Growing up in the countryside is not a romantic idea to me: it was simply where we lived. But the sense of being connected to a particular place, to feel that I have a home village, a place where my ancestors are buried and where I go to remember them, is probably no longer a common thing, at least in my country, where most people live in towns and cities.
I wrote the novel Pearlwhile living in my home village Tilston in South Cheshire, near the river border with Wales. I grew up in the village, and the local myths and stories that appear in the book are all ones my mother told me as a child. The skipping games are ones we sang in the village school yard, and the songs were all favourites of my mother’s. Although the novel creates its own parallel universe that runs alongside my own memories, it does borrow from a real place and time.
At the time of writing, my mother had recently died, and I had moved back to my village to look after her in her last illness. I turned back to the Medieval poem “Pearl” and to my story as a way of expressing how a landscape can come to feel inhabited with loss. Every hedgerow, every lane or seasonal change felt charged with my mother’s absence, or connected to one of her stories.
In this article, I tried to choose books to recommend where the landscape is full of emotional importance to the characters, and where the day-to-day life on farms and in villages is not romanticized, but simply told from the insider’s point of view. In all of these books the setting becomes a central character who can impose its will and its sensory immediacy in the same way a character might do. In all of them the setting has a kind of depth and richness that comes from the layers of stories and myths and memories that the characters in the stories experience as a part of being in that place.
Here are books set in the countryside where the landscape is a kind of character in its own right.
Set on a tiny, rocky island, The Summer Book was Jansson’s favorite of all her works for adults. In it, an older woman artist and her granddaughter negotiate their relationship to each other and to the island where the family always spends their summer months. The place is rocky, mossy, weather-beaten and well loved by its summer inhabitants. They watch the first flowers appear, accidentally slice a worm in two, fall in and out of love with cats, observe the midges dancing in the full moon, and argue about God, the Devil, superstition, and the correct way to respond to a ‘Keep Out’ sign.
A young girl is sent to spend the summer with relatives on their farm in Ireland. The story begins with the child and her father travelling to the farm, and ends when he collects her at the end of the summer, so the child’s life before she arrives, her home, mother and siblings are all related incidentally, through her reactions to her new environment. The life of the farm, the smells, sounds and textures of the indoor and outdoor worlds, the different foods she eats, the animals they care for, the fields they tend, the behavior of the loving foster parents, are all seen from the child’s unfolding point of view, and the secret lying behind the farm’s warmth and kindness is revealed as the child uncovers it, piece by piece.
Laurie Lee’s account of his childhood in a tiny village in Gloucestershire, told in Cider With Rosie, is full of rich sensory accounts, but this later story of his first travels through Spain as a young man trying to pay his way by playing violin and dependent on the kindness of strangers, is equally vivid, with the added sting of an outsider’s response to the poverty and oppression he observes on the eve of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In one section he describes people harvesting a field as if the field of wheat was the ocean, and they are moving through it like bright fish.
This strange mixture of poetic prose and musical poems moves across the world observing the resilient, surprising, and ancient life of mosses. The moss becomes the narrator’s teacher as she negotiates her way through the loss of her father, and tries to absorb the reality of a world without his presence. The survival of this strange life-form and its many adaptations throughout evolution becomes her touchstone for persistence in the face of grief.
The world of Riambel is one split between rich and poor, where the same place means very different things to the different people living there. The narrator lives on the margins of a beautiful place, scratching a living as the daughter of a servant, with little hope of breaking into the parallel world of her employers. The sounds, smells, tastes and textures of the place, its different locations and the way the different characters’ worlds are tucked inside the same landscape wrap the reader in the many layers of the world of Riambel.
The countryside in this story might be medieval, or it might be dystopian, or mythic, but whatever it is, it inhabits the story as strongly as any character, and stays in the mind long after it is read. A clever, neglected boy and his pet rooster set out to solve a serious problem, spurred on by the random kidnap of a young girl in front of his eyes. He leaves the narrow confines of his home territory, and confronts the evil at the heart of the mystery. Although it has elements of fairy tale in it, the evocation of the land, the forests, tracks and villages and the day-to-day conditions of survival make it more like a post-apocalyptic quest.
This might be an odd choice for books about the countryside, as it starts off with life in the kitchens of various eateries in Paris, and then moves to London, but much of the second half of the book sees the narrator walking from town to town to claim a night’s lodging, part of the constantly shifting tribe of homeless men left to ‘tramp’ from place to place as they are not allowed to stay more than a night at any of the hostels along the way. Forced to live in the open air, the narrator feels all the realities of weather, hedgerow, field and lane in desperate close-up. The countryside is seen as something to survive, a series of obstacles, and a way of life. Hills are there to be climbed, trees to shelter under, the spaces between towns measured in shared tobacco and the wearing down of boot leather.
This is essentially a murder mystery set in a remote and fairly inhospitable region in the mountains on the border between Poland and the Czech Republic. The narrator is a wonderful mixture of witch, fortune-teller, animal rights activist, recluse, and incorrigible writer of letters to people in authority. There is plenty in the way of clues, misdirection, and intrigue to keep the detective fan engaged, and the setting is vivid in all its seasonal variation.
Set in a hard-working cherry orchard at harvest time, this novel does not romaniticize the life and work of the countryside, even though several of its characters do just that. The day to day routine and annual pattern of farm work, its relentlessness, physical demands and uncertain returns are beautifully written. It’s a lock-down story, and a story of changing climates and changing perspectives on this from one generation to another, and a story of what it means to be at home, on the planet, and in the orchards of our childhood.
It fractures bodies into camps of health and malfunction. It fractures time into I probably can and I simply cannot. It fractures trust in the medical system. It fractures relationships, careers, bank accounts, hope.
In writing The Body Alone, form and content needed to reflect what I have experienced as the cyclical quest of a body tangled in pain for nearly two decades. By leaning into hybridity, I could capture the devastating—though often invisible—rift pain caused by activating multiple voices, various literary elements, scholarship, research, theology, and philosophy to carry the weight of an increasingly complicated story.
Broken bodies tell broken stories. Or, they can, at least. Mine does. I find that hybridity beautifully accommodates chronic pain and illness narratives by offering flexible space in which to unravel intricate narratives. This reading list honors the boundary-pressing books that in their hybridity expand and rethink the narrative of chronic pain and illness.
Portrait of a Body in Wreckages traverses the biological systems of the body by calling to the surface the body’s function and, at times, dysfunction. Meghan McClure notes, with exacting brevity in micro-reflections and poetic essays, the parts of the body where one might want to linger—its corners and pockets—as well as the parts chronically left behind—skin, fingernails, saliva, piss. Acknowledging the body’s porousness alongside the small violences it endures, McClure beholds pain as a reminder of occupancy in our own bodies and in this world.
To read Lisa Olstein’s Pain Studies is to look over the shoulder of the author as she gathers, researches, interrogates, dismantles, absorbs, and critiques cultural and literary histories of pain. Blending lyric essay with poetry, Olstein teases out the distinctions between acute and chronic pain while affirming that pain itself is an unknowable condition except by the person, and in the moment, it is being experienced. Unique to this luminous collection is the way Olstein grabs and attaches to the paper those fleeting moments of the experience of pain marveling how, even now, years later, the arrival of pain still manages to surprise.
The Cancer Journals documents more than Audre Lorde’s experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. By expanding selected journal entries with critical essays, Lorde, a “Black lesbian feminist mother lover poet,” accounts for the tangled emotional and intellectual journey women face in illness and pain. Confronting the anger, pain, and fear that surrounds diagnosis, treatment, and recovery, Lorde uses her own experience of cancer to illuminate but also push back on the lack of proper care and personal models for survival and recovery. This slim collection captures the brilliance of Lorde’s poetic mind and tender beating heart.
Ava unravels, sentence by sentence, the ecstatic mind of Ava Klein, a 39-year-old woman on her last day alive. Maso devotees will recognize, and gravitate towards, this unconventional novel that leaps and circles its way through a blur of memory and actuality, poetry and prose, consciousness and reality, imagination and emotion. Driven by desire and grounded in the search for meaning, Ava articulates the mind of body that has reached its conclusion.
The Voice of the Fish reads like a current. With ease and purpose, Lars Horn navigates the sometimes fluid other times solid borders and boundaries of the body: their own body, bodies of water, the animal body. Horn identifies and gives language to the complex way the body exists as a locus of tension and an ever-evolving contradiction. Part memoir, part essay, a blend of scholarship and criticism, entirely poetic and gripping, The Voice of the Fish widens the banks of river by expanding our collective understanding of what it means to tell the story of body.
What Her Body Thought by Susan Griffin
Susan Griffin refuses the silence of illness by electing instead to honor the redemptive power of the witness. In What Her Body Thought, Griffin vocalizes the experiences of pain as a means to maintain agency and validate the invisible. Nausea, Nails, Knees: slipped between sections of memoir are collections of micro-essays that evoke dawning awareness of the body. Space, Paper, Wave: these sections capture the voice of a child’s body, a social body, and an erotic body. Pulse, The Honey, Song.
In the same way people in pain can’t help but press fingertips against the sore spots, Amy Berkowitz admits they can’t resist the impulse to solve the riddle of pain. The arithmetic is this: to be diagnosed with Fibromyalgia, patients must experience discomfort in 11 out of 18 identified places. The micro-essays in Tender Points similarly act as points of contact; they exist as tender points of reflection, refusal, and critique. Berkowitz stares down the ghosts of their past and uses art to reclaim their presence, their voice. (CW: rape and trauma.)
In her memoir, Mettlework: A Mining Daughter on Home, Jessica E. Johnson writes “a story that has room for men who get things done” and “women who make-do and ask for little.” It’s a story about growing up in various mining camps, interwoven with her transition to parenthood in post-recession Portland, Oregon. But at its heart, it’s a story about motherhood, what is means to create a home, and what society determines valuable.
In Johnson’s world, hard tangible things like gold and silver held value; thus, her family made homes around these things. More abstract things like caring for others and making a home comfortable—things Johnson’s mom did and what Johnson does for her children many years later—come secondary.
When an archive of her childhood arrives via email from her mother during the early weeks of postpartum, Johnson begins to see how the bedrock images of her isolated upbringing have stayed with her.
Married to a third-generation Alaskan fisherman, having uprooted myself to live with him and relinquished my career to raise our children, I saw parallels between my life and the narrator’s mother. Reading this book felt very resonant as I reflected on my contributions, both inside and outside the home, and the worth of motherhood in a capitalistic world.
Summer Koester: What was it like to pour over your mother’s letters during her times in the mining camps—places without help, running water, and help—while you were just a few weeks postpartum?
Jessica E. Johnson: Growing up and in my twenties, I had a lot of ambivalence about being a mom, and even after I knew I wanted a family of my own, I carried that uncertainty with me. There was less public writing then about ambivalent motherhood, and I sometimes felt freakish in my feelings and unsupported as my actual self in my actual circumstances. My mother’s letters opened a window onto the past-before-memory; both what happened, and a sense of my mother’s account taking shape. I sensed that some of the contradictions I was experiencing were set up by the past and the narratives I’d received about it. I had an inkling, too, of the ways in which the life into which I was born was emblematic of larger social narratives. The experience started me down this path of investigation that became Mettlework.
SK: So much lip service is given to mothers who sacrifice their careers to stay home and raise children. But when the rubber hits the pavement, we live in a capitalist society, and there is no capital in mothering. Most do not consider parenting “work” and, therefore, it deserves no compensation.
You write, “A different currency is required.” Can you elaborate on that, or what another currency would look like?
JJ: I used the word “currency” there because I’d been working with this language of metal and capital throughout the book, but in fact I’m a socialist, and I think the real answer to this question is working toward a society (or many small ones) with the capacity to value land and people and plants and animals beyond their ability to be exploited. To me, the call for a new currency in this passage is the simple recognition that the current form of capitalism reaches into every part of life and fails to value that which is most precious. This is a simple thing to know and not an original insight on my part but still a difficult thing to live with here and now.
The current form of capitalism reaches into every part of life and fails to value that which is most precious.
There are large-scale policy changes that would make a huge difference in perception of value, things like the right to healthcare, housing, and a fully funded education, and the orientation of all of these away from profit and toward the idea of widespread and balanced thriving into the future. Some low hanging fruit might be decent parental leave for both parents and something like an expanded child tax credit.
However, value is a social proposition, which means people can always create some sense of value simply by recognizing each other and fostering the spaces in which recognition is possible. Inclusive literary and learning spaces are important to me for this reason. So are the writer-mom text threads that get me through day to day.
In your question, I also note the ways in which naturalism and gender attach to carework. The idea that gestating, birthing, and raising children is a matter of instinct and nature for women, is an idea that has made the biology and labor of pregnancy, birth, and childcare invisible. One can see this in public discourse about abortion: educated people are deeply ignorant of many basic obstetric and gynecological facts. I want to think this mythology can change, first through awareness.
What does it mean to recognize and value the work of raising people—or the work of study, or of art-making—in the communities where we have the most influence? In individual workplaces? In friend groups? In families? Recognition and re-valuing can start anywhere. And part of change might be simply the awareness of living in deep contradictions.
SK: You write about pursuing a “workmanlike identity” that might “feel masculine and purposeful.” How does pursuing such an identity square with the role of mothering that you are naturally drawn to? How do you reconcile your role as the self-sacrificing, virtuous mother similar to the one depicted in your mother’s handbook for mothers and that of financial contributors?
JJ: When I was younger, I was definitely more drawn to the workmanlike identity–it was the primary, consequential role in the very small places where I grew up, and I think people who know me might say I still carry some of this identity.
As union members who work in the same (public) sector, my husband and I have generally maintained balance in the earning and caregiving. Membership in a union has been crucial to my ability to do this, and even to occasionally flex toward writing or additional caregiving when necessary. This is why I have thanked my local in both of my recent books–without the contract and its provisions and protections, I’m not sure I could have written them.
In Mettlework I was attempting to walk a difficult line: of reckoning with the internalized misogyny in my own desire not to become a mother like my own mother, but also thinking about the construction of the mythology around (white) maternal virtue and creative self-sacrifice. How much of this self-sacrifice is inherent in parenthood, how much is a deeply problematic myth that upholds the colonial family, and how much is reinforced by laws, policies, and practices? In my own thinking, I acknowledge that some elements of this problem are probably in the nature of being a parent, while trying to stay aware of myths that can be exposed as such and structural forces that can at least theoretically change.
As one example, as a wealthy society, we could have a functional childcare system that allows parents to work if they want to and children to thrive and childcare workers to be paid decently. This is possible, though perhaps politically far-off. But there are also smaller scale and interpersonal ways for everyday people to begin undoing this knot in which having children means diminished public participation.
In my own life, I think I reconcile these roles by recognizing that the gendered splitting of capacities in the nuclear family structure is ultimately not something I want to reproduce.
SK: You write: “Everything would work out, she was saying, if I could be endlessly fluid, endlessly gentle, addressing my needs by finding a way to need less.” Then you add, “Things would be fine if–for the first time—I could find a way to be more like her.” How has that belief shaped the way you parent and exist in the world?
Taking care of people is a form of expertise rarely recognized as such because the scale is small and because it has been seen as women’s work.
JJ: In that passage, I’m trying to figure out the diaper question—what kind of diapers to use—which stands for the larger question of how to fit the baby into lives already complicated by art and illness (two time- and energy-consuming factors that don’t pay). In this moment, I’m deeply resisting the idea of making things work out by giving up my job and sort of living in the moment like my mother did. In fact, I continued to resist, though I had some reprieve in the form of job-sharing periods (when I wrote much of this book, and another). I have been harder edged than she was. I insisted on maintaining some boundaries around a sense of what I need to do, both as a worker and as a writer. This has not been easy. Like many women I know, and men who take hands-on parenting seriously, I often feel torn apart by competing demands. On the other hand, I think it was pretty much impossible for me, personality-wise, to do what my mother did, and I’m sure that would have been profoundly challenging in other ways.
SK:Either by choice or expectation, your mother asked for little and managed with less. Later in the book, you describe how fish sacrifice their lives to reproduce:
“They keep going, I thought. Their bodies start to decay while they’re alive. They keep going. They are a vehicle for the next generation and nothing more and it’s okay. They change and change and change and then they die.”
What parallels, if any, did you see between your experience as a mother and your own mother’s?
JJ: I remember having some moments early on in which I had the sensation of inherited memory, the sense of what women before me survived. Each of us here is here because of a chain of women giving birth and raising people in what had to have been incredibly hard circumstances.
It was important for me in writing this book, even as I’m looking hard at the social role she occupied and some of the ways she made sense of her life, to honor my mother’s labor, her writing, and just who she is as a person. I hope to have done that. I wanted to reckon with the situation I was born into. At the same time, I felt that disavowing this past completely would be–ironically–a way of reproducing it. It’s easy to say, “that’s not me,” but something in that move reminded me of my parents’ unquestioned practice of picking up and moving on from one mine to the next, forming minimal relationships with the places they were.
One connection to my mother—though maybe not a parallel—is that she created and preserved this home that was often a place for wonder, creativity, and rest. She could do that by keeping a kind of mental barrier between the household and the outside world, an avoidance that I believe caused me harm. In writing this book, I sometimes came to think of the work I have tried to do in public–especially in my teaching–as a way of bringing the acceptance she showed me outside the family unit and into an open-access educational space. I have made different choices than she did; I also wouldn’t be able to do anything I do without the benefit of her responsiveness and care.
Possibly a more direct parallel is that the unpredictability of my husband’s illness sometimes requires of me a kind of responsiveness that is not unlike my mother’s. She had to shift according to the mine and my father’s career, and I often have to shift and scramble according to the health needs of my partner and children.
SK: In one passage, you are talking to your daughter and say: “I can’t watch you dreaming around the house and forest, talking to trees, embracing your brother, twirling for the sake of twirling, without remembering all the forces, outside and ahead, that will work to separate you from yourself, that will whisper that your beauty can be measured according to a standard, that your body can be ignored, that your time and brain are without value except as the means for someone to accrue profit, that your ability to see and hear and care for others is, at best, worth minimum wage.”
There are so many things to unpack here. Why do we undervalue caring for others? How do we evolve from attaching a price tag to our worth? How do we begin to value more intangible things like caring for others? Can we?
JJ: In this part, I’m stating my determination to pass on a worldview different from the one I inherited, a way of looking at things that could sustain my beloved child, even in an uncertain future. I was thinking that might mean a sense of herself that would keep her whole despite all she might encounter.
Part of that worldview requires putting care at the center. Taking care of people, holistically, in an intimate way is a form of expertise rarely recognized as such because the scale is small and because it has been seen as women’s work. I conjecture that this has to do with centuries of misogyny and probably colonialism—but I’m just a poet. Taking care of oneself is maybe undervalued, too. Society is structured in ways that often require people to override or ignore basic needs and make real care very difficult to get. I wanted everything good for my child, and as parents do, I considered the fact of her miraculous. Her being was (and is) precious to me. And while of course change begins the moment a person is born, I wanted to pass on an account of the world in which life–including her life–is in fact precious.
I think we evolve from attaching a price tag to our worth in social formations that can recognize non-monetary value and engage in resistance to notions of purely market-based value. Resistance can mean many things. Not everyone has the same options when it comes to activism. And political situations are always fluid, so the forms of resistance should be too. However, I see this question of value as fundamentally a social one. We can value care in community and as an act of resistance. This sounds super serious, but to me this is also about laughing for real and seizing joy where you find it and feeling greeted and seen and known–and being able to take more risks because you know there are some people who have got you.
When I think about everything I just said in relation to my mom’s life, I note that her physical isolation often made community very difficult. Still, I see it as almost impossible to do much of anything alone.
My right foot is a right foot in the garden in a black Croc no socks in a great deal of pain.
A day of summer
Neuropathy, the confusion of nerves, comes in a slew of colors. Indigo. Lemon. A cold lavender and a hot marmalade. I don’t walk to the public pool on F and Blake or up Howard to see the peach poppies blooming the size of dinner plates. I don’t lounge in the stalls of peppers at the farmer’s market or wander the arboretum or take myself running or hiking on Moscow Mountain, the place that returns my friends in this town to sanity multiple times a week.
I’ve lived in Northern Idaho for two years, but given what the disease has done to my connective tissue, I’ve never had reason to go up the mountain, and I probably never will,which is not a thing I’m supposed to say because I ought to narrate my body into healing. Language has the capacity to capture a state a person has never experienced, of course, but it’s my imagination in this case that’s unable to stretch to meet the words.
I’ve never been well; I don’t know what it feels like to have a body that’s not in pain.
I have a handicapped badge for my car that I renew every six months at first, and then later only every three years, as permanence sets into my body. I’m still afraid each time I hook it to my rearview, afraid of who might scowl at me in the parking lot as I rise to my feet, my twenty-eight-year-old but unsteady feet, my feet that have lost the ability to regulate what impulses move from them to my brain.
My desire with sentences is to translate something true.
Nerve pain, in all its colors, is ultimately a failure of communication—the sending of a warning message from the foot or elbow or neck to the brain when nothing external warrants that message. Pain is a somatic experience that the brain sends back; pain grows from the brain, shooting outward as prescribed by mixed signals—a faulty call and response.
Trying to justify my body will always make my sentences too long.
At home, I try to write better sentences, if try means: run the sink, make a cup of tea, stare from the couch at the pine out the large front window over a closed laptop or no laptop at all. Better sentences would be staccato with certainty. Instead: languishing trails of narrative that run in slow loops.
I take my body to the yard, where the limey green that’s crept over our raised bed, which stretches from one fence to the other, is not something I planted. A weed, with shields for leaves.
Pain, in my body, does not come in the color green.
A day of summer
I’ve never been well; I don’t know what it feels like to have a body that’s not in pain.
Where I grew up in Colorado, we had no creeping bellflower yet, but we did have roses, which Mom did not plant and did not love. For parts of every year, the bushes got so spindly that they’d wrap the mailbox, and the postal service would refuse to deliver mail—cutting us off from the outside world until we dealt with the “dangerous conditions” of our home. Mom does not have the right kind of hands for roses; her fingers are twice the width of mine, masculine and covered in scars from hot glue guns and kitchen burns. She’d use the French knife Uncle sharpened every Christmas to hack the bushes down to their stumps, both aware she was only encouraging their growth and temperamentally unable to take a daintier approach. When, every few years, she tried to dig them up, she never got much more than thorn gouges in her neck and the backs of her hands.
Mom and I have a disparate relationship to pain. She never notices when she’s sliced into herself or charred her wrist red on a saucepan’s edge, every nick a source of disembodied entertainment—Well! Look at that. —and then ambivalence. Meanwhile, my body curls around its center, collapsing floorward when I use its joints too much in a day for standing upright or twirling a wooden spoon. Even wordless, my shape hosts the femininity of complaint.
Another long sentence: Our pains are different, of course, but I can’t keep from comparing us—Mom has the strength of her family’s men, while I arrived waiflike, like the wisps of my patriline’s girls. I practiced her approach first, taking a kitchen knife to the tops of the bellflower plants colonizing the garden. It wasn’t sharp. The weeds keeled over but hung on at their hinges by threads.
A day of summer
Just as any body that can do harm, creeping bellflower is deceptively pretty, with light purple buds slumping like a wind chime along one side of its stems. Its near-lime green leaves ruffle in any breeze. The weed thrives in heat and cold, drought and monsoon. Last year this time, I’d pulled the bellflowers a handful of times already, and I had a deep tan from the 6 or 7am garden waterings that often took two hours or more. The tomatoes and the cucumbers and the broccoli and the thyme were always so thirsty.
This year, it’s rained near every day in June, and the Weather app’s flood warning decal has settled in for the season at the top of my phone screen. It’s 47 degrees. The back of the yard has leapt skyward in bellflower and nipplewort, which hadn’t made the fall from the raised beds to the lawn yet this time last year.
The internet says the bellflowers will eventually choke out every thread of grass from the fence to the house and that it’s all but impossible to eradicate. Bellflowers are electric, nervous and strange. Most gardeners write that the only effective method is to dig up every single thread of the plant. It has thick, carrot-like roots, though, which live a foot or more underground, and thousands of white hair-thin ones that tangle in every millimeter of soil above and below. Even a half centimeter of root or leaf left behind will regrow the plant, and if they’re allowed to flower, each individual can release 15,000 seeds to the wind.
I get out a trowel and the rusted kitchen mixing bowl my partner Adrien has dubbed our yard bowl. I set them on the stone wall that wraps the raised bed of bellflowers by the fence and, because Adrien is working, slowly walk the push mower in rows around the lawn. I think: I’ll clear the scene of grass before I get to the real work with the weeds. I’ll prepare the stage for my experiment.
If my body were manual, the sentence would be: I mow the lawn.
Instead, electrified and glitching, the sentences go: It is, by far, the most walking I can do in a day—more than the most—but I can’t stop myself. I can walk more than I can walk in a day. I reread the sentence. That’s correct. I can walk more than I can walk in a day, just like a credit card. Tomorrow: debt. Horizontal. My ligaments and joints. Before I’ve done anything at all with the weeds, I return the trowel to the garage, collapse in the shower, and cry my body to sleep.
A day of summer
The employee at the hardware store’s garden department has a body like Venus of Willendorf, a thing I like about them. A pre-mullet they run their hands through and run their hands through. What do you know about creeping bellflower? is what I ask them because there are these blue and yellow delphiniums in the greenhouse that look like giant sweet corn, and they’re all I want. There are these feminine, soft pink larkspurs I’d like to plant without condemning them to a slow choking death by the weed.
That’s rapunculoides, Venus starts. I don’t know if I have the creeping kind, but… They start to walk away.
Oh, no. I don’t want them is what I say, as quickly as I can. I have them. Everywhere.
I wonder if anyone before has come looking for my weed, has paid money for impossibility.
Later, outside the store, my knees and feet shoot through with pain as the lip of the horizon starts sucking the sun back toward the wheat fields. Into my trunk, I load up a pot for my ancho pepper and no delphiniums.
I ought to narrate my body into healing is something I said some other day just like this day. It’s an echo of what I’ve been told. Maybe, though, I’d find more relief in just handing over the yard to the weed, learning to love the matte dangle of its bells. Sometimes I do talk to my foot, ask what it needs. What I’m not saying is I ought to make peace with my pain. But I’m not not saying it either.
Just as any body that can do harm, creeping bellflower is deceptively pretty.
Alone in the car on the short ride home, I throw up my hands.
A day of summer
Now I get up at 3:45 or 4:45 in the morning because I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to write a sentence in my dissolution. Clauses pile up around me. I’ve been getting sicker this summer, palpably so, and spending hours sitting on the tiled bathroom floor—which I crawl to from the bed—with my jawbone resting on the tub’s edge. Sometimes the cold ceramic can pull me back from puking. The light before the sun comes is blue, paler than the blue of Didion’s grievous blue nights, her gloaming, but more so in what it promises than truly in its shade.
Shade is not really what I mean. Shade, which has to do with a color’s proximity to light, to white, is too neat for this; the morning’s blue is more cyan than the night’s—ultimately a disagreement of hue.
Mostly, I’ve quit em dashes.
Mostly, my sentence structures still are painfully the same.
Commas. Qualifications. The word which, whose appearances I go back through and delete and delete until they are few enough to bear.
My body is only my body until I have to describe it.
This time of morning, my stomach picks a point in my esophagus where it would like to turn itself inside out. It sticks a pin there to remember the crease, irons it with heat.
I put on the kettle and collect my trowel from the garage. The yard bowl sits. Over hours, then days, I fill it with roots of the creeping weed. I dig in the blade and shake soil clods loose. With a fingernail, I part the floss of the bellflower’s root from the black clay.
In the bowl, the pile of leaf and white dries and collects dew and rain and dries again. I burn a slew of sports bra and tank top straps into my shoulders, turning my top half into a Sherwin Williams strip of sunshine.
The sentence, getting clearer, is I know something of compulsion.
A day of summer
A man who managed to get the weed out completely after four years of daily effort from spring till fall is labeled a wild success story by one blog’s comments section. A woman who’s given the same effort for ten still has stalks unfurl from the soil. Sisyphean is the sort of task I like to assign myself. Pain, anyway, can easily be a seed of purpose if only you do anything at all in response to it. Anything at all and response are definitively and importantly not the same as remedy and defense.
Adrien and I go to the fish truck that crosses the whole state of Washington from the coast to reach Moscow every Friday, and we pick out salmon and tuna and eel from the coolers of crushed ice. We roll sushi rice and fish in seaweed all day; we tuck the yard bowl in the collapsing garage, and when our friends fill our yard with their warm noise and cans of beer to eat, the soil of the raised bed behind them looks rich and dark. Open. The two sage bushes I’ve planted with hope are soft in their furry green, and for a night, we are unmarred by the lightning of my feet and my weeds.
A day of summer
On Wednesdays and Saturdays, I drive to a barn seventeen miles southwest, into wheat and lentil fields, where artists make and sell our work. I switch from throwing with a stiff chocolate clay that makes my fingers and neck and ribcage lock up, mechanical, to a white porcelain that’s thin and butter-like. My body can no longer manage the weight of something hard to move.
Now, I make bowls at the barn that look like the bodies of poppies; I pull their petals up and split them by hand. I stain them red-orange with oxides and frits. If thin enough, porcelain lets light come through once it’s fired, like real petals, but not like the clunky petals of the bellflower. A doctor once suggested that using a kick wheel and getting my hands in clay each day would be integral to my body accepting treatment for its disease. He said my cells needed the regulation earth can give. The few other potters who work in the barn mostly hate my finicky porcelain, but the softness of a new bag—twenty-five pounds I still can’t pick up on my own—turns my hands back to hands around it.
I crave these things that give my body back the malleability of a body.
Water does the same, presenting me with lightness, so I lie in the bathtub twice a day for two hours each, grading students’ papers and giving my bones a chance to float. Some days, when I am not taking doctors’ suggestions about grounding then wading—when I instead have something to prove to myself about both my pain and my tolerance of it—I remain in the tub after I’ve pulled the plug, feeling every ounce of my weight return to my frame, leaden, while the water takes itself from me.
Today, I drive myself to the public pool to watch the teenagers flip and belly flop with pride from the diving board, and I stand in the water, interlacing my hands in the warm field of my hair. Today, I let the pain take itself from me instead.
A day of summer
Pain punctuates.
In strange places.
Refracts.
A day of summer
I watch myself punish the body in small ways or play out games like this months-long fight with the bellflower. I call the body the body and refuse it the communion of my.
Something about compulsive acts rings not of goodness but of penance, and perhaps that’s the closest, just now, I can reach to the correct sound.
After an early morning pulling roots, I go inside and tweeze my bikini line one single hair at a time on the tile floor. The thinnest of them hurt the most, clinging to the tiny pores from whence they come. I do not wish to inflict injury on my body. I do not wish to inflict injury on my body, only to engage with any power at all in the conversation it and I have every day about what is tolerable and what is possible.
It’s not that I don’t know I’m practicing harm. But the body is loud.
I go back to the yard; I talk to the knotted, thread roots of the bellflower. At the far end of the lawn, its leaves—those I haven’t touched yet—flicker and glow. A fragment of the sentence is trying to change our narrative, the narrative we’re building, but I don’t know if the sentence’s subject and verb are “I am” or “we are” or “the weed is.”
Together, perhaps we might come up with something more kind.
I do not curse the weed. I compliment its tenacity and adaptability, the way it can make flowers from soil that’s almost entirely clay. I do this aloud. I ask if it might be willing to lend the space it occupies to some flower more delicate, less independent. I start every sentence in the paragraph with I and have to remind myself to listen for the response, even if I is important here, returning a voice to my voice.
Still, accord or amity with pain cannot depend upon ignoring the pain’s sound.
Might the weed be willing to trust that the seeds it’s made will still come up in more rugged places, will be freer, if it lets this one alone?
With the same tweezers I use for pubic hair and eyebrows in the house, I sort through the soil, plucking tiny root pieces my hands have left behind. I pile them into the steel bowl where they can commune.
The one time I mistakenly toss a worm into the bowl with the rest, I follow through on the terrible impulse to dump the whole thing soil-ward—saving the one at the cost of the whole. The ground, if it is to be healthy, needs the slick creatures’ aerating movement. If I am ever to be able to harvest some of the clay in this soil to turn into bowls for soup and mugs for tea in the artists’ barn out in the middle of the wheat field, the worms’ castings must first aggregate its particles.
How much work I’ve undone.
But the sentence presses in. Unless this, too, is part of the work.
A day of summer
The yard bowl sits through every day in the sun. When I walk it, finally, around the side of the house to the street, stalks shoot from its sides. Even with the heat. Even though it looks bone dry on top, a cow patty, the bellflowers have made something of their shards and grown from steel.
What I’m not saying is I ought to make peace with my pain. But I’m not not saying it either.
Together, the roots and I collect the trash bin from the curb and roll it slowly, my feet shuffling and swollen, back to its place. I dump what I can into the bin, soggy and molding detritus from the bowl’s bottom sliming my hands. Over the next week before the truck comes again, it’ll grow more in this dark plastic heat hole. Sprouts will clamber against the plastic sacks and coffee grounds we’ll toss on top.
Back at my post by the bellflowers, I wait on hold with the City of Moscow power department to ask after the map of pipes and electric wiring buried in our yard. A foot or more underground, I’d struck plastic-coated power lines, thick and knotted together. My trowel prodded at them, slipping its blade between and among the tangle, perhaps seeking a shock or a silent, relieved celebration. The hold music is silent; there is no hold music.
My anger rolls in red, a rainstorm, and the green of leaves I haven’t reached yet grows greener in contrast.
The phone slips from the place I pinned it between shoulder and ear and falls into the yard bowl with all of its slime. I give up, tooth off a garden glove to press end on the non-music. . Here is the place where I re-tuck the electrical cords into the clay with the carrot-like taproots that I can see below them but can’t get to. Where I talk to the bellflowers through a cramped stomach. From underneath the cords, they will lightning out, casting glimmers of root toward the ground’s surface.
I wonder if present palpable harm—the risk of exposed electricity—is always worse than future harm, which is guaranteed but has yet to occur. Everything, anyway, is electrified.
I hurt my body to do this work.
The sentence is ambiguous.
Is the hurt present or preordained?
In the bowl, I hope my weed will swallow the phone, swallow the City of Moscow and its silent hold music and the utility company and my pain and causation and clauses and charged waves of light.
In the bowl, for a moment, I love my weed entirely.
A day of summer
In the bath again, evidence of my work in the weeds twirls around me. A twig, a shard of grass. This is why, I know, people who don’t like baths don’t like baths: their own detritus ensconcing them. It’s one reason I do. I don’t mind the snails of my own blood that slide around the bowl for one week a month. As a child, I watched Mom pull her own out of her with a finger, quickening the process of dropping one’s lining. I think to take a handful of my dad’s ashes from the mason jar on my desk into the water with me but don’t want to risk what I’d lose down the drain. A body so finite, dwindled to so little that remains here.
A day of summer
This time of the morning, the light comes in the window blue, and I understand Seurat and pointillism for the first time. Adrien’s back is bare, made of pinpricks of pale grey-blue and muted indigo and a surprising deep red that I squint and rub my eyes at. And black too.
Black? is what I ask myself. Mom taught me to ask what the colors really are.
The wall beyond Adrien is everything the same as she is, just a shade lighter.
Last week I spent almost four hours mowing the grass, which was two feet tall when we came back from a trip to Colorado, according to the red dash I drew on my leg with my fingernail to measure its height. Took tens of small breaks, sitting on the bricks by the back door.
A day like that one turns me horizontal for several after.
Because of my immune system, I can draw anything I like on my skin, and it will stay for twenty minutes or an hour, depending on how upset my body is. When nettles from the yard sting the bottoms of my feet, my soles turn pillow-like and purple; I can walk the venom up my legs with a nail. The color of my marks is a white-orange first, then pink, cool red. I try not to touch myself with anything pointed, except on the days I draw a map of the weed on my thigh and the side of my hip with a bobby pin, coloring the thick taproots under the thin root strings with my finger or the plastic edge of our box of floss.
A day of summer
The dog’s new favorite treat is patties of wet, mulched grass, and waiting for her to puke emerald bile is a particularly interstitial way to inhabit time. Nipplewort almost choked out our Russian sage bushes while I wasn’t looking. The creeping bellflower feels like insanity, or I am insanity with my hands tangled in it. I don’t have my glasses on, and its green is the first color to break away from fuzzy blue in the morning. The leaf spears come up from the earth easy, but their snaking remains seem giddy, laughing.
I dig up roots. I throw the orange ball and then throw the orange ball for the dog. We are all just doing something to do something with ourselves. At night, I listen to sentences piling up one after another until my memory yells that it’s one too many to hold up. I stumble from the bed to the desk to get them out of my head.
I fear that my sentences will add up to nothing, monotony in which the whole is no sum, just a repetition of its parts. I fear this of my summer, of my weed, of my body’s pain. But the simplicity of monotony is also, I suppose, what I want. Else why would I be here, in the yard. When there is no solace to be found in extricating meaning, perhaps there is solace in meaning’s lack.
Sunrise has been creeping toward 7am. Fire season looms, and earth’s spinning refuses my artificial standing still.
Something, everything, has to change. Sentences link end to end instead of lying flat atop each other and still. I take my body out to my weeds.
A day of summer
I left my nice trowel out to get rained on. The creeping bellflower creeps. Disregard for my objects is the sort of thing my dad taught me I should hate myself for. It’s also the sort of lesson he said, when he was shrinking from cancer, that he regretted passing on. Stories are harder to dig out than never to plant.
When there is no solace to be found in extricating meaning, perhaps there is solace in meaning’s lack.
Last night, the lightning chased lightning until she caught herself. The two danced. Somehow, Adrien slept. The dog shook and shook. I tried to hold her still enough to come back to her soft body. The thunder sounds like a garbage can pushed endlessly down an echoing alley, but our alleys here are only black-brown gravel, no concrete, no noises but leashes jingling, boots going crunch.
Without wanting to, I’ll hear the way these sounds dissolve into fractions of themselves when the snow comes. The snow will come, so soon, after the season of smoke. I clutch the dog into my belly and ribs and wonder if this might be what pregnancy feels like—pregnant people, always clutching their abdomens—permitted for a period to caress their own bodies. I wonder if my bellflowers’ leaves will be able to breathe when the sky is red-orange and we clamp the windows shut with tape. I pray for them, my bellflowers. My pain.
A day of summer
6:20 in the morning. I was up till 2, reading. I start the day now in the act of the same, fuzzy eyed with Doris Grumbach’s memoir of one day, as I’ve started so many days this year. I take her from the library and take her from the library. I leave my little shred of paper in page 93 because no one else takes her out. I’ve not yet passed 93. I keep beginning again. She’s caught the chipmunk she caught in one of those no-kill traps tens of times now. I don’t know how her twenty-four hours of ordinariness ends, on Billings Cove where she’s lived for years. Time in these pages is both long and short. Eventually, Doris passes the time where I’ve left her.
A day of summer
I should be packing for Adrien’s birthday in Portland; for the writing conference on the Olympic Peninsula, packing my shower shoes; packing the tent and the sleeping bag and the tarp, the swimsuit for the sea. All of my camping things are in a pile by the fence, getting dirty, getting nettle hairs tucked into them.
Naturopathic doctors sometimes use nettle stings to treat nerve pain—a shock of light in the body, a rush of blood to the area. My body is far beyond tolerating such therapy but applies its ethos: pain for pain. My feet have gathered nettle stings in their soles all summer, where my body can’t rid itself of the poison, and so the stings last for weeks instead of just one day. My white cells rail against heat and pressure, exhausted in the face of poison; my heels and the big part of the sole below the toes swell indigo purple and deep and wide. I have bruises on my knees because when I wake up in the night, I crawl across the tile to the toilet instead of walking on my bloated feet.
Still, I make the cross of the yard to the bellflowers. The bed is the clearest it’ll ever be, as we’re leaving town. When we return, fall will be riding smoke season into the valley just south of here. The sun will come down earlier and rise at a different angle to the tomato plants. The tangled hairs of root will regrow the square yards I’ve spent weeks pinching them from while I’m away.
In a moment, the sky is too big here, the neighbor’s pine holding too much time.
I grab at the patch of remaining bellflower leaves above ground, ruthless. I’ve moved methodically inch by inch, flattening chunks of cakey soil into pancakes that split to release every torn tube of root for the plucking, but now I’m lightheaded and thick in the jaw; I nearly dump the metal bowl of roots into the grass instead of taking it to the bin. Who cares. My body spins or I spin in it, a side effect of a new medication that the doctor says is too effective to stop taking, a side effect of pain.
There are leaf shards in the crumby clay, torn in my rush. My nails are short and unhelpful. Adrien blessedly calls the dog in from barking, tells her Mom is busy with her bellflowers, doesn’t rush me to the things I ought to be doing instead. This is a moment when I love my partner more than ever before; I feel time stop around us, just for a second, as her voice becomes the thing protecting my body and reality from the one that presses in on it. Though we’ll only live here nine or ten more months—though we’ll pack up our boxes before it’s hot again next summer season—she reminds our dog of the rules of this yard’s world, in which the acts of my insanity are allowed and even held sacred, even if she has no reason to agree to their value. I am studying masochism if nothing else, and we both know it, even if we hope I’ll get to study what’s on its other side. Everyone always gets the definition for positive feedback loop wrong, like it’s a good thing instead of a spiral into oblivion.I must be allowed to conduct my experiment—we both know this—an experiment that demands the presence of my body in space, feet on the ground removed from and required for the puzzle that moves me in any direction.
Comics are unfettered by the respectable rules of the realist narrative. Dreams can bleed into waking life, metaphors can become literal, and contradictory sensory impressions can be juxtaposed without connective exposition. This is also how traumatic memories often present themselves. Graphic storytelling are an especially effective medium for depicting how abuse feels—how it alters your brain and drops you into a bizarro-world. The credibility police have no authority here.
Psychoanalyst and philosopher Alice Miller, a world-renowned expert on child abuse and its political repercussions, notably uncovered her own repressed memories by making visual art, a story she detailed in Pictures of a Childhood: Sixty-Six Watercolours and an Essay. Some of the creators listed below similarly found that they drew their way into truths that the logical, verbal part of their mind had hedged around with self-protective narratives.
Peter, the protagonist of my novel Origin Story, is mentoring a genderfluid teen at a group home when they begin collaborating on “The Poison Cure,” a noir superhero comic about a mutant who seduces child abusers to kill them with his toxic touch. At first they merely seem to be working in the queer tradition of reclaiming monstrosity: Peter is a gay man looking for love during the 1990s AIDS crisis, and Tai’s femme Black identity is pathologized by their white foster care social workers. But as he goes deeper into his psyche to access his creativity, Peter starts to have flashbacks of a violation he never suspected. Identifying the villain of “The Poison Cure” will be a clue to his real-life trauma history—if he can bear to find out.
The books in this list demonstrate the potential of graphic storytelling as a container for experiences that shatter our conventional meaning-making structures.
In this horror comic by the author of Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power, a rape survivor turns into a man-eating sea monster at a women’s spiritual healing retreat. Doyle complicates binary gender politics while remaining unflinching in his exposure of toxic masculinity. The island locale off the coast of Virginia resembles a sinister version of Wonder Woman’s Themiscyra, as suggested by the name of its charismatic and chilling matriarch, Diana Spiro. Women’s space, even when it includes trans women, isn’t immune to cult dynamics or violations of bodily consent. Yet when human society denies justice to survivors, becoming inhuman can seem like the only remaining good option.
Quaint animal illustrations notwithstanding, Beatrix Potter actually wrote disturbing cautionary tales where the threat of predation hung over foolish females and runaway youngsters. Thus the allusion to her work makes a good framing device for this lushly illustrated full-color graphic novel about a homeless teen girl and her pet rat in contemporary Britain. When Helen runs away to escape her father’s sexual abuse, she heads for Potter’s historic home in the Lake District, which represents the childhood innocence she is determined to fight for. Potter’s example inspires her to become an artist and depict the truth about her family.
A story decades in the making, this memoir by a Canadian artist re-creates how she was groomed and sexually abused by her father’s friend when she was a teenager, and then her lengthy and fruitless efforts to hold him accountable through the courts. Uncluttered black-and-white line drawings broken up into small panels give this graphic narrative a low-key, almost detached aesthetic. This presentation style captures how a young person—at first naïve, then dissociated—would recount terrible facts whose significance would escape her at the time.
The amount of empty space in the drawings conveys her isolation in her father’s squalid cabin in the woods, but also the peace she found in solitude with her horse and sheep. It feels like a healing breakthrough when the final pages depart from strict realism, taking her on an inner psychic journey to rescue the abandoned part of herself.
A compelling narrative arc inspired by the #MeToo movement drives this second volume of Jackson’s self-published webcomic about the staff of an urban record store contending with unrequited love, addiction, fallen idols, and customers who have cringey taste in music. Chester Vick, a hard-partying music critic, is finally being held somewhat accountable for decades of preying on women, prompting some characters to defend him, and others to be angry and hurt that the “progressive” men in their life still don’t get it.
Most affected is Blackwax employee Veronika, a white woman who relapses into alcoholism because this news story triggers her memories of being sexually abused by her stepfather. The intersection of racial and sexual marginalizations causes a crisis when she calls the cops on a bombastic Black male activist who’s manhandling his girlfriend in the record store. However, Blackwax really is a place where people listen to each other, even when it’s painful. The resolution of their conflict is hopeful but not hokey.
Jackson’s work has standout composition, clarity, and dynamism. The black-and-white panels feel like a complete three-dimensional world because of effective variations in lighting, distance, and poses.
LB Lee is a transgender multiple-personality system. Their cartooning style is anime-inspired and has the simple candor of a young person’s diary combined with an adult’s tenderness toward their inner child. Subtitled “A psychological murder mystery,” All in the Family introduces us to their various headmates as they investigate why some system members have gone missing and what traumatic secrets they were created to hold.
This stark but beautiful graphic novel spans 100 years in the life of a working-class Mexican-American man. Though he lives through the major events of the 20th century, life seems to pass him by, while his family members down to the great-grandchildren experience love, madness, war, and adventure. Because of his closeted homosexuality, he passes through their lives like a ghost, so alone with his emotions that they become opaque even to himself.
It takes a generation, but his family ultimately faces the fact that Julio’s uncle is a serial predator on young boys, and metes out justice without involving the legal system. However, Julio remains in denial, perhaps associating his molestation with the sexual identity he’s been taught to abhor. The book’s stream-of-consciousness structure mimics how the significant memories of a lifetime flow into one another like fleeting impressions from a dream, rather than always being connected by complete narratives.
Drawn in the explosive and grotesque style popularized by R. Crumb and Zap Comix, whose influence Head cites, this shattering black-and-white graphic memoir takes its name from the New Jersey private school for “troubled youth” where the author was sent in seventh grade. Chartwell was run by a pedophile who groomed the boys with a bewildering combination of love-bombing, corporal punishment, and sexual abuse. It’s satisfying to learn that he was eventually convicted; Head reproduces newspaper articles and photographs of the man and his victims, definitively breaking the silence. Yet the cartoonist’s own life story is a decades-long struggle with alcoholism and pornography addiction because of his trauma. The underground comix movement was a kind of savior for him, a place where taboo thoughts and extreme emotions could be brought into the open without shame.
Eisner Award–winning graphic artist Emily Carroll adapts Anderson’s bestselling young adult novel from the 1990s about the aftermath of a date rape. Ninth-grader Melinda has gone virtually mute after a senior boy secretly assaulted her at a party the previous summer. Her parents are too preoccupied with their failing marriage to do more than punish her for her suddenly falling grades. Her classmates ostracize her for calling the police on the party, refusing to believe that their teen idol is a predator. However, an iconoclastic and devoted art teacher helps her find her voice through visual art.
This plot lends itself well to graphic storytelling, with Carroll’s pensive grayscale drawings expressing Melinda’s outer numbness and inner turmoil. An ongoing side plot about the school’s ham-fisted censorship efforts is satirically funny and timely, making it clear why Melinda feels her experience is unspeakable in her community.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Better: A Memoir About Wanting to Die, the debut memoir by Arianna Rebolini, which will be published by Harper on April 29, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
After a decade of therapy and a stint in a psychiatric ward to treat suicidal depression, Arianna Rebolini was “better.” She’d published her first book, enjoyed an influential, rewarding publishing job, and celebrated the birth of her first child. Yet the pull of suicide was still there. One night, during bath time, as her young son Theo lined the tub with toy cars, she began calculating how many pills she’d have to down to effectively end her life.
In Better, Rebolini interweaves the story of her month-long period of crisis with decades of personal and family history, from her first cry for help in the fourth grade with a plastic knife, to her fears of passing down the dark seed of suicide to her own son, and her brother’s life-threatening affliction. To understand this dark desire, Arianna pored over the journals, memoirs, and writings of famous suicides, and eventually developed theories on what makes a person suicidal. Her curiosity was driven by the morbid, impossible need to understand what happens in the fatal moment between wanting to kill oneself and doing it—or, unthinkably, the moment between regretting the action and realizing it can’t be undone. Then her own brother became institutionalized, and Arianna realized that all of the patterns and trenchant insights could not crack the shell of his annihilating depression.
A harrowing intellectual and emotional odyssey marked by remarkable clarity and compassion, Better is a tour through the seductive darkness of death and a life-affirming memoir. Arianna touches on suicide’s public fallout and its intensely private origins as she searches for answers to the profound question: How do we get better for good?
Here is the cover, designed by Milan Bozic, featuring art by Edvard Munch.
“While writing Better, I was super conscientious about maintaining an honest albeit uncomfortable exploration of suicide without turning maudlin or nihilistic; it was important to me that the cover reflected that balance, as well,” says Rebolini. “A memoir about wanting to die doesn’t need help signaling sadness, but ultimately, the book is called Better—the point of it is that it believes in survival. We went through a few rounds of possible covers, trying to land on an image that evoked that sense of hope. That’s exactly what I see in the Munch painting: the young woman looking forward, the sun bright in the distance. I geeked out about Milan’s decision to curve the older woman—that kind of looming specter—onto the spine because it feels so true to the experience of suicidality, how it can lurk behind us, how it can feel separate from ourselves. As someone who is generally obsessed with book covers, I was giddy the second I saw the mockup.
I might have seen you for help from my affliction with Blackness.
I don’t know. Kendrick says he has been diagnosed
with real nigga conditions. I needed you to make mine
go away. I wanted you to will the earth to swallow
the cop at my door. My relationship with the land
is the longing of my fathers for their kin. As you know already,
I am not from here; and cannot make request
from the land. Your fathers have reaped from desire.
Upon learning the palace will have its first black son
the crown decreed he will never be called prince
and will hold no titles. Although I do not condone,
I understand the queen. The boy’s mother could
have removed him from the crown’s household
because she could imagine him growing up
to be the queen’s housenigga. What puts us in bed with those
who lorded themselves over us besides our desire for mercy?
When my people knew I stopped seeing you, they wanted to know
if I was thankful because where I’m from it’s often said that to be kept alive by
what could kill you is a gift.
Forty-One
I blamed the time difference. I blamed the miles over which our voices were carried by the phone when my mother claimed my voice didn’t sound like mine. I blamed the ocean between us. I repeated myself; but my voice sounded like a needle. When I opened my mouth all 23 years of Amadou Diallo’s life fell out. I didn’t see his face until I rinsed the blood off. But I held him even without knowing it was him because he has my body, I mean my brother’s body. I hugged him because he is mine in the way my body is mine. I cradled him until his eyes opened. I cradled his head until his mouth opened into stories of the many ways his hands have failed him. He stopped the stories abruptly before their ends. He was restless. He wanted a haircut, food, and travel all at once. He wanted to live all 22 years of his death in a minute. He wanted to live like he never died. But he left me for the shores across which our mothers are waiting for us.
The more I learn about memory, the less I trust my own. Neuroscientists tell us that the process of remembering does not mean that we are retrieving fixed images or scenes from a sealed vault in the brain, but rather that we are firing synapses along specific pathways, leading us back to a moment from our past that changes a little every time we send for it. The stories we tell ourselves about our past are crafted and filtered, mutable and unreliable. We cannot trust that what we believe to have happened actually happened unless we can locate evidence from outside ourselves to corroborate our own story. And even then—what if the evidence is faulty?
In the age of misinformation and artificial intelligence and the Internet, this inability to trust what we remember has grown and morphed. Now we’re often unable to trust what we see, what we hear, and even what we feel. Then again, perhaps it’s unfair to blame technology… After all, isn’t this the province of literature? Haven’t stories always made us see, hear, and feel things that are not there?
In my new novel, Monsters We Have Made, a dark and terrifying Internet legend inspires two young girls to commit a devastating crime. Thirteen years before the story opens, Sylvia’s nine-year-old daughter Faye attacked her babysitter in the name of the Kingman, a creature that she and her best friend discovered online. In the aftermath, Sylvia’s marriage, home, and family fell apart. Now Faye, recently released from a detention facility, has gone missing, and she’s left her four-year-old child behind.
As Sylvia hunts for the missing Faye, tracking her through unfamiliar cities and primeval forests, she is haunted by memories of the family she lost and by the monster who is growing ever more real to her. “In my peripheral vision,” she tells us, “I glimpsed quaking branches, cold white waves, stars colored brightly as jewels. Sometimes from my bedroom window: the crest of a black cloak coiling around the corner of the garage.” When she pages through old family photo albums, she sees the Kingman lurking just outside the frame; when she peers through the window, she sees a wooden face staring back at her.
“Sanity is a matter of borders: inside versus outside, truth versus dream, fact versus fiction,” Sylvia reflects. “How can a person tell, at any given hour, on any given sleepless night, what side of the line she is on?”
The books in this list are also concerned with those borders. What is real versus what is imagined? What is remembered and what is crafted? How do we know when to trust our perception, what do we do when our memories or our senses fail us, and what does “evidence” even mean in a world as slippery and shifting as we are?
“Scenes in a memoir,” Jill Ciment writes in her new book, “are no more accurate than reenactments on Forensic Files.” This claim is both startling and suitable for a new memoir (Consent) that revises a previous memoir (Half a Life) that Ciment wrote twenty-five years ago. The older narrator of Consent analyzes her younger self’s “memories” in Half a Life to illuminate how those memories were deliberately—sometimes creatively—crafted. In her first book, Ciment framed her relationship with an art teacher thirty years her senior as a choice she willingly made. In the second, she wonders whether it was ever possible for her seventeen-year-old self to willingly choose a married, middle-aged father of two. In a recent interview, Ciment described the first memoir as the product of the “shared mythology” that defines a relationship, and suggested that she didn’t tell the whole truth (even to herself) because she wanted the story of her marriage to be one in which she was empowered, not victimized. Her observation that “a memoir is closer to historical fiction than it is to biography” reminds us that our own memories, too, are crafted: polished, cut, exaggerated, shined.
Simultaneously a fictional biography and a counterfactual history, Biography of X follows narrator C. M. Lucca as she struggles to uncover and record the mysterious life of her recently-deceased wife, X. The trouble with X is that she was a performance artist whose entire life, we learn, was a series of performances—making it difficult for the grief-stricken Lucca to figure out which elements of their relationship were real. Lucca chooses to write X’s biography (expressly against X’s wishes) because she needs to be reassured “that our life had actually happened, that I had been there with her, and that I hadn’t imagined all those years, her company, our life, the home we had in each other—though I was forgetting her every day, forgetting whatever was between us and whom she’d been to me and who I’d been beside her.” With X gone, Lucca becomes the sole keeper of those memories; which means that she can no longer be certain of their veracity.
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being, a novel concerned with the slippage between past and present, is filtered through protagonist Ruth, a writer unable to complete a memoir about her mother’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. When she finds the diary of a Japanese teenager, Nao, Ruth decides to track her down. As Ruth suffers increasingly from lapses in memory and dreams that bleed into reality, she becomes desperate for “corroboration from the outside world… that Nao and her diary were real and therefore traceable.” Over time, her own sense of self becomes uncertain: “Was she the dream? Was Nao the one writing her into being?… She’d never had any cause to doubt her senses. Her empirical sense of herself as a fully embodied being who persisted in a real world of her remembering seemed trustworthy enough, but now in the dark, at four in the morning, she wasn’t so sure.” Ruth’s uncertainty begs the question for readers, too: what evidence do we need in order to trust that what we have experienced is true?
I really love this strange, ethereal, fantastical, gem-like novel, which takes place in a magnificent, classical, sprawling mansion full of waves and statues. The protagonist, known to us as Piranesi, lives in “the House” alone and engages twice a week with a mysterious, irritable person we know only as “the Other.” When the book opens, Piranesi is content in his strange existence, unaware that anything might have come before it. But then he discovers that pages have been “violently removed” from his diary, and that other entries look like his handwriting even though he doesn’t remember writing them. When the Other informs Piranesi that he does, indeed, forget things, Piranesi’s initial shock gives way to disbelief. “‘The World’ (so far as I can tell) does not bear out the Other’s claim that there are gaps in my memory,” he muses. “And so I have to ask Myself: whose memory is at fault? Mine or his? Might he in fact be remembering conversations that never happened? Two memories. Two bright minds which remember past events differently. It is an awkward situation. There exists no third person to say which of us is correct.” Even without that third person, Piranesi’s new wariness of his own perception and experience leads him to conclude that the Other “is right about one thing. I am not as rational as I thought.”
At the heart of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive are a boy and a girl traveling with their parents toward the Mexican border in Arizona. Their parents are sound documentarians working on different projects: their mother on the children’s immigration crisis at the border (a story that has been ignored) and their father on the last Apache leaders on the American continent (a story that has been erased). “The story I need to tell,” reflects the mother, “is the one of the children who are missing, those whose voices can no longer be heard because they are, possibly forever, lost. Perhaps, like my husband, I’m also chasing ghosts and echoes. Except mine are in history books, and not in cemeteries.” In the backseat of the car, the boy and girl play at being lost children, too; and when they finally take off alone, their game becomes real. The novel deals with the erasure of historical memory, the creation of familial memory, and the lengths we go to in order to prove to ourselves and each other that something happened. “When you get older,” the boy informs the girl, “and tell other people our story, they’ll tell you it’s not true, they’ll say it’s impossible, they won’t believe you. Don’t worry about them. Our story is true, and deep in your wild heart and in the whirls of your crazy curls, you will know it.”
One of my favorite novels to teach, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods is a vivid, sylvan thriller whose experiments with form and style contribute to its mystery. Centered on the disappearance of Kathy Wade—the wife of a Vietnam veteran-turned-politician John Wade—the book intersperses conventional narrative chapters with sections labeled “Evidence” (which consist of citations and interview fragments) and sections labeled “Hypothesis” (which describe all of the fates that could have befallen Kathy Wade). As the story progresses, John Wade struggles to remember what happened on the night she disappeared—but he has spent so many years deliberately forgetting what he saw and did in Vietnam that his memory is dangerous and unreliable. Although the “missing person” in the novel is ostensibly Kathy, John’s failure to remember what he did or didn’t do to her shatters any sense of a coherent self and transforms him into a type of missing person, too.
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jacquette
Adania Shibli’s slim and devastating Minor Detail is less about the erasure of the self and more about the disorienting experience of moving through a once-familiar, beloved landscape that is in the process of being erased. The first half of the novella depicts, in spare prose and unflinching detail, the rape and murder of a Bedouin woman by Israeli soldiers in Palestine in 1949. In the second half, an unnamed narrator in Ramalla undertakes a dangerous journey across borders and through checkpoints in order to learn more about the crime. The evidence she seeks is the kind of minor detail “like dust on the desk or fly shit on a painting, as the only way to arrive at the truth and definitive proof of its existence.” But no one she meets can tell her anything about the crime; and the further she travels into an occupied land from which all traces of Palestinian villages have been erased, the more disoriented she becomes. In a space in which the unimaginable—rape, murder, the bombing of the office building next door to hers—is so unrelenting as to become mundane, one’s very existence begins to feel surreal, unlikely, and nightmarish.
“The literature of adoption,” writes Shannon Gibney, “is a fictional genre in itself.” In The Girl I Am, Was, and Never Will Be, Gibney leans into this argument by weaving together her own actual adoption story (including documents and photographs) and the story of what might have happened if she had remained with her birth mother. By intentionally combining memoir with speculative fiction, the book illuminates the multiple pathways that exist between the past and the present. Gibney’s fictionalization of memory liberates the narrator from the impossible project of perfectly reconstructing the past, provides her a new angle on the present, and reminds us that the boundaries between inside and outside, truth and dream, fact and fiction are much more permeable than they appear.
Esmeralda Santiago’s book When I Was Puerto Rican debuted 30 years ago. This memoir introduced us to Negi (Santiago), a pre-teen with a captivating voice who chronicles her life in rural Puerto Rico in the 1950s. In Santiago’s own words, the memoir captures a world that no longer exists in Puerto Rico.
We watch Negi grow from four years old to becoming a teenager, from living in rural Puerto Rico to living in Brooklyn, and from helping rear her younger siblings to having to take on the responsibility of learning English. We watch the dissolution of her parents’ relationship, constant dislocation, and how the United States transgresses into their lives by innocuous means like a nutrition guide and by a nasty concoction of powder milk and peanut butter. But we also see Negi’s curiosity, her incessant questions to her poet father, her defiance, her love of storytelling, and how Negi and her family survive. They keep going, and this memoir ends with a fairy tale ending, which is what any reader would want for Negi after reading this endearing and enduring memoir.
I interviewed Santiago via Zoom. Our conversation took frequent diversions which gave us insight into the world of working-class people in New York in the ‘60s; her ordinary, but extraordinary, mother; and how as we grow, we learn to forgive our parents and all the uprootings we may have suffered.
Ivelisse Rodriguez: All three of your memoirs, When I Was Puerto Rican, Almost a Woman, and The Turkish Lover,are being reissued, along with audio versions in English and Spanish narrated by you. What does it mean to you as a writer to have written books that have had such longevity to the extent that 30th anniversary editions are being published?
Esmeralda Santiago: I was thrilled to hear that the book has been in print for 30 years and being taught in schools across the United States and in some foreign countries. We often think our lives are so singular. But in many ways, there are so many points of connection between us and other people who are completely unlike us. This is what I love about memoir—you can write about your experience in rural Puerto Rico in the 1950s, and somebody in Moscow can get something out of it. It’s fantastic.
IR: What was the impetus to write your memoirs?
ES: I started writing from a place where I felt invisible in the United States. I had a child, and I was worried that my child would not know anything about his mother. We lived in suburban Massachusetts, and I was pretty sure I was the only Puerto Rican in this town. So I began to write because I didn’t want to forget the experience of how I grew up, and I wanted to pass it on to my children, so that they knew about it, even though they were going to have a very, very different life from the one that I had.
I started writing from a place where I felt invisible in the United States.
Also, when I was in Brooklyn, I found myself learning about the United States by reading the literature that I came across. But then at a certain point, I realized, wait a second, I’m not in this culture. None of the books are about me. And that’s when my need to write about people awakened, so that I would not be the only one going through this experience.
And when I was about 16 or 17 years old, the famous, wonderful poet, writer, essayist Langston Hughes came to my high school. He came to do a presentation about his book and to talk about being a writer. And I just remember he was just so very handsome, he was dressed beautifully, and he was this Black man with such dignity, and a beautiful voice, and he talked about his writing and about how he hadn’t seen himself in literature either.
IR: Oh my God, that’s amazing that you got to meet Langston Hughes!
ES: It was just sheer luck that on that day, I didn’t have to take my mother to welfare, or I wasn’t sick, or something. I happened to be there when this man was there with an important message for all of us. This message of writing yourself into the literature really, really stuck with me to the point where when I met people who were at his presentation, they don’t remember that event until I remind them. It was like he came from this place in Harlem to talk to me, who could barely understand English. But I literally went from school to the library and took a stack of all his books that I could find and read them all. He showed me the way to write about myself in literature, and I am forever grateful to him and to that event and to whoever organized it.
IR: Though there were hardships in your childhood, one of the things that always stood out to me about your book is how endearing it is, and how lovingly you recreate your childhood in Puerto Rico. How do you, as a writer, hold the hardships of the past alongside the love for the past?
ES: I decided to not write it from the perspective of an adult because an adult makes all kinds of assumptions about the past; we visit the past in a way that’s more comfortable for us. So, I decided I was just going to try and inhabit the child at that stage and detail what that child would have experienced and would have noticed at that age. And so, by doing that, it made it possible for me to really tell a story rather than trying to make sense of the past or turn the writing into therapy. By limiting the point of view to the child, I thought the reader would have a much more immediate connection to the experience.
IR: I was wondering about the courage to represent your mother as you saw her when you were young. She was doling out cocotazos and frequently fighting with your father. At first, she seems angry, but as we keep reading, we see what she was going through.
ES: In When I Was Puerto Rican, I just didn’t want to add the knowledge that I now have as an adult to this child’s head. As a child, all you know is what you’re seeing. For example, as a child, I didn’t have any idea about infidelity. My mother just said your dad is with other women. As a child, you can’t even envision what that means, but obviously it’s a bad thing. If you read my other memoirs, the character of Esmeralda continues to mature intellectually, so she’s better able to make those kinds of connections later on. It requires experience in life for you to understand those kinds of things.
Plus, I didn’t want to subject my parents to psychologizing. It was a literary decision that made it possible for me to avoid playing Dr. Freud.
IR: How did your mother react to the book?
ES: At some of my events, my mother would answer that question by saying, “You know, everybody talks about this book as if this is about Esmeralda, but this book is about me.” So, she understood that she was the hero in this book. Even though I’m the main protagonist, she really is the person who makes things happen for the character. And then my dad said he loved being the villain in this book.
This story was about people like us: jíbaros.
The rest of my family has been like her. They’ve been very, very supportive, encouraging and generous about not challenging any of the things that I’ve said because they all understand this is the way I saw things, even though they might have had a different experience. I’m the eldest of 11, so we all say that we each had a different mother. The more experience she had as a mother, the more she learned and became a different person.
My mother also thought it was great that this story was about people like us: jíbaros. I think my parents really understood that I picked up on something that had not been done in literature. There really wasn’t a lot of writing about the jíbaros from the perspective of the jíbaros. The books that existed about that community were written by people from places like Barcelona. They did not live that life, but I lived it. So, I wrote When I Was Puerto Rican from the perspective of a jíbara. And my mother really appreciated that. She said my book really sounds like the way it was. My parents were both smart people, and they liked reading, and they liked seeing themselves in literature.
IR: That’s an excellent point about the jíbaro experience and who was writing about it. I am glad you pointed out that this was a gap you were filling in literature by Puerto Ricans. Also, it is interesting to see how you come to understand yourself as a jíbara. Early in the text, when you’re living in Macún, you wonder what a jíbaro is, and you are told these people who live in the countryside with all there mores are nothing to aspire to. But when you moved to Santurce, you were called a jíbara, so you had to see yourself in a new way.
This is the beginning of a series of rejections and becomings that you had to endure for the rest of your life. How did this help you transition to living in Brooklyn?
ES: Well, I think when you live in chaos, you get used to living in chaos. You find ways to deal with the chaos around, for example, the chaos of being in one-room apartments with eight, nine, ten, 12, 15 people. I can’t control that. That was all we could afford. I really understood that. I was very empathetic to my mother’s struggles. In fact, at a very early age, even though I was angry at her for bringing me to New York, and not going back to Puerto Rico immediately when Raymond was fine about a year later, I really understood that a lot of what was happening around us was outside of our control, my mother’s too. I remember she would work in a sweatshop for a week, and on Friday when she got to work, it would be closed because they didn’t want to pay the workers. This happened to her all the time, to the point that she then only worked in the sweatshops where they would pay at the end of the day. She learned how to fight for herself. She had to make these transitions as well.
We were all going through these transitions: learning language, getting used to the climate, and more. All those kinds of challenges were happening to all of us at the same time. But of course, my mother had the biggest responsibility because she had all these children.
IR: One of those challenges was learning English, and this led to a fight with your mother when you came home late from the library. She accused you of thinking you could do whatever you wanted because you spoke English. In what ways did learning how to speak English give you freedom to develop a self?
ES: My mother really just drilled it into me that I had to learn English when we came to the United States because, first of all, she needed a translator. I was the eldest, and I was the most willing because I was always reading. I had to learn it fast because she couldn’t do it. And no one in our immediate family was remotely bilingual. So, I knew that this was my task. I had to learn it quickly, and I had to learn it well enough to be able to help my mom because that was the only way that I could as a little kid. I didn’t resent it. In fact, I thought it was great. I love learning. I came to the United States in 8th grade. By the time I graduated, I entered grade nine, and I was reading at a 10th grade level in English. But I couldn’t pronounce things. I couldn’t speak it. I mean, I could have, but I would have mispronounced everything. So I was very silent and quiet the first two or three years that I was in school, but I aced all my exams. I realized then that that gave me power. When translating for my mom, for example, I realized I couldn’t mess up the translation of application forms or mess up translating for a kid who’s convulsing.
The culture was harder for me. I was a teenager who wanted to be like every other girl. And, according to my mother, I was not like any other teenager because I was Puerto Rican.
IR: In Nicholsa Mohr’s Nilda, another classic book written by a Puerto Rican woman about girlhood, Nilda’s mother is giving Nilda consejos on her death bed. Among the advice the mom gives is that she warns Nilda that men will leave her with a bunch of children, and then she will have to go on welfare. This is, at times, what happens to your mother. Nilda’s mom continues with her advice and tells Nilda to always keep something for herself that is all hers and that if she cannot see beyond being a mother, then life was not worth it. What do you think are the things that your mother kept for herself that brought her joy?
ES: First, I think my mother really kept a lot of stuff from us. A lot. And I don’t know just how much. Maybe I know 4.5% of what she went through from the interviews that I did with her. And even that information was absolutely horrific to me. I know that I will never know what all her sacrifices were.
But in terms of what brought her joy, she was a child of the depression, so she just loved feeding the people she loved and making sure that they were nourished. She loved dancing. She loved music. She wasn’t a swimmer, but she liked going to the beach just to feel the salt air. She loved dressing nicely. When you’re raised very poor, you have longings for certain things. When my siblings and I all had jobs and could make money, we gave her gifts that would bring her joy.
She was somebody who was full of joy in many ways in the midst of chaos, tragedy, hard work, and humiliations. She always found a way to smile and to find joy in something. And I think she passed that on to all of her children.
IR: That’s really heartwarming—that you were able to participate in giving her that joy.
In When I was Puerto Rican, before you get to Brooklyn, you write that you did not forgive the uprooting. At this stage in your life, have you forgiven the uprooting of coming to the continental U.S.?
ES: Yeah, I guess I have. I’m not a person for regrets. As a child, I was very angry for years because I didn’t understand what had happened. Nobody explains it to you when parents break up. And then many, many years later, as I matured, as I learned, and as I knew my parents better, I understood that they really did the best that they could with what they had. Once I understood that adults do things for reasons that children cannot understand until they’re adults, then it was really easy for me to forgive.
In Puerto Rico, the doctors were ready to amputate my brother Raymond’s foot. My grandmother and all of my mother’s aunts and uncles were in New York, so they encouraged her to get a second opinion in the United States. And, the doctors in the U.S. said they could save his foot. She came back to Puerto Rico, and she asked my dad if he would go with us. My father and his family were very independence-minded, anti-imperialism, and anti-colonialism. So he refused. My mother was forced to make a choice between her children or her man. Even though they were always fighting, they really did love each other. She had to make that decision, and she chose her children. She knew that she would have to move to New York, at least for a year or two, in order to make sure that Raymond was completely well. I think once she was here, she realized, it’s equally hard here, but I have more help here. Seven years later, she did go back to Puerto Rico with all the kids that were left. And it was just me and Elsa who were in the United States. We were both studying, so we didn’t want to go back at the time.
Both my parents have passed, and I think they should be and must be very proud of the children that they had because we are two or three steps economically from where they were at their best. That was something that they wanted for us. They wanted us not to struggle quite so much. We still struggle, but the struggles are different. We live in nicer neighborhoods than we did when we were growing up. So, all their sacrifices, dreams, and aspirations did come about. I’m very proud of the work that my parents did with us.
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