A typical conversation about Sally Rooney often includes some version of the question: Are you a Normal Peopleperson or Conversations with Friendsperson? Rooney readers tend to have a strong, if not fraught, preference. Whenever people have asked me this question, however, I’ve had a different answer. “Actually,” I say, “I’m an ‘Even if you Beat Me’ person.” My answer, Rooney’s first published essay, has stumped some ardent Rooney fans, including those familiar with the broad contours of the story it chronicles.
“Even if you Beat Me,” appeared in 2015 in The Dublin Review, two years before Rooney’s debut novel. It traces the future author’s climb from an anonymous college debater to the number one competitive debater in Europe, followed by her disillusionment with the debate circuit altogether due to its “political frivolity” and disconnect from real-world issues. It’s considered the essay that launched Rooney’s fiction career, too, after catching the attention of the Wylie Agency. And while the specifics of the debate world and the essay’s significance in the arc of Rooney’s career are interesting, what I admire most about “Even if you Beat Me,” is Rooney’s unflinching portrayal of her own hard work, competitiveness, and ambition.
Since we live in a moment where the self-conscious cultural elite both valorizes success but treats visible striving with distaste and even suspicion, owning one’s own voracious ambition is startlingly refreshing. In many of the circles I move in, peers deride institutional meritocracy even as they define themselves and their work by its standards. They hide their ambition and self-interest behind nonchalance or appeals to ethical and moral concerns. But not Rooney, at least not the Rooney in “Even if you Beat Me.” She straightforwardly admits her desires. She was a “nearly friendless teenager living away from home for the first time” when she stumbled into the debate hall and, to her delight, quickly identified the debate community as one where she could become “successful and popular.”
No more free international trips. No more “thrills from counterfactuals.” No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is.
That’s not to say the essay doesn’t grapple with what it means to desire acclaim and popularity within unfair systems. The opening scene depicts Rooney and her “privileged, English-speaking university students” riding past “dwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements” on the way to a debate competition in Chennai. She comments, “No one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it?” echoing how many of us feel when confronted by an injustice so enormous we struggle to know what to say or how to make it a little bit better. And yet another strength of Rooney’s essay is that she does land on a way to make it a little bit better: by the end of the Chennai debate, Rooney quits debating. No more free international trips. No more “thrills from counterfactuals.” No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is.
Again, this kind of action feels like a breath of fresh air during a time—or, perhaps, all times—when it’s easier to say the right things than do the right things. Reading Rooney’s first novels through the lens of “Even if you Beat Me” can also clarify the intentional tension between personal drive and ethical awareness that underpins the inert, shallow politics of many of Rooney’s characters.
In Conversations with Friends, for example, Frances identifies as a communist yet feels drawn to fame and affluence: “She was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.” Bobbi, Frances’s ex-girlfriend, faces a similar predicament. She’s critical of capitalism while desiring the social and artistic opportunities that can come from proximity to capitalism’s victors. When Melissa suggests introducing Bobbi to Veronica, her “old money” friend who “was very helpful with getting her book published,” Bobbi responds, “Wealthy people sicken me…but yeah, I’m sure she’s great.” Knowing any of these characters, it’s not a stretch to imagine each might accept Veronica’s help while privately maintaining their critique of wealth and privilege.
But by quitting debate right when she’s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions. She writes, “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.” On the one hand, this reflection, along with others like it, underscores the essay’s achievement as a rare piece of millennial writing that doesn’t downplay, ironize, or disguise raw ambition, but rather demonstrates it as a real meaning-making driver in many of our lives. On the other hand, it’s also a bit of a riddle when considered alongside Rooney’s later literary success and Marxism. Are we to believe so much success simply fell into her lap? Not necessarily. In her essay, Rooney acknowledges that she is “still working on that,” suggesting that her relationship with “prizes” is an ongoing process.
“I don’t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much,” Rooney confesses about her obsession with college debate. Another, more cynical version could go: I don’t think I will ever again show that I want something so meaningless so much. Performative modesty and what the Italians call sprezzatura (a kind of studied carelessness) are, after all, learned skills in elite social spaces that reward effort only when it appears effortless. Effortless is cool, credible.
By quitting debate right when she’s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions.
Effort is for the pitiful, for the lesser gods. With that in mind, Rooney’s own trajectory offers an example of—take your pick—genuine growth or learned restraint.
More than a decade after “Even if You Beat Me,” and its delightfully unflinching closing lines—“I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best”—a New York Times piece about Rooney bore the headline “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.” In the interview, she is portrayed in what has become her signature posture: one of ambivalence toward her effort, fame, and success.
It is impossible to determine whether this framing and adaptation to elite norms is Rooney’s own doing or the industry’s presentation of her. In contrast, recall the example of actor Jeremy Strong, who was mocked for being openly ambitious — à la “Even if You Beat Me”-style —in a 2021 New Yorker interview, “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.” Throughout the piece, the interviewer, a Yale graduate, implies that Strong’s hard work, seriousness, and ambition are uncool. Essentially, Strong is punished for violating the unspoken rule that true talent never tries too hard.
But why is this so frequently the case in elite or creative spaces? Why must achievement often appear accidental or uncontrollable? You see this same treatment of achievement in Rooney’s first three novels, where her characters’ ambition and hard work are often muted or pushed to the margins of her stories. Many of her characters suffer from what I think of as latter-seasons Rory Gilmore Syndrome: things just come too damn easily for them. This is also true of her socially mobile characters, such as Connell from Normal People, the son of a house cleaner, who ascends to Trinity College Dublin and later, a prestigious M.F.A. program in New York. Rooney’s characters attend the best schools, write celebrated essays and books, win major scholarships, and maintain flawless physiques without breaking a sweat or counting calories. With few exceptions, they possess the right shibboleth, exert the right amount of effort, and easily forge connections with the right people: journalists, literary editors, film stars, scholarship committees, and graduate school admissions officers. There’s little trial and error amongst her successful, ambitious characters. Neither is there much aggression, jealousy, rage, or other neurotic behaviors associated with highly competitive people, except when concerning les affaires de cœur.
This is not the case for Rooney in her essay. At its start, she “suffers from intense nerves” yet submits to “the continual low-level humiliation of failure.” She admits to knowing “nothing about the outside world…when the war in Afghanistan had started, or what the Patriot Act was, or where exactly the Arab Spring was happening.” In fact, Rooney makes “disastrous attempts to fake [her] way through” her early debates until she finally “just starts to read the news.” Although this is a story about debate, not art, this kind of growth smells of a traditional Künstlerroman, a story of an artist’s development. Tellingly, when no longer a novice debater, Rooney learns “to hide [her] ambition behind concern.” Concern for what? For whatever topic of debate was on the table for the day.
Rooney explains that “competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game.” I read this now like a prophecy of our broader public discourse, where winning and losing can feel like everything, and the performance of conviction and concern often acts as a substitute for real action. In high school, I remember being drawn to Jaques’s famous monologue in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players…” I wondered how many of us understood ourselves as performers. Did I understand myself as one? How did this relate to free will?
It seems to me that one’s understanding of oneself as a performer is closely tied to one’s idea of oneself as part of a narrative or within a narrative arc, and the more we adhere to a narrative about ourselves, the more we cling to performance. In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances. Or the more we live narratively, the more we assemble our lives like performances.
In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances.
It’s commonly accepted today that the Internet, and particularly social media, has intensified this performance culture by giving every person the means to narrativize their lives constantly. There’s no more waiting for the holiday card or high school reunion to make narrative sense of your life. The public jury is always there waiting to see if you are sticking to script. Here, Rooney’s reflection resonates: “Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.”
For a long time, I considered “Even If You Beat Me” a singular text within Rooney’s oeuvre. Of all her characters, Rooney, as a character in the essay, was the most legible to me as a striver surrounded by other strivers. Then Rooney released Intermezzo last fall, and once again I found the striver voice with fraternal protagonists Ivan, a chess champion, and Peter, a former successful college debater. Both brothers, like Rooney herself in her essay, hustle, and they aren’t afraid to admit it. In one conversation, the brothers discuss achievement. Peter remarks, “Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us,” and “Ivan considers this, then answers: I wanted my life to be like that. Me too, says Peter.”
“Even if you Beat Me” highlights how desire, ethics, and merit intersect, while—to use a common expression from where I’m from—showing us how the sausage gets made, a typically messy business, especially if someone is hailing from the working class or other marginalized backgrounds. It’s not until Ivan that we really see this sausage-making process again in her work. Ivan might be described as handsome, but he also wears braces, studies chess moves, and attempts a professional comeback, all while wearing his heart on his sleeve and battling the grief of losing his father. Ivan describes the “trapped knight” inside himself; it’s both an allusion to Ivan’s knights in the game of chess, making the right moves, and to the medieval knights of legend, those possessing the noble ideals that Ivan himself wants to possess: sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. Rooney in “Even If You Beat Me” also ultimately wants something more virtuous than what the debate circuit has to offer. However, it’s not so easy for strivers to kill the competitive beast inside us. Peter, who struggles with performance more than his younger brother, exemplifies this. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t need his rich friends to be poor, or even for himself to be rich, but rather, “To be right, to be once and for all proven right.”
“Even if you Beat Me,” with its messy, authentic examination of ambition, is still my favorite text by Rooney, only now Intermezzo is a close second. Success never appears effortless in Rooney’s latest novel, nor are the main characters detached observers of the world around them, like the debaters Rooney once envied—“I wanted to be aloof and cerebral like the speakers I most admired.” The setting where Ivan meets Margaret, his future love interest, is a local community arts center, is different than any other Rooney setting. It buzzes with potential. It’s there that we witness Ivan teaching a ten-year-old girl how to correct a flawed move and encouraging her to practice. It melts Margaret’s heart (and mine too), while calling to my mind a moment in “Even If You Beat Me” when Rooney admits that despite all her ambition and awards, “I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.” But that’s not the case with Ivan, as this scene shows, and it doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of us either.
Nuclear realities have been a consistent thread throughout my life. Since childhood, I’ve paused at semis hauling cement canisters full of nuclear waste down the only road in and out of the area I call home. A photograph taken not far from the hills I inhabit depicts a chamisa bush gathering wind in a Los Alamos canyon; unremarkable in appearance, human-made radionuclides infuse its molecules. While the atomic era’s seep into our daily, political, social, and environmental existence began decades ago, it remains unceasing.
Any art dealing with nuclear pasts and futures necessitates an acknowledgement of the intense politics embedded in the subject. Many recognizable comics—graphic novels’ ancestors—full of sci-fi drama were preceded by propagandistic booklets pushed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that helped establish the promethean metaphors routinely woven through tales of the nuclear age. As LM García y Griego wrote, “From the beginning, the nuclear enterprise was portrayed as a heroic undertaking.” After centuries of alchemy, nuclear physics appeared imbued with controllable magic that many believed would equal permanent peace, boundless prosperity, and near immortality. Yet villains and heroes cannot be easily delineated, and reality does not obey presumptions nor fantastical visions.
From the Manhattan Project to commercial nuclear power plant accidents, the volumes below complicate oft-repeated narratives that polish and simplify events with mythified characters and tales of scientific conquest. The books in this list tell all-too-human stories of uncertainty, trauma, responsibility, contamination, ethical conundrums, human experimentation, and so much more. They are part of a growing canon, largely headed by authors outside the U.S. whose works are often untranslated into English—or out of print like Kōno Fumiyo’s stunning manga Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms. Rooted in archives and personal experiences strung with almost tactile visuals, they reach inside us as only graphic novels can, drawing our senses alive.
Radium Girls by Cy., translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger
Originally published in French, Radium Girls follows a group of young women who meet while working as dial-painters in the nineteen-tens. It is the era of radium; the isotope infuses daily objects and myriad tonics marketed as cures for every known malady with florescence. As the friends at this novel’s center find their future dreams overshadowed by sickness, they navigate the realization that instructions to wet their brushes with their lips led them to ingest dangerous radioactive particles. As they prepare for slow deaths, they open a landmark court case that continues to influence workers’ rights. Shaded in hues of purple and green, each page thrums with a disquieting undercurrent as the girls go about their days and attend evening parties, hands glowing when they turn out the lights before bed. This book is best read slowly, savored, illustration by illustration, and accompanied by a scholarly work or two.
When a nine magnitude earthquake spurred a tsunami that tossed waves over Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant’s seawall in 2011, officials reacted in shock—haphazardly, and besought with a lack of clear communication. While workers struggled to manage a worsening nuclear disaster, families were told to leave their livelihoods and animals—many of whom responders were ordered to kill—behind, but Naoto Matsumura stayed home in Tomioka, six miles from the nuclear plant. He quickly became the determined caretaker of the exclusion zone’s surviving animals. Although his story has been repeated across mediums, Guardian of Fukushima relays his daring decision with art’s “imaginative empathy,” as the manga artist, Roland Kelks, writes. Colorful graphics weave Matsumura’s life with Japanese folktales to build a book that reaches into hearts and lingers. Kelk calls it a “story of duty,” and perhaps it is; Matsumura does as we wish to in the midst of disaster: He does what he believes is right.
With a slightly salty tone, a sigh, and the galled bemusement of an adult looking back on childhood unknowns sifted clear, Nuking Alaska weaves Anchorage’s nuclear history with personal remembrances of growing up in the Cold War’s penumbra. Each page hums with Dunlap-Shohl’s strong voice and equally unique graphics. This quick read highlights moments where the overarching nuclear establishment interrupts daily life with accidents, tests, and buried secrets—and, finally, asks how we can find courage to face the continued future of our nuclear reality. While centered on Dunlap-Shohl’s personal relationship with the nuclear history he finds at home, the graphic novel incorporates the voices of other citizens living with the absurd realities of the Nike Hercules missiles poised around Anchorage in the 1950s and ’60s, U.S. plans to detonate a nuclear bomb to hollow out a port, the Cannikin nuclear bomb test on Amchitka Island, and a secret burial of radioactive dirt.
In some respects a love letter to Marie Curie, to passion, and to the immersion of curiosity itself, Radioactive begins: “With apologies to Marie Curie, who said, ‘There is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life.'” Although focused on Curie, Redniss weaves in important moments from across nuclear history to form a mosaic of a book as passionate as the people she profiles. Marie Curie’s life breaking barriers as both a scientist and a woman shines. Included in an astonishingly long list: Curie discovered multiple isotopes, changed the field of radiochemistry, and was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize. With a mixture of poetic prose and dialogue pulled from archives, Redniss bends the idea of a graphic novel to present a delicately orchestrated work that feels like an art book, filled with stunning, often abstracted yet illustrious and colorful cyanotype prints.
Originally published in French, The Bomb follows the construction of the first atomic bombs through conjoined stories that are rarely incorporated into a single volume. The narrative opens with a personified voice of uranium that weaves between dramatic retellings of events—with a plethora of exclamation points in the dialogue. From General Groves’ appointment to the Manhattan Project, through tensions between military secrecy and scientific openness, covert operations to sabotage the Nazi nuclear program, and secret plutonium experiments on unaware hospital patients, a tremendous amount of care and attention to detail went into this book’s writing and scenography. Nearly every character, scene, and much of the dialogue draw from archives with one narratively important exception: a family in Hiroshima whose experiences, while fictionalized, also reach into historical accounts. Detailed illustrations that expand outside of a comic book’s traditional rectangles fill every page and make it hard to look away.
Ichi-F depicts post-disaster nuclear decommissioning from the eyes of a man on the ground. After a tsunami struck the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in 2011, after irradiated towns were evacuated, after the plant’s workers managed to mitigate partial meltdowns and overheating nuclear waste, after the shortest lived radionuclides decayed, attention turned towards clean-up. Decommissioning is an immense undertaking. In Fukushima, it requires decades and thousands of workers hired through a complex arrangement of contractors and sub-contractors that Tatsuka deftly learns to navigate. Beginning in 2012, he returned to work in Fukushima again and again, writing and drawing Ichi-F along the way, cautious to ensure that he would not be refused further employment on the site. This book is rooted in his personal account, full of interesting people and details—including daily processes for working in irradiated zones. Both a guide to his experiences and Fukushima’s landscape, it is a unique, dynamically drawn memoir bursting with personality.
Wrapped in cerulean blue, soft yellow, army green, black, and white, the effects of corrupt government mechanisms and a climate that values speed and appearances over safety rise from vibrant illustrations. The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster may have occurred in 1986, but this jaw-dropping graphic novel reminds us it will continue to affect individuals and ecosystems for generations to come. Originally published in Czech, the novel is replete with detail—from the complicated organization of the Soviet nuclear complex to the general components of an RBMK reactor. Matyás Namai pulls from witness testimonies, oral histories, and archival records to build a winding collage of voices. Packed with history that begins with the nuclear power plant’s construction and ends in 2016, this slim book manages to move through decades by highlighting moments in the individual lives of plant workers, farmers, villagers, liquidators, soldiers, and more. Each textural illustration is imbued with captivating visual depth and movement.
An important addition to the realms of both nuclear history books and graphic novels, Doom Towns rises from a quest to recount everyday experiences in the early atomic age. It is constructed with an eye for anecdotes bound to haunt. Wrapped in intensive, deep research, and full of graphics drawn directly from primary source documents, Kirk and Purcell illustrate oral narratives of atmospheric nuclear testing in Nevada between 1945 and 1963, gathered in the years prior to this book’s publication. Each chapter looks through the eyes of ordinary people who—knowingly and unknowingly—are caught in the fervor of the early atomic years’ and the literal and figurative fallout that continues to affect the environ. Ranchers, soldiers, journalists, and more speak from the pages. This book is a graphic history to its core: a deliberately constructed site for expanded tellings of deeply researched moments, portrayed through a close relationship between artistry and scholarship.
This gorgeous volume opens with a chorus of voices as Emmanuel reads aloud in a train carriage on the way to a village near Chernobyl’s 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone in 2008. The journey was long in the making: Activist friends of his began arranging a small artist residency at the Exclusion Zone’s edge in Ukraine years prior. Emmanuel joins them despite deep unease. Laden with food, art supplies, and plans to meet as many people as they can, the group of artists spend a spring in Volodarka. Splashes of color explode black and white graphics as Emmanuel walks through a post-Chernobyl landscape of abandoned towns and shrinking villages, confronts his own expectations, and wrestles with the difficulties of finding a way to picturize the centuries’ long effects of radiation often invisible to the naked eye. At its heart, Springtime in Chernobyl is an ars poetica of navigating and depicting a disaster-struck environment.
A diligent tracing of Oppenheimer and Szilard’s engagement in the construction of the first atomic bomb and the moral quandaries faced by scientists at the beginning of the nuclear age, Fallout is a solid work with a certainty of focus and depth of characterization, timescales, and drawings. It is full of moments that jump off the page. The dialogue drives at a surprisingly smooth pace. The authors dig into the origins of the Szilard-Einstein letter that spurred the creation of the Manhattan Project, the divides between scientists who believed the bomb should not be dropped in war and those not averse to a deadly show of force, and the progression of Oppenheimer’s security hearing—where they deftly highlight both Oppenheimer and the ruling committee. As much a story of historical events as a window into the early atomic era’s politics, Fallout is a topically-hefty book that reads like a thriller and a drama mashed together. Oh, and Ottaviani has a nuclear physics degree.
Serious clowns have their faces painted onto blown-out goose eggs. My son tells me this on the drive from Corpus Christi to Houston. The custom began in the sixteenth century, a method of remembering makeup patterns, but now it serves as copyright. The eggs are done up with acrylic paint and accented with felt and glitter, with tiny flowers and ribbon and clay, and the records are preserved in the Department of Clown Registry in Buchanan, Virginia. He says a clown’s makeup is called his slap, and whiteface clowns rank highest in the hierarchy. Then the augustes, with their red cheeks and ivory mouths. Then character clowns, then hobos. The first known clown appeared in a pharaoh’s court during Egypt’s Fifth Dynasty—he was a pygmy. Clowns in Russia carry the same clout as pianists, as ballerinas.
It’s a tepid Friday in March, and we’re going to a clown convention at a Marriott by Hobby Airport. On Sunday he’ll compete in a contest hosted by Clowns of America International. Asher is thirteen. He’s a hobo.
“Fear of clowns is called coulrophobia,” he says. He’s paging through one of his clown books in the glow of my truck’s interior light. Outside, the dusk is particulate. We cross the Brazos River, rust tinted with sediment. A megachurch’s illuminated cross, as tall as the mast of a great ship, rolls over the horizon. My son says, “The fear stems from how the heavy makeup conceals and exaggerates the wearer’s face. Also, the bulbous nose.”
“Do ballerinas carry a lot of clout in Russia?” I ask.
“It’s like being a football player in Texas. Like being one of the Cowboys.”
“Hot damn,” I say because it sometimes gets a laugh. Not tonight. He’s too wound up; he’s been x-ing out days on his calendar for two months. “Are we talking Landry years or Johnson years?”
“Landry. No question.”
That Asher knows his Dallas Cowboys history always calms me. I’m suddenly more comfortable in the truck’s cab. My wedding band catches the light of the low moon, reminding me of thrown copper. I say, “A lot of wide receivers study ballet. It helps with spatial awareness.”
“Besides Santa Claus,” Asher says, “Ronald McDonald is the most recognized figure in the world.”
At the hotel, two giant plywood clown faces command the lobby. From chin to crown, they’re eight feet tall. Asher stands in front of them while I check in—he’s so enthralled that I half expect him to kneel—and only moves when a long-haired woman asks him to snap pictures of her posing between the clowns. The desk clerk hands me breakfast coupons and keycards, Asher’s welcome packet and lanyard. Our room’s on the sixth floor. As we ascend in a glass elevator, Asher tells me the long-haired woman has been here a week and she estimates there are over a hundred clowns at the hotel. “Tough luck for coulrophobics,” I say, and he smiles like I’ve passed an exam. It fills my every cell with breath. My mystifying son—the boy can send a tight, arcing spiral forty yards, but he’d rather hole up in his room with Red Skelton videos. After showering, he emerges from the bathroom wearing a shirt that reads Can’t Sleep, Clowns Will Eat Me and orders room service. Throughout the night, the hotel trembles when the nearby planes take off. I wake up often, confused as to how we got where we are.
I work in oil and gas. I’m a geological technician, which means I spend my days pulling well information. I study maps generated by geologists and run numbers to track which wells are still producing and which need to be plugged and abandoned. I like knowing what’s burning beneath our feet, the black oil and farther down, the clean effervescing gas. The knowledge makes me feel simultaneously large and small, and in that I find comfort. After I blew out my knee during a college scrimmage, I switched my major from communications to geology. I wanted, I think, to encase myself in rock, in hard things that last.
Geo techs don’t make a lot of money; we leave that to engineers and landmen. This trip to Houston is a stretch, and although I could’ve saved half a month’s pay by booking a room in the motor court across the freeway, I didn’t want to skimp on what Asher’s taken to calling the most important weekend of his “career.” I want him to feel fussed over. I want him to know I’m on his team. As the convention approached, I imagined moments we might share: father and son splitting their first can of Lone Star, talking about the birds and bees, or maybe passing the pigskin, analyzing the pitiful seasons the Cowboys have been suffering, the injuries and heartbreaks that now define a once-great team. (Before we left Corpus, I aired up our old football and dropped it into the truck bed, just in case.) I also thought it might be a chance for us to finally talk about his mother. Jill’s been gone two years. She was forty, and the first time she visited the doctor, the tumors lit her X-rays like a distant constellation. Three months later, the images were blurred with metastases. “Like a snowstorm,” Jill said, sounding oddly pleased. She didn’t make it to Thanksgiving. Asher and I avoided turkey that year and ordered pizza, then we went to a movie full of explosions and rooftop chases. “We’ll make new traditions,” I said. That Christmas he asked for his first makeup kit and a foam nose.
On Saturday morning, at the breakfast buffet, I realize my son will likely get thumped in his contest. He’s just outmatched. Even with their painted faces, these clowns look severe and cagey. Purposeful, I think. Ornery. There are probably thirty of them in the restaurant, and another fifty mingling in the atrium. Their costumes are elaborate and expensive—billowy and silken and intensely colored. Pigment assaults me. They wear patent leather shoes as big as rural mailboxes. Two of them walk on stilts and can rest their elbows atop the plywood clown heads in the lobby. Some are bald. Others are neon geysers of hair—red and orange and purple, Afroed and spiky and twisted into formidable braids. One clown wears goggles and flippers and a small inflated pool around her waist. They’re all adults, I’d guess mostly in their sixties, and they’ve come from as far away as Quebec and Maine. Seriousness radiates from them like heat from asphalt. They have swagger and business cards.
I’m embarrassingly relieved Asher didn’t come to breakfast. He’s awake but wanted to rehearse his routine alone in the room. His event is Paradeability. He’ll be judged on the originality of his act and how many times he can complete it while moving through a gauntlet of would-be parade spectators. We’ve practiced in our backyard with a stopwatch. We record the sessions with a video camera propped on our propane grill, then Asher studies the footage and makes adjustments. As I eat my omelet, I catch myself hoping they give out ribbons for participation, something he can at least hang on his wall.
A clown in the hotel atrium starts squeezing a bicycle horn while another skips in circles, tossing confetti. His limberness surprises me. In a high falsetto, they sing, “We’re having a hoot, an absolute hoot!” It’s easy to imagine Jill here, trailing Asher, snapping candid pictures of him with the clowns. At home, framed photos of him hang on almost every wall—Asher selling raffle tickets, Asher feeding a brown pelican on Padre Island, Asher sleeping. Photography wasn’t her hobby—watching Asher was. She was rarely in front of the camera, something I realized too late. Her absence blitzes me everywhere. The way the sheet and pillows on her side of the bed stay undisturbed, regardless of how I toss in my sleep, is menacing. The junk mail that still comes addressed to her leaves me as cored out as a cantaloupe. Lately, on Sunday mornings, I’ve been hitting open houses in different neighborhoods in Corpus, trying to wrap my head around moving. I tell Asher I’m going to church. Maybe he believes me.
“Here’s someone who knows eggs-actly what he likes for breakfast,” a woman says. She’s beside my booth, but a beat passes before I realize she’s talking to me. She’s in a pinstripe suit, wielding a clipboard and walkie-talkie.
“Do what?” I say.
“Professor Sparkles got me with that one earlier this morning, but when I say it, people just seem baffled,” she says. She extends her hand. “I’m Dayna. With a y.”
“I’m—”
“Asher’s daddy,” she says.
I shake her hand, puzzled, wondering what kind of information is on that clipboard. Then I remember her: the woman from last night, the one Asher visited with while I registered. Her hair is up this morning, and she looks like a pretty librarian, drab amongst all the color. I say, “Are you a clown parent, too?”
“I wish,” she says. “Mine’s a cheerleader. She’d walk five miles to avoid a clown.”
“I suspect that may be an epidemic among cheerleaders.”
“Asher’s a cutie. What kind of clown is he?”
“Hobo,” I say.
“I would’ve guessed auguste.”
“He likes thrift stores,” I say.
“An original, I love it. Come to enough of these and you see the same getups every year.”
“This is our first. I’m afraid we’re out of our league.”
“Horsefeathers,” Dayna says. “You’re eggs-actly where you’re supposed to be.”
I smile and take a sip of cold coffee. “Professor Sparkles would give you high marks for that one.”
“Let’s hope not. Last time a clown left marks on me, my husband almost put both of us through a window.”
Behind Dayna two clowns are covering a conference room door with pink balloons. Because I can’t think of how to respond, I say, “That’s not so good.”
“Fourth floor, the Hilton in Nashville. Three years ago.”
“I didn’t know clowns were so prone to scandal.”
“Neither did I,” she says. “Isn’t it fun?”
His name is Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He keeps a notebook with ideas for costumes and gags, and on the cover, in pillowy letters, he’s written, Pretty Much the Only Property of Po’ Boy the Hoboy. He subscribes to a quarterly called Clown Alley. He’s saving for a unicycle. Every couple of weeks we make thrift store rounds, hoping to scare up plaid trousers and polka-dot bow ties. Once, he found a dented bowler hat at the Salvation Army and cradled it like a wounded animal the whole drive home. He spends hours in the bathroom applying and reapplying his slap. I’m positive he’s never kissed a girl.
Not that he’d make a bad catch. He has his mother’s eyes and dark hair. A good jaw and nice posture, sturdy shoulders. Before he cottoned to clowning, I had him pegged as a quarterback, maybe scholarship material. He used to love watching the Cowboys and casting for redfish in Baffin Bay. His grades are good, but not so good that he eats lunch alone; any chance he gets, he incorporates clowns into school projects. He has friends, kids who call too late at night, who invite him to the beach. Last year he flirted with cigarettes for a month; his clothes smelled of sour smoke when I did the wash, but just when I gathered the nerve to confront him, the odor evaporated. Occasionally he’ll get detention for cutting up or skipping algebra, and I admit those infractions probably leave me feeling the way other parents do when their kids make honor roll. I’ll manufacture some annoyed concern and tell him to mow the yard as punishment, but really it’s in those moments when I feel most like a father, when my blood duty is clearly defined, when I halfway believe I can do right by my inscrutable son.
After breakfast, I find him in front of the mirror in our room, adjusting his red foam nose. He’s painted on a charcoal beard, and his cheeks and eyes are chalky. His eyebrows are thick rectangles. He wears his bowler and baggy pants, a necktie as wide as a flounder and two-tone bowling shoes. I suspect the shoes are stolen. They appeared two weeks ago, after he went to a bowling birthday party.
“Looking mighty fine,” I say. I’ve brought up pastries and chocolate milk that I show him in the mirror.
“I had my bow tie on, but I looked butler-ish.”
“Good call,” I say. “It’s a sea of bow ties down there. Originality matters.”
Asher studies his reflection. He’s remote again, the giddiness from last night buried under his slap. I wouldn’t mind starting to chip away at his hopes for tomorrow’s contest, but I can’t figure out how, so I just sit on my bed and watch him. He fiddles with his tie, loosening and tightening, then moves toward the pastries. He shakes the milk carton and debates between a muffin and Danish. His mother used to do this. She never knew what she’d order until the last moment, and then it was even odds whether she’d flag the waiter and reverse her decision. He opts for the Danish.
“I didn’t see any other hobos this morning,” I say, though I’m not sure that’s true.
He chews, takes a swig of milk. In the too-big clothes, he appears younger than he is. He says, “The hardcore clowns will come tomorrow for the contests. Today’s novice-y. There’s a talk on balloon sculpting. Workshops on improv and face-painting.”
“Hot damn,” I say. “Should I bring the video camera?”
“I think you’d need a conference badge.”
“I bet there’s an auguste who’d look the other way for a few jars of face cream.”
Asher puts his Danish on the dresser. He slips into his blazer. There are mismatched patches sewn randomly on the coat; I stitched them using a needle and thread from Jill’s nightstand. He says, “I just don’t want you to be bored.”
I’m about to say that whatever we do will be fine, I only want to spend the day by his side, but then I realize he’s brushing me off. My mouth goes thick. I’m awash in a blunted, disconnected feeling, like I’m nothing more than a family friend watching someone else’s kid for the weekend. I resist an urge to ask where he got his bowling shoes.
I’m about to say that whatever we do will be fine, I only want to spend the day by his side, but then I realize he’s brushing me off.
“Sure thing,” I say. “I need to review some maps anyway, run some petroleum numbers.”
He pulls a pair of fingerless gloves from his pocket and tugs them on. He says, “Are you going to church tomorrow?”
Maybe there’s an edge of suspicion in his tone, maybe not. Either way, my guard goes up. At last week’s open house, the realtor glanced at my wedding ring and suggested arranging a time to show my wife the property. I gave her a false name and the phone number for La Cocina, a Mexican place where Asher and I used to get takeout. Now I say, “I’d planned on skipping. I feel a bout of heresy coming on.”
He steps back from the mirror, assessing his costume. My heart goes panicky. I’m afraid he’s about to call me out on church or ban me from watching him compete tomorrow, but instead he says, “Then we should practice in the morning.”
“I was thinking,” I say, “if you’d rather just watch tomorrow, maybe get ideas for next year, I’d be game. We can make this an annual trip.”
“It’s in Chicago next year.”
“One of America’s finest cities,” I say, though I’ve never been. “We’ll make a vacation of it.”
“Sweet,” he says. “If I win tomorrow, next year’s fees are waived. They want you to defend your title.”
“The most important thing is to enjoy yourself,” I say.
He crosses back to the dresser, takes another drink of milk. I think he’s about to reach for his Danish again, but he goes for the muffin. He tears off a piece with his fingers and places it in his mouth like a dip of snuff. He chews slowly, careful not to disturb his makeup.
Before Asher goes downstairs, I take pictures of him on our balcony. He acts put upon, but he enjoys posing. We make plans to eat dinner together—it’s clear he agrees to this out of pity, but I’m elated nonetheless—and then he’s gone. In his wake, the room is littered with makeup sponges and a silence so complete I have to turn on the television. I surf the channels, flipping past adult pay-per-view, public access preachers, and movies with actors I don’t recognize. I exhaust the stations a second time, then a third. I try to review the maps for the new prospect my office is vying for, an oil play down near Laredo, but my thoughts keep veering. I worry that losing the contest will undo Asher. I worry that for all the ways I know I’m letting him down—my inability to buy the toothpaste and fabric softener he likes, the grief I occasionally allow him to glimpse, my lies about church, our eating too much takeout—there are still deeper, more insidious failures that will only rise to the surface after doing irreparable damage. It’s disorienting, such melancholy. I can’t remember a day when I haven’t thought that, with his mother gone, I’ve forgotten how to be a father. Not a day when I haven’t thought, I used to be good at this. I leave a note—addressed to Po’ Boy rather than Asher—saying I’ll be in the hotel bar.
The bar is closed, though, and the lobby is mostly deserted. A family is checking out while a housekeeper, a woman with multiple earrings, polishes the granite planters by the elevator. Behind closed conference room doors, I hear the murmur of people speaking into podium microphones. “Obviously,” a man says, “miming wouldn’t work there. You have to use your noodle.” The plywood clown faces have been commandeered as message centers. There are pamphlets for a San Antonio clown camp tacked to a cheek, a sign-up sheet for ride-share on a nose, and pieces of personal correspondence all over—folded notes addressed to Spangles the Clown, Purple Peggy, Sir Smile-A-Lot. A table next to the door covered in pink balloons serves as a lost and found. So far, the only thing that’s been lost is a yellow feather boa. The door is propped open with a box holding a disco ball. No lights are burning in the room, so the surfaces are dim, given to deep shadow. Most everything is draped in sheets.
Then a switch is flipped and fluorescent light opens the space. It’s the vendors’ area. A man in denim shorts and rainbow suspenders emerges from the back, whipping sheets from the tables. He says, “When you see something you can’t live without, just holler.”
The vendors’ area is an L-shaped corridor; it might normally be a hallway leading to the laundry room or kitchen. Inside, I feel the inexplicable need to move stealthily. There are displays of leather shoes—jester-toed and oblong, sequined and high-heeled—and a few tables boasting nothing but makeup. There’s a walk-in booth with frilly costumes on hangers and an elaborate wig arrangement—thirty Styrofoam heads, tiered according to style. Tables are devoted to magic tricks, juggling props, and party favors. The suspendered man leafs through a convention program in an airbrushing booth. He’s surrounded by wispy clown portraits and stacks of white T-shirts emblazoned with his handiwork. At the far end of the corridor is an open space with a rack of unicycles and large three-wheeled bikes. I pick up a chrome unicycle, as if gauging its weight, though I have no idea how to assess such a strange machine. I lift it to my shoulder like a rifle and sight down the frame, foolishly making sure it’s straight.
“Careful,” the man says, “she’s loaded.”
I lower the tire to the ground, bounce it a couple of times to check the pressure. “How much?”
“That’s Zany Laney’s booth. She’ll be back after the balloon talk.”
I wheel the unicycle back to the rack.
“What type of clown are you?” he asks, bored.
Without thinking, I say, “Hobo.”
“Hobos are destitute. Where’s he getting the scratch for a unicycle?”
“I’m mixing it up. Come to enough of these and you see the same things over and over.”
The man shrugs, puts his program under his chair, then goes to straighten the pallets of airbrushed shirts on his table. He says, “I like hobos. Emmett Kelly, Otto Griebling. It’s the only truly American clown.”
“You ever get folks asking you to airbrush their faces on goose eggs?”
“Son,” he says, “I’ve been asked to airbrush faces on things that haunt my dreams.”
“How long does it take?”
“To haunt my dreams?”
“To airbrush a face on something.”
“Depends on the face. Depends on the something.”
I like the suspendered man, his irascibility. I like how he’s unfolding the shirts and then gingerly refolding them so his artwork is more visible. He’s the size of a nose tackle. I say, “I’m not actually a clown.”
“And thus the mystery of the unicycling hobo is solved.”
“My son is, though. I’d like to get his face painted on something.”
“Regrettably, I believe the gift shop is fresh out of goose eggs.”
“How long will you be here?” I ask.
“Until the Lord our God rises again or happy hour, whichever comes first.”
In the lobby, there are huddles of clowns deciding which workshops to attend. Someone, somewhere, puffs at a kazoo. Dayna is sitting with an auguste, an unhinged-looking woman in her seventies, and speaking into her walkie-talkie. I don’t see Asher. Another hobo has materialized, though, a hunched man shuffling around with a sign that reads CAN YOU SPARE A LAUGH? I watch him, searching out anything that might prove useful for Asher, but the hobo just mopes by, wearing a hangdog expression and tuxedo pants cut off at the calves. One clown waves him away, but another grants him a belly laugh; it’s showy and territorial. The hobo bows. Then he catches sight of a clown with a tinselly wig pushing a whiteface in a wheelchair, and he’s all energy as he maneuvers in front of them. They stop, and he brandishes his sign with a cocked head, pleading. The man in the wheelchair nods. He hunts around for something in his lap. I think he’s misread the sign and is looking for change, but then he produces a device, one of those mechanical larynx numbers, and presses it to his throat. I don’t hear anything at first, but soon there are low peals of disembodied laughter vibrating toward me like a flock of harsh, metallic birds. I retreat into the parking lot, the sad noise still buzzing in my ears when I reach my truck.
Hobo clowns likely came out of the Great Depression, though it’s possible their roots stretch back to vaudeville. Asher wrote a report for his history class. They’re forlorn and downtrodden, ever the brunt of jokes. They’re always on the receiving end of pies to the face, kicks to the keister. That Asher reinvented himself as the only clown without hope or mirth bothers me. I assume it’s because of his mother, but maybe not. I’m afraid to ask.
And yet when he returns to the room on Saturday evening, he’s jazzed up and garrulous. I’m immediately optimistic about dinner. Maybe we’ll split that beer. Maybe I’ll find words to inoculate him against tomorrow’s disappointment. He hangs his blazer on the desk chair and tells me, breathlessly, about the compliments he’s gotten on his costume, about learning to twist balloons into airplanes and dinosaurs. Better still, a workshop instructor said he had such a knack for painting faces that he could get work at birthday parties. The instructor suggested setting up a website, running classified ads in the paper, acquiring a tax ID number.
He’s in front of the mirror again. I think he’s wiping off his makeup, but soon realize he’s touching it up. I say, “Will Po’ Boy be joining us for dinner?”
“Change of plans,” he says. “The Calliope Ball is tonight. It’s unmissable.”
“You have to eat, Ash.”
“There’s a buffet. Mexican, I think. We can eat down there.”
“We? What happened to that airtight clown security?”
“I scored you a badge from Mrs. Barrett,” he says. “She didn’t want you feeling left out.”
“Mrs. Barrett?”
In the mirror, I can see him clipping on a bow tie, sliding the stem of a plastic sunflower through a hole in his lapel. Outside, a jet is descending and the noise rattles the windows.
“Ash?” I say.
“You met her at breakfast.”
“Dayna?”
“She’s the director of the conference. She said you seemed lonesome.”
The lobby is transformed by darkness and oldies music. The disco ball I saw earlier now hangs from a tapestry of Christmas lights, spinning and refracting color. Asher hands me my badge and says he’ll meet me in the room later, then, before I can protest, he squeezes into the crowd and disappears. Clowns sidle past each other with plates of enchiladas raised above their heads. I smell chili powder and corn tortillas. The suspendered man is sipping a beer by the glass elevator, chatting with two clowns in tutus. When he sees me, he cocks his arm and pantomimes throwing a pass. Seconds later, I act like I’ve caught it, right in the numbers.
I climb the stairs to the second-floor balcony and peer down. Asher is already talking shop with the shuffling hobo and a female auguste. They’re interested in whatever he’s saying, nodding and letting him go on, and I hate that I didn’t bring the camera. Jill would have. She would have stood beside me, snapping pictures and watching the mass of clowns move below us like a cloud of phosphorescent marsh gas. I try to imagine which costumes she’d like. It’s a habit. When I take Asher to the mall, I guess which necklaces she’d want from jewelry store windows. Driving to my open houses, I keep an eye out for gardens she’d appreciate, and inside the rooms, I envision how she’d arrange our furniture, where she’d hang the photos of Asher. Now, I wonder if she’d like the cowboy with the checkerboard Stetson and matching boots. The woman in the yellow jumper and platinum wig? The scarecrow with a black balloon raven perched on his shoulder? I feel no affinity for any of them. They all look grave and infirm to me, an endangered species, a well that will soon be dry and abandoned.
She would have stood beside me, snapping pictures and watching the mass of clowns move below us like a cloud of phosphorescent marsh gas.
A female clown, a whiteface in a pink jester costume, walks onto the balcony. She wears a ruffled collar and a three-point hat. I assume she’s looking for someone in the group below, but she steps closer and says, “Sulking alone wasn’t quite what I intended when I gave Asher your badge.”
“Dayna?”
“Call me Ginger,” she says. “Ginger the Jester.”
“I didn’t know you were a clown,” I say.
“I’m good with secrets.”
The glass elevator, packed tight with whitefaces, passes the balcony and stops in the lobby. Asher is still with the hobo and auguste, and soon he’s being introduced to someone in a skunk costume. He doffs his bowler. The skunk curtsies. I feel conspicuous with Dayna beside me. Maybe Asher wouldn’t recognize her dressed as a jester, or maybe keeping tabs on his old man is the furthest thing from his mind, but I worry. Before Jill died, she’d joke about my romantic future. “One year’s too soon,” she’d say, “but if you’re not ringing some gal’s bell by year three, I will, from on high, assume you’ve switched teams.” I did an intentionally poor job of masking how much I despised such talk, but later, when she’d lost so much weight and asked me to promise that I’d eventually move on—“For me,” she’d said, weeping, “for Ash”—I had conceded only to spare us the rest of the conversation. I can’t remember the last time I stood this close to a woman. Dayna’s perfume smells of daylilies. Her gloves are satin. My blood is teeming with a miserable, traitorous vitality.
Dayna has been talking. She says, “That’s what my daughter calls it, the John Wayne Gacy Convention.”
“Asher wanted to do a school project on him, but I banned it. I got the silent treatment for a week,” I say. I’d forgotten about that uncomfortable phase last year, when Asher was preoccupied with Gacy and seemed to always be spouting dark trivia. Gacy was a whiteface named Pogo. He painted sharp corners on his mouth, whereas traditional, non-mass-murdering clowns use round borders to keep from scaring children.
In the lobby, Asher is waving to a group in the glass elevator. They wave back as they ascend, the glimmer of the disco ball reflecting on the windowed wall. “Chantilly Lace” starts up. My heart feels dizzy in my chest.
“Kids are the pits,” Dayna says, dancing a little with her bottom half. Behind her, the elevator opens and clowns slowly exit, like their joints hurt. Dayna says, “My daughter was spatting with another cheerleader, something about a boy, and she mixed Nair into the girl’s shampoo. Can you say, ‘suspension’? Can you say, ‘permanent record’? Can you say—”
“How good?” I interrupt.
“I’m sorry?”
“You said you were good with secrets. How good?”
“Oh,” she says, a lovely lilt in her tone, her hips still keeping time with the music. “ Really good. Unfathomably good. Better than—”
“Room 618,” I say.
“Wow,” she says. “Okay. Wow.”
“Take the stairs,” I say, making for the elevator.
When I go to my open houses on Sunday mornings, I worry Asher thinks I’m meeting a woman. I expect to return home and find him waiting, his eyes narrow with betrayal. Asher at the kitchen table, glowering. Asher pacing the house and brooding over the questions he’ll hurl at me like stones: Who is she? Do you love her? What would Mom think? But he’s always asleep when I get back, the door to his room unopened since the night before. The house is disappointingly quiet, indicting in its stillness, so I wash the week’s dishes to bide time until my son emerges. Sometimes I intentionally clang pots and pans together, then apologize for waking him. Had I not started telling him I was going to church, he wouldn’t even know I’d been gone.
At the showings, I ask about school districts and property taxes, mortgage liens and mineral rights. Such questions, I think, paint me as a serious buyer, but I’m also hoping for some combination of answers that will spur me to action. Early on, I expected to be easily swayed. The smell of fresh paint and carpet, the gleam of marble counters and the pulsing sound of sprinkler systems in lush lawns—I thought they would prove irresistible and I’d want to make an offer on every property. But the houses punish me with newness, and I feel negligent and untethered, guilty for having left Asher at home. I can’t actually imagine putting our house on the market or packing up our rooms. Once, the notion of surrendering my keys to another family brought me to tears. I was scrubbing bowls in the sink after visiting a three-bedroom ranch on Riley Drive, and Asher came out of his room and caught me.
“Dad, I think you’re crying,” he said, as if alerting me to a nosebleed. He wore his Clowns Will Eat Me shirt, his dark hair was mashed from the hard sleep of youth, and he seemed mortified to find me in such a state.
“The service this morning,” I said. “It was beautiful.”
On Sunday, the lobby has been transformed again for the Paradeability event. It’s roped off in a zigzag course. One of the giant plywood faces marks the start point, the other stands at the finish line, and the route is lined with clowns and bleary-eyed family members slurping coffee. There are twice as many clowns as yesterday; if I look in one direction too long, the clashing colors make me lightheaded. I position myself halfway through the course and actually feel like I’m at a parade. Asher waits in queue with the other competitors, pacing. I worry he’ll vomit or faint. He didn’t return to the room until after one this morning, and although Dayna was long gone, it’s possible he spied her leaving. When we practiced his routine before breakfast, he was off his game, sluggish and tentative, and his lassitude felt like an accusation.
Before each competitor enters the circuit, an announcer rallies the crowd. He calls us ladies and germs, fillies and foals, boys and girls. If the clown is new to the competition, he says, “Ladies and germs, our next contestant is a First of May.” But the event is sleepy, tedious. I have to keep turning the video camera back on because it times out between competitors. Some clowns juggle through the course—rings, bowling pins, rubber chickens. Others just mosey along cracking jokes. There’s a hobo who sneezes into a paper sack every few steps and sends a plume of powder into the air, then he offers the contents of the bag to the crowd and mocks offense when we decline. The woman wearing flippers and the inflatable pool acts like she’s swimming by, and every so often she spits a high arc of water into the audience. How she refills her mouth is a mystery. A whiteface in a silver astronaut costume stomps along, occasionally lifting her bubble helmet to shout, Moonwalk! There’s a clown on stilts who moves in slow motion, reciting poetry with an Irish accent. Passing me, he says, “I, through the terrible novelty of light, stalk on, stalk on.”
Then the announcer says, “Boys and girls, how’s about another First of May?”
There’s a smattering of applause, a long, bending whistle.
“Well then, ladies and germs, set my head on fire and put it out with a hammer, here’s Po’ Boy the Hoboy!”
For his routine, Asher wears a pair of boxing gloves and has a small cardboard box tied to his ankle with a yard-long cut of twine. Once the clock starts, he says, “You want a piece of me? I’m the best kickboxer you’ll ever see!” Then he kicks the cardboard box ahead of him and starts bobbing and weaving and punching his way forward until he catches up to it again. Repeat, repeat, repeat. When he’s throwing his jabs, he exhales through his red foam nose, sharp like a real pugilist. That was my idea. Granting the twine doesn’t get tangled around his shoe, he can usually run through the routine six times in a minute.
And despite his lousy practice earlier, in the contest he’s a crackerjack. I’m caught off guard by how his voice carries, the snap of his jab, the accuracy of his kick. The box lands directly in his path every time. When he passes, spectators whoop and cheer and sound horns. I feel like I’m in the bleachers at a bowl game and the audience wave is approaching. People maneuver for a better view; they lean and jostle and nod venerably. I record everything. I feel an almost unbearable pride, and my stomach roils with guilt for having ever doubted him. On his fourth stop, he’s close enough that I have to unzoom the camera lens. “You want a piece of me?” he says to an auguste. She raises her hands in surrender. Everyone laughs.
Then, when he kicks the box, the twine breaks. The box is borne aloft, cartwheeling through the air, until, after what seems like minutes, it lands in the crowd. There’s a collective gasping—“Holy smokes,” someone says—and confusion as to whether this is part of Po’ Boy’s routine, a premeditated flourish at the end. Had he noticed the audience’s credulity, Asher might’ve been able to call an audible. But he freezes. There’s a wretched silence, and I want to run to him, to gather my son in my arms and spirit him away. By the time the box is being passed back toward him, he’s composed enough to start throwing jabs again and proceed forward. I expect him to stop when he reaches the finish line, maybe to find me in the crowd so I can reassure or console him, but he bolts from the course. Everyone applauds, more confused than ever, while Asher heads for the exit. I stop recording just before he opens the door and disappears into the radiant sun. Then I go to our room.
Some mornings I wake up forgetting Jill is gone, and for a perfect crushing moment, a moment that is both too long and too brief, I think to reach for her in bed. Then I remember, and the old life recedes, like a tide being drawn back into the ocean. For the rest of the day, I feel halved. Other mornings, I’m positive I’ve lost Asher. Once, the fear was so consuming I snuck into his room and watched the blanket—a clown print—rise and fall with his breath; it was all I could do not to lie down beside him. Or I’ll come home after work, calling his name as I close the front door, and if he doesn’t answer right away, my heart will stutter. How often have I braced myself against finding a note, written in the same bubbly hand as Po’ Boy’s notebook, saying he’s decided to light out on his own? I worry my son will run off with the circus the way parents of promiscuous daughters worry about abortions. I can’t believe I’m enough to keep him here.
When I find Asher in the parking lot, he’s on the tailgate of our truck, smoking a cigarette. In his costume and slap, and with the smoke ribboning into his eyes, he looks old and grizzled, convincingly penniless.
“Heads-up,” I call from across the parking lot and wing our football toward him. I’ve had it in our room since yesterday and went to retrieve it after he fled the lobby. My pass is wobbly, shamefully so, but with his cigarette clamped between his lips, Asher scrambles and catches it.
“What’s this?” he says, turning the ball over in his hands.
“It’s you,” I say.
It took the suspendered man only half an hour to cover the football with Po’ Boy’s image—charcoal beard, thick eyebrows, alabaster complexion, and crimson nose. He worked from the screen of our camera, using a picture I’d snapped of Asher that morning. The ball looked so fine, so astoundingly lifelike, I’d thought to hold on to it for a birthday or Christmas present—I never know what to buy—but I knew I wouldn’t be able to wait. When I showed it to Dayna last night, she said, “You’re a good father.”
“My wife died,” I said.
“Oh, sugar,” she said, “I know that.”
Maybe Asher told her. Maybe, given the hours she’s spent surrounded by elaborate masks, my unpainted face seemed impossibly readable to her. I don’t know. I broke into a humiliated sweat, sacked by guilt and relief, and willed Dayna to leave. Soon she kissed my scalp and slipped from the room without a word.
In the parking lot, Asher toes out his cigarette with his bowling shoe and blows a stream of smoke over his shoulder. The air smells acrid, poisoned. He studies the ball like a man deciding on a bottle of wine. He says, “This is pretty sweet, Dad.”
“The gift shop was out of goose eggs,” I say. Maybe he smiles a furtive smile, I can’t tell. A silver jet rumbles into the sky behind him.
“The twine broke,” he says.
“There should’ve been a flag on the play.”
“It’s never happened before.”
“You handled it like a pro,” I say. “Next time we’ll use a nylon cord.”
He spins the ball in the air, catches it. He says, “I don’t smoke a lot. I just bummed that cigarette from a housekeeper coming off her break. I’m sorry.”
I avert my eyes, arrange a pensive expression on my face. He expects me to be angry, and I know I should be. I should ground him. I should ask if he’s taken a good gander at that crippled clown with the mechanical larynx. I’m aware of this just as I’m aware of the oil and gas coursing miles beneath our feet. This is prime fathering time here, the moment when I should impart solid, inviolable wisdom that will serve as his north star and guide him into a healthy future. But right now every truth seems porous, every judgment skewed. I feel something give inside my chest, as surely as when my knee buckled in the scrimmage and I knew my world was forever altered. When I look at Asher—the dour mask, the clothes that once belonged to someone else, the weary secrets buried beneath his obsession—I see only the smallest traces of the boy Jill and I raised together. Instead, I see myself. It gives me vertigo, this recognition, like I’m staring at a mirror that I’ve always taken for a window.
Asher is looking at his football again. I think he likes it, but I’m careful not to betray how much this pleases me. Cars and trucks are swooshing by on the freeway. A plane is about to touch down.
Asher says, “I really am sorry about smok—”
“Come to church with me,” I interrupt.
“Right now?”
“Next week,” I say. “I think a little fellowship might be in order.”
He nods, contrite. He thinks I mean to scold him, and I’ll let that ride to keep him honest, but punishment never enters my mind. The prospect of our finding a church together is invigorating, and I feel as though we’re on the verge of something essential forming between us. We’ll get dressed up. We’ll file into a holy building and take our places among men in bow ties and old women with powdered cheeks and bright lips, believers seeking shelter. We’ll sing and pray, confess our sins and mourn our dead. We’ll kneel before ancient altars, behold the glory of ritual and sacrifice. We’ll weep and be saved. We’ll go every Sunday. After services, Asher and I will hit a thrift store, or we’ll swing by an open house and try to divine the years ahead. We’ll talk about girls and college and his mother. We’ll talk until our voices grow hoarse. When we return home, I’ll slap a couple of steaks on the grill and we’ll scroll through TV channels, looking for a game. If the Cowboys are playing, the stands will be packed with fragile men wearing wild wigs and oversized jerseys and war paint on their faces. Asher and I will root for all of them, the heartsick fans and their doomed, beleaguered team. We’ll hold our breath when the quarterback lets fly with a Hail Mary. We’ll hope for a miracle as the receiver stumbles toward the end zone. His arms will be extended and his legs weak and his palms open to the sky, and from where we sit, from our house, he’ll look like a man trying to outrun everything behind him, like a man begging, at last, for mercy.
There are days lately when my body feels too small for everything I’m feeling. Maybe you know the sensation. That hot, tight coil of frustration that won’t unwind. The pressure of trying to stay pleasant while the world around you keeps insisting you should be grateful it’s not worse. It’s a strange kind of claustrophobia: emotional, physical, psychic. A sense that your skin has become a jar with the lid screwed on too tight. In those moments, I want stories that blow the lid off. Tales where women reach the point where their human shape can’t contain them anymore and something in them refuses to stay small. Stories where metamorphosis isn’t a curse, but a way out. A widening of the self, an unfurling, a reclamation of the things women are told to suppress: anger, appetite, selfish desires.
When I was working on my own book, The Fox Hunt, I found that my heroine’s leap into fox-form allowed her to escape the clutches of the boys hunting her: a secret society of young men whose wealth, power and privilege would usually secure their every whim. But I also found that this transformation let her slip free from the expectations the world had taught her about herself. Be quiet. Be gentle. Don’t bare your teeth. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t want too much. Her new shape gives her the path to revenge, to freedom, and to justice. Transforming my heroine in was a way of letting her find her power, rewrite her story, and bare her teeth without apology.
In the seven books below, we see that the monstrous woman isn’t a cautionary tale. She’s a reclamation. She’s what happens when we stop asking permission to feel angry or hungry or alive. She is the sum of the wildness, defiance, and power that lives in all of us. When we embrace our wild side, we don’t lose our humanity. We shed everything that strangles it. Because the beast is not the enemy. The beast is the way out.
The Bloody Chamber is the quintessential feminist reimagining of fairy tales. In this collection of short tales, Angela Carter exposes the teeth and passion beneath bedtime stories we know well. “The Tiger’s Bride” is a standout. Carter flips the whole Beauty and the Beast script inside out: Gentleness isn’t rewarded, obedience isn’t the moral. Instead of taming the Beast into becoming human, this Beauty sheds the skin that made her acceptable and chooses the one that lets her finally breathe. And when the Beast licks the human skin from Beauty’s body to reveal the beautiful, rippling, tiger-striped fur beneath, it is a joyful consummation. Becoming an animal is an escape from the roles that hemmed her in: virgin, daughter, object. Her beastly body holds her true self in a way that her fragile human form could not. I love this transformation story because it tells us that the wild versions of ourselves may actually be the most honest.
Clara is a nun, warrior, and unapologetic werebear. Yes, werebear. But her bear-self isn’t a shameful secret: It’s simply a part of her, and one she carries with matter-of-fact pride. Kingfisher’s world treats female strength with affectionate irreverence. Clara is powerful enough to break a man in half and tender enough to worry about rude table manners in between battles. Her transformation doesn’t make her less human, it makes her more wholly herself, refusing every attempt to shrink her. Sometimes the only way to carve out space in a world built to contain you is to become something too large to hold.
Nightbitch captures the feral underside of motherhood with unnerving sharpness. The protagonist, overwhelmed by childcare and isolation, begins noticing changes. She’s finding patches of fur, craving raw meat, and sniffing the air like a hound. Is she transforming into a dog? There’s an ambiguity there. But what matters is how the possibility lets her entertain feelings and thoughts we’re taught women shouldn’t give in to. Her emerging dog-self becomes a counter-spell against the expectation that mothers should be endlessly self-sacrificing and sweet. It makes for a funny, unsettling, and liberating story. When the world demands you be patient, tender, endlessly pleasant, this book hands you permission to growl.
Published in 1922 and still astonishingly modern, Garnett’s novella begins as a domestic oddity and spirals into something far wilder. Silvia Tebrick, once a perfectly respectable English wife, abruptly transforms into a fox and refuses to be forced back into the shape expected of her. Her husband tries to dress her, feed her at the table, keep her in the house. But Silvia’s instincts overwhelm the rigid etiquette of their marriage. She scratches at the door. She bolts into the forest. She chooses foxhood, with its mates, cubs, and danger, over the suffocating politeness of traditional womanhood. The more her husband clings to propriety, the more Silvia slips away. Until it is clear that there is only one loving outcome: He must free her. It is a story where transformation is a vessel of freedom for a woman trapped by the smothering confines of domestic ideals.
Anyanwu, the immortal shapeshifter at the heart of Wild Seed, can analyze a creature’s entire genome by consuming a small fragment of its flesh. This power lets her transform her body down to the smallest detail: paws or fins or wings. More than that, she can alter her own age and sex, and heal others. Butler contrasts Anyanwu’s self-crafted power against Doro, an immortal man who steals bodies for survival, killing those he decides to inhabit. One builds her shape carefully, with minimal destruction; the other consumes bodies without thought. As the two clash in a toxic relationship, the novel shows another facet of transformation: that Anyanwu’s ethical, careful approach to taking other forms can have its own transformative, improving effect on even the most violent elements of the world around her.
In Margo Lanagan’s take on selkie folklore, the women of Rollrock Island are seal-wives. They have been called from the sea and trapped in human skins so that men can claim them as brides. These seal-women are not cheerful wives, but exiles aching for the water. Their marriages are abductions, separating them from their true selves. In prose that stings like wind off the sea, Lanagan paints the domesticity the brides are forced to wear by hopeful husbands, and their unabating longing for the cold, deep water and their true forms. In this story, beast form is a lost dream of freedom: a utopia of female existence, freed from civilization, in which women’s original forms are sleek, powerful, and magical. It is a haunting and beautiful read suggesting that women do not want to turn beastly, so much as to return to their rightful beastly selves.
Moreno-Garcia’s reimagining of The Island of Dr. Moreau centers on Carlota, raised among her father’s hybrid creations. These are human-animal beings, stitched together through cruelty disguised as science. As Carlota uncovers the truth of her origins, her own body becomes a site of revelation and rebellion. Her animal inheritance pushes her toward a freedom her father never intended her to have. This novel understands that monstrousness is often defined by whoever holds the power. It reminds us that embracing the “beastly” parts of yourself might be the only way to survive a world built on exploitation. This is a story for anyone who senses that the thing they’ve been taught to fear in themselves might actually be their own strength.
One of my favorite ways to get to know someone better is to share a spa day with them—but I don’t mean booking forty-five minutes at some chain place where you can get a manicure in a bathrobe. What I have in mind is a Korean spa, a jjimjilbang, where you stash your clothes in a locker and wear nothing but a spiral plastic bracelet while you move from hot tub to cold plunge, wood sauna to steam sauna to salt room to body scrub. The communal nudity of these spaces offers a radical departure from the body-fearing purity culture I grew up in, and the particularity of the setting often draws out unexpected revelations and moments of clarity.
A visit to a bathhouse forcefully separates me from my regular defenses and distractions. If I opt for a traditional body scrub, it even separates me from my skin. The bathhouse is a meditative place, where I am but a body among other naked bodies. These spas are often located in unremarkable strip malls or commercial centers on the edge of town, and their ordinariness restores a kind of blessed banality to the hypersexualized body. When I dump a plastic scoopful of mugwort tea water over my scalp and bare shoulders, I remember that my body exists for so much more than visual consumption. When I sit on a cedar bench and let the dry heat of a wood sauna penetrate every pore, the heat blossoms inside my ribcage and expands my sensory range. I become more permeable to the world, and my receptivity recalibrates. To go back and forth from a cold pool to a steam sauna, only changing rooms or pools when I can pretend that I’ve forgotten what it feels like to feel differently, is to practice enacting those famous lines from Ranier Maria Rilke: “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
For this reason, I always get excited when I encounter a written scene that takes place in a jjimjilbang, a Russian bathhouse, a hammam, or any other kind of specific bathing venue. I set about aggregating some of my favorite bathhouse scenes and discovered that each example, while ostensibly centering on the venue where it happens, expresses the style and priorities of the larger work from which it comes. This internal integrity is one of the signs of a well-constructed book: Whatever the book’s priorities, they are reiterated on every level of scale, from craft choices as small as diction and syntax to sentence structure to scene to overall effect. I loved recognizing how the overarching concerns of each of these works is captured in miniature in their spa scenes.
Set in Korea and Japan between 1910 and 1989, Pachinko chronicles the daily lives of four generations of Koreans in exile. Forty years apart, two different characters—first, Sunja; later, Ayame—visit the public bathhouse, or sento. In each case, the bathhouse is a utilitarian space used for hygiene and relaxation, and each mention underscores the tensions the characters endure in the midst of their quotidian responsibilities. For Sunja—the woman at the center of the novel’s tessellating history—the sento she visits on her first night in Osaka is a reminder of her alienation from her home country, as well as an adumbration of the nationalist prejudice that will intensify over the years to come. This is the work of a skilled novelist: to take a generic personal obligation—something as simple and routine as bathing—and leverage it to convey both context and interiority. For Ayame, her bathhouse visit precedes her discovery of a clandestine sex grove. Her return visits to the sento are infused with a growing curiosity about the secluded thicket and what happens there. In this way, Lee reflects that a bathhouse is not necessarily a sexual space, but neither does it preclude the erotic dimensions of an embodied life.
Zauner’s memoir, which shot onto bestseller lists after its publication in 2022, commemorates her relationship with her Korean mother. In the scene with the Korean spa, Zauner has just introduced her (white) boyfriend, Peter, to her parents for the first time. They bet on whether or not he’ll chicken out on the trip to the spa, and by showing up, he wins her mother’s respect.
Crying in H Mart also includes the most comprehensive description of a Korean spa of any of the books I’ve listed here. Zauner writes: “Jjimjilbangs are typically separated by gender, with a communal area for both sexes to socialize in the loose-fitted, matching pajamas provided on entry. Inside the bathhouse, full nudity is standard.” For Zauner, the visit to the jjimjilbang provides a moment of protected intimacy with her pre-cancer-diagnosis mother, months before Zauner could appreciate how precious such experiences would become. The spa trip in Crying in H Mart commemorates a tender mother-daughter milestone while demystifying elements of Zauner’s Korean heritage for a multicultural readership.
Winner of the Washington State Book Award, this delicate memoir is built around Koh’s teen years and the letters she received from her mother, who returned to South Korea with her father while Koh and her brother remained in California. The spa scene comes during the summer after Koh has graduated high school, when she flies to Seoul to visit her parents. The visit to the jjimjilbang is part of Koh’s immersion in her mother’s Korean life. Koh’s mother professes a devotion and attention to Koh that manifests primarily in saccharine language and overstated acts of generosity, but fails to penetrate Koh’s daily life in the States. Their time at the spa illustrates these insufficient attempts at intimacy, while allowing them to share in a significant ritual. Throughout her memoir, Koh gestures toward the limits of language and the elusiveness of intimacy.
A spa visit is ideal fodder for Jamison: a bespoke, sensory setting that gradually recedes into background to allow for dialogue or interior reflection. In this case, Jamison and her friend Anna spend an evening at the Russian and Turkish Baths on Tenth Street. Jamison’s descriptions are lush and steamy, much more florid than either Zauner’s or Koh’s. The presence of others in the bathhouse is a fact Jamison uses to console herself against her personal disappointments and deprivations, and she gestures toward the communal nature of these spaces and the sense of shared humanity they open up. As elsewhere in Splinters, Jamison is straining for transcendence, and she asserts it via her projections onto and vivid descriptions of others.
Kit, the protagonist of Parsons’ novel, is a young mother unmoored with grief over the death of her sister, so her best friend Pete plans a getaway to Montana for the two of them to unwind. Part of this adventure involves not a trip to the spa, but to nature’s spa: a natural hot springs called “Boiling River.” Kit’s grief keeps her suspended between timelines, mentally leaching into the past at each lapse in stimulation, and the Boiling River provides ample time to lose herself in recollection and to experience a bizarre altercation with a much younger hot-springer. Their interaction dredges painfully into the present a piqued iteration of the same questions that underlie the entire novel, questions of care, connection, and responsibility.
“I met Ian at a bathhouse,” states TJ, one of three narrators in Washington’s second novel. Washington’s fiction centers Black and mixed-race gay men, and he references the bathhouse as casually as if it were a bar or a bakery. The two characters meet in line for a post-fuck vending machine Coke, and Ian offers TJ his quarters. The scene underscores Washington’s preoccupation with excessive generosity and the fuzzy space between transactionalism and emotional intimacy. Ian, the love interest in question, immediately draws attention to the blurred lines and ambiguous boundaries of the bathhouse. Like the rest of the novel, the bathhouse scene normalizes hookup culture while also demonstrating a longing for something more.
Dixon’s essay “Deprivation” is entirely about her session in a sensory deprivation tank, one of those capsules of heavily salinated water in which a person can soak in the dark, completely suspended. The quiet of the tank makes Dixon wish for the familiar external stimulation of her phone. Most of Dixon’s book foregrounds loneliness and the dubious pleasure of digital distraction. The solitude of a sensory deprivation tank is appropriate to Dixon’s creative project even as it illustrates how our contemporary social faith in individualism overshadows long histories of communal spaces and practices. After having soaked in so many different spa scenes, I wonder what essay Dixon might’ve written had she gone to a jjimjilbang, and how spaces devoted to nonperformative, routine human interaction can counter the mythology of being the only one.
This essay, selected by Alexander Chee as the winner of the 2023 Sewanee Review prize, ends with a scene in a Korean spa in Tacoma, Washington. The narrator is, like Michelle Zauner, descended from a Korean mother and a non-Korean father; however, Grey’s mother died in childbirth and effectively severed Grey from whatever Korean heritage they might have accessed from their mother, who was, herself, adopted by white missionaries in the 1970s. Grey’s pilgrimage to the jjimjilbang is a powerful scene of restoration. Grey describes the body scrub they receive in precise detail, describing the routine conscientiousness of the woman performing the body scrub, and noting that their time at the spa is “also the longest I have ever spent around other Korean bodies.” In clear and resonant language, Grey braids together physical experience, an internal instance of racial self-integration, and emotional upheaval. Grey’s essay considers the nuances of racial identity and self-reclamation throughout. Finally, Grey also recognizes the messy entanglement with capitalism: “It felt sacred,” Grey writes, “yet this was her job, and she will probably wash another four women besides me today. Today, for two hours, I got to be fully Korean.”
The first thing Jenny Tinghui Zhang and I bonded over when we met at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, aside from both being writers, was that we were both devoted Lorde fans. Every time I meet someone who enjoys her music, it’s almost guaranteed that we immediately have a great friendship. A couple hours later, Zhang and I sang karaoke to one of Lorde’s biggest hits before the rest of the conference’s attendees. A couple months after that, I drove over 400 miles to see the pop star in concert—the same show Jenny attended too. Leading up to and following the show, we both couldn’t help ourselves; so many conversations, theorizing who Lorde was behind the music, what she spent her days doing when she wasn’t on stage, and why she made this or that artistic decision. Sometimes, we’d dare to say that we knew the answers. That we knew Lorde.
Jenny Tinghui Zhang’s electrifying sophomore novel, Superfan, asks stans and fans alike to stop and question these impulses. Following college student Minnie, we see her go from listless and lonely to passionate and obsessive once she discovers the American-born, K-pop-trained boy band HOURglass. Every dance move on stage, every lyric in their songs, even intimate livestreams from their hotel—it all feels like they were tailor-made just for her. Is she wrong for believing in their closeness?
Uniquely empathetic for both the fan and the artist, Superfan critiques fandom culture and parasocial relationships during a time when intimacy is manufactured for economic gain. Zhang and I discuss fandom culture’s shift from shame to pride, ownership and authenticity in fan-artist relationships, and Heated Rivalry as proof of our human need for connection.
Jalen Giovanni Jones: It’s so exciting to see Superfan out in the world, especially after the success of your debut. What has the publishing process been like the second time around?
Jenny Tinghui Zhang: When my first book was coming out I didn’t know anything. You’re just happy to be there, getting your book published. I’ve gone through the publication process before, and now that it’s happening again it’s almost like I know too much. I feel more vulnerable as a result. Debuts are inherently exciting, but for follow-ups you’re asking, “Will this measure up? How does this reflect upon me as a writer in my career?”
Now you have the critics, the reviewers, and your publisher, whereas with the first book, most of the time you’re kind of just writing for your own happiness. You’re barely thinking about audience, or the market. I think you just know too much after the first book, and sometimes knowing too much is a bad thing for art.
JGJ:I found that the relationship between the audience and the artist is actually a big part of Superfan. Did having a more formal, defined audience following Four Treasures of the Sky change your process when approaching your second novel?
JTZ: Weirdly with both of my books, audience was one of the last things that I thought about. A lot of the time I am thinking of a hypothetical one person that I would like to be writing to, and whom I would like to be read by. But I don’t approach the writing of the novel like there is this one specific target, in terms of readership. It sounds very narcissistic to say this, but I always feel I am my audience, first and foremost. I think: Is it interesting to me? Is it something that I would want to read? Because if it’s not, then what’s the point in me pursuing it?
Sometimes knowing too much is a bad thing for art.
JGJ:What immediately made Superfan stand out to me was its use of a dual perspective narration, between Minnie’s point of view and that of HOURglass member Eason. What made you realize that that dual perspective was necessary for this story?
JTZ: With Four Treasures, it’s very much a strictly first person novel. With [Superfan], I wanted to challenge myself to do things that were outside of my comfort zone, and writing in the third person was just that. Following two narrators and seeing if I could develop those characters the same way that I would develop just one character was also another way to challenge myself.
I initially thought we could just follow the fan. But as I was writing into Minnie’s story, I just found it so interesting, how so much of being a fan is kind of assuming someone’s life, making up stories about that artist and [the] motivations behind their actions. Because I wanted to play with the inaccuracies of that, I brought in Eason. Having both perspectives was a way to showcase just how wrong, or maybe sometimes right, someone could be when they’re making all these assumptions about someone else that they don’t really know. Superfan is really interested in unpacking what it means to be your authentic self, and asking how much of that authentic self you owe to an audience.
JGJ:Often in popular discourse, fans are treated as this invasive mob, but Superfan very much humanizes Minnie and fans in general. The book shows that Minnie has a reason for acting in her fanatical ways. She’s gone through her own pain, and HOURglass does a lot of good for her.
JTZ: I’m so glad you said that. A lot of how we talk about fan girls today is with a patronizing tone. “Oh, they’re crazy,” and that’s the end of their story. But having been in many fandoms in my life, I’ve seen that there’s also a lot of community to be found in those spaces. And there’s a reason why superfans are drawn to things to the extent with which they are. I wanted to show empathy for that.
JGJ:When it comes to the fan-artist relationship, at what point would you say the fan might be crossing the line?
Many fans feel like they have ownership over this person that they’re a fan of.
JTZ: Usually we as a society cross that line when there’s an aspect of ownership to the fan-artist relationship. Many fans feel like they have ownership over this person that they’re a fan ofand believe they get a say in the choices that this person is making, get to rebuke or celebrate the person that their celebrity is dating, etc. There’s this increasing feeling of ownership, almost like “I’m your fan, and you owe me certain things.” Where we start to cross the line is when that belief system takes over, where you’re no longer seeing the humanity in that artist, are no longer treating them as a human who can make their own decisions and who exists outside of this persona, but instead only seeing them as the object of your fandom and of your ownership.
JGJ:You paint this relationship between artist and fan as a two way street. Most thinking and writing around these types of parasocial relationships show that relationship as one directional. This novel shows that the artist, too, can feel partial to the relationship. Eason is deeply attached to his fans.
JTZ: That’s exactly what I was trying to get at. This is becoming more of a thing in Western music marketing and promotion, and it is for sure a strategy in the K-pop industry—there’s encouragement for K-pop idols to cultivate very close and personal-seeming relationships with their fans. In the book, this is shown through Eason’s live streaming. Live streaming is huge in K-pop. Fans hit the notification that they’re live, and they’re instantly taken to the idol, so close to the camera, and they’re bare faced and without makeup. They’re in a hotel room after a concert. They’re dressed in normal people clothes, just talking to their cameras. It really feels like you’re on FaceTime with your BFF or boyfriend. I’m trying to point out that there is kind of a benefit to establishing this kind of relationship with your fans as well. The companies stand to benefit from it too, because they want for people to buy the albums, buy the merchandise, and establishing this very intimate relationship is one of the ways to guarantee that. But we should also be talking about how celebrities benefit from this relationship as well.
JGJ:I want to question that a bit more. Eason’s live streaming, for example, is an attempt to get closer to his fans—can that come from an authentic place, or is that always a way to make more money? Is it always capitalizing off of that perceived intimacy, or can the artist genuinely want to just hang out and have such intimate moments?
JTZ: I think it could be both. In our world, someone like Lorde or even Taylor Swift, they do love their fans, and they give a lot to their fans. But if we’re talking about the industry, all of these big record companies also know that there is money to be mined from that relationship. That’s always going to loom over.
JGJ:You mentioned that American music is starting to take from K-pop industry practices, and that is the formula that HOURglass follows in the novel. We’re really seeing that now, especially with examples like KATSEYE, who just performed at the Grammys. Why do you think this mix of Western and Eastern popular culture is becoming so prominent today?
JTZ: I would like to believe that the powers that be are seeing a diverse mix of members with diverse backgrounds as what is most interesting and appealing to the audiences that exist today. But in band-making shows, producers and executives discuss the marketability of each person. Part of me wants to believe that the industry is realizing it doesn’t have to be just one type of person that can be a star. At the same time, part of me is skeptical. Is it coming from an authentic place, or is it just that there’s more money to be made by appealing to more groups of people?
In general, my suspicion is around the industry at large that pulls the strings, and that’s reflected in the book. Most artists just want to showcase their talent, their art, to perform, and to connect with the fans. But there’s always this larger schema at play, that maybe they aren’t always in control of.
We’re just inquisitive creatures who want to connect, to know more. We’re like puppies out here.
JGJ:The internet definitely has a strong presence in Superfan, especially through the blog post sections that we’re given throughout. How has the internet changed the way fandom culture operates, compared to how it did in a pre-internet age?
JTZ: Growing up, I was part of many, many fandoms. In middle school I was really into Lord of the Rings. But there weren’t a lot of spaces online for me to vent out my obsession. There was no way for me to be a fan more than simply loving it and writing in my journal about it. Fast forward to when Lost was on air and became super popular, I remember how that was the first time there was a whole community on LiveJournal dedicated to a fandom. Every week, people would discuss the episodes, post their theories, and talk amongst themselves. Today, fan spaces are everywhere—whether it’s on Reddit, Twitter, or wherever, it’s just easier than ever to be a fan. The internet has made it easier to connect with everyone, but also it’s made it easier to kind of create your own little silos and havens in community. Before, it was almost an embarrassing thing to be a huge fan of something. When I was growing up, there was some shame attached to it, and you weren’t out there constantly advertising you were part of a fandom. Now, people are so happy and eager to express their fandom, and to partake in fanning. That shift has been really interesting to witness.
In writing this book, I was thinking about how disingenuous it would be to not include the voice of the internet. I wanted to give a voice to the way that people speak in fandom spaces online. You could call those posts another “voice” or perspective in the novel, in addition to Minnie and Eason. I wanted to give this sense that there is a larger collective, a larger community. We never really know who is behind those posts, or if those are all posts from various people. We are just hearing from a mysterious collective that kind of has a presence over the events of the novel.
JGJ:How do we mediate our relationships with our favorite celebrities, pop stars, artists and the like, and make sure they don’t get out of control like they might in Superfan?
JTZ: Have you seen Heated Rivalry?
JGJ:I haven’t watched it, but I’ve heard and read a lot about it.
JTZ: Like with HOURglass, the actors of that show had a meteoric rise to fame overnight. Their teams are doing so well with pumping out content and making sure they’re going to all the fashion shows, doing all these interviews, there’s always more and more content. That seems to happen for any celebrity that’s hot off the presses. We all just want to know more about them. I actually don’t know what the answer is in terms of mediating our relationships, because I feel like everything right now is geared towards making sure that we have a kind of parasocial relationship with the things that are out there.
Whenever I finish something I have to go on Google and search for the entire cast. I have to know about their lives. I have to see what other projects they’ve been in, or are going to be in. There is this drive to know more. That inquisitiveness and curiosity slowly morphs into a feeling of intimacy that morphs into a deeper parasocial relationship, which can then be taken to the extreme. Ultimately, what it all is is our human need for connection. We’re just inquisitive creatures who want to connect, to know more. We’re like puppies out here.
I am writing to share the news that after 16 years at Electric Literature, 14 as the editor of Recommended Reading, and 10 as Executive Director (EL’s first), I will be stepping down in June.
It’s difficult to leave an organization that I love, but the decision was easier knowing that I’m leaving Electric Lit in capable hands. Editor-in-Chief Denne Michele Norris will assume the reconfigured role of Executive Director and Publisher, Wynter K. Miller will become Director of Operations and Fiction Editor, and Katie Henken Robinson will be Deputy Editor. I am proud of what we have accomplished together so far, and I have full faith in their ability to take Electric Lit to the next level.
Electric Literature’s mission is one I care about deeply. There were times I thought I’d be happy to lead the organization indefinitely—but I find myself ready for a new chapter, both personally and for EL. In addition to publishing my debut novel and writing my next book, I plan to pursue teaching and editing. I will remain close with Electric Lit, and be open to new opportunities.
During my tenure, in close collaboration with the board and many talented staff and writers, I established Electric Lit as a nonprofit, earned the support of the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, created EL’s membership program, won the Whiting Literary Magazine Prize, grew the annual budget from $0 to $500,000, and transformed the staff from a pair of volunteers to a paid staff of ten, with three full-time positions.
I co-founded EL’s weekly fiction magazine, Recommended Reading, and helped start The Commuter, EL’s home for flash, poetry, and graphic narrative. As editor of Recommended Reading, I have overseen 717 issues, over 100 of which I personally edited and wrote introductions for. Electric Literature’s website, electricliterature.com, grew from a literary blog with 225,000 annual visitors to the culture’s preeminent literary website, reaching over 5 million readers. Electric Literature has launched the careers of countless writers, and helped to sustain many more. We have connected readers with life-changing literature, and carefully read tens of thousands of submissions. Work published in EL has been repeatedly recognized by Best American Short Stories, Poetry, and Essays, the O. Henry and Pushcart Prizes, and other anthologies and awards.
Over the years Electric Lit’s work has been more than my vocation; it has formed an essential part of my identity, and I will forever cherish and rely on the lessons I learned in this role. Even as EL has professionalized and become more financially secure, we have made sure to preserve the vital independent spirit we started with. There is no other publication like Electric Literature, and its value in the literary landscape cannot be overstated.
The team will be preparing over the next four months to make this transition as seamless as possible. It’s a big change, but I believe that for thoughtful, creative, and analytical people, the change you choose is almost always for the better. Please consider supporting our work at this watershed moment, either by making a donation or becoming a member.
I am tremendously grateful for your time, attention, and encouragement. Thank you all for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
I am the sort of writer who will put a tree in any piece of writing to improve it. But I am also the sort of writer who ignores houseplants. This contradiction in interests twisted upon itself some years ago when I moved to Panama newly married, following a spouse who worked as a tropical tree scientist. At some point during that first year, my writing projects fell apart. I was unemployed save for bit jobs here and there. In May, I decided, despite everything I knew about myself, to set up a small tropical garden in front of my house, my own plot of curated paradise, full of butterfly-attracting flower bushes, vines and ferns that tumbled in interesting patterns over the lips of their pots, succulents, orchids, club mosses whose leaves shone the oily blue of peacocks, beans, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, and a moringa tree to remind me of home.
We can laugh at my hubris now because I am no longer as sad as I was back then, and sadness is the only condition under which I would resort to gardening. Plants are just not compelling enough. They do not cry out for attention. They do not scratch behind their ears or fold their wings into pleats. They could have been painted onto the walls for all that I cared about them.
In Panama, we lived in a row house on Cerro Ancon, a nature reserve on a hill formerly quarried by the American military to build the Panama Canal, now used as a recreational and biocultural landmark by Panamanians and tourists alike. When I looked out the windows facing east, it was to a view of trees that mounded up the hill up to the summit, from which the flag of Panama fluttered, around which vultures spiraled, over which clouds would gather to rain down. Our west-facing windows were a wall of variegated greens, dense rainforest that made mockery of any sense of categorization—vines and trees and epiphytes and lianas that grew tangled upon and through each other’s limbs and leaves.
There was some landscaping around our house. A shallow trench separated our driveway from our neighbors on the left, and in front we shared a small rectangular plot with our neighbor on the right. All told, this might have been seven square meters of earth hemmed in by concrete, prefilled with plants that looked like swords, plants that looked like bleeding hearts, a short, palm-like tree that my spouse told me was a cycad, a birds-of-paradise hedgerow, and some grass no one had planted, all left to tend to themselves when we moved in.
All this was green enough to suit my passive interests. Not so, my spouse. In January of our first year living together, he stuck toothpicks into a couple of avocado seeds left over from lunch. He intended to germinate them in cups of water on the windowsill. When the seeds split down the middle and put out tap roots and their first pairs of leaves, I condemned the entire project. We intended to leave Panama within a year, I said. Trees lived for decades—we were being irresponsible.
They’re beautiful, he said to me. They might bear fruit. What’s wrong with watching them grow?
They’re sessile organisms, I said. They’re boring. I refused to look after them. This is, in fact, a subclause of our marriage contract, that I would have nothing to do with the tending of plants. I did not participate in the avocados’ transfer into pots, or their move downstairs to catch sun by the front door. I was too busy. I had a novel to write. I told myself that for a few months.
May, and the rain season pulled us under its blankets overnight, as if to make a clean break with summer. Though Panama lies eight degrees north of the Equator, its borrowing of Southern Hemisphere terminology reflects reality—December through April is summer, the dry season, a hot and gusty time for picnics on the beach and lolling about parks in flip flops. Winter is rainfall, cloud cover, wet sneakers, and the smeary softness of mold upon every surface.
There is neither glamor nor financial sense in choosing a profession in the arts.
Initially, I marveled at the sheer weight and clamor of the daily downpours, a superabundance of water unlike anything I had grown up with. I had always wanted to live somewhere that felt so alive, so richly biodiverse. I should have been so thrilled. So grateful.
But the lulls between storms began to haunt me. There was no wind, it seemed. From every window we could see myriad leaf forms from undergrowth into the treetops, from simple lobes to compound clusters, skinny blades to elephant-eared flags, all rain-fed and turgid, and still. Not a breeze to riffle the leaves, not even a whisper to flick a drop of moisture off a leaf tip. Humidity in a rainforest can seem so thick as to be solid, gluing everything in its place. It felt absurd, watching a vine dangling off a branch thirty meters from the ground, free to sway but unable to turn for lack of wind. Between the rains, the forest held its breath, heavy in the throat.
And I, too, was suspended. There is neither glamor nor financial sense in choosing a profession in the arts. You do it because you cannot imagine doing anything else, and in between those sporadic bouts of validation that come from having some ditty published here and there, the work is lonely. I would sit with my internal editor for hours on end, and we went back and forth on the quality of this sentence versus the next, the inadequacies of my daily fruit and fluid consumption, and the worth of my life in general. It was in self-loathing that I woke up in the mornings, with which I sat down to write or argue with myself, with which I chose what to wear and where to go. It was in aimlessness that I cut into a tomato for lunch one day, only to find the flesh around its seeds glowing green.
My mother has been a gardener for as long as I can remember. This is no easy feat, for we lived in Dubai when I was young, where temperatures hit the mid-forties Celsius each summer, and the earth is sand, unable to hold moisture and nutrients. But my mother is a force of nature. Once, she hitched a leg over the bedroom window of our first apartment and disappeared onto a narrow concrete awning over the street below. I was perhaps four years old, and desperately wanted to follow her. I thought I might never see her again, as children sometimes do. She reappeared, as mothers generally do, clutching three small, ripe tomatoes from the plant she had grown from seed in a little pot outside. I do not know how often she had gone out to water it, only that she returned that day, like magic, bearing fruit.
In Dubai, we lived in a series of apartments that my mother filled with a growing collection of house plants. She dusted their leaves, probed the soil around their stems for moisture and airiness, pruned them, and even spoke to them. By the time my parents could afford a house with a garden, my mother had honed the skills she had developed on house plants into a vision of orderly abundance. She selected outdoor plants for their heat tolerance—palms and bougainvillea, succulent ground cover, citrus trees, rosemary, aloe, and a curry tree grown from a sapling procured in India. Among these hardier plants she cultivated fruits and vegetables like eggplants, figs, okra, pomegranates, and tomatoes, taking care to plant the tenderest of these during what passed for winter in Dubai, and watering them judiciously to cope with the heat.
There are photos of our garden taken over ten years that illustrate the fervor of my mother’s caregiving—what started as a sand plot dotted with bare-boned shrubs and spindly trees turned into an oasis, a profusion of color and productivity, dappled shade over the footpaths and veranda, the little lawn meticulously picked clear of leaf litter, every plant trembling with flowers, fruit, and seed pods, a-burr with insects and birds who sought, like us, the solace and sustenance of vegetation.
Perhaps I was reminded of my mother when I cut into the tomato that became the first of my Panama gardening projects. Green is the color of sunlight spit out by cellular machinery that has no use for it. It means that microscopic biochemical processes are converting water and carbon dioxide into sugars. It means cell division, height and girth and inflorescence. More than anything, the vivid green of those tomato seeds signified something I had forgotten. That even if I felt stuck, so much else in this world was yearning for a chance to live that I might as well pay attention, to pass the time.
After the tomatoes came squashes. Chilies, then beans. Onions and garlic I pilfered from groceries. An assortment of seeds from the spice cabinet and some handfuls of lentils from the larder. Not all these germinations were successful, and eventually I began to buy herbs and vegetables from plant nurseries and supermarkets to supplement my efforts. A cluster of cheap pots. Sacks of forest soil. And then, ornamental plants, for the jazziness of their leaves or the promise of their flowers. A silver lace fern, perennial peanut with merry yellow button-blooms, a feathery club moss with leaves that shone blue when the sun caught them. When my in-laws came to visit, they mistook my sudden interest in plants for something sustainable and gifted us three varieties of lantana and a weeping firecracker plant to attract hummingbirds and butterflies to their traffic-light blossoms.
A certain madness can seize a person driven by desperation. I did not know why I was doing it at the time but something had short-circuited inside me and I now lived for these plants. Consider the squashes, for example, all writhing stems and saucer-sized leaves, with flowers bright and floppy as summer skirts. The whip-thin tendrils they put out from each growth node were touch-sensitive and would catch and curl upon anything. I would come out to water the pots and note how they winched themselves into corkscrews around bamboo stakes, a rope trellis, twigs of neighboring shrubs, even each other. By the next morning, their spiral grips would have tightened into green fists, pulling the plant further up and out of its root bed, a creature heaving itself out of the mud to seize the landscape around it.
For every failed starter pot, the squashes put out new growth, and that verve began to replace my emptiness. No, I was not talking to my plants, but I did anthropomorphize them. That is to say, I projected upon them my sense of self. I had become a sessile organism since moving to Panama. I was an uprooted transplant, far from family, disconnected by time and distance from my closest friends. I missed my friends so much that I had resolved not to make any more for fear of the wrenching separation that I knew would come when my spouse and I eventually moved countries again.
So much else in this world was yearning for a chance to live that I might as well pay attention, to pass the time.
The great myth of my generation is that technology connects us even though we no longer stay in our hometowns, because we must seek an education and a living, and the specifics of what we wanted were never guaranteed in the places we were born or raised. But I have yet to have a satisfying cup of tea with a friend over Skype. I have yet to know, let alone alleviate, in the long time between text messages, the ache of a friend’s spiraling dissatisfaction with her life, because I was not there to read her body language. I have yet to write an email to my mother that feels like it does when we speak in person, in a crude alloy of our mixed languages—English and Tamil, inflected with Hindi, punctuated with an emotional register beyond the scope of an emoji panel.
There are people I have not spoken with or written to in years because every time I try to do so online, I am overwhelmed. In a meeting face-to-face we would fill up the time with things of no consequence—the pettiness of a neighbor, the food strikes our cats were on, the snazziness of a new pair of shoes. But what takes precedence now is the desire to say, I miss you, without collapsing into heartbreak. Because there is nothing mundane left to fill the space between us. Instead, we are all just throbbing bundles of nerves who may just be doing alright, but are so often not, and where are the words to explain that state of being without devolving into the most vulnerable versions of ourselves, pixelated and jittery, our voices shot through with static. Where is the nuance in that?
One day, I came out to my squash pot to find the leaves on some of the vines wilted and yellow. I did not think much of it at the time—lack of nutrients, perhaps, or localized shock to one of the stems. But the next day, the yellow leaves were shriveling, and the day after that, they had turned brown. My squashes were dying from their extremities inward and I could not figure out what was causing it. I did some Googling. It might have been stem-boring beetle grubs. It could have been a fungal pathogen. There are kinds of sap-sucking bugs that can inject viruses into plants the same way mosquitoes do, had I considered that?
It became a moot point to try and figure out what was happening to my squashes because a couple of weeks later, they had been weed-whacked out of existence: a miscommunication from our landlord to the handyman who subcontracted the guy with the gas-powered whacker to trim the hedgerow in the front of the house. He had not considered that I had wanted my vines to wander aimlessly, that I had wanted to follow after them.
I did not weep, though I did mourn. But the thing is, I also felt a strange relief. I had never wanted to look after plants in the first place and it had taken me a long time to admit to myself that I was doing so only because I was depressed. I was attempting to keep something under control, and now I could be released from that illusion. I watched the nubbins of my squash stems desiccate and noted what grew up in their stead. I wasn’t expecting much, but the pots went wild, now that I wasn’t supervising them.
The biggest problem I see with maintaining a garden in the tropics—even a few humble plant pots outside the front door—is that it is only through force that one might maintain a boundary between the natural world and the built one. So long as there is sun enough, and rain enough, and life, everywhere ecstatic moving life tucking tendrils and dropping seed-laden droppings into fresh soil, gnawing through roots and cutting windows into leaves and turning corpses into nurseries and nurseries into graveyards, it is entirely possible for a fountain of squash vines to be replaced by a den of ferns blown in by spores. My tomatoes became entangled with a legume I didn’t recognize, its seed dormant in soil I had failed to weed. My orchids died and mosses grew in their stead. My club moss died and grasses colonized its pot.
I ceded command to natural forces. What would come would come, I thought. Within a year of my experiment in tropical gardening, almost nothing remained of what I had planted, and yet every pot overflowed with something that had come from elsewhere. How fabulous, I thought, this displacement. I do not have to tend to either myself or the plants around me, they shall just do what they will and I shall live, vicariously, through their efforts.
I am not sure which came first—sadness or the inability to write. My spouse’s job was renewed, and it became apparent we would live here indefinitely. So, a couple of years after moving to Panama, I adopted two kittens from my neighbors because I felt tired of living as if ready to blow away. I needed to commit to something alive that I would promise to take with me no matter where I went next. My spouse had legs and a passport, a sense of agency. But there, I thought to myself, following my kittens, those are my helpless little roots to tend. When they were old enough, I put harnesses and bright blue leashes on my cats and took them outside on walks. A single cat does not walk very far, and two cats will never walk in the same direction together, so I never left the perimeter of the row house on these excursions, and that suited me just fine. The cats took turns to press through the hedgerow of birds-of-paradise to nibble on unmown grasses. I stood between them, tugged gently on this leash or that to make sure they were always in my line of sight, never able to pounce on wildlife.
My plant pots thrived. My internal editor said I was growing and worshipping weeds but I preferred to call them volunteers because they had chosen these pots, these little neglects I left lying around my house. I took up plant identification, a feebler attempt at control that involved minimal effort, and a lot of reverse-image searching on Google. It was in Panama that I finally learned that globally, most house plants are tropical species, chosen because they would never drop their leaves in controlled indoor climates, even if outside it was blizzarding, or outside, it had not rained for eleven months. Half my mother’s house plants, and nearly half the food plants we ate, could trace their roots to Central or South America. Meanwhile, nearly half the ornamental outdoor plants I had grown and killed through negligence in Panama came from elsewhere in the tropics—Asian or African species chosen for aesthetics or, ironically, ease of growth.
The great myth of my generation is that technology connects us even though we no longer stay in our hometowns.
What does it mean to love plants—gardening, greenery, farming, parks, nature hikes, bouquets, pickling, tabletop hydroponics—when so much of what we do with plants is a pastiche of wild and untended nature? Everywhere I have lived, I’ve been surrounded by disturbance, amalgamations of the natural world in the form of planted, cultivated abundance. All plants are adapted for certain parts of the world—the particular challenges of their climate, the naturally occurring pests and pathogens in their ecosystems. Now, released from these origins, plants show up everywhere simply because someone loves them enough to let them be, regardless of whether they fit. In Dubai, a miniature fig tree at the dentist’s front desk, leaves glossy and ending in drip tips to let rain roll off as quickly as possible, so the plant could breathe—it will never rain in this office, but the fig’s leaves waterfall off the plant in emulation of a downpour. In Mumbai, tomatoes in everything—when my family once tried to cut back on how much we used to cook with, we fell into a funk, so deeply unheartened were we by food that did not run red and sour across our tongues. When I lived in the United States, Kentucky bluegrass painted across lawns in Michigan, Florida, Iowa, peppered with dandelions—one was a weed and the other a status symbol, and neither were eradicable now that they had put down their roots so extensively, now that their seeds were always in the wind.
And when I moved to Panama City—mangoes everywhere. I am not much of a fruit eater by nature but in Panama I wrote execrable poetry about what it meant to eat fresh mangoes so far from home. I picked them off street trees when they were still immature, green and tart as limes, with a resinous undertone that reminded me of pickles and also of the lengths that plants will go to, just to protect their tenderest parts from herbivory. Green mangoes fight your tongue—bitter, acidic, astringent sap that says, We are not for you.
Too bad, I thought, chewing them, You have become me now.
I didn’t belong here, this much I knew. The first inhabitants of this place we call Panama had other names for this region, other ideas of borders. Their descendants include the Naso, Emberá, Wounaan, Guna, Ngäbe, Buglé, and Bribri people. Spaniards claimed their lands. English pirates and Scottish mercenaries. The land became part of Colombia, before Americans helped it secede, only to then bisect the country to control the Canal, an artery of seafaring commerce. Panamanians today include descendants of Afro-Caribbeans who built the Canal and Chinese immigrants who built the railroad that flanked it.
I lived in a house that had been built, at first, as an American army barracks in the Canal Zone—its very rentability a function of that history, for how else does a newly married foreign couple find a home so centrally located in the city, where Panamanians commute two hours each way to work? Socioeconomics determined my ease of travel, my ability to choose a profession that paid sporadically, if at all. To watch, to wonder, to write, to edit, these were unearned privileges I squandered if I did not acknowledge their artifice. This is a painful realization to come to if you grow up loving words and how they sound off the page in your head. Was it any wonder, then, that I found it hard to write?
My only real success in tropical gardening was a moringa sapling my spouse brought home some time in our fourth year of living together, because I had told him so often that this was the source of my favorite food in the world. It was a tender thing, no more than a few delicate compound leaves on the end of a green stem. It could grow into a tree if I’d just let it. If I’d transplant it out of its pot. It could produce drumsticks—long, green, three-sided pods I could stew in tamarind broth, eat over rice, take me back home. I watched it grow in its pot with increasing fascination. Where all my other plants had failed, this one held on.
I am not sure which came first—sadness or the inability to write.
As with every other plant I had invested in, I began to project upon this spindly thing my entire identity. Moringa oleifera was a tree native to India, just like I was. Like me, it was unfussy about its living circumstances. Like me, it didn’t take itself too seriously, putting out copious branches from a slender, not-entirely upright stem. Unlike me, it grew tall—in fact, moringa trees grown for harvest are typically pruned short to reach their fruit. Like me, moringas were soft-wooded, easy to chop down. Like me, they would re-root wherever their broken stems touched ground.
It is unwise to plant non-native plants in a nature reserve, but when my moringa risked toppling over its pot, I gave in, found a shovel, forded my shapeless hedge of birds-of-paradise, and started to dig. The ground here was clay-rich and gummy, studded with rocks. Not a place for orchard trees, but the moringa, once planted in earth, flourished like no other plant I’d ever grown in a pot. Within a year its trunk was wide enough that my hands could not encircle it. It was a shaggy champion—unruly branches sprouting this way and that, reaching higher than the first-floor kitchen. It produced white flowers in little sprays. One year, at long last, it produced fruit. I picked them green. I made vatthalkozhumbu with them. I photo-documented the entire cooking process, astonished that such a thing could occur in a kitchen so far from Chennai, where this recipe was honed and taught to my grandmother, who could never have conceived of how far she would pass it on.
And yet I felt wracked with guilt whenever I looked at my moringa, ebullient in front of the house. I knew enough biology to understand that moringa possessed traits that lent themselves to weediness. It thrived despite nutrient-poor soils or low water availability. If its seed pods dried and snapped open, they could scatter oil-rich seeds to flutter, float, and root who knew where else. It regenerated from cuttings effortlessly.
When a large branch broke off our moringa in a rain storm, my spouse and I heaved it into the carport because I feared we would lose control of it if it resprouted. We took turns to saw the branch into armlength logs. The tree’s bark was thin-skinned and green underneath—meaning it could photosynthesize even without leaves. The logs sat in our carport, turgid as green beans. They put out shoot after desperate shoot from their sawn-off ends, from the nodes where we had snapped off their smaller branches. They tapped every inner reserve the tree had packed them with to give themselves another chance at life. We let the logs desiccate all the way through. It took months before they were truly dead.
Halfway up Cerro Ancon, this verdant forest island in the middle of Panama City, is an open, rocky cliff face. Not much can grow on bare rock exposed to sunlight, where the rain washes straight down. For the first years of my life in Panama, I took this to be just another feature of the landscape, no matter its discordance with the surrounding rainforest. It was only later that I realized that this was a scar—no, a gouging disfiguration—left over from American quarrying activities in the 1900s. Panamanians protested fervently to reclaim the Canal Zone from Americans. Memorial plaques on the summit of Cerro Ancon commemorate their fight for independence. Above my moringa, on the hill crest, the Panamanian flag waved. Below my moringa, I walked my cats on leashes because they were invasive species, and I would not have them killing native lizards or birds. And I was an Indian writer living in Panama off my Dutch spouse’s American income, stockpiling disenchantment with stories on my laptop that felt like lies. Was I not, as well, just a fucking weed?
I gave birth to a child, and a month later we moved from our home of five years to one further up the hill because its walls were built of brick, which the termites could not reclaim. In my final act of gardening, I chopped down the moringa tree to a stump, and dug up the root ball for good measure. My spouse borrowed a pick-up truck and we moved every gnarly root and hacked-down limb to the carport of our new house, to watch over them while they dried out. We froze some leaves for soup. We ate the last of the moringa pods.
At nine months, our child learned to walk, and we took her down the road to show her the old house. Our friends had moved in—Panamanian sisters with proper green thumbs. They had plant pots everywhere, growing herbs, flowering bushes, shrubs that produced fruits. Their cat and dog wandered among the pots and the birds-of-paradise hedge.
We had done a good job too, though. The moringa had not grown back. This is all I really wanted for myself, as well. To flourish for a while before I died. To nourish someone. To leave no greater trace.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover ofIntrovert Pervertby Jendi Reiter, which will be published March 10, 2026 by Word Works Books. You can pre-order your copyhere!
As witty as it is honest, as dark as it is blindingly bright, Jendi Reiter’s poetry collection Introvert Pervert weaves pop culture, personal experience, and lightning intellect to explore our American trauma, our “reptilian sludge,” and our absolute and complete need for love—and to love.
Here is the cover, designed by Susan Pearce with art by Jendi Reiter:
Jendi Reiter: When planning this collage, I was envisioning an image that would combine flamboyance and concealment. Sources that inspired me include Nick Cave’s “Soundsuits” sculptures and the queer collage anthology Cock, Paper, Scissors. My collages often juxtapose homoerotic magazine photos with “wholesome” and “feminine” scrapbooking materials as a way of integrating my past girlhood with my present as a trans man—both rebelling against good-girl repression, and reclaiming those colors and textures that have always given me sensory joy regardless of gender assignment.
Susan Pearce: Working with this bold image, I felt the lettering should be supportive but not overwhelming. I chose the magenta color to anchor the image at the bottom. Matching the color in the headdresses, I chose cyan to pull the eye upward towards the title.
Sometimes when I lie down, I feel sad and lonely. I think how my momma must have hollered when they were beating her with the pinta broom. I can’t use pinta broom no more. I stop sweep my yard. When I go feed the chickens wallowing in their own mess out there, I can’t look at them. There was a time when chickens were my passion. I groomed them and took them to compete in fairs all over this country. That was before things started going downhill around here. It’s January and things are still going downhill.
It started last month when the men arrived in the evening. I was standing on the veranda, playing the game I’ve been at since I was small, willing the sun not to go down. If the sun goes down, it means tomorrow is here and tomorrow means more work. When you live in the country, all you do is work. Even chickens are a kind of work. The men were doing their work riding in on donkeys to tell me my momma dead. They drove me to the next village over, and sure enough she dead out like they said, but I could only tell it was her from the collared shirt, soaked red in places. She didn’t have a face left. All our old women wear collared shirts tucked into oversized skirts, but I used to make her pin a kerchief to her blouse, just like the girls in primary do. We had to take those kinds of precautions with her. That’s how I was able to say to the men what they wanted to hear, so they could get her off their hands, you know?
That’s from the beating, the man carrying a bag of groceries said. His wife was going to make pumpkin curry and roti with tea for dinner. It was a popular dish in our village. He showed me the brooms they’d used. They asked if I wanted to take she home and I thought about how much work it would be to heist her and walk for both myself and her in that heat. I couldn’t wait to crawl underneath the mosquito netting and catch a five. We were already in the season for mosquito netting. Half of the night already gone.
I took her back for Dadi’s sake and mumbled an apology to the strangers. Many of them, excepting the mothers and babies, had come outside and made a big fuss over me. I hadn’t made it into town to get a haircut yet. I could tell my long hair disturbed them. Plus, I had feathers sticking out of everywhere. They wondered if I was an accomplice, but my English put them at ease. Cut-up English means advancement. The truth was I’d gotten no further in school than any of them. I shook my head like I’d seen Dadi do whenever his shirt wasn’t ironed properly or his rice was cooked too hard. The man with the groceries called for his wife to bring me a glass of lime water for my troubles. She emerged from a house that looked like mine. I could see how my momma got confused. His wife was too pretty to live in the country.
I asked Dadi if he wanted me to run out to buy oil. Everywhere was closed but the family of one of my school friends owned a shop. I could knock at any hour and he would give me what I want. He slept in the back of the shop because of thief-man. The smell will wake the whole village, Dadi said. He didn’t want people to know it finally happen. He wanted them to know on their own time. He was the kind of man to see things through, in his own way. He didn’t want to leave her on the veranda overnight because of the strays, and nowadays you have to watch out for people.
But no one was going to miss her. That’s why I think the two of us made such a show of things. Dadi dug and I lifted the sack and tossed it in and we sat right there, in our backyard by the rotting dungs tree, looking into the abyss that the body had fallen into, a body now indiscernible in the darkness. He cried and I cried, and then we cried more. Starting was hard, but once we started, it was easy to keep going, too easy, and we had to keep looking sideways at each other to make sure the other wasn’t taking it too far, hadn’t toppled over into despair. For good measure I threw in my watch. Dadi gave me that watch when I started primary school. My wrists were too small, so he bore extra holes in the band with his pocketknife and while he was cutting he said, Whatever they teach you, don’t take on, because taking on is how people trip out. My momma didn’t always stay so. She take on and then she was only good for cooking doubles and selling them by the roadside, but then she couldn’t do that either and Dadi said one day she was going to walk into the wrong village and they was going to—my wrist felt naked and strange. I had to keep touching my hand to make sure it was still mine, keep looking sideways to make sure Dadi was still there.
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.
