After my mum died, I decided I had to do something with her paintings. She’d painted as a hobby throughout her life, and they’d accumulated in drawers all over the house. I felt that if I didn’t do something with them, who else would? I imagined they’d eventually become my kids’ problem and they’d get quietly disposed of when they no longer had room to store them.
The thing about the paintings that I particularly loved was the stories they reminded me of. The way they were a backdrop to my childhood. I decided to write a graphic novel, using the paintings to illustrate moments from my family’s life. Putting the paintings into context in this way felt more real than exhibiting them in a gallery.
Sorting through the paintings helped me see how my relationship with her had changed over the years. How, despite leaving home and having my own children, I’d always felt partly like a child around her. How, when her health declined and she became less mobile, my sister and I had to take on a more caring role.
This changing relationship with our parents as we, and they, age is familiar to many of us, and is a theme that occurs in lots of writing. I’ve chose to look specifically at comics and graphic novels as that’s the area I work in. All the examples below are written and drawn by a single creator, unlike the more well known superhero comics where a team of writers and illustrators may work on a single issue. The visual language of comics allows artists to present ideas, and communicate their message, in unique ways, differently to how a writer presents a work of prose or poetry.
Eve is a dystopian, fictional graphic novel set in an imaginary town in the north of England. It is a political book which raises questions about the polarization between the left and right, and how we respond to the climate emergency. The book discusses what it is to be a daughter and a mother, and how these roles change throughout life. Una also writes about how society views these roles and the problems that arise when confined to these expectations.
Alison Bechdel deals with her relationships with her parents in two autobiographical graphic novels—Fun Home focuses on her relationship with her father, and Are You My Mother? focuses on her relationship with her mother. The books work together as companion pieces, through which Bechdel explores her own sexual orientation and gender identity. The narrative structure of both books is non-linear—events are recalled in a similar way to how memories work – jumbled chronologically, connected by themes and ideas. As Bechdel’s parents age (and her father dies), she tries to come to terms with the effect they’ve had on her life—how her father’s closeted homosexuality, and her mother’s lack of affection left a psychological mark on her life. Bechdel discusses her relationship with her parents, particularly through adulthood, in an unflinching, honest way.
Where? started out as a series of zines combining prose, poetry, comics, illustrations, and photos. It was later collected into a book. Moreton began making Where? after his father passed away. The narrative threads that run throughout the work relate to his memories of his father and the landscape where his family lived in the 1980s and 1990s. Moreton writes about the relationships in his family and how these change over time, through childhood and into adulthood. He discusses his father’s cancer diagnosis and death in 2017, and the grief that the family experienced afterwards. Where? is a beautifully created tribute, told with love and compassion. It connects emotion to place.
Roz Chast is a New Yorker cartoonist, and this book is told using her familiar short strips and single page illustrations. These short anecdotes build up to create a picture of Chast’s relationship with her aging parents, and their relationship with each other—George, the father is anxious, and Elizabeth, the mother, is overbearing. Chast documents her parents’ decline in health and death, showing how she, as their child, takes on a more parental role in caring for them. She is honest in explaining the frustrations this entails. The comics are told with a sense of humor, which highlights the love the family shared despite the difficulties experienced during old age.
This graphic novel, which began as a webcomic, documents the course of Brian Fies’ mother’s lung cancer. He shares his struggles with his mother’s treatment and the effects the experience has on him and his sisters. Fies intended the comics to be a way of sharing information and insights into the practical and emotional effects that serious illness can have on patients and their families. He talks honestly and with humanity about the pain and fear the family felt.
In tells the story of a young man struggling to find his place in the world. Someone who has grown up and created a life and career for themselves, but still struggling to get to grips with adulthood. He is troubled by his mother’s illness, but not sure how to relate to her, trapped in his own ennui. When she passes away, he expresses regret that he didn’t get to know her better. A lot of the storytelling is done visually, relying on the artwork to communicate ideas with no text, mixing neat, black and white drawing with bold, colorful, surreal watercolors. This contrast in media is used to show the main character’s feelings of loneliness and isolation.
Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs
Ethel and Ernest is subtitled “A True Story,” and depicts the lives of Raymond Briggs’ parents from their meeting until their passing. Their story is played out against a backdrop of a turbulent time in history—the second world war, the moon landing, the atomic bomb. Ethel and Ernest, however, live a quiet, working-class life—their ordinariness is celebrated through the dialogue and detail in the drawing. Although the narrative focuses less on Briggs’ relationship with his parents, the tenderness with which he tells their story is deeply moving, and the reason why the book has become a classic British graphic novel.
Fear of Mum Death and the Shadow Men by Wallis Eates
Fear of Mum Death and the Shadow Men is part of Wallis Eates’ Mumoirs project—a graphic memoir about growing up a single child to an unmarried mother in the 1980s. The book is made up of short stories about her memories of that time along with reflections from the present day explaining how the events in the comics have affected her later in life. The comics also contain annotations in red pen with further reflections as though Eates has revisited the stories at a later date. Eates is unflinching about her mothers’ mental health struggles and explains how her behaviour affected her own mental health. There is a mixture of art styles throughout the book along with the inclusion of childhood photographs. This gives the book a feeling of a child’s scrapbook or diary which complements the highly personal writing.
Detroit Public Library, Burton Historical Collection
Major flooding occurred in the lower levels of the Detroit Public Library–Main Library, during the torrential rain storm on June 25, 2021. Every room and area of the lower levels were impacted by the relentless downpour.—Detroit Free Press
The sky broke that summer
salt-swept the city, collapsed
the freeways' movement.
Some say they were cursed
anyway, those man-made roads
that crashed straight through
the parts of town
built by Black migrants.
This is not a poem about the freeways,
or the way the city emptied
when we arrived,
but if those roads filled like a pitcher,
we should have known
what would become
of the basements,
even Burton, monument
that it is. Was.
Photocopied maps.
Obituaries.
Property deeds.
Records of whole families
floating in a pool
of their own waste.
Black Out, August 2003, Detroit
It was one of the biggest power outages that the US ever saw. At first, people were worried it was an act of terrorism, but when the blackout was confirmed as merely a power outage, the mood shifted.—Michigan Radio Newsroom
The grills turn up. Somebody speakers serenade all our porches, and we jam, smoke-soaked and lawless, all open hormones and this powerless field. What is it about the end of the world, makes you think you are owed an explanation? From God. From your mama. From the boy who ghosted months ago, when the air became more steam than breeze, his number still memorized and half-dialed each evening. You would chase him down, make him answer to you while the streetlights are silent, but this block, this city, don’t know how to tell us apart in the daylight— done swallowed whole bodies before this night, ripe for disappearing. First, the “man” of the house next door swept clean off his mama’s porch. Maria, a dandelion blown away from the passenger seat of her new man's custom Cutlass. My city give a fuck about the proper order of things. She love a malfunction. All them downed wires. Mirrors broken in the street. Our minivan, sat on stolen bricks by thieves kind enough to leave the metal skeleton stripped in the driveway. This block hormone swoll, smelling herself. There is no law. Sometimes, in May, it snows.
Do you scrutinize the acknowledgements pages of the books you love? Do you peer between the lines to build a story in your mind of how those books were made? We’ve demolished the myth of the lone romantic genius madly scribbling in a garret until he is discovered and published to startling acclaim, but a new understanding hasn’t fully taken its place. Writers are often loath to talk about money and slow to credit the role of institutions in their artistic career.
Enter the editors. To get a full sense of how very social the act of publishing is, we need to look at the work of the editors who acquire manuscripts and sculpt them into their final shape. We might define an editor as a superb reader who has discovered a way to supercharge her reading, to make it useful in the service of the work. When I was researching my biography of Katharine S. White, the invisible hand behind The New Yorker from its founding in 1925 to her retirement in 1961, I was astonished to see how much else she did for her writers. She advanced money to Vladimir Nabokov before he published a single word with her. She introduced Jean Stafford to the man who became her third husband, reporter A.J. Liebling. She talked an alarming number of women writers through their divorces and breakdowns and helped them back to their typewriters. The letters between White and her authors testify, again and again, to one salient truth: the art of writing is truly only possible when you know there is a receptive reader on the other end of line, calling out your best work. How moving this is! Stories of sensitive editing show that reading can be an act of care, and penciling up a manuscript can be generative.
I once heard a literary biographer anxiously muse that if all our biographies of writers vanished from our shelves, we’d be no poorer, because the revelation of a writer’s life doesn’t truly impact our interpretation of that writer’s work. Maybe, maybe not. But the work of a literary biography is to show how the writing life is possible—thereby making it possible for today’s readers to grow into tomorrow’s writers. Herewith, eight nonfiction books that tell stories of the behind-the-scenes relationships that have resulted in some of our most beloved books and magazines. May the reading of them open doors to future work.
Women have been editors since the founding of the American republic. Literature is one corner of the cultural landscape where women have been permitted to exercise their authority. Blanche Knopf was not, therefore, the first woman to hold power in a publishing firm, but for a long time her important work was shadowed by her husband and cofounder Alfred. He betrayed an agreement they made before they married by giving the house only his name when they founded it in 1915.
Laura Claridge’s biography gives a well-rounded portrait of Knopf, who was that rare creature: both a bookworm and a bon vivant. She could spot talent and also throw them a glittering dinner party. Even a partial list of authors she brought into print for American readers is jaw-dropping: Langston Hughes and Nella Larsen, Willa Cather and Elizabeth Bowen, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Simone de Beauvoir and Albert Camus. Her marriage to Alfred was acrimonious and her affairs and her adventurous overseas scouting trips turned some people against her, but Claridge recognizes that Knopf’s autonomy is what allowed her to excel at her job. She was a woman out of sync with her time who helped to bring about ours.
Judith Jones was the first woman editor that Blanche Knopf hired, but not until 1957, and only after Jones had notched a significant victory over Knopf by publishing The Diary of Anne Frank with Doubleday. Jones learned how to manage her imperious boss, and though the two never bonded as the only women in the room, Jones was eventually given significant leeway to pursue her own editorial agenda. She worked at Knopf for over fifty years.
Jones understood her femininity in a different way that Knopf. She made an intellectual life out of women’s pursuits. Most famously, she learned to cook during a youthful year abroad in Paris and was therefore the perfect person to help shape Julia Child’s monumental Mastering the Art of French Cooking, a book which launched Child’s career but also Jones’ career as a cookbook editor. She went on to publish books by the finest chefs and food writers: Edna Lewis, Marcella Hazan, Madhur Jaffrey, M.F.K. Fisher, James Beard. Franklin’s sensitive and affectionate book—she knew Jones at the end of her life and cooked with her in Jones’s Upper East Side kitchen and Vermont country house—shows the interplay between an editor’s life and the books she was receptive to. Franklin writes, “Judith’s books embody the cultural tensions of her times, illuminating the friction between women’s private and public lives, and explore both the expectations foisted on them and their desires for themselves.” The Editor perfectly conveys the pleasure, intellectual excitement, and cultural importance of this job. Franklin says that for Jones to spend her life editing “is an act of devotion. Editing is more vocation than job.”
Notice how often the word “genius” crops up in this list. For Ursula Nordstrom, the word applied not to herself but to her authors; she used it in so many of her lively, bolstering letters to the likes of Louise Fitzhugh, Margaret Wise Brown, and E.B. White. Oh how I would love to receive a letter from Nordstrom. Incredibly, she made it a policy never to turn away an unestablished writer or artist who came to her office with their portfolio. She was the definition of fair in her judgment and wildly enthusiastic when the judgment was in favor.
Nordstrom was director Harper’s Department of Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973, part of the second generation of women to head children’s book departments at major publishers, but she reinvented the role. Nordstrom cut through the saccharine sentimentalism of her forebears and published, in her own words, “good books for bad children”—books that veered toward the edgy and even transgressive. Think of that chubby little penis in Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen. “I can assure you that this will be a work of genius. I can assure you that it will turn out well,” she wrote to Sendak when he doubted its inclusion, and then she went to war when librarians began putting a diaper on the boy with white paint.
A “high-strung, voluble, tartly witty woman,” Nordstrom was known as Ursula Maelstrom and Ursa Major, but she was beloved just the same. The daughter of two actors, she created her own persona—a lion who roared, but who also lived quietly with her long-time companion, Mary Griffith—and understood how much writers too needed a persona. This rich and lively collection of letters gives the reader so much delight in the very unchildlike personas behind now-canonical children’s books. Think of Shel Silverstein, who was writing for Playboy when he published The Giving Tree with Nordstrom. Watch as these fallible adults collude on the books that shaped your very childhood.
Sure, there’s are grisly murders and an unbelievably corrupt acquittal in this book, the stuff of cinema, but Furious Hours also contains a heartbreaking story about writing, not writing, and editing.
In 1978, eighteen years after Tay Hohoff, the lone female editor at Lippincott, had published Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird and nineteen years after helping her friend Truman Capote research In Cold Blood, Lee began researching her own true crime novel, The Reverend, about the Alabama serial killer Reverend Willie Maxwell. She sat on the benches at Maxwell’s trial and spent more than a year researching the case. Cep portrays how Hohoff had gained Lee’s trust by working with her over several years to revise the original manuscript of Mockingbird, turning it into something quite different (as would be seen in 2015 when the original was published as Go Set a Watchman). Hohoff desperately wanted a second book from Lee but also guarded her against writing something commercial merely to capitalize on her fame. Hohoff died in her sleep in 1974, which devastated Lee, and when she began to think of Maxwell’s crime as her next book, she had no one to receive it. With astonishing detail, Cep portrays the not-writing that ensued, the gaping holes in Maxwell’s story that Lee would try to bridge in an unchanging routine of writing in longhand and typing the words up each night, an average of a page a day—a routine that was flooded with alcohol. No editor ever wrote Lee letters about her genius or penciled notes in the margins of her pages. The manuscript never appeared.
If there is a mythology of the editor, it begins here, with Berg’s 1978 portrayal of Scribners editor Maxwell Perkins, improbably turned into a movie starring Colin Firth in 2016. The editor is a nondescript man in plain gray suits who shuns the spotlight, but who works heroically behind the scenes to craft masterpieces out of messy, scribbled pages. Perkins was known as the most influential person in publishing who nobody knew. He wanted to keep it that way; when The New Yorker published a profile of him in 1944, Perkins consulted a lawyer about having it suppressed. It is perhaps because of him that editors ever since have largely defined their jobs as purposefully invisible.
Perkins tailored his approach to each author. To Nancy Hale, he counseled sustained periods of not writing when she had trouble with the blank page. “In fact I would be much more concerned if you did not have to go through periods of despair and anxiety and dissatisfaction,” he wrote to her. “I think the best ones truly do.” To F. Scott Fitzgerald, he gave a sensitive reader response to his first novel, describing his reactions to each part of the manuscript and noting when something wasn’t clear—for instance, his protagonist’s facial features. Fitzgerald marveled, “I myself didn’t know what Gatsby looked like or was engaged in & you felt it.” Fitzgerald repaid his editor’s acumen by introducing him to the reporter Ernest Hemingway. Perkins most famously edited Thomas Wolfe’s graphomania. He met with Wolfe twice a week to cut 90,000 words from Look Homeward, Angel and carved Of Time and the River out of three thousand manuscript pages, a process that Wolfe then wrote about in The Story of a Novel, further mythologizing Perkins.
The late Robert Gottlieb indulged in a bit of self-mythologizing of his long editorial career at Knopf and The New Yorker, and here the editor is not gray and nondescript but a nerdy, quirky genius. There he is, in the photo insert, intensely conversing with Joseph Heller across his messy desk, brandishing a copy of The Power Broker next to a very young Robert Caro, laughing with Toni Morrison at the National Book Awards, leaning over a stack of pages with Bill Clinton at Chappaqua. He gleefully quotes a long passage from a review of The Journals of John Cheever which praises Gottlieb’s heroic editorial scalpel by way of a comparison to Max Perkins.
This fleet, gossipy memoir proves that the author found his métier in publishing—like Blanche Knopf, he was both a book- and a people-person. He chronicles his friendships among fellow staffers as well as his growing stable of authors, though there are gaps. He has little to say of his colleague Judith Jones, for instance, calling her only “a calm and steady presence in the Knopf mix, unassertive except when pushed to the wall.” Nor does he provide much insight into the work of publishing, writing at one point, “I don’t keep track of my editorial interventions.” He does not add anything of substance to the much-chronicled story of his controversial—indeed, heavily protested—assumption of the editorship of The New Yorker after William Shawn retired or was forced out. But there are thumbnail portraits aplenty and lots of behind-the-scenes stories that make vaunted authors into real people. This is an important supplement to more staid accounts of the business of publishing. It was here that I learned, for instance, that Knopf as a literary powerhouse was fueled for decades by the runaway success of Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, which sold as many as four hundred thousand copies a year without need of advertising, thus subsidizing the highbrow stuff and paying Gottlieb’s salary—which he spent on ballet tickets and an enormous collection of plastic handbags.
The first history of the magazine to be written after its archive was made available to researchers, About Town in an essential read for understanding twentieth-century literary history. The New Yorker has been a different beast in each decade since its birth in 1925 as a scrappy comic weekly. Its ascension as a tastemaker and canon-maker was in no way foretold. Yagoda tells the story of its evolution largely through the personalities of the editors and writers who pushed on the magazine to make it bigger than Harold Ross’s original vision.
So much of The New Yorker was idiosyncratic and so much of its success was counterintuitive. These pages will tell you why the magazine had no table of contents for decades, no masthead, no photography, and why it ran bylines at the end of essays and stories. As E.B. White wrote, “Commas in the New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim,” and here you will discover the theory and practice of its bizarre grammar rules and strict editorial precepts. Yagoda beautifully depicts so many relationships between editors and writers, each one a novel in itself, and he charts the larger events that swung the magazine’s fortunes back and forth, from the drain on talent caused by the siren call of Hollywood, to the success of the “pony edition” of the magazine that was given free to soldiers in WWII, to the criticisms lobbed at the magazine by its writers (forever upset at what they perceived as a New Yorker formula) and by outsiders (Tom Wolfe’s infamous “Tiny Mummies” essay). The first issues of The New Yorker are remarkably similar to the magazine we know and love today, yet so much has happened inside and outside its pages, and this book tells it all.
Why, exactly, was The New Yorker so unlikely? Its founder, Harold Ross, was a high-school dropout and a former tramp reporter with no money and no credentials. He partnered with Raoul Fleischmann, heir to a yeast fortune, to start a rival to Smart Set, Vanity Fair, and Punch. His idea, which proved to be so accurate it transcended itself, is that a magazine with a hyperlocal focus on Manhattan would have a built-in readership and a built-in advertising base. Go small to go big. Arguably Ross’s biggest talent was assembling around him a staff who could themselves find and acquire and edit talent. Between Ross’s wife, reporter Jane Grant, and a core group of editors and writers including E.B. and Katharine White, James Thurber, and Wolcott Gibbs, plus an impressive group of artists and cartoonists, the tone of The New Yorker was set in place almost immediately.
Ross was the stuff of legend in his own time for his profane mouth and wild head of hair. “How the hell could a man who looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler set himself up as a pilot of a sophisticated, elegant periodical?” asked the playwright Ben Hecht. Ross was, in the term of sociologists, a “charismatic editor,” a figurehead who represented the organization and drew people to it. He did not acquire pieces of the magazine, but he did read them all with a pencil in hand, and his always fascinated and curious queries have outlived him. “Who he?” he would write if a character had not been properly introduced. “Where is New York?” he wondered, about the exact spot in Manhattan that marked the city in railway timetables. “Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?” he asked after reading a line about cracking walnuts in front of a fire. Kunkel portrays all the complexities of this man, how he inspired fanatical loyalty among his staff, and how his success arose from his very contradictions. Completists will also thoroughly enjoy Kunkel’s edited collection of Ross’s correspondence, Letters from the Editor, in which Ross’s voice comes through loud and clear and hilarious.
It’s been thirty-two years since Eric Drooker published his groundbreaking tale of destitution in the city, Flood!A surreal, wordless graphic novel, Flood! was inspired by the work of woodcut artists Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, Jungian psychology, and the pitched battles Drooker witnessed in his native East Village between police and the working-class activists who would not be silenced. A 1988 Tompkins Square Park protest in which Drooker took part appears in the final pages of Flood!, where jazz musicians and a powerful barefoot woman face off against club-wielding police on horseback.
After Flood!, Drooker collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on Illuminated Poems, drew the art for Howl: A Graphic Novel, and published Blood Song, a dreamlike account of a young woman’s journey from a jungle paradise to a dystopian urban world. Throughout his career,Drooker has stayed true to his activist roots. The latest in his long line of political posters, “Ceasefire!”, featuring a Palestinian child shouting for freedom, can be seen in apartment windows and shop doors around the San Francisco Bay Area. And in his thirty-five New Yorker covers, Drooker has tackled issues ranging from gun control to racism to climate change in his signature vivid, kinetic style.
As Nick Hornby wrote of Blood Song in The New York Times, “You can try stopping to stare at the pictures, but their strength is their simplicity . . . maybe we need lessons in how to read books like this.”
When I first met Drooker around 2010, at one of the spellbinding slideshows he puts on in the East Bay neighborhood we both call home, I tried to glean such a lesson from the artist himself. After the show I walked up to Drooker, introduced myself, and asked him to clarify an ambiguous plot point in Flood! “An author never tells,” Drooker responded coyly.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, I thought I’d try again to get a straight answer out of Drooker, this time about his latest graphic novel, Naked City, due out October 9 from Dark Horse Books. Told from the point of view of two wildly different creatives, Naked City follows a young Mexican-Italian singer-songwriter who hitchhikes to the big city searching for an audience and the genuinely-not-creepy male painter who hires her to model for his paintings. A tale of class struggle, artistic ambition, and unlikely friendship, Naked City breaks the mold of Drooker’s earlier work, incorporating dialogue throughout. In the small but airy upstairs office of his home near downtown Berkeley, Drooker was more forthcoming than before, talking about the role of the artist in an era saturated with images, the challenge of leaping into a perspective that’s not one’s own, and why the homeless window washer who calls himself Mr. Nobody is the wisest character in the book.
Carli Cutchin: The genre of the graphic novel has undergone a transformation since Flood! and even since Blood Song. My kids basically only read graphic novels, and in the adult market, there are now academic studies devoted to the genre. How does it feel to be, well, ahead of your time?
Eric Drooker: Yes, there are college curricula now studying the history of the graphic novel. In the last ten or fifteen years graphic novels have mushroomed into this legitimate art form. What makes it legitimate in our economy is that they’re selling lots of copies in bookstores. If you can find a brick and mortar bookstore, there’s a whole category for graphic novels. The art form is in a golden age.
My native tongue is pictures.
The term graphic novel wasn’t in circulation when Flood! came out thirty years ago. I would go into a bookstore and the store wouldn’t know where to put Flood! Superficially it looks like a comic book; it’s sequential art, but it’s not exactly a comic book because a comic book is this little floppy pamphlet, and Flood! was dealing with more adult things. Some bookstores would put it with science fiction; I would sometime find it in psychology. Some just put it in with the coffee table art books. Around the millennium, certainly by 2010, the graphic novel had become a category.
Graphic novels all use pictures in a sequence. Most people use the term a little wrong, they think comics are the co-mixture of words and images, but what about all the examples of comics or graphic novels that use no words, but the book is three hundred pages long? What does that have in common with Peanuts or Superman or Wonder Woman? [The graphic novel] is a sequence of images telling a story, using words or not.
Click to enlarge
CC: One of the preoccupations of Naked City is the status of images. The window washer Mr. Nobody laments to the Painter, “People prefer images over reality these days—Symbol over substance . . . But you can’t caress a symbol—You can’t eat money. Images are a dime a dozen in this town!” I thought his statement was interesting, given that your groundbreaking graphic novels Flood! and Blood Song are nothing but image, are completely wordless. In Naked City, you use dialogue to develop relationships between the characters the Painter, the singer-songwriter Izzy, and Mr. Nobody. Does your foray into words betray a loss of faith in the image?
ED: When I’m in the middle of [creating a book] a lot is unconscious and I’m going along for the ride. My native tongue is pictures. I was drawing a few years before I learned to read and write. [Naked City] gets into the nature of pictures and asks, What’s the point? Our culture is super-saturated with images already—with illusions and things like that. What’s the point of creating any new images? [Pauses.] That’s an open question.
CC: It’s always interesting when a work critiques its own medium, when it’s asking, What’s the status, what’s the purpose of what we’re doing here?
ED: What are we doing here?
CC: Right!
ED: I felt like I’d explored to the limit, How much can you tell a story without using words? Another way [Naked City] is a departure is that it’s a comedy, a dark comedy, whereas the other [novels] were so heavy. Since we’re living in such heavy times in the twenty-first century, I wanted to create some comic relief. That part was conscious. Also to have it be more cartoony. There’s enough heaviness in the world and in my life up to now.
CC: There’s this question of authenticity, too. The character of the Painter explicitly asks, Why am I creating art, what does it mean to make pictures for money? Who am I to be an artist? My question is, did you see yourself in the Painter?
Survival is elevated to an art form in 21st-century America.
ED: It’s partly autobiographical, I suppose. The Painter resembles a younger, stupider version of myself. I am feeling a bit guilty about taking money for an artistic calling. Many artists go through this. It’s not that we’re doing it for the money. The landlord is demanding money. All the artists I know would be doing it anyway. [But] the art supplies are not free, the rent isn’t free, and the food sure the hell isn’t free. I make as much money from three New Yorker covers as for an entire book, to put it in perspective.
[Take] Mr. Nobody. He’s an artist of survival. Survival is elevated to an art form in twenty-first century America. There’s a whole permanent class of people called the homeless. Growing up in New York in the 1960s and 1970s we didn’t have [a significant] homeless population. I have a vivid memory that the word homelessness abruptly entered the language within months of Ronald Reagan becoming president. With Reagan, everything became deregulated very rapidly, including the real estate industry, which was allowed to raise prices to whatever the market would bear. Until then there were rent protections. [Suddenly] there were dozens of people walking up and down my block who didn’t have a place to stay.
CC: As you describe it, it’s as if a diaspora happened.
ED: That’s right.Before Reagan, even the poorest people lived five or ten families crammed into one tenement apartment. This concept of living on the street in a cardboard box … we’re asked to accept a permanent underclass known as the homeless, as if they’ve always been with us and they’re always going to be with us.
[But] the neoliberal era started very abruptly. Bust all the unions, deregulate all the industries, privatize everything, and offshore everything. For people who have been born and raised in [the current] era, there’s the illusion it’s always been this way.
That’s one of the things this story is about. I wanted to show the cruelty of the economic system but also how absurd and unnecessary the whole thing is, and how comic it is in its absurdity. As we get into the final chapters, a shift takes place. We realize [Mr. Nobody] is the only one who has real perspective on what the function of art is in society. Is it of any value? Who is able to make it work for them? What is the relation of art to beauty, to economics? He says the most beautiful art he heard was down in the subway. He got that from me, I noted that years ago as a young man. The most exquisite music I ever heard was down in the Lexington Avenue train station. Subway musicians are sacred to me. It’s a form of high art. When I least expected it and most needed it, I would go down and hear this incredible music, some of the best musicians in the world since they’re rehearsing for twenty hours a day. When you least expect to hear music, that’s when people need it most.
CC: There’s an interesting gender element to your work. As in Blood Song, in Naked City your primary protagonist is female, and you’re exploring issues of the female body and female empowerment. Why did you choose a young female protagonist who is—not you?
This is the gig of any storyteller, it’s a leap of faith, a leap of imagination and a leap of empathy.
ED: In Flood the protagonist was very much like—well, was the artist, you see him at the drawing board and he has a striking resemblance to yours truly. I did that early on. [Telling the story from another perspective] is more of a challenge. This is the gig of any storyteller, it’s a leap of faith, a leap of imagination and a leap of empathy. Can you tell the story through the eyes of another person who’s not like yourself?
CC: Yeah. Naked City is told from multiple perspectives, so there’s a question of, Do you want all these perspectives to be that of male Jewish artist? That could feel like navel gazing.
ED: It’s more vivid storytelling if you have a few different characters who contrast. One of the principles of aesthetics is to have vivid contrast, even if it’s abstract art. In this story, I made the decision there would be not one but two protagonists. In [my first two] stories, we’re identifying with these single journeys of these single heroes, if you will. Here, the first person we’re introduced to is Isabel, this wannabe singer-songwriter, who hitchhikes to the big city. Shortly after coming to the big city, she encounters this artist who’s a little bit older, who’s native to the city. This was a device, now that I’m looking back on it, of maximum contrast.
CC: Who are some of your favorite graphic novelists who have come on the scene in the last ten or fifteen years?
ED: I have so many favorites now. If I had to boil down which ones influenced me the most—there’s Harvey Kurtzman, the creator of Mad Magazine; before it was a magazine it was a comic book. He’s not a household name but he’s one of the most influential people in our culture. There would be no Stephen Colbert, no Weird Al Yankovic, no Saturday Night Live or The Simpsons, there might not even be a Frank Zappa without that emphasis on satire and parody that Harvey Kurzman was a master of. He in turn influenced a whole generation of underground cartoonists like R. Crumb, who’s a major influence on me, and Kim Deitch, another first-wave underground cartoonist. Right now, there’s people like Dan Clowes. Kate Beaton, a working-class woman from Canada, put out a memoir called Ducks which I think is one of the best graphic [narratives] that anyone’s done yet. Emil Farris is brilliant; she just put out of her second volume of My Favorite Thing is Monsters. Eleanor Davis wrote The Hard Tomorrow. Brilliant artwork and writing. This is a traditionally male-dominated form, comics, but the most innovative and expansive uses of the form are from women now.
In South Africa, novels have always been written in a society of fundamental divisions, in particular racial ones, and in a country where culture, language, land and other resources are perpetually contested. Most South African literature, especially since the mid-20th century, deals with colonialism and Apartheid and their aftermath, whether directly or indirectly. It was, and is, impossible to ignore the weight of history when it is still so present in people’s lives. Sometimes one may imagine you’re escaping it by setting your novel outside the country. Even then, though, the reprieve is partial and brief.
Because of the multiracial, multilingual and multicultural nature of the country, the idea of a great South African novel, one that would encompass a broad variety of South African experiences, is elusive. The perspective is always specific, always limited.
For a small, young and relatively isolated literature, South Africa probably punches above its weight in producing interesting writers and good novels. In part, this is because the complexity of the social and political world in which South Africans live has always tended to heighten the intensity of human experience.
My novel Fathers and Fugitivesfollows a queer South African journalist living a lonely and drifting life in London. His father’s will compels him to visit a long-lost cousin on the old family farm in the Free State, deep in the South African hinterland. My book is about fatherhood and family, loyalty and betrayal, inheritance and belonging. The fraught history of colonialism and Apartheid forms a barely visible, but inescapable, backdrop.
Schoeman, who as a young man was briefly a novice for the Franciscan priesthood in Ireland, was the kind of author who turned his back on the world to write. Both as a novelist and historian, he was enormously productive. In 2017, at the age of 77, he took his own life, leaving behind a manifest of sorts about dying with dignity.
This Life is a novel about four generations of a white pioneer family in a barren and remote part of South Africa. The book is obsessed with the tough poetry of the landscape. It is narrated by an old woman, now all alone, who, it is suggested, was in love only once, secretly, with her sister-in-law. Now she is trying to finally collect and order her memories. The narrative is cyclical, wrestling with Africa and the place that someone of European descent may or may not have in it. The book may sound bleak, but the quality of the writing transforms it.
This book by Galgut, the first South African author since J. M. Coetzee to win the Booker Prize, is an elegant and moving novel in three parts. The protagonist, Damon, remembers three journeys—to Greece, Africa and India. He is, respectively, the Follower, the Lover and the Guardian. For one reason or another, each journey ends in disaster. In an arresting formal innovation, the book alternates between a first and third person narrative (sometimes in a single sentence) to dramatise how close and real memories can be. No matter how far you travel, this book seems to say, you can never escape yourself.
One of South Africa’s most interesting and talented contemporary novelists. In this delicate and hypnotic novel, a lexicographer assists a man working in a museum and who is collecting Afrikaans words that are no longer in use. Her treasured collection of shells are then stolen in a burglary. The subsequent search for her shells becomes intertwined with her work at the museum and the motley crew of people she encounters there, and a general survey of her life and its losses. Behind every loss there is an earlier loss, the narrator at one point muses. Part of what makes this book so moving is precisely the slippery, infinite regression of losses it suggests. It also, consolingly, relativises personal loss against cosmic events.
A magisterial novel by perhaps the foremost living novelist in Afrikaans. These days, Van Niekerk lives in the Netherlands and has apparently fallen silent, but this book could be the closest anyone has come to producing the Great South African Novel. Narrated by Milla, a white woman who has ALS and is bedridden, the book follows the story of the complex power shifts between her and Agaat, the mixed-race woman who is taking care of her. Milla took Agaat in as an abandoned child. Initially she treated her like her own child, but then she became a maidservant and nanny. Now immobile and increasingly unable to communicate, Milla has to reckon with not only her and Agaat’s own history, but by implication the entire country’s fraught history of the second half of the 20th century.
Heyns is a highly accomplished South African novelist and the country’s foremost literary translator. He has written numerous surprisingly different novels, but his debut – a tender, unsentimental coming of age (and coming out) story, set in a small Free State town during the Apartheid years of the 60s – is a good place to start. The reader cannot be left unmoved by Simon, a bright, bookish and sensitive boy finding his way through the intrigues of childhood in the dusty streets of Verkeerdespruit. Heyns’s warm, understated humor adds to the satisfaction.
Ntshanga is one of the most exciting young South African novelists. In this book, his debut, we follow a group of young friends adrift in a Cape Town awash with chemicals (they sniff glue, smoke crystal meth, gulp pain killers and observe the city through fresh eyes). Ntshanga has written two more books since his debut, and it turns out this disorienting and somewhat surreal account of young lives in post-Apartheid Cape Town, with its strange and beautiful twists and turns and arresting descriptions, was indeed a harbinger of good things to come.
Rose-Innes is one of the very best South African novelists writing in English. Katya Grubbs, Rose-Innes’s protagonist in this novel, is in the business of pest relocation rather than extermination. This brings her to the attention of a property developer whose gated residential development outside Cape Town, Nineveh, has been rendered uninhabitable due to an infestation of strange insects. Katya takes up residence in the empty estate and is gradually drawn deeper into its chaotic urban wilderness, exposing the tensions between the natural and man-made worlds.
Disgrace is one of South Africa’s Nobel-prize winning author’s masterpieces. It is also a controversial work that has elicited much debate and discomfort, particularly in South Africa. Published in 1999, not long after democratisation in South Africa, it follows David Lurie, a divorced and middle-aged professor of communication and Romantic Poetry at a Cape Town university. Lurie has created a comfortable, if somewhat detached, life for himself. He teaches his classes and pays a weekly visit to a prostitute. When he seduces one of his students, the consequences however fundamentally disrupt his contentment, forcing him to retreat to his daughter’s smallholding, where an incident of violence and unspeakable terror occurs. This chain of events leaves Lurie humiliated and disgraced.
Forty years after the publication of Leaving the Land, Pulitzer Prize finalist Douglas Unger returns with his fifth novel, Dream City, an excoriating tale of hope, greed, and betrayal in Las Vegas. C.D. Reinhart is Unger’s fatally flawed protagonist, a failed actor bent on self-improvement who is forced to be the public face of his company when a construction worker dies in a terrible accident.
Dream City stands out among contemporary novels for tackling the subject of money head on. In his brilliant portrayal, Unger reveals every level of casino economics, from the bottom to the top, and gives the reader a terrifying view of a world where the individual is always playing against the house, and the house is American finance. In doing so, Unger lays bare the role of illusion and greed in our system and proposes that people place risky bets so they can briefly experience the luxury of hope.
Douglas Unger presently teaches writing at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, where he is cofounder (with Richard Wiley) of the Creative Writing MFA. We met Unger decades ago when he taught in Syracuse University’s Creative Writing MFA program. In this conversation, we spoke to him about writing political fiction and how his Las Vegas novel is a cautionary tale about aspirational greed, the casino economy, and “a culture that puts a price tag on everything at the expense of humane values.”
Sorayya Khan & Laura McNeal: You describe your work as political fiction. How have your interests as a novelist developed over time, and are you surprised that your journey as a novelist has taken you from small town life in Leaving the Land and The Turkey Wars, to political strife in Argentina in Voices from Silence and El Yanqui, and now to Las Vegas in DreamCity?
Douglas Unger: It’s been twenty years since I’ve published a new book, so it’s nice to think there might be continuity with the others. I’m not surprised. I’ve always been drawn to books and plays about social changes and how they affect the characters, to stories written against something. Some reviewers tagged my early fiction as “political” with Leaving the Land, a novel that takes on the death of the family farm and its replacement by a macro-scale system of corporate owned farms (along with everything else). The Argentina novels, especially Voices from Silence, I wrote in deep pain at murderous injustice. I witnessed the rise of a brutal military dictatorship that “disappeared” two of my student-exchange brothers and subjected the surviving family I loved and many friends to horrific abuse. I’m experiencing PTSD right now as I follow the rise of violent fascism in the United States—all seems in place for a dictatorship here. I feel we must prepare, with no little urgency. That’s a future story, one I still hope won’t happen.
Dream City takes on a system motivated by aspirational greed. The main character measures his self-worth by money, and by how far he climbs a corporate ladder. I hope his destiny set within the metaphor of Las Vegas and the casino economy acts as a kind of cautionary tale for a culture that puts a price tag on everything at the expense of humane values. Also, I mean to write against the usual Las Vegas-mobster story cliché. Dream City shines light on a Wall Street gang. Is it political? I hope so, but more importantly that it might be interesting.
SK & LM: What is Dream City saying about capitalism and morality? Is the novel an indictment of capitalism, or is it a story about a character, Curtis “C.D.” Reinhart, who is a flawed capitalist? Was the income inequality in the book inspired by things you see happening in the US now?
Douglas Unger: For years, I carried a copy of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-first Century on a Kindle and kept re-reading it, mindful also that what economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted in The New Industrial State has already happened: the line between big business piracy and elected governments has disappeared. Early drafts of Dream City started about midway through what’s now the third major section—C.D. has lost his job and his money, and he’s stuck in the shock of that, like an existential illness. A stuck character examining his life, just thinking, is not the best beginning, so I rewrote the story more chronologically to develop the boom and bust straight into the crash. Las Vegas was one of the most devastated places in the nation by the Great Recession, with highest jobless numbers and foreclosures. The big casino-resorts fell into receivership or hovered at the edge. I know many people financially ruined, who lost jobs and homes, because of what? As books about that era make clear, Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail, McDonald’s and Robinson’s A Colossal Failure of Common Sense, Michael Lewis’ The Big Short, our economy isn’t capitalism anymore, in the Adam Smith or Milton Friedman sense (whose lectures I attended at the University of Chicago). The economy became a pyramid-like betting scheme fueled by insidious greed of powerful people with large concentrations of wealth, backed by trick-and-trap practices of a banking culture that deceived and exploited hard-working people. With the Roberts’ Supreme Court rulings that trash financial regulations, similar three-card monte games are recycling around again. There’s no free market capitalism left except for a small business sector, farmers’ markets, maybe eBay. The whole system favors monopolies or cartels. C.D. senses this, though he doesn’t quite understand it as it’s happening all around him. He sets out to join a circle of rich and powerful pirates who inhabit his world. That he fails, after modeling himself after the business elite he knows, leaves him baffled, his whole life upended. His solution, I hope, might suggest a remedy: to renew basic human values that matter most—love, family, neighbors helping neighbors, and to leave the money-chasing delirium behind.
SK & LM: Is Dream City an exposé of the Las Vegas casino business in the way that Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was an exposé of the 20th-century meat industry? It felt, to us, like a brilliant form of muckraking.
Douglas Unger: The Las Vegas in Dream City is a metaphor, meant to evoke the business ideologies of the 21st century not only for casino-resorts. In many ways, the casino industry is more honest than most other businesses—odds are against the players, but at least the odds are posted and available to anyone who asks. I’ve simplified and fictionalized some industry complexities. But, yes, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, Frank Norris’ The Octopus, Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier and The Titan, and Sinclair Lewis’ Babbitt, are influences. So is John Updike’s third novel in his trilogy of the boomer generation, Rabbit is Rich. Rather than muckraking, I mean one takeaway to suggest a vision similar to Hieronymus Bosch’s allegorical triptych painting, “The Haywain”; or a vivid scene in the baroque Spanish masterpiece novel by Luis Vélez de Guevara, El diablo cojuelo: the parade of Fortune, in which the unlucky or blithely unaware get crushed beneath the wagon wheels.
SK & LM: Tell us about the research that went into creating the scenes that give precise details about construction and finance in Las Vegas.
Douglas Unger: Research for Dream City relied mainly on talking to people and listening: to casino-resort executives, ironworkers, electricians, teamsters, culinary workers, hotel designers, dealers, salespeople, and front desk clerks. Through my wife, Dr. Carola Raab, a professor in UNLV’s famed College of Hospitality, I frequently joined the “breakfast bunch” of her colleagues who met monthly on a Sunday, all of them experts in finance, marketing, gaming, management, and who had lived and worked in Las Vegas for decades. The book Super Casino, by Pete Earley, is influential; as is John L. Smith’s Sharks in the Desert, along withhis columns about local issues, personalities, and books about the casino moguls. Sally Denton’s foundational The Money and The Power is a must-read about the origins of the at times shady business culture in Las Vegas. For theory and insight into what drives the place (and the country), I rely on the late great historian (and friend) Hal Rothman, his Neon Metropolis. Over the many years I’ve spent co-founding and building the Creative Writing International program at UNLV (why I moved to Las Vegas 33 years ago), we’ve depended on donors, and in the early years, on one generous donor especially who worked as a top casino executive. We established a nonprofit institute that funded readings, panels, Ph.D. fellowships, grants for journals and presses, and City of Asylum for dissident writers. All this morphed into the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute that has helped to grow a thriving literary culture in Nevada. The “donor cultivation” experience provided me glimpses into a circle of the Las Vegas wealthy and elite, as did my obsessive work with political campaigns. In my opinion, the best research for a novel, or at least the contemporary realist novel, is to talk to people and listen. Every scene or chapter based in finance, business or construction has its seed in a story told to me.
Dream City fictionalizes certain figures and personalities, combining and recombining them into characters that are pure inventions. It does the same with some of the casino-resort corporations and their characters, reimagining them with made-up names. I’ve braided these inventions into a narrative alongside easily recognizable histories and tales of iconic casino-resorts and some powerful people drawn from the era of the 1990s through the Great Recession. Also, during the time-period of Dream City, the Las Vegas Sun published a series of exposés on the shocking deaths and safety deficiencies caused by shoddy, negligent practices in the construction industry, for which the newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Worker safety is an important undercurrent in the larger story. I know ironworkers and members of trade unions who fought those battles. And I spent hour after hour researching statistics and facts: financial reports, gaming, real estate, banking, foreclosures, layoffs, worker safety. I had to simplify and omit so many complexities to make a readable story. I worry about oversimplification, what purists about Las Vegas might think about this. I also worry about too many facts. Advice to writers: do not attempt a novel based on so many facts! You risk getting lost in them!
SK & LM: We both loved the novel’s reference to King Learin Part Three: “In college, for a class in Shakespeare’s tragedies, one of C.D.’s assignments had been a close study of King Lear.” C.D. recalls that the class “learned how tragedy can happen in a conceptual space between nothing and never, everything in between becoming some otherworldly playing out of actions already doomed.” This seems like an excellent summing up of the novel and C.D.’s character. His awareness of his impending doom is what makes him pitiable. When did you decide C.D. would be a theater student and a failed actor—from the beginning, or later on? And can you tell us anything about the source of this scene?
Douglas Unger: This interpretation of Shakespeare’s King Lear is my variation on thoughts from the late great poet and dear friend, and teacher, too—my friends have always been my best teachers—Hayden Carruth. His essay “Lear” appears in his collection Suicides and Jazzers. Hayden and I talked about “King Lear” along with many other poems, books, plays, and writers, at his kitchen table or mine in upstate New York and when he visited in Las Vegas. He talked about “Lear” as Shakespeare’s longest poem. How it’s bookended between five repetitions each of the words “nothing” and “never” expresses an existential truth. Writing about the boom and bust Las Vegas economy when it crashed into bankruptcy, this concept summed up for me what had happened. The action moves directly downhill, no stops, from disaster to insanity to catastrophe.
Dream City started with a character, the failed actor, lost to himself, moving from role to role in his life. There’s a whole book of cut chapters about his theater studies, his fledgling career and failures, also what it is to be his type of sexually attractive male to so many women and men, and how he learns, painfully, to be more human. He represents for me how, in contemporary society, most men start out as lost, insecure beings who don’t really know what their social or cultural role should be anymore. They have a natural power, partly a sexual power, but they’re unsure how that power should be used. For some, this insecurity results in a tendency to withdraw and grow quiet, with simmering unhappiness; others act out through aggressive, too often abusive behaviors shunned by society, which is also unhappy, and can get dangerous. Or—as happens with C.D.—there’s a choice to pursue money as a substitute for self-worth, which is, sadly, the most acceptable male role in American society.
In his thoughtful book, Enigmas of Identity, scholar and theorist Peter Brooks suggests that a character’s search for identity is themotivating force in literary fiction. He asserts that most of us have at least two identities bound up in the same person: the identity we conceive ourselves to be and project to the world plus another one continually investigating, interrogating, and making unstable our conceived identity. I feel this is probably true. Still, I suspect Brooks’ theory applies better to male characters than female characters in stories. It seems to me that most women, also women characters in literature, are more secure about who they are, or at least they have more resources to draw upon to develop and nurture their identities. Of course, women have more external, difficult obstacles to overcome to self-actualize, all socially inflicted, most often by direct male oppression or by cultures of male hegemony (in addition to the natural pressures of motherhood or the choice or life circumstances not to be mothers). This identity principle feels important to Dream City, because, deservedly or not, the women in his life save C.D. from himself. I hope that rings true. In a larger sense, too, I hope I’ve done justice to the ever-shifting identities of Las Vegas. It’s been too long between books. I’m experiencing a bit of stage fright about this. Twenty years! Still, I’m grateful Dream City is out there now for anyone who might be interested. After so long, that feels so very good.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Leave: A Postpartum Account by Shayne Terry, which will be published by Autofocus Books on February 25, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
Shayne Terry’s fourth trimester is not going as planned. Instead of bonding with her new baby, she’s stuck on the couch with a third-degree tear, barely able to walk. When the women in her family show up to help, they come bearing family secrets and old wounds that also need repair. Begun as notes on Terry’s phone documenting a parental leave gone awry, Leave: A Postpartum Account examines a healing process complicated by capitalism, intergenerational trauma, and a healthcare system with a long history of devaluing women. This powerful postpartum account treats birth as a portal, one that can connect us to a lineage of pain, joy, death, and life. And at a time when our bodily autonomy is being stripped away, Leave is an urgent exploration of one woman’s experience recovering from birth in America.
Here is the cover, designed by Amy Wheaton:
Author Shayne Terry: “Early on in this project, I thought I was writing an essay. That essay grew longer and longer until I realized I might be working on a book. This was 2021 and I was spending a lot of time researching obstetric anal sphincter injuries, trying to understand what had happened to me by reading articles in medical journals and watching surgical repair instructional videos on YouTube. I was captivated by the line drawings I encountered in medical textbooks and how much they resembled botanical illustrations. I decided to include my own drawings in the project and imagined them as chapter headings or separating parts of the book. I am not, however, an artist, and I was never satisfied with my drawings, so eventually I abandoned them.
Fast forward to 2023, when I first spoke with Michael Wheaton at Autofocus about the book. Two things he said made me certain that Autofocus was the right home for this very personal story. The first: ‘This is a book that pretends to be about birth, but it’s really about death.’ He got it. The second thing he said was that his wife Amy, who does all the cover illustrations for Autofocus books, had experienced a similar injury. I understood immediately how meaningful it would be to work with Amy on the cover.
I suggested the medical textbook illustration style, and Amy took that direction and knocked it out of the park. I love that the cover gets in your face; this book is not for everyone, and a good cover enables readers to self-select. At the same time, the colors Amy chose serve to soften the body horror, in my opinion, just enough. The cover is subversive, bold yet gentle, and I know it will help the book find its people.”
Designer Amy Wheaton: “Shayne has taken this painful thing that happens to so many women and written about it in a way that makes me feel understood — as I know this work will do for so many others. I loved Shayne’s idea to do a medical drawing or a series of drawings of vaginal tears. I’ve long been interested in that style of illustration, and having torn badly myself during my first son’s birth, I thought it completely necessary to represent the book in this way. I thought about all those who will find community in her words. I wanted to represent her, them, and myself.
I looked through as many photos and medical illustrations as I could find—different degrees of tearing, stitching, episiotomies. I drew a series in-line with the style we’ve developed for Autofocus covers. I thought about Shayne’s experience, I thought of my own experience, the lack of research there is on female health, the treatment women of color experience in contrast. At first, I thought to use different skin tones on the illustrations, but instead opted for colors unnatural to the skin to show the female anatomy the way it is often treated in procedures like these, as a means-to-an-end for birth. I lined them up like numbers, leaving the last spot for sterile instruments, the inverse of the female anatomy.”
A year before she dies, Sophy has a visitor in the hospital. It is the renowned painter John Millais, of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. He brings everything: paint, palettes, linseed oil, stretched canvas already prepped a soft brown, a stand, a jar full of brushes, a jar full of stuff to clean the brushes, palette knives, a change of clothes. Then he offers her a chagrined smile and leaves, these things in a heap, only to come back with more things: clothes for her to wear, a drop cloth for her floor, a crate for her to rest her arm on, should she choose to sit.
Sophy chooses to stand.
The critics appear as he paints. It has been a long time since Sophy last saw them. The first one hovers at John’s shoulder and squints at Sophy. “So waifish,” he says.
“Absolutely none of the boldness that made her famous,” the second critic adds, materializing behind the first.
“But that makes this rendition all the more intimate and sad,” the third critic says, having appeared in a corner. “And who better to render the heartbroken tragedy of her life than her brother-in-law?”
The first critic nods. “They always had a connection.”
“Look directly at me, Sophy,” John instructs. “As you did twenty-five years ago.”
He thinks he can hide the emaciation within her clothes, the thinness of her wrists in a dynamic pose. Her face is another story; her nose has suffered the loss of fat, its imperfections more pronounced. At least her lips and chin are the same, as full, as bold, as set in gorgeous disapproval as they were when she was a child. He paints into the night, pausing only to massage cramps out of his wrist.
1873
The asylum is called Manor Farm House. During the first of Sophy’s admissions, she finds it a tolerable place to live; she plays piano and reads and sometimes takes visitors. James Caird, a well-to-do from her hometown in Perth, Scotland, comes three times. On the third, he asks her to marry him.
“You look splendid,” he says.
She does not. Her thinness has not read delicate since she was a child; now, she is emaciated, and her dress a decade out of fashion.
He never understood her fame, James tells her. He’s met a few of the pre-Raphaelites and found them to be jumped-up, sex-crazed, pompous windbags. James Caird prefers science. He wants to fund an expedition to Antarctica. He thinks Sophy’s family cares too much about what people think of their daughters, and that all Sophy needs to cure her hysteria is fresh air and sunshine.
“And about your family,” James says. “You need solitude to recover your resilience. Once we are married, I don’t want you seeing them so much, especially that John.”
With this addendum, Sophy accepts on the spot.
Before their wedding, her sister Effie stands behind her at the vanity and pins Sophy’s hair. “Do you remember when you came to stay with me in London? I would tell Ruskin that I had to brush your hair just to have an excuse to get away from him.” Effie picks up limp sections of Sophy’s hair from her shoulders and lets them fall. “I was so jealous of it. But look how thin it is now.”
The first critic is there. He mutters to itself. “The hair,” he says. “Surely the crowning of Sophy’s sensuousness was her hair unbound. Millais’ portraits of Sophy’s other sisters always had their hair pinned and netted.”
Effie puts their faces together in the mirror. Her hair has begun to gray, her cheeks begun to line. Sophy, though a decade younger, has long since gone this way. Her hair is brittle and comes out in pieces.
“You can stay with me and John instead,” Effie says. “You must know that after all this time, we forgive you. No one even talks about it anymore. You needn’t be afraid to come back to society.”
The wedding is sedate and quiet, accompanied by hushed voices of people scared that a sudden sound might shatter the careful peace between Sophy’s parents, weeping with disapproval, and the bride, whose face hurts from smiling. When the ceremony is finished, she boards a sleeper train with her husband, James Caird. Only that night, in the cabin, does her mistake become obvious: as he enters her, James Caird says into her ear, “I saw ‘Portrait of a Young Lady‘ in a gallery ten years ago, and wanted you every day since.”
The three critics, crowded at the window of the compartment, smirk at this. The second points out, “A man of science is nearly always a man of art. You cannot separate the two.” But it is too late for Sophy to do anything else but endure, and bleed a little on the sheets, as she loses a long speculated-over virginity.
1869
The eve of her that first institutionalizing, Sophy plays the family piano in Bowerswell House for hours. Her mother cries. “It’s so beautiful,” she says to Sophy’s father. “Why can’t she speak to us like she speaks to those keys?”
Sophy is a woman of twenty-six, but still thin like a girl, with the same jutting collarbone and delicate wrists as when she sat for her most famous portrait. In the morning, John Millais arrives to escort her to the Manor Farm House. It is the least he can do, he assures her parents. He takes Sophy’s hand like it is as fragile as porcelain.
“Dr. Tuke is very good,” he says. “He understands passionate people like you.”
They take the train all the way to Chiswick. Effie appears briefly, to kiss her sister and husband on the cheeks, before rushing off to a social engagement. She promises Sophy will feel so much better, so very soon. The Manor’s garden boasts a tangle of roses lining a neat, brick walkway. But when Sophy arrives, all the rosebuds are shorn to nubs, thick and bare and gray, waiting for warm weather to return.
Dr. Tuke escorts Sophy to his office after the intake is over. The patient’s chair is close to the window, where she can look down at the garden. The critics follow her, but at a distance. She has gotten less interesting, lately.
‘Do you think your hysteria is down to your tendency to seduce men with wives?’ Dr. Tuke asks.
“Do you think your hysteria is down to your tendency to seduce men with wives?” Dr. Tuke asks. He pulls at his collar. “Is your anorexia nervosa so that you can maintain your sex appeal?”
It was a marvel how a rosebush could be cut nearly down to its roots, down to a stubble of branches, and still flourish in the next bloom.
“Were you the cause of the demise of your sister’s first marriage?”
On the pathway below, John Millais is leaving. Sophy watches him as he stoops to touch one of the pruned-off bushes, inspecting it like it might tell him whether it will grow taller, bloom more beautifully, than the rest. Dr. Tuke cranes his neck to see the path and harumphs into his mustache.
“It’s my advice you get married,” he says. “Perhaps in absenting the rumors about your relationship to your brother-in-law, you’ll feel better.”
1859
Sophy is sixteen, and at a party. Her portrait, which her family has rejected, has been sold to John’s friend George Price Boyce. She is invited to the unveiling. Effie and John are there; Sophy hasn’t seen them for three years. Boyce’s lover, Fanny Cornforth, is also present, her neckline shoved sloppily to one shoulder. Her portrait, sized the same, is displayed beside Sophy’s.
“Aren’t we gorgeous?” she asks by way of introduction, and kisses Sophy’s cheek.
Fanny’s portrait is called “Bocca Baciata”—the mouth that has been kissed. Next to this rendering—Fanny’s parted lips, apple-cheeks, flushed skin—and in the matching gold frames Boyce has procured, Sophy’s portrait is all the more suggestive.
“You’re so quiet,” Fanny says, her arm snuck around Sophy’s girlish waist. “Isn’t she so quiet?”
Sophy-at-thirteen looks down on Sophy-at-the-party from the wall.
The third critic appraises her. “She demonstrated so much erotic potential, so young.”
“Contextualized through display next to Boyce’s famously promiscuous mistress, you can’t help but imagine that this is how Millais intended her image be received all along,” the second critic says. “Passionately.”
“Don’t you look lovely, my muse?” Boyce asks, kissing Sophy’s hand.
“I wish your parents had kept it,” Millais says, kissing Sophy’s other hand.
“I think you look terrible,” Effie says, and everyone, even the critics, laugh from their bellies. In every room Sophy enters the artists whisper and circle her, the reclusive muse of John Millais. Bursts of merriment echo into the hallway. She opens a door to another receiving room and finds Fanny kissing George Price Boyce, open-mouthed. The critics follow and crowd her wherever she goes.
“One imagines she was an object of great lust in her time,” the first one says.
“Even before ‘Portrait of a Young Lady,’ she exuded sexual charisma,” the second says.
They jog to keep up with her. The third critic is waiting behind the door when Sophy flings it wide.
“Given Millais and Sophy’s obvious closeness,” he says, “one wonders about the timing of Sophy’s trip to London, and Effie’s subsequent failed marriage to John Ruskin.”
“Sensuous!” the first shouts down the street at Sophy.
“Coy!” the second shouts as Sophy buys a ticket for the train.
“Notorious!” the third shouts as her parents’ manservant meets Sophy at the Perth station.
The critics press their heads together at her childhood door and go on: what undeniable attraction she must have had for Millais to level such a gaze at him, what suggestive maturity she displayed by lifting her chin so. What about the rumors that Effie Gray banned them from seeing each other? How tragic, for John, to have two such noted loves of his life, and to only be allowed to choose one.
In the morning Sophy’s parents let themselves into her room to find the mirror, the pearl-inlaid brush, the canopy, and the vanity all cracked, broken, slashed, and dented. The critics chatter on, even when Sophy holds a pillow over her head and screams.
1857
John Millais has finally finished “Portrait of a Young Lady.” Before he reveals it to the world, he unveils it for Sophy’s family. The critics gasp three identical gasps, and then there is silence. Sophy’s mother begins to weep. Sophy’s little sister Alice oohs and aahs. Sophy’s father jumps to his feet, shouting, “What’s the meaning of this?!” Effie sits in brooding silence, her hand grips Sophy’s so tightly, white spots appear on Sophy’s skin.
“Sophy is an incredible muse,” John says, admiring the portrait. “Her likeness stirs great emotion in all of us.”
“It’s pretty,” Alice says.
John nods serenely.
The sitting had gone on so long, Sophy did not look at the painting afterward, only fell asleep and was carried to bed. Who is the woman in front of her? It captures her best, her most intimate, her deepest self plainly surfaced. She has not even had time to see this face in the mirror, yet. Sophy turns and sees her parents’ faces. They are aghast, pained.
She flees upstairs and sits for long hours at her vanity, while bursts of shouting sound below her.
Her father comes first, his face red and mustache bristled. “Your sister has worked so hard to escape the gossips, you know, after all that business with Ruskin.”
Sophy crosses to the bed and pulls the cover to her chin.
“We’ve given you and John a great deal of trust, you understand, letting him chaperone you in London, and all those portrait sittings. I’d hate to think you were acting against the interests of the family.”
A critic, probably the first, who knows her best, snuggles in next to her. “Masterpiece,” he whispers.
“Remember your honor,” her father says, and leaves.
“Once-in-a-generation face,” the critic goes on. “Mature beyond her years.”
Effie comes next, once Sophy is already asleep, slamming the door open like a crack of thunder through a clear night. She seizes Sophy’s pearl-inlaid brush and uses it to wallop Sophy about the legs and shoulders.
“You slut,” she says. “You temptress. How could you do this to me again? You’re never going to see John again. I’ll never let you sit another portrait as long as I live.”
Another critic pets the angry red skin on Sophy’s thigh. “That penetrating gaze,” he sighs. “I wonder, what is the object of the desire spelled so clearly on her face?”
Effie yanks Sophy’s door so hard on the way out that it misses the latch and bangs right open again.
John is the final visitor. Just before the light comes crawling back over the horizon, he comes crawling into her bed, a solid wall of man. “My dear, my sweet muse, don’t worry about all this fuss.” He captures sections of her hair in his big fingers and winds them into unthinking knots. “When I unveil your portrait to society it will achieve such acclaim that your family will see this as an embarrassing overreaction and not speak of it again.”
When I unveil your portrait to society it will achieve such acclaim that your family will see this as an embarrassing overreaction and not speak of it again.
He touches his fingers against the neck he bared to her family.
“Great art moves us all, but not always in the same direction,” he says. “Don’t worry about Effie. She’ll come around.”
“Immortal life through painting, the most beautiful girl in Scotland, a wonder, a triumph, a star,” John and the critics chant softly through the night. Finally, when the light turns blueish, John slips away, and Sophy collapses in sleep.
1856
After John Millais marries Effie, she offers up Sophy to be his muse. “She owes me,” Effie says. “And I can’t bear the gossip from my divorce, I won’t be painted again.” John puts Sophy in two well-received, nostalgic portraits of the Scottish countryside: Autumn Leaves and Apple Blossoms.
In London, society is beside themselves over the debut of this earnest new muse. Not only is she unusually beautiful—not at all waifish but strong, hale, and determined—Sophy is the little sister of Effie Gray, and society is not done discussing that scandalous divorce.
“She’s perfectly captured in a year of change,” a critic says. “The only autumn where Sophy will be both girl and woman. Look at the flush of her cheeks! It hints at imminent sexual maturity, the way a flower hesitates before unfurling.”
Effie and John take Sophy to galleries, to houses, to studios; she sits for sketches and plays piano, but John won’t let any other painter have her. “I alone can tell Sophy’s story,” he says. “She’s far too complex for the rest of you.” When she turns thirteen, he tells her to wear the green dress to bring out the red in her hair.
“Have you noticed how impersonal a portrait is?” he asks, swiping charcoal on canvas like he is brushing away a fly. “How boring? How can you capture a person’s essence when you’re instructed to cover up this birthmark, do away with that mole, make larger the eyes and the lips. Infuriating. Not everyone has your natural beauty, Sophy.”
Finally, he paints, starting with her bold, upturned chin. It is a foundation on which to set her rouged lips, full and womanly and turned down not in a pout, but in knowing frankness. Her nose is imperfect; he includes the slight crooked curve of its bridge and sets her nostrils at a flare. Her cheeks—almost as red as her lips, stained with an inconsistent blush, and her hair—a mountain onto itself, or a river, maybe, made with red and brown and deepest black.
He works on her eyes late into night, until they cut through the portrait.
“It would ruin it if I knew what you were thinking,” he tells Sophy as he paints. “The allure is in what you restrain. But oh, how I wish.”
He sweeps his brush over the canvas. “How I wish, how I wish.”
Effie comes early in the morning to the room where Sophy is asleep upright and John is still painting, to bring him eggs. She looks at the painting, and looks at Sophy, and back at the painting, and back at Sophy. Her eyes narrow. John looks impossibly pleased with himself, nearly out of breath with the exertion of his talents. In the peripheries of the room, figures shift as if to move closer; critics, who can sense what Effie can sense, that this one is special.
1854
But at first, the critics don’t care about Sophy. They care about Effie. When Effie and Ruskin divorce, they’re everywhere. They speculate about why the marriage has gone unconsummated for so many years. Perhaps she has an odor, perhaps she is deformed in an un-pleasing way, perhaps she menstruates more than a woman should.
“How could you possibly understand?” Effie asks Sophy, tucked under her sister’s thin little arm. “You’re just eleven. I’ll die if I have to go to that doctor, I’ll simply die.”
The doctor is to determine the credibility of rumors that Effie has retained her virginity through six years of marriage. It will be useful in arguments of annulment.
“All because he doesn’t like my hair,” Effie moans.
She does not mean the hair on her head.
One morning, she wakes Sophy up in the hotel they are staying in in London for the months it takes to sort out Effie and Ruskin’s separation.
“You would do anything for me, right?” Effie asks. “Tell me you would. Don’t think I don’t know that you owe me.”
She gives Sophy a folded note and directions to John Millais’ studio.
“Don’t let them see you,” Effie says. She means the critics that follow her everywhere.
On the way, Sophy opens the note: Written: —and finally come together as one, my dear Mr. Millais, is it foolish to believe fate has allowed me to save myself for you? I await your hands along my sides, ache for them to—Sophy closes the note.
In the studio, Sophy sits and awaits his reply. While she waits, even her breath wanes, risking nothing from the humidity of her mouth. A stray blink, the lift of her collarbone with her breath, may distract Millais from his work. All around her, setting oil paint stretches and cracks as it dries. Millais presides in the center, busy in session.
“You have the most incredible patience,” he says, hours later, when he finally takes the note. Sophy says nothing, but her face more than makes up for it.
1852
Sophy turns nine, and her behavior is so good, her letters so neat, that her parents decide she will make the perfect chaperone and companion for Effie, who has gotten so lonely in London that she is beginning to act out. They have concerns about Effie taking up painting and arguing with her husband and his friends. Ruskin is a complicated man, but undeniably improves the Gray family fortunes.
“Be good, Sophy,” her mother says. “Help to keep them together, if you can.”
Effie squeals when she sees Sophy on the train platform.
“We’ll be proper society ladies,” Effie says. “You’ll see. I have us in fittings all day. You deserve a fine hat for your trouble. And we don’t let a single boorish man hold us back, not even Ruskin.”
They go to parties where Effie is at the center of every room, clever witticisms leveled at London’s pre-Raphaelites until they are nearly all falling at her feet with adoration. Effie teaches Sophy to kiss a cheek properly, to critique a painting for symbolism of its colors, and all of her laughs. Short, amused titters behind a hand or a fan; delighted, gay peals with their heads thrown back; even the derisive snort, which Effie says must only be deployed against a nemesis. Outside Ruskin’s house, Effie is bright and lovely and loud.
But inside, Sophy counts the taps of Effie’s fingers against a dinner table designed for twenty and used by three, until Ruskin reaches over and stills them.
When the sisters retire upstairs, Effie throws herself against Sophy’s big poster bed.
“Sophy, Sophy,” she wails. “Married five years and still a virgin. Could you even stand it?”
Effie flips herself to look at Sophy in the vanity mirror.
“When I was your age, I couldn’t keep him away. I’d half-fancy he likes little girls most of all. You stay away from Ruskin, Sophy, I don’t need the competition.” She throws a frilly little pillow at Sophy. “I don’t know what I’d do without you, though. You must never leave me.”
At the next party, Effie departs without Sophy, and Ruskin comes to her room with a book.
“I wrote this for your sister when she was young,” he says. “Do you want to know what happens?”
He sits in an armchair and pats his knee, draws little Sophy up into his lap with a hand around her waist. It’s a whimsical story, about a wicked brother and a kind one and their adventures through Austria. At the end, the wicked brother is turned to stone, and the kind one inherits their family’s lands. As he reads, Ruskin moves his hand all around; Sophy’s thigh, Sophy’s shoulder, Sophy’s thin little arm.
“Pretty little girls never stay that way,” he sighs. “I’d marry you, Sophy, but you’d only grow old on me.”
There are no critics in the room. There is no one to observe besides Sophy and Ruskin, not even to tell the story wrong.
“I don’t want to marry you,” says little Sophy.
“Shh,” answers Ruskin. “I’m thinking about the love you could give me, if I could only freeze you in time.” And he moves his hand around, all around.
At the train station when they leave London together, Effie cries into Sophy’s small shoulder, and Sophy stretches her arm to touch Effie’s hair, in a manner that might make up for what she has lost.
1882
Back to the asylum. John steps away from the canvas. He packs his paints, palettes, oil. The jars full of brushes and of stuff to clean the brushes. He folds the drop cloth. Sophy touches the back of her neck, which aches from holding still.
Her body will ache until she dies, which will be soon. The coroner will diagnose her death as a seventeen-year atrophy; rumors of suicide-by-starvation will be hard to substantiate. Effie will be in the room when it happens, firmly clasping Sophy’s cold hand between hers. She will bring a vase of flowers, news of her children, and before she leaves, touch Sophy’s face, to see if she can find something in there as expressive as what her husband put to canvas years ago.
Breeze cuts through the heady aroma of paint. John takes Sophy’s arm and leads her around the easel, careful to keep her slightly shaking body steady.
“Well?” he asks. Brown paint dapples his forehead where he swipes the back of his hand to clear a sheen of sweat. Gray, from her clothes, mottles his fingers.
The painting is simple and uninspired, the figure’s expression smiling and bland. “Disappointing,” a critic whispers. Sophy can’t see anything. Only black void at the center of the canvas, a nothingness her whole life has amounted to, her potential captured just once and given to the world before she could find it. She lifts her hand to reach to herself, in case herself is reaching back.
There’s nothing more delicate than a line. In the world of my Triple Sonnets, my lines consist of approximately ten syllables each, mimicking our natural speaking pattern of saying ten syllables and then pausing. I love the tightness of this line—how plot, conceit, and yes, romance, are brought out in a compact yet deliberate space. Romance is a necessity, and because lines are delicate, getting to the point and excising unnecessary words brings us closer to the sincere truth.
When a loved one asks me, “What’s in your heart?” I feel closer to them. When seeking out poetry collections, I look for poems full of heart. When I say “heart,” I’m referring to the emotional core that moves the poem forward into volta—or the infinite turns of realization. In my day-to-day life, I often have trouble saying what I mean. I’m constantly telling myself: “Speak from the heart and others will follow suit.” I want to be less self-conscious. I want to be as fearless as I am in my poems.
Return of the Chinese Femme, my fifth poetry collection, feels like a true return in many ways. Like its predecessors, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold and Revenge of the Asian Woman, it’s a return to the B-movie-and-Star-Wars-inspired-grand-gesture-filmic-title. More importantly, Return is a culmination of all the subjects I return to: food, sex, fantasy, pleasure, family, and of course, queer Asian femme identity within these themes. In Chinese culture, eight is the lucky number, because when it’s flipped upside down, it voltas into an infinity symbol.
I’m proud to present the following poetry collections by Asian American authors. These collections represent the infinite volta.
I love opening with a feast, and Ina Cariño’s Feast is a sensory-spellbinding-steamed-rice-in-the-throat collection of tongue and salt. An immediate intimacy, revealing history within the body, is established through food, or in Cariño’s words,
“my family dines luxurious—peasant food in crystal bowls: seven thousand six hundred forty-one islands jostling in my soup.”
As the speaker’s tongue picks up salt, they further reveal:
“I salt the rice heavy when the meat is low, to trick my stomach out of hunger. my muscles still remember old aches—as if suspended in the salt of an ocean I crossed alone. how much can the body take?”
Salt is linked to the body, revealing intergenerational histories and traumas. This astounding collection reminds me how often, our bodies sense these histories and traumas before our minds even begin processing. I adore Cariño’s moments of unabashed clarity, like “I’m a different kind of brute from what the man on the train thought— ”. This queer declarative rings throughout, and I’m entranced by moments like “on days when I feel more like a woman / than a man” and “& on days when I don’t feel like a woman / or a man.” Cariño gives us intimacy from the queer body to intimacy within a familial history of cooking. “Perishable” is a standout in this collection, and I admire the familial intimacy of “my grandmother taught me how to slit / the milky belly of my favorite fish” to “…picked the meat clean / of tines—scooped it soft into my mouth.” Feast transforms the role of the mouth in Asian American poetics through intimate scenes.
“I was born right after midnight on a date marked for chaos,” Mookerjee opens False Offering. This ultra-femme, ultra-kink, ultra-hot rage collection gives us the “hot trance” of “100 ways to make / your nipples show through your shirt.”
Mookerjee is a performer both on and off the page, and through Sailor Moon transformation sequences, we’re simultaneously graced with a queer appreciation of fashion and a limitless encyclopedic knowledge. She is creating her own 21st-century Vanitas painting with pleasures of long nails, velvet couches, cosmetics, and oils. Through these earthly pleasures, Mookerjee constantly urges the reader to fight the colonizer’s gaze. “Truly” is a standout, and through sexy usage of the forward slash, the speaker seduces us into the poem:
“How can you not be a lesbian when you watched movies with characters named truly scrumptious I mean she is on the beach in white frills like a three-layer cake.”
A wonderous moment occurs with this intense, declarative volta, adding a further homage to American family cinema:
“I’ll start over you can learn a lot about my sexuality if you watch chitty chitty bang bang.”
Barizo’s stunningly fluid collection juxtaposes various modes of performance within a millennial backdrop:
“…the more Time presses the more beautiful they become— lover / husband mistress child—I played Goldberg Variations as she slept thinking of the geologic proportions of Manhattan: limestone, marble, malachite.”
The quirk of language from the role (“lover / husband mistress child”) to the tactile (“limestone, marble, malachite”) plays off the sequential movements of Barizo’s hybrid work. “I’m alive I’m alive” is the meditative chant that closes “Woman on the Verge,” a poem that is representative of Barizo’s unwinding of what exactly makes a woman. The social constructions of gender are a major study throughout, and I adore her juxtapositions of “Mozart piano concertos” and “used the massage / chair as vibrator.” After all, what is highbrow? What is lowbrow? Sexual health and awareness is everything. Gender is a construct. Amidst the intersectionality of these topics, Barizo always crucially lands on tenderness—
“It is just past eight thirty in the city and I wanted to write a poem about currency but it turned out to be about love, what I mean is to live is to rapacious:”
With finesse, she tackles the age-old question: “Is every poem bound to be a love poem?”. “Coda,” another stunner answers this:
“And what is it you hate? She asked. Bureaucracy. And what is it you love? he asked. Rivers.”
Adrienne Chung is a true master of language. Winner of the 2022 National Poetry Series, selected by Solmaz Sharif, Organs of Little Importance combines Jungian psychology, Y2K nostalgia, critical theory, poetic footnotes, and sexy-quirks-of-peculiar-playfulness within high femme interiority and emotion. This collection is luxe and introspective. I am thoroughly transfixed with Chung’s language:
“When I understood that she did not understand me at all, I left and pornographically cried in the terra-cotta-tiled bathroom, the door to which did not open onto a moonlit balcony where a handsome man stood smoking a cigarette, with sex appeal and feeling.”
Chung defines zeitgeist: within the speaker’s personal experiences, she projects outwards into millennial culture and feminist theory and praxis. Within the playfulness of word combinations like “love languages,” “how he likes his martini, his hand job…,” and the glorious “dickmatized,” the speaker is critiquing the patriarchal structures of our society and putting up the metaphorical middle finger at the male gaze. Her speaker emphasizes ironies that further call out patriarchy; for instance, in “Blindness Pattern,” she states: “4. Color blindness afflicts men at a rate several times that / of women” and “5. (How unsurprising it is, then, that they have such difficulty distinguishing between stop and go?).”
I would follow Eugenia Leigh’s speakers to the ends of this earth. Leigh is a master of balancing the delicate line with fierceness, truth, and reveal. “All my life I thought I was hard to love,” she writes, and it serves as the perfect landing and infinite volta into an exploration of healing. I admire how she names “Palpable rage” and “Our people, collectively unwilling // to let go, believe we share / a turbulence, a complex emotional cluster.” It is through these “complex emotional clusters” that Leigh’s speaker pivots us through familial trauma and rage at patriarchal forces that make her question, “How to be mother enough.”
I marvel at this pivotal volta in “Consider the Sun”:
“…Have you found what you’re looking for, a handwritten No below it — and beyond the doors
wobbled a lone dresser drawer holding a flask and a book from 1928 called Come Be My Love.”
I will keep “Have you found what you’re looking for” in my poetic pocket.
I’m a femme born in the Year of the Snake sending a love letter to Stark, a femme born in the Year of the Tiger. This is a gorgeous collection framed by hybridity: stunning collages featuring the author’s mother grace us. Stark writes in “Ballad of the Red Wisteria”:
“Is red love with a knack for breaking code first memories: sure, first memories of home include a pick-pocket or two, a stolen newspaper route coupon drawers and ketchup packets: but that’s survival, baby”
Stark voltas several rounds here, from her skillful use of caesuras to the multiplication of red, to the emphasis on immigrant survival and honoring our Asian mothers and their sacrifices for us. She weaves through the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, drawing out the implications of this story through the Asian femme lens. In “Hungry Poem in the Language of the Wolf,” Stark continues her caesura collaging, opening:
“Call us what you will thief, slut, mastermind, reaper, ordinary time calls us mis-memory, we were born in a time of great need, wanted nothing that wouldn’t pay us when my mother is sick when I am sick, we spend it talking talking.”
And it is through our mothers that we learn defiance, hence the “knack / for breaking code.” In the title poem, Stark’s speaker narrates:
Craig Santos Perez writes in from unincorporated territory [åmot], winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry and the fifth collection from Perez’s unincorporated territory series:
“teach them about our visual literacies
our ability to read the intertextual sacredness of all things,”
I am awestruck by this collection with its sequential layering, intertextuality, abundance, and elements of surprise through language, honoring the author’s native Guåhan (Guam) and the Chamoru people and language. Perez utilizes the space of the lyric to show both the speaker’s present moment and Guam’s history. For instance, in “ginen the micronesian kingfisher,” the speaker pays homage to the extinct Guam Kingfishers, known as sihek. In this sequence, he opens with a literal sacred space for “avian silence” in the middle of the page. This is followed by an upside-down citation (at the bottom of the page) explaining the arrival of invasive brown tree snakes in 1944, thus putting the sihek population in danger. He closes with a sacred plea:
“will guam ever be safe enough to re-wild native birdsong.”
Perez’s connections between food and empire made me the most curious.
“kikko is an ancient chamoru chief who once caught 10,000 green sea turtles & stored their tears in bottles”
In explaining the meaning behind the Kikkoman soy sauce name, the speaker then transitions into an even larger history within taste:
“yet where the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere failed…. to the fifth taste of umami & the sixth taste of empire.”
This is not the war cry of a gladiator in the arena, but the primal scream of a trader on the floor in HBO’s financial drama, Industry. The words belong to Rishi Ramdani (Sagar Radia), following his threat to crack people’s heads during a tense trade, which inspires his boss, Eric Tao (Ken Leung), to remind him that he can’t threaten actual violence at work. That’s rich coming from Eric, who keeps a baseball bat ominously within reach of his desk.
Even if Rishi is all talk and Eric never swings the bat, violence pervades the fictional, London-based investment bank of Pierpoint. And while the blows exchanged by this cutthroat band of bankers are all rhetorical, they’re no less bloody for it. Pierpoint’s many players wield flowery metaphors and baroque phrases as swords, dictating and narrating their trades like archaic bloodsport. And ethics aside (which could be the Pierpoint motto), they’re not totally off on their self-casting as warriors and killers. While literal punches are rarely thrown, the financial schemes these one-percenters enact with a handful of carefully chosen words often have a crushing impact on the everyday people they hardly consider—and that’s to say nothing of the way they cut each other to the bone in the process.
By creating a kingdom where concepts of respect and civility are only as valuable as they are lucrative, Industry becomes its own cycle of violence: casual cruelty trickles down from the top, saturating the trading floor until it feels normal to its inhabitants. It’s no coincidence that the series premiere features an employee literally working himself to death, a tragedy from which his coworkers are expected to promptly move on. When an environment that unhealthy goes unchecked from the jump, it can’t help but overflow into its employees’ personal lives, and ultimately out into an unsuspecting world.
In the show’s third season, Rishi emerges as one of the clearest embodiments of Pierpoint’s vicious ethos. He has so absorbed the spirit of the land that his moral compass has been completely demagnetized, and his seeming addiction to high-risk/higher-reward opportunities seeps dangerously from his dealings at work into his personal finances until he finds himself in levels of debt he can’t escape from. While almost everyone at the firm uses violent language to describe their trades (they don’t “outmaneuver” the competition, they “kill” and “gut” and “slaughter” them), Rishi transcends any metaphorical buffer to be directly and intentionally hurtful.
Blinkered by the pursuit of profit (and Eric’s bat-wielding encouragement of that pursuit), Rishi doesn’t even notice the violence innate to his language. When it’s pointed out to him after being brought to the attention of the HR department Pierpoint often pretends they don’t have, Rishi can’t fathom why he should be reprimanded for the very thing that makes him good at his job. “Why would I censor myself?” he asks. “The contract in this place is simple: as long as I’m making money, I’m free.”
The company doesn’t care if Rishi’s language is violent or not; they only care if his violence is profitable.
Despite the HR charade, he’s proven right: during an intense, drug-fueled trade in which Rishi spearheads a highly risky position, Eric calls a security team to remove him from the desk—until the risk pays off in an eight-figure win for the company. Right on cue, Eric calls off the dogs, and Rishi’s would-be funeral turns into a parade.
Lost as he may be in the fog of war, Rishi understands that Pierpoint’s charter is purely financial and wholly insatiable. Ultimately, the company doesn’t care if Rishi’s language is violent or not, literally or in effect; they only care if his violence is profitable. As long as it is, it will be tolerated and even venerated, due process be damned.
It’s a mindset that follows the employees home. For Rishi, that means cheating on his wife and gambling greatly with their money. For Yasmin Kara-Hanani (Marisa Abela) and former employee, Harper Stern (Myha’la), it permeates the fabric of their friendship.
After two seasons of using each other as ladders to grapple their way up the financial ranks, Yas and Harper have cautiously rebuilt a friendship by season three. When an argument with Yas’ lecherous, embezzling father leads to him jumping off a moving yacht and drowning right in front of her, it’s Harper that comforts Yas and helps cover up the non-murder (fittingly, it was only words that sent him over the edge). This act bonds them together, even as Harper’s Machiavellian scheming leads her to run her own investment fund as Yas’s client—less because Yas is a friend than because Harper sees her as easily influenced.
After all, a friendship forged in the war zone of Pierpoint’s trading floor is subject to the same rules of combat preached by Rishi and Eric. When Harper’s new business partner, Petra (Sarah Goldberg), commands her to use Yas’s gullibility to exploit Pierpoint’s vulnerable position in the market, Harper acquiesces after only a few mild protestations, just moments after comforting Yas in the midst of a crisis about her father’s death. If profit is king, then any profitable angle—no matter how personally horrific—demands to be exploited. Harper may have absorbed Pierpoint’s killer ethics, but she hasn’t yet accepted the consequences of the game; when she preys on Yas’s weaknesses, she still privately believes she can silo her personal relationships from her professional violence.
Not even a fight between friends is free from the violent language of its corporate origins.
But the two are inextricably intertwined. When Yas realizes that Harper played her, the pair incinerate their friendship as a result. In classic Pierpoint fashion, Harper and Yas lob linguistic Molotov cocktails back and forth until even the viewer feels scorched. “My pain is useful to you,” Yas says. Harper simultaneously hides behind her professional justification and takes a personal stab at Yas’ wealthy upbringing: “This is the business. Sorry the world is showing you what it is, without any of the protections that you are so clearly used to.”
This blurring of the professional and the personal is the culture Pierpoint creates:not even a fight between friends is free from the violent language of its corporate origins. If Pierpoint has taught them anything, it’s how to work an angle, and as they weaponize their shared history, the fight evolves from broad slashes to heat-seeking missiles targeting any vulnerability they can find. They sharpened their knives cutting deals for the company, and now that they have each other in their sights, they’re simply throwing what they know.
Only once they’ve emptied themselves of all the poison they have to spew do they resort to actual, physical violence: one slap to the face each. Compared to the verbal onslaught, it’s almost funny, a formality to commemorate a war without weapons. It couldn’t possibly hurt more than what’s been said.
Watching Industry’s characters cut into one another is often as hard, if not harder, to watch than even the bloodiest fights from Game of Thrones. The violence here is not a simple physical act stemming from an emotional turn or an escalation of tensions; rather, the violence dripping from every one of their words represents its own emotional escalation. Thrones had its share of acid-tongued schemers and back-room machinations, but at some point, its characters would usually take their personal issues to the arena or the battlefield, where any blows they landed were simply reflecting emotions they had already expressed.
As shocking as a hacked limb or slit throat can be, viscera doesn’t carry emotional valence, and ironically, most gore is so extreme as to be almost intangible to viewers. By contrast, watching Industry’s characters engage in a full-on psychological blitz is both excruciating and exhilarating to witness. When Harper and Yas drop bomb after verbal bomb on one another, each detonation opens a fresh wound that may be less visible, but is all the more relatable for the way it echoes our own scars from friends or family. And theirs isn’t even the grisliest battle to watch.
As savagely as Harper and Yas act toward each other, they’re still only the militarized product of Pierpoint—the trickle-down violence compared to the original source. Eric may not have been party to the company’s original sin, but he’s a few decades of experience and several rungs up the corporate ladder closer to it than the analysts and associates below him. That close to the top, the imperative to do whatever it takes to protect profits is even more concentrated, combined with a heightened instinct for self-preservation; no one wants to fall back down the ladder once they’ve climbed it.
In that atmosphere, a friend is only a friend while their interests align with yours. Harper and Yas are still young enough (and newly unemployed by Pierpoint enough) that a future reconciliation is possible, perhaps when their personal and professional aims are no longer at cross-purposes. Their coin might be flipped to contempt for now, but by season’s end, it already looks primed to flip back to friendship, with the two killers reconnecting once they have new targets in their crosshairs. But in the rarified air that Eric occupies with the other Pierpoint elites, there’s less oxygen to spare on friendly considerations.
Still, if you’ve managed to scrape and claw your way to the top like Eric has, you’ve likely only done so with the occasional support of other climbers. In Eric’s case, that’s Bill Adler (Trevor White), who Eric hired during his New York salad days. Bill has since lapped Eric to become a global head at Pierpoint, and despite the expected corporate grappling (I play you, you play me), they’ve maintained about as close an approximation of friendship as their stratum would allow. They’re close enough that Eric is the only person at Pierpoint Bill confides in when he discovers that he has a malignant brain tumor and not long to live. Eric is sincerely affected, and the men share one of the show’s rare moments of true tenderness, even if it manages to characteristically circle back to Pierpoint as they swear to fight for the company’s soul together.
It’s still a surprisingly moving moment considering all of the horrible things we’ve seen these two men do, which makes it all the more crushing when Eric uses this information to trade the remainder of his own soul–-and Bill’s career—for one more rung on the ladder. After another exec warns Eric that Bill is only keeping him around as a “useful idiot,” Eric commits one of the most violent acts in recent television history with nothing but a few carefully deployed words and a blackened heart. At a crucial moment, when Bill is about to close a deal that may save Pierpoint from bankruptcy, Eric fabricates a conversation that never happened in order to slyly suggest to Bill, in front of a table of execs and investors, that he forgot the nonexistent conversation they’d supposedly had mere moments ago.
The masked barbarity of Eric’s words hits us just as their implication hits Bill, who is visibly shaken by his apparent decline in mental acuity. Eric, having successfully teed himself up, lands the final blow by convincing Bill to tell the entire table of execs about his tumor, knowing it will spell his doom. The betrayal is horrifying to witness; between the mock concern on Eric’s face and the crestfallen look on Bill’s, we feel as though we’re watching a word-of-mouth execution.
In weaponizing the deeply personal for professional gain, Eric pledges his ultimate fealty to Pierpoint and their ethos. When he goes on to bring in suspicious foreign investors as his own save-the-day plan, he’s not betraying his earlier goal of preserving Pierpoint’s soul; he’s affirming the fact that it was always corrupt, and he its corruptible pawn—a useful idiot to the company, if not to Bill. Unlike Harper in her betrayal of Yas, Eric holds no illusions about being able to keep his personal and professional lives separate. He’s just willing to trade one for the other, dropping the friendship/contempt coin down the slot machine and hoping for triple sevens.
As Eric and the remaining execs plot to pin Pierpoint’s bad performance on Bill’s lapses, an unnamed c-suiter says the quiet part out loud: “While I respect the rules of the game, I find pinning this all on a sick man morally unconscionable. But, tomorrow is more important than yesterday for Pierpoint.”
Empowered by the invisible weight of the British pound, words can end careers or mint millionaires
Contained in that deadly couplet is the Pierpoint ethos writ large: an ability and a willingness to write over any amount of human cost with simply a few words. It’s also a penthouse echo of something Harper previously said to Yas when explaining why she enjoys working in their industry: “It’s a perpetual present tense.” Whether using their words to paper over past traumas or to create new ones in the name of profiteering, the ultimate joke of the show’s language is not on the people harming one another with words, but on the countless others their words ultimately hurt.
The punchline is that the chosen vocation of these linguistic assassins is one where their words are underwritten by more than just personal animus.When wielded by Industry’s besuited executioners and empowered by the invisible weight of the British pound, words can end careers or mint millionaires; they can make the wind blow and shape reality, causing trickle-down effects their speakers wouldn’t have time to consider even if they wanted to. Ironically, those same violent words help to insulate their speakers, abstracting the consequences of their market-moving actions and absolving them of all crimes—after all, it’s just language.
The flimsiness of a system built on that lie comes under scrutiny in the season finale, which sees the younger bankers attempt to double down on it even as the veterans finally feel a wobble. Even though Yas and Harper haven’t spent nearly as much time being indoctrinated into Pierpoint’s primeval ways as Eric and Rishi, they’ve spent long enough in that home built on violence that they both choose to make violence their home rather than embarking on healthier paths to unknown ends. For Yas, that means heart-stabbing a man she probably loves to get engaged to a man she probably doesn’t, but whose family name (and wealth) makes her instant demiroyalty. For Harper, it means growing dreadfully bored of the (relatively) respectful, legal work environment she and Petra have built after all of thirty seconds. If there’s a way to exist in their industry without back-stabbing or killing everyone around you, she’s tried it long enough to know it’s not for her. Rishi, meanwhile, is far beyond any moment of choosing violence and has arrived at the point of being swallowed up by it. His reckless words and gambles culminate in the shocking murder of his wife, a scene that suggests clearer than ever that violent words do, in fact, beget violent actions.
As for Eric, he turns out to have sold his soul for nothing, his coin fruitlessly eaten by the slot machine. After the takeover, he’s laid off by the same executive who inspired his betrayal of Bill. “There’s no business need for you at Pierpoint now”: a death sentence if he’s ever heard one. As it turns out, Pierpoint’s new bedfellows have as little respect for their acquired workforce as Pierpoint does, and Eric is well enough acquainted with the cycles of corporate violence to realize his fate even quicker than Bill did: “I get that I was a useful idiot.”
The problem is, Eric—like Yas, and Harper, and Rishi—doesn’t know how to be useful in any kingdom that won’t cosign his violence. “Your desk is your house,” he says in one last speech to rally Pierpoint’s troops. That makes Eric spiritually homeless now, a victim of the snake finally eating its tail. You can’t teach your employees to kill everyone in sight and arm them with the language to do so without eventually facing some collateral damage.
As he makes his final arrangements, Eric tosses his ever-handy bat away. He’s leaving the arena; he has no use for it anymore.
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