There’s an episode of Adult Swim’s wildly successful animated romp, Rick and Morty, where the eponymous duo is chased across the multiverse by a gaggle of alternate dimension Ricks. (Don’t ask.) Hopping from ‘verse to ‘verse, a running gag emerges where one world’s inanimate objects are another world’s animate inhabitants. In one, a slice of olive and mushroom pizza calls for takeout: “Yeah, I’d like to order one large person with extra people, please.” His companion, a pepperoni slice, interjects: “White people. Nononono — black people. And Hispanic on half.” After a few iterations, Rick and Morty settle down at a restaurant called La Poltrona Fame (The Hungry Armchair) in a universe where chairs sit on people. They order phones à la clams and phonesgetti with phoneballs.
Christopher Boucher’s Golden Delicious takes a concept similar to this and runs with it for three hundred pages. This is a world where humans date vending machines and traffic cones run society, where houses chat and move and sentences are kept as pets. It’s bonkers, in the best way.
Our hero, _____ (yes, an underline is his name), is a pudgy, bald, and lonely teen whose only close friend is the Reader (that’s you), and he’s the disappointment of his family. His father, Ralph, is a down-on-his-luck landlord, and the only one who takes much of a liking to _____. His quick-tempered mother, Diane, certainly does not, even when she’s around; for the bulk of the book, she’s either off with a group of flying Amazonian-type dictatorial matriarchal warriors called the Mothers, or training to become one of them. _____’s sister, Briana (later the Auctioneer) barely gives him the time of day.
_____ and his family live in Appleseed, Massachussets, a town filled with prosperous apple groves and rich in meaning. And by meaning, Boucher means money. Here, meaning is currency — truths and theories each have their worth. And with that meaning, _____ and his family can buy all sorts of things — like chips, or questions.
The book’s central conceit is that it is, in fact, a book. The earth beneath _____’s feet is not soil, but pages, and his family originally hailed from “the margins.” Language is grown, and sometimes sentient, like _____’s pet sentence, “I am.” Thoughts are sentient, occasionally leaving characters’ heads or influencing their behavior unduly, and prayers are words shot out of the head and sent toward the intended recipient. At one point, _____ leaves the story and heads to another novel. In any other book, this would be a Fourth Wall break, but here, the idea that life is a story is par for the course.
The town is quaint and lovely, in spite of its oddities. Named after the famed Johnny Appleseed, its legendary founder, Appleseed makes due with his Memory, who wanders about planting and harvesting language and ideas. But as the book progresses, it becomes apparent that Appleseed is in crisis. Bookworms begin to appear in the shapes of letters or sentences, digging holes throughout the town and, eventually, even its residents. As the plague grows and things get worse, _____ gets more and more depressed — or maybe it’s the other way around. His mother abandons his family, his sister runs off in the middle of the night to go to auctioneer’s school, and his father, utterly meaningless and in debt to a few imposing banks (which, yes, are sentient), abandons his buildings and goes to work at a factory where work and toil are produced. _____ is left alone with no one but “I am.” and the reader. Then the reader leaves, and the sky darkens.
The beauty of Boucher’s concept is that Golden Delicious can afford to be an utter hodgepodge peppered with nearly inexplicable happenings and still make an elegant sort of sense. Once the reader — uh, that is, the Reader — accepts the book’s internal [il]logic, parsing the wending tendencies of the plot becomes relatively intuitive. And hodgepodge it is: part bildungsroman, part picaresque, and part meta-commentary on reading, living, and meta-commentaries themselves.
It’s in the area of meta-meta-commentary, an admittedly complicated trick, that the book occasionally falters. In one of its rare fumbled moments, the Reader is forced into a position where her presence is required to put the story back on track. It feels a bit like a Breakfast of Champions sort of deus ex machina, as she literally revises the story to end in a manner that satisfies the reader. Or the Reader. Or both?
But isn’t that right, in the end? Don’t we, the readers, fill in the shadow between dead words on the page and the mind in which they spring to life? Is that not, in a sense, revision? Boucher, thankfully, doesn’t say — nor does the Reader. Only the reader can do that. Meaning is, in the end, our true currency.
Don’t die on the toilet; it’s really the worst way to go.
Even Elvis never lived it down, and he got away (for a while) with fake kung fu,
white jumpsuits, dyed eyelashes, using the word “ghetto” in a ballad,
and fluffer-nutters. You’re no Elvis.
Also, don’t die in the driveway: the likelihood of being backed over.
Don’t die on the subway platform or you’ll be cursed by thousands for fucking up their commute
before they even scrape you up. Oh the eight thousand inconveniences.
Deadheading
Have I become already the person writing about flowers? And yet you have to tear the dead things away, in order for more to come. They say you have to.
Though of course in the wild there’s no one keeping track of when the begonia stopped blooming, no deer with a clipboard shaking his tender head
and measuring soil acidity, his blackish tongue probing the roots for diggers. The conditions are always changing.
Way Down Deep
Discarded hashtags are filling up the ocean, fishnet throwaway comments winding around legs and fins; years from now we will see misshapen coral and tiny-waisted turtles who ran afoul of Kim K’s latest craze or the weighted-down corpses of things we tried to say without saying.
I learned how to sing love songs long before I learned how to love. I knew the love of a mother, of brothers and sisters, and the continual turns that good friends take through years of being together. When I married Chue Moua I was bathed in a torrent of desire to love and be loved by her. Throughout our nearly thirty-seven years of marriage, I have told her many times of my love for her, but I have never spoken of the moments in which love bloomed in my heart.
I sang songs of finding love, of losing love, of loving through the ages, of loving through different lifetimes. I have been unable to sing the one song of how love found me, how love never lost hope in me, of how love taught me to grow up, and how love is helping me grow old, Chue.
This much, you know. I’ve yet to tell you all the things that you don’t know.
When we were young, it was the narrowness of your waist, the rise of your breast, the smooth strands of your long, black hair, the clean curve of your cheek, the gentle turn of your head, the feel of your small, soft hand in my own that pulled me, one day at a time, toward the possibility of us. This much, you know. I’ve yet to tell you all the things that you don’t know.
***
I loved you when the Pathet Lao soldiers came into the jungles of Laos with their guns and their shouts, their threats and their warnings. We had been married for just six months. To save the women and children, the men had to run. We couldn’t afford open gunfire. There was no time for goodbye in the hustle to part. You and I stood beside a stand of bamboo trees. The wind blew through the fine leaves. We stood beside each other, holding hands beside a big bamboo truck. You were carrying my child in your belly. You were wearing my one spare shirt. You would not let go of my hand even as the sound of the soldiers approached us from all sides.
You would not let go of my hand even as the sound of the soldiers approached us from all sides.
I loved you when I pulled my hand free and saw the look of hurt on your face, to be replaced by fear because the soldiers had discovered we were there. I will never forget running away from you into the jungle after my brothers, leaving you behind with my mother and my sisters-in-law and their children, and those soldiers running toward you with their guns high in their hands. You looked young. You looked lost. You looked so brave. You placed both your hands on top of your belly, spread your fingers wide to protect our child; and you watched me run for a moment, and then you turned toward the soldiers and you faced them.
I loved you when I found you again, thin and pale, with our child strapped to your chest, your hand curved around the small globe of her dark hair, supporting the fragile neck. When I stood in the mouth of that mountain cave and I took our child into my arms for the first time, unburdened you from the weight of her during the months of your captivity, I felt her warmth and smelled her breath against my cheek, felt softness I had never known, and held something I could never own, I knew I loved you. You, who had carried her so far, to share her with me. You had given her a name to live by, Dawb. Her name was the color of white in our language, white like the clouds on the mountaintops or the flowers that perfumed the air in the cool months of the New Year.
I loved you when I heard you cry in the middle of the Mekong River because the silver necklace your mother had given you had slipped from your neck and you could not free your arms from our child to grab it in the strong current. I heard you cry on the banks of the Mekong River with the baby in your arms. In the months it took to get to the river, she had turned from a chubby baby into a small burlap sack of skin and bones. In the crossing of the river, her head had fallen beneath the surface of the water. She had stopped breathing. Her arms and legs dangled limply from her small, bloated belly. You clutched her close to your body, you rocked on your heels, and you stared not at the dawn or the new world around us but at the world in your hands. I watched your chest rise and fall, and your heart hammer in your throat, as you breathed life into our child, one breath at a time, your body swaying with the weight of a war lost, a country left behind, the future at its end.
I watched your chest rise and fall, and your heart hammer in your throat, as you breathed life into our child…
I loved you during our first night in Thailand, sitting beneath the United Nations compound, our child strapped to your chest, when I heard you whisper, “When we get to the refugee camp, I want papaya salad. I want the taste of spicy and sweet, of sour and bitter in my mouth. I want papaya salad when we get to the camp. I want the taste on my tongue.” I saw you shaking with hunger. I watched as your thin frame bent over our baby, our baby who hung on to life only because you refused to let her go. Your breast was infected and you were so thin, you had no milk for the baby. You extended your hand out of the shed overhang, your fragile wrist white and delicate, the thin blue vein throbbing with the beat of your heart, so you could catch the rain drizzle. You dipped your wet fingers into the mouth of our little baby, again and again, the long night through.
I loved you when we walked into Ban Vinai Refugee Camp and all you owned was the sarong around your waist, the torn shirt on your body. You walked with a limp because your little feet were so badly torn. The infection in your breast hadn’t gone away. You couldn’t hold the baby close to your breast because of the pain. You held our little baby strapped to your back. Your hair was swept away from your face, tied back. Your spine was straight. You held your chin parallel to the ground, the way I will always remember you in our weakest moments. Your eyes were trained ahead even as mine swerved to look behind, tried to find the mountains that had been our home, the country across the river, the family you left behind so you could be with me and mine.
You held your chin parallel to the ground, the way I will always remember you in our weakest moments.
I loved you when we had our second daughter, Kalia, in Ban Vinai Refugee Camp and you were scared of her because the night of her birth she cried each time one of us made a move to turn off the precious oil lamp. You were so exhausted, your head against the shirt we used as a pillow, but you looked at her the whole time, the small bundle of red and white in your arms. I couldn’t sleep the night through because our older daughter, Dawb, was only a year and nine months old and she had never been separated from your warm embrace in the dark of night. I remember her reaching for my breast, pulling at my nipple, on the brink of sleep, whimpering. I saw you looking at me as I offered her my breast, a poor substitution for yours, and allowed her time to suckle, held her in my arms so that she could find sleep in a night that offered no rest.
I loved you when you had your first miscarriage. We were so excited about the pregnancy, about the possibility of a son. You woke up in the early morning. You left the door open so the dawn could stream in on us. I was holding the girls close against the morning chill. You were on your way to the garden, to till the rows of green onions you had nurtured in the dry, hard soil. You wanted to haul water from the well so you could water the few rows of cilantro before the hot sun grew strong. You were four months pregnant. Instead of getting up and going with you, or telling you to stay with the girls while I attended to the chore on my own, I allowed my eyes to grow heavy and the warm breath of our daughters to lure me to sleep. I can still hear the screams of the women, the sisters-in-law, each in turn, as they called out to me to run fast. You were at the garden. You said you felt cramps. You were on your way to the toilet sheds when you fell. Blood seeped through your sarong and pooled in the uneven earth. You cried for help. You reached for the women who ran toward you. Your first words were for me.
I can still hear the screams of the women, the sisters-in-law, each in turn, as they called out to me to run fast.
I loved you during the second miscarriage. I heard you poke me in the night, and the shortness in your breath as you whispered, “The bleeding won’t stop.” I felt the thick wetness of warm blood between us. The girls slept their deep sleep by the wall. You said, “I don’t want to die on the bed with my girls.” Your voice broke. I grappled in the dark for you. I felt the tremor in my legs as I lifted you up from the bed. Your head went limp on my shoulder. I started screaming for help. Voices from the sleeping quarters around us: “What’s wrong? What’s happening, Bee?” Footsteps rushing our way. The door into our room rammed against the split bamboo wall as lanterns were raised. I saw you in my arms, your pale face, your eyes closed. I heard your labored breathing. I heard my mother say, “Bee, you are covered in blood.” My heart jerked, and I ran with you to the water wagon. I pushed you the distance to the camp hospital. I stumbled on rocks I couldn’t see. I lifted the wagon across the sewage canal, and my heart was hammering so hard against my chest, all I felt was its beat, not the water, the waste, the cold of both in the night.
I loved you during the third miscarriage when I stood beside you on the single bamboo bed and watched as the doctor and nurses circled us. I was helpless as I saw you wince in pain when the needle went into your arm. The nurses struggled to find your small veins. The doctor yelled, “She needs an IV. Now!” Your gaze was trained on the bedpan on the tray. Our baby was laid on the cool metal, on his side, six inches long, eyes closed, mouth open slightly, thin arms and legs, little red fingers and toes. You looked without blinking. I wanted to put my hands over your eyes, to block what you were seeing, to stop the gasps that you expelled. Your eyes did not blink and your gaze did not waver until one of the nurses noticed and took the baby away. You blinked. You blinked again as if you were in a dream, waking up for the first time. You turned toward me, you raised your hand a little, but it fell back on the bed. I saw your hands fisted tight, your knuckles white against the hospital sheet.
Our baby was laid on the cool metal, on his side, six inches long, eyes closed, mouth open slightly, thin arms and legs, little red fingers and toes.
I loved you during our fourth miscarriage when I helped you home along the dirt road, your light weight against mine, your feet directionless, your eyes on my face, and the words you kept on saying: “I’m so sorry, Bee. I know how much you wanted this baby. I tried to be so careful. No matter what I did, I felt the baby slipping away. I tried not to open my legs. I tried not to squat. I tried everything, Bee. I’m so, so sorry.” All I wanted you to do was be quiet. All I wanted you to do was stop apologizing to me for the pain you just went through. All I wanted was to be the person for you to rest on, to trust to lead you home again.
I loved you during our fifth miscarriage when the little baby was the size of a Coke bottle, its head round and pink, and you kept on screaming and screaming, and crying like you had never done before, deep from your belly, bellows up to the sky. I tried to hold you still but you fought me, in your wash of blood, you struggled away from my arms, moved toward the corner, put your knees up, and put your arms around your knees, shaking so hard. You would get tired, and when I thought you’d given up, you’d start again until your voice grew raspy and your screams were just muscles of the mouth and throat moving. I told you then, “We stop trying. This is our last time. I don’t want you to have to go through this again. We have two girls. We will be fine.” I told you, again and again, “This is our last time” — until my voice grew hoarse and I lost the energy for words.
I loved you during our sixth miscarriage when we thought it would be our last, and all I could do was bury my head in my hands and cry by your side at the camp hospital.
I loved you during our sixth miscarriage when we thought it would be our last, and all I could do was bury my head in my hands and cry by your side at the camp hospital. I heard the scream of a mother in pain and then the cries of her baby being born. All I wanted you to do was reach your hand for mine, but your hands were cold and they held your belly, and your eyes looked up at the ceiling fan, and the only reason I knew you were in the room was because streams of liquid flowed down either side of your cheeks. It was you, then, who said, “This is our last time, Bee. I’m not going to try again. I can’t make it through this again.”
I loved you in the early morning when you got up to stoke the embers from the night fire, blow into the red lines in the burnt wood, and wave your hand in front of your face to ward off the smoke.
I loved you late at night when the sound of the crickets grew fierce and unafraid, and we could hear the scurrying of mice along the floor, but your head was on my shoulder, your hand was on my heart, and the smell of your green Parrot soap wafted up to my nose and invited me to play in a garden of fresh flowers lush with rain, to swim in streams warmed by the day’s hot sun.
I loved you when you set aside the thigh of a chicken for my mother at dinner, spooned the softest part of the rice from the metal pot onto her plate, and made sure she had a bowl of broth by her side to help her swallow down the food we shared.
I loved you when you bathed our girls at the small well on our side of the camp. You hauled buckets of cold water up from the dark depths. You told the girls to close their eyes. You poured the water over their heads. You used your hands to create suds from our soap. You washed their hair, made them giggle with the tickle of your soft hands on their scalps. Your gentle hands ran over their arms and legs, brushed the expanse of their bare backs, slapped at their bottoms. You washed inside their ears, under their necks, in their armpits, everywhere, the crooks of elbows and knees, in between fingers and toes. You held the bowl of water high over their heads and you created a fountain of love for their growth.
I loved you when you refused to let me sleep so that we could talk about a journey to America.
I loved you when you refused to let me sleep so that we could talk about a journey to America. I told you that my mother wanted us to stay together in Thailand, that losing Shong in the jungles of Laos was too much already, that we couldn’t lose each other in a journey to a country whose language we didn’t speak, whose people we didn’t know, whose work we probably wouldn’t be qualified to do. But you just kept on shaking your head; you said if we left, then so would the others and eventually my mother would have to agree. You said what happened to Shong was a consequence of war, and that we would lose our children to poverty and a life of fear if we didn’t take this chance with our fate. You said we were young, still, and that in America even if we never mastered the language, we would learn enough to survive. You said if we never got good jobs in America, at least we could get jobs that allowed us a chance to educate and raise our children so they might one day find good work. You said so many things that when I closed my eyes and my breathing evened out, your words led me into dream worlds where you and I ventured far and grew brave and fearless, we went to a place where buildings shone and walkways were paved, lived a life where there was food on the table the long week through and cars to drive whole families from one place to the next.
I loved you when you did not cry as we boarded the orange bus for America. You sat straight in the seat and you held Dawb in your arms, and when you looked at me there was no fear in your gaze, only a determined focus on the future. You showed me in that moment the heart and the hope that allowed you to walk away from your own mother to be with me, the courage that I lacked but have always loved.
I loved you when we arrived in Phanat Nikhom Transition Camp to America to find ourselves encircled by barbed wire fences taller than grown men, beneath watchtowers guarded by men with guns. You held the hands of our daughters and stood by my side as we both turned toward the gray peaks far away and breathed our last breath of captivity in a country that could never be ours. Late at night, on the hard cement floor with just a cloth spread on the ground to buffer the cold, we slept with our girls between us. The cloth walls that separated our sleeping compartment from other families’ billowed in the night wind. The open entryway beckoned our eyes to the stars in the black distance. Our feet touched in the night and I felt the cool softness of your skin. I knew we would walk from this long night together.
Our feet touched in the night and I felt the cool softness of your skin. I knew we would walk from this long night together.
I loved you during the hot, endless days of preparing for life in America in classrooms of people our age, men and women, with hands covering mouths, practicing American words slowly with stiff tongues: “Hello. How are you? I am fine. Thank you. Goodbye.” We said the words again and again to ourselves before taking away our hands and slowly repeating the words to each other. Your eyes glittered with fearless mirth as you said the words while I struggled to find the laughter in our situation.
I loved you on the plane to America when your new shirt from Thailand began soaking up the blood of our youngest, Kalia. She leaned into you on the seat, across the hand rest that separated you two. Her head rested against your side, the tail of your shirt clutched in her hands, as she wiped at the blood that dribbled from her nose. I took her from you so you could rest. In my arms, her eyes grew heavy with sleep. The red on your shirt dried to the color of rust, and in the dark chamber of our flight across the heavens I watched your fingers scratch at the dried blood, trying futilely to remove the stain. I watched you hide the stain in the fold of your fingers.
I loved you when we stood up on the bridge, overlooking Highway 94, side by side, in our American clothes. We wore jeans from the thrift store. We had on sweaters whose sleeves bunched at our wrists. The church basement jackets were too big and too long. We stood without words, looking at the cars that rushed below on the fast highway. The sky was a layering of dark clouds. The rain drizzled lightly. Half the trees that rose high from the walls on either side of the highway were bare without leaves, arms reaching hungrily toward the gray. The other half carried brightly colored leaves in yellow, orange, crispy brown, shades of pink, some of them still clinging to the last of the summer green, all a sharp contrast against the day. A brisk breeze blew. We had no words for each other or our new lives. You kept both your hands in your pockets. Strands of your long hair flew across your face, and I knew you would cut it soon, and I could not ask you to stand young beside me for longer than I could stand young beside you. We knew we would age in America.
I could not ask you to stand young beside me for longer than I could stand young beside you. We knew we would age in America.
I loved you when you asked me, “When are we going to get a washing machine now that we are in America?” I hadn’t expected the question. We’d walked through Sears and I had seen you touch the tops of the washing machines with their matching dryers. I had seen you flip price tags and look at numbers. I hadn’t expected you to ask me that question in the car. The children were loud. They grew quiet. I tried to focus on the road but everything was blurry for a moment. My throat grew tight. Words were hard. All I could do was swallow my hurt and my pride and tell you what you already knew to be true: “I am sorry I cannot get you a washing machine, even now that we are in America.”
I loved you when you were pregnant with our little boy, Xue. Your stomach hadn’t been growing much. You had been bleeding. You felt pain. I couldn’t believe we would have a baby and I chose not to believe it even after the ultrasound. I loved you when you gave birth to Xue. I couldn’t believe he would be in our life until the moment he cried up at me, his head all bruised from the vacuum, his little face suffused with purple. His hands were in fists and he punched up at my unbelieving eyes. He was angry because I had not dared to accept him as part of my reality. He was angry because the journey to us was so long. The look in his brown eyes, so fierce and focused, worried me. For the first time, I wondered if I could be a good father to a son. I felt my own reservation and fear in the wrestling of his fist against my hold, the soft fragility of fingers I wanted to fold into my own. I looked at you, exhausted, hair mussed, eyes closed, sinking into the hospital’s pillows, and I knew you would leave this for me to figure out, my son and my relationship, leave it to our own making. Your trust in me then and now scares and reassures me.
For the first time, I wondered if I could be a good father to a son.
I loved you all those years we worked every hour we could to feed our children and clothe them and the young ones kept on coming, and our hearts were full of love but our heads hurt trying to work around budgets that never balanced. I loved you on the cold dawns when we dropped off the younger children at my brother Chue’s house. We scurried in the dark, up their icy walkway, tinkered with the lock — all in the shadows of night. We sat the children down and took off their jackets and snowsuits. We turned on the television set and placed them in front of the flickering screen. We propped bottles nearby. We watched Xue hold Hlub as Hlub sat close to sleeping Shell, as they waited for their cousins to awaken into the day, for their aunt and their uncle to gather them close in the morning light. Each day you whispered to the children that it was your last day of work, of leaving them. I had to nudge your arm to get you to move. I had to be the one to open and close the old brown door. I had to watch as the Minnesota cold stung your eyes and its icy wind bit into your face, as you tried not to cry for the three little ones and yourself. Each and every day, those long years through, feeling but unable to do a thing to alleviate or help the sorrow that grew and grew inside of you for the time you could not give the children, the gift you could not give yourself, my love for you grew.
I loved you when you said we couldn’t get up at three in the morning anymore to go to work away from our youngest children, and you wanted me to change jobs, to get work that would allow me to take care of the children during the day. I wanted to tell you that we were assemblers who did not speak much English in this country. I wanted to ask you who would drive you to work in the mornings and back home again when the shift is through. We only had one car. You were afraid of cars. I wanted to tell you that I was scared to go looking for a job and come home without one. I wanted to tell you that I was scared to go to work without you in the same place with me. Who was going to help you move the heavy boxes of machine parts to the stacks when you’d filled them? What if something went wrong in the factory? Who would hold your hand and run with you outside? How would I ever work in this country, raise the children, without knowing that you were beside me? You were the only reason I felt we had a chance going forward as a family and you were asking us to part our days for our children. I loved them too much to speak to you of my fears, so I said I would look for a job, even at lesser pay, on a different shift, so that I could take care of the children, and we wouldn’t have to part with them each morning for work before the light of the sun could comfort them from the dark.
I wanted to tell you that I was scared to go looking for a job and come home without one.
I loved you through all the years when we couldn’t be together because we worked different shifts in different places. Each day, you continued our old routine. You woke up at three in the morning. You brushed your teeth, cooked food, and then dressed. You pulled the front door behind you and the key turned in the lock by four. By five you were at Phillips & Temro Industries in Eden Prairie. I took care of the children until you got home at two in the afternoon. My shift at the new company started at three. We had the minutes in between to say hello and goodbye. I didn’t get home until midnight. The only light in the house that was on each night I came home was in the kitchen. The small, moldy house was fogged up by winter and our efforts to stay warm. The house was quiet because you and the younger children were already asleep. The older girls looked up from their homework at the small dining table, called out greetings, made an effort to get up and come give me hugs, but I always thought about their safety first, I always told them not to come close. I was working as a polisher in a machine factory and I didn’t want the residue of the chemicals and steel particles I worked with to get on them. I knew that it could cause cancer. I said, “After I shower, I’ll give you hugs.” Each night, I showered and then I kissed my older girls good night, and then I made my way to our room, where I clung to my edge of the mattress, the three younger ones in between us, their even breathing my song in the night. Rest never came until you woke at up at three again, and I could scoot the children over, closer to your vacant place by the wall, and sleep on my back.
In those years, it was only in my dreams that we were together.
In those years, it was only in my dreams that we were together. There, you reached out to me and you held my hand across the heads of our children. There, you spoke softly and asked me how I was doing with my new work. There, you held me close and told me that I was doing a good job right alongside you, but our life wasn’t like my dreams. I never asked you what your dreams were. I was scared of them, as you were of mine. On the weekends, we were shy and angry, tired and exhausted, too happy only to be with the children, unsure of how to be with each other, our voices colliding, crashing, silencing, pleading on the weekends when we shared the same house, the same children, the same life.
I loved you when you said we had to move because our little girl Taylor had gotten lead poisoning in the small, moldy house, and there was no room to breathe. You pushed the air from my chest with your fervor and your fearlessness. Financially, nothing added up. We were barely making ends meet. The house we lived in we bought for $36,500. We were on a thirty-year mortgage. You said we had been in America for sixteen years. You said we had lived in the McDonough Housing Project, in a haunted Section 8 house, in a two-bedroom apartment, and in this rotten house for eight long years. You said you wanted more than nine hundred square feet. You wanted more than one bathroom. You wanted more than two and a half bedrooms. You wanted more for your six children and yourself. You wanted more for me. I looked at you, chest heaving, your short hair touched by gray, and for the first time since we came to America, I saw what our life here had done to you.
I looked at you, chest heaving, your short hair touched by gray, and for the first time since we came to America, I saw what our life here had done to you.
I saw your trembling hands, hurt by carpal tunnel. I saw the turn of your head, ear angled toward me, your loss of hearing because of the loud machines. I saw the heavy curve of your shoulders, once clean lines of flesh and bone, muscled and toned. I saw the force of poverty that pulled you down, the gravity that sucked you close to the ground. I saw you trying to rise up in life, one more time, perhaps the last time. I worried about you, and I said, “I want a house like the one you want. I want a house with a big yard where my children can run and I can have chickens.” Then, we began smiling, tight at first, rigid with fear, and then we began laughing, crazy and loud, and the children noticed, and the young ones danced around us in joy and celebration. But they said, “We don’t want to move. We love this house. We want to stay here.” We turned to each other, perplexed by their love of a house that had destroyed so much of our health, and we called in our crazy laughter and reined in our fear, and we said, “We are moving to a better place where we can be together more often. We don’t know how we are going to do it, but we will figure it out as it is being done.”
I loved you in 2003. In 2003, our oldest daughter was at Hamline School of Law. In 2003, our second oldest graduated from Carleton College and was on her way to Columbia University in New York City. In 2003, my mother died.
In 2003, I realized you stood with our children in the place my mother had stood with me. She was alone in the fight to feed and clothe us. I started worrying that I had left you alone for stretches of the fight, that you alone had been the engine for the journeys of our family ship, as my mother had been in a life without a husband to help.
In 2003, I lost all the songs inside me because I had not written them down, and when my mother died, my heart grew weak and could no longer hold the songs intact.
In 2003, I lost all the songs inside me because I had not written them down, and when my mother died, my heart grew weak and could no longer hold the songs intact. For the first time in my life, I had become an orphan, this person I had always felt I was but had never really been. I looked at our children and you and I knew that even without me, you would raise them to adulthood.
In 2003, I realized what I had done to your life. I married you when you were only sixteen years old. I took you far away from your family. You never saw your own mother die. You had been an orphan for a long, long time. As we buried my mother in the frozen earth, all I could feel was the empty space inside where once my songs had been. My mother had told me to bow down toward the rising sun on the morning of her burial. She said what I needed would come. My mother died on February 18, 2003.
On November 26, 2003, nine months after my mother died, you gave birth to Max, a little boy with an American name, a little boy I didn’t think we could handle and had said maybe we should consider not having, a little boy who looked up at me with almond eyes, who smiled my smile. Max was a surprise. Nearly nine years after our youngest daughter had been born, long after we said we were done having children, long after I had tried my hand at being a father to a son and was beginning to feel I had failed, out of the blue, cloudless sky a little boy traveled into our life on the wings of my mother’s death.
In 2003, I realized I had never written you a love song.
I have a new mission in life: I’m going to make Lydia Millet famous. Honestly, she should be literary-rock-star level already. She’s an exceptionally funny writer, but her sense of humor is nothing compared to her capacity for empathy. Her books glow with it. And none more than her new novel, Sweet Lamb of Heaven, in which a smart, sensible, sane woman named Anna hears the voice of God emanating from her newborn daughter. That’s not a spoiler; it’s the first page of the book. What I will not spoil for you is Anna’s flight from her evil political-candidate husband, which is the engine of the book’s plot — a plot which is thriller-level gripping, but I don’t think Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a thriller. It’s an exploration of good and evil, of language, and of motherhood; it’s high literary fiction; and, you know, it has some demons. What more could you want?
Lily Meyer: Here’s the thing about Sweet Lamb of Heaven: I’ve been talking about it to everyone I know, but I haven’t described it in the same way twice. So I really want to know how you describe it.
Lydia Millet: I suppose in basic terms it’s a story about a woman whose child is threatened, whose mental privacy is threatened and, finally, whose life is threatened. There are some supernatural elements — you know, actually, I was just looking up statistics about how many Americans believe in the supernatural, and they’re amazing. Something like 77 percent of Americans believe in angels, and — dig this — among people 18 to 29 years old who are not affiliated with any particular religion, something like 63 percent believe in demons and 85 percent believe in the supernatural.
Meyer: That is wild. Did you know about this when you started writing Sweet Lamb of Heaven?
Millet: I had no idea. I just wanted to write about language and ideas about God, and I wanted to do it in the context of a story that had suspense and tension and darkness and intrigue. And I sort of have a weakness for movies like “Fallen” or “The Ring” where there’s this real clear good-and-evil dichotomy, and I like it when evil is vested in a child. So I liked that structure, but I had no idea that there was any kind of realism associated with this book, except on the political end of the spectrum, depending on whether you interpret the antagonist as a demon or not. I thought the idea that he was a demon was outlandish — and I wanted it to be outlandish!
Meyer: How do you think your novel interacts with Christianity? I know there are a couple moments of specific Christian imagery, but I found myself thinking, from my secular Jewish perspective, that this book is sort of about the Christian God, but it doesn’t feel Christian at all.
There’s every reason Christ shouldn’t belong to the rich and powerful, but right now he does in this country.
Millet: I think the book wants to make an argument toward a broader understanding of God that is non-sectarian and is not the birthright of people, and certainly not of any specific monotheism, but is understood to be the birthright of all sentient creatures. And the plot intersects with this strain of fundamentalist Christianity that I believe has been co-opted by the corporate right and used by the corporate right to claim the moral high ground, when of course there’s no reason that Christ should belong to the rich and powerful. There’s every reason Christ shouldn’t belong to the rich and powerful, but right now he does in this country. It’s partially a book about that, but it’s not a Christian book — though I don’t want to dismiss any form of religious faith. Going forward, I think there’s a crucial role for faith to play in politics, especially in things like climate change. So I didn’t want to disrespect faith at all in this book. I wanted to look at the ways faith is exploited.
Meyer: There’s not that much political fiction getting written now, I think. Are there novelists you think are doing it particularly well?
Millet: Not directly political fiction, no. Some humorists have worked pretty well with shadow politics and symbols — like Chris Bachelder. I thought The Throwback Special is really good allegorical fiction. And then of course George Saunders and Donald Antrim, but they’re not directly political. I would like to see more literary political fiction.
Meyer: Me too! I was thinking as I read Sweet Lamb of Heaven, When’s the last time I read a novel this explicitly pro-choice? And I don’t know!
Millet: There’s a real reticence in literary fiction to be overtly political. You don’t want to be seen as advocating; you want to pretend to some aesthetic objectivity. I understand that partly, but I think it’s a cop-out sometimes. When things are difficult is really when you should probably take them on.
Meyer: To go back to the question of how you describe the book, do you think of Sweet Lamb of Heaven as a thriller?
Millet: Some people have called it that, and I think it can be framed that way. It has a certain formal kinship with thrillers, but I saw it as more of a form of horror. Maybe it’s a supernatural thriller, though people have called it a psychological thriller, and of course it is psychological, in a way.
Meyer: Well, that’s what literary fiction is, right? But your publicist pitched it to me as a psychological thriller, and, I mean, once she’d mentioned your name she could have pitched it to me as whale song and I would have been like, Great, send it to me, but that description did not prepare me at all for the extent to which Sweet Lamb of Heaven is a meditation on language.
Millet: That was where the book started, with this idea that I have about deep language. That was what got me writing.
Meyer: I’m so curious about how you actually write the sentences in a book that you’ve decided will be about language.
Millet: I wanted the diction in this book to be pretty straight. I wanted a reliable narrator, and really, my bailiwick in the past has been the flawed narrator. But here, because I had these outlandish conceits, I needed someone authoritative. She’s arch, she’s intelligent, but she’s pretty straight, and I needed that foil to play against ideas about the divine and the supernatural. You can’t really have a narrator who seems overtly untrustworthy, which is the kind of narrator that’s easier for me. But I wanted to have her be believable. I didn’t want the reader wondering whether she was just a kook. It wouldn’t have served my ideological or narrative purposes, and I think it’s sort of boring. I’m a little jaded about the Am I crazy thing that you see in a lot of horror movies. I tried to dispense with that, to say, This isn’t a story about unreliability.
Meyer: I think what ended up happening was that you created an assertive and direct female narrator of a kind that I have not seen often. That was one of the most fun things about reading Sweet Lamb of Heaven for me. I kept thinking, Oh my God, this woman is telling me that she knows she’s right! This never happens in fiction!
Millet: Obviously it’s crucial to the story that she’s a woman. And I like writing from an alleged male perspective too, but this novel had to have a strong female voice that wasn’t a victim voice.
Meyer: To what extent do you think of this as a book about motherhood?
…the greatest harm that can be done to you is to your child. You’re just a second-class citizen in your own life.
Millet: It is partly about that. You become so vulnerable as a parent, and I didn’t really anticipate that — the degree to which you are vulnerable for the rest of your life once you have children. You can always be gotten to through your children; the greatest harm that can be done to you is to your child. You’re just a second-class citizen in your own life. The stakes are very high, obviously, and that makes a mother a very raw kind of target for anyone who is willing to mess with the child. It’s about motherhood in that sense: Anna’s protectiveness and her focus on her child.
Meyer: It’s so different from other books I’ve read about motherhood recently. I’m thinking mostly of Dept. of Speculation, which I love.
Millet: You know that’s by my best friend, Jenny Offill.
Meyer: I had no idea you were friends!
Millet: She was the first person I told about Sweet Lamb of Heaven. I remember I said to her, “Jenny, I have the worst idea for a book. The single worst idea for a book I’ve ever had. There’s this baby, and God speaks through it.” And she was like, “You should do it!” She’s been a champion of the book from the beginning. Anyway, I thought the way she wrote about motherhood was very delicate and nuanced and excellent.
Meyer: Do you find that there are questions you get asked, as a writer, because you are female?
…“You’re a mother. How do you find time to write?” How many fathers get asked that?
Millet: I think the entire playing field is different for interviews when you’re a woman. You tend to get more personal questions, more challenging questions — not in the sense of difficult, but there’s less respect. There’s less talk of genius and brilliance. Instead, there’s stuff like, “You’re a mother. How do you find time to write?” How many fathers get asked that?
Meyer: That was the question I had in mind, actually. I hear female writers getting asked that all the time and it makes the hair stand up on my neck. I think the question should be, How do you protect your brain space for writing from your day job and from your life as a human, as opposed to your life as a writer?
Millet: That is a better question. And the answer for me is that I protect it by not teaching. I like students, but I don’t like reading a lot of manuscripts by students. I get infected by them. So it’s good that I don’t teach very often.
Meyer: Do you have a fantasy book that you’d like to write? Not genre-fantasy — I mean your dream book.
Millet: I would like to write a book that felt urgent. When I was writing My Happy Life I felt really urgent about it, and it actually changed the way I thought about people, writing that book. The way I thought about books, also. I was a colder writer before that book. I’d like to write another book that changed me. It was interesting to see that that could occur, that something you created could change the quality of your emotional life.
Meyer: And, finally, do you have a fantasy reader? If you saw someone on the subway reading your book, who would you want that person to be?
Millet: It should be someone who hadn’t read any of my books before and wasn’t inclined toward books of the sort that I write. Someone who came to it accidentally and liked it, who stumbled on it, but for whom it was not a typical pick. Someone for whom it was strange. That’s who my fantasy reader would be.
Literature is teeming with bad mothers. This list of manipulative, abusive, selfish, and often downright cruel women is an impressive survey of the unique ways in which a single person might screw up a child. Why the obsession with terrible moms? Historically women have been the primary caretakers. It’s been Mom, not Dad, whose everyday interactions shape a child, for better or for worse. Add that to the physical bond of pregnancy and the idea that mothers who can’t parent are going against nature, whereas many a bad father gets off with the relatively light sentence of being a jerk.
Despite the annoying gender imbalance of this phenomenon, it makes for great reading. Some mothers are overbearing, insufferable nags. Some are self-involved or delusional and hardly notice their children at all. Often these women have sad stories of their own. They’re one link in a chain of dysfunction which, like the proverbial car crash, you just can’t look away from. No matter what, these bad mothers allow literature to do what it does best: investigate the ways in which humans affect each other.
In honor of Mother’s Day, here is a list of mothers so terrible, they’ll make you want to call up your own mom and thank her as soon as possible.
1. Cathy Ames in East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to Cathy Ames, introducing her as “a malformed soul.” Motherhood hardly reforms the former prostitute who killed her parents by setting fire to their house. After seducing both Trask brothers (thus leaving the parentage of her twins open to question), Cathy abandons her children. That’s not the worst fate, as it frees them from a woman who proceeds to murder her husband and run a brothel that’s involved in all kinds of drugs and violence. In Steinbeck’s nod to parable, Cathy is meant to evoke “Eve” and the introduction of sin into the world; he also set the bar for bad mothering extremely, and almost reassuringly, high.
2. Janice Angstrom in Rabbit, Run by John Updike
Janice Angstrom is a drunk mess. To be fair, she is stuck in a marriage with a selfish, wayward ex-high school basketball star who spends all day hawking MagiPeelers to housewives. But even life with Rabbit Angstrom doesn’t justify the mother that Janice becomes or her ultimate, unforgivable act. After spiraling into a dangerous state of postpartum depression mixed with heavy drinking, Janice accidentally drowns their baby daughter in the bath.
3. Margaret White in Carrie by Stephen King
Margaret White’s foray into motherhood does not start well. After having sex with her husband before marriage, the fanatically religious Margaret throws herself down the stairs to induce a miscarriage. Her second attempt at motherhood manages to be even worse. From the time that her daughter Carrie is a baby, Margaret suspects her of being a witch and treats her as such, locking her daughter in a special “prayer closet” for hours at a time. Margaret also takes repressive views of women’s sexuality to new highs with beliefs such as developing breasts is something that only happens to “loose women.” Thankfully Carrie is harboring some kick-ass secret powers which means she can get better revenge than most teenagers, who have to settle with getting a tattoo.
4. Eva Khatchadourian in We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver
At the outset it’s hard not to feel badly for Eva Khatchadourian; her son Kevin goes on a shooting spree at his school, mercilessly killing nine classmates and two members of staff. But the genius of Shriver’s chilling tale is that she investigates not just Kevin’s guilt, but Eva’s. It’s a twisted take on a question that society has debated for ages: what responsibility, if any, does a mother have over her child’s behavior? In this case, Eva certainly bears some blame. Her adversarial relationship with her son starts with pregnancy (she only concedes to have a child to please her husband) and escalates though Kevin’s childhood, epitomized by an episode where she throws Kevin across the room, breaking his arm. Whether or not Eva is to blame for Kevin’s crime, there was no way that child was going to grow up without some serious issues.
5. Fiona Brewer in About a Boy by Nick Hornby
Yes, this novel was written by Nick Hornby and made into a charming film with Hugh Grant, but there is a real darkness to the character of Fiona. She exemplifies the problems that can occur when a woman who’s not ready, or willing, to become a mother has a child. Fiona is immature and depressed, especially in the face of her latest romantic breakup, and she completely ignores the signs that her young son Marcus is struggling. At the height of her selfishness, Fiona overdoses on drugs in the living room, lying in a place where Marcus is sure to find her. Hornby’s novel reminds us that it’s hard enough to be twelve without having to parent your parent as well.
6. Sophie Portnoy in Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
No doubt to the distress of many real women, Sophie Portnoy became the stereotype of Jewish mothers everywhere. Sophie is an overbearing, nosey nag, a worrier, and, above all, “one of the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time.” Her invasive, manipulative nature has its consequences, most obviously in Portnoy’s obsessive, anxious relationship to women and sex.
7. Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mrs. Bennet is another force to be reckoned with: she’s bossy, loud, crude, and probably an alcoholic. Most damningly, she’d trade her daughter’s happiness to calm her own nerves. When Mrs. Bennet tries to force Elizabeth into marrying the gouge-your-eyes-out-boring Mr. Collins, her meddling passes from “mother trying to ensure daughter’s future” to “enforced slavery.” Jane Austen makes it clear that even in the 18th century that’s a pretty contemptible act.
8. Sweetness in God Help the Child by Toni Morrison
What should a mother do when her child is not what she expected or desired? We can all probably agree that the answer is “love the child anyway,” but unfortunately that’s not always the case, in the real world or in literature. Disappointment mixed with a sort of revulsion is what overtakes Sweetness, a light-skinned black woman who gives birth to a “blue-black” baby in Toni Morrison’s latest novel. Sweetness hates her daughter Bride’s dark skin and Bride grows up without any love or tenderness; Sweetness won’t even touch her baby’s skin without a cloth or sponge. In the end it’s Sweetness’s cruelty that impacts Bride’s life, far more than the color of her skin.
9. Mrs. Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
Mrs. Lisbon is a fanatic Catholic who runs her household with an iron first. When generally repressing her daughters doesn’t stop them from disobeying her, she pulls them from school and locks them in the house. Being isolated within the crazy, literally disintegrating household leads all five of her daughters to kill themselves. Mrs. Lisbon is only half of the dysfunctional parenting duo that is the Lisbons, but taking even fifty percent of the blame for the death of five daughters still makes you one of literature’s worst moms.
10. Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Emma Bovary’s life is no picnic, but her decision to deal with her mounting debt through suicide ensures that her daughter, Berthe, will have a life that is just as desperate as Emma’s own. The last we see of Berthe is when she is sent to live with an impoverished aunt who forces her to work in a cotton mill. It’s a sad state and, given how her mother’s notorious past will haunt her, things are likely to only get worse.
This week, J.K. Rowling took to Twitter to apologize to Harry Potter fans:
Rowling has made a tradition out of apologizing for fictional character deaths on May 2nd, the date of the big final battle in the Harry Potter series. On it’s own, this is a harmless and fun engagement with fans, but it fits into a weird yet clever pattern of Rowling almost weekly offering apologies or revisions to her fantasy series that supposedly ended nine years ago.
Of course, Rowling is not the first creator of an epic fantasy series who couldn’t stop adding to and tweaking it. J.R.R. Tolkien rewrote a key scene in The Hobbit to fit the story he planned for The Lord of the Rings, Stephen King revised the first book of his Dark Tower series to fix continuity errors, and George R. R. Martin has been delaying finishing book six of A Song of Ice and Fire by writing prequel novellas and a compendium encyclopedia. But Rowling’s meddling goes beyond a few continuity tweaks or dawdling, and is more reminiscent of George Lucas’s revisions to his epic fantasy-in-space Star Wars films. Like Rowling, Lucas kept feeling he’d done things wrong and needed to “fix” his beloved creation…or at least realized he’d make a lot of bank doing so.
It’s interesting that in contrast to George Lucas, Rowling has mostly been praised for her after-the-fact meddling. Part of this is because Rowling is often addressing a major issue in her books: a lack of diversity despite a sprawling cast. There’s something admirable about wanting to correct that, while there’s nothing noble about adding horrible whimsical dance numbers to Star Wars. And Rowling has avoided making changes to the actual text itself, unlike Lucas and his digital insertions. On the other hand, many have noted how odd it is to give Rowling credit for diversity that doesn’t actually exist in the books. If she wanted to have gay characters or a more divers student body, she would have done far more good putting that in the actual books. It’s more interesting and important that a black actress was cast as Hermione in an actual play than that Rowling tells us Hogwarts was theoretically diverse but she didn’t get around to showing those characters on the actual page.
(I’ve heard people argue that “it was a different time” when Rowling wrote the Harry Potter books and she couldn’t possibly have been published if her books included gay characters or non-white major characters. But the Harry Potter books were published between the late 90s and late 00s, not the Dark Ages and if ANY author had the power to do whatever she wanted it was Rowling after the Harry Potter books had become the most talked about and bestselling fantasy books in generations.)
I also wonder if the different receptions to Lucas and Rowling is a matter of timing. Star Wars was a major force in the creation of modern geek fandom, but things were very different in the 70s and 80s, and still different in the early aughts of the prequel releases. A fandom culture that was obsessed with “canon” and trivia memorization has given way to a culture dominated by online commentary, fan theories, and original fan fic tales. Fans aren’t just expected to read and love a work, but to write meta essays on the series and then create their own art or stories about what they wish had happened differently. Fans are expected to meddle. In this context, Rowling is just another fan dismayed at the author’s mistakes — she called her decision to marry Hermione to Ron a lazy form of “wish fulfillment” — and offering her own additional “crazy fan theories” about the books.
However, Rowling isn’t just a fan. Her unending stream of Harry Potter news functions as brilliant marketing for her products. It works in the same way as the endless stream of casting news, teaser trailers, and rumors that help propel Marvel and DC films to the top of the box office. For years we’ve been constantly told how we are living in the age of the fan where, after publication, the book is entirely the hands of the fans who control meaning, discussion, and reception. Many authors say this bluntly, such as viral YA star John Green: “[My books] belong to their readers now, which is a great thing–because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.” Rowling shows this techno-Barthes dream to be an illusion. In the modern age, the author — or corporate brand like Marvel or DC — still drive the conversation, and have proven remarkably effective at channeling fan interest into further marketing for films and books. Comic Cons are increasingly less a place for fans to gather and discuss their favorite overlooked works, and more places for massive corporations and bestselling authors to kickstart marketing efforts.
But good marketing doesn’t necessarily make good art, and fans have shown themselves plenty willing to abandon soulless corporate cash-ins if they drag on too long. It was Lucas’s three disastrous prequels that — combined with the “Han shot first!” fan backlash — set the stage for him to sell the whole damn franchise to Disney. Rowling hasn’t gotten to that point — her prequel films haven’t even come out yet — but she’s already started to experience major pushback for her recent subpar Harry Potter world writings. If she’s not careful, she might George Lucas the entire thing to death.
The narrator of Confessions, Maroun, has never been in control of his own story. Before he was old enough to remember, his family’s van was pulled over and everyone inside was gunned down, caught just on the wrong side of the demarcation line in Beirut during the incessant civil wars in Lebanon, which stretched from the late ’70s through the ’80s. One of the gunmen discovers a little boy that miraculously survived the assault, and having lost his own son of a similar age recently, the gunman decides to kidnap and raise the boy as part of his family. Unable to ignore the strange looks and foreign feelings the boy engenders in his new home among his new family, there is not much for him to do but pay attention and wait until the secrets of his life are divulged to him.
This is the first way memory shapes the story; since Maroun doesn’t have a direct recollection of his life’s defining moment, or of his life at all before that moment, memory is doubted, and in turn, interrogated:
“How accurate are my memories? Remembering is difficult, you can’t imagine how difficult this is for me. I remember myself and I don’t. It’s like I’m remembering a life someone else has lived … Listen: In the first days of winter, when the cold sets in and the rains begin to fall, I always feel a pain in my chest. Every year, every single year. Often the pain in my chest is so sharp that I have to gasp for air. What do these small things reveal?”
Visceral and incomplete, his lost memories prevent him from fully understanding and overcoming the confusion and pain he experiences. Thus, the narrator and his memories give the novel its personality: flawed and erratic, earnest and striving for answers. Despite the fact that he doesn’t sell himself as qualified to tell his own story, Maroun consistently asserts the need for control, saying, “It’s important to tell you the story in an orderly fashion, but I keep getting accosted, distracted. I feel powerless, I feel… The images flood in and I’m powerless to stop them. But I’ll try.”
For the telling of his story, readers are silent observers as Maroun is interviewed about his past. While this gives him that chance to remember, to own his story, there are other consequences that readers must suffer with Maroun along the way. It prevents readers from understanding more about his families, both new and old, and their pasts. The conversational style also forces the story to follow the whims of the narrator’s memory, and events flow erratically as his mind connects anecdote to anecdote, until one is demanding control as much as Maroun is aspiring for it. But this strategy also enables added perspective through Maroun’s interactions with his questioner, and these moments provide some of the novel’s most pointed statements. For example, this definitive line comes very early in the story with Maroun addressing his questioner: “So much time has passed and yet, even now, I still don’t know how to tell my story.” It is therapeutic, the interview a grasp at catharsis — Maroun’s struggle is to tell his own story, visceral and incomplete as it may be.
What he does remember throughout his recollections are the blunt realities of war — as much as his being kidnapped as a child can be said to define him, it is the indefinite civil war going on in his hometown of Achrafieh, Beirut, that defines the conditions of that kidnapping and everything else in his upbringing. Many specifics within his memory relate to his seeing a burnt corpse, or the family waiting out a round of shellings in the living room while Maroun wonders where his father (and eventually older brother) disappears to all day and all night.
He also documents some of his relationships with his new family and community, who are accepting if still alienating; unsurprisingly, it’s the alienating aspects that garner the spotlight in Maroun’s memories. He grew up attracting strange looks and questions from their church and neighborhood regulars. Before he knows where he comes from, he can sense his hidden origins being condemned. He is told that those on the opposite side of the demarcation line, in West Beirut, are “beasts and monsters” by his teacher, that they are scary and they smell. He is not singled out in the classroom, but the more stoic church crowd flusters him thoroughly:
“People were turning around, showing me their faces … They never wore those unfathomable masks while looking at my sisters, and when my big brother used to come to church with us I never saw their faces change like that when they looked at him. Was I imagining things? I went back home feeling weak … I was young — I didn’t think like that back then, but now, when I remember the young boy I was, that’s how I remember him. Now I know him better than he used to know himself.”
He notices the same searching stares at home too:
“During the Hundred Days War, when the shelling was so intense that we were confined to the living room day and night, I’d see [Ilya] staring at me with that same strange look in his eyes: as if he wanted to peer into my depths. No, not my depths, I don’t know how to say what I’m trying to say. No, it was as if he wanted to see something that he couldn’t see — as if I were hiding another body within my own, a body beyond my body.”
Without the comforts of a family and home and neighborhood that feel welcoming and familiar, Maroun’s memories consist of the warfare that dictated his surroundings — where he could go, who he was surrounded by — and the silent judgment he seemed to attract constantly. That’s what he remembers with certainty, and that’s what he has to turn to in searching his past for explanations once he finally learns of his origins. At one point, lamenting the imperfections of memory, Maroun says, “What you remember overpowers you, it beats you down into the earth again and again”; it’s no wonder why Maroun would be eager for the catharsis and the possibility of control that Jaber is offering. The result is a book as unique as its subject matter — messy, incomplete, at times unreliable, yet as haunting and alluring as memories themselves.
Robin Black, author of the novel Life Drawing (Random House, 2014) and the story collection If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (Random House, 2010), has recently published her first nonfiction book, Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide (Engine Books, 2016).
Crash Course is part writing guide, part meditation, and part memoir. Over the course of 43 compact essays, Black, who began her writing career near the age of forty, shares stories of her own frustrations with her later start as a writer and her current struggles in her writing practice, detailing her experiences in a way that offers guidance to other writers and a candid glimpse into her own writing life.
I first met Black at a writing conference in 2014 after reading her short story collection, and subsequently enrolled in a workshop with her. For those who are unable to study with her in person, Crash Course offers the next best thing: spending time with Black via her stories on life and writing, all told in an incisive and honest voice.
I recently had the pleasure of asking Black some questions via email. We discussed the structure of her book and the selection of book titles, anger as an antidote to silence, and the particular challenges of writing nonfiction.
Catherine LaSota:Your book is called Crash Course: Essays From Where Writing and Life Collide, which is a great title, as your essays very much seem to address the experience of figuring out how writing can fit into the many challenges that life throws our way — sometimes it’s a matter of just diving in and trying, again and again. Can you talk a bit about the selection of this title, and your decision to organize the book into two sections, called “LIFE (& Writing)”, and “WRITING (& Life)”?
Robin Black: I have a super checkered history with titles for fiction. In general, I’m just bad at them. I really think there should be a Title Shop, like the Wand Shop in Harry Potter, where you can bring your manuscript and have a wizard match it to its true title. I think that on some level, when it comes to fiction anyway, I have basic questions that I’ve never answered to my own satisfaction about what titles are meant to do. I used to have this idea that titles should give you an idea of what a story is about and the story should in turn clarify what the title means. But the more I ponder it, the more I think that’s way too formulaic. So with fiction I have been caught in that zone of “I want it to sound intriguing, but kind of be related to the story, but not give too much away…” And I don’t want it to sound like whatever the title formulation of the year is — while being pretty terrible at coming up with my own ideas.
With this book, which is nonfiction, it was in many ways a relief to realize that I did want to tell people what the book’s about, in part because it’s an odd book, a hybrid of memoir and craft, and I needed to convey that. But in fact, almost no thought went into its title; it just came to me, as they say. So while my fiction books have all been called many things before landing on the final name, this one was always Crash Course.
The decision to have the LIFE (& Writing) and WRITING (& Life) sections also grew out of the oddness of the collection. It really is a kind of mash-up of stuff about me and my (awful word) journey to becoming a writer, and also to not becoming one for a long time, and actual craft topics. At first I toyed with smaller categories, essays about houses, ones about age, ones about psychological issues, and so on; but those arrangements felt fractured, so I just went back to the basic fact: it is a book about life and a book about writing and some essays lean one way and others lean the other way.
CL:Can you tell me about the process of selecting which of your essays to include in Crash Course? Did anything surprise you in re-reading essays that you had previously published, or in bringing these essays together for a collection?
RB: Mostly, it was a matter of discarding essays that I felt were weak or, in some cases, that simply tipped things too far in the direction of craft. I never wanted this book to be just for writers. I wanted whatever craft stuff there is to be interesting to any reader if only because those essays illustrate ways to think about writing that are tied with thoughts about how life is lived — or anyway, how my life has been lived. So, for example, I cut a very long essay on point of view. I had an intuitive sense of just how far into being either pure memoir or pure craft any essay could be. A few were reworked a bit to fit into that range.
I think of the book as one long collage piece. There is the whisper of a narrative arc to it, but the way that the individual pieces relate to one another has more the feel of multiple interactions than of a linear progression. Once I understood that, I felt much more comfortable with the whole project, with the fact that it is not exactly a recognizable type of book. That freed me up to do things like have a two line “essay” in there.
CL:In an essay entitled “Shut Up, Shut Down,” you write that “So many writers felt silenced at a critical point in their lives” and ask if writers’ block is perhaps a result of having internalized the message that if we fully express ourselves we are somehow “bad.” You write about your own sense of being silenced in Crash Course, which really resonated with me personally. Would you share a bit about your own experience feeling silenced here with our readers?
This has largely been a project of self-forgiveness…
RB: I’m glad it resonated for you — though I’m also sorry, because I know that indicates some painful stuff for you. For me, part of beginning to write in earnest at just about forty has been trying to understand what took me so long. This has largely been a project of self-forgiveness, because for a very long time I was in a chronic rage at myself for having let so many other things get in the way. And to this good day I have some pretty serious sorrow over not knowing what my own “young” work might have been like; and what my middle-aged work might be like, were I not playing catch-up, were I not so conscious of public responses to, assumptions about, dismissals of, middle-aged emerging writers, especially women. Were I free of this whole “late bloomer” thing — and were just a writer.
So to understand all the self-sabotage that went into delaying my work I have had to do a lot of work to see it in terms beyond my just being a fuck-up in my twenties and thirties. And the central fact that has jumped out is that I started to write three weeks after my father died, when he was eighty-five and I was thirty-nine. I have come to understand the degree to which his living presence in my life kept me quiet. In my case, that silencing had a lot to do with his emotional make-up, his messages to his children that they were not to try to succeed too much, lest they eclipse him, and also with the general shroud of secrecy around our family due to his alcoholism. And there’s more. He was a complex figure, by no means all bad; but the particular mix of good and bad, of intimidating and pitiable, that he was, shut me up.
And when I realized this about myself, this phenomenon of having internalized an inhibiting voice, I began to wonder about others, and I have yet to meet a writer who doesn’t feel that something analogous was true of them. And of course it’s also true that many people who aren’t writers have felt silenced along the way, but writers are in the position of both having that circumstance and choosing to violate the taboos. So it is a complex, sometimes dangerous dance.
CL:I’ve heard you talk in a writing workshop about this common experience of writers feeling silenced at some point in their past. In workshop, you’ve asked students to think about when the moment of silence may have occurred for them, and you offer the advice to get angry at those voices who silenced you, as a means to fuel the writing. Have you witnessed students heeding this advice and the results it generated? Is this a method you employ in your own writing practice?
The act of writing, absent some sense of danger, of risk, is likely too tame a pursuit to produce anything like art.
RB: I have seen students respond with great emotion to that idea, but knowing that it took me decades to understand the impact of those inhibitions on my own life, I don’t expect other people to be immediately liberated by my just suggesting that they may need to be. I say it more as a nudge toward understanding that being able to write, to get words on the page and keep doing so until you are pleased with the result, is not just a matter of how many minutes a day you do it, or even of having the craft understanding to whip such things as narrative distance into shape. It’s also about owning up to and supporting that as a writer you are almost certainly breaking some taboo that you have internalized along the way. And that’s a good thing to do, but not an easy one. I’m not big on sweeping comments about writing, but here’s one: Great writing shouldn’t feel safe, to its author. The act of writing, absent some sense of danger, of risk, is likely too tame a pursuit to produce anything like art.
In my own work, the process of getting angry at the forces that led me to accept that I should be silent has, as I said, taken decades. It is ongoing. The sensation of being a “bad person” for daring to express myself fully will probably never leave me. But knowing that makes it easier for me to do so.
CL:In your essay “The Parent Trap,” you argue that authenticity of passion is just as important as authenticity of experience in choosing subject matter. There is sometimes debate over whether writers are justified in writing from points of view (e.g., gender, race, socioeconomic status) that are wildly different from their own experiences. Can you elaborate on your thoughts on this? What role does research, if any, play in the development of characters in your work?
RB: That statement comes in the context of suggesting that someone like me, who has led a largely domestic existence, home with the kids for years and years, needn’t be limited by the walls of her house in terms of subject matter. More generally, I have thought about this issue of authenticity a lot, and reached the conclusion that the only answer can be that writers can write whatever they want — but then readers can also respond to it critically, angrily, politically, and can decry it, and can feel that it was a bad thing to write, and should do all those things if that’s what they believe. But there just cannot be a standard or a set of rules whereby we tell people what they are and aren’t allowed to write. That is unacceptable if only (but not only) because it opens up the question of who gets to decide. But speaking up against cultural (or other) appropriations that offend is also a part of an artist’s obligation. I have reacted angrily to what I saw as the “use” of a child with disabilities similar to my daughter’s, in a work of fiction. I felt strongly that the author “shouldn’t have written that.” But there is a difference between saying you don’t think someone should have done something, thinking they are hideously wrong to do so, suspecting their motives, and thinking they should be prohibited from doing it.
And, of course, the people whose realities are being appropriated or misrepresented or used have the final say on whether or not the work is offensive. I am a big believer in the idea that those who are offended by someone’s take on them or appropriation of their culture, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, and more, are de facto correct. Because, again, no other approach is acceptable. Who else can decide if they “should” be offended? Nobody.
In my own work, the area where I have run the highest risk of treading where I might offend through appropriation of a kind, is the area of disability and disease — and also people who have experienced losses I have not experienced. I have written about a blind girl, about a man with Alzheimer’s, about a man with a significant speech impediment, about an elderly woman who has had a stroke, and about a woman whose mother died when she was a baby, and so on. And I would say that over the past fifteen years I have grown more careful about being sure that I am “getting it right,” which for me, with those particular things, means talking to people who have experienced them. That is the best research I have found. I’m very, very aware of not wanting to use other people’s suffering just to increase the sensationalism of my own work.
CL:Your two previous books are works of fiction. I’m curious how your fiction practice and your nonfiction writing practice inform each other. Do you work on fiction and nonfiction writing at the same time, or do you go through periods where your focus is on one or the other? Many of the essays in Crash Course discuss personal aspects of your own life with great honesty. Did you encounter particular challenges when writing about your own life that are distinct from the challenges of writing fiction? How was the experience of publishing a book of nonfiction similar to or different from publishing a work of fiction for you?
RB: I tend to work on many things at once, and almost always have some essay or essays going, no matter what’s happening with my fiction. It is easier for me to write essays. Fiction requires a flip into an imaginative mindset, and that’s much less reliably possible for me than is doing anything approximating analytic work.
Having this book out in the world is indeed different from having fiction out in the world. It’s early days, and I’m still learning in what ways it’s different, but for one thing, these essays are about me. Which means that in writing this book, I am asking people to care about me, and I am asserting that by learning about my life, my struggles, other people will benefit in some way. And that’s very different from asking people to care about or engage with fictional characters. So I feel a little bit embarrassed by that. By the inescapable me, me, me of memoir.
And I suppose I’m also intermittently shocked by how open I have been about some things. All those years when I suffered from agoraphobia, all the ways in which I handled what I perceived as ‘my failed life’ ungracefully. These didn’t feel like tough disclosures as I was writing, because I understood very clearly why I was sharing the messier side of my experiences. But then, when people say things to me like, “I can’t believe how honest you were!” I experience a little startle, because, yeah, in some ways I can’t believe it either.
There are also areas that required special care. My daughter has learning and social disabilities, but is fully capable of giving or withholding permission for me to write about her, and it was important for me to know that she felt comfortable with the book. And as for my late father, who is featured prominently as a complicated and difficult person in my life, I thank my mother and brothers in the back of the book because they have always encouraged openness about him. I’m sure there will be people who knew him who think I should have left some of that out, but luckily they didn’t get a vote. To the extent that I had some good motives for writing this collection, they have to do with helping people who find themselves in similar situations, ones in which silence is the fuel on which an agreed upon, false ‘reality’ runs; and had I left my father out, the project would have been gutted.
CL: You have been very open about your struggles with ADD and even have two essays in Crash Course that have ADD in their titles. In what ways, do you think, has ADD affected your writing practice? Do you structure your approach to writing in a certain way in response to this?
RB: I definitely do. For one thing, I have had to reject all the writing advice out there about routines, habits, anything that suggests regularity. Maybe some people with ADD actually benefit from schedules, but I have never met a schedule I couldn’t annihilate in a single day. So I have had to learn to be patient with the fact that I cannot write every day — much less at the same time every day. And also that in the middle of writing anything, I may think of something unrelated that causes me to wander away for minutes — if not days.
ADD is probably also behind my needing to work on many projects all at once. And it’s probably why outlines feel like death to me. The ADD brain needs to have the freedom to have things occur, to change course. It’s just how we think.
The flip side though is the hyper-focus aspect of ADD. It’s not such a great thing if you have anywhere to be, or are supposed to be cooking dinner by a specific time, but it’s true that once I fall into that state, the house could be falling down, and I’d have no idea. And part of my love-hate relationship with my ADD is that I would hate to give that part up.
CL:In Crash Course, you lament the years you spent away from writing, and away from reading. I think often about the fact that there are so many books in the world that none of us are ever going to read all that we hope to read. What do you spend your time reading these days? Any recent books in particular you recommend?
RB: I still don’t read as much as I’d like to. And I admit that during this election season I have spent waaaay too much time watching the news. But the three recently read books that come first to mind are Pamela Erens’s soon to be released Eleven Hours; Leslie Pietrzyk’s This Angel On My Chest; and Robert Thomas’s Bridge. Each is extraordinary, and they share the qualities of being intense, urgent, and of feeling necessary. I love books like those three for the pure pleasure of reading them, but also for the guidance they give me as I sit back down to fiction. They are what I want to be doing. I want to be that good. I want to know, as I do when I look at their pages, that it is theoretically possible for work to be compelling and brilliant and true.
CL:What books or other media do you turn to when you feel stuck in your own writing?
RB: When I feel stuck, I do visual art. Or I garden. Or I paint a room. Doing that puts me in touch with my creativity beyond the pressure of language. And in fact during the years and years when I was unable to write at all, I painted, I did ceramics, I drew, I even decorated cakes semi-professionally for a while. When words fail me, making stuff, really making anything, is my bridge back into the work.
CL:Your book offers so much wisdom for writers who want practical advice on how writing fits into a life. I really love the section called “Twenty-One Things I Wish I’d Known Before I Started to Write,” which includes tips such as “You cannot write the pages you love without writing the pages you hate” and “Don’t believe there are rules.” What is some of the best writing advice you have heard or read over the years?
RB: This is a tough one, because there is always the caveat that what’s been good advice for me is not necessarily good advice for anyone else. There’s that tension to the whole idea of writing advice. But here are a few, from the crafty to the philosophical: Don’t let your characters be too comfortable. Don’t have them talk too directly about whatever is under discussion. Be aware if you have a clock running in your work — for example, if a story begins at the start of a two week vacation, be aware that your reader is likely to expect it to end at the end of the trip. Don’t necessarily end it there, but be aware of the expectation — and use it if it helps. Don’t share work too soon. Don’t listen to people who hate your work. Don’t agree to edits that you know in your heart of hearts are wrong. Just don’t. Really, don’t. But don’t refuse edits until you have thought them over for a day or more. Apologize when you hurt someone’s feelings — I guess that’s important for every profession, but in this world of workshops and feedback and everyone’s soul exposed, hurt feelings can be common. Don’t sweat too much over whether you were right or wrong, just apologize. Don’t think you know better than a colleague what she should be writing. Don’t try to be anyone but yourself, but don’t assume you know who that is from project to project. We change. We grow. Our work can do that, too. Don’t fail to appreciate whatever small or large successes come your way. It’s way too easy to forget to count one’s blessings because someone else seems more generously blessed. Read a lot. Be kind. Keep trying. Never give up. Never. Give. Up.
You’re your own best guinea pig in May. With five planets in retrograde, it’s a good time to take new tacks with old drafts. Channel the editorial trinity — writer, editor, and reader — and go HAM on plots and plot holes (if in doubt, insert your favorite literary trope, whether amnesiac aliens or a late-stage triple cross). Keep your lines to yourself, at least till the 22nd. Stars realign the last week of the month; revise wisely, and you might be in for some lucky byline news.
Lucky protagonist: Your literary doppelgänger
Gemini (May 21 — June 20)
Skies are groggy, cryptic — this month is one long subtweet. Everyone’s a little weird; your fave reader might return some cuckoo notes, a new magazine editor might ghost on your pitch, and your idiosyncratic office mate might dispatch memos via wood log. Embrace the mood: let your stories operate on dream logic, and mine your psyche (aka Get to Know Your Inner Derangements) for inspiration. Definitely record your observations. Go deep enough, and you might undulate your way — against a soundtrack of finger snaps and smooth sax — to literary clarity.
Lucky protagonist: Pie-loving special agent
Cancer (June 21 — July 22)
Dear Cancer, shelve your power verbs and befriend participles — May is an ace month to get cozy with continuing. You’ll summon astral vibes good for flexing word counts and revising existing pieces — save maybe your disastrous first novel (no retrograde’s deep enough to jell that earnest mix of word-spew and mental/actual flop-sweat — SORRY. But look where you are now!). On the solvency front, you might get a $$ hot tip $$ around the full moon.
Lucky protagonist: Scrappy pacifist
Leo (July 23 — August 22)
This month’s kind of an astral shrug, Leo. Planets are in backtrack, so don’t rush to sign contracts. Wait until the 22nd — though July or beyond would be a safer bet. Whoa: could your fine-tuned procrastination skills — that internet K-hole sure isn’t gonna dig itself — and champion ability to crank out fiction — aka a golden goose of excuses/REASONS — help you in a business capacity? Dude. OK, writing in May may go a little slow. But sow your fallow mind-field with URLs now (Mercury’s in retrograde; mixed metaphors are legit), and receive your yield of pages come summer.
Lucky protagonist: CEO of online enterprises
Virgo (August 23 — September 22)
Bloops from the astral hotline say you’re due for some R&R: rest and revision. Academic Virgos (on either side of the Blackboard screen) will have a leg up: this is an ideal month to research backdrops for your novel. We hear if you chant “geographic excursions” three times in front of the mirror during a new moon, a magical tax write-off appears. (This is not sound financial advice.) Stick to planning now, and globe-trot later. If your wallet’s feeling light, trade your passport for a keypad: dial a Swede to glean literary inspiration — and meatball recipes?
Lucky protagonist: Bureaucrat with big dreams!
Libra (September 23 — October 22)
Feel your feelings, Libra — this month, channel ancient LiveJournal accounts or your inner teen spirit, and be a fan. Root for yourself, your own animal of language genius, your writing crew. Communicate in superlatives, overdose on emoji, revisit the books that form your literary origin story. Sometimes writing — the solitude, Day 7 sweatpants, crumbs (let’s not get into the ability to fulfill Maslow’s pyramid) — is the worst. So treat yourself nice; the skies will it so.
Lucky protagonist: Next-level evolved Pokémon
Scorpio (October 23 — November 21)
With Mercury et al. in retrograde, this month’s perfect to revive drafts left for dead. Examine your work to see if psychological undercurrents ring true for your characters — are they human/beast/bot/stoic mineral, or more graceless mouthpiece? Clear expository cruft. Consult your local druid (OK, your editor). Though communication may be murky (definitely give feedback room to breathe), you’ll still make more headway with a collaborator. Near the end of the month, you might get word on a generous grant.
Lucky protagonist: Neighborhood necromancer
Sagittarius (November 22 — December 21)
Your month’s mantra, Sagittarius: backspace your way to bliss. Extricate yourself from unwieldy subplots, pet gimmicks, even — this might be the most hurtful — your top character, who has proven distressingly resistant to advancing the narrative in a vital fashion in rewrite after rewrite BUT is so fun/loveable/hateable/your literary stand-in/how you got into the story in the first place! Gulp down your qualms and backspace your way to bliss. In the last week of May, that new draft could be your ticket to some major champions of your work.
Lucky protagonist: Stranger with an axe to grind (and a decent heart!)
Capricorn (December 22 — January 19)
Dear Sea Goat, the month’s news from the multidimension suggests sticking to revision. You got a lot of words, why don’t you put ’em in order? (The editorial process: stamp a giant Solved! on it.) If rewriting takes a turn toward the Sisyphean, run. Get outside, pet a dog, outstare a lizard. Reset your brain. Forget pub parties and attend only the readings of writers with whom you’ve sworn blood pacts (your BPBFFs) — you’ll do better on your own most of May. After the full moon, try your luck with an agent or two.
Lucky protagonist: Zookeeper and oath keeper tag team
Aquarius (January 20 — February 18)
In this round of cosmic semaphore, the most productive thing you can do is twofold: 1) fortify yourself with your choice of Haribo and 2) inspect your desk/couch cushion or seating plank/bed/screen. (Step one applies to a lot of life scenarios.) For healthy word flow, enjoy the tools of your trade and your space, whatever that means to you. If it’s fluorescents and a legion of browser tabs, well, godspeed. If it’s strategic candy clusters and an ergonomic chair, godspeed, you magnificent literary sunbeam.
Lucky protagonist: Non-tragic hermit
Pisces (February 19 — March 20)
You’re a word pro this month, Pisces, even with the planetary retrograde. Get fresh, get loopy with stalled arcs (the floating orb favors sci-fi romance starring a pachinko machine). Inject chance — play with Oblique Strategies. Settle character disputes by asking what your fave author, glitchy chatbot, or historical crush (whether on basis of acts or facial symmetry) would do. Your limber writing muscles put you in the best position for banner project news the last week of the month.
Lucky protagonist: Sentient pachinko!!!
Aries (March 21 — April 19)
Welcome to your editorial reckoning, Aries! JK. But it is a stellar month to reassess. If your job situation is a real laugh-sob, vibes are strong in early May to get that paper — money and pages. Keep an eagle eye on any fine print, especially before the 22nd. If your plot generator needs an extra crank, try your hand at another genre. Or form a solo residency and take to the desert for high inspiration. Wander a museum. Reconnect with the pals you neglected as you finally stuck an ending for that one tricky chapter. Friendship, money, pages — look at you, hotshot!
Lucky protagonist: Spiritual adviser
DON’T MISS OUT
Sign up for our newsletter to get submission announcements and stay on top of our best work.
YOUR INBOX IS LIT
Enjoy strange, diverting work from The Commuter on Mondays, absorbing fiction from Recommended Reading on Wednesdays, and a roundup of our best work of the week on Fridays. Personalize your subscription preferences here.
