It’s Saturday, which means Greg and I are house hunting. We’ve done this every weekend for the past four years and it’s a miracle we’ve lasted this long. Of the other couples we know, only a few have managed to get an offer on the table; fewer have had them accepted. The rest—those who are still together—have decided no house is worth the physical and emotional toll the buying process takes. We were ready to give up, too, but then our dream house came on the market, so we’re giving it one last shot.
We’re dressed in our best house-hunting attire: smart khakis and crisp button-downs, comfortable sneakers and Kevlar vests—something that says “serious homebuyer” while also keeping us safe. Once, all you needed was an offer over asking and a thoughtful letter to the seller. Now you need good reflexes and great aim.
New places hit the market on Thursdays, so on Fridays we pick a few we’re interested in and study the photos and digital walkthroughs so we know what to expect—the size of the bathrooms and state of the kitchen, best rooms to attack from and places to hide.
Today, we’re only viewing the dream house: a blue Victorian on Magazine Street that’s been in same family for a century. The most recent owners, a childless couple in their sixties, died trying to get a winter condo in Florida. Lucky us. We’ve been renting a one-bedroom around the corner for eight years and often stop to peek through the hedges imagining walk-in closets, his-and-hers sinks, an office for each of us and space for children, should we decide to have them. Once, we spotted the couple on the front porch sipping dark cocktails from crystal glasses and wondered if they’d ever had to work for anything, feeling, even then, we deserved their home more than they did.
I like to get to these things early so I can feel out the competition, but Greg forgot to iron his shirt last night and made us late leaving the apartment. Now we’re walking up that same porch with less than five minutes to spare, and I’m trying not to be annoyed. But when I push through the front door and see the height of the ceilings—the listing didn’t do them justice—all is forgiven. I grab Greg’s hand and squeeze it three times. This. Is. It.
We enter the living room, still hand-in-hand. There are twenty-odd people gathered in front of a bay window where, every December, we see a glowing Christmas tree from the street. The realtor, a middle-aged blonde in a white linen suit—bold choice—welcomes us with a smile and glass of prosecco and tells us to sign in, select a weapon, let her know if we have any questions. She means about the house, but one woman, who’s holding a lance like it’s a walking stick asks how, exactly, it all works, and the seasoned among us cringe. First-timer, surely. Doubtful she’ll make it out of the room before she’s eliminated.
The realtor explains: Tour at your leisure; only target people inside the house; those still standing at the end of the hour will have the opportunity to make an offer. And keep it civil, she says.
I’ve missed out on the crossbow, my usual weapon of choice, so I go for the stave sling while Greg grabs a club, then we step back to sip our drinks and take stock of our competitors. Most are couples like us: mid-thirties professionals; the kind of people, under different circumstances, we might invite over for drinks. Then there’s a sweet-looking older gentleman, a redheaded woman we’ve seen before, and a couple in camouflage I rule out immediately. Even if they make it to the end, it’s unlikely the estate managers will accept their offer. Their attire does not scream, “We care about maintaining the historical integrity of the property.”
A clock strikes noon, and the open house begins. While the others hesitate, Greg and I seize the opportunity to slip away from the crowd and up the stairs. Primary bedroom, first door on the left. It’s as big as our current living room and kitchen combined, with parquet flooring, built-in wardrobes, and a four-poster bed we hope comes with the house. In the corner, there’s a window seat where Greg says he expects to find me every morning. I take the uncracked copy of Don Quixote from the bedside table and pose on the yellow cushion. Greg snaps a picture and hands me the phone. This house is your perfect lighting, he says, and we laugh.
We’re admiring the chrome fixtures in the adjoining bathroom when we hear the first scream. I run back to the window to see a dozen people fleeing the house, the last of them bleeding from his head. You can always count on half the prospective homebuyers to give up at the first sight of blood. Greg darts to the bedroom doorway and I crouch behind him, gripping my weapon in both hands, the stone in its sling bouncing against my back.
There’s a creak on the stairs, the flash of a camouflage arm. Greg takes the man out at the knees; I nail the woman in the right shoulder. They tumble down the stairs and I run after to check for a pulse—we never kill—and am satisfied they’ll recover for the next open house.
End of the hall, the library. Greg narrowly misses a swinging battle axe and takes out the redhead. She joins five others bleeding into the plush carpet—maroon, thank God. The room smells of polished oak, metal, and must, and has floor-to-ceiling cabinets stacked with leather-bound books. I run my fingers along the spines imagining nightcaps by the fire, sex on the desk.
At the sound of a tightening bowstring, I whip around to see the tip of an arrow slide between the door and the frame, and launch a stone just as Greg raises his club, knocking my arm. The stone sails past the door, hitting the bookcase to the right of it. I wince as glass shatters and falls to the floor. When I look up again, the archer is gone and the arrow is resting at my feet. I inhale deeply, trying to forgive, again, Greg’s wrinkled shirt, our late arrival, getting stuck with a weapon I don’t know how to use.
Two doors down, the dining room. Here, we find the realtor lying on a velvet chaise lounge with a spike in her calf, red blooming on her white suit. We ask her if she’s okay, then how many are left. Not sure, she groans, but the person who did this won’t be buying a house anytime soon. My money’s on the first-timer. Anyone else would know to use extra caution around realtors, who are there only to answer questions and prevent people from stealing. I note the size of the table we’ll need, thank the realtor, and leave.
We always save the kitchen, our favorite room in any house, for last. Here, it’s the central room, the heart of the home. Though renovated two years ago, it hasn’t lost its late-1800s charm. The floor is original checkerboard terra cotta, and a wide chimney serves as the backsplash to a polished brass La Cornue oven. There are arrows stuck in the solid oak cabinets, dents in the Subzero fridge. A shame, really, but you can’t buy a house these days without expecting to do a little work.
The only other people in the room are heaped at the base of an island, an arrow in each of their backs. It’s the woman with the lance and her partner, who made it further than I thought they would. Greg scans the room, gives a thumbs-up. All clear. Quietly, I test the weight of the cupboard doors, feel the gentle pull of soft-close drawers, take a hanging copper pot from its hook and see that it’s never been used. I wonder if we could negotiate those into the price, offer an extra thousand for the pots, the knives, the bone-white place settings.
I’m inspecting a second oven—Thermador—when I see movement in its glass door, hear an oomph, and turn to see Greg drop to the floor, his shirt still perfectly crisp. An arrow that should have been mine to shoot flies from a butler pantry and hits me in the left breast. I feel the blunt edge of Carrera marble split my head open as I fall back.
It’s over, I think, but then Greg’s face appears, haloed by a Tiffany chandelier. He’s taken off his shirt and ripped it in two. He ties one half around my head and the other around his thigh. We’re so close, he whispers, pointing to the time on the Thermador—12:58. He props me up against the island.
In darker moments, when it’s felt like we’d be renters forever, I’ve tried to visualize getting the house, like my therapist taught me. I’ve pictured receiving the call that our offer was accepted, the realtor handing us a set of keys, me and Greg walking through the front door of our new home for the very first time. What I’ve never dared picture is what it would actually take to own.
Now, I’m watching it all unfold in the reflection of the oven door: the older gentleman emerging from the pantry, crossbow raised in victory, a minute too soon. Greg leaping out from behind the island and clubbing him hard, again and again, until the clock strikes one and the realtor limps through the swinging door. She asks if we’re the only ones left. Greg, panting, nods. Makes my job easy, she says, slapping a thick stack of paperwork onto the island and sliding onto a stool. Greg sits beside her and signs his name everywhere she points.
The paramedics arrive. I hear their stretchers rumbling across the hardwood floors as I close my eyes. Already, the carnage of the last hour is fading, and the only thing I see is coffee brewing in the mornings, the Christmas dinners we’ll cook in here, the wine Greg will pour while we make his grandmother’s Bolognese—something tannic and ashy, dark red as blood seeping through terra cotta cracks.
Don’t die wondering, the old yellow button told me, but of course this only made me wonder more: Who wore this pin? Who made it? Who said it first? The pin is from the Lesbian Herstory Archives. There’s three of them, two yellow and one pink, all in big commanding capitals, no metadata provided to satisfy my curiosity. According to a book review on the Wellesley Centers for Women website, the phrase was originally “an old bar pick-up line.”
I anticipate I will die wondering, not if I’m a lesbian, but about everything else. Lately, I’ve been wondering about lesbian experiments. There’s the defining what-if—“what if I’m a lesbian?”—one of those questions that tends to answer itself in the asking. After that, there are more questions. Coming out creates a new, strange world; you can’t know it until you’re in it. It exists alongside the consensus reality of everyone else, your straight family and friends and teachers and coworkers and bosses and landlords, but sometimes you’ll describe your reality and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking sideways.
Evidently this is not only true for lesbians. But then, the irresistible charge, DON’T DIE WONDERING, could apply to all sorts of things. It is at once general and specific. If you know you know, and if you’re wondering, you know.
Myriam Lacroix’s recently released debut, How It Works Out, conjures a world literally defined by what-ifs. What if the central couple, Myriam and Allison, found a baby in an alley? What if Myriam could only muster the will to live by eating Allison’s flesh? What if they were married lesbian celebrities who hated each other? What if Myriam was a praying mantis and Allison the dog who killed her? What if Myriam was Allison’s evil boss and Allison dominated her sexually?
There’s been a glut of media about multiple universes in the past five or so years, some of them queer. The reason seems obvious: people have been joking that we’re in “the darkest timeline” since at least 2011, when the Community episode “Remedial Chaos Theory” aired. It’s nice to think that somewhere out there, things are going better. Or, that when our world feels most fractured, repair is possible. That’s not the point of How It Works Out, which may not have a point, which may just be the point. How It Works Out is not linear, not directional, and not reparative. By posing and then pursuing these hypotheticals to their sometimes funny, often painful conclusions, Lacroix creates a set of parallel possibilities in an attempt to better know this relationship from the inside out.
She has locked something away, and in order to discover what happened, she must first live what did not.
Two other popular queer titles from the past five years have used similar constructs of parallel possibilities to similar ends-that-are-not-ends. Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir, In The Dream House, follows an abusive relationship Machado survived while completing her MFA. Machado uses a fragmented form in order to explore how domestic violence between queers has been left out or vanished from our collective history, the archive which defines what is thinkable or speakable. In order to speak on her experiences, Machado must “break them and reposition them and unravel them and remove their gears … to access their truths in a way [she] couldn’t before.” In Harrow the Ninth, from Tamsyn Muir’s bestselling Locked Tomb series, Harrow, the last necromancer of her House, has only three reasons to live: she must save her people, serve the Emperor, and figure out what exactly she doesn’t remember she doesn’t remember. She has locked something away, and in order to discover what happened, she must first live what did not. In these books, the what-if serves as a lesbian move—like a knight on a board—to uncover, as Machado writes, “something very large [that] is irrevocably missing.” In other words, they are wondering in order to not die wondering.
In another universe, How It Works Out was probably published as a collection of short stories, not a novel. (Indeed, several chapters were first published as short stories, sometimes using different names, universes upon universes: Leah and Sarah find the baby in the alley in Issue 35 of Blue Mesa Review; Jessica the dog eats the praying mantis in Litro Magazine.) How It Works Out does not move forward in any particular way; the universes do not collide; each chapter has its own discrete beginning, middle, and end; and the end is more of a beginning, anyway.
The novel proffers a few explanations for its shape. In the baby ‘verse, one of the few that works out happily, Myriam notes that,
“They were so in love it felt like living inside a dream, only some nights Myriam got nervous. She’d grown up with her single mom, moving every time her father made a new threat. She couldn’t turn love into a story that made sense, and would get into these existential spirals.”
How It Works Out could be read as one such existential spiral, dreamy yet catastrophic, staring up at the ceiling asking yourself what-if after what-if. In another chapter, the one where Myriam can’t stop eating Allison’s flesh, her thesis on trauma and the cycle of abuse might suggest to us that, like any trauma, the relationship is being “restaged repeatedly through bodily performances until it has been turned into a complete, coherent narrative.” Elsewhere, Allison discovers, but does not understand, that Myriam is writing the life they are living, the chapter we are reading. We are watching an iterative performance, the point of which often seems to be: what if I was terrible, awful, so bad, worse?
Like any existential spiral, so many what-ifs can lull you into abstraction, numb and meaningless. Allison the nihilist tells us that, “if there was a meaning to life, it’d be love.” This is a nice sentiment, but not very useful for what-ifs such as: what if I hurt you, what if you hurt me? If there are infinite universes, surely in some of them it’s one, and in some it’s the other. That’s more or less the mechanism of How It Works Out’s multiverse. Questions such as “what if I were a bug” and “what if you wanted to top” and “what if I hurt you” are levers of equal force pulled variably from ‘verse to ‘verse.
There are other theories about universes. In The Dream House moves more or less forward in the same narrative plane, the mode changing rather than the material, until the end of Part III. Then, a series of violent escalations shatters the narrative like a hydraulic press. We are in a new genre: Dream House as Choose Your Own Adventure®. Machado breaks one terrible morning into multiple potential paths. “If you apologize profusely, go to page 163,” she directs us, or, “If you tell her to wake you up next time your elbows touch her in your sleep, go to page 164.” Each choice makes a new universe—but each universe ends in the same place. Abuse turns choice into a trap you spring on yourself. There is only ever one way that In The Dream House works out.
Still, we try. The reader can “cheat,” as Machado puts it, flipping against the textual directions to “a page where [they] shouldn’t be.” The reader can attempt to refuse the cycle, tell the woman in the Dream House to calm down or do her own dishes, though they will be chastised: “Are you kidding? You’d never do this.” In other words, amidst the abuse, we are still empowered to imagine impossible what-ifs.
An impossible experiment is what Harrow Nonagesimus undertakes under the fracturing weight of her grief at the loss of her cavalier. She erases her history and rewrites her own brain to construct a wholly new universe built on a single what-if: what if Gideon Nav had not died at Canaan House, because Harrow never knew her at all? But the break isn’t clean. Harrow is seeing things that aren’t there, throwing up and passing out, she is haunted. In her memories, scenes from the first book play out differently, and Harrow’s friends and enemies ask her, “Is this really how it happens?”
Yes and no. It isn’t, and yet, it is inarguably happening. As one ghost tells her, much of Harrow the Ninth is “a play [Harrow is] directing.” It is a restaging, like one of Myriam’s. Playing out these alternatives is what unlocks the tomb in Harrow’s mind where she has hidden away her dead cavalier. As her own death looms, she triggers a new set of possibilities: what if Harrow were the cavalier and not the necromantic heir, what if the deadly competition in Canaan House was actually the Bachelor in space, what if she met a really hot barista, and to each of these questions the answer is Gideon.
“This isn’t how it happens,” a dead ally tells her each time, like Machado tells her reader, who has chosen an act of resistance that would have been impossible, “That’s not how it happened, but okay. We can pretend.” Yet it’s not a thought experiment, not a hallucination. Because if it didn’t happen, where did this scab come from, and why can’t you stop picking at it?
Formally speaking, if the what-if is a narrative move as well as a lesbian one, the move should be describable. How we arrive at parallel worlds should tell us something about how it works out. These books are as slippery as lesbians, moving not only between universes but between perspectives and identities. They are nesting dolls of narrators, not unreliable but unfixed, shifting and splitting from what-if to what-if. And these books are as hungry as lesbians, too. What’s gayer than wanting your lover inside of you?
These books are as slippery as lesbians, moving not only between universes but between perspectives and identities.
There’s some understandable concerns over who-eats-who and what-does-that-mean. Myriam’s stomach problems recur across universes; the only time she is truly satisfied is with Allison’s flesh in her mouth. Harrow has stomach problems of her own. In order to ascend to Lyctorhood, the highest power a necromancer can achieve, she was supposed to eat her cavalier’s soul, but she doesn’t seem to have done it right. And she is trapped in a system that consumes, mired in the endless violence of an Empire that cannot stop colonizing and expanding and killing in order to survive. Gideon and Harrow promised each other, “one flesh, one end,” which means something different than “my flesh, your end.” Is there a way we can eat each other equally? The question feels dated, the sort of thing lesbian feminists in the seventies might have thrown a conference about. In the universe where Myriam and Allison are minor gay celebrities, their first book together is titled How It Works Out: Building a Healthy Lesbian Relationship in the Patriarchy. This might be the universe where they hurt each other the most. Perhaps hunger is just a justification for possession. The woman in the Dream House fills her fridge with produce to let it rot; in a parable, Machado writes that she wants Carmen “nestled in [her] stomach for all eternity.”
But Carmen is hungry, too. The archival silence is an empty pit inside her. At the beginning of In The Dream House, she asks, “What is the topography of these holes [in the archive]? … How do we move toward wholeness?” Wholeness is just another word for fullness, which seems to me fundamentally impossible, but the hunger keeps us moving, never lets us forget that something is gone. Or, that something else is possible. Stuck in the loop of her own choices, chasing her own tail, Machado tells herself, “There’s a way out. Are you listening to me? You can’t forget when you wake up. You can’t—”
There’s a way out of the Dream House, there’s a way out of the silence. The final chapter of How It Works Out follows FF, face de fœtus, an actor, so called because of the watery, bloated, changeable quality of her features. When FF is cast as Myriam in the new TV show Love Bun, she has a series of erotic, unsettling encounters with the actress playing Allison which bring something secret to the surface. The role of Myriam is elusive, incomprehensible. Why does she want to eat her girlfriend? “It was hunger that moved her, that moved the story,” FF knows, and so she tries connecting with that hunger. When she touches her co-star, or herself, she finds herself “almost really remembering” the woods, laughing college boys, her father’s anger: “in the dark part of her brain, black bars were bubbling and lifting off of pages.” She wonders, what has been left out of this script? Of this book? What might she recover, and at what cost?
FF’s fetal face got me thinking about Lee Edelman’s theory about children and queers. In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Edelman argues that “what about the children?”-type concerns are the foundation for white, straight society to reproduce itself. Any and everything can be justified, so long as it is for “the children” (notably, not actual children with real needs like safe housing, free from violence, et cetera). To do otherwise, to act against the interests of “the children,” is unthinkable. It is queer. The queer fails to be appropriately reproductive, so (s)he becomes the enemy of “the children”, a threat to “the children,” and to the future. As queers, Edelman argues, we have the radical possibility of asking, “If not this, what?” Or, in other words, how else could this work out?
There must be a world in which we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees.
If this seems unduly optimistic—after all, climate catastrophe means no future for real—don’t forget that Edelman first made this charge against the future in 1997, in the wake of the most fatal years of the AIDS crisis in America. The world is always ending somewhere, for someone. Edelman does not promise us some brighter, gayer future. A promised future draws a moral line: It requires “the stigmatization and exclusion (in other words, the queering) of those who put [the promised future] at risk.” There must be some other way to live, together and with ourselves. There must be a world in which we do not have to be good, we do not have to walk on our knees.
Perhaps it seems counterintuitive that all three of the books I’ve discussed are preoccupied with lineage, heredity, children. There are a lot of sons named Jonah in How It Works Out; Carmen and the woman in the Dream House talk about having a daughter, and at one point Carmen experiences symptoms of a hysterical pregnancy. Harrow is the last of her line, the only hope for the Ninth House’s future, and in order to ensure her conception, her parents killed every child on Drearburh. “I came into this world a necromancer at the expense of Drearburh’s future,” she tells her cavalier in Gideon the Ninth, “because there is no future without me.” Ultimately, she chooses no future over a future without Gideon—and creates something new, unimaginable and unforeseen.
What if, what if, what if each what-if is an act of creation, the lesbian creation that supplants and replaces and refuses birth, if by birth we mean heterosexual futures? I am riffing, I am wondering. These are lesbian experiments: questions that answer themselves in the asking, hypotheses that are functionally never hypothetical. What if we kissed just to see? There’s two outcomes in theory. It’s supposed to be possible for an experiment to reveal something isn’t true—but by acting on it, it becomes true. You can’t un-kiss or un-see. Potential energy (the thing that could happen) becomes kinetic energy (the thing that does) when an external force (lesbianism) is applied.
This is how it works out. You keep wondering, and then you die. But at least you died wondering. Because how else will you know? What if you fuck your ex? What if you fuck your gender? What if your face bursts open and there’s another face underneath that’s been waiting, hungry for love, but if not love, blood will do? What if you delete the worst thing that ever happened from your brain, until the day the worst version of you is ready to go to war for the you that couldn’t? What if you touch another woman and your skin peels off? What if you think about touching another woman and you might as well have, for how irreparably it changes you?
And the “unnamed thing, the shadow thing, the thing written between the lines of the book, the thing that tied everything together,” the thing you’ve been seeking all along—what if you find it? What if it’s you?
The Lebanese civil war was a series of conflicts that lasted from 1975 until 1990, claiming an estimated 150,000 lives. Although it assumed a sectarian face, there were a number of underlying causes, including economic and political inequality, a power-sharing structure that privileged Christian elites, and a widening rift between those who supported the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon and those who opposed it.
I was twelve years old when the war broke out, old enough to remember what it was like to be alive at the time. Beirut, where I lived, was divided between East and West Beirut, codes for predominantly Christian and Muslim Beirut, respectively. Living in East Beirut was like living inside a bubble, where people banded together and dissent was uncommon and mostly veiled. My parents rejected sectarianism, and I knew I was missing half the story.
My novel We Walked On is about the experience of living in wartime: the daily violence, the way in which war determines the course of each day, and the pockets of relative normalcy during the lulls when people try to rebuild their lives, only to watch them fall apart when the fighting resumes. I wanted to show the war’s devastating mental effects, how enmities grow and fear drives even seemingly decent people to commit acts of cruelty. Despite resisting the sectarianism that swept the country, 14-year-old Rita and her Arabic teacher, Hisham, who live in East Beirut, find themselves occasionally expressing their allegiance to the tribe: Rita betrays a friend, and Hisham pressures his brother to leave West Beirut, where he lives with his family. Both of these characters have ties that fall outside of the clan paradigm—Rita’s father grew up in Palestine, and Hisham’s brother joins the leftist militia—making them insiders/outsiders in their community and complicating their understanding of the exclusionary ideologies that fuel war.
The books featured below depict characters who cross lines and form affiliations across the divided city. While the majority take place during the war, Alameddine’s and Ghoussoub’s works are set after the war but remain shaped by it. Here are 8 books about the Lebanese civil war:
Sitt Marie-Rose by Etel Adnan; Translated by Georgina Kleege
Sitt Marie Rose is based on the real-life kidnapping, torture, and murder of Marie-Rose Boulos, a Christian Syrian-Lebanese woman who worked with Palestinian refugees. The novel, written in the first-person, describes her trial and execution. Etel Adnan’s titular protagonist crosses multiple lines. She defies her community by frequently traveling between Beirut’s Christian East and Muslim West. She lives in a Palestinian refugee camp in the West with her three children and her Palestinian lover, and runs a school for the deaf-mute in the East, where she is eventually kidnapped and killed for refusing to change her ways. Her insistent refusal to choose between two camps and give in to prescriptions of gender, class, and ethnicity is a heroic act of resistance that results in her tragic death.
Aaliya, Alameddine’s brilliant protagonist, is 72 years old and has been living alone in her Beirut apartment for years, ruminating about literature, her tumultuous past, and memories of the civil war. Once a bookshop manager, divorced, alienated from her family, prickly and erudite, she spends her time secretly translating beloved classics (War and Peace, Austerlitz…) into Arabic. Her estrangement from her family and voluntary seclusion in a society centered around community ties, her self-sufficiency and proud “spinsterhood” (she was briefly and unhappily married), her intellectual pursuits and rich and often hilarious inner world (she refers to her ex-husband as “the impotent insect”) make her an unconventional character who always strives to live by her own rules.
Hakawatis, Arabic for oral storytellers, are a dying breed in the Middle East. They typically perform in coffee houses, dragging their stories out over weeks or months, captivating their audiences and keeping them coming back for more. Various adjectives have been used to describe Alameddine’s novel: spellbinding, inventive, captivating, exuberant …. It’s prodigious, a riot of a book, and I’m a fan.
The year is 2003. Osama al-Kharrat returns from Los Angeles, where he has lived for years, to his native Lebanon to visit his dying father. The civil war has been over for years, but the city still bears its scars. Osama’s grandfather was a hakawati. The family name, al-Kharrat, translates to fibber, teller of tall tales, a fiction writer of sorts. Soon, Osama finds himself entertaining the family with his storytelling, twining stories within stories—djinns, demons, imps, the Crusaders, al-Mutannabi, Fatima, and myriad others. The Hakawati is a testament to the power of storytelling to entertain, distract from the difficult world, and bring the past back to life while freely embroidering and rewriting it. It might be a sly nod to fiction’s seductive powers and its ability to uncover truths that touch our hearts. The civil war lurks in the background, and the visible wounds it has left on the city, along with the father’s impending death, may be the impetus for the storytelling as a kind of reconstruction and balm. Alameddine’s hakawati, even as he references the war in his tales, situates it within a broader context, making it one of the many chapters in the history of a rich and vibrant Middle East.
The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat; Translated by Marilyn Booth
Barakat’s novel about a lone man living in war-torn Beirut during the civil war is both an elegy to the city and a tribute to human endurance in the face of calamity. Niqula Mitri has lost both of his parents to death; his beloved Kurdish maid, Shamsa, has disappeared; and refugees now live in his Beirut apartment. He takes refuge in his father’s bombed-out fabric store, where he discovers that the whole inventory has miraculously survived intact in the basement. He forages for food in the ruins of the deserted city while dodging a pack of wild dogs and alternating between past and present, reality and delusion.Through his ramblings, he summons back the lost Shamsa (who intones, “Come back to me, and teach me velvet”), describes to her the science and history of textiles, and delves into Kurdish mythology, Arabic and Armenian civilizations, and more. Fabric represents the weaving of stories as a means of survival in a shattered world. Mitri’s wanderings across familiar landmarks of the bombed-out city are haunting and achingly beautiful for anyone who has known and loved Beirut.
In Hassan Daoud’s The Penguin’s Song, a family of three displaced by war spirals into decline. Forced to flee their home in embattled Beirut, they spend their days longing for their old life while struggling to find a meaningful anchor in their new one.The mother regularly leaves the apartment to wander around in frustration, the father stops working due to failing health, depleting their savings, and the twenty-one-year-old son, whose physical deformity causes him to walk like a penguin, narrates the family’s demise while pining for a young neighbor. The omission of proper names reduces the family members to near-anonymity, underlining their growing dehumanization. Their cramped new apartment reflects the war-torn world they inhabit, with ever-increasing walls and barriers erected in the name of kinship to the clan.Their only way out is to turn to their memories and fantasies, as losses pile up around them. Although the family lives in relative physical safety in their sheltered apartment, their mental state deteriorates rapidly. Daoud’s novel is a scathing critique of war, depicting it as an insidious sickness that causes devastating damage in its wake.
Multilingual, multi-talented (author, artist, and playwright), globetrotter, human rights activist, and co-founder of Saqi Books, Mai Ghoussoub, who died in 2007, eschewed boundaries. Her book is a creative blend of memoir, fiction, and personal reflections on war and its consequences.
The reflections are presented in the book as “letters” addressed to Mrs. Nomy, her childhood French teacher at the Lycee in Beirut. When Ghoussoub was twelve, she wrote an essay for Mrs. Nomy, using her best writing skills to express her wish to get even with friends who had wronged her. Instead of being impressed, Mrs. Nomy gave her a low grade and condemned her behavior, claiming that “revenge was the meanest of human sentiments.” Back in Beirut after a stay in Europe, the narrator in Ghoussoub’s nuanced book grapples with the problems facing post-war Beirut, focusing on the notion of revenge juxtaposed with the general amnesia that the Lebanese have readily adopted. What unfolds is a series of fascinating vignettes about real or imagined people from wartime Beirut that she uses to raise complex questions about the challenges of reconstruction, as well as the temptations of forgetting and avoiding the painful job of reckoning with the past.
“They called it Little Mountain. And we called it Little Mountain” begins Elias Khoury’s first-person short novel set around the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War. But the mountain is not a mountain: “One hill, several hills, I no longer remember and no one remembers anymore.” This, combined with other examples of elusive narration, such as shifts in tense and pronouns, creates a destabilizing effect, accentuated by the repetitive, dreamlike style that loops and fractures across the pages. The novel begins with the narrator recalling his childhood in the “little mountain,” the Christian neighborhood of Ashrafiyya east of Beirut. Later chapters focus on the conversations and ramblings of fighters, before concluding with a sequence of disjointed memories in a Paris metro. Khoury’s use of repetition and fragmentation creates gaps in the narrative, allowing boundaries to dissolve and breaches to emerge. The novel’s fragmentary structure allows meaning to arise in the intervals between ideas, enabling a reality that is too fluid to be forced into the black-and-white imperatives of war.
Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir by Jean Said Makdisi
Makdisi was born in Jerusalem and grew up in Cairo before attending college in the United States. In 1972, she moved to Beirut with her Lebanese husband. Three years later, the civil war erupted. Her memoir offers an intimate account of those years, capturing the horrors of war and its impact on both personal lives and the fabric of the city. Makdisi vividly describes the challenges of raising a family and recreating life amidst relentless violence. Residing in Ras Beirut, a neighborhood in West Beirut known for its peaceful coexistence of people from different religions, she mourns the religious intolerance that consumed the country. However, she finds solace in the fact that some of West Beirut’s tolerance and diversity has managed to endure, even as it suffered a similar fate. One chapter delves into the devastating consequences of the 1982 Israeli invasion and the subsequent siege of West Beirut, resulting in the deaths and injuries of nearly 50,000 people. Through her memoir, Makdisi offers a valuable perspective on life during times of war, the resilience of human connections, and her unwavering love for a city that has persevered through the harshest of conditions.
Horror novels function as a way of controlling our fears and the unknown, transforming it into something tangible and… temporary. There’s something comforting about picking up a book, feeling terrified and setting it back down, the fear always contained in the pages.
During Covid, while some people turned to baking, I sought out Latina writers from across the Americas who are bringing on a new renaissance in dark thrillers in both familiar and innovative ways.
Inspired by these disturbing works, I ventured to write my own horror novel rooted in fashion: Tiny Threads.In the industrial city of Vernon California, Samara Martín will do anything to excel at her new job at the legendary House of Mota, including ignoring the increasingly disturbing apparitions “welcoming” her to her new home.
It’s an exciting time to be writing in this genre especially with these authors leading the way. There’s a no-holds-bar to the way they tackle capitalism, patriarchy, and the unrepentant violence of colonialism. It’s also the perfect time to read horror as the news keeps pouring in with increasing bleakness. These books can offer a relief from our current reality with a surprising, exorcism-like, quality. Instead of the usual suspects (the Stephen Kings and the Shirley Jacksons), expand your literary repertoire and read these scary and boundary-pushing works of terror by Latina writers around the world:
Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
Longlisted for the National Book Award, Hurricane Season is a ruthlessly dark fairytale set in a poverty-ridden Mexican village with four unreliable narrators circling around a death. In the same school as Bolaños, Hurricane Season’s denseness is brutal, unforgiving, and full of rage, evoking the slow suffocation of each character.
Argentinian author Samanta Schweblin is a master in unsettling the reader. Fever Dream is an eco-horror novel set where a child and a dying woman are in a room exchanging stories of how they came to be. What first begins as a child’s game with strange rules shifts into a terrifying examination of corporations poisoning whole swathes of people.
The first Puerto Rican to win a Bram Stoker award, author Cynthia Pelayo sets her horror in Chicago with two sisters who are tied to their historic family home even in the midst of strange noises and apparitions. The novel is part procedural story and part good old fashioned ghost story with Pelayo enlisting the city to bring forth the terror front and center.
Debut Uruguayan novelist Fernanda Trías delves into a near-future where poisonous air has contaminated the world while a corporation serves gross pink food to those who can afford it. Navigating this ecological disaster is a woman tasked to take care of a child. Pink Slime shows what it looks like to be a caretaker at the end of days.
Mona: A Novelby Pola Oloixarac, translated by Adam Morris
If you want a novel that takes on the international book awards industry and spins it on its demonic head, then this is the novel for you. Writer Mona travels to Sweden for an award she’s nominated for and encounters surreal characters that become more and more disturbing all the while denying a dark secret hidden within her. Pola Oloixarac’s story gets weirder and darker with each chapter.
Jawbone by Monica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker
Ecuadorian writer Monica Ojeda novel incorporates terrifying youth driven pop culture horrors like creepypastas and the strange dynamic within childhood cliques. Set in an elite private school, best friends Fernanda and Annelise become increasingly more violent as their secret rituals take a life of its own. Are the privileged teenagers to blame for their brutality or is their mother-obsessed teacher Miss Clara who kidnaps one of them guilty?
Cannibalism you say? Why not! Argentinian author Agustina Bazterrica is not afraid to get gory in this dystopian novel. Similar to Pink Slime, Tender is the Flesh features a society in which a virus contaminates all meat and cannibalism is legal. Marco, a worker at a human slaughterhouse, questions his role when he becomes close to a specimen meant for consumption.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Awakened by A.E. Osworth, which will be published by Grand Central Publishing on April 29, 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
A coven of trans witches battles an evil AI in the magical coming-of-middle-age romp about love, loss, drag shows, and late capitalism.
On a morning much like any other, 30-something queer Brooklynite Wilder makes the miraculous discovery: suddenly, as if by magic, they can understand every language in the world. Dazed and disconnected, Wilder is found and taken in by a small coven of trans witches who have all become Awakened with mystical powers of their own. Quibble, a handsome portal traveler, Artemis, the group’s caretaker and seer, and Mary Margaret, a smart-ass teen with telekinetic powers all work to make the cagey and suspicious Wilder feel comfortable, both within their group and with the knowledge that magic is, in fact, real.
Just as Wilder is finding their footing, a malicious AI threatens to dismantle the delicate balance of the coven and the world as they know it. Newly assembled and tenuously bound, the group scrambles to stay united as they parse the difference between difficult and dangerous, asking themselves continuously: is any consciousness—be it artificial, material, or magical—too dangerous to exist? Awakened is an exhilarating, hilarious and thought-provoking reflection on the ways that we are responsible for creating our own realities , a story of finding community, and a meditation on what it means to have a body (and if it might be far worse never to have had one at all).
Here is the cover, designed by Caitlin Sacks, Illustration by Andreea Dumuta:
Designer Caitlin Sacks: “Awakened is a wildly fun novel about a coven of trans witches who face off against an evil AI. Given the rich variety of themes and elements in this book, I aimed to incorporate as many symbolic icons as possible on the cover. The prominent eyes, for instance, carry a dual meaning. On one hand, they represent the idea of a ‘seer’—someone who possesses strong spiritual intuition. On the other hand, the eyes symbolize the ever-watchful AI, constantly monitoring the witches by infiltrating phones, cameras, and other electronic devices to gain power.
The color palette is inspired by the trans flag, with the pink and blue deliberately evoking a binary contrast. This choice was intentional, as the novel is fundamentally about rejecting that binary. I was particularly drawn to how every main character in this story, including the AI, is trans, and how the narrative beautifully highlights queer identities, the importance of community, and the feeling of connection.”
Author A.E. Osworth: “I squealed out loud in my office when I received this cover in three different colors. I ran door to door showing my colleagues—all of whom are authors, I work at University of British Columbia’s School of Creative Writing—because I was so amped up on the cover and I knew that they’d all cheer on my enthusiasm. And like—maybe I wasn’t supposed to do that and my editor is going to give me a stern talking to now that I’ve said it? I was just so excited. My closest creative friend, Nat Mesnard, once pointed out to me that in every single thing that I write, someone destroys a cell phone. When I saw a cracked cell screen front and center, it felt like the cover designer and the illustrator really got something, not just about Awakened, but about my body of work. About my simultaneous love of and criticism of the role of technology in our daily lives. Furthermore, the cover just felt—trans. Awakened is a trans book for trans people. Don’t get me wrong, everyone else can enjoy it too—it’s still going to be a fun book about magic no matter who you are. But when it comes to who I center as my audience, I center me and mine. The texture and bright colors feel akin to what I’m doing with the prose, who it’s for, what we like. I want a giant print of this cover on my wall and not just because I am proud of this book; I want one because this cover feels like it’s for me. And if you’re one of us (whatever ‘us’ means to you—trans, witch, a lover of magic and what it means to be a human)? I hope it feels like it’s for you, too.”
Morgan Talty’s debut novel, Fire Exit, is a poignant meditation on belonging, identity and family. The story follows Charles Lamosway, who lives across Maine’s Penobscot Reservation where he was raised by his mother, Louise, and stepfather, Frederick. While his mother could stay on the reservation because she married a Native man, Charles couldn’t. Despite not being Native, and not being granted access to the reservation after he comes of age, Charles still feels very much connected to the Native American experience, bound to it by the loving relationship he shares with his stepfather. Through this, Talty explores what it means to belong to a place, and to relationships not bound by blood.
The primary pulse of the book is Charles’s secret: he has a daughter, Elisabeth, who currently lives on the reservation. A daughter he has been watching grow up from across the river. A daughter who, by the fact of being his—is technically not native because to be native, blood percentages matter. As Charles contends with his desire to share this truth with Elisabeth, now a grown woman, he is also forced to grapple with the grief around his stepfather’s passing, and the relationship he has shared with his mother, whose dementia-induced episodes raise questions about his own history. Deeply moving and utterly gut wrenching, the novel reflects Talty’s commitment to placing emotion at the crux of his storytelling.
Morgan Talty, a citizen of the Penobscot Indian Nation, is the author of the critically acclaimed short story collection, Night of the Living Rez. His writing has appeared in Granta, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. Over Zoom, we talk about blood quantum, colonization and the manipulation of stories, bodies as containers of legacy and trauma, and much more.
Bareerah Ghani: I wanted to start with a central through line of the novel—lineage. Charles tells Elizabeth the truth because he thinks it’s important that she knows her history. And when Charles’s mother’s memory starts to falter, he starts to question how much he knows about his own history. In the absence of oral history or an archive, how do you think we can discover and reclaim parts of our heritage?
Morgan Talty: Let’s say colonizers wipe out languages, stories, everything that makes a culture, a culture, yet still politically treat it as an entity. Something like what happened with the use of blood quantum where, if you dilute the blood enough, your Native Americans no longer exist yet you’re kind of born from a Native person. It’s like, we die but we don’t die. We’re still here. This random percentage has taken away our status as indigenous people. How do we reclaim our identity then?
If, on paper, what makes and shapes us, is gone, it’s gone. I think we need to look toward the future, toward rebuilding new stories. That’s what I try to do, at least, as a writer. The stories I don’t know or I know only pieces of, I’ll invent or reinvent them in my own way.
I think about traditional stories, like, of Glooscap, or Gluskabe, the Wabanaki cultural hero who had multiple attempts at creating human life. One of his failed attempts was where he tried building people out of rocks, and it didn’t work because he found that the rocks are cold. They had no hearts and the very short version is that he set out to destroy them but some escaped, and well, that’s one way to explain why some people today are cold hearted, or, you know, rotten and evil because they’re descendants of stone people. So I wrote about that in The Night of The Living Rez but I expanded it in a way that I didn’t know had been really told. And I think that’s the point with oral storytelling, too—there are certain things that can’t change, the rest you can, you know, build around, and every storyteller tells a story differently. And so going back to the idea of ‘when we have nothing, we reinvent’—if we have the DNA, we’re good to go. If we can’t remember how so and so told it 200 years ago but we know that these are the elements of it, that’s enough to reclaim those types of traditional oral stories.
BG: Following from this, I am wondering about how the novel at different points presents this idea of the body as a container of blood and legacy. Charles insists that our bodies retain memories that we may not be aware of. And I find that idea really fascinating, because that posits bodies as separate entities of themselves. I’m just curious about your thoughts on this. How do you contend with the possibility of not knowing something integral about yourself?
MT: I have been thinking a lot about this idea, especially with children who are adopted into families that they’re not actually related to. In South America between the ’70s and ’90s, a lot of babies were basically stolen for white people to adopt in the U.S. This one individual I know who grew up with their white family, they ended up teaching themselves Spanish to reconnect, and now they’ve gone back to their home country. They love their parents, and yet they find this strong pull to go back and reconnect. So I think our bodies hold memories that aren’t even ours, that don’t even belong to us.
There’s this experiment where scientists had taken adult mice and put them in a cage, and sprayed a specific scent the mice liked. They would wait a second or two after the mice had enjoyed it, and then the floor would deliver little electric shocks to their feet. They kept doing it, and eventually, when they would spray the scent, the mice would begin to jump because they knew they were going to get electrocuted. Then, they had those mice have babies which were placed in their own cage. Now the babies had never experienced what their parents experienced. Yet, when they sprayed that smell, the babies automatically jumped. Their bodies remembered what their parents had endured, and had adapted to make sure they wouldn’t get hurt. Their body had created a defense mechanism, which I find fascinating. And I wonder what our defense mechanisms are against intergenerational trauma, if they exist.
Speaking of not knowing things, I’m actually working on this memoir about my parents and in a way I envision it as one day, my son or children could read the book and be like, Oh, I feel like I’ve known my grandparents my whole life. And a while ago, I was at this event reading from Fire Exit actually and in the audience was my great aunt. She’s really young compared to my grandparents. She was surprisingly closer in age to my dad. At the end of the reading, she was telling me about how my dad, who had dropped out of Northwestern, and was bad into drugs and all that, had called my grandparents up one night and said he needed to be picked up. So my dad’s dad, my papa, and my papa’s brother went and they also had this little baby with them. And my dad looked over at this baby, and he was like, I’m never gonna get the chance to have a baby. That broke my heart because he loved babies and I never knew that about him. And after the reading that night, I was walking to get food, and I just started crying. I was like, shit. This memoir isn’t just about my son, Charlie. It’s also about what I don’t know. And so now I’m wanting to interview every single person that’s ever come in contact with my mother and father because the more we know, the more it helps us heal in a way. The happiest families I’ve ever seen are the ones who know their histories really well.
BG: There’s a line you have in the book that speaks to what you’re talking about. “We are made of stories, and if we don’t know them—the ones that make us—how can we ever be fully realized? How can we ever be who we really are?” I love this idea that we are an amalgamation of all that has come before us. We carry all these stories with us. But to me, the notion of stories also includes lies, and half truths and manipulation. How do you reconcile that with ideas about inheritance, legacy and identity?
MT: I think, to some degree we are living a life where stories have been manipulated. I think Indian Country is in that position because indigenous tribes have become internally colonized. We have adopted the ways of the colonizers. Blood quantum is a big thing. Now, it’s just a matter of, Are we going to choose to correct our biases and the racism we’ve inherited? And I’m not saying that tribes in the United States lived in perfect harmony prior to contact, because that’s not true. But some tribes did get pretty close at being right about how best to live. And no culture is ever going to be perfect. But that’s the thing, we’re even far from that imperfect, perfect. We have to confront the fact that we’re contributing to problems, and I don’t just mean indigenous people. I mean, everybody—we’re all in this together regardless of race. It’s just a matter of communities coming to terms with the fact that we need to fix ourselves. We need to fix the way we operate, or else we will disappear.
BG: I understand Blood Quantum is a colonialist construct that usurps identity and rights from Native Americans and yet, it continues to be implemented on grounds of preservation. Can you talk about what preservation means to you as a Native American?
MT: There’s two ways I think about it. One is preserving indigeneity but in the form of the white man’s image. We don’t have to use blood quantum but it’s what’s used by the majority of tribes. We use it to keep track of membership, which is a requirement by the federal government. So in a way we preserve ourselves by following blood quantum. We have the ability to lower the blood quantum and let people in and tribes try to do that when they’re close to extinction.
But on the other hand, I think, Why do we want to preserve ourselves in this way? I’ll use the example of a commodity because that’s pretty much what Indigenous people have become, and our culture is like a commodity to be consumed—let’s say, we’re something that’s supposed to be frozen after it’s been opened, and what’s happened is that we’ve basically put ourselves in the fridge instead of the freezer. I don’t mean to suggest dehumanization in any way, but if we had an answer to, what does it mean to be Indigenous, we’ve kept that answer in the fridge, and it’s slowly rotting, if not rotted already, when it should have been kept in the freezer. I don’t know if that metaphor makes sense.
BG: It does. It is this idea that the essence of indigeneity has been distorted over time when it really should have been preserved.
This random percentage has taken away our status as indigenous people. How do we reclaim our identity then?
MT: Yeah, it shouldn’t have gone this way in history but it did because of powerful people who wanted land and they made it so they got the things they wanted, which inadvertently affected us. If there had been an actual mutual attempt to—I’m gonna quote Audre Lorde here—celebrate difference, we wouldn’t be needing to find the goddamn tools to dismantle the master’s house.
BG: This novel defies certain expectations about indigenous fiction. One of the most fascinating aspects of this novel to me is how it explores this idea of belonging through its protagonist Charles, a white man who he feels like he’s native, or that he has “a stake in their experience.” The novel is brilliant in exploring questions about where we belong, who gets to define and shape that sense of belonging. I would love your thoughts on this, in connection with how the novel came to you.
MT: I think the people who get to define belonging are the people who love one another, genuinely, unconditionally. That’s the whole reason Charles feels a connection to the tribe—because of his relationships with his stepfather, Frederick, who he sees as his true father, and with Gizos, Mary, even Roger, especially when you think about the end and the way they’re just able to sit there in that type of silence. And I know it’s a dramatic moment, but I think love is the thing that defines it.
As to where the novel came from, Louise Erdrich was actually an inspiration for this book. Her book, The Round House, which won the National Book Award, is told from the point of view of 13-year-old Joe Coutts. The story is that his mother is raped. There’s a high rate of violence, including sexual violence, against Native women. I think it was reported one in three Native women would be bludgeoned and/ or murdered in their lifetime. That’s 33%. That’s a high number. And one of the reasons why is because in 1978 there was a Supreme Court case, Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, where the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that tribes don’t have the inherent power to try non-members who commit crimes on their land. But the Federal Government has the Major Crimes Act, and they’re the ones who are responsible for trying and prosecuting our members. There’s a story of a Cherokee woman who was driven around blindfolded and raped by two or three men, and just dumped somewhere and even though she knew who did it, she couldn’t say where the crime happened, whether it was tribal, state or private land, because you need to know where it happened in order to know who has jurisdiction. And that’s the whole premise of the book—they’re trying to figure out where the crime occurred. So that court case was and is a huge contributing factor as to that high number, and so I was thinking about that. I was like, I wonder what I can look at, in policy or law, and not use it as the plot, really, because blood quantum isn’t the plot of this book. I remember I was at Dartmouth College as an undergrad. I got out of class and a bunch of us were talking about The Round House. I’m just sitting there, smoking a cigarette, and the idea just came to me. I was like, Hmm! What happens if a white guy grew up on the rez his whole life, had a baby with a quarter blood, which would mean, in this instance, the child wouldn’t be an enrolled member, and so the mother lies and says it’s somebody else’s. And I was like, alright cool. I didn’t write it though until a couple of years later. But it was that fast, just looking at it, and that gave me the engine. But it was six rewrites of this book to figure out what it was really about, which is family and belonging. So yeah, I owe it all to Louise Erdrich and her dedication to always have been writing about women. And you know, highlighting the violence that exists. Without her work, this book wouldn’t exist.
BG: It’s not uncommon for writers of color and those from marginalized communities to feel a lingering pressure to write in a certain way or about specific things. I’m wondering if you’ve felt something similar and how you navigated these external pressures and expectations about what indigenous stories should be or how they should be written?
MT: When I started writing, there was Louise Erdrich and a scattering of other voices that I hadn’t yet encountered. And then there was the Native writer, we all know who I’m talking about, that person is obviously no longer in the literary community. But when I started reading, that was the author I knew, that was who I was copying to some degree. I studied that literature, understood how it worked and its relationship to, at least for indigenous people as well as I imagine other marginalized communities, how we’ve had to sell ourselves in order to progress.
I think about Penobscots baskets. We used to have these utility baskets, meant for lugging stuff. We still use them, going out to camp, that’s what we would pack our stuff in because they can carry so much, and they’re made from pounded ash. When tourism started to come up in the early, I don’t know, 1900s, we started to make baskets that were prettier, looked a certain way. I recognized that kind of performative nature—and you see it all over Indian country with various aspects, to various degrees—in that individual’s writing and I was like, I guess I have to do that to be successful. But my first mentor—who I consider to be the best mentor I’ve ever had and that’s throwing no shade on anybody—told me that that kind of writing is garbage. This isn’t real literature. And he was right. But at the same time, it wasn’t that writer’s fault with how they were writing, at least to some degree. My first mentor taught me what really mattered, and that was emotion, setting, the principles of fiction, and then I could do whatever I wanted. I refused to do the performative stuff, refused to explain things. That’s how I navigated it, I didn’t adhere or conform to what readers thought they wanted, which is what Louis Owens kind of talks about, this comfortable, colorful, easy tour of Indian Country. I was not going to give them that. I was going to give them my experience, which so happened to be in a manner that you can look at it as stereotypes, tropes, things that have been talked about or written about. But I kept going that way, and then Tommy Orange came out and subverted a lot of people’s expectations and since then, I think that’s why we have such a boom in indigenous literature.
And about my thoughts on expectations about what indigenous stories should be or how they should be written—a story is a story. A story should make you feel, should aim for transcendentalism, it should change something, maybe not for everybody but it should affect at least somebody. It should be in conversation with all other forms of literature out there, despite race and background. It should be written to address the heart of the human condition.
The realtor had let herself into the house on Sunday morning while Frankie slept—overslept, rather—and baked something sweet-smelling. Now she was darting around the kitchen, opening cabinets and banging them closed, while monologuing into her Bluetooth earpiece about escrow or maybe escarole. Frankie only half listened; she lurked in the doorway in her black turtleneck and jeans, damp hair pulled into a low ponytail, saying a silent goodbye to her kitchen, the only room in the one-hundred-year-old farmhouse that reflected her taste. Last year, she’d been forced to renovate after her husband, seventy-four and thirty years her senior, started a fire in the toaster oven. The fruit and rooster wallpaper swapped for a blue-and-white floral, the cherry cabinets for white, the brown Formica countertops for pearly granite. Pleased with the brightened results, she’d replaced all the gold appliances with stainless steel, though it had busted her budget to do so.
“Smells good in here,” Frankie said when the realtor ended her call.
“Toll House cookies!” Suzy said. “Trick of the trade.” In her mid-fifties, blonde and conventionally pretty, Suzy wore a navy pinstriped suit, the jacket cut close to her narrow waist. “Out of all the senses, smell is the most evocative.”
“That’s true. I remember the first time I met my stepdaughters. They were making pies right here. They wore these adorable little—”
“You wouldn’t happen to have a cutting board, would you? I’d hate to scratch this gorgeous countertop.”
Aprons. What was Suzy’s deal? The realtor stood to earn a healthy commission: the least she could do was listen to one measly memory. Frankie crossed to the lower cabinet, slid out the wooden board, and slapped it onto the counter.
“I looked all over for that little rascal,” Suzy said. “Usually, it’s right next to the knife block.” She picked up the knife. “So, what was I saying? Oh, right, sense of smell. I challenge you to find even one person who associates baking smells with something bad.”
She could think of one: someone who was raped in a bakery, but she kept this to herself. She’d repressed quite a few noxious comebacks these past weeks, while submitting to the realtor’s endless instructions for cleaning, painting, staging, and landscaping. At times, she’d felt cornered, even bullied, into going ahead with the sale, despite her growing ambivalence. The timer dinged. Suzy slipped on the blue oven mitt, and smiling tensely, waited for Frankie to step aside.
“We’ll just let these cool a minute.” Suzy slid the baking sheet out from the oven and rested it on the countertop. “Would you like to take this batch to the nursing home?”
“Sure, thanks,” she said, thinking: Here’s your hat, what’s your hurry. “Don’t you want to put them out for the people?”
“Actually, no. I just need the baking smells. The cookies make a mess. Crumbs everywhere—” The doorbell rang, and Suzy looked at the oven clock, her face creased with annoyance. “For goodness’ sake! Early birds?” She looked older and sadder. Like a different person.
Frankie opened the door to her twenty-nine-year-old stepdaughter, Clara, who was dressed like an acrobat in a black V-neck sweater and leggings. She had inherited her German mother’s tall, sturdy frame, fair complexion, and fawn-colored hair, which she wore in a single braid, thick as a fist, down the center of her back.
“Stupid truck’s blocking the driveway,” Clara said, thrusting a take-out coffee at Frankie. Behind her in the October mist, two landscapers planted yellow chrysanthemums along the walkway. “They couldn’t do this last week?” Clara said. “Talk about last minute—” She broke off to sniff the air. “You’re baking?”
“Hello, to you, too.”
“Sorry.” Clara reached around to pat Frankie’s back. “How’re you doing? Is this hard?”
“A little.” She peeled back the plastic coffee lid. “I may be having second thoughts—”
“It’s brighter in here.” Clara moved past Frankie and took in the spacious living room. “I like it. What’d you do?”
“What? Oh—well, this rug’s new, and the linen drapes. What else?” She sipped the scalding coffee and examined the room, her gaze falling on the scratched wood floor, the buckling walls, the chipped newel post. All the flaws that had stopped registering long ago were obvious and intolerable now that strangers would be eyeing them.
“Basically, I de-cluttered,” she said.
“It’s called staging,” Suzy called out from the kitchen.
Clara’s eyes bugged out; she mouthed, “What?”
“Thanks, Suzy!” Frankie shouted. “Forgot the word.” She pressed a finger to her lips and beckoned Clara to follow her to the far corner. “The realtor. I’ll introduce you in a minute. I’m curious to know what you make of her.”
Clara’s judgments were often hasty and harsh. Without evidence, she’d accused the nursing home staff of abuse last week after Frankie mentioned seeing a bruise on Bruce’s arm. Apart from Clara, however, she had no one to ask. After her layoff from the university press the summer before, she worked from home on freelance editing projects and only occasionally met up with her former co-workers. Her book group, formed during Bruce’s Princeton tenure, was slowly unraveling as the older members moved away or lost interest.
At a louder volume, in case Suzy guessed they were talking about her, Frankie said, “I put away those needlepoint pillows, your oma’s. You can have them if you want.”
“Oma Lilly was a straight-up bitch. You should just burn them.”
“Really?” she said, taken aback. “You think Jean would want them?”
“No fucking way.”
“Well, if you’re sure. What about this painting?” She gestured toward the dark oil painting, a forest scene inside an ornate gold frame, hanging over the fireplace. Clara’s mother had brought it from Germany. “Do you want it?”
“No.” Clara hitched her tote strap higher on her shoulder. “Burn that too.”
“You sure?” Clara’s answer surprised Frankie: though her stepdaughter was unsentimental, she had adored her mother. “It’s old, might be worth something,” she tried.
“Then sell it. I don’t want it. Don’t look at me that way, Frankie. That painting gave me nightmares when mom was sick. Ask Jean. I dreamed I was lost in that forest. I mean, I dreamed I was trapped inside the painting.”
“Wish you’d told me. I would’ve taken it down. I hate it, too.” She had made no changes to the décor when she moved in with Bruce and his two daughters sixteen years ago, though the late Annaliese’s somber art and heavy antique furniture had oppressed her. “I don’t want to erase the girls’ mother,” she’d told her new husband. But at twenty-eight, she’d had no decorating preferences; she tried on other people’s opinions and tastes. If she had it to do all over again, she would redecorate every room. Outside, rain lashed the windows. A pale maple leaf pressed against one pane like a small hand. She felt drained, thinking about the long day ahead.
She opened the breakfront drawer, took out a lime-green Game Boy, and handed it to Clara. “The cleaning crew found this behind your dresser.” Frankie remembered how Bruce had nagged thirteen-year-old Clara at the dinner table, in the car, and at bedtime to “put that thing down.” In private, Frankie tried to make him understand: to ease his own grief, he’d had his adoring Princeton students and his bottomless Twain research. And Frankie, the English department administrator, a much younger woman, to satisfy needs that fell well outside her job description.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” Clara handed the Game Boy back to Frankie.
In the heavy downpour, Clara cruised through Sunny Vista’s small parking lot, the car’s wipers on top speed, searching for an open space. Frankie held the Tupperware container on her lap, a Target bag filled with new undershirts and briefs wedged between her feet.
“Are you going to tell Dad about selling the house today?” Clara believed her father should know, but she’d promised not to interfere.
“I’m not sure,” she said, though she was leaning toward never telling him. He’d soon forget everything, including the house. And what if Suzy couldn’t find a buyer, or Frankie changed her mind about selling? She would have upset Bruce for nothing.
Clara began a second loop around the parking lot. Sundays were the busiest at the nursing home, and rain increased the visitors’ numbers. Last Sunday, another washout, a woman in her late fifties with pinched features and overplucked eyebrows had asked Frankie if it bothered her dad that there were so few men at the home. Frankie had been standing over Bruce as he studied the receipt from the grocery bag she’d used to carry his books—Augustine’s Confessions, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Paradise Lost—books he’d requested from his personal library in a moment of increasingly rare lucidity. The titles, she’d hoped, were an ironic acknowledgement of his monthslong confinement, but it was the receipt that claimed his attention while the books sat neglected on the side table.
“He’s not my dad; he’s my husband,” she’d snapped, forcing the woman to stutter an apology and hurry off.
‘He’s not my dad; he’s my husband,’ she’d snapped, forcing the woman to stutter an apology and hurry off.
A reasonable assumption, she thought now. So why had she taken offense? Maybe it wasn’t offense she’d felt. Paradise Lost had been one of the first books Bruce had lent her. They’d discussed the poem for hours and hours. She pried open the Tupperware lid and took out a chocolate chip cookie. Clara thrust out her hand and Frankie placed a cookie on it.
“You wanted my opinion?” Clara said, chewing. “About that realtor, that Suzy Q?”
“Suzy Whitacre. Yes, tell me,” she said, with no expectation of deep insight or revelation; Clara had spoken briefly to Suzy, grilling her about the Princeton real estate market. Clara slammed on the brakes. Taillights had lit up on a white Cadillac parked in the row closest to the building, only fifty yards away. Waiting, Clara brushed crumbs from her lap. “So, this Suzy Q—”
“Suzy Whitacre.”
“Whatever. She looks like a fake person.”
“Fake? As in shallow? Or fake like a replicant?” She half hoped for the latter. Suzy’s studied courtesy, her self-conscious cheerfulness had a Stepford Wife quality.
“Replicant?” Clara made a face of disbelief. “Jesus, I’m not insane.” She pulled into the vacated spot so fast, Frankie feared they’d hit the parked cars. Clara shut off the engine and twisted in her seat, leaning her back against the door and tucking one leg beneath her. “I mean fake like a casting agent’s idea of a cheerful, selfless mom. Was she on one of those Nickelodeon sitcoms Jean and I used to watch? I swear I’ve seen her somewhere.”
“You’re probably thinking about her advertising signs. They’re everywhere.” Frankie had stared at one on her grocery cart last week for five minutes before she’d connected the pretty face with Suzy. She yawned. If only they could pass the afternoon inside the warm Honda, chatting and eating cookies. She preferred visiting Bruce alone. Easier that way to numb out, to practice denial.
“Nope. Not the signs.” Clara reached for her umbrella on the back seat. “I’ll Google it. You’ll see, she’s one of those perfect moms.”
“Perfect mom.” She scoffed. “What an oxymoron.”
“What are you talking about?”
“A contradiction in terms. If you and Jean judged me against those sitcom mothers, well . . . ,” she trailed off, feeling unexpectedly emotional.
“I know what the word means.” Clara met Frankie’s eyes. “Listen, we were practically feral when you showed up. I mean, who leaves an eleven-year-old in charge of a house and her nine-year-old sister? Dad was AWOL for like two years. Believe me, we were thrilled to have you take care of us. No one ever judged you. Okay?” She gave Frankie’s shoulder an awkward pat.
She nodded, grateful. Clara had told her this before. So, why did she need to hear it over and over again?
In the Memory Wing, Clara went on ahead to the solarium where the inmates—her name for the residents—received visitors, while Frankie popped into the staff’s break room. Once or twice a week, she brought the staff bagels, pastries, or donuts. Clara called this her don’t-hurt-my-husband bribes. They’d both seen the viral videos, the orderlies abusing or manhandling the slow or uncooperative residents. In one black-and-white video that Jean, her younger stepdaughter, had sent, an aide slapped an elderly man’s face hard every time he slumped over in his wheelchair. Idiotic to think a raisin bagel would deter a sadist. If Frankie found a second bruise, she would hide a camera in her husband’s room—Jean’s suggestion. Jean, twenty-six, lived in Washington State and played clarinet with the Seattle Symphony. Her husband, Wendell, a software developer, had offered to hook them up with some “sweet” surveillance equipment.
For now, Frankie would rely on trust and kindness, though she couldn’t help thinking that Annaliese, Bruce’s first wife, a mathematician, would have opted for something more rigorous, like an official investigation. She arranged the cookies on a scratched yellow plastic plate. Without attribution, the cookies would be pointless. She took a Bic pen from her pocketbook and scrawled across a brown paper towel: Enjoy! From Frankie Mulroney! She laid the note on top of the cookies, but then picked it up again and scribbled Shay, a name she’d never taken as her own.
Rain drummed the solarium’s glass roof and muffled the visitors’ conversations. She guessed there must be thirty or so people in the room. The air, clammy and close, smelled faintly of ammonia. She spotted Clara hovering behind her father who was seated at the card table across from another man, a stranger to Frankie. Male residents came and went at such a dizzying pace that by the time she learned their names, they were gone from the nursing home and maybe gone from the world. As she drew nearer, Frankie discovered that the two were actually playing cards and betting with cellophane-wrapped hard candies. Her husband’s opponent had a pile of Jolly Ranchers and Starlight peppermints twice the size of Bruce’s. He also had an astounding protuberance, like a small doorknob, on his forehead over his left eye.
“He’s got two pairs,” Clara whispered to Frankie. “Tell him; he won’t listen to me.”
She smiled at her husband’s card partner before bending down to eye level with Bruce. His face brightened when he saw her. The bruise on his forearm had faded, and she saw no new marks. A quick assessment of his silver hair, ruddy skin, and navy wool pullover—all clean, all neat—reassured her. She moved closer for a kiss, and he opened his dry lips. Still enjoyable to kiss him. They hadn’t had sex in two and a half years, but she remembered their physical life with pleasure. Bruce’s unhurried, attentive lovemaking, after all her younger, greedy boyfriends, had been a revelation. She pointed out his pairs. He wriggled his eyebrows playfully and tossed two peppermints into the pot. His partner folded, and Bruce used two hands to sweep the small pile of candy toward himself. The other man stood, filled his pockets, and took off—probably to fleece another, more debilitated resident.
“Does he ever talk, that guy?” Clara dropped into the vacated seat.
“Excuse me, young lady,” Bruce said. “Maybe she’d like to sit.” He had forgotten their names again. He met Frankie’s eyes, a wry smile deepening his long dimples. It was their old way of communicating in the girls’ presence, mutely expressing their affection or frustration with the children.
Clara, looking sheepish, rose from the chair, but Frankie gestured for her to sit. She set down her shopping bag, pocketbook, and empty Tupperware on the card table, and circled behind Bruce to massage his tight neck and shoulders. His lifelong sedentary habits had not changed: tall and lanky, he’d grown a little belly, and his legs were thinner, frailer. He avoided all the chair exercise classes—just as he’d ignored his doctor’s orders to exercise when his health had started to decline at sixty-four. Instead, he’d holed up in his study preparing lectures and burning through weekends writing his second book; he’d flown to conferences during the winter and spring breaks.
Now she wondered if he had been racing the clock—his father had succumbed to Alzheimer’s at seventy—but at the time, she’d fixated on her own resentment and loneliness. That made her an easy mark for Kip Jones, the new faculty hire, a seasoned flirt. When the intense four-month affair ended with Kip’s abrupt departure for another teaching post in Texas, she’d felt limp and empty, a purse turned inside out.
“So, old man,” Clara said, stretching out her long legs. “What’s new?”
“New?” He chuckled. “What do you think? I’m stuck in this . . . this cuckoo’s nest.” He sounded amused and resigned. In recent weeks, he’d stopped pleading to be taken home, which should have been a relief but felt like a betrayal. The old meticulous Bruce with his subtle, logical mind would’ve been—had been—horrified to find himself trapped here.
“What’s new with you?” he asked. “You married yet?”
Frankie’s hands froze on Bruce’s shoulders as she watched her stepdaughter’s grimace soften into a patient smile. “Not until I find a man as wonderful as my father,” Clara said.
He laughed. “Smart girl.” He gave her a thumbs-up. “So, how’s . . . how’s work?” Bruce had always connected with his daughters through their academic careers and later through their professions. Clara was a data analyst in the Rockefeller Foundation’s grant office. Now she told her father about a global commission to end energy poverty.
“Energy poverty,” he repeated, nodding thoughtfully. As Clara elaborated on the project, he continued to repeat the odd word or phrase, an old teaching technique, Frankie suspected, meant to reassure the speaker that he was listening, that her ideas had merit. When Clara reeled off some figures, he twisted in his chair to view the room behind him. Clara raised her voice, as though his hearing was the issue. He pushed back his chair, and Frankie staggered out of the way. She reached out for him, heart racing, when he struggled to a standing position. It was muscle memory from the winter evenings when she’d had to stop him from leaving the house in his pajamas. Once she’d found him teetering at the top of the staircase, his arms loaded with books.
“Do you need the bathroom?” she asked, taking his elbow.
“I need . . . I need . . . .” He looked around with a panicked expression. “Where’d that fella go? The one with the . . . um . . . .” He touched his forehead.
“He’s with his daughter.” Frankie gestured toward the couch where the card shark sat with the woman she’d rebuffed last weekend. She brought her iPhone out from her pocketbook. “I have Jean’s latest recording. The symphony? Come sit, Bruce. Take a listen.”
Clara got up to help lower her father into the chair. Frankie handed him her AirPods; he looked with a bewildered expression at the two white plastic devices resting in his palm. She shot Clara a worried glance before calling out Bruce’s name. He looked up, and she pointed to her ears. He inserted the earbuds one at a time. She found the recording on her playlist. He closed his eyes and settled back in the chair with a contented smile on his still handsome face.
“He seems out of it,” Clara said, frowning down at Bruce. “Usually, he’s like this later in the day. Did they change his meds?”
“They raised the dosage on his antipsychotic; I meant to tell you. He blocked his door with a chair. He thinks someone’s taking his stuff.”
“Maybe something else is scaring him.” Clara patted her father’s shoulder. He grabbed her hand and held it. “Time to set up that camera, Frankie,” she said.
“Okay.” She tugged at her turtleneck; the room was too warm. “I guess you’re right.”
“Of course, I’m right.” Clara unhooked her tote from the chair. “I’ll go talk to the director. If they’re overmedicating Dad to make him easier to handle, I’m raising hell.”
After Clara left, Frankie moved the empty chair closer to Bruce. She took his large hand in hers. No doubt her stepdaughter would get some straight answers. While she admired Clara’s initiative, she sometimes feared her questions and demands would provoke the staff into taking out their resentment on Bruce. On the other hand, Frankie was probably too accommodating, too understanding; after months of managing her husband’s care at home she knew how challenging the job could be. Bruce plucked one earbud from his ear and offered it to her.
The gentle, melancholy strains of a Mozart clarinet adagio loosened the tight knot in her chest, and she breathed more deeply. The rain had become a misty drizzle and a weak light filled the solarium. This moment was as good as it would ever get. She remembered her mother’s warning: “If you marry him, you’ll end up being his caretaker.” Anyone could have predicted that. What Frankie hadn’t anticipated was how much it would hurt her heart to say goodbye to Bruce after every visit. Or the particular pain of imagining one of the night orderlies reacting with indiscretion or unkindness to Bruce’s occasional incontinence. Or how she’d seethe when visitors or staff spoke to her brilliant husband as though he were a child. When Bruce was still begging her to take him home, she’d asked the director about weekend visits, but his doctor had advised against it. Frankie had been secretly relieved, remembering his wakeful nights, his belligerence when confused, and that terrifying fire in their kitchen.
What Frankie hadn’t anticipated was how much it would hurt her heart to say goodbye to Bruce after every visit.
Bruce’s hand loosened its grip on hers. He’d fallen asleep.
Clara returned, looking agitated. Frankie removed the earbud. “Is something wrong?”
“Everything’s fine. Well, not really. Dad was hallucinating. And the medication is helping, but it’s making him sleepier.” She glanced at her father, slumped in his chair, snoring. “I left a message for his doctor to call us.”
“Oh, good. Thank you. Let’s get someone to—” she began, but Clara talked over her.
“The thing is—oh my god, Frankie. I looked her up, that Suzy Whitacre. You are not going to believe what I found.”
In the car, before they left the nursing home parking lot, Clara pulled up the newspaper account on her phone and read it aloud: “On June 15, 2004, in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, Thomas McCrae (42) threatened his wife, Susan Whitacre McCrae (39), with a butcher knife before kidnapping their two-year-old daughter, Tracey. After a weeklong manhunt, authorities found the father and daughter dead in a motel room 281 miles away in Fredonia, New York. Police labeled the deaths a murder-suicide. The child had been suffocated, and Thomas McCrae had slashed his own wrists.”
On the short drive to the Princeton Café, Frankie silently read the newspaper account. She didn’t want it to be true, but when she proposed that the woman in the article wasn’t the same woman baking cookies in her kitchen, Clara shot her a pitying glance. “It all lines up: the dates, the name, your Suzy’s weirdness.”
Once they were seated inside the crowded café, Frankie and Clara forced themselves to read the menu and order lunch. Frankie selected a good bottle of sauvignon blanc. Their quiches grew cold as they both kept putting down their forks to pick up their iPhones. On the realty site, Clara found Suzy’s professional bio, which featured the same headshot that was on all her local ads. A list of her credentials revealed a BA from Rutgers, an MBA from Wharton, and an earlier successful career on Wall Street. “No dates,” Clara pointed out. “Looks like she’s hiding something, doesn’t it? There are dates for her awards though. See?” Clara held out her phone.
Frankie googled the most recent award. The newspaper announcement mentioned that Suzy Whitacre and her real estate lawyer husband, Bradley Clark, had resided in Princeton, New Jersey, for ten years.
“Seems like a miracle she could trust another man.” Clara poured herself a second glass of wine and topped off Frankie’s glass. “Does it say how long she and Clark Kent have been married?”
“It’s Bradley Clark. No, it doesn’t.” She put her phone down and pushed it away. “Let’s talk about something else,” she said. “How are you and Jason doing?”
Clara had moved in with the thirty-eight-year-old, never-been-married orthopedist four months ago. Initially, Frankie had chalked up Clara’s complaints about Jason’s rigidity and brooding silences to the normal adjustment of living with another person. But after a few dinners with the couple, she wondered if they were a bad match. The alteration in Clara’s personality on those occasions had been surprising. Her stepdaughter seemed subdued, her natural frankness and exuberance repressed in Jason’s presence.
Clara blew out her breath. “You know how he was always dropping hints I might be able to change his mind about not wanting kids? Well, he told me he’s made up his mind. No kids.”
Frankie grimaced with sympathy. “I’m afraid you have to take his word for it this time.” She had not taken Bruce’s no-kids decision seriously. In the early days of their relationship, she’d managed to change his mind about so many things, including beach vacations, house cats, and Greek food. Yet, he’d held disappointingly firm on the issue of children. If he had relented, she would be raising a teenager now. Not an easy or affordable thing to do on her own.
Clara pulled her braid over her shoulder and held onto it with both hands. “To tell you the truth, things have been sort of shitty with him. This might be the off-ramp I’ve been looking for.” She tossed her braid behind her. “Hey, did that Clark-Whitacre union produce any offspring?”
Frankie picked up her phone and skimmed the announcement. “Nope. Nothing on the realty site either.” It made sense now why Suzy had cut her off earlier when she’d brought up her stepdaughters. Perhaps, Suzy could not bear to bring another child into the world after her daughter’s murder. Or maybe by the time she’d met Bradley Clark, she had been too old to conceive—another kind of sorrow, one Frankie hoped Clara could avoid.
After they’d ordered dessert, Clara excused herself to go to the restroom. Frankie looked around the crowded restaurant. Most of the tables had big groups of professional people, men and women on their lunch breaks. Suzy had been a stockbroker, which Frankie imagined as a boys’ club. Not an easy field to advance in unless you played the boys’ game. When Clara returned, Frankie wondered aloud whether an affair had been the motive for the murder suicide. “You know Wall Street. Suzy’s an attractive woman, working long hours, entertaining clients—”
“What are you saying?” Clara looked disappointed. “It’s Suzy’s fault her husband killed her kid? Really, Frankie? Check yourself.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but closed it when the chubby young waiter appeared to set down their desserts: chocolate cake for Clara and for her, crème brûlée, which the waiter set aflame with a small propane torch he’d kept tucked beneath his arm. Frankie gasped. Clara clapped her hands. Heads turned at the nearby tables.
“I’m not saying it’s her fault,” she said, after the waiter had moved off, taking some of their dirty dishes and silverware with him. “I just want to know the story behind—”
“You want someone to blame,” Clara said. “It’s not that simple. If Suzy was fooling around, she probably had her reasons. Her husband was clearly unstable. Plus, who knows what their sex life was like.” She scraped her fork through the chocolate frosting on her plate. “People in good marriages don’t have affairs, do they? I mean, yeah, sure, it’s a fucked-up way to deal with marital problems but not as bad as murder.”
Their eyes met for a brief, uncomfortable moment. Bruce may have been oblivious to his wife’s affair, but a teenage girl, roiling with hormones, would’ve been tuned in. Frankie had managed to meet Kip Jones at least four times a week, partly by making sure the household ran smoothly: regular meals, bills paid, clean laundry. If Clara had caught on, she’d kept it to herself. Having lost one mother, she wouldn’t want to risk losing another. What an awful secret to keep, Frankie thought now.
She put down her spoon. The heavy sweetness of the crème brûlée unsettled her stomach. The waiter placed the check folder on the table next to Frankie, correctly assuming that she was the responsible party. She skimmed the charges. Clara offered to pay half, but Frankie pretended not to hear and reached into her pocketbook for her wallet.
“What I want to know,” she said, sliding her credit card into the little plastic holder, “is how you recover from something like that? How do you keep getting up in the morning?”
“You become a realtor, that’s how,” Clara said.
Frankie looked to see if Clara was being sarcastic, but she was serious.
“You take over strangers’ houses,” Clara continued. “You stage the rooms to look like some idealized domestic space. You bake cookies in their pretty kitchens. You borrow someone else’s life for a weekend. You become”—she made air quotes—“the perfect mom.”
Frankie smiled wanly at that impossible phrase. In a sense, she had borrowed Annaliese’s life. She had been a good enough mother to the dead woman’s grieving little girls. She’d done her best through Clara and Jean’s rebellious teenage years. She’d handled it all—meeting with their teachers, meeting their friends, finding them therapists, raiding their bedrooms when necessary. Their stickier offenses, like truancy, sex, and drugs, she’d kept from Bruce, sensing he’d overreact, make things worse for everyone. In those instances, she’d behaved more like an empathetic and responsible older sibling. But it had all worked out. Everyone had survived, including Frankie, who had managed to keep a part of herself separate and safe, like a roped-off room in an otherwise open house.
After lunch, as they walked across the parking lot to the car, she asked Clara how she felt about selling the house. “I should’ve checked with you sooner,” she said. “It’s your childhood home. All those memories.”
Clara didn’t answer until they were both inside, seatbelts fastened. “It’s your decision to make, Frankie. Your future. It’s sad to think about, but he’s not going to get better.”
They drove in silence. The rain had ended, and the streets were busy with cyclists and runners. Frankie asked Clara to drop her off a mile from home. The open house still had an hour to go. Clara pulled over to the curb, and with the car running, she searched the internet for Wi-Fi nanny cameras. Frankie agreed: they couldn’t wait for her son-in-law Wendell’s suggestions. They settled on one model that was disguised as a small phone charger; it would allow them to watch videos, both live and recorded, on their phones or laptops. “Buy two,” Frankie told her. “I’ll pay you back.” Clara sent her a questioning look. “One for the house,” Frankie said.
Frankie walked home, buzzed from the wine. She had the floaty sensation that she was outside her body, watching herself, attentive to what came next. The sky had cleared, and the late afternoon sun lit up the gold and green leaves arching over the street. Everywhere, the thunderous roar of leaf blowers and lawn mowers, the landscapers making up for lost time. The bright air shimmered with leaf dust. Her street, with its older houses, deep landscaped properties, and tall shade trees, had not changed much in sixteen years, though strangers lived in most of these houses now. Only a few people knew her as Bruce’s wife and Clara and Jean’s stepmother. Older people, Bruce’s age, some his Princeton colleagues. She’d see them out strolling with spouses or dogs, and they’d wave to each other like survivors on adjacent life rafts, drifting toward the falls that were, for now, only a faint roar in the distance.
She slowed her pace as she approached her house. The old place had never looked better with its fresh coat of gray paint, new roof, and the yellow chrysanthemums dolloped along the walkway. Suzy’s red Mini Cooper was still parked at the curb, a blue Audi station wagon and a black Lincoln SUV behind it. Through the open front door, Frankie spied shadowy figures moving about her living room. She checked the time on her phone: a half hour to go until the house was hers again.
She sat beneath the old tulip tree at the edge of her property to wait. The ground was uncomfortably hard, bumpy with roots. Dampness seeped through her jeans. Overhead, migrating Canada geese filled the sky with cacophonous honking. She tilted her head back to look through the yellow leaves, and spotted the frayed gray rope dangling from one thick branch—all that remained of the tire swing Bruce had hung years ago, back when Annaliese was alive. How could Frankie have forgotten the swing? Every time she’d visited Bruce, his girls would drag her outside, begging her to push them. Although she was younger then, it had taken all her strength to lift that heavy tire into the sky. That heart-stopping instant when she had to let go. Once, she’d ducked too slowly, or maybe in the wrong direction, and the hurtling tire had landed a glancing blow. Clara and Jean covered her throbbing shoulder with little kisses. Where was Bruce in this memory? Somewhere inside the house—in his study, probably—already receding into the background.
In January, soon after the house had been sold, Frankie put a deposit down on a two-bedroom condo, but the closings were still a month off. She found solace in watching the nanny cam videos. Bruce, alone in his room, listening to music, napping, or serenely gazing out his window. By this time, he was calling her Anneliese and sometimes Doris, his beloved deceased sister’s name. She minded less than she’d expected. On days when Frankie needed cheering up, she’d watch the video of Suzy recorded on the day she’d sold the farmhouse for twenty thousand over the asking price. The realtor entered Frankie’s kitchen like a boxing champ, chin lifted, punching the air with two fists. She plucked one of the wooden spoons from the ceramic holder and spoke into it like a microphone. “I’d like to thank everyone who believed in me,” she said. “My gorgeous husband, Brad, and all the kind, talented people I work with who probably thought I was a hot mess, but gave me a chance anyway—” she broke off, doubled over with laughter. Frankie could watch this video over and over again. It never grew old.
It’s one thing for a book to pass the Bechdel Test or give readers a glimpse inside Virginia Woolf’s room of one’s own—it’s another for a book to let that room extend from cover to cover. After spending far too many of my school years reading books about cis boys and men, as an adult, I’ve gravitated toward books about the rest of us, and I’m particularly fascinated with stories that focus spaces where women are not only present, but centered.
My chapbook of flash fiction, The Theme Park of Women’s Bodies, is organized around spaces created by, for, or around women. Some—like the ship run by badass lady pirates in a story called “Our Lady of the High Seas”—are spaces of empowerment and mutuality, while others—like the sanatorium in “The Cure”—are sites of oppression and control. Many fall somewhere in the middle and explore the ways that gender and the body can both foster solidarity and beget violence, exclusion, and exploitation.
As it turns out, even the absence of men on the page cannot neutralize the impact of the patriarchy, a reality that the following writers grapple with as they consider woodsy islands, old mansions, college campuses, and locker rooms populated by women and nonbinary people. Still, each of these authors carves out space for the pleasures, rewards, and even the radical possibilities of creating space for marginalized genders—on the page and in the world beyond our bookshelves.
In The Women Could Fly, a Bureau of Witchcraft mandates women marry by age 30 to ensure their magic will be controlled. The only alternative for protagonist Jo: a mysterious island that appears in the middle of Lake Superior once every seven years—a witchy Brigadoon where she has reason to believe she’ll find the mother who disappeared when Jo was a teenager. Come for the timely speculative premise, stay for the precisely observed and grounded description—Giddings is equally great on the indignities (and occasional pleasures!) of dating as a Black woman in the Midwest and the thrill of magical flight over a wooded island.
As climate change renders earth increasingly uninhabitable, a lucky subset of the population retreats to the Inside: an elaborately built shelter designed by Jacqueline Millender, a toxic cis white ladyboss whose version of utopia many millennial readers will recognize as sinister send-up of the Wing, complete with mauve uniforms and a signature scent that just-so-happens to double as a sedative. Jacqueline’s thesis is that men are responsible for the ecological destruction of the world, and so, she’ll rebuild civilization from a generation of women only. This plan is exactly as foolproof as it sounds, and the fallout is both emotionally and literally disastrous. Told through the perspectives of Jacqueline and a diverse cast of women both Inside and out, Yours for the Taking is a queer dystopian novel about a certain brand of feminism and its shortcomings—a sequel, The Shutouts, is forthcoming later this year.
The action of Killingly revolves around the disappearance of Betha Mellish, a student at Mount Holyoke College, a place devoted to the education of women in a time when that was in itself a somewhat radical notion. There are plenty of men in this book, from Bertha’s family’s doctor to the detective hired to find her. However, the essential mystery of the novel is inextricably linked with the secret world Bertha and her fellow young women made for themselves—and Bertha’s desire to live a life outside the strictures of what was permitted of a woman in 1897. Juicy and suspenseful, literary and atmospheric, Killingly is a queer crime novel with Sarah Waters vibes.
Not unlike Jessamine Chan’s The School for Good Mothers, Joanne Ramos’s The Farm uses an institutional setting to dig into the complications and injustices of modern motherhood. The novel is centered on a commercial surrogacy outfit called Golden Acres, where women are paid big bucks to gestate under intense surveillance; the main character, Jane, is an immigrant from the Philippines who hopes carrying the child of a super wealthy client will be her ticket to financial security. The novel toes the line of realism and dystopia, offering a character-driven critique of the all-too-recognizable ways the economy of motherhood rests on the exploitation of low-income and BIPOC women.
Clare Beams’ haunting second novel takes place in 1948 at a grand old house in the Berkshires, where main character Irene, alongside several dozen other women, receives an experimental treatment for repeated miscarriages in the hope of finally carrying a baby to term. Yet as much as Irene wants a child, she’s also not a rule follower, sneaking away to discover a walled garden that appears to have uncanny powers. Inspired by the real history of mid-century fertility treatments and their chilling side effects, Beams weaves a gorgeously written account of what she’s called “pregnancy as a haunted house” and the troubled relationship of women’s reproduction and the medical establishment.
Kelcey Ervick’s graphic memoir tells the story of Title IX and its impact on women’s sports alongside her own experience as a goalkeeper through childhood and into college. This is Ervick’s first foray into book-length graphic narrative, after a decade of publishing fiction and prose nonfiction, and The Keeper showcases both her breathtaking artwork and literary sensibility. Ervick reminds readers that Nabokov, too, was a goal keeper, and like one of his butterflies making its way from bloom to bloom, The Keeper beautifully draws from sports, feminist history, and memoir.
I have to admit my bias here—I’m Thomas’s literary agent, but I’d like to think that even if I weren’t, I’d be talking about her “charming, irreverent, tender…journey through lesbian history.” In six chapters, she digs into the largely untold stories of lesbian bars, feminist bookstores, sex-toy boutiques, softball diamonds, rural retreats, and vacation destinations—exploring the way these places were the settings where women fell in love, formed communities, and engaged in organizing and advocacy. Thomas is clear eyed about the way many of these spaces fell short, replicating the transphobic or racist biases of the women who built them; at the same time, she reveals the ways these places and the women in them laid the groundwork for queer life in 2024.
When I first read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, I was straight. Or, at least I thought I was. It was 2014, and I was a sixteen-year-old closeted bisexual in the Pennsylvania suburbs, with nothing to my name but a mildly successful hipster-themed Tumblr blog. The novel’s ending, in which Edna walks confidently into the sea and presumably drowns, left its mark on me. I couldn’t shake the image it conjured: a grown woman, defeated and determined, descending into the waves until there is none of her left. At the time, I chalked up my obsession with this ending to its overall melodrama and second-wave feminist messaging. It took a decade and a queer awakening of my own to understand the real reason I couldn’t seem to let it go.
In the past year or two, I’ve seen parts of this ending reflected in piece after piece of queer media. From novels to TV shows to music videos, there it is: this very dramatic, very wet end. A descent into the water, an ambiguous death, a life or lover left behind—it’s all there. In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, destined for life underwater. And the lover left behind is almost always queer.
It’s quite a specific trope to encounter upwards of five times in the span of a few years. While there’s certainly more queer representation in media than there used to be, it’s still undeniably a much smaller genre—an island of queer stories amongst oceans of hetero romance. Smaller still is the percentage of these stories that spotlight sapphic love between queer women and non-binary people. So it feels significant, and more than just an odd coincidence, that multiple fairly popular sapphic stories released in the last five years hinge on this strange plot point.
In each story, a main character is transformed into something non-human, neither dead nor alive, destined for life underwater.
I first recognized it as a trope when watching The Haunting of Bly Manor. Like many young lesbians in the fall of 2020, I spent two days in October glued to my couch, binge-watching the new Netflix miniseries. New sapphic romance in mainstream media is not an everyday event, so when I heard whispers on social media of the new gothic drama featuring WLW love, I didn’t walk: I ran.
Though Dani and Jamie’s romance is briefly a sweet, infrequently seen picture of lesbian domesticity, it comes to a harrowing, wet end in the season finale. Dani, who’s spent the last decade growing increasingly possessed by the evil Lady of the Lake, makes the decision to leave for Jamie’s safety and retreat back to the lake on the manor. Like Edna in The Awakening, she walks steadfast into the water. Though rather than presume she drowned, we understand her to live on as the new Lady of the Lake. The following scene, in which Jamie swims into the water to find her wife asleep on the lake’s bed, is one of pure sapphic suffering—a wailing woman, weeping for the loss of her wife.
Then there it is again in Julia Armfield’s novel Our Wives Under the Sea: After Miri’s wife, Leah, returns from a submarine mission gone wrong, she watches as Leah slowly transforms from her charismatic, loving wife into a sea creature of sorts—drinking salt water, bathing for hours, shedding human skin. Something happened in that submarine that changed Leah forever, and Miri cannot get her back. She is, instead, forced to carry her into the sea and watch as her wife swims away.
In Chlorine, the 2023 debut novel by Jade Song, we see it yet again. Ren, a talented teenage athlete, grows so obsessive over her competitive swimming career that her childhood fascination with mermaids takes on a life of its own, and the line between human girl and mermaid blurs to the point of no return. Meanwhile, the novel’s other protagonist, Cathy, endures the queerest of fates: falling desperately in unrequited love with Ren, her best friend. Ultimately, it is Cathy who must deliver Ren-the-mermaid to a creek, and watch as she swims underwater without resurfacing.
Jamie, Miri, and Cathy all have no choice but to helplessly witness the deterioration of their lovers as they turn from a human woman to something not-quite—something whose home was no longer in them, but in the water.
As someone who has experienced the heart-wrenching, all-consuming emotional nightmare of one’s first lesbian breakup, the pain these queer characters endure by losing their relationship in communion with the loss of the person themselves sounds insurmountable to me, which may be part of why I recognized this repeating theme in the first place. Heartbreak is by no means exclusively queer, but one could argue that lesbians have somewhat of a monopoly on yearning—of which this trope begets plenty. In all of these stories, there is a refusal to let go that is decidedly sapphic. An unending yearning that is emboldened by the ambiguous loss of the lovers—they are both gone and not. They live on in the water, and their lovers are left to blindly hope for their return.
One could argue that lesbians have somewhat of a monopoly on yearning.
In Bly Manor’s finale, it’s revealed that the show’s omniscient narrator is Jamie herself, telling her and Dani’s story some twenty-five years later. It’s been decades since she lost her wife, and still we watch Jamie sleep with her door open just a crack, in case of Dani’s return. Still she runs a bath and fills the sink at night, in case Dani is called to the water, I Shall Believe by Sherly Crow playing softly in the background.
When Ren swims away from Cathy in Chlorine, instead of letting go and moving on, Cathy does the gayest thing one could: writes love letters. These love letters are more than just a coping mechanism for her grief—they’re an earnest attempt to communicate with Ren underwater, regularly depositing messages-in-bottles into the creek with hope Ren the mermaid will write back. In one of her letters to Ren, she writes, “Remember, remember, remember? Feels like all I do is remember the times I had with you.”
It’s dark, quite frankly. Both Cathy and Jamie are stuck living their lives in the past. This level of devotion blurs the line between romantic and pathetic, love and purpose, independence and codependence. And yet—such is lesbianism. Nothing has ever distorted my sense of self and purpose quite like queer love, which is precisely why I think this trope has found its home in queer media. It provides the perfect stage for the darkest, most vulnerable parts of sapphic love to shine.
Even Chappell Roan is in on the metaphor: in the “Casual” music video, Roan’s love for a sexy siren develops quickly and forcefully, from sharing a popsicle on the beach to making out with her in a pool. Over the course of the video, we see Roan’s character transform herself into what (she thinks) the siren wants—dressing in bluer tones, giving her bedroom a sea-themed makeover, even turning a blind eye to the siren’s murderous tendencies. All of this just to be abandoned by the siren in the end, and of course: watch as she retreats into the sea. The sapphic yearning is desperate here—just as it is in Bly Manor, Our Wives, and Chlorine—to the point where these queer characters are willing to abandon common sense. They believe the unbelievable because the love, the want, feels so good.
The mythical nature of these lovers (the siren, the mermaid, the sea creature, the possessed) intensifies the queer love within the stories, extending it past reality. Without the fantastical element, the loss of these characters to the water would be matter-of-fact. It would just be…death. Instead, magical realism creates a layer of ambiguity to the losses, allowing the longing to be theatrical and placing queer love on a bigger scale, for all its complexities and pieces to be seen up-close.
For the human-half of these relationships, taking care of a lover-turned-mythical-creature seems instinctual. In Bly Manor, Jamie spends the majority of her marriage compensating for Dani’s deteriorating self and memory. “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us,” she says. In Our Wives, Miri tends to Leah day and night in the bathtub, where she’s most comfortable. She dissolves tablespoons of salt into water for her to drink, bandages her face when her human eye is lost. In the “Casual” music video, Roan intimately bathes her murderous, shark-toothed siren.
The trope provides the perfect stage for the darkest, most vulnerable parts of sapphic love to shine.
In each instance, love is an active effort. As said in Bly Manor, “To truly love another person is to accept the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” The way in which each of these stories refer to love as “work” is purposeful; the work may not be effortless, but when so deeply entrenched in queer love, it feels natural.
There is something to be said for the unspoken way in which a queer lover is often able to anticipate the wants and needs of their partner. The effect is a blurring of bodies and hearts—I am made up of you and you are made up of me. The question of adopting the caretaker role through their partner’s transformation is not a question at all, but rather a raw determination to channel the intensity of love into action.
Maybe this is why the lover-lost-to-water trope is surfacing in so many queer narratives, like dots waiting to be connected, or breadcrumbs on the trail. The love we are capable of as queer women and non-binary people is like the sea, unwieldy and vast, and the consequence of losing this love is just as unpredictable and terrifying—which all of these authors and artists tap into and lay bare in their heartbroken characters.
I see in them the parts of myself I shrink from—the parts I like to pretend don’t exist within me, lurking. Jamie’s helplessness, Miri’s detachment, Cathy’s desperation, Roan’s codependence, all triggered by loss and change. And yet, just as clearly, I see the parts I revel in—the hopeful feeling of unending, easy love. Of yearning satiated. It is the kind of representation I hope to see more of as queer literature and media continue to expand—raw and dark, beautiful and truthful, yet done in a way that plays with the unknown. And what is more unknown than the sea?
In The Awakening, Chopin writes, “…[Edna] was beginning to recognize her relations to the world within and about her… [the] voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring… the touch of the sea is sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace.” Aside from this being the most sapphic description of the sea I’ve ever read, I like to think Chopin intended more for Edna’s final moment than death. I like to think she inspired a generation of queers to play with the boundaries of love and yearning—of wanting more—just as she did.
My whole life I’ve felt like a bad girl, like something was inherently wrong with me that I couldn’t manage to play the part society (and my immigrant family) had carefully laid out for me. From coming out to being splashed across headlines for listing “sex work” as a work experience on LinkedIn, I always seemed to be doing something wrong. Never mind my ADHD and autism—just recently discovered—that now puts a whole new lens of understanding behind my “badness”.
I can only speak to my experience, which I do in my debut, Being Bad: Breaking the Rules and Becoming Everything You’re Not Supposed to Be, so the books below—spanning from auto-fiction to fiction and back to memoir—recount stories of AFAB people (Assigned Female at Birth) and trans women, and all the ways society has claimed our behavior—and sheer existence—bad.
It’s not always that obvious, and some of these works never say it out loud, but to be born without a penis—let alone born with one and being a woman anyway—makes us all bad from birth. And if we choose to not conform, constrict, and consistently meet all the instructions laid out for us before we ever exited the womb, well, society deems us doomed.
The books below are some of my favorites. From a trans non-binary butch memoir about a person going to a conservative Catholic college, to a postmenopausal woman orgasming herself into trouble, each work is not only achingly well-written, but infused with the particular perspective of those who know what it is to be on the outside—even if they pretend not to be.
Playboy by Constance Debre, translated by Holly James
Constance Debre’s prose is direct, emotionally removed staccato sentences that makes it clear she’s now a butch dyke. The granddaughter of France’s former prime minister, Playboy, the first in her trilogy of memoirs, is a series of sharply cut short vignettes, chronicling her first sexual encounters with women—an older married woman, a young model—and her fumbling liberation away from her prominent career as a lawyer, and becoming a broke, single lesbian—which is already “bad” enough. But add her obvious distaste for her grandfather’s politics, and descriptions of her eye-fucking passing woman, and she becomes one of the foremost contemporary voices in French literature and discourse to date. Her writing is vivid, unworried about offending, and alive.
Dark and uncomfortable, this novel begins with Edie, a young Black woman having online sex while sitting at a desk at her day job. The man she’s talking to is older and white, a midwestern married man living in Jersey with a much simpler life. Narrated in the first-person, there’s a self-destructiveness about Edie, an attraction to violence and an apathy towards herself. We see her on an uncomfortable first date with the white man, Eric, and after losing her job, she finds herself in front of his home, meeting his wife, and offered the guest room. It is a fascinating work, yet I found myself wanting to close my eyes and cover my ears through some of the violently visceral descriptions of Edie’s life—a woman making “bad”, if not terrible, choices that you keep rooting for.
This searing memoir is one of bravery, courage, and a shitload of confusion. When Mertz moves away from their abusive father and moves in with their mother and stepfather—who’ve entrenched themselves into conservative Catholic homeschooling, and all that comes with that—Mertz is just starting to feel the first stirrings of queerness. And yet, Catholicism becomes the safety shield away from their father who’s a non-believer. We watch Mertz choose a Catholic college in conservative Ohio, navigating their way through sexual attractions, questions of identity, and whether there’s space for them in the community they gave so much of themselves to, or anywhere else. Mertz isn’t just a bad Catholic, but not even a girl, at all.
I can’t talk about this book without talking about the cover, the first reason I picked it up. A cropped close-up shot of a man’s chest peeking through emerald green corduroy, his gold braceleted wrist resting on his thigh, his hands right over the pants of his crotch. The narrator is a literary professor in her late 50’s, married to the chair of the English Department who’s had his fair share of sexual student relationships. Now, the narrator’s “feminism” is being questioned as she doesn’t support the removal of her husband from faculty after 300 hundred students sign a petition against him. She now has become “an enabler” by frowning upon the female students’ claim of no agency. She stops being a student favorite just as a young new assistant professor moves to town with his brilliant writer wife. Our narrator becomes hopelessly jealous of the wife—not just of her husband, but of her writing career that’s taking off, while hers has stagnated. A postmenopausal woman filled with lust, ambition, and a little hint of violent recklessness, a story of an older woman doing none of the things she’s “supposed to”.
Bad Girls by Camila Sosa Villada, translated by Kit Maude
“Las Malas” (translated from the Spanish) dives into a community of Argentinian trans sex workers, mirroring the author’s real life experience. Our heroine is Camila, a young trans woman who’s born to a poor family that violently rejects her once she starts dressing like a girl. She finds her way to university, and, to support herself, starts working as a sex worker and finds her way into a community of trans sex workers who take her in and become family. In the bushes, they find a baby, and the magical realism begins to unfold. Funny, gritty, and perfectly magical, Sosa Villada writes to her community, not for anyone else to understand.
A summer in the Hamptons with a self-destructive sugar baby. Need I say more? Okay, okay, I will. Alex fucks up at a fancy dinner party and gets dumped by her rich older “boyfriend” and put on a train back to Brooklyn. Except, she doesn’t get on it and instead spends a week pretending to be totally fine—with no money, no phone, and nowhere to sleep, conning and causing destruction along the way. All she needs is to get through the week until her ex’s Labor Day party where she can win him back. I won’t spoil the ending. A story of excess, addiction, and dark comedy, somehow you’ll find yourself rooting for this antiheroine.
Easily one of my favorites, this book is often considered the first work of the new “trans lit”. Written by a trans woman for other trans women, the novel follows Maria, a Brooklyn internet blogging trans woman who writes tips for other trans women online. Although she’s positioned herself as an “educator” of sorts for baby trans women, she’s a mess. Her external and internal lives come undone as she gets dumped, gets fired, and borrows-but-actually-steals her best friend’s car and begins a roadtrip across the country, meeting a young sales assistant at a Walmart in Nevada who she can tell is maybe, probably, trans. She takes James under her wing and you’ll have to read the rest because it’s an absolute cult classic for a reason, primarily because it’s not written for anyone else but Binnie’s own community.
This book is wildly visceral, strange and somehow extremely relatable—at least for me, having struggled with eating disorders, and being queer and Jewish. The story follows Rachel, a mentally unwell young woman working in LA who falls in love with a Jewish Orthodox woman who runs the frozen yogurt counter at her chosen spot. The story is filled with self-loathing and perfectly accurate descriptions of what it is to be food-obsessed with an eating disorder, a repressed queer person, and a lonely human. The whole time I was reading I found myself being completely captivated by Broder’s mind. A book that shows all the traps of trying so hard to be “good”.
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