Greta had a powerful stare. Approaching her with a platter of eggs, I imagined that her steady eyes were going to raze me until I was nothing more than a pile of wood shavings. The force of my transformation would send up a fine sawdust that shimmered in the light from the window behind her table. I wanted to be looked at but not like this, that is, not until I realized that I was supposed to stare back. She wanted to get to know me. And she succeeded in teaching me how little I liked eye-contact, how frightening it could be, until you decided to meet it head on. I came to like Greta, look for her. She softened the longer I met her gaze.
I say I miss food service and my friend May looks at me like I’ve lost it.
I say I miss food service and my friend May looks at me like I’ve lost it. “You don’t remember,” she says, shaking a sugar packet into her coffee at our favorite diner in Austin, a hole in the wall that is deliciously un-instagrammable and crammed with others who crave its faded upholstery and dated green glassware. She’s probably right. Miraculously, my body has forgotten the dispassionate questions—“and on the side would you like”—the tense waiting game between kitchen and hungry businessmen, the backache at the end of each day, even though my mind remembers. My body only remembers a constant state of flow.
In my apron, halved at the waist, packed with straws, it was as though a waterlog broke inside my ears, leaving a clarity through which I could appreciate that I was living in the world. I was in a place that thrummed, and I thrummed, too. Ten years later, in my first office, where I design HR training videos for companies in Central Texas, there is no flow and no world. I don’t know how else to explain it. I float in constant worldlessness. I try to remind myself what a luxury it is. Meanwhile, my mind encourages my hand to pantomime the lever of a phantom espresso machine.
May suggests that I am probably not getting enough exercise. She is a good friend and she is probably right. But something about running, which I love in the abstract way we love things that have gone fallow, does not capture the whole feeling I am yearning for. Inside the feeling is a ringing telephone with a distinctive bleat. Inside the feeling is a pair of elderly women who eat breakfast together every Saturday and order the same omelets. Inside the feeling is even the day that one of them comes alone, bravely, to see if she can say goodbye to a tradition spanning years, and we all know what happened.
Gwendolyn Brooks writes: “but World… / wants to be Told.” The slant rhyme is achingly beautiful: life will never translate perfectly into story. In my pristine void, shielded from “the public,” I think about how ardently Told wants World, too. Writing has gone the way of running. I want to love it again, but I am too hungry for the feral stories that live in the wild, the kind you have to witness with your own wrists resting on a bar top.
If you have ever worked in food service, you most likely know how to hate a place and love it at the same time.
When I moved to Austin for graduate school, which felt like my forever-departure from the purgatory of food service, I reconnected with an old friend who was trying to make a living as an artist. “How do I make enough money to live but also make art?” she asked, and I didn’t know. I had given up on that question. She started gigging as a circus performer at parties, swallowing swords, juggling fire, swimming through hotel pools in a hot pink mermaid tail. Satisfied hosts left her Google reviews, and suddenly, it seemed as though she had an event to perform for every night. To my mind, she had cracked it. There was so much world inside her world. I did not know how to eat a machete but I wanted so badly to see if there was something I, too, could do to increase the time I spent talking with strangers. It was this capacity for interaction, more than the glamour, that drew me in. I wanted to escape the banality of office life for what some would consider an equally banal alternative: one that would include children and the elderly, that could engage my body, and that could quench my thirst for social novelty.
My first waitressing gig was at a place called Cici’s Café. Tucked into a strip mall in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley, Cici’s had a cult-following, summoning two-hour lines on weekends as seamlessly as a magician pulling a stream of handkerchiefs out of a hat. There were no reservations. People would wait in pouring rain or scorching heat, and inside, choose a reward for their patience from a twenty-page menu, laminated pages strung together with faux-leather string, mostly of novelty pancakes.
If you have ever worked in food service, you most likely know how to hate a place and love it at the same time. At Cici’s Café, we hated the people who made our jobs harder and loved that complaining about them made us a “we.” Courting regulars made us a “we,” too; a porous “we” that could welcome the people who treated us like people into a common fold.
Cici’s is where I met Greta. I also met Elena, a woman with a tremor in her hands who sat at the bar twice a week and tried a new plate of pancakes every time she visited. Once the green-tea tiramisu; once the strawberry cheesecake; the next our wildly underrated hotcakes drizzled with fresh corn and honey. Over the course of several months, she fed me and the rest of the bar-crew details about her life in exchange for decaf coffee refills. One day she asked me if I would be interested in ghost-writing her memoir. “I like the way you speak,” she said. “Maybe you could make sense of it all.” Elena had been adopted from an orphanage in Greece by American parents. She never knew her birth mother, but had grown up taut between the desire to find her and the desire to remain unknown. “Maybe,” she said, “I want her to find me so that I can decide whether to know her, so that it feels like the ball is finally in my court.” I never wrote Elena’s memoir. She decided one day, with fervor and without explanation, that it would be a terrible idea, and never brought it up again.
Countless other regulars and one-time customers joined Elena, almost everyone transformed by the talismanic power of the barista counter into a person ready to share something personal, a phenomenon I had thought only existed on Cheers. A man of indeterminant age with rough skin and young eyes who made leather vests for a living; a woman and her daughter with the same chin, home from college; shy first dates and old friends reconnecting tentatively after growing apart; a woman who was always ready to travel somewhere new, always alone. Then there was that sprinkling of Twilight Zone the universe reserves for restaurants: someone sits down for coffee, weeps profusely, and leaves you fifty dollars. Someone leaves you their number and uses an uneaten hard-boiled egg from their salad as a paperweight. A group of three cuts their own hair at the table and leave you the trimmings.
Back of house, I befriended a line cook named Arturo who commuted two hours to work from Bakersfield. Depending on traffic, it could take two and a half hours for him to reach home. The cost of commuting was cheaper than the cost of finding a place to live for himself, his wife, and his children anywhere in Los Angeles. Arturo had a thoughtful way of speaking and a smile that would put most movie stars to shame. He was so kind to me and everyone else that I found myself wondering how he spent his daily eternities on the road. How could someone possibly be that composed every day without breaking down? I suspected the answer would reveal the naiveté of the question: we don’t always have a choice.
A prep cook named Ryan, who we all knew was a Chippendale dancer on Friday nights—that was all we knew—once came into the smoking patio from the parking lot holding a live pigeon, bare palm against its chest. “It fell from a tree,” he said, with all the nonchalance of a man holding a football he had found outside a school yard. He wanted to know if someone had time to take it to the animal hospital. I grew up with a mother who could not bear the suffering of animals, and leapt to the task with Pavlovian speed. Ryan helped me swaddle the bird with dish towels and pack it into a fruit crate. “It’s like you do this all the time,” I joked, and he said, with utmost seriousness, “I do.” I hurdled down the freeway with the bird blinking slowly in its makeshift car seat, praying I would reach the rescue ward in time. A vet tech would tell me he was going to take the bird to a warming plate, and suggest I keep my expectations low. I would call the next day to leave a message. I would never hear back.
I don’t know why I miss this special variety of heartbreak. All I can offer is that sometimes the point of a story isn’t how it ends.
My office is on the twelfth floor of a mixed-purpose building with thirteen floors and has a spacious window, which I inherited as a fluke when my senior coworker resigned, and which I am ashamed I do not appreciate. On good days, I can pretend my videos are not so different from the teaching work I performed at the university where I was an English PhD student, a career I also loved, but that brought with it a daunting job market and eventually herded me to this desk in search of a regular schedule, a guaranteed paycheck, and a way to stay anchored to the city I called home. Beyond the window, there is a balcony that you can only access through a locked door, now permanently shut to all employees due to an incident that has escaped the rumor mill’s memory. Birds visit the metal railing sometimes: the vultures and hawks who dominate high altitudes, the sparrows who remind me that I am not so far above the ground. Mostly, they arc soundlessly across the thin sky and seem too majestic to fall, but I know that if one did, someone would witness it. And I know it is at least possible that someone would do their best to intervene.
In The Queer Art of Failure, Judith Halberstam argues that many of the acts we perceive as “failure” are actually a failure to meet capitalist, patriarchal standards for success: finding a partner of the opposite sex, producing children, accumulating wealth and property. There are few arguments more appealing to someone looking to make sense of how consistently they seemed to have dropped the ball. What if, Halberstam asks, we were to “imagine new versions of maturation, Bildung, and growth that do not depend upon the logic of succession and success”? What do we learn from “practicing failure,” which can lead us “to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour”—and on that detour, find a true expression of what we really need? In this sense, the detour that some might perceive as failure is also a portal into a deeper, self-determined success.
Waitressing was the portal my heart traveled through to reach my sleeve. I went from a “quiet” girl to a girl who could not stop talking to strangers. I remember waking up, many days at six in the morning, and realizing that I was actually happy. It was important that the daily social interaction was also a vocation. It was not a pastime, but an act of service.
I would go on to perform other acts of service, such as being a teacher, but only food service lives in my body. For some people this would be—and is—horrifying. Maybe it would have been for me. Maybe because I grew up thinking my body did not matter and longing for something I could not name, lying in fetal position on the carpeted floor of my bedroom during the dog days of summer, waitressing introduced me to the sanctity of movement. I hadn’t realized my body could process my feelings; that if I turned off my ceaseless mind, a run of twenty drink orders could take me somewhere better. It was also a lesson in accepting little beginnings and little ends, hundreds happening over the course of a day. A crash course in developing a tolerance for mistakes. A meditation: to be a good waitress, that is, one whose soul does not break despite constant indignity, you cannot forget (orders, allergies, broken glass) but you have to move on. Somehow the work galvanized me in spite of the too-old men who stared at my chest, in spite of the manager who ripped a sandwich out of my hands during a stolen lunch break, in spite of the teenagers who dined, dashed, and left me paying their tab out of my tips because I had too many tables to catch them, in spite of every time I was yelled at, once so badly, I ran blurry-eyed into the parking lot to sob. How to explain that something could be treacherous, haunted by broken systems, and also revelatory, as though it made use of a vestigial limb?
I miss being in circulation, like a library book with a card full of names. I miss this act in the literal sense, too: circling a wide room with an urn full of coffee, locating empty cups. Whisking away empty plates. In my memory, the movement is noiseless and swift, a trapeze act. I sail through the sky of the day. I learn from the older waitresses to walk in worn-out athletic shoes like I wear combat boots, to talk back to rude customers during a lunch rush like I’m kicking open a door, to smile big for tips if I feel like it and frown through a shift without apology if I don’t. I learn to ask questions that get cagey bar flies talking, to recognize the difference between loneliness and solitude, and to use an alias if someone sour asks me for my name.
A coworker once shared with me that in her view, servers—especially women and femmes—witness a component of adult psychology that few other professions draw out. When people are hungry, she said, and they are sitting, and you are standing above them, and you are waiting on them but to the same extent, they are waiting for you, you enter a complicated power dynamic that smells parental. You become a channel—and a barrier—to being fed. Your customers can enter this dynamic restless, buying willfully into the promise of their control with an undercurrent of suspicion that they do not really have the upper-hand. I started to track this affect. Part of every irritated posture was a shoulder or an eye holding not only hunger or entitlement, but also fear.
Is there any act of professionalized caretaking that doesn’t also require the recipient’s vulnerability?
I still wonder: is there any act of professionalized caretaking that doesn’t also require the recipient’s vulnerability? Paying for someone to serve us in a world constricted by commerce allows us to enter the sacred act of trusting a stranger. The act is compromised: a credit card can insulate you. Still, it is possible to feel something older than money when someone’s hands comb your hair out of your face, or delicately paint each of your naked fingernails, or place a platter of scrambled eggs in front of your hunger. Years after I unknotted my apron and let it fall into the UPS box under the tip jar in my last restaurant for the last time, I want only to enter this act and stay inside it—to stir latent body-memories of kinship that capitalism, turning all it can into transaction, has attempted to bury. If this is failure, it is a failure I long to slip into, the way an actor can slip into a costume and become a truer version of themselves. Maybe, someone told me once, you miss food service because it represents a time of pure desire for all the things it wasn’t and that you had yet to become. A time of unrealized potential. I still think about this theory. It never rings true.
A waitress refills May’s coffee, and she hugs the cup with her hands. She loves this feeling, she says. The cup becomes warm from the inside like a rock in the sun, fits the pads of her fingers perfectly.
I tell May that I’m going to see a career counselor. I worry they will not sanction how badly I want to fail. I worry I will not be able to explain that making a living as an artist is, for me, as much about connecting with as many lives as possible as it is about putting food on the table. We will have to talk about things like health insurance and retirement plans. There are so many things that keep us just outside of the world so that we can still be tethered to it. I don’t know what it will feel like to fall back to earth, or how many detours await me there. All I know is that I no longer dream of going somewhere full of voices just to close a door.
In 2016, nine years ago, I published a list of forthcoming books by women of color that had piqued my interest. As a novelist and occasional critic, I was interested in looking for such books to read and, perhaps, review. Given I’d had trouble finding as many as I’d hoped, I thought others might also be having trouble and could find the list I’d compiled useful. The piece spread widely, and I was told it helped inform other people’s books coverage and syllabi. I put a list together again the following year, and so on.
But for a while, I’ve also wanted to stop. Most-anticipated books lists have wildly proliferated since 2016, as have best-of lists. And though I know how useful they can be, I’m also aware of some of the other effects they can have, especially on writers; a list like this necessarily leaves out more people than it will include. I published my second novel, Exhibit, last spring. To my surprise and alarm, though it was my second time publishing a novel, I often felt as I did the first time around: upended, exposed, as if I’d lost a layer of skin. Part of it might be that I published a book that felt, and still feels, especially vulnerable, a novel centering women hellbent on pursuing what they want, and this in a world continuing to prove that not a few people intend for women to exist as helpmeets, living for others, stripped of our rights. Regardless of the book, though, I know few writers who find publishing to be a calming experience.
But as the writer Michelle Hart did last year with queer books, I took a look around and saw that women of color’s books are still relatively passed over and sidelined. It’s still the case that a disproportionately large majority of books released by the biggest publishers are by white writers. Book bans are still sweeping the country, and by far the books most affected are those by people of color, and by queer and trans writers. The news remains terrifying. I am tired of my anger and sorrow. I want to move toward what I love.
With all I am, I love reading. I think of writing as an extension of the reading, a kind of call and response. So, here are some of the 2025 books I am excited about. I’m one person with an incomplete knowledge of forthcoming titles. If you’re looking forward to a title not mentioned here, please consider preordering it from your local bookstore, requesting it from the library, telling people about it, or all of the above.
A few brief notes on categories: this piece is front-loaded toward the earlier part of the year, as there’s less information about later books. I love and crave poetry, but am less aware of what’s publishing in poetry, so I’ve kept this list to prose. The term “of color” is limited, dissatisfying, and shifting. In its earlier years, a couple of versions of this list included nonbinary writers. After Electric Literature and I heard from a number of nonbinary writers that it can be preferable to avoid grouping nonbinary people with women, I’ve since focused on women: cis women, trans women, and nonbinary women who assented to having their books included in this space. The majority of nonbinary writers and readers we’ve heard from have found this preferable. Electric Literature has recently published a piece about anticipated books by queer writers.
I’m elated about the novels, memoirs, essay collections, and other books coming our way; please join me in celebrating.
I’ll read anything the brilliant Imani Perry publishes, and her latest book, a meditation on the color blue and its roles in Black history and culture, is no exception. “This book is a great gift, in that it allowed me to see the world anew with Perry’s clear-eyed insight,” says Jesmyn Ward.
We Do Not Part by Han Kang, translated by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris
During a phone interview not long after learning she’d received the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature, Han Kang was asked which of her books, if she had to pick one, she’d recommend to those new to her writing. Han suggested We Do Not Part,a novel haunted by the aftermath of the 1948–1949 Jeju Island uprising and massacre. Over 30,000 people on Jeju were killed by U.S.-backed Korean forces, and their ghosts fill the pages of We Do Not Part.
One of my favorite things about having a phone is that, with some friends, I occasionally exchange photos and screenshots of poetry and excerpts we think the other will appreciate. And as I send and receive these gifts, scraps of words we’ve especially loved, Aria Aber’s poems routinely show up. Good Girl, her first novel, evokes a young Afghan German woman trying to destroy her life. Jamil Jan Kochai calls it “a heartbreaking song of youth and desire and violence and history and the unbearable solitude of displacement.”
I’ve awaited Hyphen editor-in-chief Karissa Chen’s novel for a while, and it’s here at last: a 500-page epic traversing six decades in Hong Kong, Taiwan, New York, and Los Angeles. Celeste Ng says that Chen’s debut “weaves expertly between present and past, telling the story of childhood sweethearts who meet again late in life and are torn between looking back and moving on.”
This previously unpublished historical novel from Zora Neale Hurston examines and reimagines the infamous Biblical figure King Herod. “The Life of Herod the Great—like Hurston herself—is a masterpiece, a miracle, and a marvel,” according to Tayari Jones.
February
Death Takes Meby Cristina Rivera Garza, translated by Sarah Booker and Robin Myers
A professor stumbles upon a castrated corpse positioned beside a poetic couplet jotted in pink nail polish. More mutilated bodies follow, as do more poems, in this new novel from Pulitzer Prize-winning Cristina Rivera Garza.
Canisia Lubrin, a recipient of the Windham-Campbell Prize for Poetry, has written a first book of fiction that “departs from the infamous real-life ‘Code Noir,’ a set of historical decrees originally passed in 1685 by King Louis XIV of France defining the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire.” The 1686 Code had 59 articles, and Lubrin’s book includes 59 braided stories that Christina Sharpe praises for their “formal inventiveness and sheer audaciousness.” Published last year in Canada, Code Noir will soon also be available in the U.S.
Uglinessby Moshtari Hilal, translated by Elisabeth Lauffer
A book-length essay on power, attraction, and what is considered beautiful and ugly from visual artist, curator, and writer Moshtari Hilal. Melissa Febos calls Ugliness a “thoughtful, provocative, playful, and truly original exploration of bodily aesthetics and the factors that define them.”
An ex-McKinsey consultant named Prudence Wright and her husband go out to dinner in D.C. with a colleague who, to Prudence’s surprise, shares part of her past. “Once again, Francis-Sharma’s phenomenal prose delivers; here, with exquisite suspense in a revenge story chocked full of thorny characters,” says Xochitl Gonzalez. “This is an unforgiving tale of cat-and-mouse begging us to confront just how far we’d go to take control in a society hell-bent on minimizing our pain.” I’ve admired Lauren Francis-Sharma’s work for years.
Sucker Punch is a follow-up to Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, her hilarious, astute debut essay collection. This time, according to Jennette McCurdy, Koul has written “a beautiful, painful, funny, and ultimately inspiring account of a marriage crumbling.”
One summer, a scholar with a Ph.D. from UCLA decides to “marry rich” and sets off on a hundred dates, aiming to have a marriage proposal by the time school starts again in the fall. Her plans change, though, after a tragedy in Tehran. Bryan Washington says that “Liquid is a dream of a book—written with heart and feeling and longing and clarity, bracingly astute, elastic, and precise—an absolute delight expanding the possibilities in American fiction.”
Three siblings—two human, and one a robot—get tangled in a murder investigation taking place in a unified Korea. Silvia Park’s rendition of a near future is their debut book, and Charles Yu calls it “a novel full of pleasures, big and small, gorgeous sentences from which Park weaves a rich, layered story of family and work, of history and speculation, of Korea, past, present and future.”
Even our dreams are surveilled and punished in this alarmingly plausible novel by the virtuosic Laila Lalami. In The Dream Hotel, a woman is detained for months in a “retention center” because, based on an algorithmic probe of her dreams, authorities have decided she is at risk of harming her beloved husband.
Olivia Becente, a woman who can see and hear ghosts, uses her abilities to investigate mysterious deaths. “The Haunting of Room 904 casts a magnificent spell with a deep grief at its heart,” says Lev Grossman.
Sarah Thankam Mathews praises Goddess Complex as “the most interesting, illuminating, and bold contemporary novel of ideas” she’s read in years. Sanjena Sathian’s second novel follows a woman who walked out on her husband because they couldn’t agree on whether or not to have children. Now the husband has gone missing, and the woman sets off to try to find him.
In this second novel from the author of Dances, a journalist grieving his father’s death investigates a cult called “The Nameless.” Megha Majumdar describes O Sinners! as “a world where mares and wolves live alongside grief and love and memory, each its own creature, each equally dreamlike and real.”
A multigenerational chronicle of a family divided into far-flung cities: Tehran, Houston, and Los Angeles. “Sanam Mahloudji takes us on a journey to reshape our understanding of power, heritage, and ancestry—and brings a rare wisdom to the chaos of family,” says Vanessa Chan.
I heard Katie Kitamura read from Audition last summer in Tennessee, and was both mesmerized and tantalized: I wanted to read the rest of it immediately. Two people meet for lunch in a New York restaurant, and as is usual with Kitamura’s remarkable oeuvre, so very much more is happening.
I recommend Jasmine Guillory’s utterly delightful novels right and left, and now there’s a new one to shout about. One woman gives her friend lessons in flirting, and what ensues between them is something more than friendship. Taylor Jenkins Reid says, “This is Jasmine Guillory at her best. She has outdone herself.”
At the reception for one man’s wedding to another, he learns that his estranged father, a reverend, has just been in a terrible car accident. When the Harvest Comes is a debut novel from Denne Michele Norris, editor-in-chief of this magazine, and Alejandro Varela says the novel is “for anyone who’s ever believed they didn’t deserve happiness, for anyone whose worldview has been shaped by marginalization, for anyone who’s accomplished more than was expected of them.”
Vauhini’s Vara published a Believer essay in 2021, “Ghosts,” involving her sister’s death, AI, and some of the outer borders of language. I have read it so often; each time I reread it, I get full-body chills all over again. Searches is the formidable Vara’s first essay collection, and it includes “Ghosts” as well as a number of Vara’s other essays on technology and humanity.
A debut memoir about disordered eating, ghostly dreams, and ancestral voices, written by a daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees. According to Alexander Chee, “Sarah Aziza’s astonishing memoir is a record of a mystery of the self, a woman in the grip of a despair that has too many names or none at all, hiding as it seeks to erase her. To survive she must move towards being, as she says, ‘ambushed by hope.’”
Acclaimed critic Andrea Long Chu’s first book brings together her writing on novels, television, theater, and video games. Authority is described as “a bold, provocative collection of essays on one of the most urgent questions of our time: What is authority when everyone has an opinion on everything?”
“I have never read a book that has changed me so profoundly,” says Javier Zamora. Mary Annette Pember, a former president of the Native American Journalists’ Association, examines histories of Native boarding schools in the U.S.
A young fashion influencer striving to financially support her family finds it difficult to both uphold her values and meet the demands of her professional life. I initially heard about Bad Influence from Claire Ahn last summer, and have anticipated it since.
Morgan Jerkins’s new novel, extending across a hundred and fifty years, asks if there can be reconciliation in the future for what was broken in the past—not just for the people living in the future, but also for the dead. Kiese Laymon says, “If ever there was a time for textured art that takes the complicated, often comically ironic, intoxicating love lives of the enslaved serious, it is now. It is Zeal. Morgan Jerkins made it. We can rejoice.”
Madeleine Thien’s novel takes place at an enclave, “a staging-post between migrations,” where people from the past and future overlap. Lina, who’s come to the enclave with her father, befriends great thinkers including Jupiter, a Tang Dynasty poet; Bento, a seventeenth-century Jewish scholar from Amsterdam; and Blucher, a 1930s philosopher fleeing Nazi persecution.
Living with her parents and grandmother in a one-bedroom apartment in Singapore, roiling with ambition, Genevieve Yang believes herself to be an only child. But then, an unexpected sibling shows up. I’ve deeply loved Jemimah Wei’s writing and mind; Roxane Gay lauds the The Original Daughter as “an incredible debut.”
A stalled artist lives with a hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman in a deserted San Francisco, the city flooded by years of rain. Neither wishes to leave; so they stay, and talk. “Awake in the Floating City is an astonishing work of art, rich with attention, patience, and love: the rare elegy that hums with hope, and makes the strongest case I’ve ever read for remembering the people and places that matter to us,” says Rachel Khong.
Caro de Robertis conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two-spirit elders of color, gathering conversations they wove together into a “collective coming-of-age story.” Jaquira Díaz calls So Many Stars “an intimate and multilayered accounting of personal and collective grief, family, love, art, and the complexities, joys, and heartbreaks of the past and present.”
Jennifer Hope Choi’s mother tells her they both share the curse of yeokmasal, said to cause the afflicted person to wander far from home. Choi, an editor at Bon Appétit, relates a story of drifting apart from her mother and coming back to her again.
I delight in Aimee Phan’s writing, and in The Lost Queen, her first book since 2012, a fortuneteller’s granddaughter begins having visions of her own. She and a friend take on other abilities—telepathic, premonitory, and linguistic—they’ll need for difficult times ahead.
On days when Hala Alyan has published a new poem or essay, I’m inclined to drop what I’m doing to read her splendid writing. I’ll Tell You When I’m Home is Alyan’s debut memoir: after years of miscarriages, Hala Alyan seeks out motherhood via surrogacy. In this time of delayed hope, Alyan turns to “the archetype of the waiting woman,” Scheherazade, and gathers family stories and communal myths from Palestine, Kuwait, Syria, Lebanon, the Midwest, and elsewhere.
A new Susan Choi book! I’m a completist about Choi’s singular fiction, and Flashlight is described as a novel “tracing a father’s disappearance across time, nations, and memory,” his daughter trying to learn more about the man she lost.
From the author of the memorable Nightcrawling comes a novel centered on a group of teenage mothers in small-town Florida. According to Kaitlyn Greenidge, Leila Mottley “brings to life the beauty and brutality of the Florida panhandle, and turns narratives about motherhood, girlhood and the South on their heads.”
In this intriguing memoir, Anelise Chen is mourning a divorce when she’s “transformed into a ‘clam’ via typo after her mother keeps texting her to ‘clam down.’” With that typo-driven metamorphosis alone, I was already beguiled—bugled—ahem. “From the moment I started reading it, I could hardly put it down—carrying it around like a talisman, crawling inside it like a wunderkammer, putting my ear to it like a shell, so I could hear its vast, surprising ocean,” says Leslie Jamison.
I’ve followed Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s work since I first read striking stories she published in literary magazines. The Other Wife, her first novel, chronicles the shifting desires of a woman in her late thirties who’s not sure she’s made the right life choices.
A joyfully hailed satire about trans star athletes—indoor volleyball players—from dancer, producer, and novelist Benedict Nguyễn. Patrick Cottrell calls it “a rigorous and gutting satire, a courageous social fantasy, a realistic portrait of the hell that is humanity, a deeply felt book about love and competition.”
The Plimpton Prize-winning author of Vagabonds! has written an exploration of cross-generational queer life in Lagos. Necessary Fiction is described as a novel posing questions such as: “What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone?”
A famous resort in the Dominican Republic is at the heart of this second novel from Cleyvis Natera. Central characters include Vida, a curandera called to the resort to help with a crisis; Laura, a resort manager; Laura’s sister Elena, who babysits at the resort; and Elena’s child’s father, who bribes Elena for help she shouldn’t give.
I’ve kept an eye out for Deena ElGenaidi’s short-form writing for a while, and we’ll soon have her first novel, Dust Settles North. ElGenaidi, a former editor at Hyperallergic, begins her novel with two siblings flying from New York to Cairo for their mother’s burial.
“The Wilderness is a wonderfully ambitious novel that follows five women throughout decades of friendship, as they struggle to find purpose and belonging in their rapidly gentrifying cities,” says Brit Bennett. The many fans of The Turner House will rejoice to have a second book from Angela Flournoy.
Jacinda Townsend’s third novel is told in alternating sections by Ruth Hurley, who changes her identity and moves after her father is killed by police, and Myron Hurley, her husband, who’s trying to learn the truth about his wife.
Mothers by Brenda Lozano, translated by Heather Cleary
A kaleidoscopic examination of the kidnapping of a two-year-old girl in 1940s Mexico City. Like Townsend’s, Lozano’s novel also alternates perspectives, though Tree Dreaming switches between the perspectives of the family of the kidnapped child and of the kidnappers raising the girl.
What a Time to be Alive by Jade Chang
Jade Chang’s first, riotous novel was unforgettable, and What a Time to be Alive is her follow-up, featuring a grieving woman who becomes an influential self-help guru.
Carnaval Fever by Yuliana Ortiz Ruano, translated by Madeleine Arnivar
The winner of an English PEN Presents Award, Carnaval Fever is set in Ecuador and involves a young girl who’s also “simultaneously the body of all the women who’ve raised her.”
The White Hot by Quiara Alegría Hudes
A furious mother leaves her house in the middle of a family argument, goes to the bus station, and asks for a ticket to the furthest destination. She ends up leaving for ten years, and the novel takes the form of a letter from the mother to her daughter about this time.
This is the Only Kingdom by Jaquira Díaz
Described as “an epic portrayal of a working-class Puerto Rican family that spans generations,” and taking place in the aftermath of a murder in Humacao, This is the Only Kingdom is Jaquira Díaz’s second book and debut novel. I first heard Díaz read from her writing last year, an experience that made me an admirer for life.
We are supposed to lie about the mansion on the hill. We are supposed to say that the man who lives there is Lyle Charleston, that his family has lived there since the 1850s, and that they made their fortune in textiles. But the man who lives there is not named Lyle Charleston, and he has no family, and we all know how he made his money. You know, too. He was, until recently, the leader of a country, though we cannot say which one. This country started a war. It exhausted its supply of people before it exhausted its supply of weapons; in order to keep him from exhausting the weapons as well, he was given the new name and the new history and this mansion in our country.
We wonder how it will look engulfed in fire. That is the subject of tonight’s meeting and tomorrow morning’s action. We will act before dawn, and one of the more dramatic among us has even whispered very forcefully, “so that the sun does not shine again on that monstrous injustice.” There were many cheers at that, quiet cheers but cheers all the same, and all of us nodded our heads. Monstrous injustice—yes!—monstrous injustice. As if it were a dragon on the hill.
“Easy, quiet down,” the barman reminds us every time we get too loud. It is his bar, and he is nice enough to allow us to use it as our meeting point, but he is also wary of rebellion, and its consequences. The bar does nice business, and he is attached to it.
There are wireless lamps for light along the bar, and he points to one of them as he repeats, “quiet down.” This time, he mouths the words, and we all know why. We all know that they have put microphones in the bottom of each lamp, beneath each stool, perhaps in other places, too. That was one condition of Lyle Charleston’s resettlement here atop the hill, that he should be able to listen to the whispers and know when he had reason to fear some sort of violence.
“Are they listening right now?” we ask the barman, mouthing the words ourselves. “No,” he says, and nods his head yes.
“We don’t care,” we tell him, though we are still whispering. “It has gone on long enough. You cannot reward such behavior as his.”
“As whose?” the barman asks.
“As Charleston’s.”
“What behavior?” the barman says, this time aloud. “The behavior of manufacturing textiles?”
We look between ourselves and then we ask, “So why did the war end?”
The barman sighs.
“Let me ask you a question,” he begins. At the same time, he pulls the tap handle and begins to fill some glasses. “The war had begun. That was our world. So if the choices were—hypothetically, I mean—that either the war goes on, or somebody gets a house atop a hill, which is better?”
We don’t answer, but keep our eyes on the glasses being filled.
“Do you mind the house,” he says, “or do you mind that it is on a hill?”
“What does that mean?” we ask. The glasses, though filled, have remained on his side of the bar, and he stares into our eyes as if he has forgotten all about them.
“Do you mind that the house exists, or do you mind that you live in its shadow and have to see it every day and do you mind that it is a bigger house than yours.”
We do not answer and we do not look into his eyes.
“We could go somewhere else,” we tell him. Our mouths and our voices are pointed down towards the wooden bar.
“Yes, you could,” he says, “but that would be ignorant.”
“Ignorant of what?”
“Of how many mansions in how many towns are built in such a way.”
“Who builds the houses,” we say, “who pays for them?”
“You do.”
“With what?”
“Silence,” he says.
He has filled up the glasses, who knows how many there are, and slides them forward along the bar. He can read the room well because he is a good bartender. His family has owned this very bar and tended it since the 1850s.
We, too, have been here for a long time, and we will return nightly as we always do. We will return to voice our righteous anger at the mansion on the hill, to promise violence, demand justice, scream dissatisfaction until our throats are dry and raw with rage, and then we will have our open mouths filled with something free, and the rawness and the dryness will go away until tomorrow. The drinks are on the house—they are always on the house—and that’s something of a victory. We think so, anyway, and glow with a certain satisfaction as we walk home from the old bar that isn’t so old, under the shadow of the mansion on the hill. It was built in the 1850s by the Charleston family. They made their fortune in textiles.
I inherited my (sometimes closeted) fandom of period dramas from my mother who was always up for anything with overly formal square dance, a wig, and arranged marriages. From the original BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice to the day-time TV Poldark, I would openly roll my eyes as she swooned over young Colin Firth, but I secretly coveted those shapeless Regency dresses that were all bust and no waist. The rash of Austen adaptations and their imitations, throughout the 90s and early 2000s, became my go-to comfort viewing for low stakes drama of people who called themselves poor but still, somehow, managed to have teams of servants.
I later became a (very closeted) fan of romance when I tried to write a feminist parody novel of Fifty Shades of Grey and my dip into Mills and Boon soon became more than just “research.” These obsessions were beginning to wane just as Bridgerton came along and offered the perfect blend of period gowns and steamy romance to win me over despite the intervening years of feminist militancy.
What none of us bargained on as Season 1 became a runaway pandemic success was just how queer and neurodivergent a show Bridgerton would become as it galloped into a third season, with a fourth promised for 2026.
Season 3, launched in May 2024, sated fans with a visual feast of ever more elegant gowns, elaborate wigs and lavish balls alongside the fraught matches, hidden identities and financial intrigues of previous seasons. The show has generated much commentary—both positive and negative—about its fictitious reimagining of racial equality in Regency England while glossing over colonial realities. Season 3 takes another leap towards inclusion with visibly disabled characters appearing among the ton: a wheelchair user and a deaf mother and daughter who are seen using sign language in a number of scenes.
For so-called “invisible disabilities” like autism, ADHD and other neurodivergencies, Bridgerton drops many easter eggs for neurodivergent viewers. There has been rampant online speculation that the season’s newest debutante Francesca Bridgerton (Hannah Dodd), Queen Charlotte’s (Golda Rosheuvel) “sparkler,” is very possibly autistic. Francesca and her suitor Lord John Stirling (Victor Alli), have weird and uncomfortable social interactions. They do not like noise or crowds, they prefer silence over the agony of small talk, they have very defined special interests to which they give their all, they find social expectations overwhelming and prefer the wilds of Scotland to the buzz of the t ton.
They do not like noise or crowds, they prefer silence over the agony of small talk, they have very defined special interests to which they give their all
Whether deliberate or not, the show could not come out and name autism explicitly, because it would be another two centuries before autism would be identified and named as a discreet neurological “condition.” In the early 1800s people who presented with obvious autistic traits—including repetitive movements or non-verbality—could have been labelled anything from “eccentric,” “idiot,” to ‘simpleton.” Their eccentricity might be tolerated, such as Lord Debling’s (Sam Philips) vegetarianism and single-minded concern for animals, or their social privilege or the level of disruption or discomfort they created for those around them they might be institutionalised. The latter, however, does not quite fit into Bridgerton’s pastel infused, fantastical retelling of history.
The tensions at the heart of Season 3—the desire for a life that is true to one’s nature and the pressure to conform to gendered, class, racial and neurotypical expectations—are characteristic of the challenges neurodivergent people face when confronted with the expectation to adapt to, and conform with, neurotypical expectations rather than making space for our divergent needs and desires. In the ascension of the boxer, Will Mondrich (Martins Imhangbe) and his family to high society, we are permitted a rare insight into the rules of the Ton. The men and elders of the ton explain to the newly titled Mondrich family the intricate social norms that delineate acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and to what extent those rules might be bent or even broken.
Those with most freedom to push back against those norms are men, and sometimes married women. Meanwhile the debutants on the marriage mart, like Francesca, Penelope Featherington (Nicola Coughlan), Eloise Bridgerton (Claudia Jessie) and Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen), feel the full force of those rules. They are expected to not only understand, but accept, those rules unquestionably.
Francesca struggles not only with society’s demands, but the demands of a family in which she stands out as an introvert among the easy confidence of a herd of extroverted siblings. Violet Bridgerton (Ruth Gemmell), ever the insightful mother, is frequently confounded by Francesca’s reticence, and often obvious discomfort in social situations. The season’s protagonists, Francesca and Penelope, even manage to connect over their shared unease with their first families, when Penelope empathises: ‘I am different from my siblings as well, it can be difficult can it not?’
My undiagnosed neurodivergence was the source of tension and conflict in my family over many years. On top of the challenges of negotiating the demands of a neurotypical world without support, I struggled to deal with the fallout from a messy separation and an emotionally abusive parent who preyed on my susceptibilities. My family singled me out as a trouble maker. As the conflict escalated I became more and more isolated before eventually being expelled from the family home. It is a story often repeated in the neurodivergent community, where typical neurodivergent behaviours (anything from intense interests to distractibility, to food and other sensory aversions, the desire to spend time alone, sleep problems or failure to make eye-contact) are too often interpreted as “bad behaviour” or insolence. In response, we are often subjected to abusive therapies meant to “correct” our behaviour, institutionalisation or must reckon with the deep rifts that can open between families.
I became more and more isolated before eventually being expelled from the family home.
Bridgerton, however, offers an alternative resolution. Though Violet initially tries to mould Francesca into the image of her flawless oldest daughter Daphne, she learns to accept her daughter’s wishes and preferences even when she doesn’t fully understand them. It’s refreshing to see how Francesca is allowed to find a place for herself among her noisy, boisterous and extroverted siblings. Season 3 gives us a lesson in acceptance—not mere tolerance—of difference.
Penelope’s clashes with her family wane as her confidence grows as a writer, and as she achieves financial independence from her craft. Nevertheless, she continues to struggle on the marriage mart and her quest for a husband becomes increasingly desperate. In Season 3 she laments her own social awkwardness: ‘I know I can be clever and amusing, but somehow my character gets lost between my heart and my mouth and I find myself saying the wrong thing or more likely nothing at all.’
As someone who (sometimes) makes a living as a writer, I identify wholeheartedly with Penelope’s ease of expression in writing and her tremendous awkwardness when confronted with human, in-person social interactions. On the page I play with words, rearranging, then deleting them, writing the same idea three, four or more times until I am satisfied with the words I have chosen.Social interactions rarely, if ever, accommodate prolonged processing of this kind. My mouth always seems to lag behind my brain, or sometimes my brain takes a few minutes to catch up with something that has just come out of my mouth. All of this means I can come across as both dim-witted and thoughtless in the same conversation.
It is notable that Penelope feels comfortable enough to be herself around a select few people, many of whom are potential neurokin, but particularly Eloise.
While Penelope longs for social acceptance and the security of marriage and Francesca sees marriage as a practical inevitability, Eloise continues to scorn all the gendered social conventions and expectations forced upon her and remains determined to avoid marriage at all costs. Her rebellion against the intellectual as well as relational and sexual demands society places on her gender—she is neither interested in men nor in the few pursuits allowed to ladies—is the embodiment of neuroqueerness.
Neuroqueer, a term coined by Dr. Nick Walker and colleagues can be used an adjective or a verb, an identity label or a way of describing practices that question how ‘socially-imposed neuronormativity and socially-imposed heteronormativity were entwined with one another, and how the queering of either of those two forms of normativity entwined with and blended into the queering of the other one.’
Eloise’s youth in season one permitted a certain amount of leeway not granted to debutants who are already out. But her debut in Season 2 provoked a clash of desires with social expectation that manifests in an “inappropriate” friendship with a working class political activist. We are never sure if Eloise has a purely intellectual or also romantic interest in Theo Sharpe (Calam Lynch), but she is nearly ruined in Season 2 when this friendship is exposed. In Season 3 we meet a much more guarded Eloise who tries, but largely fails, to fit into society. She puts on the neurotypical and heteronormative mask: she wears the dresses and attends the balls without protest but barely tolerates the genteel conversation at the edges of the dance floor, shares none of her fellow debutants interests and makes absolutely no effort to find a suitor.
she wears the dresses and attends the balls without protest but barely tolerates the genteel conversation
Her flourishing friendship with Cressida has become the source of much queer speculation, with fans surprised and delighted by their promenades, lingering looks and unguarded conversations. But beyond the potential sexual chemistry, the pair click in a way many neurodivergent people do when we find ourselves inexplicably drawn to each other. There is a shared understanding and empathy of their position as almost-ruined and almost-spinster young ladies flailing in society.
Cressida:You are unlike many people, Eloise. How is it you have the courage to be so different?
Eloise:It is not courage. I simply cannot understand why others do not see things the way I do.
Despite previous ruthlessness in the marriage mart, Cressida’s proximity to Eloise seems to inspire her to make a real bid for freedom. Despite her ill-advised her plot to pass herself off as Lady Whistledown, her desire for an independent life free of patriarchal authority is clear.
While Eloise and Cressida share little more than lingering glances, Benedict Bridgerton (Luke Thompson) spends his third season floundering around on the edges of society, lurching from one existential crisis to another with the same frequency he lurches between illicit relationships. His ennui, lack of purpose and failure to follow through with anything, feels characteristic of an ADHD temperament, though this aimlessness without any corresponding life or financial crises, is only possible because of his extreme privilege. With Benedict, at least, we are rewarded with the most interesting sex of the season as he finally allows himself to explore the queer and polyamorous desires that have been hinted at since Season 1.
Benedict is already slated to regress to heterosexual respectability and fulfil his destiny as suitor to a blushing debutant in Season 4. We will therefore have to wait until 2026, gentle reader, to see if we are finally rewarded with a lasting queer storyline. Bridgerton is set more or less around the time Anne Lister, “infamous” lesbian from Yorkshire and star of the hit BBC show Gentleman Jack, was wooing noble ladies the length and breadth of England and beyond. There is, therefore, no excuse for Netflix to keep denying the queer possibilities for Bridgerton’s debutants. I, for one, would love to see Cressida’s miraculous return to society to pursue a clandestine affair with Eloise and the neuroqueer affair between Francesca and her betrothed’s cousin, Micheala (Masali Baduza) that has already been hinted at!
In a world where Raymond Babbit and Sheldon Cooper continue to dominate the popular imagination of what it means to be autistic (white, male, socially awkward, math genius) we often have to look beyond the characters dubbed “Autistic with a capital A” for representation that reflects the complexity of real neurodivergent experiences. Bridgerton celebrates, rather than pathologizes or makes a spectacle of, its potentially neurodivergent characters who are mostly women and people of colour, and at least some are possibly queer. Bridgerton does not give us a neuroqueer revolution. At the end of the day, conflict is usually resolved through the heterosexual imperative of holy matrimony after which the couples usually disappear into titled bliss. But, the season’s misfits, outcasts, abject failures and rebels nudge us towards the possibility that social norms, no matter how rigid, can be bent—even broken—without provoking catastrophe. Discomfort, perhaps, but not the end of the world. As Violet says: ‘living to please others? I imagine it can be wearying at times.’
When I was 23, my best friend from college invited me to a networking mixer at the headquarters of a top publishing house in New York City. I was in graduate school at The New School at the time, and already working on the manuscript of what would become my first book, Born to Be Public. Besides being an avid reader and keeping abreast of new and upcoming books, my knowledge of the publishing world was limited. Real limited. As in, I just learned what a query letter was.
My friend, who worked at an academic press at the time, was my only connection to publishing. I learned how to write a book proposal because she sent me a few from her imprint that had already sold or were already published for me to reference while I wrote my own. When she asked me if I wanted to be her plus one to this networking mixer, I said yes. I wanted to connect with folks in the industry. Most of all, I wanted to make new friends.
I was determined to enter that mixer and make everyone in the room—and every room thereafter—want to know who I was.
Something I know how to do quite well is stand out, so I put my twist on business casual, which was: a bright yellow blazer with no shirt underneath, black, skin-tight skinny jeans, and a pair of red, patent leather pointed-toe boots with a leopard-print bandana tied around one ankle. Something I learned from my days as an active participant in New York City nightlife is how to conjure curiosity. My friends from the world below Fourteenth Street sauntered the streets with the conviction of a superstar until, eventually, many of them would go on to achieve global stardom in some capacity—from Broadway to performing for 50,000 people at a stadium in London and everything in between and beyond. I was determined to enter that mixer and make everyone in the room—and every room thereafter—want to know who I was until I was someone to know.
Well, I did stand out at that mixer, but the only people who wanted to know who I was were two marketing assistants in their early twenties who wanted to know where the “weird, but fun” places to party in the Lower East Side were, and the server handing out cheeseburger sliders who slipped me his number on a cocktail napkin as I left. There were some modest attempts at making meaningful connections, but besides a few well-intentioned compliments—“I like your shoes”; “I love the color of your blazer”; “Wow, is that your real hair?”—I didn’t leave with plans to grab coffee with anyone. The server never even texted me back! These are things I laugh about now, but the memory that still haunts me to this day is meeting A Very Well-Known Writer who looked at me like I was a nuisance, like they needed a spray bottle to get me away from them.
“What is someone like you doing here?” they asked, giving me a glance up and down after I went up and introduced myself. “Uh, isn’t it obvious? There’s cheese,” I replied, joking.
They let out a suggestion of a chortle; I thought I was killing it.
“I’m here with my friend who works in publishing, but I’m a writer, too. I’m writing a book right now!” I told them. “I really loved your first one. I keep it close by when I work on my own.”
After a mildly awkward pause, they looked at me and smiled. “That’s so nice,” they said. “Well, it was nice meeting you!” And with that, they stopped, dropped and rolled away.
I left that night feeling disheartened. I did not feel welcomed like I did when I walked into my first dive bar on Rivington Street when I was 18. I wanted to meet people who loved books and could maybe offer me a little guidance, but all I got was acid reflux from the nine burger sliders I ate. That night, I made a promise to myself: If I ever published a book and attained any modicum of success, I would always hold space for other writers—established or not. I vowed to make sure anyone who crossed my path felt like they belonged, even if—and especially if—they were just starting on their path to publication. There’s room for everyone, even if you’re made to feel like there isn’t.
This endless grind, this self-imposed urgency, is not what keeps me going anymore.
I have since gone on to publish my first book, which has sold thousands of copies, which is thousands of copies more than I ever thought it would sell; I’ve been published in my dream publications; I’ve met (and befriended) so many of my heroes; I run my own reading series; I teach; I organize; and I’m working on, like, three books right now. All of the dreams I had when I was 23 came true and then some, and that is something I forget all too often after more than a decade of working my ass off and putting work before everything else and constantly trying to outdo myself. But this endless grind, this self-imposed urgency, is not what keeps me going anymore.
The success of my memoir—and the success I’ve achieved since—has less to do with my promotional efforts, and more to do with the writers who lifted me up along the way. These are the folks who have been there, and understand that it’s hard to break out in this industry without name recognition or a massive platform. The folks who pledge to support newcomers as they navigate the literary landscape—which, in the beginning, can feel like being the new kid at school—because they wish they’d had someone to turn to for guidance when they debuted. These are the authors who blurbed my book, said yes or offered to be my conversation partner at events, or even just posted a photo of my book along with some kind words about it. Now, they are friends who I call when I get frustrated or feel like I want to give up, but remind me the feeling will pass; it always does.
My literary ambitions remain grand, if not bigger than when I decided to pursue writing as a career. And I still contend with fear, doubt, and anxiety; I still struggle with insecurity. There’s also being mired by life in general: heartbreak, health issues, familial discord, job insecurity—you name it. The only difference is I’m not alone. I am constantly uplifted, both in times of achievement and duress, by those who also believe in the promise of the page. This has been especially true for the past year, when my agent started pitching my second book to editors. After getting my hopes up twice, my proposal died on submission months later. Feeling unmotivated and discouraged—and trying to swat away thoughts of failure and the fear that I would never publish another book again—I struggled to devote time and attention to my projects. Every time I felt pulled to the page, I felt like I kept striking matches that wouldn’t light. Instead of giving in to the urge to fling my computer into the sea and start over as a maple tree farm laborer, I let myself lean on my writer friends. Before long, I felt a renewed sense of purpose, which feeds my art and vice versa.
When I flew to Los Angeles last summer, in 2023, to host a reading, I thought it would be a one-off event. I pitched a concept called “Spring Cleaning” to my friend, fellow author, and co-host, Jen Winston, earlier that year when we were in Seattle for the AWP conference. The idea was for writers to read work that was cut, killed, unpublished, or otherwise rotting in the bowels of their hard drives. “Spring Cleaning” turned into “Empty Trash,” and a few months later, we booked 12 LA literary luminaries to read at a local theater. Afterwards, milling about outside under the marquee, writer after writer came up to me. “Thank you for doing this. We don’t have a lot of readings like this out here,” one told me. “It’s one of the things I miss about living in New York.” “We’ve been waiting for something like this,” another said. I had already been flirting with the idea of moving to LA, but after hearing comments like this, I pretty much decided to move then and there. The opportunity to build community stood out to me.
Writing is a solitary job, and the industry in which we work is almost invariably brutal.
Writing is a solitary job, and the industry in which we work is almost invariably brutal. Not only is it an endless buffet of rejection, but, now more than ever, it is a business trying to tread water amidst constantly shifting tides. There are mergers, acquisitions, a starkly evident mismanagement of resources (don’t get me started, girl), and an overall disconnect between those whom I like to call the check-signers and the often overworked, underpaid folks who are employed by these corporate overlords, a lot of whom work just as hard as their authors to advocate for the voices and stories that have historically been, at best, relegated to the sidelines, and at worst, entirely invisible.
Not only does this pose an obstacle for emerging writers to get their foot in the door—especially writers from marginalized backgrounds—but creates distinct challenges for established writers, too. Those who have already broken in can also find themselves bereft. I have two friends who’ve both recently been orphaned by their respective editors. This is the second time this has happened for one of them. Another friend recently had their contract for their third book killed. Writers at any stage of their career—sometimes even blockbuster names—still struggle to make a living writing full-time. Many of us have other jobs, sometimes more than one, and still live paycheck-to-paycheck. I don’t know where your Aunt Joyce got the impression that we get rich from publishing a book, but please tell her that I overdrafted at Walgreens just the other day.
We’re all just trying to successfully string our words together and stay afloat so we can pay our damn bills, but, oftentimes, it feels like an uphill battle. It’s easy to feel discouraged when all you want to do is share your work with readers, but the route to doing so is an obstacle course. Why navigate this treacherous terrain alone when you can do it together? (Preferably over a strong cocktail.)
I used to sometimes feel dejected after seeing a handful of screenshots from Publisher’s Marketplace announcing book deals scattered across my various social media feeds, feeling like a flop because my second book seems to have stalled in submission purgatory. Don’t get me wrong; I’m thrilled when I see my friends and peers sell their books, and celebrate every win that comes their way. But there used to be a part of me—the part that’s hypercritical and mean to me for no reason—that reframed everyone’s success as my personal failure to keep up. That part of me still exists, but its volume is drowned by the voices of those with whom I am in community. Even if it’s a ping from my group chat—which is comprised of authors in all different stages of our careers—I know I am not alone, which is critical when you’re confronted with the same difficulties in a business that treats us like literary factories.
I want to work in a world where the people underneath the writing are honored and treated well.
More deals, more acquisitions, more options. Most of this industry focuses solely on the writing and trying to manipulate the sentences into a direction that will yield profit. I want to work in a world where the people underneath the writing are honored and treated well. We are not machines that can produce an endless supply of content without detriment to our health and wellbeing; we are real people with real experiences and real problems and real challenges and real emotions whose job is to metabolize all of these things and create something that we hope will impact at least one person out there. We are already tasked with the writing, but most of us are also tasked with publicizing that writing, and, more times than not, that includes dipping into our personal finances to fund things, like travel to conferences, festivals, and other events. Or the labor is emotional, like being asked to plunge into our wounds for the sake of generating buzz. There’s a scene in the second season of Special on Netflix where Ryan O’Connell’s character, also named Ryan, tells his editor during a meeting that he’s dealing with writer’s block, and she glibly responds with, “Why don’t you just write about your disability again?” Are you picking up what I’m putting down?
Who knows what the future of publishing looks like (or doesn’t), but one thing is for certain: We can count on each other. Whether starting a massive online movement like #PublishingPaidMe to expose the stark disparities in equity and promote transparency going forward or complaining about a publicist dropping a ball over coffee, we will find each other, again and again and again. Across cities, states, and countries. What a blessing it is to find one’s people, one’s cherished community beyond family and close friends. What a felicity it is to spend so much of your efforts in a solitary way, and then find your people and emerge and grow alongside them.
My dream has always been to walk into a bookstore and see my book on a shelf. Now imagine walking into a bookstore and seeing your friends’ books alongside your own. It never gets old for me. It’s a constant reminder that magic exists—you just have to know where to look. And what a gift it is to look no further.
The day after the election, November 6, having spent the previous evening cooking and consuming a healthy meal of grass-fed beef and roasted green beans and quinoa as a form of self-care, I sat at the kitchen table eating every single piece of our leftover Halloween treats. KitKats whose wrappers were red as the electoral map. Bags of popcorn labeled, preposterously, Lesser Evil. Coconut-chocolate bars called Unreal.
Around lunchtime, deep into this who-cares sugar binge, I opened my email and saw a new Substack post from Patrick Nathan, an excellent writer and an especially astute critic of all the ways—both explicitly and implicitly—our country has embraced authoritarianism. America, he writes in his newsletter, not as a country but as a mythology and set of unifying ideals, is dead. It’s clearer than ever, he says, that “there is no ‘we’ on a national level, and there won’t be anytime soon.”
And yet, writes Nathan, “if America is dead, our communities survive.” If our national politics has become little more than farcical theater, our towns and city councils and neighborhoods are where real change can be enacted. There, he says, we have a voice. And while Nathan’s talking mostly about local politics, I’d like to include you all, the readers of Electric Literature, as a community that can and must survive. Our books and our bookstores, our libraries, our writing groups, our literary magazines, our review columns, our interviews. Our stories.
“Part of what’s intrigued me, over the years,” Nathan writes, “in thinking about social media, entertainment, and corporate influence, is how agency sits at the heart of it all.” There are so many forces working to pacify us, including the entertainment we often turn to; call me romantic (or delusional), but I refuse to believe that reading literature is one such force. I’m not so naive as to think that books are the way out of this or even through it, but I do think there is true power in sharing stories—not just those we’ve written but those bravely put to paper by others.
“Eight years ago I despaired,” Nathan writes at the end of his newsletter. “I panicked. I grieved. I binged the news and waited for something to happen, for someone to stop it. This morning, I woke up ready to act. This isn’t to condemn or belittle grieving, nor panic nor despair. But I do hope, after you take the time you need, that you find it in your heart to shut off the stream, to go out into your community, to find out what people need, and to do whatever you can.”
I’m writing this little intro on November 7 with no idea of what’s to come. But what I do know is that what I can do right now, what I need to do, is share some of the stories that other brave, brilliant people have shared.
At the table one evening Ethan declares to his very liberal husband, Gabe, that he is planning to run for Congress…as a Republican. Just as his campaign is set to begin, Ethan’s sister Kate, a reporter at a top-tier newspaper who’s grown tired of covering America’s madcap political arena, comes back into contact with the ex-girlfriend who broke her heart. For years Elizabeth Harris has been one of the most vital journalists covering the publishing industry for the New York Times, and now we get to enjoy her engaging storytelling from the other side.
Haslett follows his Pulitzer Prize finalist Imagine Me Gone with another largehearted family saga, this one centered on Peter, a gay immigration lawyer, and his estranged mother Anne, the founder of a feminist “intentional community.” Peter’s latest case involves a young queer Albanian seeking asylum and brings to the fore the source of his and Anne’s estrangement.
Fagan, the bestselling author of What Made Maddy Run and the equally heartrending memoir All the Colors Came Out, turns her prodigious talents to fiction with this epic and intimate saga of a famous writer whose identity has been kept hidden…until now. Evelyn Hugo vibes abound.
In this intriguing debut, two Shakespearean actors enter a lavender-ish marriage of convenience—one of them is a gay man evading the House Un-American Activities Committee, the other a woman in the midst of a crack-up—a roleplaying arrangement made all the more complicated when they’re invited to participate in a makeshift Globe Theater in the middle of the New Mexican desert.
Betancourt has for many years now been one of the best cultural writers around; I’ll echo author and editor Matt Ortile, who calls Betancourt “a dream critic—as in, a fabulous scholar of dreams, of the desirous imagination.” In The Male Gazed, Betancourt wove biography and pop culture to explore modern masculinity, and here he examines the agony and ecstasy of intimacy in the digital age.
A critic in the UK called Jeffs’s debut a kind of queer One Day, following university students Mae and Ari over the course of a decade, ten years of triumphs and turmoil and intimacies gained and lost. A book about the wondrous possibilities of queer family-making.
No blurb I write could be a better sell for this book than its subtitle. Edmund White has been a candid pioneer of erotic writing for a long time and this autobiography not only distills the raw sagacity of his work but becomes a breathing, throbbing document of gay love throughout the past century.
With her highly venerated debut Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead, Emily Austin emerged right away as a vibrantly unique storyteller, one capable of laying bare the delirium and delight of being a queer woman. Her books are often cheekily funny but never shy away from heavier things, especially the mental health struggles of neurodivergent people. She continues that work here, in a moving tale of two sisters desperate to (re)connect to each other and to the good parts of their shared childhood.
(Bonus: I’ll be in conversation with Austin for this book’s launch on January 27th at Watchung Books in Montclair, NJ.)
Hernan Diaz’s Trust but make it gay? Narrated in the sly-eyed style of Plain Bad Heroines? I am absolutely buying what this book is selling, an epic and intimate tale of three secretly queer aspiring business titans who band together—and in the case of two of them, marry—to build an empire.
A memoir by Lidia Yuknavitch is never just a memoir. In The Chronology of Water, the Poet Laureate of Misfits embraced corporeal nonlinearity as a truer form of autobiography. Here, she retells some of the most significant moments of her life not purely as fact but as passages of fiction, “a way to read my own past differently, using what I have learned from literature: how stories repeat and reverberate and release us from the tyranny of our mistakes, our traumas, and our confusions.”
In all but a few of her songs, Joni Mitchell employed alternate and abnormal guitar tunings, reportedly to assuage discomfort in her left hand as a result of childhood polio. I didn’t actually know this until I cracked open Paul Lisicky’s new memoir, which weaves Mitchell’s music through his own autobiography and vice versa. It explains why her songs feel at once otherworldly and intimately familiar, a slightly left-of-center lilt that Lisicky himself often taps into in his incantatory books.
Pitched as Pose by way of Junot Diaz, Heredia’s debut follows two Dominican best friends navigating New York City’s queer underbelly at the dawn of the new millennium, a time and place full of promise and pitfalls. Adam Haslett calls it a “remarkable” book that captures “the pain and power of friendship that extends across seas, and borders, and the struggle of working people to survive in America.”
Dirt Creek, Hayley Scrivenor’s 2022 debut, was a national bestseller but still criminally underdiscussed, a small-town mystery that’s sort of Mare of Eastown meets Sharp Objects. Her follow-up centers on an intense friendship and love triangle that ends in tragedy when a girl falls to her death. But was it an accident?
How does an author follow a blockbuster, game-changing debut novel like Detransition, Baby, a book the New York Times hailed as one of the best of the twenty-first century? Peters continues to fearlessly push the envelope in this genre-bending, darkly comic collection of novellas, including one about a cadre of cold and lonely lumberjacks who hold a makeshift fete during which any of them can attend and be courted as a woman, and another set in a speculative world in which bodies stop producing hormones, forcing everyone everywhere to choose their gender.
“Imagine everything you can imagine,” Mary Oliver wrote, “then keep on going.” It’s a line that shows up in this book by writer and teacher Ariel Gore about her wife’s cancer diagnosis and what it means to be a queer caretaker in America’s labyrinthine medical system, a book that lays bare everything you might imagine about breast cancer and then keeps going. Because what else is there? “Breast cancer is no joke,” comedian Tig Notaro says in her blurb for the book, “but sometimes finding the humor shifts the story into something you can tell. Rehearsals for Dying will help many.”
Most likely Kristen Arnett needs no introduction to readers here but what she probably does need is a beer—probably several, and probably at some airport bar somewhere—so let’s all raise a glass to one of the wittiest, most warmhearted writers around and her new novel. Stop Me, her third, follows Cherry Hendricks, a clown down on her luck but high on balloon-animal helium and birthday-party laughter. Cherry’s still figuring things out when she meets Margot the Magnificent, an older magician who dazzles Cherry and offers to show her the ropes of their chosen professions. But like silks up the sleeve, questions of how to build an authentic life through performance never end.
Laskey’s previous two books–Under the Rainbow and So Happy for You–brimmed with hilarity and heart, featuring witty, willful characters. Her sensibilities then are perfectly tailored for a contemporary romance, and this, her first foray into the genre, comes with an attention-snatching hook: a publicist doing PR for a high-profile actress very much in the closet must make sure the starlet’s sexuality stays hush-hush…all the while trying to keep from falling in love with her.
Dimitrov’s previous volume of verse, 2021’sLove and Other Poems, was a fiercely poignant look at the ways in which solitude can be a shared experience. Expect no less from Ecstasy, a collection in part about how the memories of pleasure can be as immediate as the experiences themselves.
Prizes as big and important as the Pulitzer are often cause to argue over the value of arts and letters in American culture, as well as the individuals and institutions who get to say what that value is, but the committee’s 2023 selection in the criticism category provoked perhaps more debate than usual. Past winners like Emily Nussbaum, Hilton Als, and Wesley Morris haven’t just critiqued art, but changed the conversations about how art is created and consumed; indubitably added to that list is Andrea Long Chu, whose book and television reviews astutely examine some of the most fraught topics of our current cultural moment in often breathtaking ways. Authority, her first book since winning the award, explores the role of serious criticism in a world of unadulterated bullshit opinions.
One of the biggest names in contemporary romance returns with a sweet and fizzy f/f pairing set in Napa Valley. Avery is a newly single event planner with limited dating experience but an interest in exploring her sexuality. Taylor is a classic rake, her insecurities masked by bravado, who offers to help Avery learn how to flirt. Guillory’s books always go down smooth but they never lack complexity.
The latest collection fromPoetry Northwest editor Keetje Kuipers embodies the erotic desolation of its title and is also so much more: a book about trying and failing to love men, a book about trying and sometimes failing to love herself, about how the present makes sense of the past, about motherhood and wifedom and all the quiet, surprising desires that resound throughout a full house.
Irish poet Seán Hewitt makes his prose debut with a novel about a young man looking back two decades in his past at the year his life changed, when as a sixteen year old in a remote English village he met a boy like him, torn between the stability of home and the promise of elsewhere. Martyr! author Kaveh Akbar calls Open, Heaven a “searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it’s a novel about time. Which is to say it’s a novel about us.”
On my best days, I’m a bit of a cynical grinch. But when I had the chance to read an early version of Denne Michele Norris’s debut novel I honestly felt my cold, cold heart grow several sizes with each turn of the page. Norris is, of course, the editor in chief of this very website, and has led Electric Lit splendidly into a new golden era, but she is also an immensely talented writer in her own right. Harvest follows Davis, a musician, who learns during his wedding ceremony that his estranged father, a venerated pastor, has been in a car accident. The complexity of the loss threatens to upend not only his fledgling marriage—to a white man—but his own sense of self, his dreams and desires.
Look, I’ll be honest: the pitch for this book came with the information that Luca Guadagnino is planning to adapt it to film and that Challengers actor Josh O’Connor is on board to play its protagonist, a young German musician who tries to distance himself from the impending death of his lover by traveling across Europe. Yet it’s also worth recognizing that Tondelli’s novel, originally published in 1989, is considered a classic of contemporary Italian literature, having arrived just two years before the author’s death due to AIDS.
I’m almost tempted to say that the world is not ready for this novel but hot damn this is the novel we need right the hell now. One day, a gig-working loner in Brooklyn, Wilder, is struck suddenly with the mystical ability to understand and speak any and every language. Before they know it, a ragtag group of magically-inclined beings has come to claim Wilder as one of their own. To call Awakened the queer and trans answer to a certain fantasy series that shall not be named would be both a gross oversimplification and a disservice to the anarchic wonderland Osworth has conjured. It’s thrilling and riotous and magical af.
Whenever I put together this list, there’s inevitably that one work of historical fiction that almost threatens to become more relevant by the time it publishes, and Milo Todd’s elegiac debut—about a vibrant queer community in prewar Berlin pushed into survival mode—might be it. As a fan of Cabaret I was sold immediately on this tale of a trans man who finds love and solace in an underground club only to be forced into fleeing as the Nazis ascend to power. Not only is The Lilac People a moving story, it might also be a roadmap of how we move forward.
No joke: Wilco’s Sky Blue Sky, often cited as the quintessential “dad rock” record, is one of my desert island albums, a pleasurably frictionless blend of blues and alt-country centered on the difficulties of contentment (how queer!) So I was thrilled upon learning that one of the internet’s foremost commentators on the relationship between gender and music uses this much-maligned music label to explore questions of desire and transition.
Ostlund rightfully garnered a lot of acclaim for her 2015 novel After the Parade but I first fell in love with her fiction with her 2009 collection The Bigness of the World. Happily, Ostlund, an astute chronicler of the queerness of mundanity and the mundanity of queerness, returns for her first book in ten years with a book of short stories full of “guns, god, and gays.”
I remember cracking open Night Sky with Exit Wounds and secretly hoping Ocean Vuong would write a novel—not that every poet must turn to prose at some point!—and I remember getting to the end of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and hoping he’d write another. So I, for one, am glad for the existence of this follow-up, a heartwarming tale of friendship between a teen boy and the older woman who intervenes during his suicide attempt.
Believe me when I tell you I was wrecked before the end of this book’s prologue. Queer and trans people are taught that our desires are private, and if that’s true, Faye laments, then “we are culpable for our own feelings of lovelessness.” We are locked out of–exiled from–the traditional realms of happiness and comfort, left alone with our unworthiness. But of course this memoir-in-essays, from the author of The Trans Issue, argues the fairly obvious but no less revelatory point that we are indeed worthy of loving and being loved.
Sometimes the universe sends you a book written by someone else that feels like it’s been written just for you. As a former basketball player myself, Crane’s follow-up to I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is an alley-oop from the literary gods: perfectly pitched and right when it’s needed most—at a time when the profile of women’s basketball is higher than ever. Full of beauty and brawn, the book centers on Mac, a straight-shooting, Iverson-worshipping basketball star going into her senior season of high school—a year that begins with the death of her father and the arrival of an alluring and talented new teammate. Fans of films like Personal Best and The Novice shouldn’t hesitate to jump into this story about the complicated give-and-take between queerness and ambition and how, for better or worse, the body always seems to keep the score.
Melissa Febos is straight-up one of the most essential memoirists today, each of her books a deeply profound exploration of the mind and the body and the complex relationship between them. Whip Smart, her first, more than lived up to its title and delivered a dextrous, piercing meditation on addiction and the things we sometimes do to and with our bodies, while Girlhood–genuinely one of those books that would vastly improve the world if everyone were to read it–chronicles the physical and psychological harm done to our bodies from youth to adulthood. It’s a testament to Febos’s incredible skill that a book centered on celibacy features some of the most erotic writing she’s ever put to paper–and if you’ve read any of her work you know that’s saying a lot. Of course, Dry Season is not just about celibacy; it’s a treatise on listening to and trusting our corporeal instincts, on finding authentic forms of pleasure independent from hegemonic scripts. It’s a book that is itself a pleasure.
I always got along with my girlfriends’ families, and for that, I had Florence to thank. She set a real precedent for me. The first time I went down to Georgia with her granddaughter—my girlfriend—Maxine, I didn’t know what to expect. Florence was an authentic Southern debutante, with a dining room wall covered in oil portraits of herself. To my surprise, she was very kind to me. And she did provide a warning. That first night, when Maxine went down to the basement to dig up an extra set of sheets, Florence stood in her enormous, brass-adorned kitchen and said, “She left home when she was sixteen, did she tell you that?”
“She did.”
“My oldest grandchild. She was impatient. Stubborn, too. Is she still that way?”
“She is.”
“That’s not a thing that changes in a person. Once a leaver—”
Maxine came bounding up the stairs then, with her Cheshire Cat smile, so I didn’t get to say what I believed, which was: On a long enough timeline, isn’t everyone a leaver?
With Maxine and me, it took another fifteen years, but it did eventually happen. She left me without warning, on a winter night, the week after New Year’s. It was like a country song about a man going out to buy cigarettes and never coming back. I mean: it was wholly unbelievable. I was sitting at our kitchen table, leafing through a seed catalog when she said she had to run out to the pet store for the dog’s new senior formula food. Thirty minutes later, she called from a payphone at the gas station two miles from our house.
“I don’t think I’m coming back,” she said.
“You cannot be serious,” I replied.
But she was serious, a rarity for her. We were living communally then, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and all our friends were really shocked. They said there was no way she meant it, she was having some kind of psychotic episode, she would surely be back. But I knew her, and I knew the voice she used when she’d made up her mind. She never came back. We never saw each other again. A month after she left, she sent me a list of belongings she wanted from the house—everything fit in two boxes, which I shipped to the Vermont address she provided.
Florence had been dead for a year, so I never did find out what she thought of Maxine leaving me like I was a housewife in curlers. I don’t think she would have said, I told you so. She was harsh, but not cruel. I liked to think she would have hit Maxine on the back of the head and said, What is your problem? That girl was the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I spent a lot of nights imagining that.
Many years later, I pulled off my wool socks in the locker room of the YMCA. It was quiet for a Saturday afternoon, just me and a young woman standing in front of the sauna, fidgeting with the temperature dial. Snow kept people away. I’d have an entire lap lane to myself, a relief. My daughter, Anya, had left for college on the West Coast and I was having a horrific time at work. I was in a period of feeling very sorry for myself, and that required space.
The young woman—she looked only a few years older than Anya—opened the wooden sauna door, stuck her head in, then turned up the dial even higher. Waiting for the temperature to climb, she turned to the room’s sole full-length mirror and put her hand to her neck, which was encircled in a green ring. This had happened to me before, when I wore cheap jewelry into the chlorine.
“Do you need some makeup remover, honey?” I asked, already fishing the plastic bottle and a cotton round out of my locker.
The young woman startled, just slightly, at the sound of my voice. It was always monastically quiet in there, and I had a feeling the snow falling outside further muffled any sound.
“Yes, thank you,” she said, and stretched out her hand. I rose from my bench, set the cotton round on her palm, and dribbled the makeup remover until it was soaked through.
“You might have to really work at it, but it will come off.”
“Alright.” She turned back to the mirror and began scrubbing at the green ring with fierce determination.
The pool, which I swam in three or four times a week, had a utilitarian beauty. The lifeguards kept it clean. The overheard lights were florescent, but the far wall was made of glass, overlooking a wide avenue. I adjusted my swim cap and lingered at the water’s edge. I’d missed a phone call from Anya that morning. Should I have waited by the phone instead of coming here? Should I have called Gloria (my ex and Anya’s mother) to make sure everything was alright? I knew that was silly. I couldn’t stop my life every time I missed a call, but I wasn’t used to her living so far away yet; the distance had made me illogical, uncertain of how to behave.
I dove into lap lane four—my favorite—and propelled myself toward and away from the glass wall again and again and again. I loved when my feet slapped the concrete for a turn. The water was cold enough to motivate.
The last time I saw Florence alive, we were down in Georgia to celebrate Christmas with Maxine’s family. I still found Christmas novel then and committed to it with the whole-hearted spirit only an outsider can have. I was baking sugar cookies in a checkered apron when Florence asked me to go out to the rose garden with her.
“It’s snowing,” I said.
“I have something I want to show you.”
Maxine looked up from her spot in the living room where she was fixing a shelf, caught my eye, and shrugged.
“Alright. Let me just take this apron off and put my coat on.”
In the rose garden, with the snow coming down, she said, “There’s nothing I need to show you. I need to ask you for a favor.”
“A favor?”
“I need you to drive me over to Dahlonega.”
“Why?”
“To see Jim.”
“Jim?” Jim was her ex-boyfriend from years earlier. I’d never even met him. Florence was engaged in romantic drama until the day she died, which Maxine and I agreed you had to respect.
“Yes, Jim.”
“I don’t think—well, I don’t think your family likes him very much.” “That’s why I’m asking you to take me.”
“It’s snowing.”
“And that’s the second reason why I’m asking you to take me. It’s not safe for me to drive in these conditions. You’re young. You’re from New York. You can drive in the snow.”
“I really can’t.”
“Sure you can.” She looked toward the house, then bent over one of the brittle rose bushes, beckoning dramatically in a performance of “showing” me something.
“We’ll tell them we’re out of bacon and have to run to the store.”
I sighed. “They can check the fridge and see there’s bacon. Let’s tell them we need more butter.”
The roads were worse than I’d anticipated. In Maxine’s truck, I drove ten miles below the speed limit, gripping the steering wheel, my whole body tense.
“You’re doing great,” Florence said the second time the tires skidded. “I really do appreciate it.” She pulled a gold tube of lipstick from her purse and began re-applying in the rearview mirror. “I would wait, but he’s leaving town tomorrow.”
“For how long?”
“Forever, maybe. He’s moving to the desert, where his son lives. He sold the house. He’s leaving tomorrow and he just told me yesterday. Can you believe that? Unbelievable. I have to go over there and let him know it’s unbelievable.”
The snow began to slow and finally we reached Jim’s house. It was bigger than I’d imagined from how Maxine talked about him, as if he was some kind of low life, a real scum of the earth man, but this was a respectable brick house, with pillars and manicured hedges out front.
Florence opened the door and then looked at me, expectantly. I didn’t know what to say. “Good luck,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
She eased herself down from the truck and walked gingerly up the icy path to the house. Terror struck me. If she fell, how would I explain it to Maxine and her family? She looked tiny and shrunken. Finally, she made it to the door. She steadied herself, pulled her shoulders back, and knocked. Jim answered quickly. They did not embrace. She stepped inside. Immediately, he kneeled down with surprising grace and I saw he had a pair of slippers in his hands, which he set down before her. She placed her hand on his shoulder, slipped her shoes off, and put the slippers on in one swift motion. I imagined they’d done this thousands of times. He stood back up and closed the door.
I waited, trying to imagine what they were doing inside Jim’s house, but I couldn’t get any farther than an image of the two of them sitting at a white kitchen table. After thirty minutes, Florence emerged and shuffled her way back to the car. Again, I was terrified she would fall and again she didn’t. She seemed unchanged and completely composed, but when she lifted herself onto the passenger seat, I saw she was still wearing the slippers, which were now wet from the snow.
“Your shoes,” I said.
Florence looked down at her feet. “Oh!”
“Do you want to go back inside and get them?” I thought of her making her way across the icy path again. “Or I could do it?
“No,” she said, inserting her seatbelt into its buckle. “No, I do not.” I drew my breath to argue.
“We will stop at the store to get the butter though,” she said, leaving no room for discussion.
At the grocery store, I offered to run inside by myself, but Florence said, “No, I’ll come with you.”
I followed her to the dairy aisle. She somehow made the slippers look like real shoes.
“Which kind?” I asked in front of the butter case.
She pointed to a brand wrapped in gold foil.
On our way to the checkout line, in the soda aisle, she paused and straightened her back and said, “Do you think you and Maxine will ever have children?”
I did not. I didn’t want children then, and Maxine didn’t either. We were both thirty-four. For years, she’d been saying, in a dreamy way, that she was interested in fostering troubled teenagers—I would say we could talk about it when the time came, although it sounded like a nightmare to me, and I knew the time would never come. But I was flattered Florence would ask, standing under the florescent grocery store lighting, in her wet slippers, having just said goodbye to a man who, for all I knew, was the one true love of her life.
I was flattered Florence would ask, standing under the florescent grocery store lighting, in her wet slippers, having just said goodbye to a man who, for all I knew, was the one true love of her life.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think we will.”
“Very good.”
I never did tell Maxine about my expedition with her grandmother that day. When we got back to the house, Maxine was under the massive Christmas tree, rigging up a complicated mechanism to ensure it would not topple over in the middle of the night, like it had in previous years. “Come join me!” she called when we opened the front door. Orchestral music played from the stereo. Florence excused herself to take a nap and I joined Maxine on the soft, lemon carpet, surrounded by boxes of ornaments. She paused her work, smiling at me with a screwdriver between her teeth until I laughed and she set it down. “I was starting to worry,” she said, taking my socked feet in her lap and squeezing them. “Thought about calling the grocery store.”
“The roads were icy.”
“But you handled them?”
“But I handled them.”
She stood up and began to hammer a metal hook into the wall behind the tree. “Thank you for taking her. You know how she can be when she sets her mind to something.”
When I got home from the pool, the red kitchen telephone was ringing off the hook. It was Anya, upset. Gloria was, evidently, having some kind of surgery. Did I know that? I didn’t. How couldn’t you know? she said, through tears. And it’s snowing there? She doesn’t have anyone to take her home from the hospital and it’s snowing!
I tried to calm her down, then called Gloria.
“Our daughter tells me you are having surgery and need someone to drive you home from the hospital.”
“I told her not to call you.”
Gloria refused to specify what kind of procedure she was having, and I refused to ask more than once. If she wanted to keep secrets, there was nothing I could do to stop her. I had learned that long ago and given up on the hope that I could somehow shake them loose from her.
Her procedure, whatever it was, was being performed in a hospital outside the city, which seemed bad to me. Why not one of the hundreds of hospitals here? It must have required one hell of a specialist. Or worse, she was cutting corners, going to someone who would do it for a discount. So like her, I thought, to endanger herself without considering the consequences for other people. It was easy for me to dip into that egoism, to believe I knew what was or was not like her.
Gloria said the surgery was scheduled for the end of the month. She would take a cab to the hospital by herself, and, if everything went well, spend only one night there. I could pick her up on Friday morning.
“I’ll be there,” I said.
“You don’t have to sound so smug about it.”
I was hurt, but she was probably right. I probably did sound smug.
I was having trouble filling my evenings during that period. No Anya to entertain. No one I was interested in thinking about. There was still an hour of daylight left and the snow was slowing. The landlord usually sent a service to salt the sidewalk in the morning, but I’d seen a shovel in the downstairs utility closet, and, after the conversation with Gloria, I couldn’t face being inside for the rest of the night.
I met Gloria ten years after Maxine left me, at a fundraiser for a community farm I did some pro bono accounting work for. This was the summer of 1988. The fundraiser was an elaborate dinner in the middle of one of their fallow fields. Halfway through the second course, an unexpected thunderstorm hit. We fled our tables and rushed into the barn to take cover. I leaned against the wall, watching the lighting and thinking about how, as a child, my mother would take me into our dank garage to watch summer storms with her. After an hour, the rain stopped. Everyone cheered. Then Gloria stood up on a bench to announce that the road into the farm was flooded. “But not to worry!” she said. “Be merry while we figure it out.” She was wearing a loose denim shirt, so I didn’t notice she was pregnant until later, when, after everyone else had left, in the loft above the barn, she offered me rum punch from a galvanized bucket. She gave me the chair while she sat on a small wooden bench.
“You’re going to let me drink alone?” I asked.
She let out her yelping laugh and pulled at the back of her denim shirt, so it was tight around her belly. “For three more months, anyway.” She lifted her hand to the bottom of the glass and tipped the rum into my mouth. Then she took my hand and pressed it against her stomach, while using her knee to open my legs.
Two months later, we moved into the apartment on East Third Street, where Gloria still lived, where she was sitting right now, looking down at the slush-filled street, angry that, despite everything, she still ended up with me driving her home from the hospital.
When Maxine and I were together, we never had any messages on our answering machine. Most of our friends lived nearby and walked over if they had anything to tell us. But one afternoon, right after my thirty-fifth birthday (I remember there was discarded silver wrapping paper in the corner), I came home from town to the machine lit up red. When I hit PLAY, Maxine’s mother’s voice filled the kitchen, a blinking telegram from another world. “I am calling because your grandmother is in the hospital with pneumonia. It’s nothing to worry about, but I knew if I didn’t tell you and you found out later, you’d use it as an excuse not to talk to us.”
I called the clinic, where Maxine was working a double-shift, and got one of the other nurses to put her on the phone.
On the drive down to Georgia, we fought. We could fight about anything. I actually liked fighting with Maxine. It was athletic. Her grandmother had been right; she was stubborn, but not in the way most people are. She was a flexible thinker with immutable conviction. This was inspiring and maddening, in mostly equal measure.
Florence’s situation worsened quickly. I didn’t realize that people die of pneumonia all the time and so was confused all week, always one step behind whatever Maxine was telling me. When it became obvious that Florence was not going to recover, Maxine convinced her mother to move Florence back to the house, so she could die in her own bed, surrounded by family. It seemed wrong for me to be in the room when she died, so I excused myself when it became clear it was about to happen. Maxine’s entire family was assembled, forming a ring around the bed.
They were quiet, painfully awkward, tense. From the hallway, I heard Maxine break the silence. “Does anyone have anything they want to say to Florence?”
I was stunned, again, by her good-and-direct-ness.
After the funeral, the family gathered at Maxine’s uncle’s house, a rambling ranch-style surrounded by thin pine trees, at the edge of a man-made lake. Buck was an enormous man with six black labs. The oldest one was also named Buck. No one seemed to think it was funny except me and Maxine.
It was a warm, wet spring evening. On the rickety wooden deck, the family started telling stories. Because I hadn’t heard the stories my entire life, I became the audience.
“Has she ever told you,” Buck began, handing me a bottle of beer, “about when Mama stole the guns back for me?”
“I don’t think she has,” I said.
“Maxine, what have you been telling her?” Buck took a swig from his bottle and leaned back, readying himself to tell. “My father was, by all accounts, including his own, a real piece of shit.” He looked at Maxine. “You’ve told her that?”
“She knows.”
“He was very unfaithful to my mother. When I was eight and Maxine’s mother was ten”—he pointed to Maxine’s mother, who was listening from her spot next to the hot tub—“he left her for his secretary. And then, six months later, he dropped dead on a tennis court on a hot July day. He’d already divorced my mother, left her nothing. He kicked her out of the house. She didn’t have a college degree—she’d dropped out of school to marry him—and was working at the market to support us. That apartment—I don’t like to think of it. She was a very hard worker. She went back to college in her forties—you know that?”
“It’s really impressive.”
“My father always promised me I would inherit his gun collection. His new wife said no. All the guns were locked in the basement of Daddy’s house, where we no longer lived. My mother gave that woman three chances. Every time, she said no. The guns belonged to her, she claimed. Maybe when she died, I could have them. One day, Mama picked me up from school. I don’t know where Maxine’s mother was that afternoon. She picked me up from school and there was a big, fluffy towel on the passenger seat, which she told me to hold.”
“At the barn,” Maxine’s mother broke in. “I was at the barn.”
“First, we stopped at the hardware store. Mama bought a hammer and a roll of duct tape. Then we drove over to Daddy’s house. Our old house. Mama told me to wait in the car. She went right up to the front door. There were rectangular windows on both sides. Mama duct-taped the towel to one of them. Then she used the hammer to break the glass. Once she removed the towel, she stuck her hand right through the broken window and unlocked the door, calm as could be. The new wife hadn’t even changed the code on the gun safe. Couple minutes later, she came back out to the car, carrying the guns. I’ve had them ever since. They’re in the basement right now. She was always calm under pressure. Graceful. That’s how I’ll always remember her.” Buck took a long swig of beer and several family members tutted in agreement.
“She forgot to pick me up,” Maxine’s mother said from her perch.
“What?”
“From the barn. She forgot to pick me up that day. I stayed at Helen’s house until eleven that night, when she finally remembered me.”
Buck’s face darkened. “That’s not the point.”
“It was the point to me.”
Tension rushed over the family, a wire pulled tight.
I excused myself and went inside to fish another beer from the cooler. I knew Maxine’s mother had a right to assert her version of the story. Still, I found myself siding with Buck. I was grateful to have witnessed his awe, and the way he seemed to believe it would keep him safe.
The thing was, I thought about leaving Maxine all the time. No, that’s not true. I couldn’t imagine the act of leaving. I saw us together, I saw us apart. What it took to get there—a black box. We had so much furniture! How could I leave? Where would I go? Some people make homes in other people. It makes leaving very difficult.
Afterwards, I thought of Maxine in Vermont, feeding a stove. Her practicality. The rigor she applied to daily life. My shock: in the end, her imagination eclipsed mine.
I bought ice packs. I made a list of Gloria’s favorite comfort foods. I called Anya and assured her everything would be alright. The snow stopped, then started again.
In those first weeks after Maxine left, our friends wanted to hold vigil with me. I swatted them away like flies and spent most of my time walking the dog. Trudging through the leafless forest, I realized: I’d expected Maxine and I to slowly unbraid ourselves from each other. I had witnessed that kind of divorce—it was rare, but it did happen. It seemed to involve a steady drip of pain, stares across a sturdy kitchen table, lots of heads in hands and chamomile tea. The couple dissolves. Two people emerge. A decade later, they embrace at a party and smile, sensibly, at everything that has passed between them. The other partygoers, witnesses now, think to themselves, those two—what a testament to the power of time, then take another hors d’ouevre.
That kind of divorce seemed to involve a steady drip of pain, stares across a sturdy kitchen table, lots of heads in hands and chamomile tea.
I wanted that kind of divorce. I didn’t get what I wanted, which is not the same as getting nothing, but it felt the same for a very long time. I stayed in Tennessee for another two years. I did not replace any of the belongings Maxine asked me to ship to Vermont. I learned to live without a blender. Friends came over and I had no wine glasses. A framed photograph of a Texan mesa hung above our bed and one night, it came crashing down on me, dragging the nail out of the wall with it. I never re-hung it—no hammer. Anyway, I left the photograph behind when I moved back to the city. To my friends in Tennessee, I described my move as temporary, even though I knew it wouldn’t be. I was never good with short stints. You meet people, you delight in encountering certain dogs on your walk to work, you learn which hardware store is better, which market sells fresh ramps every spring. You accumulate knowledge and then you’re supposed to throw it all away? I could never bring myself to do that. I’ve loved so many people who dreamed of escape (Maxine and Gloria being only two). When they asked, in their different ways, Don’t you want to run away? I answered truthfully: No.
The day before Gloria’s surgery, the woman with the green ring around her neck was in the locker room again.
“We’re on the same schedule,” I said.
“Must be.” She turned the sauna dial. “It’s so peaceful in here. I like to linger. I don’t know why it’s so peaceful.”
I too had not understood the peace for a long time. Then it dawned on me that the rules of the YMCA excised entire populations from the locker room. There were, of course, no men, but there were also no children and no young mothers. There was a separate locker room for kids, so ours was mostly the domain of women who hadn’t yet had children or who were past their childrearing years. There was the occasional off-duty mother, sneaking away, but it was infrequent. That locker room was full of women looking at their older and younger selves, and the effect of that was peaceful. I didn’t tell the young woman any of this. I closed my locker and left it for her as a thing to discover.
Sometimes, the end does not correspond to what came before it. Maxine loved me, wholly and devotedly, so I trusted she would leave me in the same way. Eventually I made new friends who’d never met her. I was careful not to tell these people how she’d left; it did not reflect who she was. She was not cowardly. She was not rash. She did not take pleasure in my pain. Yes, Maxine left me without warning on a cold, dark night that began a cold, dark stretch of my life. But she only did it once. She spent one day leaving me and thousands loving me. I did the simple math and knew which outweighed the other. I went on living.
Other times, there really is symmetry. After six years together, I left Gloria. Symmetry, but no balancing of the cosmic scales. I didn’t track down Maxine and tell her I finally understood what she’d done to me because I still didn’t understand. I moved across town, to a bigger, more sterile apartment and filled it with new furniture and small appliances, all wrapped up in their little cords. Anya was still my daughter. There was a period when I worried Gloria would try to say otherwise, but she never did. We split our time with her fifty-fifty. Now, when she came home from college, Anya could take the bus across town, but for years, we met on the second Sunday of every month, at 12pm sharp, in Lankletter Park, the midpoint between Gloria’s apartment and mine. I had a car and Gloria did not—she’d always refused to get one, saying her family had never needed one growing up, implying, I felt, that mine was wasteful for having one. I would have been happy to drop Anya off, but, no, Gloria said, that wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. Eventually, I came come to resent it. Maybe it was about fairness, but I think she also wanted to keep me out her life. On the morning of her surgery, I hadn’t been inside that apartment for twelve years.
When I arrived at the hospital, Gloria was sitting in a wheelchair out front, dressed in plaid pajamas, a nurse watching over her. She had a bandage at the base of her throat. She nodded hello to me. I got out and watched as the nurse eased her out of the wheelchair and into the passenger seat. Then I reached across her, clicked the seatbelt into place, and closed the door. The nurse handed me a plastic bag. Inside, she explained, were Gloria’s drain care materials. She had two drains, one connected through a port under each armpit. We were supposed to empty them twice a day, measure and record the amount of fluid in the log they provided, and call the doctor if the amount dropped below 30 milliliters or the plastic tubing between Gloria’s armpits and the plastic bulb became irreparable clogged. If there was just a small clog, the nurse said, I would be able to fix it by applying lotion to my index and middle fingers, using one hand to hold the tubing, and the two fingers to work out the clot. Did I understand? Yes, I said, I understood. Then the nurse looked at me gravely and said, “She’ll be fine if she chooses to be.”
What was that supposed to mean?
The sky was approaching sunset by the time we finally got to East Third Street, after a stop at the pharmacy and the grocery store. I put the hazard lights on and went around to open the passenger-side door for Gloria. She grabbed my arm and forced herself to her feet. In the backseat were the paper sacks of groceries. There was no way she would be able to carry them inside.
“The groceries,” I said.
“I’ll see if Mr. Harris can bring them up for me.”
“Don’t bother Mr. Harris. I’ll just do it.”
“The car.”
“It’ll take five minutes.”
“They ticket more than they used to.”
“It’s fine.”
“They’re ninety bucks now.”
“I’ll roll the dice.”
She stood there for a moment, in the center of the salted sidewalk, formidable not despite her bandage and pajamas but because of them—she’d always been this way, whatever state she inhabited was the strongest state.
“Don’t bother Mr. Harris,” I repeated. “I can do it.”
I expected the apartment to be unchanged, but it wasn’t. Gone was the pleasant clutter. Gone was the Tiffany lamp on the small foyer table. Being inside seemed to weaken Gloria’s defenses.
“I’m going to lay down for a second,” she said, leaving me in the kitchen.
I unpacked the bags, put a bunch of bananas on the counter, a jar of peanut butter in the pantry, the icepacks in the freezer. I took the various orange bottles from the pharmacy bag and lined them up on the counter. There was a pad of paper and pencil near the phone and I grabbed them, copied down the names on each of the plastic bottles, and put the paper in my pocket.
The radiator clanged. The winter Anya was born, it clanged all January and February, like a body possessed. Then, the kitchen was wallpapered in a daisy print. The steam from the radiators molded the wallpaper, and I eventually removed it with a vinegar solution and razor, slicing the paper into strips and removing it like bark from a tree. Gloria painted the walls mauve. Now, they were soft yellow.
I toasted and buttered a piece of bread and brought it to Gloria, who was laying on top of the comforter, with the television on. She had a television! In the bedroom! This was shocking. It disturbed and depressed me. When we were together, Gloria never watched television. It would have been unthinkable. She didn’t brag about it, she just had so many other, more important things to do. This television was a violation. I thought of her as someone who lived outside culture, a quality that frustrated and enchanted me when we were together. Surely, Gloria didn’t watch the local news? She didn’t tune in to sitcoms? Had she and Anya been watching television in bed together, all these years? Wouldn’t I have known that?
“How are you feeling?” I asked, from the bedroom threshold.
“Bad, Joanna. I feel bad. Come in, it’s fine.”
I sat on the bed and handed her the toast.
She had the same headboard as when we’d lived here together. It was heavy walnut with laurel engraved in it, a twenty-first birthday gift from her mother. The bed was king-sized, too big for the tiny room. I’d always resented it, how there was nowhere else in the bedroom to go, how you had to shuffle around it, how it was the command center from which all business got done.
Gloria took a small bite of the toast, then set the plate on her bedside table. “I’m tired, and I think I need to sleep. You can go. I’ll be fine.”
“We have to empty your drains first.”
“Mira will be here in an hour. She just couldn’t get the day off work.”
“We should do it before I leave. Not worth risking infection.”
“She’ll be here.”
“What if she’s late?”
“I can do it myself.”
“You can’t raise your arms above your waist. Up,” I said. I said it how I used to say it to Anya when she was parked in front of the television and refused to brush her teeth.
In the bathroom, I set the fluid measuring cup on the sink’s ledge and the recording journal on the toilet seat.
“Should I stand in the shower?” Gloria asked. “In case it gushes?”
Nothing in the instructions mentioned gushing, but it was a small miracle she was letting me do this, so I said, “After you.”
She climbed into the tub and I climbed in after her. My socked foot skidded on the porcelain.
I unbuttoned her shirt, then eased each sleeve off her shoulders. She didn’t wince. There were two drains, one hanging on each side of her waist like little grenades. Under each of her armpits was a port where the tubing exited, terminating in the plastic bulbs. The tubing was taped to her sides. It all seemed very low-tech. Each bulb was about half full of a yellow and red liquid. It looked like all bodily fluids—snot, urine, blood—combined into one. I bent over and disconnected the left bulb, squeezed the liquid into the measuring cup, wrote down the amount on the log. The right bulb was clogged. A small clot of blood was stuck halfway down the tube, so the liquid was backed up.
“One second,” I said. I stepped out of the tub and retrieved a bottle of lotion from beneath the sink. Just like the nurse had told me, I used my index and ring fingers to work at the tube, easing the blockage down into the bulb. I was surprised when it finally worked. “It’s all good,” I heard myself say, as if I was some blissed out hippie.
Gloria laughed, in a not unkind way.
I helped her put her shirt back on and she climbed back into bed, closing her eyes in exhaustion. I pulled the comforter over her body and ran my hands over her legs, could feel her shinbones beneath the down feathers. She opened her eyes and looked up at me.
“I always thought you would die before me,” she said.
“I did too.”
“Most people probably thought that. Your family. Prone to early death. I found comfort in it after you left me, you know. I’d been afraid of finding you dead, and then I didn’t have to worry about it anymore.
“You should really try to eat the toast.” I picked up the plate.
She took it and set it back down. Behind us, the TV played the local news.
“I can’t believe you have a television in here,” I said.
“I’ve always liked falling asleep to the television.”
“Not when we were together.”
“I put it away before you came over for the first time to impress you.” She pointed to the closet. “It was in there, the whole time.”
I couldn’t believe it. “Why didn’t you just say you wanted to watch television?”
“I thought I could be a person who didn’t watch television with you. I was, I guess. I succeeded.”
“All that time, you were hiding it away?”
“Six years. Not so much time.” She straightened her back against the headboard. “I’m really getting tired, Joanna. You can leave.”
“You’re sure you have everything you need?”
“I’ll be fine.” She made a motion with her hand like she was shooing away a cat. “What are you going to do now?”
I had the whole evening ahead of me again. “Probably go for a swim.”
“Sounds nice. I should swim.” She closed her eyes.
I waited for her to fall asleep, then slipped out of the room, through the kitchen, and down the stairs. The sun was still out, and the snow had started back up. There was a ticket on my windshield. On the corner was a church with a stained glass window that hit the sky like a gong. When I stepped onto the sidewalk, I thought of Florence stepping into that cobwebbed basement, how she turned the dial on the safe’s combination lock, if she laughed at the absurdity of stealing from her own house. Did it feel like trespassing? Were the guns heavy? And when she flung the car door open, as I was doing now, did she get a robber’s rush, the drunken mix of shame and righteousness? I’d been wrong, and I was grateful for it. Be patient long enough, and everyone comes back.
The publishing industry can feel like an opaque, black box to aspiring authors, with countless gatekeepers—agents, editors, publicists, book buyers and more—shaping the process behind the scenes. Even established authors can find the sector confusing as they attempt to read the tea leaves behind changing advance sizes, varying levels of publicity support and shifting print run amounts.
Fortunately, there are now dozens of newsletters that aim to demystify the publishing business. I’ve been fortunate enough to have found many of them through my book recommendation newsletter, What To Read If, and now love seeing their names pop up in my email. (Given the state of my inbox, this is the ultimate compliment.)
From publishers and publicists to authors and reviewers, the eight newsletters below provide valuable insights and analysis to anyone looking to get smarter about—or to survive in—the publishing world.
I first found Counter Craft when Lincoln Michel, author of The Body Scout, when he debunked viral claims that most books “only sell a dozen copies.” In the post, he broke down the surprisingly complex process of how book sales are tallied, delivering the explanation in a way that’s both accessible and funny. This newsletter is a combination of commentary on books, craft and the publishing sector. Think of it as a cross between an MFA and a publishing course. Paid subscribers ($40/annually or $5/monthly) receive exclusive posts and can join in the comments sections.
Jason Sanford, author of Plague Birds and dozens of science fiction & fantasy stories, covers the genre in this newsletter. He provides monthly news and analysis of awards’ drama, ongoing issues at the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association and broader publishing trends. Sanford also offers occasional stand-alone deep dive issues, such as a recent newsletter about allegations that a Nebula-Award winner had improperly submitted a story written by a white writer to a magazine for Black writers under his own byline. [Editor’s note: Sanford has since provided an update on the situation, which can be found here.] Even if you’re not a science fiction & fantasy reader or writer, you’ll still find Genre Grapevine a valuable resource.
Current or aspiring cookbook writers will want to subscribe to The Not So Secret Agent, a newsletter from Sally Ekus, who runs the culinary and lifestyle division at The Jean V. Naggar Literary Agency. She provides insights into how cookbooks get made, including tips on writing proposals, finding for an agent, and the process of getting those mouth-watering food photos for recipe guides.
Paid subscribers ($80 annually or $8 monthly) receive early access to events.
Cassie Mannes Murray describes herself as having “worked in almost every capacity” in publishing—as a lit mag editor, accountant, designer, agent, bookstagrammer, English teacher and more. Now, she channels those expertise into Pine State Publicity, a publicity agency that supports independent presses and authors. In her newsletter, she provides DIY publicity advice for authors looking to get their books in front of readers, examining what makes a companion essay shine, how to improve marketing copy, and insights into the (dreaded) author brand. Mannes Murray pushes authors to think about publicity not in terms of sales, instead her “goal for publicity is building-onwards (building a career, building a platform, building towards something larger for the author, community-building, building a bigger portfolio of work, something something something).”
Catherine Baab-Muguira offers “gothic self-help for writers and other creators” in Poe Can Save Your Life, an extension of her book with the same name. Baab-Muguira writes in a frank and entertaining way about the challenges of being a writer in today’s media environment. Her newsletter features Q+A interviews with books authors about their publishing journey. I particularly appreciate Baab-Muguira’s honesty about money, sharing posts about making an estimated $6.86/hour on her book and earning out her advance. As she notes,” I share this information because to the extent I have an author brand, it’s in sharing this kind of information, and because oh God this is SUCH an opaque business…. All this makes it hard for authors to understand their sales and earnings in context. And it makes it hard for aspiring writers to understand what they’re getting into.”
During her more than two-decade career at editorial houses, Kathleen Schmidt worked in publicity and marketing, promoting books by writers like Jodi Picoult and even celebrities like Prince. Now, she’s sharing her takes on the best ways to market books, alongside in-depth analyses of the ever-evolving publishing landscape. Recent posts delve into TikTok’s publishing program, the future of book publicity and the role of Substack in marketing a book.
Free subscribers receive one post per week, while paid subscribers ($70 annually or $6 monthly) have access to additional posts and regular “Book Therapy” AMA sessions with Schmidt.
Alyssa Morris’s Romancing the Phone, a newsletter focused on BookTok, the romance genre and where they intersect, is new but has already become a must-read for anyone interested in online reading culture. Morris, a former writer and marketing strategist at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, offers critical analyses of America’s most popular genre. She decodes why some books go viral on BookTok while others flop and investigates trends, such as the current surge in popularity of hockey and cowboy romances. Notably, Morris comes as an obsessive romance reader and brings that passion to her writing.
Paid subscribers ($50/annually or $5/monthly) receive exclusive posts linking to viral TikToks and trending books. For as long as BookTok drives titles to the top of bestseller lists, this one will be worth reading.
Ken Whyte launched Sutherland House, a Canadian nonfiction publisher, after tenures at Maclean’s, The National Post,and Saturday Night Magazine. Whyte is also the author of two nonfiction books, meaning he’s seen more angles of the book world than most, and his insights are shaped by his extensive experience across different corners of the industry. His deep dives include Taylor Swift’s foray into self-publishing and the transformation of Indigo, Canada’s leading book retailer.
Paid subscribers ($80/annually or $8/monthly) have access to the full archive, while free subscribers can read posts in the period before they go behind a paywall.
Queer characters deserve happy endings. And after everything we’ve been through—hiding our identities, hating ourselves, loving in secret, and living through stigma and fear—queer people deserve everything. We deserve the meet-cute, the toe-curling sex, and the over-the-top destination wedding. If I had my way, we would all have our student loans forgiven and become instant lottery winners when we turned thirty.
Yet, we all know that life doesn’t work that way. Happy queer couples fall out of love and break up or divorce. Queer people are human, and all humans eventually die. Not to be a complete buzzkill, but I prefer such messy realism over fantasy. For one, I learn from messy queer characters and stories. I learn from these characters’ contradictions, blind spots, and how they navigate their shadow selves as they grow and develop. Only through personal transformation can queer people survive and eventually thrive toward liberation, and this path is often long and circuitous. While pat endings serve a dual purpose, providing both hope and escapism, they frequently do not do justice to queer stories, which are often complicated by childhood trauma, stigma, marginalization, and other complexities.
In my debut novel, Something Close to Nothing, the dual protagonists, a mid-thirties professional gay couple in San Francisco, appear to have it all: a loving relationship, high-paying careers, a baby on the way via a surrogate, and a single-family house in San Francisco. Yet, Wynn and Jared’s shadow selves, their arrogance, anger, selfishness, and inability to communicate with each other lead to the downfall of their relationship. While they develop and grow throughout the story, I didn’t necessarily feel either was “ready” for a happy ending. They had too much growing up to do. I played with the book’s ending over the years and considered a few storybook and even “neutral” scenarios for them, but eventually landed on a messy one (no spoilers!). I knew the ‘truest’ ending would leave the reader with the precise lesson I sought to convey. Moreover, I considered the many queer stories that had come before me and found that almost all of them featured messy protagonists with equally or even messier endings. Here are my favorites:
I came for the gay cowboys and stayed for the crystalline prose in this classic novella. Two young, closeted Wyoming cowboys fall in love but can’t be together for obvious reasons. Proulx publicly stated that she wished she had never written the novel due to rabid fans chastising her for the tragic ending. But given the time and setting, could it have ended any other way? Harsh landscapes yield harsh outcomes. Proulx aptly demonstrates how homophobia and violence not only destroy love but also lives. What I found most heartbreaking was how Ennis’s fear of coming out may have saved his life but also made the reader question whether life was worth living without love.
The novel opens like modern-day fan fiction with four young men, recent college graduates with promising futures, living in a run-down apartment in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. Yet, the story turns very dark, zeroing in on Wilhelm’s harrowing story of childhood sexual abuse. In an interview, Yanigahara said she hoped to write a “protagonist who never gets better.” In this gripping novel, many well-intentioned, kind, and loving characters attempt to save Wilhelm from his pain. The story made me consider the friends and acquaintances who have been lost to suicide and whether there are some people we can’t help due to living with unceasing and unknowable amounts of psychic and physical pain. These ruminations and the consecutive nights I stayed up reading resulted in me coming down with pneumonia soon after finishing the 832-page novel.
The recent death of Allison has put a spotlight on her rich literary legacy. The novel, based on Allison’s fraught childhood, sheds light on child abuse and rape yet is ultimately about multi-generational poverty, addiction, and abuse. At the end of the story, the protagonist, Bone Boatwright, is physically safe yet fully aware of how her childhood and her mother’s abandonment have scarred her, jeopardizing her tenuous future. “What would I be like at fifteen, twenty, thirty? Would I be as strong as she had been, as hungry for love, as desperate, determined, and ashamed?”
In his lyrical novel, Washington’s dual protagonists, Benson and Mike, are a young gay male couple in Houston whose relationship is in a fragile state. When Mike’s father in Japan falls ill, he abruptly leaves their home in Houston to be by his side. Told in alternate voices, Washington aptly demonstrates how couples sometimes need to grow apart and evolve individually to come back together better and stronger, or not. Washington leaves the ending artfully ambiguous, yet we are left with the belief that whether Benson and Mike decide to reunite or go their separate ways, the kids will be all right.
Chee’s gut-churning debut explores childhood sexual abuse. A charismatic choir director grooms and molests a shy Korean-American boy named Fee and his choirboy friends. The years after, are mired in guilt and shame for never reporting what he observed and experienced. The novel turns dark when Fee switches roles—from the perpetrated to a perpetrator—exploring his shadow side and showing the reader that we cannot escape our pasts unless we face them head-on.
In Matthews’ coming-of-age novel, Sneha, a recent college graduate, has moved to Milwaukee to begin her first grown-up job. In her own words, she is ready “to be a slut.” Complicating this sexual awakening is her keeping her sexuality a secret from her parents, who have recently returned to their native India. Instead of swapping and sharing sapphic beds, she falls hard for Marina. While the two do not end up together, Sarah’s friends are there to hold her, showing her love can come in many forms.
In this ingeniously plotted fictional memoir, Trey is a queer Black teen from Indiana who has forsaken his trust fund to make his way in 1980s New York City. Newson takes us along Trey’s lively and naughty adventures, from bad jobs to frequent escapades to a Harlem gay bathhouse. Trey’s political awakening leads to activism at the start of the ACT UP movement. Newsom carefully threads a heartstopper of a finale, where Trey saves the life of one friend and ally at the expense of another, shedding new light on the adage of “the end justifying the means.”
When I was thirteen, I began flirting with a man who worked for my father. I also worked for my father, after school. His advertising agency was a mile from my bus stop. It was a mile further to my house, walking in the Florida heat or rain, elongated by the weight of my backpack and my day. The relative nearness yet remoteness of my destination compounded my teenage irritation at my father’s refusal to leave the office for five minutes and pick me up. So, I stopped halfway, to bother or help him. He paid me five dollars an hour to file, bring people coffee, and mostly sit around until he was ready to go home.
It was 1998. The office had computers with music and the internet on them, and graphic artists and other interesting people to talk to. In the office kitchen there was an early model Keurig machine, which I enjoyed sampling, because there were flavors, like vanilla and hazelnut and caramel. A poster of Jenny McCarthy in a bikini squirting mustard onto a hot dog hung outside the doorway.
There was also a photo of the agency’s receptionist in a stringy black bathing suit hanging in the lobby. She was nineteen and married to my dad’s business partner, Sean, who was in his late twenties and ran the sales department. Sean was tall, handsome, loud, and Italian. He and my dad had met a decade earlier when they were in the same pyramid scheme together. Sean had been in the Marines and already completed his term without seeing combat. My dad was impressed by his confidence. He could be very convincing on several levels. He was my dad’s agency’s first employee. My mother disliked him.
His wife greeted the agency’s visitors. She didn’t wear bras, and since it was the late 90s, she often wore butterfly shirts that tied in the back, and behind the neck, and swooped down low around her breasts. She and Sean divorced after a few years. I was told that she had problems.
Like Sean’s wife, John was also nineteen when I met him. I remember him being a high school dropout. He’d been hired into the phone room by Sean, who knew him on a personal level somehow.
I can’t recall how it started with John. The sequence is murky. I can tell you that my favorite outfit was a navy blue skort-and-spaghetti-strap matching set with white Spice Girls platforms, out of the box on my first day of eighth grade. I can say that I saw John making eyes at a graphic designer whose name was Melissa, the name of popular girls. Melissa was pretty, about his age. She seemed to like his attention until she saw me seeing her liking it. As far as I know, they never dated, though John dated other women in the office. He wasn’t cute. He was just persistent.
At thirteen, I had a retainer in my mouth, there to close a seven-millimeter gap between my front teeth; part of that process also involved pulling my upper canine baby teeth, which still had not fallen out on their own, and which left holes that would not fill in for another two years. I had newly pierced ears and freckles. It was the year I got my period and a padded bra. It was also the year I French kissed for the first time, while shadowing a boy at the high school, one I had requested by name after meeting him dancing in The Nutcracker.
I might have known it was flirting. It’s possible I was oblivious. It’s possible I was hyperaware.
It’s possible John saw me spinning in circles on some chair or playing with X-Acto knives on the drafting table. He might have seen me sitting outside on the plaza’s sidewalk, building a house for ants out of sticks and leaves.
I might have known it was flirting. It’s possible I was oblivious. It’s possible I was hyperaware. It’s possible I initiated or that I was unaware of initiating. I might have liked it; I might have thought I should like it. I might have liked it and then not liked it anymore or only liked it in theory, but wanted to like it, or liked it when he wasn’t around. I might not have known how to act when I didn’t like it, because I thought that I should. All of the above. I was sensitive.
I was also lonely. An only child, on days when I’d elect to walk the mile further to my house, I’d let myself in and make a box of Pasta Roni, adding extra butter and cheese. I’d watch TRL and make music videos on my dad’s Sony camcorder. Listen to Mariah Carey and Green Day and the Indigo Girls and read the liner notes in their CDs. I’d log onto AOL on the guestroom computer to see if I had emails, which I didn’t, and lurk in chat rooms, maybe briefly chat with a stranger, then chicken out or grow bored and log off.
I’d get around to my homework before my parents came home, read books on wicca or novels about teenagers, and write poetry on the computer in my room, which didn’t have internet. I’d call my friends on the main house line, unaware that the phone in my room could link to another, different line, which only rang for me.
I’d open my seventh-grade yearbook to the H page, and gaze at my hopeless crush. I’d passed him a note the year prior when we sat at the same table in science class. The note had been folded to hide a message inside: If you like me, pass this note back. He didn’t.
My friend Meaghan had a boyfriend named Louie. She was thirteen, like me, and Louie was nineteen, like John, and supposedly her mother would let Louie spend the night. Meaghan had shown us a point-and-shoot snapshot of them asleep together in her bed, and though their faces were obscured, we had all seen it, and we’d also all met Louie once at a local carnival, so we knew for a fact he was real.
It was a different time. We’d play M.A.S.H. in our notebooks in the bus circle, in the halls, between classes, at our lunch tables, then again on the bus ride home. Mansion, apartment, shack, or house: the available dwellings for when we grew up, a distant prospect. The future was mapped out in who we would marry and how many children we’d have, how many pets and what kind, and what the pets’ and children’s names would be. Maybe what we’d do for a living to support all these creatures.
We always left one field in each column for our friends to fill with absurd variables from their most perverse imaginings. You could easily end up marrying someone you found repulsive. That was part of the fun.
Possibly it started with John in a vacant wing of the office. At the time, my father’s company occupied five total units in a multipurpose plaza, which it shared with a psychic and a chiropractor. The sales and creative and operations departments of my father’s agency made up four of the connected units. The fifth was a conference room, usually empty, that was separated from the others by an outdoor walkway. Adjacent to the conference room, a mailroom housed boxes of mirror tags and other promotional materials for car dealerships. Sometimes my father would give me a list of campaign orders and ask me to pack and label them in this mailroom by myself.
The outdoor walkway was shaded by live oak trees, under which people often stood smoking. John was one of them. Everyone smoked. The gossipy bookkeeper, the sales guy who told me he’d cured his stomach cancer using only acupuncture, the lesbian graphic designer who’d let me ride in the bed of her pickup truck. The smokers would joke around with me as I crossed between the units; I was my father’s daughter, cute but ostensibly forever off-limits. I’d joke back, linger, snoop on the conversation, act like I was cool. By this time John had added little to my name. Little Sarah. Little Sarah Gerard. His New York accent, round eyes, and square, sloping teeth, kind of lopsided, smirking as he said it.
Then I’d proceed on to the mailroom, quiet and air-conditioned, where the lights were out. I would listen to the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Clueless soundtracks on my portable Sony CD player while I packed boxes for my dad. Music blasting in my ears, I weighed bundles of mirror tags according to order quantities, then boxed and addressed them to car dealerships in other states.
There was a bathroom in that separate unit. Occasionally I’d be in it, and on the other side of the door, I could hear people entering the conference room for a meeting. John would be among them, and I’d flush, aware they could hear this, and when I exited to return to the mailroom, John would follow me with his eyes. And I’d follow him with mine.
Sometimes he’d be smoking out on the main sidewalk in front of the plaza, and I would see him through the windows in the mailroom. Or I would be sitting on the planters out front, staring at the parking lot and considering just walking home the single remaining mile, when John would come out for a smoke and find me there. Sometimes he’d offer to drive me home, or I’d ask him.
That second mile, back to my empty house. John and I talked in the car, air conditioning blasting, cooling the searing seatbelts. Five minutes. The agency, his colleagues, and my father shrinking behind us. It may have been on one of these drives, in that private window, that it occurred to him, or occurred to me, or to both of us, to exchange screen names in my circular driveway before I went inside.
Sometimes, with nothing left to do, unsuccessful at coaxing my dad or anyone else to drive me home, I would cross the side street to the plaza next-door. I liked to browse the consignment shop there, trying on fur coats and shoes, and buying experimental items from the dollar rack with the cash my dad had paid me.
To get there, I’d walk the length of our plaza to the opposite end, past the men who stood smoking outside of the final unit which housed the sales pit. I’d venture over, feeling his eyes on my back as I crossed to the other parking lot.
Sometimes after leaving the consignment shop, I’d proceed to the liquor store to buy a bag of Funyuns and a can of Barq’s Cream Soda. I might see John or another of my father’s employees there, too, buying cigarettes or a snack, or a tiny bottle of something. We’d check out together and walk the length of the plaza back to the agency.
Others would be gathered around the back door of the sales pit, and our groups would merge. We’d stand outside on the sidewalk, and the men would talk like I wasn’t there. Then they’d remember I was, and change the subject; or not change it, but wink at me as if to say, Keep this between us.
The sales pit was a sausage factory. The guys who worked there were all friends, and they were all getting rich. They drove luxury cars and wore Robert Graham shirts that made them look like peacocks. The word money was a form of praise: That’s money, baby! I knew they all went to Mons Venus, the all-nude strip club that didn’t serve liquor. They’d go clubbing in Ybor on the weekends, do drugs, and have group sex. I’d heard this once about John, Sean, and his wife, at least. I vaguely recall hearing my dad tell my mom about it. It made sense.
I can’t recall a woman being in the sales room unless she was passing through to exit out the side door, visiting from another department on business, or coming in from the outside, briefly: one of the sales guys’ girlfriends, exotic birds in bright miniskirts and heels, blonde highlights and gold catching sun. No women were employed on the sales floor—this only, as I recall, happened twice, later, and both of those women had been my childhood friends. They didn’t last long.
Typically, the only women to be found in the sales pit were those posing on desktop backgrounds, or on posters alongside a framed picture of Sean smoking a cigar like Al Pacino from Scarface. I think there was a Scarface poster, too.
At some point John was fired, then rehired and promoted. He’d taken a kickback from one of his clients at a local dealership and pulled into the plaza one day in a new car. He was gone for some time, during which he opened a nightclub in St. Petersburg, then came begging Sean for his job back when the club shut down. My dad resisted and so did my uncle, who was by now also a business partner. Sean gave John his job back anyway.
It’s possible nothing began between John and me until then, when he asked for my help with market research. For some reason, this time around, John was not on the sales floor anymore but had been given a longer job title and his own office adjacent to my father’s. There was a window connecting their offices, with glass that slid to the side should you ever need to say anything through it. It never opened. My dad didn’t like John.
Is it scandalous or naïve to say that a teenage girl wields power over a man?
I remember sitting in John’s office on an ergonomic swivel chair. I’d been tasked with making calls. I had a list of names and numbers and would cold-call to ask these adult strangers prepared questions about their last car buying experience. I recorded their answers on a sheet of paper, and this information was supposedly used. Most of these calls were easy because people didn’t answer or hung up. Sometimes they wouldn’t, though, probably because I sounded like a child, and I would ask my little questions, and say thank you. Five minutes.
I’ve thought about one man for years. He must be dead now; he sounded very old then. He told me how lonely he was, or maybe I just gathered. We talked for thirty or more minutes. I recorded his answers about car-buying, but then he kept talking, asking me questions, telling me about himself, trapping me on the phone, not letting me say goodbye, not seeming to want to leave me. Unsure how to end things, I listened, and answered politely, and listened more. What was said in that half-hour has long since vanished from memory, but what’s stayed is the feeling of intensifying panic. Somehow the conversation ended. I wish I could remember how I did it, what my technique was.
John’s office was steps from the kitchen. I would make repeat trips past the Jenny McCarthy poster to the Keurig, stopping to say hi to my dad on the way back. I remember John leaving me alone in his office then coming back and working quietly across his desk, then rolling to use another surface, rifle through a file drawer, then roll back to me, close in my proximity.
A break outside together. A cigarette in the shady area behind the office, against a wooden fence, in dead leaves. No one could see us standing there while he smoked, and I watched him. I’d tried my first cigarette at twelve, I probably told him, confirming his hunch that I broke rules. My friend had stolen it from a retirement home ashtray. She’d been smoking since she was seven, sneaking from her father’s packs. I remember her having colorful stories to explain her injuries. We climbed a tree to hide ourselves from view, and she pulled a lighter from her pocket. I hated the taste of the smoke and the feeling of it in my lungs. I didn’t smoke again until later. But I enjoyed the smell coming from John’s mouth, and the motion of a cigarette rising to his lips.
Is it scandalous or naïve to say that a teenage girl wields power over a man?That I honed it to get cigarettes and later weed and alcohol, that my friends used men for the same purpose? That I used John, and that at times, I let him use me, too?
Soon I was fourteen, in high school. I had a crush on a boy on my school bus, in my same grade. He smoked and would buy his Marlboro Reds from the newsstand by our bus stop. I’d follow him there. The man who owned the newsstand had grey hair down to his shoulders and was shy. He asked me my name. His was Elliott, which made me think of Elliott Smith, my new favorite singer-songwriter. Elliott and I would talk about music and magazines. I remember thinking he was cute, and knowing he thought I was cute too. He would sell me my first pack of cigarettes. He might also be dead now. When I search his name and the newsstand, I find him telling the local news that he knew the woman who was murdered and set on fire in the plaza’s dumpster.
By fourteen, I’d felt the influence of other men, older and not, strangers and not, trusted and not, transgressing and testing and teasing. I’d made choices to seek their attention, and it worked. It blindsided, flattered, scared, confused, excited, and hurt me. I’m not remarkable.
I learned that I could use my body to gain access. I learned that my body could be accessed for gain. I hadn’t yet learned its worth, or my value. Or unlearned the story of my body holding value for the purpose of exchange. I thought only of the possible cost if I used it the wrong way: Don’t tell your dad.
Two of my friends were young mothers. One of them would discover her baby had autism and place her for adoption while we were still in ninth grade. The other, that same year, stumbled pregnant down the stairs in Building 7, and the panic of our classmates catching her before she hit the ground sent ripples through the school.
He was twenty or twenty-one and had started calling me Trouble.
John could smell it on me, on all of us. He was twenty or twenty-one and had started calling me Trouble. My friends would sometimes take the bus home with me. We’d get off at my bus stop and walk toward my house, stopping at the plaza, hoping for a ride, cigarettes, alcohol, or weed from John or another guy. John wasn’t special. He was just the only one of those guys who put his hands on me. That’s why he gets a story.
It was on one of these walks toward the office that my friend and I spotted a bright blue car painted with white flames. We stopped to watch it pass. One of us pointed at it. It turned around and passed us again, going the other direction. Then turned down the next block, ahead of us, and waited.
We approached. A man in his twenties was driving. He rolled down the window, revealing close-cut blond hair. I was wearing the navy spaghetti strap tank top that I’d once paired with the skort, but skorts weren’t cool anymore, so I was wearing it with tiny shorts and blue Velcro cutout sneakers I’d bought at Hot Topic.
We talked to him. What matters is we continued walking, unimpressed. He wasn’t unattractive. I couldn’t say what it was, a feeling. We were halfway down the next block when he called us back, but only my friend returned, while I waited.
She came back upset, and he drove away. We were across the street from the elementary school, still three or four blocks from my dad’s office, just on the other side of a gated complex and the plaza with the consignment shop and the liquor store. He had shown her his dick, she told me.
Initially, I thought this was funny. I did. I laughed. I thought she would laugh too. I’d forgotten she was upset, though she was right in front of me.
She didn’t laugh. We walked on to the office, and I wondered why she was treating this like a big deal. Guys show everyone their dicks, don’t they? Isn’t this a good thing? Or at least comical? I thought my father would think it was funny too, the way he thought how the sales guys acted was funny.
I remember us telling my dad, and me laughing, and the sinking realization that he was not laughing with me—he was instead picking up the phone.
We were escorted home. That evening, a female officer came to our house. She showed me a binder of grey photocopied mugshots in plastic sleeves, with numbers underneath them. She pointed to a page of faces and asked me if I recognized anyone on it. This one, I said.
Come fifteen, braces, glasses, and acne. My adult teeth grew in. I cut my hair short and regretted it, gained ten pounds when I quit ballet, became bulimic, lost the weight, lied to my dad when he asked me why there were vomit splatters on the tile beside the toilet. I lost my virginity to a boy whose nickname derived from attempting to spell his other nickname in pee on the sidewalk, and not having enough pee to finish the job. My mother put me on the pill. I joined the high school choir.
I turned a pair of old jeans into a purse and went from dreaming of a career in opera to one in fashion, a designer or photographer. Then a musician like Conor Oberst. I liked talking to this new guy at the office, a sensitive aging New Wave rocker who clued me into the Cocteau Twins and Catherine Wheel.
I’d ride around in my friends’ cars and the backs of pickups, take the public bus for hours north and south, sometimes hitchhike, go to punk shows, loiter at the mall movie theater, shoplift from Target, smoke Marlborough Lights I bought at the newsstand, drink Smirnoff Ice. It was a different time. I’d do whatever it took to get out, whatever that meant. I was throwing myself at experience.
I was chatting on AIM. My screen name was Sarbab because Sarbabe was taken, and I had not yet changed it to BadGnrtion, and then afterward, TheMelancholies. It must have been the weekend, early evening, the sky dark. John was on and messaged me, or I did it first, and he responded.
I asked him to pick me up. It’s not that I wanted him to, or that I wanted to hang out with him specifically; it’s that I wanted something, anything, to happen. I wanted to know what the limit was, and I was afraid of finding out. I told him to bring beer.
I say this like I’m sure how it happened, but I’m not sure. I’ve written this scene a handful of times, and it happens a different way each time. I asked him to buy me beer and realized only after he arrived that he expected us to drink it together. I had thought, stupidly, that he would just give it to me. Sometimes he brings a six-pack, sometimes a whole case. Today he brings a case. I’m sure they were brown bottles, and that they were warm.
Here’s what is certain. He pulls into my driveway. He keeps the headlights on. No. They might be turned off. I tell my parents I am going out with a friend, then John and I go to Indian Rocks Beach, the closest to my house. The beer rides by my feet, then we carry it onto the sand.
We sit on two plastic lounge chairs with wide horizontal slats, white, just beyond the lights of the condos. We look around to make sure we aren’t seen. We try to make conversation, but it’s awkward because we have nothing in common, and I’m smarter than he is, and I don’t want to be there. I didn’t know we’d go to the beach together. Or I suggested it but didn’t know it would feel like this. I imagined it feeling more exciting. I don’t like the taste of the cheap beer, which fizzes and makes me burp. I’m bored.
We drink. I feel sleepy from the alcohol, though I’ve only had one bottle. It’s too dark to see the horizon. The waves rush the shore and atomize. I’m cold. At some point we start kissing, not because we feel moved to do it, but because that was the tacit agreement once John’s car left my street.
Do I need to tell you that he unzips me? How his hand is clammy? How my body does not respond?
How, in my memory, this feeling is linked to the year I met him, when a friend of my friend’s older brother climbed into a waterbed next to us, and told me, It’s alright, it’s okay, while my friend slept? How I woke her up and she yelled at him to leave, like she knew exactly what he was doing there?
John and I didn’t become friends. We didn’t become lovers. We didn’t become equals. We didn’t start hanging out. He wasn’t my boyfriend. He wasn’t a boy I was talking to. He wasn’t my colleague. He didn’t love me. Didn’t long for me. Or think about me. Ask about me. He wasn’t an authority, or caretaker, or partner, or adult.
This memory is clear and specific. We were at a birthday party at John’s girlfriend’s house, the one they shared. People from the office were there. I remember learning about the party, and that he had a girlfriend, and wondering what she looked like. It wasn’t a feeling of jealousy, but something different, something I still can’t name, more akin to morbid curiosity.
We were at the house they rented together—I remember being impressed by this, that he lived with someone, and that they had their own house—packed into their sunny kitchen in the afternoon, most people drunk but my parents and I sober.
John was telling my parents that his girlfriend worked in the Charlotte Russe at the mall, a store where I had shopped and shoplifted. He called her the “clothes lady,” and I cringed at this ham-fisted nickname. We were standing in a conversational square with my parents.
Then John steps in closer, and my parents move away like water flowing down another celebratory groove, into another pool. John leans into me. How many times a day do you think I fuck her? he says.
Meaning his girlfriend. He wants me to look at his girlfriend and imagine him fucking her on the table where, right now, in this very moment, she is serving herself tropical punch, beautiful and blonde and grown.
Nine times a day, he tells me. I fuck her nine times a day.
What did I say to this? Nothing. I was mute at the feeling of my stomach catching fire in my parents’ presence. The flush in my cheeks. The suggestion that he might have wished for her to be me or was glad that she wasn’t me, but that he wanted me to wish I were her because she was the one who fucked him.
Soon after, he was driving me home, but he didn’t drive me home. I climbed into his car, parked facing the main road. To the left was my house. He exited the plaza’s parking lot, pulled up to the corner, and turned right.
He took me past the place where the man had shown his dick to my friend.
A few blocks further, across from the elementary school, he pressed into a shady neighborhood with green lawns and no sidewalks. I asked where we were going. He might have said we were going for a walk.
We arrived at a park. I recognized it because my summer camp used to come here to look for fiddler crabs.
The day was hot and humid. I wore a knee-length jean skirt and a button-up collared shirt, tight under my arms. I was carrying the purse I’d made out of jeans.
A boardwalk led us through mangrove thickets to a stilted gazebo looking out over an inlet. I stood at the wooden banister. The water was murky. Flying insects landed on the surface and shadows moved underneath.
I’ve written this scene a handful of times over the years. I feel like I’ve been writing it forever. I’ve written about this park in other stories without telling this part. I’ve written it as fiction. In the real story, John comes up behind me. He presses himself against me, bending me at the waist, over the water. I feel the sun on the back of my hair. I am confused, unsure if he is holding me affectionately, because his grip is rough.
He tells me to lean back into him. Press my ass into him, he says, and grind against him.
I attempt to do this without knowing why, what the purpose is, absent of the expectant signals like kissing, fondling, heavy breathing, that I think are supposed to precede sex. I notice the absence of any shape of an erection through the layers of thick fabric between us.
A couple interrupts John and me just as he’s trying to move me onto his lap. We play it off, say hello. Like it’s a normal day, and we’re a normal couple. We leave.
I want to say this next time was the last time I saw him, but it wasn’t. He continued working at my father’s company until it closed in 2008. He dated another woman who worked there, one closer to his age, who dumped him and then endured months of sustained harassment: flowers on her desk in the mornings, rumors circulating throughout the office, people asking her why she wouldn’t give John another chance. Her brother worked in the sales pit. There was no HR department. Or my dad was the HR department, and it was a different time, and there were other things happening within the company, which took precedence.
I could have but didn’t want to get John fired. I was afraid to get him fired, afraid of that responsibility, naïve to the impossibility of such an outcome, to the truth that it wouldn’t have been my fault if he were fired. He was very good at fucking himself.
Others might have thought it was my fault, though, if John had been fired. Or known. About us. It’s possible I didn’t want to tell my father that I’d been lying about whether something was going on betweenJohn and me, like he had asked me. I thought I would be in trouble. I’m still unsure what I should have said was going on. I never confessed to anything, not until just a few years ago.
John was driving me home. It was 2003. I was a senior in high school, and I was wearing a knee-length khaki skirt and a seafoam green button-up elbow-length shirt. He drove a sports car, of course. I think it was white with black leather, but in my memory, it merges with the car with flames.
I want to say that the air conditioner was blasting. But it was near the end of the school year, so it would’ve been very hot out; the air wouldn’t have gotten cold in the five minutes it took for him to arrive at my house. We must have been sweating. As I write this, yes, I can feel my shirt tight against my skin.
I was tense. I didn’t want John to drive me home—I wanted my father, but John offered, and I wanted to be alone inside my house, not stuck at the office for hours. We pulled into the circular driveway. He said something about coming inside with me, but I said no, that I had homework. He got out of the car anyway.
He followed me to the front door. It occurs to me now that my shirt was burgundy. Looking down at my keys, poised to turn the lock, the door cracking open, that’s what I see. Dark red.
He follows me in. I remind him that I have homework, but he says he’ll just come in for a minute. He shuts the door. He steps toward me, and I step away. He shoves me up against the wall in the entryway and tries to kiss me, his hand searching for the space under my skirt, but unable to find it. The fabric is too long and stiff.
I fight against him, as he insists. I shove him away from me. He says something like, Come on. I shove him to the door. This is what I want to think happened. That I was decisive. Somehow, I get him to leave. Somehow, I lock the door after him. I wish I remembered my technique. I watch him through the sheers as he turns away, despondent.
In my memory, this image merges with another. Another man in the circular driveway, a man very much like John, but not John. A boyfriend from that summer. Soon after I made John leave, this man held me down in his bed and had sex with me. I shoved him off, too, kicked him.
The next time I saw that man, he was standing in my parents’ foyer. He insulted my outfit. Asked me why I always made myself look like shit. I told him he should leave. Just like John, he walked to his car. Climbed inside. Drove away.
In 2017, I searched John’s name. I sometimes did, over the years. He was married with stepchildren. His wife owned a yoga studio in Tampa. Together, a few years earlier, they’d run some kind of telemarketing or direct sales phone scam, evidence of which has since disappeared from the internet. Finding this, I thought: Figures he wouldn’t do something honest. I thought that he didn’t age well. His eyes got buggier.I wonder if he’s having sex with his wife’s teenage daughter.Should I tell his wife what we did?She accepted my follow request.I wonder if she’s reformed since they were scam artists.
I wondered if I’d made this all up in my head. I wondered, What does consent mean?Did I invite his attention? Yes.Did I know enough to do that?
His wife is a lot older than he is.
Should I send his wife an anonymous letter?Should I take a yoga class at her studio?I bet he works at a Verizon store now.Or on a car lot.Or delivers Jimmy Johns.
I bet he hasn’t read a book in ten years. I bet he never thinks about the coworker he sexually harassed.I bet he never thinks about me.
Is he going bald?I wonder if this is still his home address.I wonder if he fucked any of my friends.
My friend’s sister worked at my father’s office for a period, in sales. I was told she did a lot of coke. I was told she had issues.
Then her sister, my friend, worked in the office too. She later told me John had forced her to give him a hand job on their lunch break.
I also thought: Here’s someone I know from the literary world on his wife’s Instagram.
He looks happy standing in front of this tree.
Why does he deserve to find love?
I search for him again in 2024. Two years ago, he was indicted in an SEC lawsuit for embezzling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a “digital media and content technology company,” as the temporary co-CEO. His name is all over the internet. He funneled a large part of the money through his own competitor company, which he’d lied about not being affiliated with.
A letter from the chairman of the board warned that John had “manipulated and lied” to the company to steal this money. His wife helped him embezzle another $250,000 through her own job at iHeartRadio.
A Change.org petition by the shareholders alleged that John’s “disingenuous conduct has apparently resulted in a halt on all trading of the Company’s stock.”
There is an entire sub-Reddit dedicated to the SEC investigation and lawsuit, and a Twitter hashtag, populated by the company’s stockholders, hosts frequent Live discussions about how to recoup lost money.
Around this time, I also find John’s Blogspot. It is named after him, with the phrase “words of the day” in the title. He hasn’t updated it since 2014. His posts were no more than a few lines, full of misspellings, with pithy or philosophical themes. “A contained thought is a seedling of tomorrows reality,” says one. “Negative or Positive, it is going to grow. Depending on the amount of water and sunlight you choose to provide to it, will only then determan what tomorrow will bring.”
Another one says, “Forgiveness is the most powerful weapon against our enemies.” There are quotation marks around this, but he doesn’t credit the line to anyone.
The third-to-last post shows John standing in front of a small single-engine airplane, smiling in black sweats. “We all have had things in our lives that we enjoyed doing and then stopped for what ever reason,” the post says. John advises you to think of one of those things you used to love doing and start doing it again.
John’s last post says only, “The only difference between tragedy and laughter is time.”
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.
