When I was a very little girl my mother used to take me over to the neighbor’s house down the street. Susan* (*not her real name), the neighbor was twenty or so years older than my mother and had a forty-year-old son who lived at home with her. He used to take me upstairs and molest me while my mother drank with Susan and their friends on Sunday afternoons. They drank whiskey in a glass while cigarette smoke filled the kitchen, in a house that was fascinatingly clean and empty where I was led up the stairs to the man’s bedroom. I told my mother what happened, but nothing changed. We still spent Sundays there. This ritual seemed sanctioned, somehow, like a powdery aunt kissing your cheek or an older cousin who tickles too hard. It was sanctioned in the way that so many terrible things that happen to children—generation after generation—are, and it turned my generation, Gen X, into great, winged, helicopter parents who never let our kids out of our sight., We try to protect them, yes, but also, impossibly, we try to make right the wrongs that were done to us.
When I sat in the parlor of my best friend who lived across the street from the man who was molesting me, I told her mother what was happening. I told it like it was a joke, something funny that happened to me. She was horrified. She told the appropriate people, including Susan, who then put her son into a group home. She didn’t abandon him; he came home on the weekends. And so there he was every Sunday afternoon when my mother continued to bring me over to the house while she smoked and drank with his mother. Sadly, this was not the only time I was left to fend for myself while my mother retreated into the oblivion of alcohol and her own private pain. It was not the only time I begged my mother to not force me to go places where I was abused or mistreated. Abuse and neglect were part of the warpand weave of my childhood.
I was left to fend for myself while my mother retreated into the oblivion of alcohol and her own private pain.
When the Alice Munro story broke, I was horrified by Andrea Robin Skinner’s story, by what she had experienced and by how long she’d had to carry this awful family secret. I didn’t personally feel the loss of Munro as a literary icon because—and I guess I can admit this now that all my friends are placing her books in recycling bins—her work has never really moved me. For a moment, I thought about returning to some of the stories in the books I still have on my shelves. I wanted to return to the stories so that I could understand why her work had always left me cold. I doubt, really, it had anything to do with the person we found her out to be, a woman who didn’t just turn a blind eye to her husband’s abuse of her 9-year-old daughter, but actively chose him again and again, even after she knew all the facts and he’d admitted what he’d done.
I wondered when I read Andrea Robin Skinner’s account if Alice Munro drank, as my mother had. Drinking is a way that people live with horrific truths, about themselves and about others. I have no idea if they have this trait in common. What I do know is that they both seemed to have suffered from the kind of profound selfishness and lack of empathy that often accompanies the disease of addiction and of codependency.
My mother’s desire to drink and to numb out the world was greater than her desire to protect me. Alice Munro’s desire to stay with her husband was stronger than her desire to validate and try to repair her daughter’s pain. I don’t know the roots of Munro’s choice. I do know that my own mother drank in part because her own childhood had been so hard, marked by sexual abuse when she was a teenager—my inheritance.
Despite my mother’s difficult upbringing, she, like Munro, went on to do work that changed people’s lives. She taught public high school in Detroit and she taught with integrity and deep care, so much so that her students often sought me out and told me how much she had meant to them. Her fellow teachers drove from Detroit to the middle of nowhere town where she’d finally found peace and happiness just to pay her respects when she died of cancer at age 69. In the country where they retired, my mother was known to bring shoes right to the house of the kids whose shoes were falling apart. She brought winter coats to them that she bought in bulk from Walmart. These two women are both my mother—the one who went out of her way to bring coats and shoes to her neediest students, who never gave up on them; and the woman, who sat downstairs and drank at her neighbor’s house while her daughter was molested upstairs. In some ways, my life would have been easier if they’d been two different women—a good mother and a bad mother— but they are not. And so I’ve been left to struggle all my life with this complexity.
When I read Skinner’s essay, my first reaction was a feeling of admiration for the courage it must have taken for her to tell her story. My next reaction—which has more to do with my own family history than hers—was a feeling of sadness that she wasn’t able to tell the story while Munro was still alive. It’s not that I want Munro to suffer that humiliation for the sake of revenge, but rather, part of the enduring trauma of the abused is that so many of us are never told by the people who were supposed to protect us: I’m sorry. I should have done more. The longing for that validation never really goes away. I still feel it today, years after my mother’s death.
The longing for that validation never really goes away.
This kind of wound—childhood sexual abuse—is profound and so misunderstood that when Freud was presented with evidence of many of his female patients coming to him with their experiences of incest and child sexual abuse, he chose simply not to believe them. In fact, he came up with theories of girls seducing men and fathers, theories that helped men like Alice Munro’s second husband (who was convicted) justify his abuse. Instead of believing the women’s stories, Freud changed them to be about the fantasies of men.
Of all the painful aspects of Munro and Skinner’s story, the one most painful to me is the fact of how common a story it is—the story of women like Munro, like my mother, who are able to free themselves from so many of the constraints and injustices of a misogynist culture, but who, in the freeing, leave their children behind. And so when I think of my mother it is with a familiar mixture of sadness, rage, regret, and also, admiration and love. I did love her and she did love me and maybe that’s the hardest thing about all of this. Underneath it all, no matter how fraught and twisted the story, there is love.
Tell us if there’s a specific date or date range that you’d rather not see in your memories. —Facebook
I would rather not see November 18, 2008, the day I faceplanted on the sidewalk after school and snow surged up my kitten mittens and stung my wrists so deeply that tears froze the corners of my eyes as I stumbled home. My mother draped the mittens over the towel rack in the downstairs bathroom, directly over the heating vent, but the purple wool was still soggy the next morning when my brother and I were ready to leave. Casting about in the winter drawer, I found my father’s black leather gloves and put them on; they were so large I could make fists inside them, the fingers flapping free. On the walk to school I felt my shoulders broaden and harden. My steps felt sturdier, the imprints of my boots so snug in the snow that I knew I would not slip and fall. Instead of bone china, I was brick. When I got home, my mother said my father’s gloves were too big and handed me my still-damp mittens, and I was back to bone.
I would rather not see December 24, 2010, in the scratchy tulle dress with sparkling snowflakes chosen for me to wear to the family Christmas Eve party at my great-grandmother’s always-sweltering house, the party no one liked where reeking uncles hugged you and aunts looked ready to jump out windows and dozens of cousins you never saw gazed shyly or sullenly at one another, plates precariously balanced on thighs, eating meals that consisted entirely of cookies. Rowdy boy cousins were eventually sent to the basement to wrestle while girl cousins suffered with the adults, perched on wobbly card table chairs and answering questions about favorite subjects in school, lips smeared with powdered sugar. I sat with my knees pressed together. I had on four pairs of underwear, because I did not like how air slipped effortlessly under the hem of the sparkly dress and traveled unhindered up my calves and thighs. I felt exposed—the air had eyes, and hands—so I’d added the extra layers of protection. Still, I squeezed my legs together with such force, and for so long, that I grew dizzy, and in the stifling house and having eaten nothing but cookies, felt my mind erupt from my skull like a startled bird. I tipped out of my chair and the next thing I recall I was on the floor, the dress at my waist, the adults standing and silent and my mother kneeling beside me, fear in her face as she smoothed down my skirt. Are you all right? she asked.
I would rather not see April 1, 2006, when I put on my brother’s football uniform for April Fools and asked my mother, “Do I look like a boy now?” and she said, “Oh, you’re much too pretty to be a boy.”
I would rather not see June 4, 2011, trapped in a Kohl’s dressing room with eight swimming suits while my mother waited quietly just outside. I’d chosen the suits from the racks myself, so they were the best of the worst—one piece, black or navy, high neck, wide straps. My back to the mirror, I stepped cautiously into each leg hole, shimmied the suit over my hips, hooked it over my shoulders, and then turned for a quick glance, averting my eyes from my reflected face so I could pretend the body I saw was not connected to the person who looked like me. Still, mid-turn, each time, there was a glimmer of hope tucked inside the dread—perhaps this one would not look so strange?—and each time the glimmer was snuffed. After I tried on all eight I thought of my mother on the other side of the door, her anticipation thick enough to taste, and I lowered my expectations and tried each of them on again. When I finally emerged, all the suits strewn limp on the floor behind me, I found my mother seated inside the triangle of mirrors, reflected to infinity.
I would rather see October 31sts. All of them. Show me my hair tucked into a cowboy hat. Show me Buzz Lightyear and the Red Power Ranger. Show me Jack Sparrow, my chin dotted with drawn-on stubble. Show me Captain America, the top half of my face hidden by the blue mask, my mouth bent into the determined grimace I practiced every afternoon in the bathroom mirror. Show me the day, the only day I ever loved getting dressed, breakfast in costume, walk to school in costume, math in costume, lunch in costume, music in costume, party in costume, playground in costume, pizza in costume at home before trick-or-treat. And then the greatest prize: blocks and blocks of front doors opening in the dark, neighbors who didn’t recognize me, moms and dads I’d known my whole life, their eyes passing over me, just another boy in a superhero costume, the old lady on the corner who said, “Look at him!” and her husband, who, shuffling forward, said, “Lemme get a peek at that shield, fella.” Show me, show me, in my pajamas but still masked, in bed, body concealed under covers, looking out my open window at the slivered moon when my door eased open and my mother slipped in. I knew she was going to tell me to take off the mask to sleep, but instead she leaned down and touched her lips to my blue forehead. “Sleep well, Captain America,” she whispered.
While reading a debut novel, oftentimes, there exists a momentary thrill of forgetting about craft. Instead, it can feel as if these writers grew up alongside their stories—in parallel lines and lives, naturally accumulating sentences with every inch they grew. There is a tender, literary innocence and a certain freedom from expectation that comes with debut novels. There is a freshness and urgency in the voice that subconsciously emerges from the story that perhaps they’ve been waiting their whole lives to tell. But, of course, every writer has their unique process and their own journey to find the right words in the right order. And debut writers are not to be underestimated for their work behind the scenes—the time they’ve spent harnessing their characters’ emotions into comprehensible sentences and their plot structures into legible timelines. They’ve thought carefully and revised thoroughly and have arrived this summer to tell the tale.
As Matthew Salesses writes in the article “25 Essential Notes on Craft”: “Craft is about who has the power to write stories, what stories are historicized and who historicizes them, who gets to write literature and who folklore, whose writing is important and to whom, in what context.” These three debut writers are using craft in this exact way—all are currently changing the literary landscape, shapeshifting it right in front of our eyes. They have each written an incredible first novel and now are unveiling the gears behind their experiences.
This interview features the following writers who have published debut novels this summer: Santiago Jose Sanchez, the author of Hombrecito; Uchenna Awoke, the author of The Liquid Eye of a Moon; and Yasmin Zaher, the author of The Coin. Sanchez, Awoke, and Zaher spoke with me about the highs and lows of the writing process, their evolving relationships with the novel as a form, and their experiences publishing their first books.
Santiago Jose Sanchez: I began writing Hombrecito almost ten years ago with a short story that imagined a young boy, in Colombia, waiting for his mother to pick him up after school. I gave him my name, a life closely parallel to my own, and though I didn’t remember living any such moment in the classroom, it felt like the sentences were coming straight from the corners of my own past. I continued writing from his perspective, treating each story as a portal into the most intense moments of his life. The first few pieces focused on his mother’s decision to leave his father and their homeland, and from there, the project grew into a nonlinear network of pieces that mapped a fictional life that was and wasn’t mine. With each iteration, the Santiago of these stories, and then my novel, became an entity separate and distinct from me. From time to time, I considered changing his name, distancing myself from his story, but ultimately I chose to own the connection between us. By blurring the lines between fiction and reality, by investing myself so deeply in the character of Santiago, I hoped to create something that was both highly personal and universally resonant: an honest exploration of the complexities of family, culture, and selfhood, written with intensity, empathy, and grace.
Kyla D. Walker: Did you write Hombrecito with a general outline or ending in mind?
SJS: There was no general outline or ending in mind. I didn’t know I was writing a novel; I was simply exploring and creating, figuring out what I wanted to capture from my experience with fiction. I wrote out of order, from different points of view—including my mother’s—collecting scenes, scraps, and stories. I trusted my curiosity and instincts, letting the stories unfold in their own way, without forcing them into a predetermined shape. In one, I followed Santiago as he briefly joined the Boy Scouts to get closer to a crush. In another, I was in New York City, following him during the two weeks before his first time hooking. Continuity, the very thing my life had lacked, didn’t concern me. Some stories were short, no more than a page or two, while others spilled past ten thousand words. Some came together in just a few days, others took years. Again and again, my curiosity took me back to the fractures that had shaped my life, pulling me towards the energy that came from the deep gaps between my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood—between my relationships with sex, my mother, and my motherland. It was the in-betweenness of my experience that I wanted to capture.
KW: How did you decide on the structure (with its shifting POVs) for the novel?
SJS: The structure of Hombrecito emerged organically once I had the whole network of stories in front of me. Two pieces fell into place right away: a story that follows Santiago as a young boy waiting for his mother to pick him up from school in Colombia, using definitive articles to refer to Santiago and his family as the boy, the mother, the father, and the brother; and the only story from the mother’s perspective, so distinct from the rest of the novel that it had to be placed at the end, giving her the final word.
Between these bookend chapters, a three-part structure took shape in a more conventional first-person perspective: Santiago as a child, as a teen, and as a young adult. The first section was tender and heart-breaking, capturing the raw, beautiful vision of the world through a child’s eyes. The second was quietly angry, full of sexual exploration and playful riskiness. The third was more tentative, exploring different paths and attempting to heal and build a life.
This linear structure also revealed a homecoming arc: Santiago’s story begins with leaving Colombia as a boy and returning with his mother as a young adult. Within this outer frame of my family’s migration, I found the space and freedom to tell my story in my own way, at the level of imagery and subject matter. With each POV shift, I wanted the reader to sink deeper into Santiago’s consciousness, an embodiment of his fractured relationship to time, memory, and stories. The gaps between chapters and the sharp focus on singular scenes felt true to the living a life split between two countries. Structuring the book any other way would have felt artificial. To own how I’d written the book was to own myself.
KW: What was your favorite part of the writing process for this novel?
SJS: The rush of devotion, pouring my heart and soul into a story. The discipline, showing up consistently and with faith, because as long as I kept coming back, something meaningful would emerge. The moments of adrenaline when the words struck a raw nerve, and I cried in public or in my bedroom. But more than anything, the comfort of knowing that no matter where I went, I was never as alone as I thought I was—Hombrecito was always with me.
Uchenna Awoke:The Liquid Eye of a Moon started as a short story published in Elsewhere Lit in 2017 with the title “Shallow Grave.” “Shallow Grave” is the story of a childless woman who was ostracized in her community for killing a god incarnated in a tortoise, and when she passed, her church congregants hired foreigners to bury her because they would be ostracized if they did it themselves.
KW: What did the path to becoming a writer look like for you—and what were some of the hardest challenges you faced?
UA: Growing up in a rural community, our world wasn’t as digitalized as today’s world. No computers, no cell phones, no social media. Some of us didn’t even have family TV. But we had books, mostly crime thrillers by James Hardly Chase, and the Nigerian Pacesetters series. Friends would exchange novels and have conversations about what they had read. I was inspired by the way their authors crafted stories that captivated readers. I was challenged to write like them, but writing is time-consuming, and one of the difficulties I faced was finding time to write while struggling with a meagre income and family bills. Finding the right publisher for my work posed another kind of challenge, although my fellowships at MacDowell and Vermont Studio Center provided me with the opportunity to network with other authors for insights into the publishing process, but that was after I had sent out dozens of query letters and got no response. I feel like my manuscript was waiting to be claimed by one of the best agents in the business—Annie DeWitt of Shipman Agency.
KW: Did you write The Liquid Eye of a Moon with an idea of how it would end?
UA: “Shallow Grave” helped to create plot ideas for The Liquid Eye of a Moon, so I definitely created the plot skeleton from a back story. As I continued to build the plot, I wrote short paragraphs for the various narrative arcs. Often, I write different arcs in the form of short stories. Mostly I have only a vague idea of how it will end, and this could change depending on the character arc.
KW: What usually comes to you first for a story: the idea or the character/voice?
UA: The Liquid Eye of a Moon is a character story. For me, the character drives the plot, the structure, the whole story.
KW: How did you decide on the structure of the novel?
UA: I decided on the Three Act Structure in which I basically established Dimkpa’s ‘ordinary world’ in Oregu village: his dreams of returning to school when his father becomes village head and building a fitting tomb for his aunt Okike. His father losing the position sets the story in motion. The threshold is crossed when Dimkpa realizes that he must make his own destiny. Once I got the story moving from the plot point one through to midpoint and plot point two, the resolution came seamlessly.
KW: What inspired you to write The Coin?
Yasmin Zaher: Living in New York City and reading The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector. I wanted to try to write without inhibitions.
KW: How did you decide on what structure the novel would take?
YZ: Because I wrote without any notion of structure, I had to excavate it from the material. I started with just recognizing a beginning, middle and end. Then, inside those categories, I created clusters of scenes that should go together, because they had their own internal structure and logic. The hardest part for me was the beginning, because there were so many ideas to introduce, but I wanted to keep it light.
KW: Did the themes/content of The Coin help inform its structure of short, fast-paced chapters?
YZ: I think it’s more connected to my short attention span. Each chapter was probably written in one sitting, and a page or two is probably as much as I can do in one sitting. I can see now that the short chapters create momentum in the book, that it resembles our contemporary rhythm, or the rhythm of the city. It wasn’t intentional, I try to just follow my intuition while writing, and sometimes decisions are unintentional but they work out because they’re authentic.
KW: What was your favorite part of the writing process for this novel?
YZ: The first draft. There is no greater feeling for me than writing a sentence and being surprised by it. It’s like I’m hanging out with myself and I’m enjoying it.
KW: What did revision look like for this project?
YZ: Tortuous, frustrating, annoying. Six long years of revision. It felt like working on clay that had already dried, there were problems that didn’t want to budge. Sometimes I felt like I was going backwards, and I probably was. It’s not just about making changes, it’s also making changes to the changes, and sometimes changing back to the original.
KW: How has your writing process or relationship to your writing evolved over time?
YZ: I’m less intimidated by the page. Before, I had ten million rituals before I could start writing, and now I only have a million.
The Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction, a $25,000 prize honoring a book-length work of imaginative fiction, today announces the shortlist for the 2024 prize.
The prize, created to continue Le Guin’s legacy, is given to a writer whose work reflects the concepts and ideas that were central to Ursula’s own work: hope, equity, and freedom; non-violence and alternatives to conflict; and a holistic view of humanity’s place in the natural world. It is also intended to offer its recipients a bit of freedom; as Theo Downes-Le Guin, Ursula’s son and literary executor, said in 2022, “We tried to design a prize that, even if it wasn’t life-changing in the context of every individual’s circumstances, is a significant enough amount to provide a positive disruption.”
In 2022, the inaugural prize went to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for The House of Rust, and in 2023, Rebecca Campbell received the prize for Arboreality.
The prize shortlist is selected by the Ursula K. Le Guin Foundation, and the recipient is chosen by a panel of authors that this year includes Margaret Atwood, Omar El Akkad, Megan Giddings, Ken Liu, and Carmen Maria Machado.The recipient of the 2024 prize will be announced on Monday, October 21st, Ursula K. Le Guin’s birthday.
A young man rejects his chosen-one upbringing and discovers a much stranger life in a city full of doors and powers. Through layered storytelling that is both fantastical and familiar, Chandrasekera re-mythologizes the boundless ways that people shape and reshape history and the world.
At the grave of her beloved aunt, a queer, blue-skinned, Palestinian American woman ponders the next stage of her life and how it is informed by her family’s past. Cypher deftly explores the complexities of the stories we tell about ourselves, and the histories hidden in tales of magic and transformation.
In De Marcken’s compassionate novella, a nameless, undead protagonist finds new ways to navigate the landscapes shared by the living and the dead, the human and the inhuman. Her journey poignantly demonstrates new ways to grieve in and for a world we often take for granted.
Over the course of a single day, six astronauts orbit the earth, witnessing repeated sunrises, tending to their tasks and their bodies, and watching as a typhoon gathers far below. Meditative and precise, Orbital fosters an essential and global shift in perspective.
Hattman’s elegiac novella follows two women as they cross a shifting, surreal, post-climate disaster landscape, seeking a place where they can grow food. Tender and rich with memories of the world as we know it, Sift is a meditation on isolation, change, and loss.
The loyal mechanic to an emperor tells a story of revolution, community, and love in Johnson’s novel, which begins as a supernatural murder mystery before expanding to fearlessly consider what it might take for one world in the multiverse to achieve massive structural change.
Johnson’s novel takes the form of the story a young woman tells to an AI god she intends to destroy. Encompassing several worlds, many gods, and peoples displaced and destroyed by war and colonialism, her tale is woven through with complex ideas about selfhood, history, and freedom.
In a world long divided by conflict, a famed pacifist is coerced into a mission of war alongside a zealot who cares only for victory. Mohamed melds inventive worldbuilding with a nuanced consideration of power, violence, nationalism, and what it takes to achieve peace.
A space opera and a profound lesson in changing one’s mind, Some Desperate Glory follows a girl raised in a violent space cult who learns how to unravel the lies of her upbringing. Tesh shows that paradigm shifts are possible, however wrenchingly difficult they may be.
Returning after a long absence, a story-collecting cleric finds that their abbey’s leader has died, and their distant family waits at the gates, demanding the body. Tracing the multitude of connections that exist in a single life, Vo illustrates the transformative power that grief has for an individual and for a community.
Philadelphians are frequently thought of as pugilistic, mostly because of our reputation as a passionate sports town, and there is a pugnacious attitude in the city. Caught in the middle of the megapolis between New York City and Washington, D.C., Philly has been overlooked and ignored, more frequently thought of as the home of the fictional Rocky Balboa than remembered as the birthplace of American democracy. And while you may encounter someone who wants you to put up your dukes, you’re more likely to encounter people who will happily give you directions or share with you the best place to get a hoagie. People in Philly are passionate, which is why our sports fans get such a bad rap—but passionate people care about making things better and they care about each other. The other thing about Philadelphians is that they know how to take a joke.
I wanted to write a novel filled with characters like this, characters who at their core are kind and passionate, and maybe also a little funny. Enter Jewell Jamieson. Jewell is having a very lousy day, and in a moment of self-pity wishes that she could find someone who loves her like her dog does. Someone loyal. Someone who doesn’t judge. The next morning, she awakes to find a man in her bed and her dog gone.
While there are plenty of dark themed books set in Philadelphia, More Strange Than True is not one of them, and neither are these.
Here are 8 novels set in Philly with mostly happy endings:
Bar Maid is a love letter to the somewhat seedy 1980s version of the city as seen through the eyes of a dreamy, romantic, and entitled Charlie Green. Like a lot of rich kids from New York City, Charlie ends up at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s a weird sort of kid who likes to day drink and hang out at bars, imagining the inner lives of the bartenders and patrons. In Philly, he stumbles upon the famous Sansome Street Oyster House, where he meets a bartender named Neil and the titular bar maid, Paula Henderson. At times Charlie seems to be channeling Don Quixote or Leopold Bloom, or wants to be, always looking at life through an ironic lens. Sometimes it seems as if Charlie would like to be anyone other than himself. Paula and Charlie’s love story is surprisingly tender and poignant, a lot like the city itself.
The forward action of this novel takes place over the course of a dinner party, but throughout we get the backstory of Liselle Belmont, her husband Winn Anderson, and Liselle’s college girlfriend, Selena Octave. Liselle and Selena meet at Bryn Mawr and have the kind of tumultuous relationship that is almost always destined to burn itself out. After college, while working in New York City, Liselle meets Winn, a charming lawyer who convinces her to marry him. They eventually settle down in the Philadelphia suburbs and Winn runs for political office and loses. He’s also under investigation by the FBI. Meanwhile, Selena has been in and out of mental health facilities, trying to gain control over her depression. Pushed by her husband’s pending indictment and her imploding marriage, Liselle can’t stop thinking about her time with Selena. It turns out that neither woman can forget the other and they are pulled back toward each other in unexpected ways.
I’m not sure how much time Reid spent in Philly when she was drafting this novel, but the book is set here. Some locals might not feel that Such a Fun Age is as grounded in the city as some of the other novels on this list, but Reid definitely captures the flavor of the city. It also has moments of real humor. One thing it does really well, is explore the chasm-sized class divide that is still part of the make-up of this city. Emira Tucker is young, not sure what she wants, and working as a full-time babysitter for Alix Chamberlain’s three-year-old daughter, Briar. Alix is performatively progressive and so insecure that she does a lot of cringey things to prove how cool she is. Her obsession with Emira and her needy desire to have Emira like her, drives Alix to do things like read her email. Emira meets and starts dating Alix’s high school ex and then things really get awkward.
Mickey Fitzpatrick is a beat cop in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, a part of the city that is devastated by the opioid epidemic and chronic poverty. Mickey knows about this devastation firsthand. She spends much of the novel in search of her sister, who has been living on the street, and hasn’t been heard from in months. Mickey is also a fiercely devoted single mother, and balancing being a cop and taking care of her child are as challenging as anything she faces on the job. While I wouldn’t necessarily categorize this novel as “feel good” it is definitely full of hope. And there is no one more passionate than Mickey. While tracking down her sister, she and an ex-partner also investigate a series of murders, women forgotten and abandoned by almost everyone. They don’t give up until they’ve solved the crime even though it comes at a great cost to them both.
Warren Duffy is back in Philadelphia because he’s inherited his father’s Germantown mansion. That might sound like a good thing, but the Loudin mansion is in desperate need of repair and Duffy is in desperate need of cash. Duffy has been living in the UK and is recently divorced. He’s on a journey of self-discovery and acceptance, he just doesn’t know it. And if he did? He would reject it. Duffy meets Sunita Habersham at a comic book convention, where he is on a panel. Sunita works at the Mélange Center, a school and outreach organization that celebrates being mixed race, and she challenges Duffy’s identity calling him a “sunflower.” Duffy thinks he might be in love. These characters are funny and insightful—everyone has something to learn. Duffy reconnects with old friends and makes new ones against his will. He also discovers he fathered a child as a teenager and is not only saddled with a crumbling mansion he desperately wants to get rid of, but also a daughter. And there may or may not be ghosts haunting his mansion.
If I had to pick the most Philly book on this list, it would be a toss-up between The Blessings and Silver Linings Playbook. The Blessings is really a novel in stories, each chapter a different piece of the tapestry that is this large Irish-American-Catholic family. The Blessings are a close-knit clan and do their best to love and support each other, especially when times get tough. As close as they are, many of the Blessings also feel an uncomfortable amount of loneliness, wanting to find out who they are on their own, but always longing to be in the comforting company of the extended family. They’re all struggling to figure out not only how they fit into their family but the larger world.
Okay, so Pat Peoples might want to fight you. He’s that rabid Eagles fan that if pushed too far, will definitely take a swing at you. If you’ve never read Quick’s novel it is well worth the time. While the film adaptation is wonderful all on its own and totally worth watching, the novel more fully explores the depths and severity of Pat’s mental health issues, exacerbated by a traumatic brain injury. It also more fully explores his beautiful but very strange relationship with Tiffany, a young widow struggling to come to terms with her own mental health challenges. Silver Linings Playbook also gives you a fairly accurate picture of an average Eagles fan, someone willing to do the chant or sing the fight song in almost any situation, whether it is appropriate or not. By turns, funny, sweet, and sad, this novel is, like all the others on this list, one that will leave you feeling satisfied and hopeful.
Hank Toohey is a hilarious foul-mouthed 13-year-old romantic determined to propose to his chain-smoking 14-year-old girlfriend, Grace McClain. Set in an Irish-Catholic neighborhood in Northeast Philadelphia, Hank thinks by making a grand romantic gesture he can rescue his broken family and bring the neighborhood together. The novel takes place in 1984 and captures the essence of the city in those days, working class, rough and tumble, and waiting for a come up. The sports focus in this novel is baseball, specifically Mike Schmidt, the Hall of Fame third baseman of the Phillies, whom Hank despises. Very funny and surprisingly poignant, Green Grass Grace captures the gritty but loveable vibe of so many of Philly’s working-class neighborhoods.
Halle Butler, author of Jillian and The New Me, returns with a darkly humorous and brutally honest portrayal of the millennial ethos. Banal Nightmare centers around a character named Moddie, who moves back to her Midwestern hometown from Chicago after the end of a toxic relationship. Reconnecting with her old friends from high school, Moddie finds herself amidst a web of social gatherings, simmering resentments, and pervasive disillusionment. Her return is marked by a series of confrontations with her past, making clear how a re-evaluation of exploitative sexual interactions has impacted her.
Switching rapidly between points of view, Banal Nightmare follows an extensive group of minor characters who devolve into behaving with increased bizarreness and desperation. Sharp and incisive, Butler’s writing shines as she satirizes the absurdities of modern life, such as in a series of monologues laced with corporatized vocabularies and therapized non-speak. Her third novel is less organized around a plot and more a series of set pieces that communicate thematic ruminations on the often grotesque and humorous realities of interpersonal relationships, the extent to which we shape our identities in reaction to our social environments, and the disorienting nature of contemporary life.
Butler and I spoke over email earlier this spring. We discussed social paranoia, the fallacy of careerism, and how the obscure can serve a narrative.
Marisa Wright: I’ll start with the book’s title. It suggests a juxtaposition of the mundane and the unsettling, which I think captures the ethos of all three of your novels. What draws you to that intersection?
HB: There’s a scene in Banal Nightmare where Moddie sends an email to an acquaintance along the lines of “Hey, good to see you the other day, let’s get lunch soon.” It’s absolutely normal, routine, almost boring, but Moddie sends the email in the middle of an operatic, psychotic revenge and anger monologue, and in the context of the novel and that scene, we understand this very normal thing, the email, as this dark, almost poisonous thing full of confusing and unconsciously hesitant malicious intent. I’m drawn to this because I find it funny. It is a little ridiculous. It’s paranoid, it’s over the top, it’s a comment on, and a joke about, the hidden intentions of social pleasantries. But then if I turn it the other way, or view it in context with other scenes, I find it very sad, or turn it another way, it’s disturbing. I like moments that feel like they contain the potential for several different emotional responses at once. I find working in simultaneous and contradictory, or semi-contradictory, states to be very stimulating.
MW: This book includes a wider cast of characters than your first two novels. Did the characters or the themes explored in the book come to you first?
HB: I wanted to spend time thinking about repetition, repeated patterns among couples and friends, repeated fixations about professional and personal jealousy, and I wanted to show this not just inside one person but repeated across a whole social net. Many times throughout the book, I thought about the town as a social organism, or even sometimes that the characters were nightmare anxiety manifestations of Moddie’s. Though, I think that what I tell myself to keep writing is not always what I end up “meaning”—which is just to say, I don’t think the book is a dream, though it does exist in a more bizarre level of reality than the first two novels.But these are more bizarre times, so that makes sense.
One throughline is professional jealousy and ambition. It’s something nearly every character thinks about at least once in the book. On the extreme end, we have Kimberly, who is the most cartoonishly obsessed with these things, then Pam, Moddie, David, all representing different expressions of the same set of questions: am I getting what I want? Does someone else have the thing I should have? Should I try harder? And with a bigger cast, I can explore these questions from different angles, different depths of satire and sympathy. Many things that come up in the book once come up a few times, in different arrangements.
MW: You’ve previously discussed including elements of your own life in your novels, and several details indicate the town referred to as “X” in the book as East Lansing, MI, where you went to high school. Obscuring in that way is not something you’ve done in previous work. Why do so now?
HB: “X” felt sort of 19th century to me in a way that I found inspiring. I was reading a ton of Balzac while I wrote this book, and was trying to view the characters and scenarios, which were firmly rooted in 2018, from a different angle—both the angle of a few years hindsight, and the angle of the 19th century. Which social conventions have been inverted, which have stayed the same, and so on. This could be any Midwestern college town. I didn’t want to pick one at random or make up a name. For me, the town exists in an almost dream place, simultaneously vivid and inaccessible, real, and imaginary.
This novel does have many things that are obscured and then revealed, and I was thinking about repression and suppression—what do the characters know and not know about themselves and each other—and there are things in the landscape that are obscured and revealed, too. There’s a coffee shop in the book that used to have a racist name, Moddie finds an Iron Cross sticker on her neighbor’s mailbox. Do we see the past, or do we see the future? How do things flicker in and out of focus? Which reality are we living in? That’s how I was thinking about the obscure, more in the context of the confusion and uncertainty of the characters.
MW: Your writing style of switching frequently and quickly to different characters’ points of view is striking. Where does that come from? Why do you think it’s a style you’ve returned to in your fiction?
A lot of my characters are socially paranoid, so I like to switch to show how close or how far off their assumptions are.
HB: I know it’s not unique to me. I believe there’s a lot of this movement in To the Lighthouse, and there’s also that amazing scene in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire that weaves in and out of different characters’ inner monologues. I could go on. That kind of freedom is exciting to me, to be able to choose when to wonder what a character is thinking and when to learn, and how you can use this for different effects. A lot of my characters are socially paranoid, so I like to switch to show how close or how far off their assumptions are. It feels like a way to play with perspective, humor, and trust.
MW: Your first two books largely center around workplaces, but the workplace is much more in the background even as wealth, professional jealousy, and class tension are at the fore in this novel. Can you talk about how work and class operate in this book? Do you think it’s different than in your previous books?
HB: I don’t know if I think that class tension is at the fore in this novel, as all of these characters are middle-class straight white people working at the same university and living in the same town, and they more or less all grew up together under similar economic and social circumstances. It is a very homogenous group. But jealousy is definitely present, and maybe a false perception of class tension.
The character Kimberly is very convinced that she’s embroiled in some kind of class conflict with Moddie. Kimberly wants to be class conscious or maybe wants to be perceived that way, and there are many times when she gives lip service to supporting vulnerable social groups, but usually in a way that loops back to benefit her own ambitions, and she often tacks herself onto the end of the list of people who should be considered vulnerable. When she’s angry with Moddie when she says she feels “triggered” by Moddie’s privilege, she uses the language of meritocracy—I worked for what I have, so I deserve it, unlike Moddie. This is the kind of language used by people who the system works for and is often used to deny the existence of systemic racism. I think this contradiction in her thinking is still very unconscious. She oscillates between claiming victimhood and bragging about her achievements and status as an Ivy League educated, married, well-employed homeowner. There’s something about this identity, I think, that unnerves Kimberly, so she swings back from bragging to claiming that she’s under attack, and when she feels under attack, she then attacks through self-aggrandizement. I’m very interested in this loop.
MW: You’ve previously said you’re very nice to yourself while writing but very critical while editing. How do you keep those two modes separate during the process?
The characters who are the most devoted to career advancement are presented as arrogant buffoons who end up being humiliated in some absurd, deflating way.
HB: There are so many different phases of writing a novel, and I find it incredibly useful to separate them out as much as I can. I feel like I have entered the “editing” phase once I have a rough draft where all of the characters and events are roughly in the correct order, and I can see the final version of the book more clearly. This is a really wonderful feeling. It can also be an awful feeling—the initial limitless potential of the book is now narrowed. What I mean by “very critical” is that I try to hold myself to the initial standards of the idea. When you have a vague idea for a novel, it feels like a perfect thing that only needs to be transcribed. Then you have many hours, months, and years, of trying to bring that idea out onto the page. I try to be “nice” to myself during this part because I don’t want to scare the idea away, I want to set up a convivial and intimate dynamic between myself and the book, and I want it to feel—as much as is possible—like I’m shooting the shit with myself. It’s a long, uncertain process. Once I have the rough thing to work with, I just really want to see how good I can make it—and when I fix a scene to my liking, it’s incredibly satisfying.
MW: Early in your writing career, you said you try not to have fantasies about the future, so you won’t be disappointed. Now having published your third novel and experienced success in the literary world, do you still feel that way?
HB: My work is critical of ambition and careerism. The characters who are the most devoted to career advancement, or who have the most naked ambition, are presented as arrogant buffoons who end up being humiliated in some absurd, deflating way. The characters in Banal Nightmare are mostly either frustrated artists, like Moddie and David, or working in art-adjacent careers, like Pam and Kimberly. There’s friction between these roles in the novel—animosity towards both the freedom of the artist and the safety of the career. I could just repeat David’s speech about how “careerist is a pejorative” but it’s so much more interesting for me to do this within a novel. It’s really interesting for me to have a character say something I hold very dear, and believe very deeply about art, and then in another scene have him say something that I find upsetting.
Editor’s note: The last question, after the break, includes plot details.
MW: The main character’s arc involves a sexual assault, and the book also includes some ruminations on #MeToo and the Kavanaugh hearings. I think they present an unorthodox approach to these issues, but I’m curious: how would you describe what you were trying to communicate with those elements?
HB: I don’t think it’s the role of the novel to present an orthodox approach to social issues. That’s the role of propaganda. The characters talk about this distinction throughout the book. There were a million creative challenges with this project. Can I introduce uncertainty, complexity, and confusion into a character’s experience of sexual assault, while still giving full respect to the experience? Structurally and narratively, how do I gain the trust needed to treat the characters and the dynamics as I would in any novel, not as special “sexual violence survivor and perpetrator” symbols—which was a trend that I found condescending and emotionally narrow. Am I able to simultaneously show how fucked up assault is, and also show the un-flattering behavior of allies? If I show the assault and its aftereffects in clear enough detail, will the scene speak for itself? And, even if people forgot the assault scene, was there something interesting there, too?
Writing about assault and the MeToo era in a way that felt honest and artistically free was challenging, especially since I tend towards satire, social critique, and bizarre humor, it felt important to me to try. Some of the scenes were very upsetting and difficult to write and read, so I would try to follow those with a break, a shift, or some broader perspective. And sometimes I would see how far I could push a character to say or think increasingly out-of-hand things because agitated, shocked, or guilty laughter felt like the right emotional register.
Just before the end, when we talked about those first text messages, we found that we’d all imagined the same—that the Ministry had been discussing the findings for weeks before they contacted us. In fact (as Tomas later told me) when all our phones pinged that Saturday morning it was a little less than two hours after they had confirmed them.
The messages came in a stream of three very long SMSs, our names written in capital letters so they looked a lot like the automatic texts I used to get from my daughters’ school.
With the exception of Tomas, it had been twenty-five years since we’d been allowed to work in our doctoral fields. As we realized what the messages were, we all had the same sense of bewilderment that the Ministry knew our numbers. When we met the next morning at Terminal 2, we were full of theories why—if the texts were to be believed—they had contacted us, of all people: the discredited members of the King’s Ecography Institute class of 2002.
Were our ideas about to be re-evaluated? H shook his head, his eyes even bluer now with his hair grey. During the years of his distinguished career in the army and subsequent work as a security consultant, I had accomplished pretty much nothing. Yes, he said, the sightings were in the outer rings of the Arctic Circle as we’d imagined, but the text messages had described the objects as having “arrived”—our theses had used the word “exposed.”
Honestly I remembered hardly anything of my thesis. After packing, I’d spent that Saturday evening hunting the old floppy disks and our noisy disk drive. And even then David needed to download something that would open such an old document. About midnight he called out that he’d got it working.
It’s brilliant, he said when I came in, You were so clever.
Maybe he was right, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it.
And the next day, hearing H make such small distinctions, it was strange to recall I’d also once been so definite a person. It seemed almost a betrayal of my younger myself, but now I feel knowing things is less like a decisive seizing and more like a lapping motion. Maybe it’s having found a way to bring up kids, but I’m not so sure I believe in information anymore—it feels much more something like faith.
Back then, I think we were simply bound together by the force of Mikel’s will power—even in the middle of our loudest arguments, when he leant forward, his jet black hair arching down, we would fall quiet. There’d been seven of us; although, without poor Ulla now, Joanna and I were the only women.
We didn’t talk much in Heathrow. We didn’t know if the trip would go ahead and, if so, how long for. It was too late to book leave from the library so I’d planned to call in sick the next day.
I can’t see this going ahead, I’d told David in bed the previous night, Tomas is supposed to have planned it but I’ve never seen him arrange so much as a train ticket.
Mm, said David half-asleep, think of it as a nice break.
Look, said H.
Peeling off from within the crowds in Departures, my eyes were drawn to the long, slightly asymmetrical stride of Tomas as he approached and vaguely, soberly shook all our hands. Amazing to think of him as the same person as before, now team leader and liaison with the Ministry, after everything. He had grown, very strangely, quite handsome—all of his old quirks now oddly becoming, a blend of the celebrated professor we saw in newspapers and on TV and the awkward, wide-eyed nuisance we had helped to his doctorate. He had been something like our group’s ongoing pet project, something like an in-joke—at Tomas’ expense, we imagined.
Mikel had once described Tomas setting up the theodolite so reluctantly, he said, it had appeared like a child he’d been asked to adopt. With all the instruments, in fact, he harboured a suspicion that verged on mistrust; the measurements he recorded often had more decimal places than it was possible to read, and sometimes, with the electronic instruments, more decimal places than they showed. We all used to do the same impersonation of Tomas, half-shutting our eyes and retracting our chins in the manner of his lugubrious guppy mouth, talking in that strained monotone as if forever suppressing a yawn.
On every one of those expeditions he would have his responsibilities taken off him one by one. He seemed simply out of his depth. But, watching his rise over the years from a distance, I think his brazen disregard for the work was his way of wanting to be in on the joke.
We kept him with us because of his talent for negotiating the hierarchy. While we imagined it wouldn’t be long before the Academy exposed him, instead, every funding application, Expedition Assessment, CPD document, in fact everything he wrote in the short history of the Ecography department, was approved without question. In a way that should have proved a warning for us, Tomas’ success with the board sometimes made even us question our sense of superiority.
And when, on publication of our collective thesis, our group was accused of being “unsound,” his name was never mentioned. During the months of the tribunal he was on a dig in China and wasn’t called to the hearing. For many years, he was silent on it all: while he was making professor; in the early years of his unavoidably public marriage to Carmen Fernandoa; during his tenure at Boston. It was only in the year after his even more public divorce that he wrote the book about our group, Dawn of the Idols, which renewed our moment of infamy that whole autumn, a constant stream of reviews, opinion pieces, TV appearances and general hand-wringing from everyone our group had ever offended. Dawn of the Idols was probably the main reason none of us said much to him at Heathrow.
Although, personally, any hatred or incredulity that I’d once felt towards him had become, with distance, more like incredulity and then, with the turning of more—twenty two?—years, something almost a bit like wonder.
And, in fact, as I look back now, his book was only the finale to a near-constant series of resentments and bitternesses amongst us; they had accompanied our work so closely we thought them a side-effect of our astonishing progress. And, probably proportionately, now we knew our work counted for nothing, all of our old rivalries were something more like wearied solidarity.
Looking back, it seemed so important that we felt every development; more concerned with the idea of “bouncing off each other”—whether that be throwing glasses or fucking each other, in both of which I was foremost among sinners.
Just as everyone said, maybe we had been too young. There’d certainly been a suspicion of us being straight out of our MScs and suddenly leading a new field of research—a suspicion now that I would completely share.
To this day, when I wake in the dead of night filled with shame, I wonder what would have happened if, as Tomas wrote in Dawn of the Idols, we’d “just done more science.”
Instead of reading my thesis that Saturday night, I got down my copy of Dawn of the Idols and watched the pages unfold and fall open to the page on my work: “In a largely impressionistic account of the Displacement and its initial Migration phase, she seemed to attend less to scientific causality than making her conclusions accord to the poetic possibilities of her wording.”
Looked at by different metrics, our youth seems at once many lifetimes ago and, also, just yesterday. At the time of our last field trip more than two decades ago, David and I had only just met and we missed each other terribly. This time, both girls were at university and he was so busy running down the last year of an ill-conceived professorship that I do not think we exchanged more than a handful of WhatsApps during those first few days. Though I was hardly ever busy, there was never a message I felt was honest enough to send him.
My old Arctic jacket was in the loft but—I don’t know why—I did not get it out and so met everyone wearing the thin puffer I wear to walk the dog.
We were only in Oslo an hour before taking our second flight on to S—, a city on the northern coast, within the Arctic circle. Descending over the fjords and islands, the pilot said that taking photos was forbidden because the Norwegian Airforce had a station here.
At the airport we were introduced to Tomas’ assistant, Martha: tall, glasses, young, as brusque and impersonal as Tomas. Martha came out last night, Tomas said.
She’d hired a minivan. Always the pilot, H drove. We left the airport and turned east past a small, brand new city, bound for L— , a port town on the north coast of a neighbouring peninsula. Among the backseats, Martha and Tomas sat next to each other and talked in low voices. Like sitting behind my parents on the long drives of my childhood, I could make out the fricatives and sibilance of their conversation but no words. Because she seemed so unemotional, I wondered what Martha had heard or thought about us.
Since we’d last seen each other we had lived the same length of life again. Time doubled. I imagined the years would accrue like rings in a tree trunk, but instead they’ve come to feel like a series of more and more windows, each one a further silencing, a further distancing from the person I hoped I would become, until without any moment of ceremony or anyone to blame, I am suddenly forty-eight and half-deaf in loud places, constantly steeled against anything new, wondering, when I meet people in their twenties or even thirties how they manage to be so young.
The poetic possibilities of her wording—I remember a feverish conversation with H about the similarity between our predictions and versions of a local myth.
I remember a feverish conversation with H about the similarity between our predictions and versions of a local myth.
“Like a cloud, so fled all the birds in the sky.”
“A new god, stood to its middle in the sea, the world around filling with gold.”
On the drive, the lakes and valleys and mountains were initially breathtaking but quickly grew so constant as to feel merely repetitions of each other, so much so that moving between the familiar fjords gnawed away at my sense of purpose. It took four hours almost exactly—over bridges, through tunnels and along the veering coastline—although, H called back from the driver’s seat, the distance we’d covered was less than ten miles as the crow flies.
After an hour or so Mikel said that we’d not passed a single car since leaving S—, after which I began to notice the complete absence of people. There were no telegraph poles, no planes, the only town on the signposts was our destination of L—. And through the prehistoric terrain, the yellow markings on the black road were each so flawless that it came to feel like we might be the first ones on it, to feel as if all the effort and expense of making the road—the metre-by-metre planning and excavations to make a 200 kilometre thoroughfare—was so mysterious that it seemed there purely to carry us along. The sense of isolation grew so deep that I was surprised when, passing lakes, we’d see the odd boat at the water’s edges.
Other than that, I caught myself watching H’s blue eyes in the rear-view mirror.
It was all so . . . strangely fine. Sat amongst ghosts I’d dreamed of longer than I’d known my kids, heading out of the habitable world towards something unthinkable I’d probably invented in my youth, I experienced nothing like the despair I get when David and I take weekend breaks to English market towns.
We drew into L— that evening. After the nothingness all afternoon it was strange to see a conurbation approaching. Rising above the houses and the long suspension bridge were a number of church spires and the vastness of three great boat hangars. Fishing communities have the greatest density of churches per household, said Mikel. Had he always been so prosaically factual?
I found myself oddly affected by the daylit floodlights and the way they made the space around the boat hangars a uniform white. Now on the other side of all that nothingness, here was humanity again, with all its anxieties about man-hours and quota fulfilment and—the only thing that ever saves an island town from atrocity—incessant trade. Under the arc lights, the spidery shadows of the workers on the hangar walls gave me a familiar feeling of guilt and remoteness and unasked-for privilege, so that my experience of L— was that it mocked the idleness of my every-day life.
H parked up in a back street—we got out noisily and stretched. Joanna did the old skit: When will it get dark?
Let’s see, said H, checking his watch, savouring all our delight, In ooh . . . about a fortnight.
I could have kissed him.
We stood around for a while until I realized Martha was talking to me.
Oh, I’m so sorry, I said.
I said I read your paper.
Oh God, I said, It must seem like such nonsense.
If I’d read it any other week, I would have thought you were crazy, she replied. But now I think I was terrified how accurate you were. If we find what I think we will, you will probably get the Nobel.
Probably just lucky guesses, I said, delighted.
You’re being modest. This must be a strange time for you.
Maybe, I said, I think the strangest thing is how normal it all feels. Have you ever gone back to anything after twenty years away?
I don’t know, said Martha, Twenty years ago I was three.
They’d arranged an AirBnB for the night, after which we’d set out next morning. The project was meant to be top secret (What a childish expression, Joanna said) and Tomas worried we would be conspicuous in a small town like this. But L— was full of tourists and we were only one of a great many similar-looking expeditions.
Beneath the bright sun of early night time, there was a drip of déjà vu, a memory so vague that if it had occurred in my normal life would not have seemed like mine but, stood there at just that moment, solidified then, to feel like I was waking after a long and tedious dream.
While the restaurants were full, we decided to draw the van as close as we could to the harbour and carry the equipment onboard.
God, that boat, said Ronnie, rubbing his head, It’s even older than us.
Martha had chartered an old tourist boat, a sixty-footer with coffin berths in the stern; my ability to parse boats, it seemed, had not faded. It might long ago have been adequate for a voyage like ours, though now it was hired only for sightseeing trips around the local coastline. If it had been anything other than the height of summer I don’t know if we’d have survived more than a few days on it.
We left our things below the for’ard deck. In the gloom, H’s old army kitbag lay like a corpse beside our wheelie suitcases. Crammed into the inside of the prow lay the dark machinery of the satellite system, which was—unknown to us at the time—the real reason Martha had had no option but charter this boat.
Tomas commandeered the cabin at the rear of the ship. Setting up HQ here, he said distractedly to no one. Martha following him in, two laptop bags crisscrossed over her chest like a bandido.
I’d stuffed my puffer in a bin in the toilet at Oslo airport and bought a very expensive jacket in Duty-Free. Martha was to stay in the town for the six days we were away, which was (typically for Tomas) the first time we’d heard how long the trip was to be.
We checked through the inventory, H holding the huge wrench like a tommy gun. Stick ‘em up, he said with a levity that surprised me.
That was the first time I really understood: we might be only a few days away from finally, a lifetime later, being proved right. I laughed and hugged him, leant all my weight on him. The Ministry’s text messages had said: Of all the paradigms used to understand the findings, they appear nearest to the object your team once predicted would arrive at the same approximate longitude.
Then, as if we’d summoned it, Martha’s phone went off.
The Ministry, she mouthed at me and passed it to Tomas.
Hello, he said, Yes, it’s in my pocket. He frowned. No, he said indignantly, no, I don’t care for its stealing of one’s focus.
We all smiled at Tomas’ great importance in the world.
He listened for a long time, nodding into the phone; then afterwards, he handed the phone back to Martha and looked round, seemingly surprised we were waiting for him. Almost begrudgingly, he said: In a nutshell, there’s been intercepted traffic. The upshot of which is we have been prioritised and, among other operational factors, we have to leave immediately, as in the next half an hour. If the traffic is credible, we are neck and neck. We now know there are other forces responding to news of the sightings.
Other Forces, Joanna said later, doing his face. Mikel said it was Tomas’ instinct for melodrama that made him such a fitting lackey for the governing class.
Martha would now have to travel on board with us. She shrugged, got her bag from the minivan and put it below-deck with ours. As we made ready to leave, H revved the engine loudly. From the rearward plastic chairs put out for the tourists I watched a thick white wake churning behind us. I gave up then worrying about arranging my leave from the library—whatever happened, I thought, I wasn’t going back there.
At 20:13 local time, we set out. Imagining we were a tourist boat like any other, the seagulls took it in turns to hover abreast of us as if suspended from a thread.
As we passed the many speedboats and passenger boats we bumped and tipped over their wakes, setting off a bell—that I never found but must have been somewhere below decks—ringing loudly over the water, making the tourists all look over at us and wave.
The novelty of being on water passed quickly. The landscape was similar to that which we’d seen all day, and after two planes and a long car-ride, I was tired and disoriented enough to be able to imagine myself anywhere. After being on deck for an hour or so, I found it more settling to sit inside, next to H at the helm.
He had a can of lager in his hand and two others crumpled by his feet.
You’re drinking? I said. He’d once nearly died of hypothermia in a meteorological station off Iceland.
Lucy’s a doctor, he said, So I’ll be fine.
What? I said.
Lucy’s my wife. She’s a doctor so I’ll be—it’s a joke I say sometimes.
Oh ok, I said, Congratulations.
With the beer on his breath, feeling again the old sense of being next to him, I watched the red dot on the screen plod along the fjords like an old video game.
Do you have kids? I asked.
He shook his head. I was amazed you did, he said.
I was hurt for a moment but then remembered how well we knew each other.
Yeah, it was strange, I said. Putting their tiny shoes on I sometimes had a desperate urge to throttle myself.
That’s what Lucy said it’d be like. How’s Peter?
David, you mean. When I’m bored I plan his eulogy.
He smiled. You love him?
I looked out at the rocky shore going past the window and back at the red dot.
You know, I said, this GPS is a minute old.
Completely forgetfully, I left my hand on his leg and he put his hand in mine.
Though night drew on, the sky stayed mostly cloudless and very bright, its blue so light it became yellow around the horizon. The brightness seemed full of a great intent, defiant almost—showing all the veins and colors in the rocky escarpments. The trees, though distant, were each so vibrant it was as if they pulsated.
The only islands we passed now were short precipitous mountains that reached far above us, and I lost my sense of land as something to walk and build and shop on top of.
We had not yet got into the open sea and, despite its impending collapse, the air over the Gulf Stream felt almost warm.
On old field trips, we would strip down to t-shirts in the first hours to condition our blood for the upcoming arctic front. But now we sat around inside in jumpers and coats; Joanna was so well hidden in the intricate hood she’d drawn tight over her face we could not tell if she was asleep. I was regretting how insulated my expensive jacket was but didn’t think about taking it off.
Midnight came and went and nothing seemed to change. Usually the team leader would set up a rota to make sure there were crew awake and everyone got sleep, but Tomas hadn’t left the cabin since we’d set off.
In my mind, shards of our old ideas dislodged themselves. The exact tonnage of ancient water, still “repressive” in its molecular structure after half a million years; its transgressive effect on the region as a habitat.
The exact tonnage of ancient water, still ‘repressive’ in its molecular structure after half a million years; its transgressive effect on the region as a habitat.
I did not know where to be and so found myself going in and out of the cabin every half hour or so. There were a few wispy clouds but otherwise it was still bright sunlight. At some point we’d left the peninsula behind and were moving through a hinterland between Gulf Stream and arctic waters. Every ten minutes or so another island would come into view beside us. Outside, Ronnie and Mikel were sitting opposite each other with a half-full whiskey bottle. There was a strange air about them; as if they’d been arguing and reconciling so many times they looked almost afraid of each other. I watched as they sat in silence, occasionally a hand reaching out to take the bottle from the other.
At some point in the early morning, Martha came out on deck with binoculars around her neck.
Did you sleep, I asked her.
I tried to, she said, training her binoculars on the sea behind us, but Tomas is always wanting to fuck.
I had forgotten until then how many secrets I had had to keep. I used to worry they saw something in me that made me a mere confessor—the anti-chronicler—of the group; although years later, listening to a friend I made at the school gates sitting in my kitchen talk about her plans, I missed it all so much I went and sat in the bathroom and cried until she let herself out.
Martha and I stood next to each other for a while.
Are you looking for the other forces? I asked her.
She put down her binoculars and smiled.
There are three other expeditions following ours, all from countries we’re in intelligence-sharing relationships with, she said, so it is easy for them to follow our satellite signal.
And their boats are as slow as ours?
No, they’re waiting. It is Tomas only who has the location. My fear is they will simply overtake when they see it.
She brought up the binoculars again.
Sorry, she said, My English is not so good now.
I went over and lifted Mikel’s binoculars by the strap off from around his shoulders. Through them I saw we were still passing small islands; one, shaped like a horse shoe, had a wooden fishing boat tied up. Something bobbed and vanished quicker than I could see; a seal I imagined.
I went to the bow and trained the binoculars ahead. I don’t think I knew what I was looking for. I remembered the phrase “a vast coalescence” and a glimpse of that ridiculous model I’d made, a shape I’d carved out of some compound that would simulate the suppressive effect on the water.
I studied the air, picturing my diagrams of every arctic bird in flight. Sea eagles first, then guillemots, terns, kittiwakes . . . I could remember only a little. And, despite—or maybe in the place of—our unwavering certainty, I realized at that moment I had never truly believed any of it would really happen.
I am sort of regretting this boat, said Martha, just beside me.
Tomas appeared later. Eight bells, he said quietly, and all the breath left my body. It had been something Ulla used to say; I remember her telling us how she’d read her dad’s old maritime novels. Quietly, thoughtfully, she had been our most determined: I could hear her still—head on one side, voice slightly nasal—always so thoughtful and consciously finding her way in life that she seemed the last person to imagine dead.
I wanted to hit Tomas in the mouth but just stopped myself, my anger clouded by the sense of some possible future regret, and instead I went below deck and sat on the toilet and slept a bit, sobbed a bit. On the way up, I looked in the cabin at the front, at all our luggage and the satellite components.
Up in the bridge, I watched our red dot move on H’s screen, wondering who else was looking at it.
Surely you don’t need that on anymore, I said to H.
I don’t need to know depths anymore but it would be nice to know the way back, he replied.
I didn’t say anything—I would have done anything other than go back.
Outside, it was definitely colder now. Asleep now in their plastic chairs, I watched H and Mikel cross and recross their arms, their lips curled and trembling.
I couldn’t see anyone following us but had the sense of the urgency of the other boats; I could feel them bodily like something pushing into my side.
Of all the islands we passed that morning, I counted three with houses on them.
There’s nowhere on Earth, H said, humans don’t feel the need to domesticate.
But I was thinking instead of the enormity of it all. If this was what we’d predicted all those years ago and we could somehow get there unseen by the other boats then, it started to occur to me, I might get myself free.
By lunchtime on the second day there were no longer any houses. And by dinner time, no longer any land visible from our boat. The only man-made things were the occasional IABP buoys, all long since deactivated, though they still reoccurred, bobbing beside our boat every hour or so.
At meal times everyone sat together on the rear deck, though it seemed more like an old memory I was reliving somehow, rather than us truly all back together again.
With everyone sat there, I got up, went inside and found H’s toolbox, the wrench so heavy I had to carry it in both hands down the steep steps; not waiting for my eyes to adjust, I stumbled over everyone’s bags and was for a moment unable to get up, and crawled the rest of the way to the metal body of the satellite system.
I would only get one or maybe two swings at it before everyone got here so I put down the wrench and felt the different sections of its machinery under my hands, its nodes and tubes, imagining it something like the cross section of a rabbit warren. One small box had the make and model number on it, so I picked up the wrench again and aimed for this. The box was underneath a larger one which meant that to get a clean hit at it I would have to swing sideways, though the wrench was almost unbearably heavy held like this. And in fact, I was unable to move it then, found it almost glued to my shoulder before I realized that H was beside me holding it by the end.
In the dark there he appeared amused and I wondered if he might still allow me to break it, though a moment later, pulling me up on deck I was shocked at the disproportion of his fury. Even in my children I had never aroused any emotion like this. I don’t think anyone spoke—Tomas looked around at the horizon, panicked. Tall, unemotional Martha, whose admiration I’d wanted so much and who’d been so dismissive, even she looked hurt. Joanna’s face was messy and red from sleeping in her hood.
Oh grow up, I think I said to Martha.
They didn’t want to lock me in the cabin so agreed instead that I was to sit by myself on the front deck.
Absolutely nothing happened for the longest time; I looked through the binoculars as we trespassed further and further north, so unfathomably far that, though once a scientist, I sat in my new jacket gripped by the unshakeable sense that the sea would just tip away beneath us.
I remembered measuring the relative speeds of all the fish and cetacea, estimating the lessened resistance to their collective prow wave, the rushing of new water behind them. But even I knew that, if the longitude was correct and the event really two days old, we should have met the migration by now.
Although, later—I don’t know how much—I began to notice the daylight was lit up by something even brighter, making the air around us blush a deep pink in contrast. Up ahead, the rim of the world grew brighter and brighter with a white haze, like an approaching sun so vast it would fill the whole sky.
And when this light began to dawn, it came as an unending twinkling brilliance spread out as far as could be seen in each direction. It grew brighter and nearer and I realized it was a series of many lights moving swiftly towards us, faster than we were approaching them. I felt they were trained just on me, burning so brightly that I couldn’t see anything when I looked away. The rest of our old team were below deck—it was just me, forced to sit there. It hurt to look at the lights now, the pain in my head that throbbed and swam, growing louder as they came nearer, until almost as the lights were upon us, I saw they were hundreds and hundreds of boats, from the smallest trawlers up to grand icebreakers—all of them with searchlights and horns blaring—travelling so tightly their sides nearly touched and I couldn’t see how we’d avoid a collision on their way, down the world’s face. But though they hooted and roared, they began to part for us, so that in a few moments we would be able to pass them, on our way beyond where they’d come from, and our boat would roll and list in their combined wake so that on the other side all their lights and horns there’d just be the sound of the bell ringing constantly.
When I meet a fellow swimmer, there’s a kind of knowing connection. We have our favorite pools, we’re morning or evening swimmers, we started swimming at a particular, perhaps painful, point in our lives and now we can’t imagine our days without these bodies of water.
Often, it’s the moments before and after the pool that underscore our relationship to the ritual of swimming. In the changing rooms, women talk about their bodies and their lives. They talk about their pains and surgeries and recoveries. I love the fleeting encounters that create a feeling of community. Some people just want to ask “Did you swim already? How’s the water today?” More recently, swimming while heavily pregnant, the conversation turned to women sharing some experience with me from their own lives: a woman who arrived in Australia as a refugee from Vietnam, who told me about her mother birthing twelve children; others who take a moment to remember their own pregnancies, sometimes decades ago—moments risen to the surface through an encounter with the naked, pregnant body in the changing room.
In my novel BodyFriend, the narrator starts swimming in the local pools in Melbourne while recovering from surgery. At the pool, she meets another woman, Frida, who happens to have the same chronic illness the narrator has lived with since her early twenties. Together they become obsessed with the pool and what it suggests to them: control of their illnesses, and a blissful, temporary freedom for (or from) their bodies.
Here is my list of books in which local pools or other bodies of water are a kind of character, where swimming says something about life. These aspects aren’t necessarily the driving force of a book—while sometimes swimming is a constant thread through a person’s life or at a challenging time, in other books they make up incidental moments that nevertheless speak to something about bodies, relationships, or life.
How to End a Story by Helen Garner
The third volume of the revered Australian writer Helen Garner’s diaries, How to End a Story, follows her life from 1995-1998, when she lived in Sydney with her husband, also a writer, whose ego and betrayals will likely leave most readers infuriated. He doesn’t make room for her art-making in the house, so the younger Garner often spends her mornings at the pool before finding somewhere to write. It’s heartbreaking to read her denial of what is happening to her relationship. I was struck by the regular pairing of her swimming and her writing, which also occupy me so frequently. She adores the pool, it makes her feel strong and confident, but then she feels guilty if she puts off writing by swimming. There’s a push and pull that feels so familiar to me.
Garner has reflected on writing her diaries, that “During these hours of peculiar solitude, in conversation with myself and no one else, I’m free.” I can’t help but see a parallel feeling in the act of swimming, up and down the lane, alone and free for a moment—despite what else is going on in life.
Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James
In a similar way to Garner, Constance Debré’s searing novelistic rendition of real life events sees a regular swimming routine accompany immense upheaval and pain. Debré has recently left her former life: her career as a criminal lawyer, her marriage to a man, the home she lived in with her husband and son. She has embraced her sexuality, she now dates and sleeps with women, while her days are spent swimming and writing her first book. Again, the regularity of the swimming and writing seem to fuel each other. The harrowing experience this new world brings is the loss of custody of her son, Paul, and the bitter legal fight blanketed in accusations, homophobia and the denial of Debré’s requests to see her son. Throughout it all, she swims and writes, and while these acts may not console her, they do in some way sustain her.
Otsuka’s novel is one that best captures the community and liveliness of the pool changing room. Tellingly, the novel opens with a beautiful set piece describing the pool and its occupants in the first person plural: “Most days, at the pool, we are able to leave our troubles on land behind.” There is a sense of ritual, almost of religiosity, in how this collective chorus approaches the pool. Otsuka’s characters are proud of their devotion: “There are those who would call our devotion to the pool excessive, if not pathological.” The pool then becomes a potent metaphor as cracks develop in its foundation, and the focus turns to the character Alice, one of the swimmers, who has dementia. This honing in on one swimmer made me consider all the many different lives of the swimmers I encounter each time I visit the pool.
This is one of those examples of a brief, almost missable reference to swimming in a book—though Au’s is a slender, delicate piece of writing that commands us to pay attention to every single line. The narrator is a woman from Australia who travels to Japan to meet her mother for a short holiday. The passage in which swimming features is preceded by the narrator’s reflections on how she “liked the idea of living according to a certain strictness or method,” whether in her studies or working in a restaurant. Her attitude to swimming also says something about her: “Walking back from the pool…I felt something—my body as my own, strong and tan, which could be anything I wanted it to be, so long as I worked hard enough.” I know this feeling, on leaving the pool, of being capable of anything. Through my own health challenges and living with a chronic illness, the pool has suggested so much possibility for healing and betterment, even if only temporarily.
At the Pond: Swimming at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond
This gorgeous essay collection by various writers takes us through the seasons at the Hampstead Ladies’ Pond, a wild swimming location in the heart of London, in Hampstead Heath. Here, as in so many of the books on this list, swimming continually says something about life. The concept of a “ladies pond” and what that means for access and inclusivity is explored in some delicate, devastating ways, such as in So Mayer’s contribution to the collection. They write that though “[t]here are many trans and non-binary people who swim and have swum at the Ladies’ Pond…Their molecules and their courage are already coursing through the water like minerals,” Mayer no longer wants to swim there. The winter section of the book is particularly enthralling, as I imagine the long timers who have ventured out on dark mornings of 32 degrees, to plunge into the icy pond while the rest of the city sleeps.
Another writer who swims at Hampstead Heath is Deborah Levy. In the second book of her non-fiction trilogy she calls a “living autobiography,” Levy reflects on how her mother taught her how to swim in the murky swimming ponds at the Heath. Her mother taught her a technique to ‘totally give herself to the water’ by floating, facing the sky, “emptying her thoughts.” Levy has said that her element is water, and that a swimming pool is “a kind of theatre, it has its exits and entrances. And we wear costumes…” Pools and water recur across her work. In The Cost of Living, she swims with a friend Clara in various pools across London. She also contemplates her failed marriage, and her decision not to swim back to the disintegrating boat that was that relationship. Levy’s relationship to water, through a regular practice of swimming, seems to have infused her work, her symbolism, her prose.
Everyone and Everything by Nadine J. Cohen
There’s a renowned rivalry between Australia’s two biggest cities, Melbourne and Sydney. I’m a proud Melbourne local, but I have to admit that Sydney has one thing we just can’t compete with here: ocean pools. These pools are built into cliff sides, with steps, handrails and concrete or tiled floors, and are filled by the waves rolling in from the ocean. Nadine Cohen’s debut Everyone and Everything is a novel about grief, suffering and healing, both devastating and funny—a true spectrum of light and dark. For the protagonist Yael Silver, swimming offers constancy and relief at a time of great pain. She is a regular sunrise swimmer at the McIver’s Ladies Baths in Sydney, where she strikes up a new friendship with a woman decades her senior. The novel’s prologue featuring a sunrise ocean pool swim is just stunning.
There is a reason we consume content about love, and it’s not only because of its relatability. No, I’d argue that love makes us selfish. We are all trying to decipher lovers lost and found, past and present, hoping that someone else’s experience might shed light on our own. We hope that the question of, “What went wrong?” will finally be addressed, or the overdue epiphany might at last descend, like a delayed plane on the runway. See every Taylor Swift album, including her most recent, The Tortured Poets Department, which has me admittedly nostalgic for the series of heartbreaks that punctuated my twenties.
It is no wonder that my debut novel, The Art of Pretend, memorializes this turbulent decade in all its glorious uncertainty and chaos, self-sabotage and desperation. But it wasn’t until the final drafts that I recognized one of its most important themes: toxic relationships.
What, exactly, makes a romantic relationship “toxic?” The qualifications that come to mind range from empty promises, love-bombing, obsession and projection, gaslighting, and, of course, the grand finale of many toxic tête-à-têtes: ghosting. Fun, right? What is perhaps even more fun are the range of emotions following the storm: Crushing disappointment. Grief. Occasionally, rage.
I recall a relationship many summers ago when the object of my own affection played me like a puppet. He would go weeks at a time without contact, only to reach out the exact moment I made peace with his absence, and there I’d go again, following the breadcrumbs he laid out for me to his neatly-laid trap. I remember the fleeting peacefulness when I woke each morning, the few seconds of bliss before all the emotions flooded back and I was forced to pretend I was fine. Work helped, a temporary numbing agent that wore off at six, when I would find myself lurching toward the subway, again joined by the terrible company that was my thoughts. When would the pain subside? And why had I refused to recognize the signs when all my friends already spotted the red flags waving defiantly in the distance? Because before we were bad, we were good, and I subscribed to the idea of us more than reality. Like Ren, the protagonist in my novel, I learned that people aren’t always who they say they are, and eventually, the pain subsided. Summer turned to fall, then winter. His texts no longer lit up my phone like a flare, but rather the tiniest rock in a lake, barely dimpling the surface. Then one morning I woke up and didn’t think of him anymore.
And yet, I wouldn’t change any of it. Despite the pain, toxic relationships are, dare I say, the cornerstone of growing up. They are some of my favorite dynamics to both write and read. So, here are some of my favorite novels that brilliantly memorialize the most toxic relationships we have with others, and occasionally, ourselves.
Early twenty-something Alex skulks around the Hamptons after being thrown out by her much older boyfriend. Taking place over the span of a few days, we watch with bated breath as Alex grifts around the exclusive enclave, inventing stories about herself as various strangers naively welcome her into their lives. Alex takes us on a carousel of toxic relationships, from a fling with an unstable teenager to an ex back in New York who lords something over her. The slow-burn culminates in a pulse-stopping ending that had me sitting in silence afterward, only to start ripping through its pages again.
The coming-of-age novel that changed the way I think of coming-of-age novels, I devoured Stephanie Danler’s debut in one sitting. I was twenty-four at the time, embroiled in my own unending roulette of toxic romances, and absolutely captivated by protagonist Tess’s obsession with bad-boy bartender, Jake. Like Ren’s lust for Archer in The Art of Pretend, their relationship is a testament to how love defies logic, and how people do what they want despite the consequences.
Charlie and Sophie are a childless married couple living Brooklyn when one weekend, Sophie is bitten by a neighborhood cat. As Sophie becomes increasingly paranoid that she has contracted rabies, Fox peels back the layers of their seemingly idyllic life. A classic tale of “Everything is not what it seems,” it left me wondering about the secrets we keep and just how little we really know each other.
After being fired from her job as a lowly publishing assistant, Edie moves in with her lover, his wife and their adopted daughter; but a comedy of errors, this is not. Leilani masterfully crafts realistic characters in a stunning narrative about love, art, race and class. Edie’s identity as an artist living in fear of her own self-doubt is also beautifully rendered and painfully relatable.
A page-turner that is both a thriller and darkly funny commentary on the publishing industry, Yellowface explores the dynamics of a contentious friendship whose obsession extends beyond the grave. This was my favorite read of 2023, and I know I’m not alone. I simply couldn’t put it down.
Selin is a freshman at Harvard pining for her older classmate, Ivan, in this account of, “Will they, won’t they?” that is both tender and laugh-out-loud funny. What is not funny? Just how slowly the egotistical Ivan gaslights our green protagonist, leading her on as she accepts a summer teaching position in Hungary, in part to be closer to him. This one is for anyone who has ever invented a thousand excuses for their delusional antics—Batuman nailed it.
A privileged and depressed twenty-seven-year-old woman decides to sleep for a year in this story set against the looming backdrop of the September 11th attacks. During moments of lucidity, she reflects on grief, her lame existence in New York, and an on-and-off relationship with a Wall Street banker-type who feels more rooted in fact than fiction. But their situation-ship is just one small piece of this ultimately moving novel that addresses what it truly means to be alive. I get chills every time I read the ending.
It wouldn’t be a list about toxic relationships without Heartburn. Ephron’s sole novel, Heartburn is a loosely fictionalized account of the writer’s own marriage, which dissolved due to her husband’s affair, while she was pregnant with their second child, no less. But this being a creation of Ephron, she will make you laugh with her one-of-kind wit, only to punch you in the gut with raw emotion when you least expect it.
Maggie Nye hopes that her debut novel, The Curators, will “unsettl[e] the reader in a productive way.”I present this book to you as a reader unsettled.
The Curators is set in 1915 Atlanta against the backdrop of the murder of Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old laborer at a pencil factory, and the subsequent trial, conviction, and lynching of the Jewish factory owner, Leo Frank. The narrative follows five adolescent girls who are obsessed with the trial, with “their Leo,” and with each other—who, after the lynching, create a golem in Frank’s image. The Curators is a haunting blend of historical fiction and magical realism. It’s a story about racism and sexism in the American South and the power—and dangerous electricity—of girls’ friendship.
In a basic sense, this book is a retelling, of both a true historical event and of a well-worn parable. But told from the collective and individual perspectives of these five girls, the story becomes much more: not simply a retelling, but a challenge to dominant narratives; an interrogation of the way archives can flatten or animate our understanding of history; a dare. The novel takes on these ideas with shiver-inducing attention to the possibilities of language, through both its prose and its plot.
Nye and I first met nearly a decade ago at a writing workshop, where she was working on the short story that would become The Curators. Over Google Docs, we discussed how researching and writing the book changed her understanding of truth and loyalty, her affinity for complicated narrative voices, fiction as a response to political rupture, and what makes a story even better than reality.
Rachel Ranie Taube: The Curators manages a fascinating feat of point-of-view: much of the book, especially in the first half, is written in the first person plural “we” perspective of five girls who call themselves the Felicitous Five. There is a darkness and viscerality in their undifferentiated perspective. They are too close. It’s expressed most literally in the “spider game” the girls play, intertwining their limbs until they can’t tell themselves apart (perhaps one of the book’s first “monsters”). Their unity is protective when they wander the streets. And when they lift a brick or build the golem, they are dangerous. As the book proceeds, the individual girls become visible to the reader, and Ana Wulff, who actually keeps the golem in her home, begins to have “wicked thoughts” about the others. To me, this progression seems to mirror the way the book makes the pop cultural artifact of the Leo Frank story something individual, concrete, personal. Could you talk about how you came to this narrative voice(s)? Were there any other books that inspired it?
Maggie Nye: Your observation about the individuation of the Felicitous Five unit reflecting the consumption and subsequent personalization of Leo-Frank-as-story is so smart, and exactly right. Once the man is abstracted into a story, he’s adaptable, mythologizable. The same is true, actually, for Mary Phagan, though while Frank’s legacy has many times been reinterpreted (victim, carpetbagger, pervert, stoic hero, scapegoat), Mary Phagan has only ever been interpreted one way. More on that later, though.
I have a particular fondness for uneasy, complicated narrative voices, and especially for writing in the collective voice. In fact, I wrote about my love of this needful narrative POV recently for Literary Hub. And while the books I discuss there are centered on the relationships of girls and women, the book that really sparked my love for the collective narrator was Justin Torres’s We the Animals—one of my all-time favorites. The honest answer to this question is that I was acting under the ecstatic influence of Torres’s prose when I wrote the short story that became The Curators. The monstrous need of the brothers in that book, the ferocity of their desires, the hugeness of it was so terribly palpable to me as a reader.
Another answer (also honest, though not as immediately articulable to me early on) is that I was interested in the unique perspective of adolescence in the midst of public trauma. Young adolescents such as the girls who narrate my novel are of course keenly aware of the kinds of trauma that saturate the cultural atmosphere—in spite of our best efforts to shield them from it—but they also have access to the ready fantasies of childhood. I was interested in violence mediated through imagination, and in the utility of fantasy.
RRT: Very early on, this book tells us not to trust it: “All stories that have survived to retelling have another version. As many versions as tellers—or more.” Chapters of The Curators alternately begin with real contemporaneous quotes from an Atlanta newspaper and quotes from Ana Wulff’s fictional diaries; they’re presented as equally reliable sources. For me, this works so well because it allows this book to avoid a “true crime” telling of the murder/lynching, and instead invites the reader to question each detail. Could you talk about the process of researching this book? I’m curious how you used that research—and respected the real-life brutality of the rape and murder—while retaining the narrative freedom to write Ana Wulff as a character. What “truths” did you most want to stay loyal to?
MN: My understanding of truth and of loyalty changed pretty drastically through the research process. Most people researching the story for the first time encounter a narrative about Leo Frank’s wrongful conviction and the rampant anti-semitism that led to his lynching (that is unless you happen to trip along your research path and fall down the white supremacist rabbit-hole, a niche but significant corner of the Frank-scape represented online). I do not dispute at all that anti-semitism played a significant role in Frank’s trial and led, ultimately, to his lynching. But what is often left out of this story is the tremendously bigoted defense Frank’s lawyers mounted against Jim Conley, the Black janitor at the National Pencil Company where Frank and Phagan worked—the former as the superintendent and the latter as a laborer. The defense relied heavily on white (Christian) men’s volatile anxieties in the industrializing South, about the imagined sexual threat of Black men in spaces over which white men had no control, like the Pencil Factory, where white women worked alongside Black men. It’s possible to go on like this, calculating the weight of the historical prejudices suffered by Frank and by Conley. Indeed there are entire books that do so, meting out harm suffered on one page and potential guilt on the next.
But what they all tend to minimize—even the ones that call attention to the problem of this minimization—is the murdered girl, Mary Phagan. Many, many other accounts honor Leo Frank; I wanted my book to be animated, at least in part, by the possibilities of Mary Phagan. As you reference in your question, Phagan, a month shy of fourteen, was assaulted and murdered in the factory where she labored fitting sheet brass to pencil shafts. This is inherently tragic, but her mythologization is also inextricably linked to her beauty and her virginity. Her beauty and sexual purity were gifts owed—and denied—to the culture of white southern manhood. And in her death, she continues to labor in her mythologization as a political symbol. Her death has been made into a heroic struggle against impending rape and the defense of her virginity.
I really had to search to find traces of Mary beyond her affability, her prettiness, the precociousness of her body’s maturity—promising womanhood to its many viewers. And I found some hints, but that’s all they were: a solo movie date, a fit of giggles shared with her brother at a church play. Still, I made it a project of my novel to imagine versions of Mary that exceeded her mythology. I wanted to imagine Mary’s rebellions, to allow her a remembrance not cast in the politicized mold of raped white southern womanhood. I tried to give the novel an ending, at least, that let Mary speak.
RRT: I love that way of describing the ending. I very badly don’t want to spoil the ending for our readers, but I’ll just say that it’s an absolutely mind-bending and beautiful one. One of the possibilities for Phagan, you found in your research, is that she might not have been raped, as the prosecution claimed. Could you describe what you found, and what questions that opened up for you?
MN: Before I go into this, I want to state clearly that her murder was horrific and that her body showed signs of extensive trauma at multiple sites. However, it’s true that evidence of her rape was inconclusive, and that the Fulton County medical examiner found “no violence to the parts” (though sexual assault is certinly possible). Further, when cross-examined, he said that her hymen was not intact, which suggests that she was sexually active before her murder.
I initially conceived of this as hopeful.
Mary’s dead body was converted into a political symbol that only worked if she was a virgin, and it was exciting to think that she might actually have lived in a way that contradicted that post-mortem reading. It was thrilling to think that she might have had some sexual agency, sought sexual pleasure, but even as I had these thoughts, I knew they were wrong-headed. She wasn’t even fourteen when she died, so almost any version of sexual life she had would have been ruled by dramatic power imbalance and likely coercion, if not outright violence. But I couldn’t shake this sexually empowered, if naive, version of the living Mary, so I gave these thoughts to my narrators, let them think the wrong, hopeful version of Mary on my behalf.
4. You tweeted something earlier this year that struck me, in which you write that “complicated” or “tortured” narrative voices might “reflect…polyphonic media/news culture & mistrust of centralized knowledge production.” I am so interested in this idea, especially given how the media industry has changed in the past decade—could you elaborate?
You’ve called me out on a half-baked idea!
Recently, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution ran a short piece on my use in the book of the historical newspaper the Atlanta Constitution (AJC’s predecessor), and the reporter who wrote the piece was oddly defensive of the book’s critical exploration of reporting and the instability of facts. “That was then, perhaps,” she wrote of the book. “This is now. I’ll go to my grave believing newspapers are a force for good.” I, too, believe newspapers are a force for good. But what a funny fallacy. As though our fore-reporters and mediamakers were uniquely vulnerable to bias, misinterpretation, profits-led decision making, and demagogy.
Her beauty and sexual purity were gifts owed—and denied—to the culture of white southern manhood.
Polyvocality is not new to the literary canon. Literature often responds to historical ruptures with mistrust of a centralized voice (we can think, here, of modernism as a response to the violent ruptures of World War I), and OK, maybe it’s my that was then, this is now perspective speaking, but don’t we seem to be in a constant state of rupture? War and armed conflict, global political instability, state-sanctioned brutality, climate devastation, inescapable surveillance, and on and on.
Our nearly-cyborgic connection to our technology means that we’re always consuming information, always consuming voices, and our state of constant rupture means we’re suspicious of all of them. We live in amplification boxes of loud and dubious claims. And of course, the world of literature is responding. I confess it’s very possible that my own reading tastes are not representative of the entire publishing landscape and that I am a magnet for such books, but in my own reading, I’ve seen an explosion of narrative disruption, doubt, ghosts, polyvocality, narratives spliced with other forms (especially reference or encyclopedic forms), etc. To name only a sampling of books I’ve read in the past couple months, in no particular order: North Woods, Jawbone, The Story Game, Our Share of Night, The World Keeps Ending and the World Goes On. These are wildly different books, but all are, I believe, responding narratively to these conditions.And several, I should add, are responding with dogged hope.
RRT: My apologies for the call-out, but I’m glad I did! I love this idea of literature as response to rupture, and I actually want to talk about how The Curators fits into that list of books. The theme of truth and fiction comes up many times in the novel, and I was struck in particular by the passage where the girls come into the possession of a rope. Not the real one on which Leo is hanged, but “once they hold it, it’s as good—better even—than authentic lynch line.” I bring up this passage in part because it feels inevitable that readers of this book will experience the racism of 1915 Atlanta against the backdrop of modern-day racism. Can the stories we tell ourselves about objects, or about our society, actually change the truth? What makes stories feel “better even” than reality?
MN: I certainly think so. What we’re talking about here is satisfaction (which is, actually, an impulse I believe we must resist). First of all, I think reality (we might ask what reality is beyond storytelling, but I’ll leave that for another conversation) doesn’t usually feel good. Most day’s headlines: major bummers. And the Felicitous Five feel that too—that’s the urge to curate, to arrange the materials of life into a satisfying story, one that makes sense and doesn’t make you feel ooky, and certainly one that doesn’t make you feel complicit. Also important to this kind of better-than-reality story, I think, is that it is quarantined. It is not allowed to be in dialogue with other stories, because dialogue might reveal uncomfortable complexity. Stories in silos. The Felicitous Five play a sort of game where they siphon all their bad, uncomfortable feelings and anxieties into a far-off person they call The Smutch. At one point, for example, they make Archduke Franz Ferdinand The Smutch, and people do this all the time. Find a far-off antagonist to maintain the satisfaction of their better-than-reality story.
RRT: Let’s turn away from reality altogether. As Ana points out, there are many versions of the golem story, too. In your book, he’s sweet, disturbing, smart, an object of desire, an object of fear. I experienced him as much more of a character than the traditional golem; for me, it’s an example of how magical realist elements can just light up an old story. What about this particular parable made you bring it to bear on the story of Leo Frank?
The girls in this collective, that desire is for control, knowledge, and power—all of which they are denied.
MN: I think the figure of the golem rose up, imaginatively, as a counterforce to the Night Witch—an ambiguous figure the girls invent from a combination of reportage, fear, and racial othering. In fact, the original title of the short story that grew into The Curators was “The Golem and the Night Witch.”
I saw, in the figure of the golem, endless possibilities. As have other authors—Cynthia Ozick, Michael Chabon, and most recently Adam Mansback, to name only a few. I was particularly attracted to the idea of the golem as a projection of its creators desires. He is a constructed object into which my narrators continuously empty their bottomless desires. In one sense, he is the ultimate Smutch, but he is also their ultimate hope for salvation.
RRT: The theme of hunger also appears again and again in this book. From literal hunger in the opening lines (“We used to sit for hours in our clubhouse with our ears to each other’s stomachs, listening to how loud our hunger could grow.”); to the parable of the golem (whose hunger, in one version of the story, leads him to destroy his own parents and town); to the girls’ adolescent sexuality and hunger for stories about Leo (hunger as in desire, obsession); to the mob’s anti-semitic hunger for justice against Leo. How do you think about hunger as a driving force in this story? What hunger drove you to write this particular book?
MN: I think the collective viewpoint is fundamentally one of desire. Any time that collective appears—and especially with adolescents—it’s a way of amplifying what is latent. The collective has more bodies, more wants, more grubby hands and sticky mouths. And for the girls in this collective, that desire is for control, knowledge, and power—all of which they are denied; it’s a response to lack. But it’s also a budding sexual desire. For Frank, yes, because he’s a (semi)appropriate object of their desire, but also, I think, for Mary and for each other. They live in a repressive society, one where heterosexuality is the only acceptable model, and virginity is paramount for unmarried women. Women are evaluated by their perceived “virtue,” and nothing could be less desirable to the girls in this novel than virtue.
As to my own desire, my own hunger, that is a question on which I continue to ruminate (in a bovine way—chewing, rechewing). One answer is that I’m very interested in how history is mythologized, and literature plays an important role in this process. There is a lot of literature already on the subject, though all of it is nonfiction (excepting one misguided effort from David Mamet), and it’s easy to understand why: such a striking portrait of American trauma and violence. But, as I hinted earlier, I have a healthy distrust in the stability of facts. I think it’s important to probe them, to interrogate them, to recombine them, put them in dialogue, and see if they can say new things, complex things. Fiction can hold space for history’s contradictions, and I think that archive is vital.
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