content of a book can’t be determined through a list of its ingredients; a story isn’t a map of the writer’s actual, factual life. As my beloved great-aunt said to friends who asked where in my novels they might catch a glimpse of her: if you want to find me, come to my house.

Persuading skeptics of the value of imagined people, though, can be an uphill battle. I don’t fault my daughter’s teacher for echoing one of our society’s baseline assumptions: the vivid world of make-believe people is for children only. (If you’re not convinced of the ubiquity of this assumption, just imagine the water-cooler conversation that would ensue if a co-worker casually let slip, “I spent my lunch break imagining how a young girl I dreamt up might respond to being lost in a foreign country.”) It may be considered acceptable for an adult to play video games or fantasy baseball…but evidently in order to become functional adults each of us must renounce our personal Puff the Magic Dragon.

It may be considered acceptable for an adult to play video games or fantasy baseball…but evidently in order to become functional adults each of us must renounce our personal Puff the Magic Dragon.

But what if all of us — not just fiction writers — need imagined people more than we realize?

We live in an information-saturated age. Social media images of friends’ dinner plates vie for our attention with breaking news; data pours in more quickly and on more channels than in any other time in human history. The supposedly-factual dominates even the world of entertainment, where — to quote John Jeremiah Sullivan — reality shows have long since “gone kudzu” on the cultural landscape. (And of course if fact and counter-fact were flying fast before 2017, we’re now deafened continuously by the sonic booms of ‘alternative facts.’ Small wonder if discussions of fiction seem irrelevant, when confabulations-dressed-as-fact demand a response at every turn.)

The notion that the imagined is passé has in fact been gaining momentum for years, even in pockets of the literary world. David Shields’ much-touted Reality Hunger: a Manifesto dismisses fiction, calling nonfiction “incomparably more compelling” and citing Alain Robbe-Grillet’s declaration that “the novel of characters…belongs entirely to the past.”

Weariness with older art forms is natural and spurs innovation — indeed there’s some fascinating experimentation in the world of narrative these days. But as #FerranteFever and the passionate response to works like Hanya Yanigahara’s A Little Life demonstrate, any claim that fiction is obsolete is easily disproven. What audiences crave, regardless of form or genre, is simply the realest kind of reality — the kind that honestly reflects what it’s like to be human. And in an age of rampant dehumanization, the story of our humanity isn’t just interesting — it’s anti-venom.

Telling the truth about any human experience isn’t easy. That’s so in every form of communication ever invented — memoir, fiction, phone call, blog post, and I can only assume hieroglyphics. Ego gets in the speaker’s way, and so does love. We writers may spout a macho line about authorial ruthlessness, but somewhere or another most of us succumb to the urge to protect someone — if only ourselves — from a too-searing gaze.

Amid that welter of impulses, fiction is the best way I know to be honest. With imaginary people there’s no one to protect, and ‘permission to speak freely’ is always granted. My characters can stumble, fumble, act badly without triggering embarrassment or litigation. What’s more, the further I venture from my own life, the less bound I feel by my own ego or fears, and the freer to enter ever-riskier layers of human experience: there’s what people say…but beneath that, there’s what we feel — that lightning-flash of suppressed anger or unexpected joy…and then the blunt, forbidden thought rolling under that…and then in the sub-basement of consciousness, a pinioning question. If access to that terrain is a benefit of what Daniel Mendelsohn calls “the protective masks afforded by fiction,” then it seems worth relinquishing the comforting authority of fact (this story matters because it actually happened).

Fiction is the best way I know to be honest. With imaginary people there’s no one to protect, and ‘permission to speak freely’ is always granted.

Each genre, of course, offers its own powerful literary maps of human experience. But fiction is what I return to, as a reader and as a writer, when I’m overwhelmed by the news; by the scripted cheer of Facebook posts; by recorded voices helping me navigate highways and telephone menus and gift purchases and health care choices, all so stripped of humanity that I can’t help mentally recasting the end of “Prufrock”: till automated voices wake us and we drown.

Writing, at its best, startles us simultaneously with both sides of this coin: Other people experience the world very differently than I do, and, I’m not alone — other people feel exactly what I’ve felt. For me, there’s delight in devoting years to learning what an endless string of fictitious not-me’s might know and experience. Pretend play makes me empathize with others. It’s the most mature thing I know how to do.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself, long after the kids are in bed, as the basket of leftover Halloween candy and I square off together against a massive volume of Enlightenment philosophy — because the protagonist of my new novel is a philosopher, and I can’t write well about her until I get my head around Spinoza.

“I’ve lived long among those I’ve invented,” wrote Bernard Malamud, himself the shepherd of a luminous flock of invented souls. Call me crazy — I’ll keep my imaginary friends.

Dungeons & Dragons & Communal Storytelling

About the Author

Author Rachel Kadish

Rachel Kadish is the author of the new novel, The Weight of Ink (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), as well as From a Sealed Room, Tolstoy Lied: a Love Story, and I Was Here.

The Future of Technology Is Freedom from Technology

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In Courtney Maum’s novel, Touch, Sloane Jacobsen returns to the United States from Paris, where she’s been hiding from grief about her father’s death for years. But when she accepts a job forecasting trends for the tech firm Mammoth (think: Google), she’s forced to confront her anxiety about closeness and her family, her strange relationship with a French performance artist, and her ideas about the teleology of replacing human interaction with machines. Sloane’s work allows her to peek inside the minds of the people who create and design tech, and she finds that while technology has made their lives easier, it has made even the tech creators at Mammoth long for old-fashioned physical contact — hand-holding, sex, the embrace of a friend. The author, an experienced trend forecaster herself, imbues Touch with this sense of longing for more tangible human interaction.

From the beginning of the novel, Sloane believes herself to be family-averse. “[S]he wasn’t a fan of being scared,” the author writes, “and it had to be petrifying to love someone more than yourself.” Sloane, like so many people, chooses isolation from her sister and mom rather than the uncomfortable reality of seeing them all the time, of having to confront the complication of her feelings about family and her father’s death. Maum uses Sloane’s discomfort as a synecdoche for so many consumers — she values privacy and distance; technology has allowed her to stay just far enough away from those she thinks she loves that she doesn’t have to suffer any messy feelings.

But Sloane is increasingly unhappy, which drives the plot and her personal discoveries. Her longtime beau, Roman, is beginning a personal crusade to change intimacy, having just “deliver[ed] lectures across Europe about the shifting paradigms of touch.” Roman dons a Lycra bodysuit in public that covers his face as a way of showing that the human body and human physicality are obsolete. He doesn’t believe in sexual contact, but instead celebrates an online world where there are no boundaries to fantasy. Just as Sloane begins to sense that the future of technology is freedom from technology, she finds herself in the middle of his one-man quest to shock and educate, to remove himself from the constraints of traditional physical union — and she’s not sure she wants to be there.

Boys Will (Not) be Boys

Maum excels at depicting the subtleties of human interaction in all its various forms, particularly the different types of tension in the workplace. Whether describing the interactions of Sloane and her boss or Sloane and her boss’ secretary — or the delicate power balance of pitch meetings — Maum uses subtext to delineate subtle distinctions. When Sloane — whose trend forecasting feels almost synesthetic, as Maum describes it — meets a like-minded coworker, his vitality forces her to confront the assumption she has that she and Roman will continue forward as a couple. Maum writes of Sloane’s idea-generating in much the same way as she writes of these relationships: The energy of each thing is at the center of her scenes, yet she manages to do this without making the whole thing ridiculous and woo-woo. One of the best qualities of Touch is how accessible Maum renders esoteric ideas.

“How long until quiet trended?” Sloane wonders, when confronted with Mammoth’s latest inventions and products, tapping into the yearning of both her peers and Maum’s readership. Her premonitions are nearly disastrous for her job in the tech sector. “People [are] going to pay to get close to other people.” It’s hard to talk about Touch without also referencing the ideas it champions — a celebration of intimacy and physical human interaction that are antithetical to the current technological boom.

When everything can be researched, debated, sorted, and organized for us online, when do we actually live? At one point Maum’s characters even lament the predictability of sites like Yelp that allow you to choose your own experiences. Maum — through Sloane — advocates for surprise. “[E]ven a disappointment is still a surprise…,” she writes. “I wonder if we couldn’t invent something that could restore the element of surprise to the way we navigate new environments.” Maum writes with longing for how things used to be, but also hope for the future. “There would be calm, again,” Sloane says, and the moment seems right for her ideas.

Maum’s Touch is the right novel at the right time, but this is not to discount the author’s skill in rendering well-paced scenes attenuated to the human condition. The author takes on technology and the current moment, but only as a backdrop to good writing. The setting facilitates Maum’s work, rather than becoming its center. What emerges from this book about tech is a deep sense that our salvation isn’t going to be found on a tiny, glowing screen. Touch is sure to leave you, like its protagonist, feeling “the reluctant budding of humanity’s best side.”

New York City, Seen Through Its Bodegas

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Introducing The Bodega Project, a new summer-long series from Electric Literature, in partnership with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Each week, one of ten authors from across the five boroughs will reflect on their community through that most relied-on and overlooked of New York institutions, the bodega.

For a city that prides itself on never sleeping and never shutting down, it was an unfamiliar and disorienting sight, on a Thursday in February, to find so many metal shutters closed on street corners all over New York. A week prior, President Trump had signed an executive order effectively denying anyone from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, or Yemen entry into the United States. Now, helicopters wavered above Cadman Plaza in downtown Brooklyn, while on the steps of Borough Hall a boisterous crowd chanted “USA! Yemen!” and blew into vuvuzelas. For the first time in history New York City’s bodegas were collectively on strike. Across the five boroughs, it was suddenly impossible not to be aware of their absence, and impossible to accept the idea of a city without them.

These ubiquitous corner stores have been open and operating, in one form or another, for almost as long as there’s been a city to host them. In the past there were Lower Manhattan’s numerous Jewish delis, the Italian alimentari on Mott Street, and the greengrocers that established themselves north of Union Square. After World War II — following an influx of immigrants from the Caribbean, particularly from Puerto Rico — the shop’s modern iteration came into being. It was then given the nickname that most New Yorkers know it by today, regardless of the neighborhood, the ethnicity of its owners, or the signage that looks out to the street.

At its most essential, the bodega is the shop on the corner that stays open late and sells whatever you need — the place where you go in a pinch to pick up milk, a can of Bustelo, an egg and cheese on a roll, or a scratch card when you’re feeling lucky. For the average New Yorker it’s something that goes beyond mere capitalism: it is the beating heart of the neighborhood, a place of ethnic and economic diversity, the center of cultural rather than just monetary exchange.

Wrapped up as they are, no contemporary history of the city would be complete without an examination of the bodega. In Justo A. Martí’s photographs from the 1950s, of Latin American bodegas in New York’s Puerto Rican barrios, it’s possible to see a larger reflection of the new metropolis that was then taking shape. In the bad old days of the seventies and eighties — when heatwaves and blackouts marred the summers, crime rates spiked, and panicked suburban “white flight” kicked off in earnest — the city’s bodegas were a lifeline, struggling to keep produce coming in and bread stocked on the shelves. The earliest hip-hop could be heard busting from speakers outside corner delis in the Bronx, at the same time as The Ramones were fueling up on Slim Jim’s, plantains, and Miller beer from a shop on Bowery and East 4th. It’s not just New York’s history either. To look at any of the contemporary forces shaping the city — whether it’s gentrification, immigration, or economic inequality — one often doesn’t have to go further than to the shop on the corner.

In New York, neighborhoods can practically be defined by their bodegas. Whether the windows are decorated with international calling cards, saints cards, Knicks gear, or cured meats will tell you something about who the locals are and how they live. Bodegas are where almost all paths in a neighborhood cross, where you can hear almost any language, a place that is romantically unromantic. Open all the time and always reliable, they tend to go unnoticed, until — as on that Thursday in February — you experience the city in their absence.

Over the course of the summer Electric Literature will be bringing you ten essays over ten weeks on bodegas and communities from across the city — brand new writing by New York lifers, transplants, immigrants, and exiles — published each Friday starting today. For some of these authors the bodega will serve as a backdrop; for others it will be the key to finding their place in this city. They’ll talk to store workers and regulars, plumb memories, chart changes in the neighborhood, and be privy to stories. Some names and sites will be familiar to you, others will be new. In the end we hope to give you a snapshot of a city that is always evolving and always open.

Welcome to The Bodega Project.

— Anu Jindal and Dwyer Murphy, Electric Literature

Read the first installment of The Bodega Project here, an essay by Charlie Vázquez on his childhood community of Pelham Parkway in the Bronx.

A Cultural Oasis Inside a Bronx Bodega

Photographs by Anu Jindal

Ted Wilson Reviews the World: Peter Piper

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★★★☆☆ (3 out of 5)

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of the world. Today I am reviewing Peter Piper.

Everyone has heard of Peter Piper, the guy who picked a peck of pickled peppers. But what else do we know about him? A lot, actually.

Based on his name, we know Peter was a professional piper. In the olden days, vocations used to be the basis for surnames such as Blacksmith or Farmer. If occupational surnames still existed today, we would have people named things like Stephanie Grocerybagger or Larry Betweenjobsrightnow.

So why would a professional piper be spending his time picking pickled peppers instead of piping? Because he loved pickled peppers. But pickling takes a lot of time — the kind of time only a divorced man has.

Despite being a musician, Peter had no woman in his life. I know this because women love musicians no matter what they look like. Take Mick Jagger for instance, and imagine that he’s an insurance salesman wearing a pair of loose khakis and a polo shirt. Would you still want to kiss him? Maybe only out of pity. If Peter had time to pickle, he was a divorcee.

It’s hard to know what came between Peter and his wife. Perhaps it was his piping attire, or perhaps he accidentally killed someone and only Peter’s wife knew about it and the stress was too much for their marriage to bear. Secret accidental deaths have been the cause of many divorces. Whatever it was, the secret of his divorce is something Peter took to his grave.

I would love to have heard some of Peter’s piping. He must have been quite talented if he was able to make a living as a musician. Or if he wasn’t talented, then he had a good brand built around him.

BEST FEATURE: Peter’s middle name was Pterodactyl.
WORST FEATURE: I was inspired to try piping myself but I was so bad at it that I fell into a deep depression.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing Cheetos.

TED WILSON REVIEWS THE WORLD: CLIFF HUXTABLE

A Cultural Oasis Inside a Bronx Bodega

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Presenting the first installment of The Bodega Project, a new summer-long series from Electric Literature. Read the introduction to the series here.

There are several bodegas in my neighborhood, the most convenient being Yaffa Deli and Grocery on the corner of Lydig and Cruger Avenues. Yaffa attracts residents from the various peoples that call my Pelham Parkway neighborhood home. This international working-class district shaped my youth and adolescence in the 1970s and 1980s, when I grew up and went to school in the nearby Fordham and Allerton neighborhoods that still bring movies such as The Godfather and Taxi Driver to mind.

The first bodega I remember going to in the 1970s, on the corner of Bronx Park South and Crotona Parkway (now Poppy’s Deli), was a treasure box of Puerto Rican culture, where you’d find malanga and coconuts before you’d spot an apple in narrow, cluttered aisles. Colorful pictures of Jesus Christ and saints lingered in Roman glory behind Plexiglas during this gritty era, when New York City served as the perfect backdrop for crime noir spectacles like The French Connection and The Seven-Ups, two of my favorites.

Bodegas terrified me once I learned about the nightmarish holdup stories that began circulating in the neighborhood every time one was robbed, when the violent crime rate across New York City was more than twice what it is today. The gunning down of owners and employees was known to happen, such as during the robbery of another grocery store in the East Tremont section of the Bronx where I attended kindergarten. Bodegas became synonymous with the perils and triumphs of the immigrant struggle.

The corner store service areas (like those of taxis) were sealed shut behind Plexiglas the same way banks are today. This would change moving into the 90s during the Giuliani years, as the city transformed in general. And although bodegas still offer glimpses into the old New York that vanishes a little more each day, they were crucial sites of cultural exchange for Puerto Ricans and others; places where our music, food and language triumphed; oases surrounded by oppressive institutional forces such as racism and police brutality.

As Néstor David Pastor writes in his essay “Bodegas: The Legacy of the Puerto Rican Bodega,” for Centro/Center for Puerto Rican Studies’ online magazine: “Bodegas provided a link to Puerto Rico.” It was in these family-owned corner stores that knowledge of my family’s roots in the Caribbean was enhanced by the textures and scents of strange-looking foods with even weirder-sounding names: ajicito, batata, malanga. This often happened on humid afternoons when men played congas with beer bottles at their feet, while their wives exchanged juicy neighborhood gossip on foldout beach chairs.

It was in these spaces that my Puerto Rican father shed his bicultural identity and dove down to his island essence while talking with clerks and neighbors, where his Spanish became faster and more clipped, weaving in and out of the complex drumming always present behind the perpetual salsa soundtrack that played in those years. Spanish dominated in the bodegas of those days and it wasn’t uncommon for non-Spanish speakers to mime their way through transactions when encountering owners and employees who didn’t speak English or refused to.

Bodegas became synonymous with the perils and triumphs of the immigrant struggle.

A lot of that imagery remains and you can still purchase plátano chips and dulce de leche treats in bodegas where new owners learn enough Spanish to continue serving clienteles cultivated over many decades (generations, in my family’s case). This changing of the guard has seen many Puerto Ricans selling their stores to buyers of other nationalities, to retire in Florida and others places. You will more likely hear Arabic devotional music or Dominican bachatas in Bronx bodegas nowadays, but the ghosts of those past, where Puerto Rican New Yorkers as myself used to shop with grandparents and parents, are still there if you listen.

We lit candles for the murdered; crimes and bloodshed, events that scored television networks headlines and ratings back in the day. What you’ll never hear about were all the occurrences that didn’t make the news; people falling in love while paying at counters crammed with sweaty sweet treats, the passing down of musical and cultural traditions. The exposure to folklore and music and art; learning about the places your parents and grandparents once called home. (As for newcomers who complain about the cats…off with their heads!)

The bodega I go to now, Yaffa Deli and Grocery, is a less turbulent space compared to the bodega in East Tremont I so clearly remember. You’ll still find Goya goods and Mistolín (and now Fabuloso) cleaning products on the shelves. You’ll even see and hear customers recently arrived from the Dominican Republic and Mexico struggling through broken English to communicate with members of the Yemeni family that have operated it for more than twenty years.

I first frequented this bodega in the 1980s, while attending nearby Christopher Columbus High School. My best friend Edgar Santiago and I befriended a girl of Latvian heritage in tenth grade, who lived across the street from Yaffa (as it was also known in 1987). It is at Yaffa that I still hear Caribbean and now Mexican Spanish, but also Senegalese and Haitian French at times, in addition to English and Arabic — a working-class crossroads of global possibilities.

The Pelham Parkway neighborhood, squashed between the 2 and 5 train lines is a mix of single-family homes and tenement buildings; home to African-Americans, Yemenis, Dominicans, Albanians, Puerto Ricans and Jewish people, among others such as Pakistanis, Mexicans and Russians. The front doors of most apartments still boast mezuzahs, painted over many times by many hands from just as many places. It’s hard not to think of these things upon finding them.

My alma mater Christopher Columbus High School counts David “Son of Sam” Berkowitz among its alumni. Not a lot has changed in Pelham Parkway aside from lower crime rates, what the rest of New York City shares as well. There’s a taco truck now. The record store where I used to buy Duran Duran and Depeche Mode cassettes and 45s in the 1980s has been gone for a long time. I left in 1988. I came back in 2006. Yaffa was still on the corner.

On nights when I write late and need zone-out time, the fat cat follows me down the aisle in Yaffa, judging my poor taste in beer with a yawn: Budweiser. Panhandlers sometimes linger outside and try the hard sell — still. There are people on the streets who shouldn’t be, folks who should be taken care of by specialized professionals trained to do so. Most LGBTQ folks keep a low profile around here but not the Puerto Rican butches. I nod as I pass them on the way in.

The world will pass you by on the corner of Lydig and Cruger if you pay attention; staunch Albanian elders who refuse to shed their ways, hurrying Chinese fry-cooks, Pakistani stay-at-home moms and Dominican barber playboys. The same Greek family has owned the Lydig Coffee Shop since the 1980s, even though they live in New Jersey now. El Torito is where I go to catch up on the latest sounds out of Mexico City, as well as campy telenovelas.

The world will pass you by on the corner of Lydig and Cruger if you pay attention…

People are bound to complain that New York isn’t the same as it once was, missing the good times but not the bad. The city is growing and rents are rising, pushing young renters and buyers into areas they can afford to live and buy in. Some call this economic development, to others it means gentrification and displacement of the poor. This has been happening for a long time and all people — at one point or another — have been the newest arrivals in a neighborhood.

Returning to where you’re from is one of the strangest things you can do. You’ve grown in ways you never could have had you stayed. The Bronx continued to crumble and rebuild in the seventeen years that I wandered through the West Coast and other places, collecting experience for — what I hoped — might make me a better storyteller one day. This is something I’m still working on, what I may never know the answer to. Yaffa was here the whole time, welcoming me back.

It forces me out of my shell, which nowadays is enhanced by endless digital distraction. I study the rough and tumble clientele that behaves according to its own silenced codes, something I never learned once I left for the West Coast at age seventeen. I’m reminded of this every time one of the Yemeni clerks thanks me in English, helps the person behind me in Spanish and says something secretive to his colleague in Arabic, a sophisticated operation that eludes proper praise and description. I love the Bronx for this reason and always will.

All the world in one place.

About the Author

Charlie Vázquez is the Director of the Bronx Writers Center at Bronx Council on the Arts. He’s published fiction and poetry and served as the New York City coordinator for Puerto Rico’s Festival de la Palabra literary celebration for five years. Charlie was awarded a commendation by the NYC Comptroller’s Office in 2014 for his contribution to the literary heritage of New York’s Latino community. He’s completed a new novel and second short story collection, works of supernatural fiction set in Puerto Rico. He’s seeking a literary agent and meets with various groups throughout the Bronx regularly, encouraging them to express themselves through the written word. You can follow him @CharlieVazquez.

— Photography by Anu Jindal

The Bodega Project – Electric Literature

— The Bodega Project is supported by a grant from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Invisible But Not Estranged

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Content warning: discussions of mental illness and suicide

Yiyun Li is primarily known for her fiction, but her recent memoir — Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to Your in Your Life — is a quiet force to be reckoned with, proving that her storytelling ability goes beyond the structures of narrative. Shifting her focus away from key moments of autobiography, Li instead unfolds herself into a text-centered discourse that often reads more like philosophy or even literary theory. Although the impetus for the memoir is clear — her two suicide attempts and subsequent hospitalizations in 2012 — the book is more grounded in her identity as a reader than as a writer or patient.

The experience of reading from one chapter to the next feels more akin to reading an essay collection than a fiction or nonfiction story. In carefully-measured sentences, Li deconstructs the relationship between author and character as well as the relationship between writer and reader.

She draws the unwieldy and intruiging title, “Dear friend, from my life I write to you in your life,” from the notebooks of Katherine Mansfield, one of her major literary influences. Li’s reading habits circumscribe the themes of her own project: she obsessively reads certain writers’ correspondences and journals, immersing herself in the private space of literary letters and diaries, in addition to books. It’s therefore not surprising that her memoir tends toward genre-bending.

As Li recounts her reading experiences, she builds up a portrait of herself that is perhaps more true than a straightforward retelling of major life events would be. Most of the live-action scenes that readers receive are merely vignettes; because of her essayistic approach, the meat of the story is in the ideas. Instead of dramatically retelling the narratives of any literal self-harm (though that is certainly implied), her prose circles back to suicide in the abstract, and metaphorical forms of “eliminating the self”:

I wished then and I wish now that I had never formed an attachment to anyone in the world either. I would be all kindness. I would not have done anything ruinous. I would never have to ask that question — when will I ever be good enough for you? — because by abolishing you, the opposite of I, I could erase that troublesome I from my narrative, too.

When I read the first chapter — or first essay — at first I felt put off by the way Li was holding me at arm’s length. I usually come into a memoir expecting the creation of an intimate reading space; instead, I encountered Li hiding herself behind third-person constructions of “one does…” and “one must…” or, occasionally, embedding the “I” into the generalized “we/our.” Sometimes she even verges on platitude:

What one carries from one point to another, geographically or temporally, is one’s self.

In the passage that focuses on the book’s title, Li writes about how she sustains her writing though this urge to create relationships and reach across distances between places and selves: “What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance, if things can be let go, every before replaced by an after.” The bridge — or lackthereof — between the reader and writer becomes a keystone in the way Li illustrates certain tensions in her life, both personal and literary.

A writer and a reader should never be allowed to meet. They live in different time frames. When a book takes on a life for a reader it is already dead for the writer.

These connections between reading, writing, and personal distance come to the forefront in the chapter “To Speak is to Blunder,” in which Li explores her reasons for choosing English over Chinese, her “mother-tongue” — even going so far as to reject translations of her work into Chinese, a controversial choice that interviewers often bring up to her. She outlines a worldview where her other-tongue, English, becomes her own “private language” in contrast with the “public” nature of the language she grew up speaking. In the newness and foreignness of English, she finds a kind of liberation: “A private language […] defies any confinement. Death alone can take it away.”

In a philosophy that is interestingly reminiscent of Jhumpa Lahiri’s sentiments in her book In Other Words / In Altre Parole about learning Italian, Li explains how this natural duality of closeness and distance between self and second-language is what gives her the freedom to escape the past, as well as the freedom to write:

In my relationship with English, in this relationship with its intrinsic distance that makes people look askance, I feel invisible but not estranged.

This idea of linguistic distance then drifts back to suicide. Li circles around the ideation in prose in the same way that the mind does:

One crosses the border to become a new person. One finishes a manuscript and cuts off the characters. One adopts a language. These are false and forced frameworks, providing illusory freedom, as time provides illusory leniency when we, in anguish, let it pass monotonously. “To kill time,” an English phrase that still chills me: time can be killed but only by frivolous matters and purposeless activities. No one thinks of suicide as a courageous endeavor to kill time.

(“To Speak is to Blunder: Choosing to renounce a mother tongue” also appeared as a stand-alone essay in this year’s first issue of The New Yorker.)

It is important to note that a large portion of Li’s discourse centers not around visible symptoms of depression, but on the idea of suicide itself. She often directly pushes back against the disembodied arguments that call the act selfish or ungrateful. The book isn’t necessarily a vindication of suicide, but it would be hard for some readers to get through without feeling buried or surrounded by the internal logic, those knots of thought that she threads around herself and her reader.

That being said, as a reader and writer who struggles with mental illness, for me it’s so refreshing to find a writer who finally addresses the real “thought-spirals” of depression, instead of merely describing symptoms like I couldn’t get out of bed all day — a type of discourse which seems to be overwhelmingly dominant in today’s mental health discussions, especially online.

In many ways, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life provides a much-needed different lens for thinking about mental illness in the sphere of ideas rather than buzzwords like self-love or self-care. While those are certainly important to our conversations, they will always be a step removed from the self.

Li writes that she “struggle[s] with a lack of depth perception,” but in many ways, depth perception is what this memoir brings to the table. The perspective, at face value, is familiar: person-with-mental-illness-pens-memoir-after-suicide-attempts almost seems like a trope, albeit an important one. But by writing through a refraction of everything she has read — from Turgenev to McGahern to Woolf — Li is able to present this “familiar” perspective with an astonishingly unfamiliar amount of depth.

Perhaps Yiyun Li’s intensely intimate relationship with English — her own “private language” — is what made me feel distant as a reader in the beginning. When I reached that chapter on language, I realized that I was a guest here, dwelling inside of her words. It was not like reading a diary, a critique disproportionately wielded against female memoirists. Instead, it was like stepping into a threshold of the mind, and being allowed to see the patterns of thought as clearly as footprints on the floor.

The intense closeness of reading what’s on (or surrounding, or entrapping) someone’s mind, combined with the unbridgeable distance of each other’s unknowability, results in a kind of beautiful dissonance. By the second half of the memoir, I no longer felt that I was being held at arms length; I felt — to appropriate Li’s phrase for another purpose — invisible, but not estranged.