Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels One Step Closer to Your TV

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The series gained a director and a release date

For just over a year, fans of Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan novels have been living with the tantalizing news that the books would soon be adapted for the screen. Details, however, have been few and far between. Until now. Late yesterday, The New York Times reported that the series now has a director — Saverio Costanzo, the writer/director of Hungry Hearts (2014) and The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2010) — and is slated for a 2018 premiere.

Costanzo will adapt the four novels — My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay and The Story of the Lost Child — as a thirty-two part series. The show will be co-produced by Fandango and Wildside, an Italian company which co-produced Paolo Sorrentino’s HBO series, “The Young Pope.” The first season will cover My Brilliant Friend in eight 50-minute episodes.

The series will undoubtedly increase Ferrante’s already large audience and will likely reignite interest in the author’s true identity (as well as the controversy surrounding investigative journalist Claudio Gatti’s exposé in NYRB last year). Those who support Ferrante’s wish for anonymity will be happy that the series’ director has made his position on the issue clear, telling the Times, “It’s her literary reality that counts. I’m one of those people who don’t care who she is.” Ferrante — whoever she is — has agreed to help Costanzo write the screenplay. Their discourse will take place via email.

The series will be filmed in Italy and in Italian, hopefully more proof that the production doesn’t intend to sacrifice the novels’ authenticity on the altar of Hollywood’s expectations. As popular as the series has become worldwide, and as much as it tackles universal themes — childhood, poverty, gender dynamics, friendship, among others — it is just as specifically a story about two girls growing up in a ghetto in Naples after World War II.

Like most great literary works, Ferrante’s prose will be a challenge to capture on screen. Yet this project could see a happier ending than most. In an interview in The Paris Review, Ferrante said, “The greater the attention to the sentence, the more laboriously the story flows. The state of grace comes when the writing is entirely at the service of the story.” Ferrante’s prose isn’t entirely at the service of the story — it’s much too well written—but it does eschew the kind of self-conciousness that makes some writing impossible to translate visually. In the Neapolitan novels, the sentences are always working for Elena. Her interiority is reflected in what she observes, or how she speaks, and the nuanced dialogue is another reason to film in Italian — native speakers will appreciate what can be conveyed by switching between Neapolitan dialect and ‘proper’ Italian, between formal and informal pronouns.

From a plot perspective, the Neapolitan novels have a lot to work with. They’re rich with emotional stakes, romantic longing, unexpected fates, and violent encounters. The books follow an unusually large cast of recurring characters, and the settings and costumes should be fantastic.

Something is always lost when a book is adapted for the screen, but like many BBC productions of Dickens or Austen, the Wildside version of the Neapolitan novels has the potential to be great.

The Disastrous Things Desire Makes Us Do

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At first, the Southern evangelical setting of April Ayers Lawson’s debut collection of short stories, Virgin and Other Stories, might seem a strange fit with the questions of sex and desire that are ubiquitous throughout the book. Unlike other writers who focus on American Christianity — Marilynne Robinson, Flannery O’Connor, Hanna Pylväinen, etc. — Lawson does not use faith and doubt as the main source of motivation for her characters. In spite of the fact that the characters attend Christian colleges, are homeschooled, and attend weekly church services, thoughts of God or discussions of theology are largely absent.

Instead, the characters in these stories spend prodigious thought and energy contemplating and anticipating sex. Some try to overcome past sexual traumas. Others wonder if they are being cheated on, and, instead, end up being cheaters. A few learn how to masturbate to images in stolen library books. Throughout these stories, Lawson repeatedly returns to the same questions: How is desire created, and why do we desire what we desire?

Very little actual sex takes place. When it does, it’s either much worse than expected, a repetition of a past trauma, or just a plain letdown. “I guess that’s it, then,” Sheila says to her husband Jake in “Virgin,” after finally having sex for the first time, months after their wedding night. “Sex. I mean, it’s fun… It just feels so… physical… I expected a spiritual element.”

Lawson zeroes in on moments when desire is odd or inappropriate. “Virgin,” the first story in the collection, begins with the line, “Jake hadn’t meant to stare at her breasts, but there they were, absurdly beautiful, almost glowing above the plunging neckline of the faded blue dress.” These breasts belong to Rachel, a woman who is not Jake’s wife, a woman who has gone through a double mastectomy. “What did they have inside them,” Jake wonders, “saline or silicone? And how did these feel, respectively?” Jake thinks Rachel may have noticed him staring at her breasts, which worries him since she must have “extraordinarily complicated feelings” about her breasts. But its Jake’s own “extraordinarily complicated feelings” that Lawson highlights — his attraction to Rachel; his fascination with her body; his frustration with his sexual relationship with his wife that, ultimately, leads to projection and self-delusion.

In “The Way You Must Play Always,” 13-year-old Gretchen first gets caught kissing her 16-year-old cousin, then, shortly after, with her hand in the bathrobe of her piano teacher’s brother, a grown man who spends his days in his bedroom reading and smoking pot, recovering from a brain tumor. Lawson captures Gretchen’s early adolescent yearning, which is mixed with an all-encompassing summer boredom that leads her to stop caring about the consequences of her actions. With both of her parents at work everyday, Gretchen sleeps well into the afternoon. Her only source of amusement is strolling through her lonely neighborhood. Lawson, with a hypnotizing lyricism, explains how this boredom is as important a component of Gretchen’s desire as anything else: “And so the sleeping late and sweaty walks and quiet desire melted into a thick, heady dream.” In a dream, nothing matters. Nothing is inappropriate.

But the odd and disastrous things desire causes us to do have real life effects. In the final two stories, decisions rooted in confusion and desire lead to moments of violent epiphany — climaxes that, more than the particularities of character or setting, truly do seem influenced by Flannery O’Connor. These are the most engaging and affecting stories in the collection, where the style, setting, and theme come together to form something unsettling and complex.

“Vulnerability,” which is almost novella-length, in particular indicates Lawson’s substantial talent. The abuse in the story is made even more unnerving through the character’s focalization. The character’s point of view makes us privy to her complicated desires, which are not eradicated by the violence she suffers. Before the harrowing ending of the story, the narrator contemplates her desire for a famous gallery owner:

And frankly by then I’d decided to sleep with you as an act of compassion. Poor thing — that night, I’d never seen anyone who so needed to be fucked. You were the kind of sad person who’d become so numb he didn’t even know what sadness was anymore, who thought he was fine because he couldn’t even remember being happy, and I wanted to help you…Happy. I saw I was making you happy. I had forgotten what it was like to make someone happy.

Lawson, again, severs desire from actual sex here. Because the narrator’s desire is more complex than something purely physical, because it is rooted in compassion, in wanting to make other people happy because of the immense sadness that surrounds her, the traumatic sex she is subjected to does not affect her in the way one might assume. Her compassion, her desire to make his life better, is not incompatible with the man’s abusive actions, because she sees these actions as rooted in his own miserable history. This is an intricate and realistic portrait of abuse, illustrating how empathy can curdle into something sour when directed at the wrong person.

Contrasted with the unsatisfying and distressing sex in the book are the characters’ relationships with high art. Each story features at least one character who is an artist, generally either classical musicians or painters. It is in art that the characters find the convergence of sensuality and spirituality they seek. In fact, both Connor in “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling” and the narrator of “Vulnerability” steal art books from the library to which they then masturbate, an act they find more satisfying and pleasurable than their physical contact with other people in the stories.

Lawson’s prose becomes effervescent when she describes characters’ relationships with high art. In “The Negative Effects of Homeschooling,” Conner thinks of his mother’s mink coat:

“Its fur was white and shot with umber streaks. The streaks turned lighter at their edges, broken up with white like streaks of dry-brushed watercolor.”

He recounts how he’s stolen a book of Andrew Wyeth watercolors and —

committed acts of passion while staring at the book The Helga Pictures…and all the desire and shame and the layers of desire, of which I’ve only recently become aware — Wyeth’s desire for Helga, my desire for Helga, my desire for Wyeth’s desire for Helga — had warped my brain, so that my imagination tried to turn half the things I saw into his paintings.

Lawson, like Conner, wants to tease out the “layers of desire” we always feel, and the characters in the book are often quite conscious of the way they can manipulate, or are manipulated by, the desires of others. Art becomes the only way for these characters to find any true or satisfying pleasure. The “acts of passion” Conner later tries to enact with an actual person — a girl from his church — curb his desire for her, rather than energizing his imagination, as happens with his relationship to Wyeth’s watercolors.

Would the characters, then, be better off dropping sex altogether? Should they sublimate their desire into their art? Or would trying to ignore their desires just cause the desires to grow even stronger, leading to even greater disasters?

There is no answer. The book, instead, is an extended meditation on these questions. These questions and themes, of course, are not new. Since at least the 19th century — think Tolstoy, Flaubert, and Stendhal — desire, and its reverberating effects, has occupied the minds of fiction writers. Lawson injects life into these questions through the specificity of her setting and the careful attention she pays to language. Virgin and Other Stories is a redolent, troubling read, both emotionally penetrating and intellectually probing.

Jami Attenberg Has It All Mapped Out

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After thirty-odd years of living in New York City, I don’t often miss my subway stop, even if I’m reading the most engrossing, page-turning mystery. But I did just a few weeks ago while reading Jami Attenberg’s latest novel, All Grown Up. I tell this to Attenberg as we sit down to chat at a Brooklyn bistro, and she seems both pleased and, a longtime New Yorker herself, suspect as to my navigational abilities.

Image result for all grown up attenberg
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All Grown Up is the story of a woman named Andrea Bern who drops out of art school in Chicago, moves to New York, and takes a dead-end job at an advertising agency. Through a series of linked but not linear chapters, we learn about Andrea’s junkie father and activist mother, her friends and her sexual encounters. However, a plot summary can’t capture what the book achieves. All Grown Up examines a process, the experience of becoming an “adult” in a world that oscillates between offering women equality and imposing outdated expectations. The novel’s sentences also propel you forward, each into the next until — and this is the Attenberg special — one stops you short with its dead-on accuracy. “Everyone should know their strength and that’s mine,” she tells me. “I’ll rework a sentence a hundred times to get that big moment.”

I spoke with Attenberg about creating a conversation with the reader, why her book is distinctly female, and how she mapped out the process of “growing up.”

Carrie Mullins: All Grown Up isn’t told chronologically. Did you write the beginning chapter first or did you start somewhere else and then find your way into the story?

Jami Attenberg: I had the story cycle of all the Indigo chapters first, and I wrote that long before I decided to write the book. It was about a friend watching a friend get married and have a baby and her marriage have trouble — I was just sort of watching these two characters interact with each other. Then I was sort of like, well that’s enough of that that. I came back to it about a year later when I was ready to tackle what else was going on. I wasn’t really interested in writing a “single person in the city” kind of book, and I figured out a different way to approach it. It’s not in linear order because that’s not what I was trying to accomplish. It has a memoiristic feel and I wanted to have the character be in conversation with the reader. She’s telling you everything you need to know about her life. If you made a top ten list of the most important things from your life, it wouldn’t necessarily be in the order they happened. The things that started popping up were just as I saw them mattering to her, and then there was some of me playing author and moving things around to create suspense or give information as it was needed.

CM: It’s funny you say that about the Indigo cycle because I felt like so many parts worked as their own standalone short stories. One of my favorite chapters — “Girl” — comes to mind. But I think when you layer the chapters on top of each other, you get something in a novel that you can’t really achieve from a short story.

JA: That’s right. They are all sort of their own short stories but at some point I had to bend them so that they were in service of a bigger story. By moving details over to this chapter or not giving all the information, I had to make that decision: is this a short story collection or is this a novel?

CM: I’m glad you went with the novel. I feel like everyone is writing short stories right now.

JA: Ha well, not me, sadly. I really think I’m a novelist more than I’m a short story writer. Some parts of the book could live on their own more than others. I have several story cycles within it, certain structures within it — like if a chapter is named after a girl it means one thing and if it’s got a different kind of title it means a different thing. I have a little map of it in my head, why everything is the way that it is.

CM: This is kind of strange, but I kept thinking it when I was reading. Have you thought about what the book would have been like if the protagonist was a male?

JA: It’s not strange but I’ll answer in two ways. One is that sometimes I go and talk to high schools — I don’t do it enough but I love it when I do — and for The Middlesteins one of the kids asked me what my book would have been like if Edie [one of the book’s protagonists] was a man. And I was like, that’s such a great question that I hadn’t considered, and it would have been a totally different book.

There is no way this book could have existed if Andrea was a man because a man doesn’t experience the same kind of pressures as a woman does in these particular ways. Nobody would give them the same kind of shit. She doesn’t get shit about not wanting babies, she’s just not a baby person, but she does get shit for not getting married or settling down.

“There is no way this book could have existed if Andrea was a man because a man doesn’t experience the same kind of pressures as a woman does in these particular ways. Nobody would give them the same kind of shit.”

CM: She also doesn’t get shit for giving up her dream of being an artist. She just abandons it and nobody seems to question that. Being single though, that bothers them.

JA: People don’t want the answers, they don’t want to hear the answer about why she’s not an artist anymore. She doesn’t really want to unpack it either. As for marriage — for almost every person in the book who’s in a love relationship, their partner isn’t helping them at all. That’s half the point of the book. She doesn’t know what to do to be a grownup, but they don’t know what to do to be a grownup either. They’ve done all the things that are supposed to make them “grown up” but that doesn’t mean that you are one. It just means you did these things.

CM: This book felt really refreshing.

JA: Yeah, I just didn’t see this character represented at all. I didn’t see anyone like her and I thought it would be helpful for people to see this character. She knows what she wants. She doesn’t know how to be happy, but she’s dispensed with a lot of the milestones.

CM: From a technical point of view, how do you write about the process of growing up?

JA: I literally made a list of everything that makes you who you are, and what was important to her. What happened with her dad? Why did she drop out of art school? What’s going on with her living space? I went through all of that and I created a little universe around her. I also read a lot of memoirs. I was reading The Argonauts and Patti Smith’s M Train and I read Chelsea Girls by Eileen Myles. They’re all written in different ways, but I saw what was important to all of them, and I watched the way that they talked to the reader because I wasn’t interested in treating this like it was a novel.

CM: That’s interesting because memoirs are freer from the confines of the plot devices we expect from novels. You don’t need the same hook.

JA: Yes. Because it’s all true. So I wanted it to feel all true, that was my strategy. There are moments where Andrea just talks to the reader. I’ve done that before here and there in my novels, where I sort of break that wall and talk to the reader. I feel like I’m in conversation with my audience, not necessarily in the first draft, but eventually I get to that point where I want them to know that I know they’re there.

CM: Everyone’s time is so limited now, especially for reading. When you’re having that conversation, is any part of you thinking about that, or the pressure to keep them engaged?

JA: Oh absolutely. I mean this is the shortest book I’ve ever written. I definitely thought when I was writing this about the way that people read now. I thought, you better give them all the information that they need up front. You better write it so that it feels super fucking important and urgent. So whenever someone tells me they read this in a day or I missed my subway stop, then I succeeded. I want them to be consumed and decide that it’s worth it. Our world is exploding right now. I don’t know if this will make you feel better, but maybe it will, just the act of reading and being consumed by something other than reality. It’s a genuine distraction, which means a lot.

Arkansas Legislature to Consider Banning the Works of Howard Zinn

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The Arkansas bill is the latest attempt to banish Zinn from schools

Howard Zinn

A bill proposed by Arkansas State Representitive Kim Hendren seeks to ban books by historian Howard Zinn from the state’s schools. According to a report from The Arkansas Times, the legislation, which would apply to both public and charter schools, prohibits any classroom reading of Zinn’s writings from 1959 until his death in 2010, including his seminal 1980 study, A People’s History of the United States.

While Conservative groups have challenged A People’s History in the past — Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels attempted to remove the work from classrooms in 2013, and in 2009 Fredericksburg, Virginia parents accused the text of being “un-American, leftist propaganda” — Rep. Hendren’s proposed legislation marks the first attempt at a wholesale ban on Zinn’s work.

The proposal comes at a moment of heightened tension around the definition and necessity of “free speech” at educational institutions. Howard Zinn, in his words, wrote “from the perspective of the slaughtered and mutilated.” i.e. people of color, women, and native populations who, especially in 1980, were ignored by the glorified nationalism of conventional American historical education. While debate rages over bigoted right-wing psuedo-thinkers like Milo Yiannopoulos and Charles Murray and their right to free speech, Rep. Hendren’s effort to subvert institutional curricular freedom over political disagreement illustrates the hypocrisy of Milo and Murray’s deffenders. While the merits of Zinn’s anti-capitalist sentiments could be subjected to debate (disclaimer: I endorse them), the deplorable treatment of marginalized groups in the U.S. is a fact. The desire to argue that Columbus was not a delusional and genocidal maniac is laughable. The desire to silence the author who helped elucidate that truth to the larger American populace is, at best, alarming. Free speech is not a guaranteed platform to spew from, it’s a protection against the erasure of those at risk.

Imagine Contemporary Literature Without Women

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For International Women’s Day we celebrate female authors that we couldn’t do without

Today is International Women’s Day, and in many places women are striking to highlight the lack of equality for women around the globe. What would literature look like without women? A pretty poor place! Here are some of great contemporary books that would disappear.

Add your own favorites in the comments!

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante

Citizen by Claudia Rankine

A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin

The White Album by Joan Didion

Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Reading woman on a couch by Isaac Israels

The Day Jobs of 9 Women Writers

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This year’s International Women’s Day, which aims to celebrate and promote gender equality across the globe, will feature “A Day Without a Woman” — a general strike to bring home just how integral women are to the workplace and society at large, by momentarily removing them from the former and amplifying their voices in the latter: absence makes the cause grow stronger.

The organizers of the strike, the same people who brought us the Women’s March on January 21st, say that the day is about “recognizing the enormous value that women of all backgrounds add to our socio-economic system — while receiving lower wages and experiencing greater inequities, vulnerability to discrimination, sexual harassment, and job insecurity.”

While we pause our work, let’s take note of women writers who, in addition to their artistic endeavors, have played indispensable roles in the workforce: improving technology, healing the wounded and inspecting potato chips (someone’s gotta do it). Today, we celebrate them as women, writers and workers.

Margaret Atwood

Atwood wrote an essay for an April 2001 issue of The New Yorker called “Ka-Ching!,” which detailed her experience working at a coffee shop in Toronto. Atwood’s eye for the dystopian was honed even at this early job; while she poured coffee and worked the cash register, “the booths were served by a waitressing pro who lipsticked outside the lines, and who thought I was a mutant.” Atwood’s days as a barista are obviously far behind; but in addition to writing her many award-winning novels, she’s also an inventor. While she was on tour for her novel, Oryx and Crake, she had the idea for a pen that would allow someone to write remotely, in ink. Atwood founded Unotchit Inc. to develop this remote robotic writing technology and the LongPen, which allows her to sign books without being physically present.

Agatha Christie Archive

Agatha Christie

The upside to having a day job (aside from putting food on the table) is that it can generate material for books. Christie, the prolific mystery writer, learned about death first hand as part of a Voluntary Aid Detachment attending injured troops at a military hospital in Devon during World War I. Her next job, as an apothecary’s assistant, gave her knowledge of pharmaceuticals that would shape many of her novels—Christie used 30 different poisons to kill her characters and chose this method of death more often than any other crime writer.

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison has always found a way to work with books, though her early job as a textbook editor was definitely less glamorous than some of her later career highlights, like winning a Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison also worked as a fiction editor at Random House and taught at several universities.

Elena Ferrante

If Elena Ferrante is indeed the Italian translator Anita Raja, then the author is a very busy and talented woman indeed. In addition to working as a German translator for Edizione E/O and helping to run an imprint called Collana degli Azzurri, Raja has also served as the head of a public library in Rome.

Suzanne Collins.

Suzanne Collins

Clarissa Explains It All was the first Nickelodeon series to star a girl, and its popularity led to other female-led shows like The Secret World of Alex Mack and The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo. It’s not surprising, then, that one of the writers was Suzanne Collins, who would follow her stint writing for TV with a series of novels starring a kick-ass girl named Katniss Everdeen.

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler

Before becoming a celebrated science fiction author and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, Octavia Butler would get up at 2 a.m to write so that she’d be on time for her many day jobs, which included everything from dishwasher to telemarketer to potato chip inspector.

Nicole Dennis-Benn

Nicole Dennis-Benn

The author of Here Comes The Sun was originally on a career path towards science: she earned a degree in Biology and Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University, followed by a Masters in Public Health, specializing in women’s reproductive health, at the University of Michigan. Even when she began to write fiction on the side, Dennis-Benn was a Project Manager in Gender, Sexuality and Health Research in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Anne Rice

Anne Rice

Before she wrote her best-selling novel Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice worked with different kinds of blood-suckers: insurance claims examiners.

Harper Lee

Harper Lee

Harper Lee moved to New York City in 1949 to pursue her career as a writer. And like so many young artists, she had to take a job, any job, to pay the bills. Lee worked as a ticket agent for Eastern Airlines and BOAC (the precursor to British Airways). Seven years later, her friend, the Broadway lyricist and composer Michael Brown, gave her the Christmas present to top all Christmas presents: one year’s wages and the note, “You have one year off to write whatever you please.” She used that year well, writing and selling To Kill A Mockingbird.

“Fourteen Shakes the Baby” by Susann Cokal

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“Fourteen Shakes the Baby”

by Susann Cokal

The first one is not so bad, hurts, grinding on the sticky floor with the others watching. He and she are drunk. Everyone else is drunk too, all the guys standing around and watching, all the girls in the other rooms.

Something bangs. It’s a cabinet door. It’s her head against the cabinet door.

The other girls are in other rooms, clothes on, trying to get attention from these men with their bleached and brittle hair, their ski sweaters, though December is mild in San Diego. Surfers wear ski sweaters when they’re not in the water, isn’t that weird? The wool scratches her chest as he bangs both her and the cabinet. He said her tits were too beautiful to leave in a bra. He called her babe. He likes the way they wiggle and shake as he rocks her. They hurt; they’re still growing, covered in streaky red stretchmarks that will turn white as she gets older. Poor breasts. She is both proud of and nervous about them. They feel better in her little black bra, cradled like eggs in a carton, but the bra is in her armpits and her hands are pressed against the cabinet, trying to protect her head.

At least he doesn’t take long, it’s over in less than five minutes. Minute minute minute minute minute, and done. The radio barely got through one song. He’s gone, and she can roll to her side and free her backbone from the cruel floor. Someone tosses her a roll of paper towels. It takes another minute to realize what she’s supposed to do, the blood, the sticky wetness.

The men cheer, and she breathes deep. These moments determine who a girl is. A girl decides who she is at these moments. How she acts afterward.

She is very drunk. She’s been a teenager for a year already, but there’s nothing clever about fourteen.

Did you ask her? Did you ask her anything?

Shake this night, shake her life hard and see what comes out. Child of a broken home, child of television, video games, shopping malls. A teen. Whatever.

At the party, soon as she walks in, she notices that though the men are older the girls are in their twenties, and they aren’t pretty, not like you’d think. Gravity and alcohol have already beaten them. No wonder the guys whistled at fresh meat when it showed up on the beach with two friends and a tiny skirt. Baby baby baby.

The friends are gone now, they left almost as soon as they got here. It was her idea to come, her decision to stay. Hers. Now she’s here and there is no no.

One becomes six, all in the same place, hurts all over now. The men (boys?) watch each other doing it, they don’t watch her. They get beers from the fridge and the ice chest. They talk to each other but not to her. They say the girls are pissed about what’s going on in here and they’re threatening to leave.

Her spine is a chain of sore, swollen eggs, her lips are sore though they haven’t been kissed. Her hands are sore from protecting her head, and her head is sore because every last one of them inches her across the floor with each thrust, till no matter where she’s scooted she ends up banging against that cabinet after all. Drumroll, please. A lump has risen on her skull, and her breasts are two knots of fire.

The seventh complains after less than a minute that the floor hurts his knees, he won’t do it like this. There’s talk of moving to a bedroom or sofa. She sits up and leans against that punishing cabinet door (clanging pots and pans) to pull the lacy bra down over her red breasts and pinched nipples. Then her tank top, white so her bra shows through. She feels the ticklish trickle between her legs and knows she’s puddling on the filthy linoleum. She begins to cry.

What’s wrong, what’s wrong. Nobody asks. She sits there crying over what they’ve done to her, which is what she’s done to herself. Her friends, after all, left long before this. Her mother, her father, would be furious.

Will somebody give me a ride home? she asks. Sounds to herself like a pathetic little bitch. I want to go home now.

Nobody answers, nobody speaks, until number four or five puts down his bottle and says he guesses he’ll do it.

She is actually grateful.

Is anyone representing your family today, ma’am?

Hands clutch a purse, knuckles yellow and veins purple. Fourteen’s mother gave herself a fresh manicure. Her long red nails are ugly under fluorescent light.

One of these horrible hands clutches Fourteen’s malleable fingers. No.

Fourteen has been instructed not to speak for herself. The other girls are at home, told to stay away from her.

Where do you live?

El Cajon.

Damn, that’s far.

The sound of the ocean crashes outside, where the party has spilled onto the lawn. What there is of a lawn. It was irresponsible of the landlord, renting to this crew of valet parkers and furniture movers, men who do only what it takes to pay the rent and taste the waves. Because everyone wants endless summer, wet life tangled up in kelp and chemical spills and foamy, broken waves. She met the landlord someplace inside, yes, the bathroom, he had a paunch and was wiping his dick on somebody’s bath towel.

She walks careful, each step a stab in insides still dripping. She walks brave. If you’re fourteen and you let this happen you have to act proud, even if you started feeling no after number two, even if you are scared right now and alone, you know you have to walk brave to get away. She and her little black bra and white shirt and red skirt and no more panties cross the dead yellow grass.

The drinkers out here, sweater-wearing girls, either don’t know about the kitchen or don’t think it’s important. A clump of old girls have an earnest conversation under a half-dead tree, and a short girl swings a punch at a taller one.

Are you going for beer? somebody calls over. He ignores her, just as he ignores Fourteen at his side.

The girls don’t notice her at all, she’s invisible to them. Maybe one of them has a boyfriend who was in her just now. Maybe they’d all hit her if they knew. Or maybe they just wouldn’t care. It could have happened to all of them before. Maybe it happens all the time.

Hop in, he says, swinging himself into the seat of a jacked-up pickup truck. Number four or five. She can’t remember what he was like.

The night is a long math problem.

858 is the area code. The phone number of the guy who invited her and her friends — the first guy who took her, the tall guy back in the kitchen high-fiving his friends — it had a lot of fives in it, like a phone number from TV.

She watches the neighborhood go by but knows she’ll never be able to find the place again. Maybe that’s a good thing, maybe memory is only a hazard, not a protection.

Can I use your phone? she asks on the way inland. I lost mine at the party.

Me too. That’s all he says. So neatly, the problem is solved. No phones.

She lost her whole purse, in fact, left it behind because she’s not used to having much to carry around. Her phone was a disposable.

I really ought to make a call, she says.

But to who, is the question. Her mom would be mad and her dad probably wouldn’t be home. Her friends will be asleep. She just wants to feel her fingers on the numbers.

Later, in the apartment with number seven (or is he eight?), she focuses on the young mother in the Citgo mini-mart where the surfer dropped her so she could use the payphone. There was no payphone. What there was was a mother buying milk and cigarettes and a lottery ticket, and she was holding a baby, and the baby was crying. The mother jiggled him up and down in his dirty diaper, saying, Hold on, hold on a minute, over and over. It reminded her of a time she’d been babysitting and the lady told her specifically, Don’t shake the baby, whatever you do, and how she’d thought that was a strange thing to say until the door closed and the baby started crying and wouldn’t stop just about the whole time its mother was on her date, and the only thing she could think was, I want to shake this baby, I wonder if it will stop crying if I shake it.

But she didn’t shake it. She walked it back and forth across the crumby apartment floor, back and forth, patting its head as if she had all the patience in the world. And when the mom came home and asked how everything had gone, she lied and said the baby had been good, because by that time it had cried itself to sleep and she didn’t want to get a reputation as a bad sitter.

Back and forth, back and forth. At least this time it’s in a bed. A smelly bed with unwashed sheets, but she can almost ignore the bruises on her spine. Not the pain down there, though, that’s pretty bad.

The clock above the dresser shows it’s late, and now she’s afraid to go home. She’s still drunk. She didn’t expect the surfer to leave her at the mini-mart, to just drop her off and keep driving. She should have made him drive her all the way. She should have planned on sneaking in through a window, into her own bedroom. But she just wanted to talk to somebody, somebody nice. Somebody her age with a phone. A friend.

The clock is old fashioned, with hands and an old Pepsi logo under the numbers. She thinks that’s sort of cool, the symbol is a circle anyway.

This guy takes twelve minutes, seriously, as if he really means it. He’s barely hard enough to get in her, though, his penis keeps sort of folding itself, and then he grunts in her ear and really rams against her.

Don’t tell anybody, he says. It’s the rubber.

She’s all prickly and burny and it feels the way her mouth feels when she has chapped lips. She should put something down there, like when you change a diaper.

She wishes she hadn’t thought about diapers.

When he’s finished, it’s his roommate’s turn. A guy who doesn’t take off his turned-around hat. She wonders what it says on the front. She wants to think about that.

You need a place to crash tonight? the guy asks before he goes into her.

She nods, then says yes out loud. It’s too late to go home, she’d wake her mother.

Midway through, she realizes she’s agreed to something like a business transaction. He’s not just being nice, he wants more of her. At the Citgo the college boy bought beer and chips and her.

She wonders if she’s going to throw up. That would be embarrassing. She lets her arms fall, they’re tired and the bed has good traction so she doesn’t need to protect her head anymore.

So that’s eight, or maybe nine. She wishes she could decide about that last guy at the party.

It was a warm day, Sunday, and she went to Bird Rock with her friends. Their favorite beach. Her best friend’s brother used to surf it before he went to college up north.

The surfers whistled and called baby baby and gave her and her friends beers from their coolers. Cans, no glass on the beach.

Want to come to a party? asked a guy with long blond hair. One of those guys. Number two on the kitchen floor.

It is almost Christmas.

The boys with the place near Citgo call some of their buddies. They’re younger than the surfers, they’re in college and excited. This clearly does not happen for them often.

I just asked, Want to use my phone? And she said yes, the first guy reports into that greasy black cell, which he hasn’t offered to her. He says, She wasn’t even wearing underwear! She’s going to stay all night, but don’t be a douche and take forever. No, it doesn’t cost anything, you douche.

So that’s ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen. Unlucky number. She throws up somewhere in the middle of it, and they let her wash her face and then give her more beer so she doesn’t get a hangover. She’s limp and tired and aching. The last two take their turns.

Finally, she passes out, or passes into a daze where nothing seems real. The guy who picked her up lets her stay in his bed, and he gets in it too. Sometime later, she realizes his arms are around her waist and his knees t behind hers and he is snoring. The window is deep blue with approaching dawn.

She hates him.

She’s afraid to pull away.

The Pepsi clock still shows the same time as last night. She sees its cord dangling, unplugged. She thinks she remembers tripping over it on her way out of the bathroom, and number twelve catching her.

Every one of them says the same thing. Surfers and college boys, no difference at all. They say, I thought she was older. I thought she was eighteen. No, I didn’t ask. Why would I? Look at her.

Her bruises are fading. She wears no makeup, and she sits like a lady as she’s been told, but she knows she will never look like her old self again. She will be what they see. She will never be fourteen.

The college kids have brought their parents. They wear dress shirts and ties. One of them has a lawyer of his own. The surfers are just themselves, a bunch of guys in jeans, no women, no parents. The college families glare at them.

The boys say she stole a phone from them and that she asked for sex. She wanted it. They say the police humiliated them by pulling up with flashing lights, frisking them in front of neighbors. They insist they thought she was eighteen. They repeat that she stole a phone. And that she told on them, ratted them out like a crybaby.

When at last she slides out of the bed and away from the Pepsi clock, she finds a phone and takes it down to the street. Her fingers are trembling, they don’t work well. She presses the numbers for her best friend, the one whose house she’s supposed to be sleeping at. A lot of sixes and a fourteen. A real number. What will she say?

Nobody answers.

She has to leave voicemail. She reads the address on the apartment building. Long squat two-story, gray with blue railings, and the Citgo sign behind the cinderblock wall. She repeats it in a shaky voice. Her friend will be able to guess she’s drunk but maybe nothing else.

She says she’s going to start walking down the E-C Boulevard, public place, and please call as soon as you get this message.

She’s not the only one on the Boulevard, even with the sun just coming up. Other girls: her age, younger, older, much older. Everyone looks tired in winter light. Groups of girls in bright skirts with their bras showing. Cars stop for them, and they get in, two, three, four at a time. It’s Monday morning, time for some to go to work and others to go to bed.

Traffic is already thick, six lanes, the roar of an ocean.

Half an hour or so and her feet are covered in blisters from shoes not made for walking. Some of the blisters pop and stick to the vinyl. She comes to a bus stop with a bench and three plastic walls. It smells terrible, urine and alcohol and filthy bodies, but not as bad as she smells. She wishes she had panties. She wishes she could sleep, forget everything, start over. She sits down and calls her friend again, another message. Please, please get your sister to give me a ride. I have to clean up before my mother finds out.

The phone shakes. A call coming in; not her friend, she cancels it.

The phone.

She feels stupid, and then she feels smart. All those numbers, all of that boy’s life stored in a flat black box. Number nine or number ten, maybe twelve.

She scrolls through his contacts list to read the names. A different set of names than the ones she and her friends have. Just five years’ difference and an Amber becomes an Isabella.

She begins calling them, the girls. Each time one answers, she asks, Do you know what your boyfriend does to little girls? Then she hangs up, because she has no word for what happened to her. Or she has a word but doesn’t want to use it.

That afternoon at Bird Rock was yesterday, so giggly and crashy with waves and gulls.

I’m just warning you, she says. I just think you should be careful. You don’t know what this guy will turn into. You don’t even know what he is now. Promise to be careful?

She feels better, just a little. In a minute she’ll get up and walk again.

Buses stop, blow diesel fumes, ruffle her skirt. The passengers stare out the window at her, and she knows how she looks, her black bra and white top and red skirt and no panties. She probably has makeup smeared around her eyes and mouth even though — didn’t she? — she washed her face last night. She washed her face after she was sick.

And he can’t even get it up all the way. She makes another call so she can say that.

She waves each bus away. She has no money to pay for a ride, she has only this thing to do with the phone. Over and over, waking up college girls in their dorm rooms and apartments, telling them to ask themselves what they really know about the boys they go with. She says, Take a minute and think about it. You sit there and think a minute, young lady.

If a girl is frightened by this phone call from someone she doesn’t know, she might stammer out, Ye-e-es? And, I promise. Just to get off the call.

But Fourteen says, Don’t ever say yes.

Every single girl hangs up. Sudden silences, lined up like bones on a spine.

When she runs out of names she phones her friend again, third time now. How can you go to sleep and leave your phone turned off? Are you mad at me for staying? Because . . .

She taps a picture on the screen and gets a stopwatch. The seconds roll by like cherries on a toy slot machine.

There should have been an earthquake. Things should have been shaken off the bookshelves, the counter, out of the cabinets and off the wall. In the kitchen, the bedroom, the Citgo. Seven point five on the scale. It should have happened that way.

She doubles over and is sick on the sidewalk. It smells bad, but not as bad as she smells. Burnt rubber and old blood.

This is when a car stops. A red sedan slows in front of her, hesitates, starts again, stops. The driver, black guy, stares. The rear windows have been tinted, as if someone important rides in the back, or someone dangerous.

He gets out of the car. Lanky but with a paunch, like the landlord at the party, like her father when she goes to visit him. She’d step away, she’d run away if she could. The walls of the bus stop trap her, and she is still vomiting.

You in trouble? he asks from the other side of the car, the side with the door open. You need some help?

She gasps and heaves and says yes, no. She’s afraid. She can’t again, no, she just can’t. She’s too sore. She’s afraid. She waves the greasy black phone at him. I have this.

Damn, girl. The motor is running, but the driver shuts his door and comes around the back of the car to her. He wears sneakers and walks stiff, like he has back trouble. His jeans are pressed but his shirt is getting wrinkly. He could be somebody’s dad.

That might be a shadow moving inside the tinted windows, someone might be with him. A lady. Maybe this other person told him to stop and get her. But you never know.

He produces a handkerchief, a real cloth handkerchief, and holds it out. When she doesn’t take it, when she cringes away, he steps up slowly like she’s a wild animal and then grabs her chin and wipes her mouth.

Girl, you got messed up. He keeps wiping her, and she’s too tired not to let him, her body isn’t her body anymore.

Look at you. You’re a nice girl from somewhere.

It feels good to have her face wiped, like he’s taking away the skin that she lived in last night and giving her a new one. But only on the face, not where she really needs it. That’s still swollen and too wet, but it feels like it’s burning.

He says, Who did this to you, baby girl? I can tell you’re somebody’s nice little girl. You want me to take you to your mama?

She starts crying because she’s alone and he is so kind and she still can’t trust him. She leans in, and he helps her blow her nose. It inflates the handkerchief to the round fragile shape of an egg.

She cries because she can’t call her mom and must not call her dad and her friend isn’t answering. She cries because in her crying she just howled, probably scared this man. Or maybe she only imagined howling. Realizes she should have howled so he never had a chance to touch her.

He has stopped wiping her face. Now she has to catch her tears with her hands. She remembers the baby crying last night in the store and this makes her finally stop.

You can get in my car, the man says, though he’s backing away. Go on. I’ll take you where you want. Where you need to go. You can trust me, baby girl.

No, she screams. No. Screams it over and over till he jumps in his red car and drives off.

She was there with the first, number one, standing by the fridge and leaning against the counter and crossing her legs at the ankles, a long way from the hem of her little red skirt. She was skinny, is skinny, looks just okay in a bikini, but it’s not bikini season. She might fill out by summer. Her best friend is the one with breasts, but she already left.

They were sharing a can of whipped cream. Passing it back and forth. He and his friends complimenting her skinny body, her young metabolism that can live off fat and sugar and not gain an ounce. They said she could be a fashion model. She put her head back, and number one shook the can and squirted airy wet whipped clouds into her mouth.

He told her to keep her mouth open, and he put his lips on hers and licked half the cream out of the deep pink hollow.

He said, You want more?

And she said, Yes.

It would take all night to understand what yes could mean.

Her parents sit together.

They say the word she does not want to think. They made her come here, they are going to make her confess. To a roomful of people. Arbitration. She knows, she can tell, that they blame her. Especially her mom, who was drunker than Fourteen when the police car pulled up and the girl got out and Mom thought they were being arrested, both of them. Mom is mad that policemen saw her that way. She emphasized that it was her daughter’s disappearance that drove her to drink.

The man in the car was the one who called the police. He did it when he drove away. He must have thought it was the only thing, he must have been decent. He didn’t think how much trouble he’d be getting her into.

Now Fourteen and her mother both wear nice dresses. Her dad wears a tie. Their hair is clean, and they wear no makeup, nothing to draw attention, only her mother’s long red talons that are supposed to look classy.

Fourteen makes herself very, very still inside and does not cry. The men are watching her. They say she fooled them into thinking she was older. She sings a counting song inside her head, numbers circling around the lump where her scalp got bruised on the kitchen cabinet.

A lawyer points at her. He says she humiliated the college boys with her phone calls. All these terrible things she has done to herself, to everybody. Little girl, little slut, loose on the world.

They might sue her family.

She wishes something very bad would happen. To all of them, but especially to the one who cuddled her through the night.

He smiled at her when he walked in. It’s his family that wants to sue.

She sits very still, as she has been told to do. Told forever. Knees crossed. Fingers quiet. She’s been informed she’ll never have a phone of her own. The worst punishment her parents can think of for a girl her age. To start with, anyway.

And her head bangs and bangs and bangs. The pots in the cabinets clatter, the guys looking on cheer. The Pepsi clock stops ticking, the hats are front to back, and everybody’s phone rings while she throws up. She’s held over and over, by surfers and students and counselors and family.

A hug makes her head rattle and shake and slosh like coddled egg; a hug is like a gavel striking down.

It was bright, warm, a gorgeous day. Everyone else was at a mall but the three of them, Fourteen and Best Friend and Older Sister came to the beach. A big white sheet to lay across the sand, chips and sodas and gossip about the girls at school.

The seagulls ducked and dove and grabbed their food. Bird Rock belonged to the birds. The girls shouted and waved and kicked, wiggling on the sheet and the sand, protecting their Doritos and Twinkies.

There were surfers in the water and some on the sand below the bluff. The ones on the sand watched the ones in the water until they were distracted by the girls’ shrieks, their legs kicking in tight jeans and little skirts that flipped up to show their panties.

They had girls with them too. More precisely, there were two, and one of these was pregnant. Hugely pregnant, as if she might give birth any minute. She didn’t look old enough, but she was going to. She headed into the water and stood there a while, and the girls realized she was peeing.

Best Friend’s sister said, When our cousin was pregnant, she went to the bathroom all the time. It was so gross.

Fourteen just rolled and kicked and laughed. It felt like ditching class, ditching chores, being here today in December, but it was Sunday and winter break besides. She reached for another soda.

Hey, girly-girls! called one of the long- and light-haired surfers. He’d just come out of the water and set his board on its end. His wetsuit flopped around his waist, and his chest was drying in the sun and the breeze while he drank a beer. The top half of him was golden. Hey, you want something a little stronger?

They approached cautiously, giggling. They clutched their purses and felt grown up. They hadn’t been spoken to this way before, by grown men on a beach, grown men with beer.

Best Friend’s older sister took the can the guy handed her. When she cracked the tab, the contents exploded.

The surfers laughed as if this were riotously funny, as if they were all in junior high and pranking each other. Even Older Sister smiled and made a polite ha-ha sound.

Hey, said a short guy. He was Mexican, maybe number seven or eight. You want to come to a party tonight?

The winter light poured over them, and the beer made their tongues tingle and their bellies flop. They said they didn’t know, they’d have to get home by eleven or maybe twelve, their parents would freak . . .

The blond guy said, C’mon. What are you afraid of?

They giggled again, clutching each other and denting their cold cans of beer. They were brave, these girls. They were a little bit tipsy and very ready to see what was next.

Fourteen thought, I want to shake this can right up. I want to shake it and crack it and see what happens.

She shook. It fizzed. The others screamed with delight.

Fourteen laughed too, her fragile head flung back and hair tangled in the breeze, skirt blowing against her thighs, beer making her top transparent and herself feel adult with its bitter smell.

Everywhere she looked, there was nothing but future.

She said yes.

Le Carré to Bring Back George Smiley

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Your wait for new installments of Smiley & Guillam is almost over.

For the first time in over 25 years, a new John Le Carré book will feature George Smiley, according to a report from the Associated Press. The famous fictional spy, best known for his appearances in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy will play a prominent role in Le Carré’s latest, A Legacy of Spies, which will be released by Viking in September. Another fan favorite, Peter Guillam, will narrate the novel.

Considered by some to be the anti-Bond, Smiley relies on subtlety and careful observation, rather than more common thriller techniques, like acrobatics and beachside seduction. However, like 007, he has several on screen avatars. Most notably, Sir Alec Guinness starred as Smiley in the 1979 BBC adaptation of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Gary Oldman picked up an Oscar nomination for his rendition of Smiley in the 2011 film adaptation.

Ranking Every John Le Carré Adaptation

Set in the present day, the A Legacy of Spies finds Le Carré’s heroes forced to defend their past spying against “a generation with no memory of the Cold War and no patience with its justifications.” According to a statement from Viking, the novel includes several callbacks to Le Carré’s earlier work: operations featuring Alec Leamas, Jim Prideaux, George Smiley, and Peter Guillam “that were once the toast of secret London…will be scrutinized under disturbing criteria.”

Given the contemporary setting, Le Carré fans are already raising questions about Smiley’s role. After all, the veteran Cold Warrior, who last appeared in The Secret Pilgrim (1991), would now be at least 100 years old. Some have theorized he only appears in flashbacks. Perhaps the end of his life will be detailed. Maybe, however, he still lives and Le Carré will surprise his readers with a gritty Gran Torino-esque portrait of a very old man talking slowly.

Here Are the 2017 PEN/Faulkner Finalists!

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Congrats to Louise Erdrich, Garth Greenwell, Viet Dinh, Imbolo Mbue, and Sunil Yapa

Imbolo Mbue

Update 4/5: Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue has won the 2017 PEN/Faulkner!

The five 2017 PEN/Faulkner award finalists have just been announced, and as Ron Charles at Washington Post notes, it is a very diverse set of finalists. In past years, the award has gone to authors such as Don DeLillo, Sherman Alexie, and Deborah Eisenberg. The winner will get a prize of $15,000, with the runner-ups getting $5,000 each.

Here are the finalists:

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell (read our review of the novel here and our interview with Greenwell here)

After Disasters by Viet Dinh

LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue (read Mbue’s recommendations for immigrant literature here)

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa (read our review here)

Congrats to all the finalists!

Allison Benis White’s Poetry Will Gut You

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I sometimes worry that there will come a point in my reading life where I won’t be able to have the kind of visceral, unmanageable reaction to a book that I’ve often felt was made possible by my being young, hypersensitive, and — frankly — unmedicated. I worry that it’s behind me now, the time where I can be positively torn asunder by a text the way that I was when I read Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation at sixteen, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway at eighteen, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets at twenty-one. I never have the opportunity to worry about this for very long, however, because invariably what happens is that a book will land in my lap that proves I’m still (and hopefully always) alive and vulnerable to language, wielded expertly, which brings into being new, singular cartographies of emotional landscapes.

Allison Benis White’s Please Bury Me in This is such a book. Its effect in my first reading cannot be overstated. I texted a photo of a page — of which I’d highlighted the entirety — to a friend and wrote, simply, “I’m gutted.”

As is the nature of anything sublime, White’s collection of poems combats easy synopsis or concise abbreviation. I’m inclined to call them elegies of a sort, if, as Mary Jo Bang suggests, we understand that the objective of an elegy is “to rebreathe life into what the gone once was.” But the elegy that extends throughout Please Bury Me in This is as much about the haunting insufficiency of language as it is about the cruelty and greed of time and the disunity with which it can frame one’s life. White’s poems have no interest in ribbon-tying or putting everything in its right place. There are no bright, right places — that is grief. The beauty and the power of these poems, then, lies in the acknowledgement of this and the persistence to search anyhow; a gesturing, a reaching toward, that constitutes its own species of expression; its own grammar of grief.

It was so gratifying — and not a little emotional — to speak with White by email about Please Bury Me in This, out March 7th from Four Way Books.

Vincent Scarpa: The epigraph for the book comes from an article that appeared in The New York Times in 2014: “Mental illness is not a communicable disease, but there is a strong body of evidence that suicide is still contagious.” I thought the best way to open up a discussion of the book might be to ask what led you to situate this as the epigraph? It seems multivalent, multipurpose — both the placement and the sentence itself. I suppose this is also a question about intention on a larger scale, too. Was there something specific that set these poems into motion and found them cohering into a collection?

Allison Benis White: Yes, the epigraph refers to something specific that set these poems in motion — well, two specific events, both of which are gestured to in the dedications: “For the four women I knew who took their lives within a year” and “For my father.” After a very dear friend committed suicide, three more women (who were in our close and extended group of friends) took their lives as well — one every three months for a year. Each suicide was in some way a reaction to the previous suicide(s) — and this epigraph about suicide contagion was a succinct way to situate the poems’ originating traumas, and to locate the speaker as a potential victim of this contagion. My father’s death was also an originating event for these poems and is, more subtly, folded into the epigraph, as he suffered from significant mental illness, although his death was natural.

VS: Rachel Syme wrote a very interesting piece recently in The New Republic; a review of Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments that placed the book in a lineage of “many short, intensely personal works by women that have in recent years blurred the boundaries between poetry and prose.” As I told you before we started this interview, I place Please Bury Me in This on the same shelf as some of my all-time favorite books — Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, Rebecca Reilly’s Repetition, Jennifer Denrow’s California, Jenny Boully’s one love affair — because I found this collection as vulnerable and stunning and precise as those books in the way it maps the tectonic shifts of feeling and thought. The question of lineage, though, or the fact that these “intensely personal works” were all written by women and were all, to some extent, fragmentary/genre-blurring in nature, hadn’t really occurred to me — or, it hadn’t occurred to me as especially notable — until reading Syme’s piece. She says, “These are expansive narratives, but ones that take place inside compact vessels. It is as if these writers feel they need to pack as much into as little space as possible…and attempt to infuse it with a new resonance and weirdness, with something human and desperate.” I’d be interested in hearing you ricochet off of this — the possibility of there being a kind of reticulum between gender, genre, form, and content — in whatever way you feel compelled. All I could land on with any lucidity in my own thought process, particular to your book, is that the fragmented form can be a machine of meaning-making by virtue of the fact that it dramatizes isolation both in content and on the page itself, cut through with white space, and it dramatizes the fraught nature of connection as it arranges some lines to feel linked to what come before or after them and others to stand utterly loose, unstabled.

ABW: Wow, what a gorgeous analysis — what gorgeous insights. My instinct is to just let your words stand and not poison them with my own. But this is an interview (!), so I’ll try and say a few things. First, I’m in love with all the books you mentioned (bar the recent Manguso, which I haven’t had the chance to read yet), and I’m honored to be in their company. Each one of these books has paved the way for my act of articulation in Please Bury Me in This. I can say, on the page, I’m interested in violently but carefully carving away the unnecessary in an effort to access essential heat. I’m also obsessively interested in the virtue of “lightness” on the page, as Italo Calvino describes so beautifully in his first essay in Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Ultimately, I think form is emotional and intuitive. At one point, in a poem toward the end of the book, I wrote, “I mean the sentences cannot touch.” And I was like, oh, O.K., that’s what’s been going on this whole time: a kind of necessary isolation and illumination of (white) space via a series of double-spaced sentences as a means to represent the speaker’s fraught aloneness/weirdness and need to connect/gather. In the same poem, the line “…so the emptiness can pass through” arose. This seemed to communicate (to me) the goal of the form as well: to create space for passage — a cage for release.

VS: As I was reading and then rereading, I wondered whether it came about naturally in drafting or if it was perhaps more purposeful, your inviting certain figures — Woolf, Sexton, Plath, Duras — to be something like interlocutors in the text. At certain moments, you’re using their words directly, but at others you seem to be almost addressing them, or speaking from a locus that their work has opened up for you. Can you talk about the process by which these and other women — Lispector, Dickinson, Stein, O’Keeffe — made their way into the body of Please Bury Me in This?

ABW: I think the process was both natural and purposeful — natural in that these women, these minds, (what I call “my good voices”) are the ones I keep open on my desk while I write, the minds I want/need to be in conversation with. And purposeful in that I don’t want to be (and terribly want to be) alone. Employing their words periodically, and speaking to them (or near them), is an act of (or gesture toward) communion. I want to be with them (as well as with my dead friends), and so I’ve made a room, several rooms, in which to safely do that.

VS: The collection has a number of interests, but chief among them — in my reading, anyway — seemed to be the (in)sufficiency of language as a conduit for expressing/communicating experience — specifically, the experiences of grief and of suffering, emotional or physical. This is an area in which I’ve always been interested and which I, too, have written about, so it’s unsurprisingly one of the elements of Please Bury Me in This that most activated me emotionally and intellectually. Throughout the collection are moments where you touch down on this. In one poem you write, “I want a larger cage: every page, every letter;” a kind of acknowledgement that language is inherently an immuring agent, but that one can still state the desire, through language, for an increase in its capacity. (And perhaps that, in and of itself, is an enlargement!) I wonder if you could talk a bit about this, specific to what your vision for Please Bury Me in This was at the start and then the architecting of it with, as you say, “these words, their spectacular lack.”

ABW: Well, this is everything, isn’t it? — the need to use language on the page (because I can’t paint or sing, which will never cease to disappoint me — although I can dance (!), but not well enough to meet my needs to convey/invent) and the inherent failure of language to communicate trauma (the unsayable). This tension is the nexus: the only way I can scratch toward articulation is to begin with an admission of failure. This act of telling the truth (to myself) allows me to persist. Language cannot resolve grief or contain it, but it can sometimes make a box (a poem, a book) within which something alive (heat-producing) can be experienced.

VS: Following that thread a bit further, I wonder what your thoughts are now, having finished the book, about moments in the text wherein you seem to be flagging a failure of language, of communication, of writing, especially as it pertains to addressing another. “I am not any closer to saying what I mean,” you write in one poem. “Someday I believe, in order to be free, what I say will trample me,” you write in another. And then, on the penultimate page, in a particularly wrenching moment in a book unsparingly replete with them, you write, “I am writing to you as an act of ending.” I love that line so much for its choice not to designate what the speaker aims to end, only that she aims to end something via the act of writing. I’m not interested in — I’m not asking about — the question of whether or not writing is cathartic. (A question to which, it has always seemed to me, there’s exactly one honest, unsatisfactory answer: only so much and no more.) Rather, I guess I wonder what you feel you’ve ended — if you feel, even — with writing and now publishing Please Bury Me in This, which you dedicate to four women you’ve lost to suicide and to your father. Do you feel closer to having said what you meant? Or is the best one can hope for something like the effect you describe when you write, “What makes the shape become visible, and breathe, is the angle and variation of absence”?

ABW: I have three immediate responses to these questions: 1) Can I please steal your line and someday title a book, Only So Much and No More — or will you please write a book with that tile? 2) At this moment, I only know/feel that I’ve ended writing Please Bury Me in This, and 3) I suspect I may be closer to having said what I meant based on this series of interview questions.

VS: Oh, that’s happy-making to hear! And yes, the title is all yours.

My final question, fittingly, has to do with a line on the final page: “I mean the death of death leaves a hole.” That line was like an apple corer to my heart. And it reminded me of a line from Amy Hempel’s story “Beg, Sl Tog, Inc, Cont, Rep”: “The worst of it is over now, and I can’t say that I am glad. Lose that sense of loss — you have gone and lost something else.” Something essential, yet almost incommunicable, is being pointed to in both. Not that one would necessarily want to treasure or cling to one’s pain or angst or grief — though I think it’s quite common, and not at all inexplicable — but that it becomes familiar, and there is a manner of comfort in the familiar, and the pain can come to calibrate you, even dictate a sense of purpose. It can, as you write, “assemble the soul.” Having had the last word — at least, the last word in this book — on the set of concerns and emotional territory which, I can only assume, were what drove you to write these poems in the first place, I wonder if you feel that hole of “the death of death,” the loss of that sense of loss, and what you do with it. I ask, perhaps, because I’ve recognized in my own writing about pain a certain kind of resistance to completion, fearing what will and will not be on the other side of writing, what wrecked city the pain might leave behind when it leaves.

ABW: These questions are destroying me (in the best way). Will you marry me? Oh wait, I’m already married. OK, that was weird. Bear with me. I’ve been alone with this work for a very long time, and your words are a kind of knowing and understanding that is just brutal. I will just say that after finishing Please Bury Me in This, I wrote another manuscript in a fever (within a year) so as to remain in close proximity to my losses. They’ve piled up in such a way I don’t know who I am without them.