I’ve dated my fair share of drummers. Same goes for guitarists, lead singers. There are songs out there that were written about me. Maybe you’ve heard one. Maybe you liked it.
I liked it too, once. But here’s the thing: I’ve also been a drummer, a guitarist, a lead singer. So why did I long to be someone else’s muse? Why did I invest time, desire, and displacement of my own creative goals to be the object of someone else’s?
The truth is that this is how many of us – many young women, not exclusively but especially – have been taught to be loved: as an object. We are trained to be observed, to be described, to be “captured” by the artist’s brushstroke or the author’s pen. We’re told, explicitly and tacitly, that this is our highest calling. And we’re expected to be grateful.
This is how many of us have been taught to be loved: as an object.
This idea was top-of-mind when I read Vincenzo Barney’s recent piece in Vanity Fair about Cormac McCarthy’s lifelong relationship with a “secret muse” that began when she was sixteen and he was forty-two.Augusta Britt, whom the article exhaustively touts as the titular “muse,” describes her experience:
“And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?”
Augusta Britt is a tremendously accomplished, intelligent, and demonstrably independent person who knows her way around horses and guns in a way that Cormac McCarthy never did. Her language reveals someone who’s perspicacious and original. And yet, both McCarthy and his nascent biographer seem keen on reducing Britt to the role of muse.
In the days since the Vanity Fair essay was published, it’s been rightfully, extensively lambasted. Much has been said about the age differential between McCarthy and Britt (definitely illegal and unambiguously pedophilic), and about the abysmal prose (eye-roll-triggering gems include “reading the blue ink meant for her blue eyes”), but I’d like to focus on something else. I’d like to talk about the idea of the muse.
The word “muse” appears no fewer than thirteen times in the essay, fourteen if you count the title. Its usage is not only borderline incessant but unnervingly lofty, and absolutely aligned with the hegemonic use of the term. The tone is one of awe, of reverence for someone (something) not quite human. I recognize the timbre: a compliment to one’s intelligence, humor, or ability as icing on the cake of “feminine aura.” But both icing and cake, of course, are meant to be consumed.
Under the pretense of flattery, designating someone a muse is insidiously derogatory, even denigrating. Even McCarthy seems to have understood the danger of this dynamic; during research for Blood Meridian, he wrote to Britt: “You are becoming something of an abstraction and I don’t think that’s so good. Need flesh and blood. Touch and feel. Actually, you’re something of an abstraction anyway. I have trouble coming to grips with the reality of you.” In further correspondence, McCarthy shares “sexy dreams” in which Britt is literally (and literarily) reduced to a [manic pixie] dream girl, a figment of the author’s fantasy.
Idolatry and debasement are two sides of the same coin. Whether the locus is a pedestal or a prison, both are forms of objectification, the reduction of the human to the non-human, the physical to the abstract. The very notion of the muse is dehumanizing. So why do we safeguard – even celebrate – this particular strain of artistic fetishization?
McCarthy and his nascent biographer seem keen on reducing Britt to the role of muse.
The answer is as simple as it is with most acts of violation: power.
Interestingly, the term muse was originally rife with power. Early usage of the termis in the realm of “protector of the arts.” That’s pretty badass – I’d love to be known as a protector of the arts. But by the 1800s, muse had taken on its more contemporary instantiation: that of a person, usually a young woman, whose function is to inspire the creative work of a typically older male.
Now, let me note: I don’t love making things about gender. This was about gender long before I came on the scene; and art, in this case, unfortunately very much imitates life. As reported by the International Labour Organization, women globally perform more than three times as much uncompensated care work as men. This invisible labor of care – of housekeeping and child-rearing but also of attention, of sex, of ego-stroking, of being quiet and holding still – is a calling card of the muse. The role requires one to decenter the self, to function in the orbit of another person’s gravity.
Another calling card of the muse is expendability. Like all not-quite-humans, they’re easily killed off. Characters inspired by Augusta Britt, for example, have a body count of at least nine. Not to be overly dramatic, but these are serial killer numbers.
Considering the deterioration of the muse from protector to pet, one is put in mind of other uses of art and language to reduce power. Think of the Old Testament angels, flaming-sword-wielding beings reduced in oil paintings to mini-winged infants. Or – far more recently and harrowingly – formidable two-spirit Taíno warriors reduced to effete savages in the writings of European colonizers who were daunted by concepts of gender considerably more nuanced than their own.
Whether the site of colonization is a land, a people, or a body, the project is exploitation. And the modus operandi of colonizers – and of proponents of the muse – is to take something they desire but don’t understand, something of which (or whom) they’re afraid, and to generate an artificial hierarchy that reduces it, even if (especially if) it’s innately greater.
For those who see everything outside of themselves as expendable for their art, anyone and anything that isn’t the artist can be reduced to a muse, from young women to nature itself. This tendency is apparent in the Vanity Fair essay too – the writer exhibits a near constant proclivity toward self-centering. Barney (and other users of the muse) tend to write as though a thing were one’s experience of the thing. He at one point compares the spectacular phenomenon of a rainbow to “the execution line on a document” and refers to “the menacing 116-degree sun.” Now, as a writer, I’m all for figurative language but, at the risk of being a bit granular, the sun is not 116 degrees. The sun is approximately twenty-seven million degrees Fahrenheit. And at the risk of being a bit broad, writers with an intrinsically colonial mentality write as though the world – and everything in it – belongs to them.
Language matters. Writing has the power to reduce and erase just as surely as it has the capacity to empower. There’s a significant difference between navigating real-life inspiration with dignity, courage, and care versus raiding the lives of others for sport.
Writing has the power to reduce and erase just as surely as it has the capacity to empower.
I’ve been guilty of the latter on both sides. As a muse, I’ve relished the attention, the view from the pedestal. As a writer, I’ve at times exploited others like I was doing them a favor. Now, I’m working on resisting the writer’s oft-fetishized solipsism in favor of invitation, collaboration, and consent.
At a recent event at Beacon Hill Bookstore in Boston, a very kind attendee asked about the origin of the title of my first book, Stories No One Hopes Are About Them. I was delighted to be honest: at one point, as a musician, I’d had enough with being a muse – with the entire premise – and was working on an album titled Songs No One Hopes Are About Them. In an act of self-reappropriation, I pivoted the title toward fiction. I aimed to write about people who transition from the object of others’ realities to the subjects of their own. I wanted to write about power. I wanted to write about degradation and agency. I wanted to write about the latent strength of muses, and the privileged myopia of those who keep them. I wanted to write with hope.
Here, I want to acknowledge myself (a human) addressing you, reader (also a human).
To anyone who may currently be a muse: Your value is not predicated on anyone else. Only when we acknowledge one another as others – as humans, as artists, as persons with autonomy and creative force – will we do our best work.
To anyone who sees themself in the story of Augusta Britt: your story being told on your terms matters.
And to everyone: You’re not an object. You’re not an idea. And you’re definitely no one’s goddamn muse.
Girls who dream of becoming models are often looked down upon as shallow, desperate, and insipid—victims of a society that teaches women that their greatest value is youth and beauty. While the fashion industry is undeniably ripe for the exploitation of the young and vulnerable, models retain a mythic power in our cultural imagination. There’s a meaningful difference, under capitalism, between being beautiful and being professionally beautiful. Modeling isn’t just a job; it’s a beautiful job, implying a beautiful life, where work doesn’t look or feel like work.
At sixteen, I got closer to the dream than some (the semi-finals of a mall model search), but not close enough to dispel it’s power. Even as it became clear that I’d never make money off parading around in interesting clothes, the idea of doing so—of all the different versions of myself I could be—appealed in a similar way to writing fiction. More than being beautiful, I would argue that models are powerful because they are chameleonic, blurring the lines between embodiment and imagination, self and performance, flesh and fantasy. As such, they make for fascinating characters.
In West Girls, suburban teen Luna Lewis takes the performance of identity to extremes, styling herself as a mixed-race model ‘Luna Lu’. As well as being an answer to a lifelong ‘what-if’ (what if I had what it took, what if the dream became reality), Luna belongs to a tradition of literary women who turn to modeling in pursuit of a beautiful life and find more (and less) than they bargained for. The following list of books about models, ranging from young adult fiction to critical thinking, exposes the contradictory ugliness and transcendence of being professionally beautiful.
Hot Or What by Margaret Clark
A fixture of Australian school libraries, Margaret Clark’s Lisa Trelaw quartet follows the trials and tribulations of former ‘beached whale’ Lisa, who is scouted while working in her family’s hot dog van. The second book in the series, Hot Or What takes place in the cesspit of mid-nineties Sydney, where Lisa (rebranded as ‘Rebel’) is living in a model apartment. This retro Young Adult classic doesn’t shy from the grot of midnight 7/11 binges and purges, yet it’s also a bit camp (Lisa’s patron is named ‘Moira Sloane’) and packed with observational humour about Sydney’s upper echelons. Plus, the throwback slang is a delight.
Nobody does ugly feminine longing quite like Mary Gaitskill and Veronica, published in 2005, is Gaitskill at her finest. Moving backwards and forwards in time, it centres on Alison, a diseased model-turned-cleaner languishing in northern California, and her inexplicable connection with the late Veronica. Daggy, uptight, and in love with a gay man who has infected her with AIDs, Veronica is an object of contempt, fascination, and, ultimately, deep fidelity for Alison. As well as its heartrending portrayal of an unlikely friendship, Veronica is masterful exploration of the amoral, subterranean allure of physical beauty. As Alison observes, ‘Here is Beauty in a white dress. Here is the pumping music, grinding her into meat and dirt.’
If there was ever an industry calling for an anthropological investigation, it’s fashion. Originally published in French, this 2019 study by Italian academic Giulia Mensitieri exposes the labour conditions of fashion’s disposable slaves to genius: (non-super) models, interns, assistants, hair-and-makeup artists. While the surface details of these workers’ exploitation are exotic (models paid in Miu Miu rather than money, moonlighting as mannequins for Saudi billionaires’ wives), the underlying circumstances will be eerily familiar to any precariat ‘passion labourer’—writers included.
Meat Market by Juno Dawson
I never demand likeability of fictional characters, yet it’s hard not to love Jana Novak, the heroine of Juno Dawson’s Meat Market, a 2019 novel. A gangly South London girl from an immigrant family, Jana gets into modeling for some extra dosh. Grounded and intelligent, she is nevertheless believably vulnerable to the industry’s dizzying heights, exploitative lows, and crushing boredom. Tackling big themes—from #MeToo to class to casual sex– for a YA audience without being preachy is no small feat, but Dawson does so with absolute facility.
Black, statuesque, and Sorbonne-educated, Jadine Childs is a high fashion model with a white patron, a white millionaire boyfriend, and a sealskin coat. Son is a fugitive sailor. On a lavish Caribbean island estate, their paths cross, igniting a complicated romance. This relatively forgotten 1981 novel is lush, erotic, and delves into internalised racism, misogyny, the social stratification of beauty with Morrison’s signature poetic intelligence.
Charlotte Swenson, a falling star of Manhattan’s fashion scene, gets into a near-fatal car crash outside her hometown in Illinois, becoming unrecognisable. While the premise of Jennifer Egan’s second novel could be the jumping-off point for deep-dive into the beauty and disfigurement, the concerns of Look At Me are much broader: small town life, family madness, industrialisation, American dreams and nightmares, the construction and commodification of identity. It’s an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink novel, and doesn’t always cohere, yet it’s packed with ideas and weirdly prescient about online self-curation.
I expected Allie Rowbottom’s 2022 debut, which follows an ex-Instagram model’s reversal of the cosmetic enhancements she underwent in her youth, to be both body horrific and psychologically disturbing. I didn’t expect it to be so elegiac. Like Veronica, Aesthetica is laced with grief: over youthful missteps, abuses, failures to thrive and connect. I came for an ironic literary take on fillers and BBLs, yet it’s the image of teenaged Anna thumbing through her phone while her mother dies of cancer that has stayed with me most.
I wasn’t meant to be a dancer. It happened only because our north-facing window looked across the courtyard and into the apartment of a Ukrainian couple: a slender, soft-spoken mailman named Sergei Kostiuk and his cheerful and dark-haired wife. That family’s apartment was a diorama for my curious and bored eyes, as is often the case in compressed quarters of poor neighborhoods—although I didn’t yet think of myself as poor.
The Kostiuks had a son my age called Seryozha, whose padding around the rooms in a white sleeveless top and underwear is one of the earliest images I can recollect. Seryozha’s arms were all one thickness from shoulder to wrist, and he was pale, thin, and soft in a way that reminded me of a Q-tip. Like the other boys in our class, he filled me with disdain. I hated how they spoke in short, overlapping shouts that only they could understand, how they pulled on girls’ ponytails, the dirt caked under their nails, their damp smell like earthworms. Out of them, Seryozha was the worst because he constantly ran into me outside of school. When we crossed paths in the stairway I looked coldly away, although Mama said I should be nice to him because he was nice to me. I was sure Seryozha was only nice to me because his mama was saying behind our backs that I was nice to him. And so, on and on it went, the chain of mothers who forced their children to be nice to their neighbors’ children.
It was a cold and raw Sunday morning. A sense of resignation coursed through the dead leaves and fallen apples strewn in the courtyard. The crows on the electric lines started cawing and Seryozha turned to his window—he caught me staring, turned red, and disappeared. A little later the yellow curtains of his room were drawn hastily shut. The birds cried louder, then lifted off as Sveta entered the courtyard below.
Something that I learned from her is that some women are beautiful even from above. I called out to Mama, “Sveta is here!”
She opened our door before Mama had a chance to do a quick sweep around the apartment. Sveta—as I called her instead of Aunt Svetlana, at her insistence—had been visiting us as long as I could remember. Even as I grew older and Mama went to the theater more, Sveta enjoyed the tea, gossip, and bespoke adjustments Mama made for her at our home. She kissed Mama’s cheeks and the top of my head while pulling off her tight-fitting leather gloves, one finger at a time. Then she stood in front of Mama’s sewing table, exuding glamour at ten in the morning on a Sunday. It was the small details that proved fatal in ballet, Sveta said. Her Lilac Fairy costume was too tight in the bodice; the shoulder straps restricted the movement of her arms as she leaped onto the stage for her variation, so she couldn’t get any ballon. Sveta had asked the chief seamstress of the women’s costume department to loosen the straps so they could fall slightly off-shoulder, but the answer was a firm no. This was the costume design from the original 1890 production of The Sleeping Beauty, and changing something at the whim of a mere second soloist went against everything that the Mariinsky stood for, which was tradition—the very fabric of ballet passed down from feet to feet for two centuries. As Sveta said this, I imagined pointe shoes trampling all over the theater’s pale blue velvet curtains fringed with gold tassels.
Mama told Sveta not to worry and then ordered me to go play in the living room. I turned on the TV and sat on the floor, where Mama had laid out the finished costumes to be steamed. The news program ended, and a black-and-white figure of a ballerina appeared on the screen. She looked like Sveta, with long thin legs ending in pinpricks of pointe shoes—and she bounded off those sharp feet with one leg reaching high behind her so that it almost grazed her marvelous backbend. Her every movement was quick and spry like a sparrow’s, as if she barely needed to touch the ground. But what I really couldn’t resist was the music. I ran to our room to get my tutu that Mama sewed out of scrap tulle. I pulled it over my hips and started mimicking the dancer on the screen, shouting, “Mama, Sveta, look at me!” I turned up the volume of the TV, knowing that would annoy them. But I’d miscalculated how much I could push my luck, and a fatal back-bending jump sent me landing right on top of Mama’s piles of costumes.
Before my foot slid out from underneath me and my bottom crashed to the floor, Mama rushed over screaming. “I didn’t mean to,” I began to say, curled up on the floor. I could feel the beginnings of a massive bruise on my bottom, but I didn’t dare cry in front of Mama. She shushed me and examined the pieces one by one. There was a finger-length tear on a soft white tulle tutu, and she ran to the fabric closet in our room, swallowing curse words. When I made trouble like this, Mama whipped me with her belt. I wondered if she’d do that then—and suddenly I didn’t want to dance or wear a tutu or do anything, I didn’t want to live. I reached over and grabbed Sveta’s hand, and she folded me into her stomach.
“Sveta,” I closed my eyes and whispered. “Please take me with you.”
She stroked my hair and patted my back, the way I wished Mama would do more often. She then crouched down to kiss my cheeks, and said, “Natashka, I can’t.”
I stepped back from her in disappointment, but she held on to my shoulders and smiled. “I saw you dancing. Do you know what ballet that was?”
I shook my head.
“That was a solo from a ballet called Don Quixote. What you did is called a Kitri jump. How old are you, Natashka?”
“Seven,” I said, rolling my eyes to the ceiling while recalling the few significant dates in my short life. It was 1992 and I was actually seven and three months old. Less than a year ago, all the flags had been changed from red and yellow to white, blue, and red.
“Well. I’m going to tell your mama that you should start taking ballet, as soon as possible. You’re the rarest thing for a woman dancer, and by that, I mean you’re a jumper, Natalia Leonova.”
Sveta left early, promising to return soon for more gossip and fittings. The minute she walked out, Mama called me to her and boxed my ear hard. Just once, so I would know she meant only to set me in my place, to make me behave and not act so wild. It was not because she hated me—in fact it was because she loved me, she told me later while snuggling me tightly in her arms. I believed her words, the warmth of our creaky bed, her gentle hand caressing my head, which she kept reassuringly moving like an oar dipping into a lake, even though she was so tired. She was so tired that she sometimes fell asleep with her eyes open, but she would keep stroking my head for hours until I forgot that she’d struck me with that same hand. This was what love was, I thought—being able to forgive. But it was not happiness.
I knew that Mama couldn’t teach me happiness because she’d never been happy. At least not since Nikolai—a name that was within my name, yet so unfamiliar to me. Mama never talked about him with me; everything I know, I heard through whispered conversations between Mama and Sveta when they thought I was asleep. Mama met Nikolai while working as an alterations seamstress at a department store. Two men, rather shabbily dressed, walked in one day wanting to buy winter suits and coats and tailor them on the spot. They were friends who lumbered out in Sakhalin in the Far East; they had just come out for a month-long vacation after an eighteen-month run. The short, skinny, polite, clean-shaven one was Pavel, and the tall, blond, bearded, silent, and somewhat wild-eyed one was Nikolai. They were both flush with their wages that they hadn’t had the chance to spend for a year and a half. During that time, they had caught a glimpse of fewer than five women on the entire island of Sakhalin. Both were eager to do something with their money and to hold a woman close. And it so happened that Nikolai was the one who spoke to Mama first, which set the tone for all the rest that followed. If Pavel had been the one to approach her, Nikolai would have fallen respectfully behind his friend, and Mama would have gone along for the ride just the same, only her entire life would have been different.
Mama hemmed the coats for the two friends and they asked her to join them for dinner after her shift. After a few days of meeting like that, Pavel naturally fell away and Nikolai and Mama spent time together alone. Mama had not been courted until then. No one had bought her boxes of chocolates or walked the scenic way along the canals instead of taking the Metro. Nikolai quoted from the poets and asked Mama about her girlhood; and when she explained how lonely she’d felt her entire life, he wrapped her tightly in his arms and squeezed all the breath—and sadness—out of her. Nikolai, whose father had downed a bottle of vodka a day, ran away from home when he was fourteen and had been making his own way ever since. The only friends and family he had in the world were books and trees; he stared into loneliness every time his eyes opened in the morning. But not anymore—he told her, interlacing his hand with hers. His every word, glance, and kiss burned her like hot coal. In short, Mama fell in love with Nikolai.
At the end of the month, Nikolai flew back to Sakhalin, promising to call and write as often as he could. He did call every week for a number of months—even after Mama told him she was pregnant. Later she gave birth and had to stop working at the department store, and Nikolai started sending her money, too. I was already nine months old when he came to visit on leave. He spent hours playing with me, reading out loud from Pushkin and rocking me to sleep. Only on a few occasions, he disappeared and came back the next morning, saying he went out with his logging buddies and lost track of time. Mama was so relieved to see him, and the time she could spend with him was so short anyway, that she immediately forgave him.
Some months after Nikolai returned to the lumberyard, Mama couldn’t get a hold of him. He didn’t pick up, so she would leave messages. Did he miss her and Natasha? Did he still love her? He called her back, and they talked briefly about her concerns until he went back to work. This happened several more times—anywhere between four to a dozen times, her memory falters—but what Mama does remember is that, during what was to become their last phone call, he quoted to her these lines from Dante: “Take heart. Nothing can take our passage from us / When such a power has given warrant for it.”
By this time, his designated month-long vacation was drawing near. Mama believed that he would show up one day bearing a box of chocolates and toys for me. Incredibly, she never lost this faith until the last day of what was supposed to be his leave. When even that day passed without any sign of Nikolai, Mama would have gone mad if only she hadn’t had a toddler to feed and raise. Nikolai hadn’t sent money in months, and she had no idea how she could work. One winter day, when she had mustered enough energy to take a walk with me in a stroller, a gentleman in a familiar coat called out to her on the street. It was Pavel, wearing the same dark green wool gabardine coat she had sold to him, a lifetime ago it seemed. Nikolai had one exactly like it, she couldn’t help but recall at the same time. A thought crossed rapidly in her mind that she’d much rather have seen Nikolai in that coat instead, and this weakness shamed her as Pavel reached out his two gloved hands and wrapped them around her own. Pavel had gotten out of lumbering in the past year—he’d made enough to buy a co-op apartment for him and his new wife. After listening to him for a while, heart pounding from impatience, Mama finally asked in a shaky voice if he’d had any news of Nikolai—she was afraid he had been killed in a logging accident. Pavel looked at a loss for words, studying the face of the toddler in the stroller. Finally he said, very sadly, “I respect you so much, Anna Ivanovna; it hurts me that neither truth nor lie can bring you any comfort. In that case I think you might prefer hearing the truth. Nikolai is well. He found a better-paying post in Vladivostok, which isn’t so wild as Sakhalin. I didn’t know he stopped calling you.”
The only way to ensure that you don’t get left behind is for you to be the one to leave.
To Mama’s credit, she did not break down in tears out there on the plaza. She thanked Pavel for giving her this news with integrity and compassion. To Pavel’s credit, he did everything he could to help this woman whom, after all, he’d only met for a few days, several years ago at this point. His wife knew a makeup artist at Mariinsky, and through her he got Mama some sewing work that she could do at home.
So I learned early on that the most painful thing in the world is uncertainty. Not knowing whom to trust. Not knowing who will stay. The only way to ensure that you don’t get left behind is for you to be the one to leave.
When I lay in bed at night, I didn’t fantasize about getting married in a white wedding dress as did other girls, I fantasized about leaving. But instead of disappearing like Nikolai, I dreamed of becoming so famous that the only way the ones I left behind could see my face would be in photographs, in newspapers.
At the artist entrance, an unfamiliar porter is listening to Puccini on the radio. When I walk in, he stops humming, uncrosses his legs, and gets up from his swivel stool so abruptly that it skids to the back wall.
“Natash—Natalia Nikolaevna,” he stammers. “I am so—it is wonderful to see you again.”
I am ashamed to admit that I don’t remember him at all. “Please, just Natasha,” I say. “I’m here to take class.”
“Yes, of course.” The porter smiles nervously, smoothing down his dwindling hair with one hand and gesturing toward the hallway with the other. When I’m about to turn away, he stops me by my elbow.
“Natasha,” he reaches and clasps my hand, which costs me a great deal of effort not to flinch.
“Welcome back to Mariinsky,” he intones rather formally, and when I smile and thank him, he releases me with an expression of terrified joy.
The dressing room is empty, and so quiet that the second hand of the yellow-faced wall clock can be heard. It’s three minutes past eleven; the company class has already begun. I change into one of the brand-new leotards and tights. Without looking at a mirror, I rake my hair up into a bun. Inside ballet slippers, my feet begin to feel more alive and alert, connecting to the floor, lifting my kneecaps, turning out my hips. My shoulder blades pull down and back, my neck lengthens upright. A shocked relief courses through my body. I recognize myself again for a moment, like a candle flame enlarging and then coming into focus.
A trickle of music seeps into the dressing room, and I follow it out the hallway. The studio door has been left open. They are doing pliés, and as I slip inside to find a spot at the barre, all eyes turn to me—the ones facing me and even the ones facing away, who are staring at me in the mirror. They are expressionless. I cannot tell whether they are happy to see me or hostile—except Nina, who flashes me the briefest, kindest smile from her perch. Out of habit, I scan the room in vain for Seryozha. Not seeing him here gives my heart a brief, sharp sensation like a pinprick under your nail. The only person resolutely not looking at me is Katia Reznikova, who at forty-one is still ravishingly beautiful and commanding as only true primas can be. All this transpires before the pliés finish and Dmitri stands before the company with a hand on his hip, announcing, “Natasha will be guesting in the fall season, dancing Giselle with TaeHyung. Please welcome her back.”
A scattered round of applause, led mostly by Nina. I find a space at the barre and do a few pliés on my own before jumping into battement tendus with the others. Without any conscious thought, my toes activate against the floor like they’re plucking harp strings. That simple and ingrained movement floods me with an exquisite consciousness of my body; and it shocks me to realize that for the very first time since the accident, I am hopeful. But during frappés, the pain returns to my feet, traveling up to my ankles, then calves. A short center combination makes both my ankle and arch collapse, and I’m hopping out of a single pirouette. When Dmitri gives a basic coda ending in a fouetté, I have no choice but to leave the studio rather than expose my complete inability to execute what was once my signature.
In the dressing room, I slump down on the bench with elbows on my knees, cradling the weight of my head in my palms. When the faint trickling of the piano stops, I pick up my things and walk out.
Dmitri is waiting outside the door, leaning against the wall like an adolescent.
“Let’s talk in my office,” he says in a neutral voice, devoid of his usual mocking tone.
“It’s really not necessary,” I reply, sounding colder than I intend or feel. “Look, Dmitri. Aside from all the things in our past—I appreciate the confidence you’ve shown me. It was tempting, I admit. But as you can see yourself, I can’t do this.” For a second, I worry that I might break down while saying this. But my eyes remain dry—there are no more emotions I have left for this situation.
“We don’t have to go up. Let’s just talk in here.” Dmitri walks inside an empty studio and motions for me to follow. Since I have come to take his class, I at least owe him a conversation. Dmitri sits down on a chair in front of the mirrors, and I take a seat next to him. He smoothes his hair away from his face and exhales, and says something I didn’t expect.
“Tell me about your injury.”
After so many years of knowing Dmitri, he remains an enigma—not just to me, but to most of the world—which is probably why my eyes pool with moistness at the hint of something that, in anyone else’s voice, could be construed as compassion. His sudden openness catches me off guard and compels me to speak.
“Arches. Achilles. Calves also—but mostly down in feet and ankles.”
“Which side? Both?”
“Both.”
We are silent for a while. In the next room, the accompanist has begun playing the Act III pas de deux in La Bayadère, a sound as calm and luminous as spun moonlight. Moonlight, fountains, clinking of glasses, Dmitri’s laughter with my friends as I hid in a corner in pain. The memory comes alive as the swelling, throbbing pain in my feet—and then as fresh anger.
“My injury is because of you.”
Dmitri snaps his gaze onto me. “Natasha, I know you’re not my fan. But let’s be fair. I didn’t cause you to get hurt.”
“If it weren’t for you—” I struggle to string my words. “No accident.”
All traces of what I thought was compassion disappear from his face. “I wasn’t even there, Natasha. I—” He raises his eyebrows and emits a short laugh of disgust.
“You used to be someone who took responsibility for her own life. At the very least, I liked that about you.”
More silence. The pair in the next studio must be talking, working through the difficult lifts and transitions. After a minute, the piano restarts fitfully.
“Here’s what I think,” Dmitri begins again. “It wasn’t right to jump straight into company class. Let’s get you working slowly back up with your own pedagogue. And we’ll get you started on physiotherapy. I know you can do it.”
“It’s not possible,” I say weakly. Dmitri becomes impatient again.
“Natasha, I was watching you during class. Do you really want to know my opinion?” He fixes his grass-colored eyes on me, and I shrug.
“Your injury,” he says, tapping the side of his temple. “It’s mostly, if not all, in your head.”
On the way out, I pass by the next room rehearsing La Bayadère and see Nina working with her partner. She breaks protocol by stopping midsequence, causing the piano to peter off; and then she comes over to lock me in a tight embrace.
“I have a break in thirty minutes. Let’s get tea,” Nina says, standing close so I can see a cropping of lines on her forehead and the lovely flush of her cheeks. There is a new slackness to her skin over her neck, collarbones, and knees, which would not be discernible on stage. It is unexpectedly attractive off stage, in the way a white shirt feels more elegant after a few hours’ wear, when it’s not so pristinely pressed. Also new: shooting stars threading across the midnight black of her center-parted hair. Nina makes aging look like an adornment. I find myself mesmerized by her appearance, as if meeting an actress in real life—because so much of her now lives only in my memories.
“I’m so sorry, Nina,” I implore. “We have to catch up, but I’m exhausted right now. You saw me earlier, so you know why. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“You really are coming back?” she asks doubtfully, and I nod. Her face softens with relief because the Natasha she knew would stop at nothing to fulfill what she said she’d do. Nina doesn’t know that this Natasha is gone. All I can think of now, standing with a parched throat and inflamed feet, is the Xanax on my bedside table. The pills are rattling like white bees in their bottle—soon they will take me to a room covered in down pillows, floor to wall to ceiling. I so look forward to the feeling that a tear forms at the corner of my eye. Nina sees this, mistakes it for the normal disappointment of a bad class, and pats me soothingly on my arm.
“It will get better. See you tomorrow, Natasha.”
Before I met Nina, I’d never had a real friend. I was always alone at school. It’s not that I didn’t want to make friends; but the other girls instinctively sensed that I was different. They were lambs—soft, pretty, playful, easily satisfied, happy in flocks. I didn’t have such endearing qualities. I was not good-looking, rich, pleasant, or noticeably bright. I was already serious and brooding, and my obsessive nature grated and exhausted me without a proper focus. What helped me later didn’t make me an ideal lunch companion in primary school. I dimmed the light behind my eyes, laughed at their jokes, and hid that thing that burned inside me, sometimes like ember and other times like molten rock. A secret power that others couldn’t fathom. I concealed this part of me at home, too, so that Mama wouldn’t have one more thing to upset her. It was only when I was alone that I didn’t have to act like what I was not—and only then did I not feel as if bursting into flames from the roots of my hair to my toes.
One day after school, I was walking home alone through the snow-packed streets. This was my favorite time of day, when I could be free to regard the world—even if that world was just bare black trees, brick buildings, and white fumes rising from smokestacks and pouring into the sun-blushed sky. In the summertime, the burning smell stung my nose and I ran as fast as I could. But now the iciness sealed everything cleanly and I breathed in only the pure scent of snow. As the wind blew and the evening chill set in, the crows began cawing from electric lines, tops of buildings, even the thin air where you couldn’t see but still hear them. Then above their cacophony, a sound of rapid footsteps was layered over my own, and momentarily my blood froze. Before I panicked, he caught up to me.
“Natasha.” It was Seryozha, with bright red cheeks. Like a couple of baby turtles on the sand, we used to clumsily overtake each other in height so that he was taller one year and I taller the next. This was evidently Seryozha’s year: he’d grown since I last stood so close to him, and I could see that he was now the exact height of a standing piano—which made me look up at him by a few centimeters. A little breathless, his blond hair swept up from the run, he asked if I would come with him to a party. It turned out that a certain Reznikov, his father’s boss’s boss, not just a postmaster but someone at the Ministry of Communications, was hosting a New Year’s party. Despite their difference in rank, the Reznikovs met the Kostiuks because their daughter used to train at Seryozha’s ballet school. I hadn’t known that he had been taking ballet lessons since he was three, and stared at him until his cheeks looked smeared with beet juice. I had never been to a party before. I said yes and Seryozha’s eyes brightened so that I could clearly see the starbursts of his blue irises. Somehow they reminded me, briefly, of snowflakes.
On the night of the party, which was very cold, the Kostiuks and I took the Metro to the Reznikovs’ apartment. After getting out of the station, we still had to walk many blocks to the Fontanka Embankment. Seryozha’s mother occasionally turned around to ask us if we were okay. Seryozha and I both shrugged, although I could feel my two pairs of thick tights had already become wet inside my boots. Soon, Seryozha’s father walked ahead to the ornate facade of a building, and motioned at us to catch up. On either side of the entrance, a pair of lanterns held the dancing light of real flames. The canal shimmered white in the moonlight except where people’s footsteps had dented the snow, revealing the hard, black ice beneath.
When we arrived, the door was opened by an elegant woman, older and more beautiful than either my mama or Seryozha’s. Her rust-red hair was swept up into a low bun, a style that usually suited young women better but looked perfectly becoming on her. She kissed Uncle Sergei on both cheeks, then moved on to his wife and son. Finally, Uncle Sergei pointed at me and said awkwardly, “And here is Natasha, a friend of Seryozha’s.” She barely glanced at me, but the way she smiled at Seryozha made me realize that they knew each other already—and that she thought highly of him. It struck me then that the Reznikovs invited the Kostiuks because of Seryozha, not Uncle Sergei.
“Have you been practicing hard for the Vaganova auditions? How are you getting on with your double tours?” She asked Seryozha, leading us through a hallway lined with paintings.
“I’ve been improving, thank you,” Seryozha said as we entered a large room. It was suffused in a smooth golden light that blurred the edges of everything. Guests were gathered in groups of twos and threes, never alone and never more than four; they were well-dressed, well-coiffed, and appropriately funny, like actors in commercials. The women were slender, polished, and lovely in a way that made me feel self-conscious for Seryozha’s mother. Madame Reznikova gestured in the direction of a striking girl, whose fiery hair immediately called to mind her own, and said, “There’s Katia. Why don’t you go say hello, Seryozha,” before being seamlessly pulled away to a sphere of guests.
Seryozha surprised me by walking up to Katia and greeting her. She was so much taller than him—she looked about sixteen or seventeen—but she smiled at him without impatience, much like her mother. Seryozha introduced me, standing a bit behind him, and she smiled at me, too. I was bewildered—why did this beautiful older girl act as though she was friends with Seryozha? He spoke rarely in class and never made any lasting impression; our teacher hardly paid more attention to him than to me. But here, Seryozha was at ease. They talked of his upcoming audition for Vaganova, where Katia was a star student in her final year. I gathered that this was the best and oldest ballet school in Russia, where the most talented children trained all day to become professionals.
As night deepened, guests grazed on the aspic, deviled eggs, and tiny buttered toasts topped with caviar. I was hungry but resisted going to the buffet table and drawing attention to myself. No one noticed that I was not eating or talking to anyone—not Seryozha, nor his parents, who were quietly milling around the room as if terrified.
The clock struck eleven. Everyone downed glasses of vodka until their careful mannerisms unraveled and they became messy; the men got red in the face and sweaty, and the women’s makeup wore off and looked dry on their skin. Then a tall man with tin-colored hair, who had been shaking hands with guests all night, raised his glass and called the room to attention. A hush spread around him.
“Thank you everyone for coming to our home and blessing us with your friendship.” Reznikov began, then proceeded to salute a long list of guests, no doubt in the order of importance at the Ministry. The air became slightly tense as this went on for a while; some guests had thought they ranked higher in Reznikov’s esteem, and when they lay down in bed later, they would toss and turn over this snub.
Then, most extraordinarily, Reznikov turned his attention to Seryozha.
“And I want to point out this brilliant young man, a gifted dancer, whom I met while my daughter Katia was still dancing at her old studio. I must say, I used to think ballet was for girls—I was happy for Katia to learn it, but took no interest in it myself. It was when I saw Seryozha dancing that I came to truly appreciate the art form.”
I thought that Seryozha would turn beet red and stare at his feet, but he didn’t. He stood tall and glowed as the elegant adults around him cast admiring glances.
“Speaking of ballet,” Reznikov now gestured at Katia, who had been allowed to drink a little bit of vodka for toasts. “Katia has just been offered the title role in Cinderella at the Mariinsky—six months before her graduation!”
Reznikov started clapping, and the guests followed suit, murmuring with astonishment; Madame Reznikova wrapped her arm around her daughter’s shoulder and embraced tightly. After the applause died down, Reznikov changed the music and asked Seryozha to dance. This surprised me less than the fact that Seryozha, the shy boy across the courtyard, showed no hesitation at the host’s request.
If you were talented enough, it didn’t matter if your papa was a postman or if your mama was heavyset and unfashionably dressed, even the rich adored you.
Seryozha’s eyes were glittering—not the dreamy, soft, snowy way they usually did, but hard like diamonds. He walked to the middle of the salon’s wooden floor, gently nodding his head to the beat of the strings. The guests fell into an attentive silence. Without any preparation or forewarning, Seryozha took his right foot to the side and then pushed off onto his left tip-toe, putting his right toes to his left knee. Then he turned. And turned. And turned.
I understood then the reason the Reznikovs took an interest in him—he was marked by talent, as young as he was. And if you were talented enough, it didn’t matter if your papa was a postman or if your mama was heavyset and unfashionably dressed, even the rich adored you. They remembered your name and noticed if you haven’t eaten or drunk anything. But these things, I did not envy. It was the expression on Seryozha’s face as he spun that made me burn with longing—and in that moment I realized that my inner fire, of which I was so proud, was not talent like Seryozha’s: it was merely desire.
Mama was waiting up for me to come home, wrapped in a blanket and drinking tea at the kitchen table. The TV in the living room was softly playing the rerun of the president’s New Year’s address, the only sign of the holiday in our family. I sat next to Mama and asked if I could audition for Vaganova. I guessed she would tell me no, because she mostly disapproved of new things or “nonsense.” But she took a long sip of her tea and told me I could, if I really wanted. She herself thought it was a bad idea. They auditioned thousands of girls each year and took thirty. And half of that number didn’t make it to their final year. Out of the remaining, just a few of the best graduates would enter Mariinsky as corps de ballet, mostly to be a prop in the background. If you were lucky, you could dance Queen of the Dryads some year or Myrtha in Giselle. Then your body would break down, a new crop of hungry graduates would fill your shoes while you languished in the rank and file. So you were finished with your career at thirty-eight, with no education or experience anywhere else outside the theater. It would be better to choose something more sensible. They always needed nurses and teachers.
“Mama, I know I can do it. Dance Odette—dance all of it,” I said quietly, and she shook her head.
“There’s something that they told me, Natashka. Prima ballerinas are born once in a decade.” As she said this she stirred another spoonful of jam into her cup of tea, as if to neutralize the bitterness of her words. But it wasn’t just her words. It was her thoughts about the world, about me.
That was the first time I realized something very important. Everyone—the girls at school, my teachers, even Mama—thought I was nothing. No, nothing would be infinite and consequential, like the vast black emptiness of space; I reminded them of something so little and ordinary, like a cat or a comb or a kettle, that it would be ridiculous to think of it trying to become anything else. Tears rained down my face and dropped on my lap. “I don’t want you to suffer, Natashka,” she said, patting my back.
But later that night, Mama called Svetlana, who had taken a teaching position at Vaganova. She was encouraging of the idea of auditioning and promised to register me herself for the August cycle. “I don’t know why she has to overreach,” Mama said to the receiver, not even bothering to lower her voice. “But I guess she was always bound to try something like this.” Hearing this, I jumped up and down in silence, pumping my arms in the air. From then on, I practiced copying the movements I saw on TV, leaping on my way to school and stretching my legs at night.
In June, Seryozha auditioned and was accepted, as his mama proudly told us at the stairwell. Mama smiled and agreed with her that indeed, Seryozha was exceptionally talented. She didn’t mention that I was auditioning, too. After we came back to our apartment, Mama opened the pantry door and said quietly to the jars of pickles, “Let’s not get our hopes up and just show up, Natashka.”
On audition day, Mama and I left together for Vaganova Academy on Rossi Street. Painted in cake-batter yellow and lined with white columns, it stretched an entire block toward the Alexandrinsky Theatre. There were dozens of children and their parents crowding around the entrance, and we took our places on one side of the stone stoop. A bronze-faced man with high cheekbones turned to Mama and asked, “Your girl is auditioning?”
“Yes, her name is Natasha,” Mama said, stroking my head.
“She has a nice form,” the man complimented me offhandedly before continuing. “My boy Farkhad is trying out, too,” he said, clasping a scrawny boy a few times on the shoulder. The son was his father’s miniature with dark almond-shaped eyes and sharp cheeks.
“Has your girl been doing ballet for a long time?” the man pressed, although Mama pursed her lips to show she wasn’t inviting further conversation.
“No, she hasn’t taken any classes. But she dances wonderfully.”
“Farkhad has been training and performing since he was five.” The man cast loving glances at his son, who reminded me of Seryozha with his mild discomfort around hovering parents. “But do not worry—I’m sure your girl—Natasha?—will do fine. You see, when I was admitted to Vaganova, I had no training either. They look for ability, not experience.”
“You were a student here?” Mama asked, forgetting to be annoyed at the man’s talkativeness, and he responded with enthusiasm.
“Yes! I started in 1960, right before Nureyev defected. It took my father and me three days to take the train from Nur-Sultan to St. Petersburg when I was ten. We packed all of our food for the journey, and I got so sick of boiled eggs by the end. Father said, this will help you stay strong and have energy for dancing! And we passed right through all the cities—Ufa, Samara, of course Moscow. I just watched everything through the window. It didn’t matter though, when I got in. The happiest day of my father’s life, he told me.
“You know, it’s funny. My son and I took the same train. And I packed the same foods for Farkhad and me, even though I was sure he’d hate it as much as I did back then. He doesn’t yet know what’s good for him.” The man smiled, his eyes shining with memories.
“Children take so long to realize anything, and then it’s too late,” Mama said.
“It’s all right though, isn’t it?” The man raked his hand through his son’s dark hair. He continued, non sequitur, “You know, Nureyev was a Tatar Muslim.”
“Was he? Well. So did you dance for a company?”
“I did, for a time in Nur-Sultan. Then I got injured . . . Back then, there wasn’t much you could do if your hip was finished, not like these days. Now I do contracting work.”
When people were starting to tire of waiting, and even Farkhad’s father fell silent, a teacher came out to tell the parents to leave. She stood aside so the children could walk into the foyer on their own. The moment I was inside, I knew that this was the world for which I was born. It was home—the walls painted in the light gray of February, the smell of aged wood, the blue-carpeted staircase, and the framed pictures of all the legendary graduates since 1742. I recognized the ethereal Anna Pavlova from her poster that had hung at my school, and instantly committed the others to memory. Nijinsky, Balanchine, Baryshnikov. And as I looked around in amazement, a clear sign assured me that I would pass the audition: there was music in my head that I’d heard only once before. It was from the ballet on television that day when Sveta told me I was a jumper. I could now recall the music note by note; I’d kept the score in my subconscious all this time. The very strangeness and improbability of the premonition made me feel absolutely certain that it was real.
But as I went through the physical exam and choreography, I realized I was far from the best. It was evident that most of the auditioners already had years of dance and gymnastics—whereas the extent of my training was doing splits in the living room when Mama wasn’t watching. The other girls seemed extraordinary in my eyes, but the teachers grumbled “stiff back,” “weak turnout,” “too short,” “too short legs,” “too muscular,” and in one horrific instance, “too fat,” loudly enough so that everyone could hear. Mine was “bad feet.” Not one, not two, but three board members muttered this while watching and prodding me as I stood or moved to their commands only in my underwear. On the second day, a doctor—one of those rather numerous people who look as though they were born middle-aged, wearing bad shoes—explained in more detail, as if comparing potato varieties in his garden: “You have a classic Greek foot. This will create problems later, on pointe.”
After the second-round medical exams, Svetlana came out and posted the results on the bulletin board. I didn’t have the strength to face it and let others push past me. There was a girl called Berezina who also hung back near me, looking frightened. She was vivid but delicate, like the wings of a butterfly. With her white leotard and white chiffon skirt, long-lashed dark eyes, and perfectly centered black bun, the only part of her that felt human was her bright pink earlobes. She was the one auditioner who hadn’t gotten any disparaging remarks—she had no discernible flaws. A girl near the board turned around and called out to her, “Nina, we both made the final round!” Only then did Berezina work up the courage to move to the front. I heard the friend say, “What would make you nervous, Nina? You’re one of the best girls here.”
My heart was beating right underneath my skin, which had become as thin as a balloon. Even other children had been taking stock of the competition, just as I inevitably noticed Berezina, and no one had singled me out or stared at me with envy. Then my mortification turned to fury, which pushed me to the front of the board. My heart nearly stopped when I saw my name with those who passed.
By the final round, the remaining fifteen auditioners resembled one another like apples at the grocery store. Small head, willowy neck, slender shoulders, supple spine, long thin legs, narrow feet—the Vaganova look, one they say is more delicate and graceful than any other school in the world. Differences in physique had been weeded out; girls simply standing in their underwear already had a pleasantly unified effect of a corps de ballet. For a second I couldn’t even locate myself in the mirror. Then I saw my reflection—same litheness, my skin stretched taut over my ribs, high and sculpted hips, sticklike legs, dark brown hair pulled back into a bun. Identical to all the others, no deviation worth mentioning except my bad feet.
“Girls, in one long row. Sixteen sautés in first, sixteen in second, sixteen changements,” one of the board members said, using her hands to show us the jumps. She cued the pianist.
In the mirror, the girls jumped together in unison. Then one of them—my reflection—rose higher than the rest. It was the force of all I’d been suppressing; I felt like I could reach my hands and tap the ceiling if I wished. The board members were now pointing in my direction. Murmurs and gasps. That’s a jumper. I sprang even higher. I could fly to space and touch the stars if I wished.
When the piano stopped, I finally came back down to earth, my cheeks warm with the other girls’ stares. I stood with my back straight, feet folded into a perfect fifth position, while the board members muttered and scribbled at their long table. Then they seemed to reach an agreement; the ones at the corners who had walked around the back to talk to other colleagues returned to their seats, and Svetlana cleared her throat.
“We are taking two,” Sveta said. Two out of five hundred girls. “Natalia Leonova. Nina Berezina. The rest of you are dismissed.”
I say goodbye to Nina and return to the hotel at three in the afternoon, the most ambivalent hour of the day. My curtains have been shut since I arrived, and the air is dense and warm. I pull aside the drapes and open the French doors, and a pale, foamy light pours into the room. Outside is a tableau of corniced buildings, cars, and people, mixing in and out of the frame, each in their own worlds. At the precise moment when I turn away from the balcony, my eyes catch the first of the cream roses drop a petal. It whispers softly as it touches the coffee table.
After I shower, I hobble out in a towel and collapse on the bed. An iron weight has been tied to every joint in my body. I feel I could fall through the many floors, to the lobby and to the center of the earth, until I put a Xanax on my tongue and float back to the surface. The cool breeze and the diffuse sound of traffic lull my eyes to close. Sleep crashes in like a wave, and I dream of a black bird—with shiny jet feathers, a curved yellow beak, and large eyes like dots of oil. I have seen this bird before. It flies ahead of me and I follow. Then more and more black birds appear, thickening the sky. Their cawing envelops me in a veil of sound, carrying me up to their height. They begin swirling upward in formation around me, creating a vortex of feathers above the clouds, just before plunging to the ground and taking me with them all the way down, down, down.
Of all creatures in the animal kingdom, birds are the most social. Even an albatross, which flies alone in the ocean for up to several years without ever touching land, sleeping midair and never seeing one of its kind, eventually returns to its colony—the exact place of its birth.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Clam Down: A Metamorphosis by Anelise Chen, which will be published by One World on June 03, 2025.
“We’ve all heard the one about waking up as a cockroach—but what if a crisis turned you into a clam?”
After the dissolution of her marriage, a writer is transformed into a “clam” via typo after her mother keeps texting her to “clam down.” The funny if unhelpful command forces her to ask what it means to “clam down” during crises—to retreat, hide, close up, and stay silent. Idiomatically, we are said to “clam up” when we can’t speak, and to “come out of our shell” when we reemerge, transformed.
In order to understand her path, the clam digs into examples of others who have also “succumbed to shellfish” to embrace lives of reclusiveness and extremity. But this is a story that radiates outward from the kernel of selfhood to family, society, and ecosystem. Finally, the writer must confront her own “clam genealogy” to interview her dad who disappeared for a decade to write a mysterious accounting software called Shell Computing. In learning about his past to better understand his decisions, she learns not only how to forgive him, but also how to move on from her own wounds of abandonment and insecurity.
Using a genre-defying structure and written in novelistic prose that draws from art, literature, and natural history, she unfolds a complex story of interspecies connectedness, in which humans learn lessons of adaptation and survival from their mollusk kin. While it makes sense in certain situations to retreat behind fortified walls, the choice to do so also exacts a price. What is the price of building up walls? How can one take them back down when they are no longer necessary?
Here is the cover, artwork by Tree Abraham.
Author Anelise Chen: “Think: googly eyes glued on pipe cleaner and construction paper, a child’s shoebox diorama for a school fair. Okay, how about, neglected seashell exhibit in an underfunded aquarium of a mid-tier city? Cabinet of curiosities. Those wood and glass vitrines from Deyrolle? But not so classy! Think dusty assemblage in a dish in a vacation rental in New Jersey. Or, midcentury science text, i.e. this one: The Sex Lives of Mollusks. Here’s a screenshot. Okay scratch that. Think line drawings in a Victorian malacology book. No. Wes Anderson poster for The Life Aquatic? Nicole, could you ask the book designer to go the American Museum of Natural History right now and study the exact font and palette of this exhibit on Nitrogen-Fixing Bacteria? Here’s a blurry photo I took. New idea. Think dial-up aesthetic, like Netscape or Windows 95 or go even further back, like a DOS command screen…
It took eight years to write the book, so I clearly had a lot of ideas about what the cover should look like. Nicole, my editor, did her best to translate my ‘ideas’ for the design team. When we finally got the options back, I was terrified, shaking as I opened the file, especially because Nicole had sent me a text to prep me for it. (It’s like she knows who she’s dealing with!) I was immediately floored by the diligence and zany creativity of the designer. (I still don’t know who it is.) They had captured the humor and the pathos and everything else I had been trying to convey.
I love the bold, timeless font on this cover. I love the iridescent hue of the background, which, as my agent Molly pointed out, looks like the pearly interior of a shell. But most of all I love the ‘I can’t even’ posture of this figure—spilled, splat—as if they’d just fallen. In fact, the book came to me all those years ago when I had been laid flat, literally and metaphorically, and I didn’t think I’d ever get up again. But I think there’s still a little bit of fight in this person. They’re down for now, but they’re just gathering themselves momentarily. And my hope with this story has always been to reach another person in that precise moment, in that lonely, desperate period of life, when you’re stuck in your shell, unrecognizable to yourself. This is a book for those of us who’ve been there, or who will perhaps be there one day. Clam down, carry on.”
Designer Tree Abraham: “I explored many approaches to the cover design (there was a late night diorama build that involved dismembering a plastic doll, gluing together shells, and suspending paper letters like a marionette). My mood notes read ‘CLAM ON CHAIR, CLAM ON SUBWAY, CLAM IN DESERT, CLAM IN PARIS, CLAM IN BED, CLAM AS HINGE, cereal boxes, Tums, a walking taco, an exquisite corpse.’ Chen’s work is a hybrid in every sense: the writing style blends experimental forms, the woman’s interiority metamorphs into mollusk conditions, and the imagery submerges itself into several aesthetic periods from 19th-century library books with engraved illustrations to computer software clipart from the 1990s. I wanted to draw upon natural history atlases while signaling that this was an unmistakably modern account of the struggle to remain human amidst the pressures of a world compelling us to clam down.”
Like many during the pandemic, I let my shit go. I cut my own bangs. I did not pay attention to the softening of my jawline as I enjoyed a more sedentary lifestyle, and I welcomed the incoming silver streaks above my ears. I wore loose linen, I made a lot of bread and witchy soups, and every night to ease my anxiety I listened to a guided meditation that described a nighttime walk through the boreal forest to meet Baba Yaga at her waltzing, chicken-legged hut.
In this meditation, Baba Yaga (who is oft depicted as a murderous cannibal) beckons me inside for some tea. As we sit and sip, she reminds me that it is okay to be wild and unburdened, to live by what my soul desires.
In the bubble of my carefully curated, neopagan approach to pandemic life, I fell out of touch with burgeoning trends. I had no idea the lengths that the younger generations were taking to avoid all old lady vibes, that many of them would not find embracing Baba Yaga as an act of comfort but of terror. The sum of every new face filter and #GRWM TikTok touting a pristine, smooth face equaled a conclusion that aging was the worst thing that could happen to anyone – even though it happens to everyone. Forget her alleged fence made of bones – Baba Yaga has far too many wrinkles to take on any other role than that of a monster.
I considered myself to be above the fear of aging as I looked forward to learning from Baba Yaga every night, but then 2022 arrived, and we stumbled back into being social. My bedtime routine changed, and the Baba Yaga meditation faded away. I started acting on stage again, growing conscious of my body in the public light, my face under the weight of stage makeup. Face masks went away. I was thirty-three, and if I caught my reflection by surprise in the window or a storefront, an insidious voice would whisper: Oh! You look…different.
To exist without receiving anti-aging treatments is a radical act.
I recognize that the mid-thirties is hardly an advanced age, but we live in a time where women begin botox in their early twenties, and where girls as young as eight are beginning anti-aging ‘preventative’ skin care regimes. Our obsession with aging has sharpened so acutely that to exist without receiving anti-aging treatments is a radical act, and every time I notice a new sag or wrinkle, my will to remain untouched weakens. I would like to think about myself as capable of enduring time’s footprint with grace, but I might be too vain.
Enter Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance, a film that hit home in a way I hadn’t expected. Lauded as an instant body horror classic, the film delivered an Oscar-worthy performance from Demi Moore as Elisabeth Sparkle, a visceral sound design that stuck to my marrow days later, and a cornucopia of special effects that triggered laughter and nausea simultaneously. It was easy to overlook what The Substance, billed as science-fiction and horror, also embodied: a distorted fairy tale; a cautionary, crone-forward fable that I don’t want to forget, especially as I slip further into my thirties as a childfree, cat-owning woman whose self-esteem is sometimes not strong enough to withstand the rhetoric dictating what type of woman gets to hold value.
The film kicks off on Elisabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday. Elisabeth is a stunning woman who possesses a naturally aging body, and because of this, she is promptly fired from the aerobics show which earned her fame. This is a decision made by network T.V. boss Harvey, played by Dennis Quaid. Harvey is never on screen without something screaming red to accompany him – the toilet stall doors in the men’s bathroom, an endless hallway, a pile of ravaged shrimp. He is the demon of the underworld in his snakeskin boots, exhaling puffs of cigarette smoke whose closeups bring to mind a fire-breathing sphincter. Elisabeth is already, unknowingly, in the palm-tree lined jaws of hell, forced to contend with a grim future of isolation. Only a deal with the devil will get her out–or so she thinks. Amid her distress, she learns of the titular Substance, which promises to deliver a better – aka younger – version of herself.
This central conceit immediately reminded me of the Triple Goddess theory. Simply put, the Triple Goddess is a deity archetype that aligns a woman’s life cycle with three phases: the Maiden (youth), the Mother (middle age), and the Crone (old age). This is an obviously limited framework with the glaring issue of assuming that all women will mother, and that bearing children is essential to womanhood. While Elisabeth Sparkle does not have children, she is the creator of Sue, and is later referred to by Sue as her “sick mother.” So The Substance asks us: what if, instead of progressing out of the Maiden phase, the Mother, staring down her Crone future with dread, could wield the Maiden again?
Elisabeth does not immediately give in to the temptations offered – she goes out drinking instead. As she drains her fourth dirty martini, she is unaware that the bar’s overhead lights cast cold angles on her exposed back, making it appear sapped of its collagen, bluish and paper-thin. As she shoots a covert, jealous glance at a younger woman, the crone has wrapped its inevitability around her like a cloak.
Intoxicated and in her apartment some time later, Elisabeth faces her collected awards and accolades with self-loathing etched across her face. She holds up a snow globe, which houses a small figurine of her younger self, flecked by golden snowflakes. The icon’s painted lips and doe eyes beckon to her, mocking.
And Elisabeth gives in.
The Substance has no visible customer service. There is only the cryptic representative on the other end of the line bearing the rules of the contract. The Substance, whose far-fetched science is grounded in a totally believable subscription box scheme, delivers clear and concise directions: Elisabeth must revert back to her middle-aged self every seven days, no exceptions. “Remember You Are One” is its core message, not unlike the philosophy behind Triple Goddess – that every woman carries these three selves within her, and they must be embodied with respect in order to live in total harmony.
But what if being the Maiden is too good to let go? Such writes Elisabeth’s downfall. Like a good fable, The Substance wields the consequences in an unforgettable, timeless way that I hope will shock others into reassessing their relationships with their crone future, as I did with mine.
When Sue, the Maiden, first emerges from Elisabeth’s back, we revel in the world opening to her. The pulse of the film score quickens, the sun beats iridescent rays on the boulevard. Her glistening youth is intoxicating, and Elisabeth lasts only two cycles of trading between bodies before she pushes the rules of the deal to spend more time as Sue. The first time she pushes the limit, forgoing the trade-off for one night, Elisabeth wakes to find her index finger irreversibility transformed, brown and scaly, a crone’s pointer.
What The Substance can teach us is that our ‘crone self’ is a product of our own creation.
This kicks off a war between her selves: Sue does not want to return to Elisabeth’s life, which seems meaningless and depressing, and Elisabeth wants Sue to respect the balance, to not allow for any more rapid aging.
They have forgotten the cardinal rule of the Substance – that they are one.
Elisabeth tries to make meaning for herself while she’s in her middle-aged body. She agrees to go on a date with a man best described as extremely nice and incredibly average, but in one of the more honestly tragic scenes in the film, she is unable to leave her house, too crippled by self-loathing. If only she gave herself just one more chance to find a friend, join a club, do literally anything other than obsess over the tautness of Sue’s flesh, she may have found a reason to look forward to living in her matured body.
Elisabeth-as-Sue continues to take beyond the parameters of the deal, and the next time Elisabeth wakes, she is changed completely. We hear the agonized scream as she takes stock of her new form: her hair is gray and coarse, her eyes dull and yellowed, her skin dry and scaly. Powder blue veins creep up her feet to swollen, knobbly knees. With no hope left for reclaiming the matured beauty of her “Mother” self, the Crone – or at least Crone 1.0, as Elisabeth’s transformation is yet to end – has fully emerged. Furious, she yells at the provider of The Substance who tells her she may stop the experience, preventing any more age advancement. But Elisabeth, now stuck in this older body, is unable to give up her tradeoff with Sue.
She concedes to the deal she made, and passes the time by cooking.
This is when, as I was watching the film, I recognized my favorite old lady archetype – but she was not the woman of my meditations. Elisabeth flips through a French cookbook, turning on the T.V. to find a late night interview with Sue, and begins to wage a food fight in their kitchen. As we look up at her from the stove’s point of view, we see a crazed face, gleaming with steam and sweat. Crone 1.0 Elisabeth is furious, petty, and bitter, but for the first time, she is something other than defeated. Angry, yes, but also triumphant. Knowing that Sue will wake up in this apartment, Elisabeth ruins it with abandon. As though conjured by dark magic, giant pig’s ears scatter the countertop as she stirs her many pots, frying blood sausage, eviscerating a turkey, finally giving into her rage. This Baba Yaga was tailor-made by Elisabeth’s self-loathing, bursting like a cystic zit forced to the surface.
When Sue takes stock of the mess Elisabeth made, she rages, pushing the bargain well past its limit until she is forced to trade off again, three months later. When Crone 2.0 emerges as a consequence of Sue’s greed, she’s meant to induce horror as one the film’s monsters, but somehow I saw the wisdom of a no-nonsense grandmother reflected back at me. Crone 2.0, which was dubbed “Gollum” during production, is a prosthetics and makeup marvel that evokes the terror of old age while ironically equipping Elisabeth with more zeal than any of her previous ‘versions.’ She knocks down doors and walks with surprising speed, and she is the only version of Elisabeth who is able to be honest, to finally admit that she needs Sue because she hates herself. Her grotesque, sagging form embodies the nightmare of the age-obsessed young generations; she is the personification of unchecked crow’s feet, the horror of time itself. And she comes for us all.
What The Substance can teach us is that our “crone self” is a product of our own creation.Elisabeth’s Crone was desperate and petty, clinging to the Maiden as the only phase worth living. What would my crone self look like if I went down a path of neck lifts and eyelid surgeries – two things I have spent time seriously considering – to fill a hole where I felt my value was departing? These small procedures may not be the Faustian bargain Elisabeth signed up for, but they say cosmetic surgery is addictive. How do I know what else I will take at the expense of my own self-acceptance?
The drive toward youth is fed to us constantly.
Even though I’m long past caring about the male gaze, coveting youth still proves a difficult thing to be rid of. It’s not limited to patriarchal subservience or heteronormativity. It exists, for me, in being an aging lesbian watching the Gen Z-driven sapphic renaissance. As young queer audiences flock to Chappell Roan, Young Miko, Billie Eilish and the rest of them, I’m forced to compare my maturing body with the youthful vibrancy embodied by them and their fans. The drive toward youth is fed to us constantly, even as “aging” stars like Demi Moore are proving their worth on screen by succeeding in these daring roles and shoving Hollywood’s standards back down its throat. But no amount of cognitive awareness prevents the anti-aging meal that is fed to us, which poisons our respect for time itself. It remains a constant effort to alchemize the dread that I feel about aging into acceptance and self-love.
Elisabeth’s own dread outpaced her acceptance and self-love every step of the way, because she had none; she was stuck in the past, cursed by the need for validation from people who only valued the “Maiden.” Crone wisdom exists as a way of navigating the certainty of death; of managing expectations from the get. You will arrive here, she says – perhaps with grace or perhaps a haggard wreck – but you will arrive here, whether you like it or not. And we don’t need a wicked man in a paisley suit to blow smoke in our face and make us fear her inevitability; as long as we continue to buy into the ever growing standards of what age should look like, we fill in those snakeskin shoes on our own. I may not be strong enough to age radically, but I hope to try – to remember how utterly beautiful the original Elisabeth looked before she caved to society’s will, and learn from her mistakes.
In a year packed with noteworthy debut novels, it can be easy to overlook a more eclectic type of debut: the short story collection. In these diverse, electrifying debut collections, you’ll encounter haunting allegorical ghosts, embattled ferocious women, gritty, bottom-feeding youths, and more unforgettable characters. These fresh voices of fiction offer new worlds—whether fantastical, absurd, or realistic—that are a treat to inhabit.—Skylar Miklus
Editor’s note: The book descriptions below were written by Skylar Miklus, Vivienne Germain, Marina Leigh, Willem Marx, Courtney DuChene, and Jalen Giovanni Jones.
Award-winning playwright Marshall offers feminist commentary, optimism, and humor in a collection of sharp, quirky, poignant short stories. Women! In! Peril! follows delightfully eclectic characters—including a failed ballerina, a sex bot, a lesbian with a mysteriously pregnant wife, and the last woman on Earth—as they grapple with womanhood and reclaim their power. From divorce to racial identity to coming-of-age narrative, Marshall’s collection embarks on twelve unique journeys, each one surprising and stunning.
Inventive, playful, and evocative, Half-Lives investigates women’s bodies and psyches in worlds that play by bizarre rules—or lack thereof. Schmeidler’s debut collection, which won the 2023 Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, explores women’s autonomy, sexuality, marriage, motherhood, aging, and mental and physical health in unfamiliar circumstances with all-too-familiar resonance. The sixteen imaginative stories are witty, wise, and wonderfully brilliant.
Jones’ debut short story collection introduces a new, captivating voice to investigate the pains, wonders, and complexities of the ways we say goodbye. From funny to tragic, from haunting to heartwarming, Jones’ dynamic stories navigate ends of many kinds: relationships, innocence, past versions of ourselves. The Goodbye Process is not only about loss and grief, but also love and healing. It’s deeply human—and a remarkable read.
Levy’s creative, riveting debut illustrates the chaotic world of Generation Z, embracing its strange, web-sourced, digitally powered mayhem. My First Book reflects reality, sometimes in surreal ways. With experimental form and style, ambitious imagination, and brutal honesty, the short stories follow earnest, anxious young people whose formative years take place in a frenzied environment. Levy’s collectionpromises a fresh and fantastic read.
In a mesmerizing debut collection of speculative short fiction, Aguda offers twelve dark, strange, and playful stories set in contemporary Lagos, Nigeria. Against a haunting and imaginative emotional and physical landscape, characters confront tradition, modernity, family, gender, myth, and magic. The storiesbrilliantlyweave supernatural chills with everyday living. Unsettling and breathtaking, Ghostroots introduces Aguda as a talented new force in the literary world.
In smart, insightful short stories, average Americans search for connection, freedom, and joy in today’s dispiriting society. Stuber’s masterfully-crafted characters—from a college professor dying from cancer to a pair of high school graduates planning a robbery—find their way through adult life, seeking liberation from consumerism, the climate crisis, and gender roles. Beautifully melancholic and full of warmth and hope, Sad Grownups is a must-read collection.
In this anti-romcom, Damilare Kuku writes twelve short stories set in Lagos, Nigeria, that detail various women, their relationships, and their experiences with men. Described as a “dynamic sociological satire,” by Bolu Babalola, this short story collection is a witty and humorous exploration of the exhaustive dating scene and attempts to find lasting love in the face of serial cheaters, mommy’s boys, abuse, and sexual naivety. Kuku doesn’t shy away from sex or promiscuity in this collection, but each story is layered and unique in its characterization and voice. This brilliant debut will have you laughing, crying, and blushing to the very last page.
In this surreal debut collection of short stories, Puloma Ghosh conjures haunting tales of otherworldly creatures and spaces to explore themes of grief, loneliness, sex, and bodily autonomy. Mouth is a collection hungry with desire. Ghosh’s stories are urgent and her characters insatiable. Between the necrophiliac fantasies, the ghosts, and the all-consuming infatuations, these stories are written to unsettle; to crawl underneath your skin. Throughout this collection, you’ll continue to wonder how far Ghosh is willing to go.
Loved and lauded, the stories in Lena Valencia’s debut collection take on contemporary and timeless subjects relating to womanhood–the #MeToo movement, the surge in female representation in cinema, the “hysterical” woman–and relentlessly turns them on their head. There’s an ineffable darkness when Holly’s younger sister goes missing and she feels relief at being “sisterless.” On the guided Glow Time Retreat, Pat finds self-actualization, not through yoga and meditation, but through a descent into the bowels of jealousy, competition, and the need for control. These are stories of revenge, violence, and horror that place women, not men, in powerful, destructive roles. Yet, for all the blood that’s spilled, all the psychological darkness that’s explored, there’s pathos, recognizable though unspoken, in the brutal, emotional honesty of these characters. Mystery Lights bends genres, inverts tropes, and ultimately reshapes what feminist literature looks like.
Electrodomésticos…household appliances, those integral parts of domestic life. That is the world this collection conjures by subtly weaving memory, history, and the rippleless moments of everyday life into a portrait of the Spanish Basque Country in the decades after World War II. Drawing on family history (McCavana’s traces her lineage to Bilbao) and deeply sensory awareness of place, this collection captures the specific tension that inhabits the quiet after the storm. The installation of a television becomes a fraught affair; music triggers memories of war; and language itself becomes a political statement (to speak Basque or Spanish? That is the question). Small vignettes spill over into larger stories and slowly, Electrodomésticos gives form to the smoothed over scars of history.
Ruben Reyes Jr. blurs the past, present, and futures in this debut collection, where he plays with the question of what we might do if we wake up one day as someone (or something) we don’t recognize. For the Central American characters in this book, they are often forced to make choices in the face of injustice, and to find voice in the shadows of what aims to silence them. There Is a Rio Grande in Heaven explores themes of sexuality, violence, masculinity, the consequences of unchecked capitalism and technological advances. The stories of this sci fi collection will stay with you long after the last page.
In thirteen short stories, J. Bowers details the ways horses have been used and abused throughout American history. Bowers’ writing is ridiculously smart and meticulous, but also lyrical and driven by the story itself. Horse Show forces a reader to examine the history of abuse and spectacle of horses, but it also shows how horses have come to be companions. Bowers shows us the best and the worst of the historical relationship between man and equine, and you don’t need to be a horse lover to thoroughly enjoy and become engrossed in this short collection.
Set in Nigeria, the stories in A Kind of Madness explore madness as an illness, but they also delve into the ways other feelings—desire, hunger, grief, shame, longing—too can bring about a type of madness. Okonkwo is interested in the relationships we hold closest to us, and why these relationships, or the spaces they exist in, are what drive us the maddest. These stories are about developing your own sense of identity in the face of cultural expectations, relationships, insecurities, and mental illness. The stories are deceptively short, demanding instead that you linger with them; that they be remembered.
The World With Its Mouth Open follows the lives of eleven people in Kashmir in the aftermath of war. Zahid Rafiq forces our eyes open and to bear witness to the real consequences of violence in communities where there is so much life. Rafiq refuses the facelessness that so often comes with news coverage and war, showing us the humanity behind the cameras. Through the haunting themes of violence, loss, displacement, and longing, Zahid Rafiq is also able to capture the profoundness of ordinary life, and this collection urges us toward beauty, laughter, and refuge in the face of darkness.
Winner of the Iowa Short Fiction Award, The Man in the Banana Trees is a collection in the old, nineteenth century sense of the term. Here you’ll find the odd and the beautiful, the fantastic and the provocative, a true assemblage of curiosities bound together with sharp sentences and ferocious intelligence. Perhaps only the banal everydayness of the world is missing. There are ghost stories (an artist who just can’t give up on her dreams of grandeur), science fiction imaginings (ice cream obsessions run amok in the year 2036), and countless other experiments in genre and ideas. What holds these stories together is a core human striving to survive, to understand, and to be happy, even in the strangest of times.
The creep factor is off the charts in this collection of thirteen strange, gothic, and otherworldly stories. But that hardly does justice to the depth of humanity buried in each tale–harbingers of death hang around to see what happens to their victims (will they escape the burning houses?), a young girl is bullied at school for not having a shadow until she befriends one that might love her a little too much, and a creature gets a little too infatuated with the humans living nearby. That’s a theme of this book, in which kernels of love and compassion repeatedly curdle into horrific realities that, nonetheless, bare the hallmarks of human affection. Flowers from the Void doesn’t revel in jump scares–no, it raises the horror genre up to a whole new level of unease by exploring genuine feeling.
Megan Howell’s twisty, speculative, bold short stories arrive with a flourish and make their presence known. In one story, a young woman’s babysitting side-hustle goes sideways when the child reveals shape-shifting abilities; in another, an Afro-French girl obsesses over her lover’s earlobes. The titular short story, in which two teenage girls detangle the fear and shame of their unusual living situation, stands out for its grit and poignancy. Howell’s stories carry an absurdity reminiscent of Yoko Ogawa and an urgent voice entirely her own. Her odd, brash, “softie” female protagonists will stay with you long after the final story.
Katie M. Flynn probes into everyday idiosyncrasies, supernatural happenings, and near-future dystopias in this collection of interconnected short fiction. In one standout, “The King of South Phoenix,” reality TV contestants beg their audience for urban funding, a scenario that feels almost too close to real life for comfort. In others, Flynn shows off her talent for world-building, conjuring peculiar universes that still ring emotionally true. The stories are united by their strong roots in terroir and by Flynn’s daring to swing for the fences.
Bad Seed marks the long-awaited first translation into English for emerging Puerto Rican fiction writer Gabriel Carle. Their prose is red-hot, erotic, and immediate as they investigate an eclectic cast of young queer Puerto Ricans. Preoccupations with gender identity, economic inequality, and the threat of HIV/AIDS tie together these breathtakingly sensual, audaciously spunky, and tenderly crafted stories.
Following her stunning poetry collection Mother/land, Ananda Lima makes her fiction debut with this interconnected set of short stories centered around a Brazilian writer who sleeps with the devil at a party. After their encounter, Lima’s writer composes these chilling stories for the devil; along the way, the writer discloses her own biographical details and experiences with migration. Lima’s tales frequently turn surreal, as in the excellent “Antropófaga,” in which a hospital cleaner becomes addicted to eating Americans out of a vending machine. The layered narrative structure creates an atmospheric, eclectic, and gripping reading experience.
In A Small Apocalypse, queer characters weave in and out of haunting, surreal stories. A group of friends manage relationship drama and tell ghost stories on a trip outside of Jacksonville. A grandmother shows her granddaughter how to pickle—and forget—painful memories. A woman slowly transforms into a reptile, forcing her to leave her boyfriend and her West Philly home for the warmth of Florida. Characters appear in multiple stories, making some scenes feel truly haunted when someone returns from the dead.
Pascha Sotolongo’s debut collection The Only Sound Is the Wind is broken into two parts: “Sustain” and “Release.” The characters in the “Sustain” section wind up in situations where they feel balanced within their bizarre circumstance though—like an acrobat on a tight rope—that equilibrium can be tenuous. One character uses invisibility to spy on her enchanting neighbor. In another story, humans birth animals. While the characters in “Sustain” come to accept their situations, those in “Release” transform their lives in ways large and small. The result is a striking collection that relishes in the intersection between reality and imagination.
Neighbors and Other Stories is the almost lost and long-awaited debut from Diane Oliver. Oliver, who died at age 22 in 1966 from a motorcycle accident, writes presciently and intimately about the daily lives and anxieties of Black Americans during the Jim Crow era. The titular story exemplifies this as it follows a family the night before their young son desegregates a local school. Oliver’s stories are unyielding and carry a clear-eyed realism about the realities of race in America.
In Perfect Little Angels, Vincent Anioke writes a beautifully tender collection that seamlessly flows into a larger narrative exploring masculinity, religion, and queerness. Largely set in Nigeria, confessions rewrite the truth when a son returns from abroad, while romance is turned dangerous when lovers develop a secret relationship. Through his recurring characters’ journeys, Anioke asks what happens when we can’t meet our own deeply held expectations.
Kate Axelrod’s writing throughout How to Get Along Without Me is unabashed and vicious in its humor. Exploring the dating lives of twentysomethings with wry, yet contemplative prose, Axelrod reveals a world that leaves us desperate for, but incapable of, intimate connections. These interwoven stories are modern, yet timeless, poignant, yet ruthless.
Award-winning author Cameron Walker writes a dreamy, enchanting debut collection that is at once spell-binding and somber. These stories confront the climate crisis in elegant prose that take understated leaps toward the magical. As readers are brought closer to the water’s edge, Walker dares us to look toward the depths of loss and love.
Following their novella “Funeral,” co-authored by Vi Khi Nao, Daisuke Shen’s debut collection writes through the uncanny to explore humanity’s most secret desires. In one story, a long-distance couple employs clones of their partners, before starting to lose their memories. In the titular story, angels transform into humans and gain the capacity to know emotions. Through concise prose and dazzling, surrealist worlds, these stories question the very nature of human connection.
The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies by Maggie Cooper
In her debut collection, Maggie Cooper writes us an escape route. In The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, nine whip-smart stories contemplate worlds built by and for women. Through unsettling, haunting satire, Cooper dissects queerness, gender, and the patriarchy as she contemplates the bounds of womanhood.
From the World Fantasy Award-winning author of Flyaway comes a debut collection of twelve fantastical fables. These stories contain many elements of traditional myths, like treacherous quests and magical transformations, but Jennings offers a welcome twist with the ease and nonchalance of her narration. Her characters – especially the kind but absentminded cryptozoologist in “Undine Love” – are vivid, off-the-wall, and sure to stick in your brain.
Adiga’s tales of migration, from Nepal to the United States and back, trouble the borders of the typical American immigrant narrative and question the structure of the short story itself. Adiga refuses simplistic explanations for human behavior at every turn, instead showcasing his characters in all their messy, self-contradictory glory. The standout story “The Diversity Committee” takes this unflinching lens to another level as a meeting between a Nepali professor and the dean of his university turns brutally uncomfortable. Ranjan Adiga’s singular voice, tightly wound prose stylings, and clarity of narrative focus all assert him as a rising author to watch.
On November 20th 2024 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City, the 75th National Book Awards emphasized the crucial role of literature during an unsettling time for politics in the U.S. and the world. Writers and publishers spoke about literature as a form of history, resistance, and change-making.
“As we gather in this room, surrounded by some of the most talented and visionary writers of our time, we are reminded that books do more than entertainment,” said Saturday Night Live comedian Kate McKinnon, the host of the night. “They illuminate, they provoke, and most importantly, they inspire change.”
A book is an offering. It’s a hand in the darkness, a way of saying, ‘I know, isn’t this crazy?’ And that’s something a robot will never be able to do.’
—Kate McKinnon
“That was written by Chat GPT,” McKinnon said, earning many laughs. But after the jokes, she shared a poignant message. “Why do we continue to write books?” she asked. “We continue because the world spins on offering us new situations, ranging from the tricky to the horrific—and I think ultimately, we tell stories because we want help. A book is an offering. It’s a hand in the darkness, a way of saying, ‘I know, isn’t this crazy?’ And that’s something a robot will never be able to do.”
In a way, McKinnon’s message foreshadowed the sentiment of the night: Books are necessary in times of unrest, because books are human.
Two writers were honored with lifetime achievements: Pulitzer-Prize winning author Barbara Kingsolver received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and W. Paul Coates, publisher and founder of Black Classic Press received the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.
“Paul shares information that every man, woman, and most especially every child in America and therefore the world must know if they want their soul,” writer Walter Mosley said as he presented the award. To him, Coates is “a warrior publisher.”
“I obsessively curate those voices, especially the old, forgotten, radical, and less popular. The more scared they are, the more important they are in my quest. Those voices are all Black classes to me. I publish them, knowing that they are critical to fully understanding and making sense of the brightly colored mosaic that is American and world history,” Coates said. “All voices are important, and all stories are important.”
Sam Stoloff, president of the Frances Goldin Literary Agency, introduced Kingsolver’s contributions as “amazingly varied,” including “reviving the social novel,” writing fiction about climate change “before Cli-Fi was a thing,” and writing about the “dispossession of rural working people.”
“All of these things are gathered in her most recent novel, the stunning Demon Copperhead,” Stoloff said. “The original memo is the social protest.”
“I think we’re at our best when we’re disruptors,” Kingsolver said about writers. “I’m proud of the respect we have finally learned to give in this country to art that engages with the real ruckus of the world.”
Next, the winners were announced. This year, the judges considered a total of 1,917 titles. The winner in each category—fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature—receives a medal, a trophy, and $10,000. Each finalist receives a medal and $1,000.
Shifa Saltagi Safadi won the award for young people’s literature, for Kareem Between, a coming-of-age novel about a Syrian-American boy navigating middle school and home life. “So often I saw books where Muslims were the villains, and I’m glad I finally got to write a story were we’re the heroes,” she said in her speech. While the novel started as historical fiction, Safadi emphasized that it is no longer historical fiction because “dehumanization of Arabs and Islamophobia have been rising more than ever in this past year to justify a genocide of the Palestinian people.” At the end of her speech, she called for justice, freedom, courage, and a free Palestine.
I want us to be uncomfortable and angry and demand that [our] adminstration should stop funding and arming a genocide in Gaza.
—Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Author Yáng Shuāng-Zǐ and translator Lin King won the award for Translated Literature for Taiwan Travelogue, a love story nested in an exploration of lost histories and colonial power. Shuāng-Zǐ delivered the acceptance speech in Mandarin Chinese with King translating: “Writing about the past is a means of moving toward the future. Taiwan has never stopped facing the threat of invasion from another powerful national. Meanwhile, internally, the Taiwanese have a complicated relationship with our own national and ethnic identities… I, Shuāng-Zi, write in order to answer the question of ‘what is a Taiwanese person?’ and write about Taiwan’s past as a step into its future.”
The award for poetry went to Lena Khalaf Tuffaha for Something About Living, a collection about the oppression of the Palestinian people. “Our service is needed as writers. Our service is needed as human beings, in every room, in every space, especially where there is something to risk, where there is an opportunity to be lost, where that courage will really cost you—that’s what’s most needed,” Tuffaha said. “I want us to feel and be uncomfortable and be disoriented and be angry and get up, and demand that any administration, no matter what letter it has at the end of its name—D, R, whatever—should stop funding and arming a genocide in Gaza.”
I will not accept the dystopian American future […] that this incoming administration wants to propagate and profit from.
—Jason De León
The award for nonfiction went to Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling, a work of reportage that chronicles the lives of smugglers guiding migrants across Latin America to the U.S. Border, investigating poverty, violence, and undocumented immigration. In his speech, he said that he “will not accept the dystopian American future” of corruption and injustice that faces people today. “These storytellers that I’m so grateful to be in this room with, I know that you will help us find our way,” he said. “Let’s all go read some banned books—we’re gonna need them in the future.”
Finally, Percival Everett accepted the most highly-anticipated award—the award for Fiction—for James, a novel that re-imagines Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, Huckleberry’s friend who escaped enslavement. “I can feel some hope,” Everett said. “But it’s important to remember, hope really is no substitute for strategy.”
If there’s one takeaway from the 2024 National Book Awards, it’s that writing is crucial to history, including present and future history. Literature is a force for change, a fundamental part of cultural narratives, and always political.
Here is the 2024 National Book Award shortlist, with the winners in bold:
“Shrink,” an excerpt from American Bulkby Emily Mester
Beauty is a growth industry, so said my CEO. She was new to the company, like me, having only arrived during the last fiscal quarter. Before that, she sold cell phones, and before that, McDonald’s, and years ago, Cap’n Crunch and Rice-A-Roni. Now she sold makeup, or I sold it for her, or it sold itself.
Though my store carried several high-end brands, it lacked the luxury pedigree of Sephora, its biggest competitor. You could see it in the bags—theirs, a glossy black that stood up on its own, ours, a pale orange sack. Sephora was the wife of Moses, she who declared her husband the bridegroom of blood after circumcising her son with a flint knife, her name derived from Hebrew, little bird. Ulta is ultra without an r.
My store split its inventory into five basic categories: makeup, skincare, body, hair, and nails. From there, all products were reduced to one of two classes: mass or prestige. The former meant drugstore. The latter meant expensive. Prestige makeup, hair care, and skincare occupied the store’s upper right quadrant, and mass, its left. Shelves of nail polish marked the boundary between prestige face and prestige hair. Hair tools, both mass and prestige, intermingled in the lower left. The salon abutted them. Fragrances rose along the back prestige wall. The registers were neither a supermarket-style row of parallel bays, nor a station along the wall. Instead, they sat around a ring-shaped counter in the middle of the store, arranged so as to be nearly panoptical. We stood anchoring the center.
I started at Ulta in October, having graduated from college the previous May. I’d spent the summer in Chicago getting rejected for unpaid positions at music agencies and copywriting jobs at Groupon, only to crawl back to my parents in August. While I was in college, they made a permanent move to the South Carolina beach town we had vacationed in for much of my childhood. To me, it was a place without time or adulthood or anything but heat and stillness. My mom picked me up from the airport. We passed the Towne Centre mall in landlocked Mount Pleasant, with its twelve-foot-tall stone horses standing sentinel in front of the P.F. Chang’s. We ascended the sloping bridge that connected Mount Pleasant to the island beach town where my parents lived, at the top of which sat an American flag and, for a tall minute, a sweeping view of the Atlantic Ocean. We pulled onto the island’s main drag, lined with palms and clogged with tourists, the pickups and surfboard-laden jeeps trundling along in a slow parade. We turned onto their street, which was a half mile long, no curbs or sidewalks, just a short strip of asphalt bookended by the ocean on one side and marshland on the other. Since the ’90s, houses there were required to be built on stilts so that hurricanes could, rather than sweep the houses away, simply flow through them unobstructed. An old, thick pug stood still in the middle of the street, staring at our car as we veered around him. That’s just Dudley, my mom said, driving past. My parents’ right-hand neighbors had a dolphin-shaped fountain in their yard. Their left-hand neighbors owned a small bungalow that sat flat on the ground, which meant it had survived Hurricane Hugo. Between me and my parents’ front door was a long flight of stairs and a fifty-pound suitcase. I lifted the suitcase gently over the first stair. I could feel beads of sweat forming already on my neck and rolling down my spine into my ass. The air felt like morning breath. Lugging the suitcase up the second stair, I let my arms slacken a little, then on the third stair a little more, until I was dragging the thing behind me, letting it bang violently on every single step. You know I hate that, my mom sighed. I reached the top, breathing hard as I shoved through the stacks of Amazon boxes that would be replaced by a new batch the next day. By the time I started punching in the door code, I’d lost all sense of forward motion. I was again a bored and restless child.
My sleep schedule quickly reversed itself. I would wake up as my parents ate dinner and go to sleep to the sounds of my dad making his morning SodaStream. I didn’t need money but I did need a job, any job, something to differentiate living with my parents at age twenty-three from living with my parents at age fourteen. I applied to and proceeded to hear nothing back from Applebee’s, Target, Costco, H&M, the Container Store, Panda Express, an ice cream cart at the zoo, and Urban Outfitters, which required that I take a personality assessment, the sole purpose of which seemed to be divining if and under what circumstances I would be stoned at work.
Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her.
Only Ulta called me in for an interview. I sat down with Melanie, who had crimpy blond hair that she clipped half up, a southern accent, and the type of black, stretchy, flared trousers that are marked at $89.99 but always on sale for $59.99 under names like The Aubrey and The Blythe and are, somehow, the uniform of every female retail manager at every mall store across the country. She didn’t ask me many questions, but when she looked at my résumé and saw that I’d majored in English, she asked what my future plans were. I paused. My parents had told me to conceal anything that might suggest I had an exit strategy. Ulta, they reminded me, did not want a liberal arts girl with rich parents for whom retail was merely a way to kill time on the way to Brooklyn, graduate school, or both. I’d learned this in high school when I’d looked for summer jobs only to find that summer jobs didn’t really exist anymore, because the people who fill them don’t really exist. If you have money, your summer job is pre-collegiate grooming rituals, all your unpaid internships and philanthropy. If you don’t have money, your summer job is the job you already have. Ulta wanted someone who was likely to stay put. Ulta’s ideal employee was someone who needed Ulta more than Ulta needed her. But in the moment, with my nose ring in my pocket, I panicked and accidentally told the truth. I kind of want to be a writer. She nodded politely.
Our store was located in the upscale-but-not-luxury Towne Centre outdoor shopping mall in the upscale-but-not-luxury town of Mount Pleasant, which was nearly on the water, but not quite. The town is nestled among old-money Charleston, with its million-dollar prewar mansions, some midsize middle-class towns, and a handful of small fishing villages. Mount Pleasant had itself been a small village, but 1931 brought the highway and 1989 brought the hurricane, which decimated the barrier islands. In Hugo’s wake were insurance payouts and talk of new beginnings and, quickly, a real estate boom that never really ended. By the early 2000s its population doubled and became predominantly upper middle class. The new mall opened. Another highway was built. Now, ten years later, its population had doubled again and was sliding toward rich. Not quite Rich rich—Rich rich being an ineffable, ancient stratum of culture and wealth in which almost nobody in America believes themselves to reside—but statistically rich, the kind of rich that thinks it’s upper middle class because it eats at the same chain restaurants as the masses.
On my first day at Ulta, I descended from my parents’ gleaming SUV and walked among the rest of the gleaming SUVs looping endlessly through the Towne Centre’s sprawling parking lot, their reflections shimmering across the windows of the Ann Taylor Loft, the Qdoba, the Hairy Winston Pet Boutique. The white pavement and the shiny cars seemed to magnify the sunlight. It was unseasonably warm that day, so hot the air looked wavy. The brief interludes of heat between icy car and icy store came as a series of shocks to the body, which may in fact be the entire point of outdoor malls: reminding you of your good fortune to be alive in the age of central air.
Dawn, the assistant manager, ushered me to the back room. I wore black pants and a black blouse I’d had to buy from the Old Navy next door. All of my other shirts either had non-sanctioned colors or had been cropped with scissors. My hair was a strange auburn color, the aftermath of a DIY bleach job I’d done a few months ago after watching Spring Breakers. I’d put my nose ring back in after the interview, and Dawn eyed it. That’s fine, she said, aiming to reassure herself as much as me, you’re allowed one facial piercing.
I sat on a folding metal chair as Dawn hit play on a training video. She handed me a headset. The Ulta CEO welcomed me to the family. A robotic female voice told me how to enter my time.
She stood next to me as my first customer approached. In life, my voice is boyish and jocular, but the one that came out was a breezy trill. Did you find everything today? I cooed. Nobody had taught me this phrase or this voice. It’s her first day, Dawn explained as I tried to remember what to press on the register screen. Thanks for bearing with us, I said. Nobody had taught me to say us.
I relished the novelty. I’d always been a shopper, never a seller, and I delighted each time the curtain was pulled back. I learned about the locked perfume cage in the back. I learned new names for the mundane: theft was shrink, a thief was a Thelma, free products were gratis, a customer was a guest and an item they plucked from the shelf and later abandoned was a go back, checkout was the cash wrap, a shelf was positioned by a planogram, a shelf was positioned by mandate from on high, a shelf was a gondola, a shelf was an endcap, a shelf was an étagère. I learned the satisfaction of a workday that dissolved in an instant. The sweet finality of clocking out. I learned just how pale my skin and just how pink my cheeks were. I learned the acute chemical effect of being called pretty a few times a week.
It is perhaps a mark of my comfortable upbringing that the prospect of working retail excited me. But it is also something else. For Christmas one year, my older brother received a toy cash register. I think the idea was to make math fun for him. He abandoned the register after a few hours, but I didn’t. I rang things up well into the evening—I sold myself a Lego, a pop-up book, a wheel for my doomed hamster, a petrified piece of licorice. The items were beside the point. It wasn’t the things that I loved so much as the transaction, the beep of the buttons, the receipt paper smooth between my thumb and forefinger. The way the machine shivered when the cash drawer clicked shut. A friend of mine once declared smoking the perfect sensory experience: you smell it, touch it, fingers, lungs, hot on the inhale, visible on the exhale. It is perfect because your nerves sharpen, then calm. You witness the fact of your steady breathing. You make a habit of it.
Guests who belonged to our loyalty program earned ULTAmate Rewards Points with every dollar they spent. Compared to Sephora, whose Beauty Insider program exchanged dollars not for discounts but for deluxe samples, Ulta’s rewards system was thought to be better, as it provided the illusion of savings. At the time, spending $250 at Sephora got you three-twentieths of an ounce of Intenso Pour Homme. The same sum at Ulta saved you, on the dollar, three-hundredths of a cent.
You needed one hundred points before you could get a discount. I’m sorry, I learned to say to those with fewer, you haven’t yet reached the threshold for redemption. A guest’s point balance was always displayed to me at checkout, but on my first day I was warned never to divulge this freely, at least not before they swiped. The points are an incentive for guests to spend more, said Melanie. If you give that up before they pay, it’s just a free discount.
Instead, I was to do this: Print the receipt and smooth it flat on the counter. Lean over. Underline the fine print. Here is a link to our guest satisfaction survey. You could win a $500 gift card. Raise my eyebrows as if suddenly impressed. Wow. Circle a number at the bottom. Looks like you have 732 points. That’s almost $30 off. Guest frowns. Wait. Couldn’t I have used that today? Well. Conspiratorial. Just another excuse to come back soon. With my neon highlighter I drew a wonky heart.
The slickness of my little script felt balletic. It was a good kind of alien. Soon, stock phrases became mantras, became prayers, became muscle memory. Hi there, If you could just swipe one more time, I apologize for the wait, Are you a rewards member, I’ll take the next guest, You have a great day! I could do it in my sleep.
It was our job to show the guests what they already wanted.
In a pre-holiday staff meeting, assistant manager Dawn taught us the art of the pitch.We were each given an index card with a product’s name. We were divided into pairs and told to role-play as guest and sales associate. The associate would ask leading questions to divine what was on the guest’s index card, which was meant to represent their singular unrealized desire. It was our job to show the guests what they already wanted. Rachel’s index card said Hempz, an organic body cream. The litany began. Are we shopping for anyone in particular? My niece. Does she like hair? No. Does she like makeup? Her skin is dry. Some lotion then? Yeah. Does she like sweet scents? No. Musky? No. What does she like? Dawn called for everyone to wrap up. What does she like? Rachel frowned, flustered, before offering: Weed?
Dawn addressed the room. Some people get shy about it. They tell me, “It feels like I’m selling them something.” And I say, well, she snorted, you are.
I am not shy. For as long as I’ve had a voice, I have loved the sound of it. At five I talked to the dog. At six to a tape recorder. At seven to the mirror, pretending to be in a Neutrogena commercial. I filled my cupped hands with water, threw the water in my face, over and over murmuring cream cleanser, cream cleanser, cream cleanser. I held up a single Mike and Ike in the back corner of a pizza restaurant and pretended to sell Tylenol to the wall. Later, I began to mimic the beauty YouTubers I watched. They all knew to speak in the same strange cadence. The was pronounced thee, the article a became ay. They spoke the same way I did when I interviewed myself on my Little Tikes tape recorder. It was a clicky, rhythmic pleasure, like a girl who has just gotten fresh acrylics and uses them to punctuate her speech. There is no way to represent it without musical notation.
So I went online andpicktup thee Tarte Amazonian Clayyyy . . . Blush? In thee shade Seduce? It izzay pinky. Mauvey. Nude : )
At my store we sold products with names like Bye Bye Pores and Better Than Sex, which is a twenty-three-dollar tube of water and wax. We sold face powders in Warmth and Poured Moonstone, and not one but three One Direction perfumes named, respectively, Our Moment, That Moment, and You & I. Whenever confused husbands came in looking for “some Naked palette,” I explained to them that there were actually seven Urban Decay Naked eyeshadow palettes, and I could, when called upon, spend a good thirty minutes discussing the relative merits of each. A shelf of headbands gathered dust in the neglected center aisle. A sodden cotton ball was stuffed between liquid luminizers. A pink-ribboned curling iron announced its benevolence. For a fee, one of our trained professionals could extend your eyelashes. For a limited time, Mandy could rhinestone your brows. You could buy lipstick in shades Shame and Dominatrix and a few feet away, genuine human growth hormone at $99 a box. A droop-eyed woman with lipstick bleed told me at checkout that it made her hair fall out. I nodded and gave her store credit.
Ulta sold a liquid lipstick called Beso, a true neutral red, and I became the reason it was out of stock. When I wore it, I sold, on average, three tubes of the stuff, just by smiling at the register. It was an acute, specific power. One woman was on the phone with her bank as I rang her up. As she was about to swipe, she put her hand over the speaker, stage-whispered What lipstick is that, and bought it on the spot. I mostly worked the cash wrap, not the sales floor, but lipstick remained my best shill. Whenever I could, I’d swatch the shades side by side on my hand, knowing full well my body sold the pitch. Sometimes, a hand was too small, and I’d clock out with stripes running clear to my elbow. I loved it when my voice sold. The sweet lull of hearing yourself talk crystallizes into an almost narcotic rush when your reverie draws cash. Whenever I’d convince a guest to spend ten dollars on an ugly little breast cancer trinket, or apply for an ill-advised Ulta credit card, I floated to the ceiling. My audience hadn’t just listened. They’d bought.
I sold things I didn’t own. I sold things I didn’t like. I sold things to people who were already buying them. It felt right, somehow, to compliment the customer’s impulses. To confirm them. It felt like the store’s final act of magic, to transform want into need. This is really a must-have, I’d say as I scanned the barcode. We can’t seem to keep it in stock. For a two-week period, a certain brand of rosemary-scented anti-lice children’s shampoo flew off the shelves. It’s always the clean ones, I’d say to the weary moms, beaming reassuringly as if shaking hands at a leper colony. I sometimes sold people to themselves, an act we also call a compliment when it’s done for free. I rang up a tall, skinny, slightly awkward-looking teenager and asked her, wide-eyed, if she was a model. Ulta employees do not work on commission. I worked on something else.
Thanksgiving was rapidly approaching. Sometimes I worked with Teri, who was a full-time CPA but worked at Ulta most Saturdays. Teri was short, blue-black-haired, in her mid-fifties, and interminably jolly. Teri warned me that all the weirdos came out during the holidays. They’re not our regular customers—they don’t act the same.
At 3 a.m., Thanksgiving turkey still warm in my gut, I began my Black Friday shift. I expected madness, fistfights in the aisles, but it was really just more people. For two weeks, my shifts had been a blur of the shrieking fire alarm, which kept going off without cause, and the song “Chandelier” by Sia. On Black Friday, the alarm went off again, this time for thirty minutes. A woman asked Melanie what was going on. Maybe it’s all these red-hot savings, I interjected. The woman laughed, Melanie did not. They were both my boss.
Then the power went out. Is Bed Bath & Beyond out? Dawn implored. The Bed Bath & Beyond next door was a major player in the Towne Centre mall. If they fell, we all did. My coworker Lindsay and I looked at her blankly. We hadn’t been outside in ten hours. A guest who’d just left the Beyond told us their power had come back. Then ours came back. I heard the opening bars of “I Love It” by Icona Pop, which sounded like the fire alarm. The actual fire alarm continued to blare. A woman came to the cash wrap looking frazzled. I asked her for her phone number, as I did all members of our rewards program. I don’t have one, she said. Our house just burned down. At the end of my eleven-hour shift, Dawn’s voice came over the headset—Why did someone wheel a shopping cart in here? We need to get that out of here.
Never mind, she said with resignation a few minutes later, they’ve got a baby in it.
When Teri said our holiday customers were not like our regular customers, I wasn’t sure what she meant. Many of our regular customers were rich—not yacht rich, or summer-as-a-verb rich, but rich enough that Dawn called guest relations putting on your Mount Pleasant.
Our rich customers adopted a mask of good-natured surprise when I told them their totals, sometimes stage-whispering down to their children, We won’t tell Daddy about this. Our rich customers rarely paid cash, but when they did, they used $100 bills. I’ve never seen so many of these in my life, I said to Dawn. Yeah, well, she replied, welcome to Mount P. A few weeks after I started at Ulta, a video of a woman’s customer-service rant went viral. Angela’s search for an out-of-stock Bath & Body Works candle had culminated in a tense standoff with the store’s manager, Jen. Jen had apologized, but Angela wanted more—a better apology, a free gift, a word with corporate, something to mark the spot where she had sought deference and been denied.
Years later, the world would become obsessed with people like Angela and give them a name: Karen, a breed of high-strung, entitled, affluent white woman who demanded servility from everyone around her. When everyone was talking about Karen, I thought back to Ulta. In telling us to put on our Mount Pleasant, my managers suggested that the degree of chipper, coddling deference we showed to the customers was directly proportional to their wealth. The richer you were, the more you wanted from us, the thinking went. But what I quickly noticed was that I acted the same no matter who the customer was. As long as they were buying something, they were also buying me.To be a service worker is to be in constant deference to Karens, yes. But in retail, a Karen can be anyone. Karen is a mindset born less of class, gender, or skin color than of the relationship between employee and customer, which is not unlike the relationship between product and customer. The rich were no more or less demanding of my hospitality, no more or less insistent that I go check in the back, no more or less indignant when the crumpled $3.50 coupon they’d fished out of their purse did not apply to their purchase because, as I had to explain several times a day, those coupons never applied to prestige products, only mass.
We want to believe that Karen’s sense of entitlement is unique to her privilege, that only a profound alienation from the suffering of other people would allow her to act so inhumane. Clearly, people would comment beneath Angela’s video, this lady has never worked a service job. But it seemed just as likely to me that Angela and Jen shared a socioeconomic class, that Angela had worked a job like this, maybe even that she did work one now. I saw it all the time on Yelp, where reviewers foregrounded their disgust by noting that they worked in the very same industry. It seemed to me that one store’s angry customer could easily become another store’s patient manager, and vice versa, that Jen could become Angela and Angela could become Jen, that they could seesaw forever, on the clock and at the bottom, off the clock and looking down.
Ulta was the first time I’d been paid to do anything, and I’d never felt less valuable.
Liberal arts college had been like a summer program for gifted and talented youth, in that my parents paid large sums of money to have my specialness tested and validated through a series of guided activities. I was asked again and again to prove my worth, the assumption being that I had it in vast quantities. Working retail is the exact opposite. You are presumed unspecial the moment you don a name tag, a smock, a novelty visor. You are the public face of the company, a sentient billboard-cum-cash register, and your studied unspecialness—your ability to cede, to blend, to empty—is, in fact, your greatest strength. I knew this before I ever worked a service job, but it still came as a shock. Once, I accidentally shorted a guest $20 in change on her $100 bill and realized it only after she’d left. I agonized over my mistake for an hour, imagining her squinting at her receipt, then back to her wallet, then back to the receipt, cursing my name. When she returned an hour later, I kept repeating I am so sorry, I am so dumb, I am so sorry, I am so dumb. When she smiled and said Everybody makes mistakes, it was as if I was learning the aphorism for the first time. I had been granted grace. I wanted to kiss her feet.
Ulta was the first time I’d been paid to do anything, and I’d never felt less valuable.
The novelty of being a product had begun to twist. Two weeks before Christmas, an older woman approached me looking for lip gloss in a natural pink—the industry calls this an MLBB: My Lips But Better. I launched into a list of several different formulas, all of which I absolutely loved. I finished my spiel and she asked, smiling, what shade of MLBB I was wearing. My chirp dissolved in my throat, my real voice flowing back low and quiet as I told her Oh, these are just my lips. Well, she rolled her eyes, isn’t that nice for you.
One day, a guest complimented my eyes, so I jumped the gun and secretly redeemed her one thousand points for a fifty-dollar discount. Highlighter in hand, I showed her what I’d done, warm with the generosity of my small corporate rebellion. But she was angry. She had been saving her points. She wanted them back. To restore the balance, she would have to return each item and then purchase it anew. Silently, solemnly, she watched me perform our transaction in reverse.
During my first week, I forgot Melanie’s name, and when I asked her, with an apologetic smile, to remind me, she narrowed her winged eyes. You forget your boss’s name? The second time, I accidentally called her Dawn. From then on, my fate was sealed. I couldn’t tell if she just thought I was dumb or if she could smell it on me, the luxury of not having to care whether my boss liked me, the fact that I belonged to the demographic of my customers and not my coworkers, that I didn’t need to be good at the job, for it was as consequential to my livelihood as a weekend pottery class. But the thing was, I still cared. I didn’t need to be a good worker, but I still wanted to be one, desperately.
Dawn—saltier, funnier, lowlier in managerial status—I got along with better, until one day in the break room. Lindsay and I were chitchatting, and I mentioned how I’d learned that, in the state of California, employees got paid lunch. I wish we got paid lunch, I said wistfully as I poked at my Southwest chicken salad. Suddenly, like a poltergeist, Dawn appeared at my side. Say goodbye to the dollar menu, she sputtered. Lindsay and I looked at her quizzically. You wanna pay more for a hamburger? she intoned. Lindsay and I said nothing still. If people don’t want to work at McDonald’s, she continued, then go to college and become the CEO of McDonald’s.
She probably thought you were trying to unionize, my dad explained over dinner. Dawn probably made a pittance too, but her pittance was still our pittance doubled, and she fought for it more viciously than the smirking CEOs who appeared as talking heads on my dad’s Fox News shows. Those men seemed to shoo labor rights away calmly, almost genially, so assured were they of their winning hand. From then on, Dawn was a Melanie too.
As Christmas loomed closer, I began spending almost all my time on register, not floor, and my charisma with customers was becoming a liability; my guest relations were too slow. I was there to grease the wheels of each transaction, nothing more. I needed to trim the chatter until I was checking guests out in two minutes or less. At the time, we were raising money for breast cancer research. A ten-dollar donation got you a clutch or a bracelet. Melanie said we could root around the gratis box if we sold ten of them in a shift, an incentive that seemed less for charity than for the considerably larger gratis I suspected Melanie would get if her store won. Melanie told us to adjust the language we used—instead of Do you want to donate to breast cancer research we should try Would you care to donate or Can I count on you to donate. I didn’t know what was in the gratis box, but I knew I wanted it.
One day, a guest told me that she already donated a portion of her paycheck to breast cancer research. I’m a survivor, she said. So is my mom, I responded, which was true, so I said it in my real voice. We talked for another minute or two. The moment the guest turned to leave, Dawn marched out from the back room with her jaw clenched. Though there were fifty minutes left in my shift, she told me to go home.
My shifts became more sporadic. Sixteen hours one week, thirty-two the next. The exhaustion I felt when I clocked out surprised me. At an office job, you have to dress a certain way, arrange your face into certain shapes, pitch your voice clearer and higher, clench your butt cheeks tighter when you walk through the hallways to your warm little desk chair. Jobs like Ulta demand the same, except there is nowhere to lean. There is no cubicle, no backstage where you can let your entire body slump, and most important, no comfortable salary on which to hang your exhaustion. There are just things to sell, people to buy them, and you. The customer is king, the CEO is divine, and between them, like an isthmus, stretches your cheerful smile. I bought gel insoles. I began to apply antiperspirant to my neck. I learned that guests actually took our guest satisfaction survey. I drove VERY FAST from my job, one wrote, and your shelves looked like WALMART. We’d gotten low marks on door greeting, but the store was kept purposefully understaffed, so Melanie just added it to the cashiers’ duties. My voice went hoarse from screaming Welcome in! over the din. I began to hate how much I hated the job, how I felt ground down by each small indignity, how I felt lowly for not having a sales floor position, how I’d catch myself scrubbing the toilets with too-small rubber gloves and thinking I don’t deserve this, as if there were people who did. I learned that my heart raced with too many eyes on me. I learned a customer’s request that we check in the back would almost never yield the requested product, that when we checked in the back we were really just staring for five minutes at our phones or a wall because the back did not contain rows of stocked shelves so long they merged into the horizon like industrial chicken cages, but rather a cement rec room with harsh lighting containing the remnants of several take-out lunches, unused promotional displays, and a bulletin board onto which management had tacked a grainy black-and-white surveillance shot of two women exiting the store, ostensibly to warn us about these professional thieves lest they return, but really to remind us that we were the store’s most probable thieves. If anyone could beat us at our many-fingered game, it was them, the thieves who paid us.
It was not Dawn or Melanie who fired me, but the bulletin board. When they posted the new schedule, I noticed that I had only a shift on Thursday of that week, and then not at all the next week. When I asked Melanie about it, she tilted her head, not unkindly. Emily, you’re observant in a way that’s good for a writer. Not for a sales associate. I asked her, hesitantly, if that meant I was fired. Well, it’s January, she responded, and you’re seasonal. The season was over.
When I refer to Ulta now, I get the urge to call it my alma mater, an urge I don’t have with the actual college from which I graduated. Maybe it’s because there is no lofty way to say my old job. I avoided entering that Ulta for years, but when I finally returned, nobody I knew was working there. The store looked completely different too—Ulta had capped off a banner fiscal quarter by revamping dozens of locations. Mass and prestige weren’t separated anymore, and the cash wrap now sat along the wall. Later, I looked Melanie up on Facebook. She was pregnant. She was doing something with real estate. She’d posted a selfie. Her lips were a bright, matte red, a true red, not too blue and not too orange. A friend of hers had commented: What lipstick is that? Melanie had replied: Beso by Stila.
Bailey, a third-tier manager who joined in November and whose role remained unclear, was the only other person working on my last day at Ulta. We closed together. She asked me to clean the bathrooms, which I’d like to call symbolic, but it was only procedure. I had already decided what I was going to steal. I knew where the cameras were, where they weren’t, which items had anti-theft stickers, and most important, I knew that the camera footage, due to understaffing, was rarely, if ever, reviewed. I slipped the items into the go-backs basket, stuffed the go-backs basket into a dark corner, and tucked the items in my bra. In the bathroom, I unwrapped them: a face brush that promised optical blurring, and a bright red lip pencil in a shade called Bang. The safest way to steal was to hide the object in dark, tender places where no decent person would root. I walked out of the bathroom with the brush and the pencil nestled tightly against my crotch. All that was left between me and the outside world were the tall, gray anti-theft pillars. I stepped toward them, wincing, bracing myself for the beep.
For guests, the beep meant nothing. Though the threat of theft defined many of our rituals, the guests were insulated from suspicion. We were forbidden from chasing customers out of the store. We were functionally forbidden from confronting them in-store too, allowed to do so only if we could keep the customer in an unbroken line of sight. If they turn a corner or go behind a shelf, Dawn warned, you can’t say anything. They could’ve put the thing back. If the pillars beeped for a customer, they would look back at the cash wrap either nervous or irritated, and we’d wave them through regardless.
The gray pillars had beeped for me once as an employee. When it happened, I panicked, though I had stolen nothing. I dug into my pockets, patted myself down like the TSA, pulled out every item in my clear plastic tote bag, the same kind required in stadiums to ensure you don’t sneak in outside food or a handgun. My sweater, I’d panted finally to Melanie, who didn’t seem fazed either way, they forgot to take the tag off my sweater.
Six years later, I stood in line at a Las Vegas Target. In my cart were eighty dollars of overpriced groceries and a nail polish I’d decided, at the last minute, not to steal. I noticed a group of teenage boys approaching the checkout with armfuls of Grey Goose and Patrón bottles. When they got up to the registers, they walked right past, their steps purposeful but unhurried. They continued heading toward the door. Everyone—the customers, the cashiers, the security guards—stood still and watched in awe. As the teenagers stepped through the pillars, the alarm sounded. Nobody bolted, nobody hid. They knew the beep meant nothing. The store couldn’t chase them if it wanted to. Crossing the threshold, one of them turned back around to face the crowd, gripping the necks of the bottles and raising them into the air as he bellowed WE DON’T GIVE A FUCK. The alarm kept beeping as the boys walked out into the sunshine. I’d never heard a feebler sound.
If the gray pillars beeped as I left work on that final day, I planned to bolt through them and head for the parking lot, to run until I was a customer again. But they didn’t make a sound. As I began to push the doors open, almost in the clear, Bailey held out her arm to stop me. I froze. Bag check, she said dully. I’d forgotten. I opened my tote and she peered down into it. She nudged aside two tampons, a fork from home, a water bottle from the break room vending machine. She stopped when she found a tube of Lipstick Queen lipstick that I’d bought from Ulta years earlier, before I ever worked there. Then she turned it upside down, searching for the dot. On my first day, Melanie had marked the bottom of the tube with a green dot of paint so that every time she checked my bag, she’d know I hadn’t stolen it. Dots were also given to my glass pot of concealer and my bottle of rosewater face spray. When I bought a tube of hand cream with my employee discount, it got a dot too. If I owned anything that Ulta sold, the dot was the only thing that let it cross between the two worlds, the one where Ulta belonged to me and the one where I belonged to Ulta. I still have the lipstick, and it still has the dot, which was made to show that it was mine, it was mine and not theirs, not theirs but on loan to them, until I clocked out.
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In Vanessa Saunders’ novel The Flat Woman, seagulls fall dead from the sky, ash poisons the air, and women are blamed for a climate crisis caused by a soda pop/prison/hotel megacorporation. For the narrator, “the woman,” this is all particularly personal. Her mother has been arrested for alleged seagull ecoterrorism, and the woman has what she calls “leaky boundaries”—she literally experiences parts of the natural world (grass, fish, feathers) inside her body. Hiding these things from everyone but her enigmatic aunt, the woman moves in with a climate activist/Elvis impersonator who ultimately turns violent toward her.
Surreal, funny, repulsive, and brilliantly thought-provoking, The Flat Woman is an example of what bold and original climate writing can do. At every turn, it complicates the intersection of public and private traumas. After all, what does it mean to miss your mother when the natural world is dying all around you? And if you can’t or won’t fight climate change, how can you stand up to your abusive boyfriend? Ultimately, Saunders’ speculative dystopia demands the reader acknowledge two truths, neither forgivable: we are largely powerless within institutional systems of harm; and most of us are complicit in the most quotidian of ways, by failing to act in the face of evil.
Saunders and I spoke over Zoom about humor as an antidote to despair, how representations of women’s pain have trained us to accept violence, and ethics in the age of information overload.
Rachel Taube: You’ve said that this book began as a way to process the violence that had been inflicted on you in your own relationships with men. You also wrote: “What surprised me was this: while this was supposed to be a book about male violence against women, the story also centers my villainy.” Can you elaborate on that transformation and what you mean by “villainy”? How did this come to be a book about climate change?
Vanessa Saunders: I think that victimhood is very comfortable and easy, but victimhood as it intersects with villainy is a lot more interesting to me artistically.In the context of this project, I was thinking about my relationship to worsening climate change. Thinking through a lot of small choices that I made, often very thoughtlessly and lazily. The book became a way of working out ways in which I was in the wrong even as I processed ways in which I had been socialized to become a victim of violence. And I’m not here talking about physical violence, but there were definitely quite a few emotional things that I was just—oof, that should not have been that situation, you know? You can see ways in which women’s pain, women’s anger, and violence against women have been represented in stories, and you can see how these stories have trained us to accept violence, to stifle anger, to silence pain.
When you’re a kid, I think you expect to become a certain type of person we also see in stories, quite a heroic character. And then you grow up and a lot of people are bystanders of a lot of harm. And occasionally people are also aggressors as well. In the time in which we live, this age of information, this question of ethics becomes more intense because we have a lot more access to and information about all the horrible things that are happening. And this can be incredibly uncomfortable, especially since many of us don’t do the right thing with the information that we have, and I think that can cause a lot of anxiety.
Interestingly, the decision to write about climate change wasn’t originally part of my plan. But it was a product of what I was subconsciously thinking about.
RT: I’m interested in what you said about how women’s stories train us to accept violence. Do you feel like stories about violence against women have trained us to accept climate change?
VS: Actually, yes. Because so many of them are just doom and gloom, oh this horrible thing is going to happen. That’s been done. We need to think about new ways to talk about these kinds of stories, in ways that aren’t just straight depressing, because that’s just prefabricated thought. That’s just not interesting.
RT: Let’s dig into where climate change meets violence in this book:The Flat Woman is full of dead birds—their feathers, their blood. In the latter half, there are also several grotesque scenes of cows being slowly run down in the street or eaten by vultures. Most people in the novel, absurdly, ignore this violence. But as a reader, I felt repulsed pretty viscerally, in particular because of the narrator’s “leaky boundaries.” Do you think the reader has—or do we want to have?—leaky boundaries?
VS: I feel like you’re reading it here as kind of like a hyper empathy or affinity with the natural environment. If we’re thinking about gender in this essentialist way, leaky boundaries would be a form of ecological care, which is certainly better than not caring. Interestingly, her physical condition does not translate to a broader sense of action or justice against the environment. It actually is the opposite, where she ends up working for this company that is ruining the planet and incarcerating her mother. It’s also worth mentioning that this is a very uncomfortable position to be in: taking in the pain and the ephemera of the world. In the case of climate change, most people have probably cut themselves off from their leaky boundaries.
RT: Do you have a preferred reading of leaky boundaries, or intention?
VS: I think it could be read as an allegory for mental illness. Or it could also be read as a metaphor for rape culture and the general state of women’s bodies, especially in America. Women do go through a lot of crazy transformations in their life, with puberty, menopause, and, for some people, pregnancy and childbirth. So, the female body is kind of this porous, unstable vessel. And if we think about that in the context of rape culture, the woman is seen as an object that is permissible to dominate or take control over. We do live in a country where women don’t have the federal right to abortion. I live in Louisiana, and I can’t get an abortion even if it was medically necessary, though there’s some ambiguity. So, I think it could speak to the ways in which women’s bodies are seen as permeable objects, and the lack of control that women have and autonomy over their own bodies, some of it being biological and other elements of it being social.
RT: You mentioned how overwhelming empathy can be, so I’d like to turn to another way to talk about climate change, which is absurdity and humor. This is a really funny book, in the most dystopian way. One example, the boyfriend, a self-described climate activist, has all the right language about corporate greed and privilege and personal responsibility—and uses them equally to abuse his girlfriend and promote his Elvis impersonator act. It’s terrifying and funny—or so terrifying it is funny? So, talk to me about the Elvis impersonators. More broadly, I’m wondering if you have thoughts about how humor or satire can be used as a revolutionary tool in writing.
VS: I’m from the Bay Area, and I started at San Francisco State in 2008. At that time San Francisco was very much a city dominated by queer culture, and a specific representation of masculinity that was very camp, very in your face, and I think queer-coded. It was totally normal for me to get onto the MUNI at noon on a Tuesday and see someone get on in a tutu, nipple tassels, shirtless. Another thing that I might have been thinking about subconsciously was the idea of the gurlesque, which is a kind of poetics theory that Lara Glenum and Ariel Greenberg came up with.Basically, these female poets that perform their identity in a really exaggerated or amplified way, as a form of taking back the gender identity that has repressed you and traumatized you and defiantly making fun of it but in a way that kind of reclaims the power.
It feels like we’re a culture that’s very preoccupied with looking backwards, because we’re terrified to think about what’s ahead.
I felt like it was important to write about climate change in a way that was not morbidly depressing. I know that one of my favorite authors, Ben Lerner, talked about how love is an antidote to despair, and I think that humor is as well. I think that if you can write a story about climate change that is funny and ridiculous—I thought it would be a way to dismantle the way that this issue is thought about, and to provoke something that’s more true and I guess more frustrating about climate change: We can laugh at it, there’s also something that you can do about it.
RT: Let’s get down to the line level. I can see your poetry background in the way the novel’s language often shirks a kind of emotional labor. The text comes fast and unpredictable. Incomplete sentences keep the reader at a distance, keep the narrator at a distance from herself. The book, of course, is called The Flat Woman, and there are references throughout to the “flat” tones and expressions of the narrator and her boyfriend. Sometimes, this flatness felt like an experience of trauma. Other times, it felt like the narrator’s refusal to reckon with her complicity. Can you talk about how you settled on the tone, and what flatness implies to you?
VS: The flat woman was actually the first line of the book, before I ever came up with anything else. She did not have a name. You have impulses as an artist and then later on, you actually really understand why you made certain decisions. I think it was my decision to play with certain representations of stories about women growing up who I felt were often super one-dimensional and flat. I’ll never forget watching one of the James Bond movies, and he has this movie-long narrative about this romance. In the sequel, the woman is gone, she is never addressed or explained, she’s just totally absent. I remember being profoundly upset by that as a kid. This was my attempt to integrate that kind of flatness into a story of feminist critique. Of course she’s not going to stick up for herself when she’s getting abused. Do any of the paper-thin protagonists in the fairy tales ever draw attention to the violence that’s being inflicted against them? In a story about violence against women, flatness has an important role in providing a connection to stories outside of the text.
The other part of it is that, yes, she is flattened by trauma. One way to read it is the trauma of the access to information. Her trauma isn’t just personal, it’s also public. I think the source of the flatness was always somewhat universal, in the trauma of girlhood and the trauma of exposure to a world built on exploitation of the vulnerable.
RT: I was struck by the line, “[T]he grief pattern of a bird is relentless flight. This is the only known grief pattern of a bird.” There’s grief surrounding the narrator’s absent, imprisoned mother; and there’s also a strong sense of climate grief, at least for the reader. They feel equally absurd and senseless. What happened when you put these ideas side by side?
VS: In a way, this was trying to make something public, which was the experience of mass extinction, into something very personal. What has struck me always about my personal experience with grief is how eager people become to blame someone over the death. That’s part of what got me interested in questions of responsibility ethics in disasters. But as a writer—the mode of poetry is, I think, largely preoccupied with universals. Fiction has the same preoccupations, but you’re trying to figure out ways in which you can explore universals through the particularity of a character. I wanted to put those two things in conversation with each other, and to explore how hard the simultaneous experience of both can really be.
One thing that my husband and I talk about a lot is how our culture is today in a kind of a state of arrested development, with all these nostalgia bands, resurgence of old movies, it feels like we’re a culture that’s very preoccupied with looking backwards, because we’re terrified to think about what’s ahead. And maybe that’s where kind of that flatness comes from, which is this overwhelming feeling of grief, but then feeling like you need to repress those overwhelming feelings, to the point where you just become very apathetic.
RT: The narrator is experiencing this public or climate grief very differently than the only male character, her boyfriend. I got the sense that, between the narrator, and her aunt, and the woman protester who burns herself alive, not only are women having this grief experience but maybe they also have some unique responsibility to react to climate change in a certain way—a particular power or opportunity, to at least protest.
VS: I think you’re picking up something really important about the book that we haven’t talked about yet, which is: It’s not just a question about blame, but also thinking about blame in the context of feminism. It’s easier to blame a woman for something than a man. It’s not only the lack of male privilege, but there are some qualities that people tend to naturally ascribe to women, which would be maybe a predilection for instability or being crazy or hysterical. Another part is, we kind of expect more empathy and less selfishness from women.
We are being asked to sacrifice our own livelihoods for the personal gain of a very small group of corporate and politicians who are in power.
In the story, women are unquestionably held responsible for climate change, and then there are small pockets of women revolting against climate change at the same time. We know that women take on a lot that they don’t necessarily need to, internal pressures that women feel based on responsibilities that are gendered in society. Perhaps these women are revolting because they feel this sense of inherent guilt that the men are not subjected to. And maybe that guilt and responsibility is a good thing in the end—but it would be easier to not feel that sense of responsibility.
RT:I can’t end the interview without asking about this line, which stopped me in my tracks: “She begins to count down from ten. If I get to one and his hands are still on my neck, she thinks, I will ask him to stop.” As he’s choking her, her boyfriend is lecturing her about the climate crisis. I found I could reframe her thought in those terms, too: if we get to 1.5 degrees, say, we will ask corporations to stop their endless pollution. But there’s a hesitation, because if we do ask them to stop, it’s going to change everything, and we’ll have to admit how bad things really are. Can you talk to me about this moment in the novel?
VS: What you’re picking up on there is kind of the doubleness, which comes from the parable, or the allegorical qualities, which came from this project staying in the poetry genre for so long. That moment is kind of a parallel to our own relationship with harmful systems. I feel like we could be in a little bit of an abusive relationship with the powers that be, in the sense that we are being asked to sacrifice our own livelihoods and the livelihoods of our descendants for the personal gain of a very small group of corporate and politicians who are in power.
It becomes interesting as an ethical question: What is your responsibility in a situation where you truly lack power? Most of us are in the position of being strangled. We are a woman being strangled, maybe without the physical ability to fight back. It’s a moment where she’s rationalizing what’s happening, because she has no power to stop him. And then I thought about it more: She doesn’t even ask him. Right? She doesn’t ask him to stop. So, maybe she has more power than she thinks she has. Maybe if she were to try to stick up for herself, then something would be disrupted in what’s going on between them. I think that there is a lot of power in mass action, but this book looks at the parts of us that don’t want to engage in that kind of activity, and some of the reasons why. The parts of us that are traumatized, exhausted, or just intrinsically selfish. And these behaviors are part of human reality, but I don’t think they get integrated into a lot of stories, especially about climate change and disaster, because those are often centered around heroic characters who are likeable and do likeable things.
The date was set for the breakup. Marco and I decided we could each bring two friends. We would make a day of it.
I chose Yulia and Caleb. Yulia because she was Yulia, and we’d sworn years ago never to do anything important without each other. And Caleb because I was pretty sure he had a crush on me. Not that I wanted Marco to be so jealous he changed his mind about the breakup. I just didn’t want it to be too easy. I’d been to breakups that were excruciatingly civil, just soboring. We all deserved to feel something.
Marco invited Geoff and Cooper, but they were both in bed with hangovers from some other breakup I wasn’t invited to (there were a lot of them that summer, before we all left for college), and we couldn’t postpone. Yulia, the first of us to leave, would be two time zones away tomorrow, and I couldn’t do this without her. It was our last chance.
I’d assumed I would be the one to break up with Marco. But without Geoff and Cooper there to support him, I wondered if that would be unnecessarily cruel. Plus, at the burger drive-thru, when we teased Caleb for ordering orange juice instead of an espresso shake, he said, “Have you tasted orange juice?” with such surprising sensuousness that it wasn’t really fair to Marco at all. Yulia even caught my eye and fanned herself. We both knew it was ridiculous to be attracted to these boys—especially when the whole reason for this breakup was so I’d be free to pursue the real men waiting in college and beyond—but we couldn’t help ourselves.
So there it was. To preserve his dignity, Marco was going to have to be the one to break up with me. Honestly, it was a relief. I didn’t have to worry about finding the right moment. I could just sit back and enjoy the day. After all, it was our last together. Once Yulia left, it would be Marco, then Caleb, then me, in quick succession.
We took our shakes to the public pool. Yulia and Caleb sat under the oak trees while Marco swam laps, plowing head-down through clumps of leaf litter. I claimed the next lane over. I tried to keep pace, coming up for air exactly when he did. He could have broken up with me then, one word every time we surfaced for breath. Maybe he thought it was too early in the day. In the car, sitting on our towels, I wondered if Yulia could tell it hadn’t happened yet.
Then we drove to Target. We looked at the dorm room display, piled with things that promised to be essential to our impending, separate lives: a plastic basket for carrying our shampoo to the shower, a miniature vacuum, a rice cooker in which we could supposedly bake a pound cake. Yulia ran her hand over a subdued pinstripe comforter. I tried to imagine her in a room I’d never seen, with a roommate I’d never met, surrounded by unfamiliar objects.
While we stood before these things and tried to divine from them our futures, Marco had gone off and bought a necklace with my initial on it. He peeled the price tag away with his teeth and gave it to me in the Target parking lot.
The necklace came in a little plastic packet. It was heavier than expected. “Why would you give this to me?” I said, because he was making this breakup extra weird. “Go back and return it.” But he wouldn’t. I thought about tucking it discreetly between the seat cushions in Caleb’s hatchback. Then I thought about putting it on and never taking it off for the rest of my life. Instead, I turned around and offered it to Yulia. She hesitated.
“If I had a boyfriend, maybe I would keep him,” she whispered to me, behind Caleb’s car. “Then if I was awkward at college, everyone would think I was just pining.”
“Take it,” I said, placing the necklace into her palm, “and pine for me instead.” She shook it out of its packet and I held her hair up while she put it on.
Next we went to the cineplex to see a movie. I was trying to enjoy myself, I really was. But what if we made it through the whole day and didn’t break up? And what if that opened up a wormhole at the other side of which we were neither together nor apart? What if I had to go to college like that, not knowing?
The movie ended and I was annoyed. Everyone seemed to have forgotten this was a breakup. Who kept suggesting all these activities? Marco couldn’t wait too long, or the others would leave—and wasn’t the point that we’d all be together when it happened? After the movie we went to the shave ice truck, and after the shave ice truck Caleb invited us to his neighborhood, which had its own basketball court.
We sat on the court and Marco dealt cards. I said, “We should do this every summer. Even if we lose touch, or whatever. We should all get back together and have a day like this, once a year.”
Yulia nodded like she was on board, which frustrated me. I didn’t actually want to relive this day every year. I’d only said it to see if Marco would call me a hypocrite. You’re the one who didn’t want to leave the door open, I wanted him to say. You said it was like a refrigerator. When you leave the door open, even a little, everything gets spoiled.
But he didn’t. “Your turn,” he said.
It was getting dark. I could see Caleb’s house on the other side of the high chain link fence that completely enclosed the basketball court. His dad was moving around in the kitchen.
I didn’t play a card. “Caleb,” I said. “Break up with me.”
“What?”
“Pretend you’re Marco, and break up with me.”
“Why?”
“Because someone needs to!”
“Okay, uhh, ‘I’m Marco, and I don’t want to be your boyfriend anymore.’”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” I said.
“What doyou mean?” said Caleb.
I didn’t say anything. What did I mean?
Caleb dropped his cards face up on the blacktop. “I hope you get your breakup,” he said, walking off the court. The gate clanged shut behind him.
Yulia, who was sucking on the letter T of my necklace, spat it out. “Wait,” she said, “does it lock both ways?”
Marco ran to the gate, rattled the handle. It didn’t open. “Hey!” he yelled after Caleb. “Let us out!”
Caleb, without turning around, gave a salute-like wave.
“I’ll call 911!” Marco yelled.
“No, you won’t,” said Yulia. She got up, steered him to the center of the court, and pressed on his shoulders until he sat back down. “There’s something we need to do first.”
In the distance, I saw Caleb open the door to his house. Yulia sat down and took my playing cards from me, collapsing them into a neat stack. Then she held both my hands in hers.
“You trust me?” she said.
I did. Yulia understood what I needed: more than Marco, more than anyone. Oh, I was terrified, though. This was not how I’d imagined it. Yulia’s hands were a little sweaty. The charm of my necklace—her necklace—glinted in the fading light. She could say it would never be the same again. She didn’t have to, because I already knew.
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