If You Lose Your Hearing, How Does the World Around You Change?

Posted on by Jo Lou

If you lose your hearing, how does the world around you change? What contours of one-on-one conversations become harder to make out, what details of a bustling room come into sharper focus? What creature comforts do you stubbornly cling to all the while?

Adèle Rosenfeld’s Jellyfish Have No Ears is about a woman going deaf gradually and then suddenly: an intimate novel in which the narrator’s mishearings conjures up all sorts of surreal circumstances. At a new job, an imaginary WWI soldier comments on the death certificates she has to scan; as she comes to terms with an increasingly unfamiliar city, she catalogs the sounds she’s losing as well as the “miraginary” plants through which she gets a new handle on reality—one in which she has to decide whether or not to get a cochlear implant and trade one form of hearing for another. 

When the novel came out in France, it was met with acclaim and compared positively to Boris Vian’s Mood Indigo and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. As a deaf translator with a cochlear implant, it was a true treat to bring Jellyfish Have No Ears into English, and on the occasion of its publication this August, Rosenfeld and I traded emails about the book’s wildness and wonder, and the singular feeling of finding, in these imaginary characters, our real selves.

Jeffrey Zuckerman: Every time I talk about this book with my friends, they comment on how much they love the title: Jellyfish Have No Ears. In the two years I’ve been working on this book, I’ve found myself calling it two things: “the jellyfish book” and “the book about someone going deaf.” Did you have nicknames for the book, too? 

Adèle Rosenfeld: I personally call it “my jellyfish” (in the plural) or even just “jellyfish,” and, with this translation, that nickname is even better, because jellyfish can and do cross the Atlantic Ocean!

While I was writing it, I had a working title, “Absourdité”—a pun on absurdité, absurdity, using sourdité, the French word for deafness. That was while I was preoccupied with the question “what is gained when one loses something?” which sums up the trajectory of a narrator growing more and more deaf.

JZ: Which was your own trajectory, too. When a novel’s narrator and its author have something in common—as with hearing impairment here—people often assume the book must be autobiographical or autofictional. But I remember you telling me in Paris that it was more interesting than that: Louise’s life was one that might be yours, but isn’t. What sparked this possibility for you?

AR: To plumb such a personal subject, I really needed to create a pure character, a literary double whose life was entirely her own, so that my creativity and imagination could take center stage and that way I could explore this topic, which had long been more or less a secret of mine. That was the condition under which I could probe deafness as honestly as possible. Mario Vargas Llosa has a phrase in Letters to a Young Novelist that I’m particularly fond of: writing as a reverse striptease. Rather than revealing herself, the author pulls on clothes that aren’t hers. I needed to have my narrator lead a life that wasn’t my own: her professional life, her romantic relationships, her friends, her family, are all pure fiction—but her unique qualities, her disability, and the particular relationship to the world that those create are all a dramatization of the feelings and the questions I had. I also felt a need to go all the way and—spoiler alert!—to have her experience what lies ahead for me, so as to get a grip on my future.

JZ: This is a book about loss, and about ways of dealing with that loss. As Louise loses more and more of her hearing, she decides to make what she calls a “sound herbarium,” where she preserves sounds like dried plants. Where did that idea come from? And did this book end up becoming, for you as a writer, a similar way of preserving something—not necessarily hearing—that you yourself were losing?

AR: My view is that any literary endeavor is borne out of a wish to preserve something on the brink of extinction: a movement, a gesture that will soon go extinct and that the writer attempts to preserve at all costs by putting it into proper language, by, as it were, translating it.

This idea of a sound herbarium came to me as I myself was setting down sounds after a hearing loss. Because I couldn’t recognize them anymore, I was trying to describe them to relearn how to hear. All the while, I’d grown interested in the herbaria of WWI soldiers. Some of those men—which we French call “Poilus”—gathered flowers on the battlefields, dried them, and sent them to their girls. And so the idea occurred to me to record sounds on paper in a poetic way, it became a literary inevitability. The metaphor of an herbarium sums up my process very neatly: glean the acoustic world, transform fleeting, living matter through poetic power into literary, hidebound matter. I also liked the thought that there would be GPS coordinates for where the sound had been gleaned, like in present-day herbaria.

JZ: There are also lots of plants in the novel that aren’t real, like the alastic lichen, which reproduces by sighs of “alas.” Where did all these “miraginary” plants come from? Are you secretly a botanist like the woman slowly turning into a tree in the book’s second half?

AR: Pretty much! I can’t get enough of botany, or at least the names given to plants and the way we talk about them: physical description, the properties we ascribe to them, their specificity. I actually made a chapbook, L’Herbier miraginaire, in collaboration with a photographer/filmmaker, where I kept going with this catalog of made-up plants, which are every bit as much emotional states which the codes of scientific language are coopted to describe. I do have a fondness for so-called encyclopedic fictions . . .

JZ: Speaking of made-up things, on the third and fourth drafts of my translation, I found myself going off the grid for weekends at a time to deal with the dozens and dozens of puns. I’d tell my friends I was busy being a pun factory for a few days. One of the most deliciously difficult constraints was the fact that some of the puns and misunderstandings take on a life of their own. Louise has to hear a particular word as “soldier” and it’s important that the word not change in translation because that very soldier ends up accompanying her through the book; he even sleeps with her friend! I felt like Alice in Wonderland: I had no choice but to play along! Did you start writing Jellyfish Have No Ears and find the surrealism sneaking in, or were you already starting to find yourself thinking in this vein and then the book came flowing out?

AR: All the wordplay had to be absolute torture for you as a translator! I can’t thank you enough for being a pun factory and not cursing me out!

What I wanted to do was to depict a personal relationship with language, to make something out of mishearings, and above all to turn a deficiency, a deformation  of language, into a richness, just like Ghérasim Luca—a poet quoted in one of my epigraphs—who, by causing his tongue to stammer, draws out the many meanings of words, shows us wholly new directions, and gives us an unforgettable experience. I love that you mention Alice in Wonderland: that’s one of the books that always stayed close at hand as I wrote my novel. The underlying premise of Alice in Wonderland is that reality is shaped by words. Which I conveyed in Jellyfish Have No Ears as well: words are distorted by deafness, and so reality is distorted as well, and so the narrator can end up living with a soldier, or a dog can appear during a job interview because she picks out sounds that resemble barking. Surrealism came into the text by way of this exploration, this playfulness that reveals this warped relationship with the world. This playfulness was present from the start of my writing: it was the only way I could see of handling such a topic, of examining it, and making it, in the purest sense, “wonder-ful.”

JZ: I will say, though, for all the book’s fillips of unreality, it is deeply rooted in reality. Paris’s buses and métros and RERs crisscross the book, as do its impenetrable bureaucracy. And then there are its museums! When I was in Paris two summers ago, I knew I had to visit the Museum d’histoire naturelle, and I opened up the PDF of your book on my phone and your chapter set in the museum became my guided tour as I walked around its main room. As you were writing Jellyfish Have No Ears, did you find that particular places or things in the real world sparked scenes in the novel?

What I wanted to do was to make something out of mishearings, and above all to turn a deficiency, a deformation of language, into a richness.

AR: It’s so touching and meaningful that the scene at the Museum d’histoire naturelle led the way during your visit! Places are the true motors of writing. For me, they do exert literary force. The Museum d’histoire naturelle in Paris is a fascinating place: it still has the old-fashioned décor of its earliest years, with its handwritten display labels, the taxidermy techniques of that time. You can go and see skeletons in vitrines arranged in “live” poses, and there’s always a throng of visitors around the displays of “monsters.” Museum visits lend themselves to moments of deep contemplation. These are places where our knowledge of the world expands; they encourage introspection, I’d say, and trigger associations of ideas, poetic juxtapositions, reflections, all of which can blow apart seemingly intractable character problems, as happened with Louise in Jellyfish Have No Ears during that scene in the museum.

Places are structuring, essential frameworks that carry ambiances and histories that inspire writing and articulate the existential problem of the characters in my mind. Sometimes, it’s a little detail that’s the spark, for example a plastic plant in a waiting room, or it’s a specific sensation, as in the bathroom, which provides an acoustic space that I put into play in a scene in the novel.

JZ: I’d forgotten about the bathtub scene with Louise and Thomas whispering across the water, actually! I’ve been so surprised that when I have conversations with friends about Jellyfish Have No Ears, they’ll fixate on sections I didn’t think twice about. There’s a whole scene where Louise is on a bus and works on describing and isolating the different sounds she hears, and I hadn’t dwelled on it further until I got a text message about it. Do you ever look through the book again and feel surprised by what’s there? Would you have written a totally different book if you were trying to explore the same questions not in 2019 but in 2024?

AR: What’s odd is that I mainly remember the context in which one scene or another was written. The same way that, with reading a book, I remember where I read it, the atmosphere, the mood I was in, it’s like a snapshot of a moment, it’s the same phenomenon. Which leads me to my answer to your second question: each scene was borne out of a need. In 2019, I was dealing with a severe loss of hearing. With Louise, I was able to displace this experience and regain language.

JZ: So often, when I’m translating a book, I’ll get so deeply into it that I have a hard time letting go afterwards. Was it the same for you? What do you miss about Louise and Jellyfish Have No Ears now?

AR: Its humor!!!

My Life Was Frenetic In My Eagerness To Leave Where I Had Been

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Frankenstein of Migration by Christina Cooke

Something changed in my relationship to New York City during the pandemic. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m still figuring out what I mean. In the three years I lived here before March 20, 2020—the day after my thirty-first birthday, when the city of go! go! go! was told to shut up and stop—I thought New York City was fine, perfectly fine I guess, but I was wary. I was in the Big Apple! The city of glitz and glamor! I spent most of my days stepping over dog shit and waiting on crowded platforms for trains that sometimes never showed up.

It is true that there was art to see, and that was nice; delectable places to eat and massive boroughs to explore. But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the City and I were out of step. I’d seen the films and heard the stories: New York City—America’s mecca for misfits and dreamers, freaks and believers; which is lovely, but there’s also the smog, the high rents, the rats (so many rats), the half-broken subway, the stalled wages, the manholes that sometimes catch fire next to piles of oozing trash, the fucking subway, and always, everywhere, the incessant stench of day-old pee. I found it excruciating. It all felt a bit insufferable. I came to learn that to be in New York City is to be in pain.

I was an adjunct professor in English back then, which meant my life was all rushing down subway stairs to squeeze between closing doors as I shuttled from one classroom to the next. First stop was Fordham in the Bronx via the D, then the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan on the C/E, followed by City Tech in Brooklyn by way of the A—which was ugh because the A was always delayed. But there were breakdancers. Young boys no older than fifteen or sixteen would squeeze onto the cramped subway car, moving their bodies in ways I had only seen in the movies, dancing in front of me, and doing so for free. My phone’s camera roll quickly filled with videos of them popping and locking to trap music warbling from speakers hidden in slim backpacks. I made a point to carry dollar bills just so I had something to give them—a little way to say, thanks for the smile.

I obsessed over the breakdancers when the stay-at-home orders came down.

I obsessed over the breakdancers when the stay-at-home orders came down. Sitting in the living room of my Washington Heights apartment, I scrolled again and again through their videos, reliving the heat and stink from strollers squeezed next to bicycles and backpacks as the boys kept dancing, their sweaty bodies screaming, alive! My wife and I, we said nothing those first few days. We shuffled around our apartment in stunned silence amid the empty skies and quiet streets, no dogs yelping or music thumping. Outside, the leaves swirled and settled around nothing at all as the Great City stood very, very still.

There was a man who lived on my block. He had a dog—a spoiled little chihuahua, probably about six or seven pounds, with a graying muzzle and tongue always hanging out the side of its mouth. The man liked to smoke on his building’s front stoop with the dog curled up inside his jacket. Didn’t matter that it was spring. He didn’t care that it was no longer cold. He kept the dog close. Everytime I passed with my boxer pup, his chihuahua would peek over the lapel of his jacket then set its face in a nasty snarl. The dog’s whole body shook as it barked, high-pitched screeches that made my shoulders seize. My boxer would perk up then yank on her leash, hyper with excitement. She thought the dog wanted to play. I’d pull her to me, hissing her name again and again to make her calm. I hated this ritual, but there was no avoiding it: his stoop was right next to my building’s front door. But what got me is that he never did anything. Not once did he tell his dog to stop. He’d see us step out and his chihuahua would start barking, then my dog lunging, but he just kept on smoking, his gaze soft and far away.

“What is it about shared experiences of pain that links us so powerfully with others?” Dr. Tracy Brower ponders in her discussion of community cohesion during times of duress. According to her research, “going through crisis causes us to release greater amounts of oxytocin,” a brain chemical that has an interesting effect on groups and relationships as it “tends to make us feel good, connected and concerned for others.”

I did not feel good sitting alone in my apartment. I felt dazed, unmoored, and very, very thirsty. My wife spent most of that first week sneezing. Allergies, she told me, as she made herself another cup of tea.

Like most of the City, we were marooned—our routines, interrupted. I couldn’t stop watching the breakdancing videos. I had a rhythm back then, a way of making sense of the world as I hurried from one classroom to the next. And the breakdancers, they had a show—“Showtime!” they always exclaimed before turning the music up to ten. Did they have the luxury, like me, to sit around feeling sad and frightened at the specter of this tragedy? Or were they still riding the subway, flipping and turning for those “essential” few who still had somewhere to go? 

Groaning, I turned my phone off. You? I imagined them saying, you sittin’ there worried about us? Shared experiences of pain can prompt us to “consider the situation we’re in [and its] impacts on others,” writes Brower, a residual effect of which can be “building understanding and fostering empathy.” All I understood of the boys’ lives was the boom of thick bass as they flipped their snapbacks from their ankles to their elbows in a smooth, rhythmic arc. Was that empathy? Maybe. I wasn’t wholly convinced.

In those first few weeks, I made smoothies and egg cups and cut up scraps of spare fabric to drape across my face. I vacuumed my living room again and again, then researched home workout routines, head arched toward the heat of my phone as I curled up under my comforter in the dark. Sometimes I would stare down the hallway at my apartment’s front door, the hollow metal locked and deadbolted in a definitive dead end. Where was I, then, without the crowded subway and milky bodega coffees? Who was I beyond the busyness of always shuttling somewhere as the City slipped by in a graffiti’d blur? Up until that March, I lived a life always in motion, frenetic in its eagerness to leave where it had been to luxuriate in the potential of what lay beyond.

I would stare down the hallway at my apartment’s front door.

New York City is the seventh place I’ve lived. Before here, I spent three years in Iowa—two for my second Master’s, one for work—before selling my mattress and leather couch and making the sixteen-hour drive to Brooklyn. I had family in New York. My love was in New York. Before Iowa, there was Vancouver, BC, where I spent two years hanging out with my sister, working odd jobs and doing the dumb things 20-somethings do. Before Vancouver, I was in Fredericton, NB, for my first Master’s. Before, four years in Memphis for undergrad. And before, seven years in a small town in rural Texas, just shy of Houston, where I suffered the godawful torment of middle and high school amid buzzing cicadas and oppressive southern heat.

But before all that, Jamaica.

My birthplace, my first and most beloved home. I lived near the middle of the island in a city called Mandeville until I was almost eleven. I can still feel the cool breeze teasing goosebumps from my skin as I gaze at the banana trees and peppermint bush swaying just beyond my family’s back door.

Whether I wanted it to or not, each place I lived left its mark on me, transforming my tastes in food and patterns of speech, making me already ill-suited for wherever I was headed to next. “[W]e have deeper engagement when we go through tough experiences,” Brower writes. Then there must’ve been something wrong with me. I had been through tough experiences and I did not feel engaged. After my many moves, I started to feel like I belonged everywhere and nowhere—that there was no singular place that could reflect all of me back in a kaleidoscopic dream. “This deeper mental engagement tends to make hard times more memorable,” Brower argues. I did not want to remember. Since leaving Texas, I’d kept on moving, moving, finding grounding and recognition in a life spent always in between. So who was I as I sat cuddling my dog in my too-quiet Manhattan apartment? How could I unfurl into the calm of my loneliness given until who-knew-when that New York was it, that there was nowhere else to go?

When you live a life defined by motion, stasis can feel like an impossible anguish, a cruel and unabating pain.

This man, my neighbor, I don’t know if he had a job. He was always sitting on that stoop with his dog slumped against him, no matter what time I walked by. He usually wore shorts—often black, sometimes brown, with a zip-up hoodie or beat-up leather jacket. And slippers, always slippers, black slides showing the skin on his heels all dry and craggy like the bark of an old tree. I remember he smoked menthols, puffed one right after the other, then shoved the butts under a loose rock in his stoop’s busted bottom step. We never spoke. Sometimes I wondered if he even knew I was there. In my two years of passing him, he never looked at me—never intentionally, at least. Not even when my dog walked up and licked his knee.

According to some experts, our common conception of pain is partial—a pat banality, an overhyped half-truth. “What you are most likely experiencing is what used to be called the ‘healing crisis’,” asserts Dana Bregman, a certified physiotherapist who specializes in therapeutic uses of pain. According to Bregman, pain is not just a sign of sickness; it can also be a harbinger of oncoming healing: as the hardened fascia flexes, trapped toxins flow free in a glorious release. “[T]hese cells communicate with your Amygdala, an area in your brain which holds memory of pain,” Bregman writes, “so it is likely that what you are experiencing temporarily is a brain perception of pain.” Pain as phantom. Not as a siren but a heralding trumpet declaring, good health is on the way.

When I read Bregman’s article in the second week of staying at home, I decided I was going to believe her. My shoulders ached. My head wouldn’t stop hurting. I needed to believe there was a reason for the misery rattling in my feet.

I needed to believe there was a reason for the misery rattling in my feet.

That night, after dinner, my wife offered to massage my shoulders as she sneezed into her shirt. I touched my forehead. Temporary perception of pain. When I lived in Memphis, I had a friend who quipped I wasn’t Jamaican or Texan or even Canadian, but a JaTexaMemphiNadian —a mashup of cultures, a frankenstein of migration. He meant it as a joke; it stung like an accusation. If I wasn’t one thing or another, was I anything? To whom and where did I fully belong? Fascia flexing, pain working its way to the surface. I opened the curtains and looked outside.

About 468,000 people left New York City in the first few years of the pandemic. Who can blame them? Without easy access to restaurants or Broadway or museums or music festivals, no High Line or Dumbo or warm sunsets on the Brooklyn Bridge—what else was there? This is the city of glitz and glamor, damnit! Who in their right mind would withstand all that fear and confusion while hemmed into a small space?

My wife and I, we stayed. We had somewhere else we could’ve gone but we didn’t. Leaving now would be irresponsible, we told ourselves while thinking of the City’s high viral load, of specks of dark sickness hitching a ride on the hems of our shirts. What about all the strangers upstate who might’ve been fine, I wondered, who maybe could’ve survived if it hadn’t been for us? It wasn’t empathy I felt then but terror. I was frightened by the possibility of blame. So instead, my wife and I took turns masking up to buy milk and frozen vegetables from the bodega around the corner as all around us, the incessant scream of ambulance sirens echoed down the barren streets and through our brick walls.

Like the rest of the City, we watched the daily press briefings, stiff with shock as the numbers climbed up. At work, I couldn’t focus. I started to have trouble sleeping. We were in a crisis for which there was not yet any healing cure. “[Y]our subconscious is constantly bracing,” Bregman writes. I glanced at the off-white walls of my Washington Heights bedroom, bracing for the rest of me to chaotically catch up. I was terrified and tired but most of all, I was so very thirsty. Though I downed glass after glass of water, I had become so dehydrated that the skin on the back of my hands had started to peel.

Early one morning, I walked into the kitchen and found my wife with her head in the trash. I thought she was being silly, just trying to manufacture amusement amid such strange times. 

“What are you doing?” I asked with a chuckle.

She stood up, bewildered. “I think I’ve lost my sense of smell.”

I crossed the street but I could still see him. This man, my neighbor, he was eating an apple with his chihuahua curled up on his chest. I fixed my mask and kept my breathing shallow, giving a wide berth to everyone I passed. I was sick, yes, but my dog still needed to pee. Between me and my wife, I was the one who could walk the farthest before needing to take a break.

I looked up at the high-rise buildings. I tried to remember my neighbors in Memphis and Fredericton and Texas.

He took a final bite then threw his apple core into the street, groaning as he pulled himself to standing. As he hobbled up the stairs, I thought of Bregman’s article. I wondered if his thighs ached with every forward movement, sharp snaps in his amygdala screaming, no more, not one day more. Or maybe there was no ache. Maybe his muscles misfired in a deafening numbness, a terrifying nothing where there should have been something. “Hey,” I imagined saying to him, peeling dead skin from my thumb. “Hey, neighbor. Crazy spring we’re having, huh?” Then we’d both laugh as though the weather were the only odd thing roiling our worlds. 

Pain as portent, a crack through the quiet where there should have been noise. My neighbor. I looked up at the high-rise buildings. I tried to remember my neighbors in Memphis and Fredericton and Texas; did I like them and what did they wear? Your subconscious is constantly bracing. I lived in New York City. He was my neighbor. A door creaked open. I looked across the street to see him kiss his chihuahua, then disappear inside.

Six days in, my wife’s breathing turned gravelly and slow. I ran a low fever, mild yet persistent like the panic tightening my chest. We downed Tylenol every four hours like clockwork and isolated from each other, me in the bedroom and she on the couch—but our bodies kept convulsing, coughing fits getting worse. On the morning of the seventh day, we did what the news told us to do: we called the City’s COVID hotline, blurting our symptoms to the triage nurse who answered before she could even say, hello.

“Can you walk up a set of stairs?” she said. “Just one flight. Can you do it without feeling like you’ll pass out?”

I could. My wife? Barely.

“Then stay home.” We weren’t sick enough, the nurse said —and even if we were, there weren’t any beds for us. As it were, she said, there weren’t enough for all the people already there waiting and wheezing, air dank with disease. “Trust me,” she said. “You have a better chance if you stay at home. Call 911 if you get worse. But for now, ride it out where you are.”

The kitchen clock blinked 11:20 a.m. In ten minutes, the daily briefing would begin. That morning, my wife watched it alone. I couldn’t bear the black-and-white graphs with their thin lines stretching up, creeping closer to a devastating oblivion.

Sneezing, I pressed my cheek against the living room window. I could see my neighbor’s toes poking over the front of his slippers, cigarette smoke curling in the still air. I wondered if his chihuahua was asleep, and if he was wearing black shorts that day or brown. Hey neighbor, I murmured in my head, seen anybody interesting pass by? I glanced at the clock again: 11:35, still morning. Maybe he was down there chomping on a bacon, egg, and cheese. Or maybe he was looking around, sensing a bent-over nothing where my body should have been. Everyday for a week I went to the window, searching for signs of him as he smoked and went, let his dog pee and went, his presence as constant as the breeze.

“Going through hard times is one of the things that can create bonds between people,” writes Brower. “In fact, the more difficult the experience, the more bonding that may occur.”

One morning, a Tuesday I think, I gave up on work and slammed my laptop shut. My chest convulsed with a dry, hollow echo from my rough cough. I thought of my apartment’s front door, unyielding and empty. Closing my eyes, I imagined slipping beyond its threshold; I dreamt of stepping off the hardwood into an enthralling beyond. But that time, I felt no thrill. My head still hurt. My skin wouldn’t stop peeling. There was a chasm of desolation where excitement should have been. So instead, I imagined stepping out and hearing the din of New York sidewalk conversations, voices rising in a crescendo of languages I didn’t know. Where would I go, once outside? I opened my eyes. I would go nowhere, just stand there, savoring the fresh feeling of reaching my end—calm yet potent, bright and still. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. Where were my slippers? I couldn’t find my slippers. I wanted the pressure. I needed the filth. I craved the sound of the City exhaling, alive! My body ached with sickness but I made myself stand. I just wanted to get back to my window, look down, and see him.

My body ached with sickness but I made myself stand.

Listen, I don’t know that man. I couldn’t tell you his name or where he was from. But I can tell you that he had a tattoo beneath his left elbow—all warped and faded from too much sun, the black ink bleeding into an off-gray blob. He was missing his top left molar, a soft gap where he sometimes shoved a cigarette then puffed. And when my wife and I got better, when I finally felt good enough to thrust my bare face into the cool air, his chihuahua still barked when it saw me—familiar yip! yip!s that made me look away and laugh.

Both physical and existential pain often crystallizes into closed circuits, repeating patterns of behavior creating hardened fascia on the head and heart. Researcher Søren Ventegodt refers to these circuits as gestalt: a site of recurring tension, an undulating yet “frozen now.” Fear of the unknown is a common gestalt. Fear of familiarity, of staying too long in one place, can be one too. According to Ventegodt, the only way to alleviate an aching gestalt is “[t]o be in holistic process” which is achieved by someone who is “able to trust and receive the holding.” The holding can be many things: it can be a familiar room, a comforting image, the presence of a trusted therapist—a deep and abiding container, therapeutic in its constancy as it carries you through. 

He was my holding. The City is my holding. Not because either gave me the answers but because they provided the prompting I needed to acknowledge the question.

JaTexaMemphiNadiYorker? JaTexaMemphiYorkAnadian? I’m not here to deliver good news from the other side. The ache still lingers. I am not healed. 

But what I can tell you is that pain can be a revelation, an enigma charting new pathways to what is honest and true. I stopped wandering in New York. I got married in New York. I made deep, new friendships that helped me look at myself anew. Here, I committed myself to working toward what really mattered, finishing my debut novel Broughtupsy published in January 2024—about wandering and migration, about finding and savoring a self-constructed sense of home. I even shed the shame and finally admitted I hate the subway, switching to a remote job where my farthest commute is from my bedroom to my couch. In this beast of a City, I’ve come to learn that there is no space here for outsized fantasy—that amid the highrises and honking traffic, there is no room for flimsy self-delusion.

Eventually, my dog stopped reacting to his chihuahua. It was understood that we would never speak. Around the same time, I discovered what Ventegodt refers to as salutogenesis which is the antithesis of gestalt, representing “a ‘sense of coherence,’ an experience in the depth of life.” My salutogenesis is this: I am not coherent. My love for curry goat and snowy winters and Texas brisket and all things Aaliyah and Sum 41—I am a frankenstein, a collection of rich fragments, each shard reflecting prismatic in the motley of me.

Soon after the vaccines came out, he expanded his wardrobe to include one pair of white jeans, frayed slits showing pink skin on the tops of both thighs. Sometimes I’d pass him with his phone on his stomach, speakerphone blasting while he chatted with a friend. Other times he’d be sipping on a coffee, brown stains streaked across the paper cup as he touched his lighter to a fresh cigarette. He never wore a mask. Why would he? Yip! Yip! That’s not the kind of man he was.

It’s been two years since I last saw him. I don’t know what happened. Maybe he got priced out and moved to another borough. Or maybe he joined the 468,000 and left the City to build a cheaper life somewhere else. Over eight million New Yorkers continue to persist amid the pandemic. About 50,000 of us so far have died. I wish I knew which one he was.

Now, when I pass his stoop, my dog strains to sniff the rock where he kept his cigarette butts. I’ll let her search for a moment, her nose twitching against the black concrete as I glance at the spot where his body’s supposed to be. Sometimes I’ll hear nothing. Or I’ll hear music thumping from a passing car. But sometimes—these are the terrible times—I’ll hear the far-off echo of sirens, sharp and threatening. Then I’ll touch the cold concrete and hurry my dog along, blinking hard against the need to weep.

7 Novels About Toxic Student-Teacher Relationships

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

The classroom has long been the site of many compelling works of literature. It is here that the nuances of power and influence are distilled; here that the kinetic energy of two minds meeting is laid bare. Needless to say, the student-teacher dynamic is one that can easily tip into the transgressive, with the impressionable student casting their teacher in the role of the worldly authority figure, and the insecure teacher seizing upon this exalted vision to shore up their self-image. 

Such was the circumstance I set out to explore in my debut novel, The World After Alice. The book takes place in the wake of Alice’s death by suicide as those around her struggle to piece together the missing details of her young life. One such detail involves Alice’s murky relationship with her philosophy teacher, Ezra Newman. Both Alice and Ezra believe that they alone can see the other clearly—until it becomes evident that what each took for sight was mere projection. As I worked on this book, I thought back to some touchstones of fiction that blur the line between mentorship and manipulation in fascinating yet toxic ways. 

Without further ado, here are some favorite examples: 

Amy and Isabelle by Elizabeth Strout

In Strout’s luminous first novel, readers are introduced to the compelling characters of Amy and Isabelle, a mother and daughter living in the stultifying small town of Shirley Falls. In this claustrophobic place, Amy begins a clandestine affair with her math teacher, Mr. Robertson. His knowledge quickly illuminates to the teenage Amy all the areas where her mother’s own intelligence is lacking. An excruciating moment occurs when Amy corrects Isabelle’s pronunciation of Yeats. “Here was something new to fear,” Isabelle thinks, “her daughter’s pity for her ignorance.” It is a delight to watch Strout train her incisive eye on this duo.  

Hope by Andrew Ridker

Ridker’s rollicking sophomore novel introduces readers to the Greenspans of Brookline, Massachusetts. The family comprises Scott and Deb, the parents, and Gideon and Maya, the kids. It is Maya’s story that is applicable here, as she falls in love with her high school English teacher, William. The relationship doesn’t start and end when Maya is in high school, though. Instead, Ridker smartly takes us into the future, showing how Maya’s feelings toward William change as she matures. If you’re looking for a smart and hilarious novel set during the peak of the Obama era, this one is for you.  

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 

In this smashing debut, Fridlund transports readers to the cold heart of northern Minnesota, where the adolescent Linda finds herself playing babysitter to the child of the new family across the lake. Linda’s observation of this family coincides with the introduction of a second newcomer: the history teacher, Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is accused of assaulting one of Linda’s classmates, her fascination with him deepens. Did he do what the girl claimed? Fridlund masterfully ties these plot points together, deftly evoking questions of identity and culpability. 

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Winner of the 1999 Booker Prize, Disgrace follows the fall of professor David Lurie after he forces himself on his student, Melanie. What ensues is a story of violence, shame, and reckoning. In an evocative yet unadorned style, Coetzee takes readers into the bleak heart of post-Apartheid South Africa. A brilliant and unsettling book about the consequences of power and the existential struggle to connect. 

My Last Innocent Year by Daisy Alpert Florin 

Florin’s debut follows Isabel, a college student at a liberal arts school in the Northeast. The book kicks off with Isabel’s sexual assault at the hands of a classmate. This event forms the backdrop for Isabel’s subsequent affair with her married professor, Connelly. Florin’s novel is equal parts coming-of-age story and retrospective, with Isabel looking back on her younger self and the choices she made. 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen 

Franzen’s multi-POV masterpiece features the Lamberts, a dysfunctional Midwestern family set to gather for Christmas. In classic Franzen style, the book is both laugh-out-loud funny and acutely painful, as the Lamberts individually deal with problems of love, aging, and personal shame. Franzen manages to cover so much terrain with this one that readers might forget about Chip’s relationship with his student, Melissa, by the time they reach the pitch-perfect end. 

Lessons by Ian McEwan 

McEwan’s ambitious latest flips around the conventional male teacher and female student dynamic. Though the novel covers many themes, spanning the protagonist Roland’s life from childhood to old age, at its heart is the grooming of Roland by his piano teacher, Miriam Cornell. McEwan juxtaposes sweeping world events against the smaller yet no less seismic events of Roland’s life to create a book that is poignant and profound. 

My Mugger Chose the Most Interesting Knife!

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

So Much to Know

Aging is great because you learn so many things on the way. I don’t mean just that you gain perspective; I mean if you slow down a bit you see so many details. I’m at that point in life where I’m worried that I might in fact start forgetting details. I fight that. I keep a list of words I want to remember to use—many lists in fact. I rotate them every day. And when I come across something interesting in the news, I print it out and tape it up next to the words. 

I’ve learned that new experiences keep the aging brain on task. I don’t worry about myself as long as I stay interested in life. Actually, I think I worry less than most people do, and that’s reassuring.

I was robbed one night, at knifepoint, and the knife interested me. I asked about it.

“Forget the knife. Don’t ask about the knife. Or I’ll use it,” my assailant said. He was getting nervous.

“But isn’t it a kitchen knife? Can you really just grab a kitchen knife and run out the door like that? Won’t it cut you just as likely as it cuts me, for instance? You should have a holder.” That was obvious, and the obvious deserves recognition.

“Give me your money,” he said.

“Of course,” I said. “I certainly will. I have a twenty-dollar bill in my pocket, but I’m afraid that’s it. I was just going to the drugstore to get some soda. Funny isn’t it, that we go to drugstores now instead of delis? I grew up when there were delis.”

“That twenty,” he said. “Give it to me.”

“Did you grow up on delis or is your generation perfectly fine with drug stores?” It was a thing I thought about often. The differences between generations. There are lots of things I miss from my generation, things that seemed boring, mundane, even insignificant—but they strike me now as having been important. Corner delis, for one. Being able to just go out and get a sandwich. They have prepared sandwiches at the drugstores, but they don’t please me. And there were stores that were specialists—stationery, shoe repair, card stores. We don’t have those anymore.

“The money,” he said. He was waving his knife now.

“You know,” I said, “you can sharpen knives? Have you sharpened that one? They get dull from cutting things—celery, onions, maybe meat if you’re a meat eater. Are you a meat eater?”

“Twenty dollars,” he said, waving it closer.  “Don’t push me,” he said. “I get nervous and I twitch, and you wouldn’t like me twitching with this knife near your throat, would you?”

“Sounds bad,” I said. “Just let me reach into my pocket and the twenty is yours and we can go about our business like normal people.” I reached in and took out my rolled-up twenty. “See? Here it is. Just like I said. It’s all right to take it. I was just going to get a soda and maybe some chips. I like chips, do you?”

He took the money. “You’re nuts,” he said. “I’ve never met anyone like you. I think you’re enjoying yourself. Are you enjoying yourself?”

“Well,” I said. “I’m friendly. I like meeting people. We could go for a coffee or something and you could tell me how you got this job. You know, robbing people.”

“Quit looking at my face,” he said.

“Face?” I asked, surprised. “Why, here’s the thing, I never remember faces, but all right, I’ll look away. To the right? To the left? Did you know that your instinct is to go in the direction of your dominant hand? And also, this I just learned, you have a dominant leg! Imagine that. I suppose we could get right down to dominant toes, maybe. Dominant eyes. My left eye is getting a little strange, it sees things darker than my right eye. Though I’m glad of course that it can see. I’m not ungrateful.”

“You talk too much.” He was putting the twenty into his jeans pocket. The jeans were a little too tight, and he got distracted by having to pry his pocket open. I smacked the knife out of his hand. Then I kneed him in the crotch and he fell down.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve taken a lot of self-defense. Well, I mean I watched a few videos and acted them out.” I knelt down on his neck and reached over to my dominant right for the knife. I began to systematically cut his clothes off. “Sorry. I know it’s chilly. But I read somewhere that people won’t necessarily call the cops if they see someone running, but they will if they see someone naked. Interesting statement about society, isn’t it?”

Choking, he said, “You can take the twenty back. I won’t fight. It’s cold and I’m anemic.”

“Do you drink a lot of coffee? I read that coffee and tea can interfere with iron absorption.” I looked at him closely. “You don’t look like a tea drinker.”

“Look, leave me some clothes. Please! I’m sorry! This my first try at robbing someone, I swear. I’ve learned my lesson.” He sounded close to tears.

“Your first time? Wow, that’s bad luck. What are the odds?” I continued to cut away his clothes. I had ripped up his jacket and was starting on his shirt.

“You’re not going to tell me the odds? You haven’t just read about it?”

I kept my knee on his neck but I wasn’t cruel; he could breathe and talk. Still, this sounded a little insulting. “I don’t know everything.”

“No, no, look, don’t get annoyed. I’ve learned a lot from you. You’ve got a great mind.”

I ripped one side of his jeans and made a slash across his waistband and then down across his back pocket and did some general shredding. His clothes had been dissected. I did a few more slashes to make sure he couldn’t try to hold enough together to be covered. He couldn’t. He shivered.

“You cold?” That was satisfying.

“Nerves,” he said. “What if the cops pick me up?”

“You’ll need a good story. I’d start with amnesia.”

“That’s a cliché,” he said, and rolled over once I took my knee off. He got up, glaring at me, but I waved the knife so he wouldn’t try anything.

“Run,” I said. “That will keep your body temperature up. You’ll be fine. Run.”

And he ran.

I checked my phone for the weather. It was 50 degrees. Marathoners run in 50 degrees, with barely more clothes. And I’d let him keep his shoes, too, so it was a good comparison.

Then I called 911. “There’ a naked man running on Maple Drive,” I said. “I think he’s probably got amnesia.”

I hoped that story would help him. One of my teeth on the right (dominant) side was starting to ache. It might have been emotional cavities (I’d recently read about them), because while this had been interesting, it had also been stressful.

I noticed I still held the knife. It looked like a pretty good knife. I would have to research the brand.

7 of the Funniest Crime Novels Ever Written

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

It’s not easy, getting people to laugh in the presence of murder. It’s also hard to cut a list down from fifty brilliant novels, and I’ll admit my picks are completely subjective—some for their humanity, some for consistency, some for their sheer originality. Everyone owes a debt to Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, who in turn owed a debt to Raymond Chandler and P.G. Wodehouse and Dorothy Parker. 

And what is funny, anyway? Wanting to kill someone can be funny, at least in hindsight, and writing is all about hindsight made real. The ritual humiliation of the hero is funny, whether you’re watching Peter Wimsey suffer for love of Harriet Vane or watching the truth dawn on a Lawrence Block protagonist. Janet Evanovich’s resilient heroine Stephanie Plum is the detective equivalent of a weighted clown balloon, forever dusting herself off, and Laura Lippman does terrible things to her characters. The original Scandinavian crime novels, the Martin Beck series by Max Sjowall and Per Wahloo, were lusty and sly and human, as opposed to the affectless recent trend. And the Brits rule for humor: I want people to read Nicholas Freeling and Bill James, Jonathan Gash and Peter Lovejoy and Peter Dickinson, Colin Cotterill and the early Martha Grimes. 

Taking anything apart can strip away the mystery, though. I came up with a list based on the way I remembered these books making me feel, and circling back around was confusing. What was so funny about Mouse the killer in Devil in a Blue Dress, or Ayoola’s dead lovers in My Sister the Serial Killer? You’ll have to read them to believe it, and please also read singular novels like Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Dwyer Murphy’s An Honest Living, and Robert Plunkett’s My Search for Warren Harding. Read Sara Gran and Lisa Lutz, Paco Ignacio Taibo II and James Crumley. And let me know what I’m missing.

Uncivil Seasons by Michael Malone

As Justin Savile, a wayward, well-born stress-drinker, peels back the layers of a North Carolina town with white trash fellow homicide detective Cuddy Mangum, each layer is stranger. The complexity of the plot and the rich social insight never get in the way of the action, or the humor. Malone wrote two other Justin-Cuddy novels, as well as some excellent stand-alones, and they’re all believable, witty, and humane. They deserve to be back in print. 

Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley

Mosley’s pitch-perfect debut gave noir a new rich world in Easy Rawlins, the man who just wants to keep his damn bungalow, and whose friends are often deadlier than his enemies. What’s funny? The sly dialogue, the innate deadliness of Mouse as a very non-Watson sidekick (“You killed him?” asks Easy. “So what? What you think he gonna do fo’you?” answers Mouse) and Mosley’s pithy, fatalistic voice, with beautiful echoes from everything from Chandler to Fitzgerald to Stan Lee. 

Stormy Weather by Carl Hiaasen

There was no Florida Man until Carl Hiaasen peeled the sunburn; he’s so altered our perception of Florida that his version has now become reality, from John D. Macdonald to a cascade of shit in a dozen funny steps. I could have picked any of the novels between Tourist Season to Squeeze Me but I’m fond of the way Stormy Weather’s retinue of con artists, deranged politicians, and problematic lovers react to the approach of Hurricane Andrew (in a word, badly) and suffer from Hiaasen’s environmental wrath. I’ve also picked Stormy Weather because I was reading it years ago on a book tour when a plane engine caught on fire. I kept reading, and I kept giggling.

Case Histories by Kate Atkinson

No one can can layer looping threads and tragedy and glee like Kate Atkinson—a plot can feel exuberant, almost out of control, and then it clicks into place like a final watch gear—and few writers are as empathetic and stylish as they torture their protagonist in amusing ways. I wrote four novels in the mid-nineties, and for a long time forgot the joy in reading mysteries. Case Histories and the four other novels in the series gave it back to me. Spending time with Jackson Brodie—sad, lustful, dented, and often very, very, wrong—is an undiluted pleasure.

Gangsterland by Tod Goldberg

Tod Goldberg wins for best premise, and a gimlet eye: would Sal Cupertine, hitman, rather be dead, or in a mob-organized witness-protection program as a rabbi named David Cohen? At points Sal’s really not sure: it’s not easy to visit the sick between gruesome hits and learning holy texts, but there’s no lazy moralism to be found in the novel, the first of three in a series. Goldberg’s Las Vegas is a rich, terrible stew of conniving and bungling, and the echoes of Leonard and Westlake and Block add to the joy. Unhinged, smart, and resonant.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite

What can you do about a sister like Ayoola—beautiful, amoral, blithe and deadly for her lovers? If you’re her sister Korede, a pragmatic nurse in a Lagos hospital, you mop up, literally, each time Ayoola loses her patience and pulls out her knife, and you watch in dread as she turns her attention to the very kind man you’re in love with. Actually, what was funny? I’m not sure. Korede’s weary fatalism? Ayoola’s oblivious and sunny moods? If she doesn’t feel guilty, why would there be a problem? . . . . Ah, family.

Conviction by Denise Mina

Mina’s novels, including the Garnethill series, have all been excellent: closely observed and realistic, with a lot of crisps-eating and amused exhaustion in the midst of brutal death. I still remember my gradual surprise at the change of tenor of Conviction, which opens up with a housewife named Anna McLean listening to a true crime podcast over coffee about an exploding boat and quickly starts spinning like a whirligig: Anna is not Anna, Anna knows the owner of the boat, and Anna is avoiding the persistent knock on her front door for a reason. And off we go into a giddy, beautifully executed balancing act. There’s a wild sense of freedom to this book, and it leaves you happy as it snaps into a perfect ending.

Helen Phillips on the Effects of Technology and AI on Our Most Intimate Bonds

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Helen Phillips’s new novel, Hum, takes place in a world populated by intelligent robots called “hums.” In this work of speculative fiction, Philips explores a near future stemming out of our world’s obsession with technology and artificial intelligence.

At the same time, though, this is a story about family, as May, a wife and mother, loses her job to AI and seeks out desperate measures to take care of herself and her family.

Underneath this dystopian story is one of a mother longing for connection and a family that is both close and so distant from one another all at once. I sped through this novel, drawn in by the characters as well as the sense of intrigue in this world not so different from our own. Phillips builds a sense of tension and quiet discomfort, keeping me gripped from start to finish.

Deena ElGenaidi: While this book is about a future society where AI is everywhere and everyone is under constant surveillance, the story is also very much about family, marriage, and motherhood. Why did you choose to show this dystopian future through a family story?

Helen Phillips: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I’m glad you pulled out the point that the setting aside, it really is about a family and about connections within a family, because I do find that to be the focal point.

I guess the reason to put that in a dystopian setting is that as we look ahead to the future at some of the things that will be wrought by technology and climate change, I feel like family is a little bit unexplored. What effect will this have on the family? What effect will this have on our most intimate bonds? That is one of the most pressing questions, certainly for someone raising children now and also for anyone trying to have close intimate relationships of any sort. So that was something I really wanted to explore. How do these technologies and changes in our world impact us at that most profound level of intimate connection?

DE: In the end notes of the book, you have a really comprehensive list of all the research you’d done and all the articles you’d read paired with specific scenes. When doing your research, did you already have an idea for the book in mind or did the idea develop out of these pieces you read? And how did the research end up informing the story and plot?

How do these technologies and changes in our world impact us at that most profound level of intimate connection?

HP: It’s such an intricate braid that it’s almost impossible to answer that question. The way I started the book was, a line would come to me, or an image or a plot idea. And then I might see a headline like “There’s been a 30% decline in the bird population in North America in the last half century.” That headline would be in my notes.

So the book began as a hundred page list of things from my own mind, overheard lines, newspaper headlines, and things that were happening in our world. I had the plot to some extent. I knew that there would be this one remaining green area that was very valued in the middle of this city. So that setting was present for me. This idea of a woman who had lost her job to artificial intelligence and needed to do something extreme to make money for her family came pretty early on. But it was also a lot of braiding those ideas together with the reading I was doing. 

I know Margaret Atwood said of The Handmaid’s Tale that nothing that happens in the book hasn’t happened in some form somewhere. That quote has always been really interesting to me as someone who writes speculative fiction. This is not set in our world, yet I did draw from a lot of things that are happening in our world as I was crafting the landscape of the story.

DE: That’s such an interesting process.

HP: It’s very slow. It’s really not efficient. There’s so much research I did that doesn’t even appear in the book whatsoever. I mean, the original draft was twice as long as the final draft. But I didn’t want it to be a didactic book, so I ended up pulling back on a lot of the stuff that I had originally put in that was more connected to the research.

DE: I want to talk about the beginning of the book. It has such an eerie start. The main character, May, is literally selling her face. I thought that was fascinating. How did you come up with that idea?

HP: There are two answers to that. One is that she loses her job to artificial intelligence, and as artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and is able to do more things, I have a very real concern about what people will do to make money. She has to turn to this really extreme way of making money. 

On a much more personal note, I have the autoimmune condition alopecia, so I’m bald. I lost all of my hair at age 11 due to this condition, and when I was around 13, I made the decision with my mother that I would have eyebrows tattooed onto my face because I had lost all of my eyebrows, and a face likes eyebrows. So I had a tattoo artist put eyebrows on my face, and I think the numbing gels have come a long way since then, but it was a really intense experience of just having needles right up in my eyes. The sensory experience of that first scene is actually drawn from a procedure that I had.

DE: Oh wow, that’s so interesting. Also in this book, the characters are always being watched. They live in a surveillance state, and the hums can immediately pull up footage of what everyone is doing all the time, which eventually leads to May’s downfall. At the same time, May and the characters enable and participate in that surveillance whenever it’s convenient for them. May is tracking her family’s location. She goes into her husband’s woom to see what he’s been watching or searching. What message is this book giving about our own complicity in surveillance culture?

How do we deal with the fact that we have been complicit in our own surveillance?

HP: You’ve asked the question that is so much the heart of the book—just this gray area of technology. It’s really hard not to be a hypocrite in the system that we live in. Like I’m concerned about the impact of a company like Amazon on our world, but I do order things on Amazon when it’s some random thing that I need quickly. And I’m embarrassed to admit that, but I do, and a lot of us do. 

This question explains everything about my book. I mean, that is the question of the book. How do we deal with the fact that we have been complicit in our own surveillance in a way that is more than what the government ever could have accomplished, because of the amount of information that we share about ourselves through social media and through the Internet and through our shopping habits?

At the same time, consumers don’t have a government or corporate system that is protecting them from this surveillance, either. So I don’t blame us. We’re in a system that operates this way, and the book is intended to be an exploration of the times when we are uncomfortable with the technology that is tracking us and those times when we allow it to happen. 

DE: The hums are also so eerie and sinister. Is there anything that inspired you to come up with them, or any other speculative fiction or dystopian stories you were thinking of?

HP: It’s interesting that you describe them as eerie and sinister because I hope that they walk a little bit of a line—that they are eerie and sinister, but also kind of appealing and friendly. I think that sometimes our technologies are.

For instance, there’s an example I read in a book called Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle. In it, she talks about the term “cookies,” which is such a friendly term. From the earliest age of childhood, if someone says “Do you want to cookie?” you’re kind of primed to say yes. So these things that we encounter as we travel around the Internet are cookies, and we say yes to them, and maybe that’s partly because they have such a cute name. Technologies that are cute and charming are kind of frightening because they become more insidious.

Maybe part of what you find sinister and eerie about the hums is the fact that they are friendly. They have calm and soothing voices. They are concerned with removing friction from our lives. I think that’s part of what makes them eerie.

Technologies that are cute and charming are kind of frightening because they become more insidious.

At the same time, and I will avoid spoilers here, I do want the characters of the hum to have a little more nuance than that. There are hopefully moments where the reader can like the hum or feel fond of the hum or not only be scared of the hum but also think that the hum has something wise to offer.

I did also do a lot of research about artificial intelligence when I was writing the book, and one book that was helpful just in terms of the scope of the history of artificial intelligence is a book by Clifford A. Pickover called Artificial Intelligence: An Illustrated History. I also read another book called The Artist in the Machine by Arthur I. Miller, and it’s about human-AI creative collaborations and takes a much more positive view of that than I think a lot of us tend to, or at least than I tend to.

So those things are both helpful for me in thinking about what the hums looked like and in trying to develop them, almost to refer back to your last question, as existing in this gray area where they’re eerie and frightening.

DE: Yeah, for sure what you were saying about the friendliness of the hums, I think is what made them eerie for me.

HP: Yeah, that’s almost scarier than a robot that looks like a warrior. A sort of friendly, cute robot has an easier time getting into our lives in an insidious way.

DE: What would you say May represents or the family as a whole represents? Is she the template for the average American, and is this the template for the average American family?

HP: Well, I’m always concerned by the word average because we live in such a complex world that what average is, really depends on who you’re talking to. With May and her family, it was more just this question of, how does one family and one woman navigate the challenges of this world of dizzying technological advancement and climate change?

She just wants the things that I think are very common for people to want. She wants to be able to love and care for and provide for her family, and those things are becoming ever harder to do and ever more complicated to achieve. I don’t know if that makes for average or not, but I wasn’t really thinking of averages, more of one specific woman navigating a situation that a lot of people are navigating a version of.

DE: Would you say that the book can serve as a warning to our current society?

HP: I mean, is it a cautionary tale? Perhaps. Yes, I think it is in part a cautionary tale. May exists in a world that bends towards disconnection. A lot of things are conspiring towards disconnection, and she is seeking connection. She’s really trying hard, and she’s stumbling a lot. She wants to connect with her children. She wants to connect with her partner. She wants to connect with nature. She wants to connect with herself, and the world she exists in makes it really hard for her to do that. But I do think she tries hard, and I hope that there are at least glimmers of her finding ways to do that even amid her circumstances.

DE: Yeah, absolutely.

I did feel almost a responsibility to not only write the dystopian but hopefully include other elements of possible paths.

HP: You know, I think that it becomes easier to write dystopian fiction as things maybe bend more in that direction. I did feel almost a responsibility to not only write the dystopian but hopefully include other elements of possible paths.

DE: This next question is purely for my own curiosity because I couldn’t get this scene out of my head. There’s a moment when May pulls out a box of raisins, and it’s filled with insects. But then she keeps the box of raisins. Why?

HP: Oh my god, that’s so funny. Two of my best friends who read the book had the same question. What I intend with that—and this is definitely operating on a thematic level—May finds something in this packaged place that is organic, that is biological, that indicates that even in our over packaged world, biological life can survive and thrive.

She looks at these insects, and obviously it would be absolutely repugnant to find something like this, but she is sort of like, oh they’re surviving. And so she doesn’t throw them away. But maybe it’s too weird.

DE: I loved the scene, but then I just couldn’t stop thinking about it.

HP: Yeah, she keeps it on the counter, and then she’s like “Don’t eat those,” but she doesn’t actually get rid of it. Maybe after the end of the book she’s going to deal with what’s in the box, but in that first moment I think she almost has a respect for all the biological life that’s thriving amid the plastic. She too wants to be able to have a biological life that’s thriving amid all of this.

7 Funny Books That Will Make You Laugh and Then Cry

Posted on by Jo Lou

Have you ever dated a comedian? At first you’re laughing and having a good time. Without realizing it, you allow yourself to let down your guard—funny people, after all, are often perceived as light and frivolous. But then the quips get a little darker, their witty observations maybe too astute, too sharp, cutting. Before you know it, you’re laughing but also crying at an anecdote about a bowl haircut in the 10th grade. You realize that the bright and shining humor is actually the beam of a lighthouse, distracting you from the churning waters below—without which they, and you, might sink or dash yourselves upon the shore. “How did I get here?” You wonder.  “And why does crying feel so good?”

Now imagine that experience, but in book form. In my debut novel, Five-Star Stranger, we begin by following the antics of “Stranger,” a rental man who is one of the most highly rated rentals on an app where clients can request someone to play roles ranging from husband to walking companion to funeral mourner. In the opening chapters, Stranger intentionally gets turned down while proposing, pretends to be a PhD student’s advisor to convince her to continue pursuing her degree, and picks up a little girl from school as her father—light, fun. But as the story progresses, the inevitable messiness of real human emotion rocks the boat. The little girl begins to realize that there’s something off about her “dad,” and Stranger has to wrangle with what sacrifices love really entails along with the legacy of loss that shaped his own life.  

I don’t know about you, but for me laughing and crying are both a form of catharsis. And honestly, in this day and age when the internet feeds me well over my daily suggested limit of rage and hopelessness, maybe you, like me, need a little release.  

Take a gander at these books that will make you laugh and then cry (though not necessarily in that order): 

Death Valley by Melissa Broder

The narrator of Broder’s novel checks herself into a Best Western searching for the answers to her impending grief about her dying father and her ill husband. In an effort to escape the doomed trappings of her own overthinking, she decides to go for a hike in the desert where she encounters a giant cactus with enough space to hide from the world inside. What happens next has to be read to be believed. With lines like “If I’m honest, I came to escape a feeling—an attempt that’s already going poorly, because unfortunately I’ve brought myself with me, and I see, […] that I am still the kind of person who makes another person’s coma all about me,” it’s clear from the very first chapter that we are click click clicking up a rollercoaster of a ride that is at once self-aware, twisted, and hilarious—and none of us, not even the narrator, has any idea what we’re in for on the way down.  

Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra, translated by Megan McDowell

Part love-poem to Chilean poetry, part family drama, this novel—translated into English by Megan McDowell—starts with an ill fated romance between two teenagers. Carla and Gonzalo are depicted with scathing, though not unkind, wit using amazing parentheticals like “(Gonzalo never did connect his sudden passion for haikus with his premature ejaculation problem).” After a falling out, the two reunite by chance a decade later at a club, where Gonzalo proves he no longer has a premature ejaculation problem and Carla reveals she now has a six-year-old son. The rest of the novel tackles many things, but at its heart is about Gonzalo and his adoptive son, as Gonzalo learns what it means to be a step-father, a poet, a partner, a scholar, and a failure.   

A Personal Matter by Kenzaburo Oe, translated by John Nathan

This novel, written in 1964, remains one of the books that has shocked me the most. After all, how could a story about a man trying to kill his disabled newborn be funny? And yet somehow it is and somehow we can almost sympathize with Bird, the main character and new father who had dreams of traveling to Africa but is now stuck with the oppressive and universal feeling of what happens when real life obligations clip your wings. Often described as semi-autobiographical (Oe himself had a developmentally challenged son), the novel is explosive, raw, and horrible, but also deeply funny as it reveals us to ourselves.  

Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant by Roz Chast 

This graphic memoir tackles a subject not often discussed yet experienced by many: the caring of one’s elderly parents. Like several books in this list one might wonder, but how can this be funny? Chast manages to tackle bedsores, retirement funds, uncontrolled bowels, miscarriage, dementia, and danishes with an unwavering gaze, intensity, and humor that holds a mirror up to the absurdity of living (and dying). Perhaps because it is true, perhaps because it is often unbearable, the only response is to laugh. The memoir unflinchingly depicts two people so full of personality and so uniquely themselves that the book is not only a recording of their last years on earth, but also a celebration of it.  

Afterparties by Anthony Vesna So

This short story collection with recurring characters is set predominantly in the Cambodian American community of Fresno, California. Each character’s unique voice serves as a different lens from which to observe the world So evokes, such that by the end we feel as though we have something of a 360 degree view, if only from the outside. The stories are raw, hilarious, and heartbreaking.  In “Superking Son Scores Again,” a badminton coach and the owner of a failing supermarket tries to relive his glory days by annihilating the top player of his own team. In “The Monks,” a young man decides to spend a week at the temple after his deadbeat father’s passing to help his father’s soul in the afterlife, but after a week of chores ends up finding release in a more unconventional way. The collection is an undeniable force that will leave you reeling with feeling.   

The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, translated by Thomas Teal

This gem of a novel describes summers spent on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The vignettes center around six-year-old Sophia and her elderly grandmother as they go about their days on the small island turning forests into magical menageries, looking for grandma’s lost false teeth, cleaning up litter, loving murderous cats, and writing treatises on angleworms. Along the way their conversations touch upon life, death, God, and love. The humor is present throughout as is the deep sadness both of the recent past as Sophia’s mother has recently died, and of the future as Sophia’s grandmother gets older. And yet, there is a humor in the sadness, too, as the grandmother thinks to herself, “It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject [of death]. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn’t have time.”    

Never Mind by Edward St. Aubyn

The first book of the Patrick Melrose novels is so sharp and so slight you’re liable to cut yourself without noticing. In it we’re introduced to the affluent Melrose family: a cruel father, an alcoholic mother, and their five-year-old child who is just on the cusp of understanding how his parents will let him down. The novel jumps between their perspective and the perspective of the high society friends who will join the family for a dinner party on that fateful day. From young party girl to simpering old philosopher, somehow Aubyn manages to capture the voices of all his characters and not only poke fun at their mannerisms and hypocrisies, but does so in that rare way that still makes them feel multidimensional and therefore deserving of some sympathy (with the exception, perhaps, of Patrick’s father). Aubyn displays virtuosity of wry humor and fresh language on each page yet also makes us worry for the five-year-old Patrick and his future growing up in such a twisted family.  

Lena Valencia Blends the Fantastic and the Mundane in “Mystery Lights”

Posted on by Jo Lou

Inspired by nightmares and the work of surrealist filmmaker David Lynch, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection Mystery Lights seeks to explore women’s darker natures.

We meet a feminist filmmaker, who obtains strength at a pivotal moment from her fictional murderesses. In an attack on the domestic goddess trope, a young girl, recently returned from the wilderness, disrupts her whitebread family dinners by devouring chicken gizzards and emitting animal-like shrieks. Valencia takes the topic of female hunters to another level with a story about a health guru leading a group of lost souls on a cult-like experience under the guise of self-actualization and meditation. The most powerful story in the collection follows two #MeToo antagonists, both women, who prey on vulnerable women in their proximity in order to succeed professionally or romantically. In these stories, the underlying themes of deception and self-deception slither, snake-like, just beneath the surface, with teeth that gnash as tension builds, as characters snap or gain closure, each tale playing out with a subversive twist.

Lena Valencia, the managing editor of award-winning lit mag One Story, not only excels at writing with a wicked humor—she tackles these challenging topics with empathy and electrifying insight. We spoke over Zoom about subverting the female revenge plot, using lore in fiction and writing about self-deception.

Liv Albright: One of my favorite stories was “Dogs.” I found it interesting that the protagonist, Ruth, she’s a screenwriter, and she writes these films about women who are seeking revenge for things that have happened to them, and one of the messages she gets from her boss is that she doesn’t have enough of a traumatic backstory for one of her characters. So, she thinks up possible traumas—sex trafficking, child porn—to explain her character’s murderous rampage. In another one of your other stories—which I won’t name for spoiler reasons—you have a murderer, and she doesn’t have a traumatic backstory. She’s the one causing the trauma, which we find out through a flashback scene. How did you come up with this theme and how did this come to interest you?

Lena Valencia: I’ve always been into the female revenge plot, and I also think that it can be problematic as well, because usually you’re watching these women suffer some horrible indignity, and that gets complicated because in some ways it ends up fetishizing the violence or the trauma that’s happening to them. 

So, I was thinking of a character who was writing against this. I recently came across this essay in Lit Hub by the writer Emma Copley Eisenberg about the female revenge plot and there’s this great moment in it where she says, “The revenge story I want is about a woman who hasn’t been raped or beaten or killed, but who rather has been disrespected subtly and discreetly over a period of many years.” And I thought that that was what the character Ruth was going for and what the studio was objecting to. 

LA: It seemed like the character Ruth was trying to write would have a lot of reason to be angry and to maybe get violent, maybe not kill, but be violent. She has an abusive boyfriend, a boss that’s a creep. 

LV: Yeah, totally. And I think that’s what Ruth was responding to. And then in the story itself, these themes and topics that she’s circling around in her screenplay come into her life in the form of these unpredictable animals, these wild dogs that chase her through the desert, and then this driver picks her up, and he’s totally gaslighting her, telling her that the dogs were nothing to be afraid of while he’s acting in this erratic, aggressive way. 

There’s a line at the end of the story where Ruth thinks, “Nothing had happened, and for that she supposed she should be grateful.” She wasn’t physically harmed in any way, but she’s still dealing with this fear. In writing the story, I was exploring those feelings of fear and uncertainty without there being some physically violent act to precipitate them.

LA: You bring up an interesting question about how with women, there always seems to have to be an explanation for their behavior. Because guys, if they’re violent, well, that’s just men being men. Why do you think women need that kind of backstory? But in other thrillers, like The Talented Mr. Ripley and similar films, we have guys who snap, but we don’t need a backstory for them.

LV: There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers. Roles that aren’t inherently violent, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap. And I don’t think that men are perceived in the same way. So, it seems it’s more believable that men would become violent seemingly out of the blue. 

LA: In the story, “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” you turn the tables on the topic of assault and focus on men who snap, or commit violence, specifically sexual assault. At the college campus where the protagonist lives, there’s folklore involving a mythological figure, The Trapper, that’s circulating around campus, and The Trapper actually, I think, turns out to be an acquaintance. How did you compose that juxtaposition?

LV: That was inspired by Twin Peaks. I’ve always admired how the director David Lynch overlays surrealist horror on seemingly everyday situations. So that was something that I was thinking about as I was writing this—that switch from the real to the supernatural and then back again. Lynch understands the language of nightmares and he’s been a big inspiration for my work. And I do think that these nightmarish situations are a lot easier for us as humans to understand when they’re packaged as the supernatural. Monsters are a lot easier to stomach when they’re monsters, and they’re not human beings, which is why I think this idea of this boogeyman or stranger danger exists.

I also really love the technique of using lore in fiction, creating these stories within stories. And then deciding which characters believe in it, which characters don’t, and who’s telling the story—it adds another dimension to the narrative. 

LA: It also seems like the mythology of the lore, The Trapper, inspires violence because when the group of boys are trying to catch him, they use another student as bait, and they tie her to a tree, and then she’s gone. The Trapper takes her. It almost permits them to behave in that way. In another crime-infused story, “Vermilion,” the legal system appears to permit themselves to act on appearance biases, rather than viewing every life as worthy of saving. In the story, a woman, Nancy, laments the fact that her daughter who disappeared, her case was ignored by the police. The story opens with a podcast about another disappeared girl, Max, who won police attention because she was pretty, vivacious. You describe the woman’s daughter Esme as overweight, angsty, with heavy makeup. How do you think beauty factors into deciding whose lives matter?

LV: I think Nancy believes Max’s beauty plays a role in the way her story captured the attention of the media, and she resents that her daughter Esme didn’t get the same treatment. 

When Nancy’s going through the reasons her daughter didn’t get the same attention as Max, she’s grasping at anything she can to explain the unexplainable. She never found her daughter and so long as that remains the case, I don’t think there’s anything that law enforcement or the media could have done to make her feel like it was enough, though she’d never admit that.

There’s an expectation for women to be nurturers, mothers, caretakers, so something horrible has to happen to them in order for them to snap.

Throughout the story, when confronted with her daughter’s disappearance, Nancy is telling herself, “I’m over it. I’m over it. I’m okay.” And she’s clearly not, but she hopes that if she keeps telling herself this lie, it will come true. A lot of these stories are about self-deception. And I think that self-deception is really horrible to deal with in real life. But in fiction, I find it incredibly fascinating to read about and to write about.

LA: The theme of self-deception and deception reminds me of your story “The Reclamation,” where a group of entrepreneurs attend a cultish wellness retreat. There’s Brooke, the wellness retreat leader, and she’s not living in a bus, but she’s pretending to. There’s the main character, Pat, who is ultimately is inspired by Brooke to act in a violent way. And then there’s Celeste who is all gung ho about the retreat, and she doesn’t do well in the meditation exercises and gets angry and thinks that Brooke is a phony, which is true. What inspired you to write this story?

LV: I was thinking a lot about wellness culture and I have mixed feelings about it, because I do think a lot of aspects of wellness culture can help people in many ways. I don’t think it’s necessarily all bad. I know there are all kinds of send ups of it everywhere. I wanted to write about a situation where someone was listening to the platitudes and clichés that are associated with self-help and wellness and interpreting them in the worst possible way. 

There’s a great book called Cultish by Amanda Montell. It’s about the language that’s used in actual cults themselves, but also in multi-level marketing communities and in wellness culture and gym and fitness culture. So, I was thinking about all that and the effect that kind of language has on how a person behaves. I think that certain aspects of self-help and wellness culture have become this one-size-fits-all approach to something like therapy, which is not one-size-fits-all, at all.

LA: Do you think that Brooke believes what she’s putting out? Or do you think it’s complete strategy?

LV: I think it’s probably a combination of both. I think at her heart, she’s a businesswoman, and she’s a hustler. These con artists have been around throughout our history and Brooke is another one of those. So, I don’t think she intends to harm people per se, but I don’t think she’s coming from a genuine place of wanting to help them either. I think she’s in it for her own gain.

LA: You delve into exploitation, in a different way, in “Bright Lights, Big Deal.” The protagonist, Julia, acts in her own best interest at the expense of her friendships. When she moves to New York, she founders, and she watches her friends succeed. Her best friend, Rose, there’s some jealousy there, and Julia publishes a story about her and her boss. And Rose responds with something like, “This was not your story to tell.” Can you talk a little bit about your interest in the ethics of authorship and storytelling and how that story came about?

There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, ‘Oh, that’s just part of life.’

LV: I think it would be different if Julia had fictionalized that story that Rose told her about this creepy experience that she had with her boss. I do think that that would be a slightly more ethically gray area. But her reporting something traumatic that had happened to her friend without her permission, and also using that for clout, I think that’s very unethical. We talked a little bit about self-deception, and I think this is another story where the character, she’s definitely duped herself into thinking she’s a crusader for justice.

LA: I think self-deception is particularly evident in one scene where Rose tries to apologize and make things right. And then Julia’s thought process is that Rose is ungrateful, and Julia shouldn’t spend time dealing with her. Apparently, Julia and her family had Rose over for Christmas and meals. So, she’s twisting the narrative a bit.

LV: There’s this class situation at play. Julia doesn’t have a whole lot to lose because she’s coming from this very privileged place where if she doesn’t make it in New York, she has a very comfortable upper-middle-class suburban home to go back to, and that’s not the case with Rose. 

LA: Julia doesn’t seem to recognize her privilege. She acknowledges she has an emergency credit card, but part of what helped her rationalize sending out that article was because she thought about how Rose had it so easy, she’s able to go off with bartenders, and she just has a way with people, with men, that I think Julia doesn’t have. And Julia’s envious of that, and she doesn’t recognize that maybe these are things Rose had to learn because she didn’t have the privilege to fall back on.

LV: I think that’s a great reading of the story. Absolutely. I think the story is also about the ugliness that this misogynistic culture creates in these relationships to the point where Julia is jealous of the fact that Rose had this awful, icky, creepy experience with her kind of hot boss, and well, Julia just had some creepy experience with this ugly older man during a job interview. So, it gets into some pretty dark places there. 

It was interesting to look back and write this historical fiction that was set in the relatively recent past of 2009. I think someone in my writing group called it “PreToo,” as in pre-MeToo. There was a lot of inappropriate behavior that was permitted back then and we were supposed to act like, “Oh, that’s just part of life. That horrible, sexist behavior is just something we should come to expect in the workplace.” I think there’s obviously a lot of work to be done, but there’s also a lot that has changed since then. 

LA: When Julia offers the writer the story of Rose and her boss, the response is something to the effect of, “Well, this isn’t news. This happens all the time.” You also explore this theme, and the dynamics of class, privilege, and men using women to their advantage in “The White Place.” We have these two women, Sandra and the painter, with differing amounts of agency. Both are sexually involved with Mike, the painter’s handyman. The painter, even though she is renowned and rich, still seems to be controlled by Mike’s flattery. Sandra, on the other hand, as the daughter of the painter’s cook, isn’t in a position of privilege, has little self-confidence, and both factors cause her to believe she has no agency. What was your thinking behind creating this dynamic between the two women and their relationship with Mike?

LV: I do think that in many ways the painter is a reflection of the world that she lives in, which is a world that’s not kind to women. And I imagine her as someone who’s built a shell around herself in order to survive in the competitive art world, so that’s not necessarily going to lead to someone being a generous person. She’s really just out for herself.

And in thinking about the power dynamic, Mike and the painter, they both ascribe a large amount of power to Sandra, but she’s just a teenager. She’s just a kid and is trying to assert whatever agency she has in these moments, like when she gets cash from Mike for an abortion and gives it back to him. And then at the end, she’s finally backed into a corner, and she’s given this chance to leap into the unknown and takes it because she feels like it’s better than whatever she’s being given in her life in reality.

LA: Sandra’s knowledge of the abortion process is limited. Like a lot of young women, she’s scared, she’s heard horror stories about bleeding to death. How do you think her experience reflects a lot of other girls who may not have all the information?

Monsters are easier to stomach when they’re not human beings, which is why this idea of the boogeyman or stranger danger exists.

LV: The story was set intentionally pre-Roe and so the only information I imagined that she would’ve had would be probably from other women in her life. And also for most women who had abortions, there would’ve been a tremendous amount of shame and guilt. I think we have much more information accessible to us now, and there’s been a lot of work done by activists to destigmatize abortions. But the stigma definitely still exists, which was something that I was thinking about as I was writing the story, even though it’s set in the ‘70s. As to access to the actual procedure today, we are very much backsliding as a country, which is terrifying and upsetting.

LA: As the story wraps up, Sandra tells the painter she will attend boarding school, but at the very end, a curious thing happens—a mystical, luminous orb appears outside Sandra’s window and she walks into the brightness, “granting her own wish.” What does this mysticism signify in terms of Sandra’s capacity for developing an agency, and choosing or not choosing to get an abortion?

LV: Sandra wants more than anything to escape her situation. And the orb—this totally mysterious, otherworldly phenomenon—is a chance for her to do just that. Throughout the story, she imagines what her future will look like based on the various options she’s been dealt—futures that, to her, seem pretty bleak. In the end, stepping into the orb is the only option where she can’t envision an outcome, and for this reason she chooses it. I leave it up to the reader to decide whether the ending is hopeful, tragic, or maybe a bit of both. 

Your Voice Is My Tether to Myself

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“A to Z” by Lucie Shelly

“A to Z” was written to be enjoyed as an audio story, and we encourage you to listen, if possible. For accessibility, the full transcript is also available below. You can read it by clicking the arrow.

Alanna: So, as I was listening to your message, I dropped a charm with no chain into—you know how every girl has that big bag of shit where every pocket is full of random ass stuff? Well, it fell into that bag. So, I’m rooting through, listening to you, and then, right as you said you got your orgasm back, I found the charm!

Anyway . . . . 

Glad you got your girl back. Bummer when she goes. Did you use porn? Not ideal or pretty. Sometimes it helps. I feel like you told me that before, about needing to picture someone you didn’t actually desire to get off—it was Professor Gibbons! Throwback. That strange little music man. But you know, you genuinely loved whenever he said “modulate.” I will never forget the look on your face when he told us that in Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” there’s a “truck driver modulation.” Anyway, I wonder—maybe there’s a part of you that’s anxious about being really vulnerable—the way we are when we’re having sex or orgasming—with people that you are attracted to. So instead—even on your own—you’re more comfortable being vulnerable with the idea of someone you don’t care about. Yep, that’s my know-nothing, psychology school of Alanna opinion.

Pandemic life in New York is . . . yeah, exactly that. I feel bad complaining because it’s nowhere near as strict as Ireland. Which is probably why the death rate here is crazy high. But, if we had Ireland’s level of restrictions, I probably would have killed Phil by now. I’m kind of picking fights with him, and then, just being in a bad mood. It’s weird, he’ll be like, Are you happy? You just seem really unhappy. And I’m so quick to be like, no, no I’m totally happy, even if it’s not fully true. Not because of him or our relationship . . . I think I’ve just been extra moody lately. This week it really has come in waves. Sounds like you’re kind of struggling with that as well. 

Anyway, my love. I’ll stop complaining. But I hope you’re sleeping well on the other side of the pond.

Zoe: Hello, from the other side! God, I know you love Adele, but jaysus I can’t stand her. 

I’m sorry to hear about the frustrations with Phil. Go easy on yourself though please, everyone is struggling right now. I wonder how much of my funk is hormonal. I don’t like to attribute too much to hormones because then I feel like I’m just their subject, like one of those weird deep sea creatures, siphonophores, don’t really know how you say that word, but they’re these creatures like jellyfish that are really organism colonies. In this case, the hormones are the creature and I am the drifting, gas-filled sack. Anyway I’ve just woken up. And it’s still lockdown. And I’m still alone in my house. Maybe today I’ll get some words on the page. 

Yesterday evening, my lockdown brain snagged on this thought: What if the great heartbreak of my life is that I’m never heartbroken? Like, I never love someone enough to feel that. The great relationship of my twenties or even that huge, first teenage love. That didn’t happen for me. I think the closest thing I’ve felt to big love was with Paul, but we never got a real shot. It’s hard when you’re friends. We had all these . . . big professions of feelings, you know, but there was always something—one of us was going traveling, he had a girlfriend. And for a while there, I was really interested in radical self-sufficiency. I don’t know, I was reading a lot of Rebecca Solnit. Oh well. Did I ever stop needing my friends? Needing you? And how can I know I’ve chosen whole independence if I’ve never properly lived the alternative?

I won’t say it’s a question of what’s wrong with me, but I do wonder what’s different about me that’s led to this difference? All I can conclude is a fear—a guardedness. That vulnerability inability that you nailed so quickly. For me, so subconscious I’m not even aware of it. But an ocean away, and you can see me better than I can. 

I never thought of myself as a person who is afraid. But maybe I am afraid of men, in a way. Did you ever see me like that?

And how do I confront a fear if I can’t articulate its reason?

Zoe: PS—Thank you for weathering my monologuing. When I talk about feeling lonely, I feel so narcissistic. I don’t know if we have a neutral way to talk about loneliness? You mention it and it’s as if people are afraid they’ll catch it, like it’s more contagious than feckin’ COVID! It’s mad looking at the US—it’s like they don’t think people can die from this thing!

Sorry, last thing, but, do you know there are people out there who consider it a conspiracy that Taylor Swift might be gay? Or bi? Whatever. The group who thinks she is gay call themselves Gaylors, and do you know what the anti-conspiracist conspirators call themselves? Hetlors. Like Hitler but hetero. 

Alanna: Oh my god, I cackled at the Gaylors thing. I mean, I assume Taylor is . . . whatever sexual, and my Jewish ass is certainly never going to be with the Hetlors. 

And I don’t think your messages are narcissistic. They are—they’re answers to the perennial question: What are you going through? So, I love hearing your monologues, as you call them, and I always want to hear them. [LAUGHS]

To your fear question, I never perceived you as being, like, afraid to be in a relationship. Maybe you’ve been hesitant because you lead a very independent life and you enjoy things like reading and writing, which require isolation and being alone for stretches of time. Like, you’ve said you want a meaningful relationship but I guess you’ve never pursued it heavily. I’ve put a lot of effort into it. Like even in periods when I shouldn’t have been putting any effort into it. I think that’s the only reason relationships have been a bigger part of my life. Weirdly, though, I think I am afraid of men. There are very few people who I’ve crossed a certain level of intimacy with. Sexual intimacy I can usually do pretty well. It’s the truly opening up on all the levels. 

Anyway, I’m running out the door so I have to go, but I’ll talk to you soon! Love you!

Alanna: Oh, really quickly. I was thinking yesterday, I wish we could be, like, solitude camels? You know, like store up all the contentment of doing your thing in your alone time and then when your life is crazed by whatever, you could just draw a little of that feeling out. Maybe I wish we could do that with lots of emotions. Joy, happiness. But isn’t that what I get from talking to you?

The solitude one feels different, though. Because even though I’d like to bottle it, in a lockdown situation, solitude is scary. Anyway, just a dumb thought. Talk to you soon!

Zoe: Hallo! So, I’m off to the café for a takeaway coffee, the fucking social highlight of my days. The baristas here are my new best pals. They’re so much cooler than I was in my twenties. I was listening to them chatting the other day and one girl says, Wait, you are queer, aren’t you? And the other was like, Yeah. It struck me because . . . it was so casual, in a small city in the west of Catholic Ireland, it was totally expected. And, well, there are these looks sometimes between me and one of the baristas and I know if she was a man I’d think it was a “moment.” 

It’s probably the time we’re in. She’s making more of an effort to connect with customers from behind a mask and I’m just that fucking lonely. I just read this great essay by Elif Batuman—she wrote The Idiot, which I loved, which was a very autobiographical novel about a loooong fruitless crush on a guy. But the essay was about finding love later in life—she’s in her forties now, and with a woman. She talks about how she’d been asking herself questions for years about the discomfort she felt when she was trying to love or be with men—even the kinds of noises she made during sex. And when she started dating a woman, all that “normal” behaviour felt fake and weird and unnecessary. A story like that makes me wonder about myself. But I feel I would know. And yes, conditioning, learned expressions of the “right” feelings. But, for instance—and no offence—I’ve never wanted to sleep with you and we’re as close as can be. Like, what if this is like saying, I’m so single and lonely, I must be gay. That’s fucked. I know it’s a spectrum, so I guess we’re all on it, but. I don’t know.

Anyway. Oh, I meant to say. Thanks for reassuring me about the fear thing the other day. And it’s interesting—I never would have perceived that you have trouble opening up on deeper levels. Or feel that you do.

Alanna: Hey. Oh wait. Oh shit. Sorry, hold on.

I am so sorry, my phone was connected to my headphones and the mic on those sucks. Anyway. Uh, no offence taken about never wanting to sleep with me. The feeling is mutual. But I also don’t think I’m your litmus test for your sexuality. I’m just one person, girl, so I’m very curious about these “moments” you’re having with the girl at the café. You know, I’ve had a number of really close female friendships that were short-lived but intense and I had this, like, reverence for them. Now I look back and I’m like, oh, maybe that was a crush. Actually, now that I’m saying this out loud, there’s this one girl from that kayaking trip I took the year after I had cancer. I was immediately drawn to her and immediately thought, oh, if I was into girls, I’d be into this girl. I saw her last time I was in LA. I thought, she’s really pretty and we just have this fun vibe, it feels like flirting. Maybe it is, I don’t know, but we rarely get to see each other, and she has a fiancé so it’s not a thing. But it was nice to get these slight butterflies that were—I don’t know, when was the last time I got butterflies around a guy? But I think I’m very comfortable flirting with men because that’s what I’m used to.

Um, have you watched “I May Destroy You?” It’s amazing. Fucking obsessed with Michaela Cole. It’s about assault, and men, and sex, but really, it’s about everything. Me and Phil watched like four episodes last night. Unfortunately, we also got into a huge argument afterwards. I don’t know, I was just kind of . . . off after the content of the show and when he said why, I said I was just really moved by the show and then he got all quiet and was obviously annoyed, so I was like, are you okay? And he was like, how could you ever think I would do something like that to you? And I said, I don’t think you’d ever try to hurt me, it’s just a thought-provoking show. And then of course it devolves into yelling. Except, normally I keep my cool, but this time I was the one yelling, yelling, this is fucking dumb. After a while he goes, why are you even with me? And I always hate it when he says that because I think it shows low self-esteem on his end . . . and because I’m not fully confident in my answer to that question. Which I know is a problem. Plus, he’s picking up on it. But I just want to be like, please don’t do this. And it will be fine. So, we are fine now, but it was a whole thing.

Zoe: So, if I sound like I’m rushing, I am because, even though I had loads of time this morning, I am running late to work. Not that anyone will know. I’m late to package a bunch of online orders alone in a shop for minimum wage.

Em, “I May Destroy You” sounds brilliant, I’ll have to watch. I never understand why guys don’t internalize those stories more. Like do they never feel afraid watching them? Not fearful like a woman, but afraid of what can be inside even quote unquote good men? And I’m sorry you became the screaming person—which, I only mean I know you’ll be hard on yourself. Don’t be. If I were you, I’d be at my limit. So, I . . . I’m glad the two of you are fine.

D’ya know what—it’s actually possible I induced this rush, because it feels good, or like life, to be rushing.

Oh! Guess who I ran into on my walk the other day? Paul. I’d seen on social he was back in Ireland but I hadn’t reached out. We ended up chatting for ages, just sitting by the canal with our coffees! He told me he’d had a mental breakdown on a Monday and he was back in Ireland on a Thursday. And right before everything locked down—lucky. He’s in therapy and considering SSRIs—they don’t prescribe as easily here. But as candid as he was, he didn’t mention his relationship, or rather, the breakup that I guess happened. I didn’t push it but—

As you know, in the past, there’s always been this charge between us. This time, things felt mellow but there was a lot of recognition and, I don’t know, a gentleness that was palpable. The problem for me is, he’s the ultimate meeting point of fantasy and reality. Since college, one of us has always had feelings when it’s not right for the other—he’s professed, I’ve professed—but regardless, we’ve never dated, so everything we’ve felt has been both imagined and confirmed. 

I was so proud of myself for not pining—I’d shed the old feelings. I was expecting to hear he was engaged and be happy for him. So this is like . . . I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Maybe it’s the strange pause the world is in, but this feels like an opening. A chance. Our chance.

I feel very calm. Even when I was with him. At the same time, he’s back in my head like a little kernel, and my head is like, what if what if what if. 

God. Me talking to you about Paul confusion. This is feeling 22.

Zoe: Sorry, one more thing. I just read House of Mirth. A classic I’ve been meaning to get to for ages. Alanna, read it. It’s not happy, but. It’s tragic without being apologetic or moralising. It’s about a young woman who won’t settle and it’s about longing and it’s about perceptions of culture and it’s about money—which we don’t talk about enough. It’s insane how relevant it all still is.

Alanna: Hello, Zo. So nice to listen to your sweet voice. And I can listen to it whenever I want. And I love that I can hear seagulls in the background and imagine I’m in Galway with you. 

I just got in, it’s so hot, I’m exhausted and just lying on the couch unable to move. But I can move my mouth. [LAUGHS] It’s funny, a year ago if I was tired like this I would have been so afraid the cancer was coming back. Today, I’m like, no it’s just 90 fucking degrees in New York City. That’s growth, right?

Um, that’s very exciting to hear about Paul. We haven’t stayed in touch. Honestly, we were never close. That drunken make out was a total accident that I still feel bad about. You were our connection. Interesting about his breakdown. Um, how do you feel about that? Wait, do you know he’s had a breakup? Cause it’s a bit of a red flag to me that he didn’t mention it at all. But I don’t mean to be a downer. I love that this . . . this could be it. You guys might finally get your shot. 

Break down. Breakup. I guess breakups are the uplifting breakages?

I love listening to your messages. They make me happy.

So I have this medical bill for an oestradiol test that I really don’t want to pay for because I don’t think I should have to, but the thought of putting in the effort to get my insurance to cover it is so daunting. I know you probably don’t have this problem in Ireland, which makes me really jealous. Like, the test is only covered if you got it because you previously had low oestradiol. But how would you know if you have low oestradiol unless you have the test?

Um, what else, what else? I got into this big fight with Phil last night over the stupidest thing. We’re waiting for “Lovecraft” to become available, so we put on this cooking show where Selena Gomez makes a dish with some celebrity chef and Phil starts ripping into Selena Gomez, like, why did they choose her for this, blah blah blah, and I was like, why does he have such strong opinions about Selena fucking Gomez? Who cares? So I said, maybe we can be a little bit less negative tonight. 

And then he shuts down, and I can tell he’s annoyed, and finally I’m like, what’s wrong? And he just gets going, he’s like, you want to change me, and I just kind of said, do we really need to have an argument about this? But it becomes this huge thing about ex-girlfriends and co-workers who said he had too many opinions or he was too negative. I kinda said, all these people from all your different walks of life have told you this, has it not occurred to you that maybe there’s some truth to it? And he’s like, I would expect you to see me for who I really am.

Which I get, but, I ended up saying, if you show me something, you can’t get mad that I’m not seeing something other than the thing you’re showing me. I think I said it like that. And he was just like, I’m gonna go. And he left. But on the way out he—we’ve never said “I love you,” which I always thought was kind of telling because, eight months. But he goes, I fucking love you and it’s maddening. And he just walks out. 

Saying it like that. I don’t know if the word is . . . manipulative? I guess I appreciate him telling me the extent of his feelings . . . . 

“A-pree-SEE-ate.” I get that from you. 

We’re supposed to go to the mountains for a few days the week after next and honestly I don’t know if we’ll make it. If we’d been dating during normal times, I’m not sure I would have stayed in this thing.

I’m sorry I’ve been talking for so long and done a woefully inadequate job responding to anything in your message. But I love you and talk to you soon.

Zoe: Good morning, Alannalove! Love to wake up to your voice. 

But I am so sorry about fucking Phil. When you were wondering what the word was, I was thinking, manipulative, manipulative, and then you said “manipulative.” That he would say I love you for the first time in . . . anger. Using that like some sort of trump card. A terrible, “gotcha.” Is that even really saying, I love you? I don’t know, I’m so sorry.

The other day, I was reading about dialects for this other thing, and naturally ended up down a linguistics rabbit hole. But apparently, any language that comes from the proto or “mother” language is called a daughter language, and the related daughters are called “sisters.” Very appropriate that the terms are feminine.

But anyway, there are tons of dialectical breakdowns based on inflection, accent, vocabulary, and phrasing blends and stuff. I was thinking, maybe on a micro, micro, micro level, based on your individual experiences and the people you encounter, the phrases and inflections you assimilate, maybe everyone is technically speaking their own dialect. Like, you and Phil could literally be speaking a different dialect, and I guess a relationship should build a dialect. Not sure that’s really going to make you feel better. Sorry. If nothing else, maybe some arguing is necessary emotional stimulation? Like, a resistance that forces us to interrogate our feelings? I feel like, we look for creative or intellectual stimulation from our partners. Maybe arguing is part of how we get the emotional? Although, in other relationships, with you, I never feel the need to fight to dissect something . . . . 

Ooh—can you hear your seagulls? My window is open. Since lockdown they are feral. Ballistic, attacking all the trash! Don’t know if I told you, but I went rollerblading in a car park that closed during lockdown. I was up on the top deck, it’s open air, and when I got up there, it was covered in seagull shit. It was like, you know in “The Lion King” when the cubs go into the hyena den and it’s full of the detritus of hyena depravity—it was like that. There were bones and feathers and big bird shits and it was like I’d found the seagull lair up high in this airy space with a beautiful harbour view. They’d taken over like, and I could tell—as you would say—they were pissed that I was trespassing. There was this one guy who just stood there and gave me that [LAUGHING] bird side-eye, which I guess birds are always giving you because their eyes are on the side of their head. Sorry. Sorry. I don’t know why I find that so funny. [COUGHING] Jaysus, might need a COVID test. Or this is just the manic laughter of someone who spends too much time alone. 

Less time recently, though! I’ve been seeing a good bit of Paul. Funny you mention a trip —I was thinking of suggesting we do one. It probably seems a little out there but we’ve known each other for so long, and they’ve finally lifted the 5K restriction, and COVID changes the dating norms. If that’s what we’re doing. I don’t even know. I would’ve told you if we’d kissed, we haven’t. I think we know what we feel, could feel, for each other. But it’s growing from such an old feeling that it’s taking time to find new form. I feel like being in a neutral place might help. This town has too many memories from college days. And nights. Nights we’re all happy to forget.

I better get up. I had one of those scary wakings. Do you remember, in college, I used to wake gasping, like I was waking because I’d stopped breathing. I thought it was sleep apnea but it seemed to go away, then, so I never did anything about it. Hasn’t happened in ages. 

But seriously, fuck Phil. I love you and it’s glorious.

Alanna: Okay, wow, I had no memory of the dance scene in “A Knight’s Tale” until you sent me that clip, but you’re right, Heath is unbelievably captivating and charismatic and it will never not be heartbreaking what happened to him.

And as a dance scene, that one has all the goods—how do all these people, medieval people, know the same fake dance to David Bowie’s “Golden Years”? Amazing. It sent me down this rabbit hole of great, unexpected dance scenes in movies. They might be my favourite kind of scene. Like, “Ex Machina”? Or “Beetlejuice”? Honestly, if I was a writer, I’d put a dance scene in every piece I wrote, like a little signature. You can take that hot tip. I expect to see my name in your acknowledgements. 

Um, I also went down the rabbit hole of dance movies in general. Oh my god, “Center Stage”? Cooper Nielsen? Best fake name ever. I remember you hated “The Last Dance” because it is bad dancing and completely unrealistic, but I love it. And I was cackling remembering your impression of Julia Stiles in her audition in Save the Last Dance. Her mean-mugging is truly preposterous. And yes, it’s another bad movie about breakdancing by white people. 

She’s great in “10 Things I Hate About You,” though. Another Heath movie. That movie is probably the best of like, contemporary movies based on classic literature—isn’t it Taming of the Shrew? I mean, “Bridget Jones” and “Pride and Predj,” they’re up there, but. 

Anyway, plenty of time to watch all these since I did the thing! I haven’t heard from Phil since I called you. I guess I thought I would, but whatever. Thanks again for talking me down that night. It must have been, what, 3 a.m. in Ireland? You’re a saint. 

Unrelated, I’m reading this great book, Lost Children Archive. It’s a novel by Valeria Luiselli who I remember you talking about when we were in Mexico. I think you’d like this, if you haven’t read it already. It talks a lot about how, with archiving, you’re making a version of the experience that is a sequence of the interruptions—the photos, the recordings, the notes. You recreate the moment by saving the things that took you out of it. I just read this one line that’s hitting a little too close to COVID life. Let me see if I can find it. Yeah: “And without future, time feels like only an accumulation.” Oof, right? 

Alright my Zig-Zag-Zo. Oh! I loved your sign off the other day! That should be our new thing. I love you and it’s . . . enlivening! Is that a word? Who cares. You’ll know what I mean.

Alanna: Oh also, let me know if you and Paul are making your getaway, please! AlrightIloveyougoodbye.

Zoe: M’Lady Lanna! How did you forget your own favorite movie, “She’s the Man,” and that it’s based on Twelfth Night? That must be your winner for retellings!

[COUGHING]

Sorry. I have to be honest, I haven’t heard you sounding so lively in . . . ages! 

[COUGHING]

God, I swear I took three tests and negative. Good thing, too, because I’m delighted to report Paul and I are taking off this weekend! To Ballykineely for two nights. An Airbnb and some surfing. Very chill. And needed. I finally asked directly, but he still hasn’t talked about the breakup yet. He managed this kind of verbal sleight-of-hand where suddenly we weren’t talking about her anymore. [COUGH] I am en route to the shop, the gro sto as you would say, for your favorite thing: road snacks. 

God, it’s strange seeing so many people out. The restrictions are up, I guess life is really coming back. I’m walking down the street and talking to my phone in a way that doesn’t quite look like I’m on a phone call so I’m feeling a bit self-conscious so I’ll jump off, but I want to tell you the sweetest thing my sister said the other day. We were griping about singledom and she said, Sometimes I think we’re lucky. We still have the chance to meet someone who makes us really happy. We still have falling in love ahead of us. I almost cried. 

Soooooo, I love you and it’s . . . serenity!

Alanna: Zoooo. Sorry it took me a while to get back to you but I’m DYING to hear how the trip went! Don’t keep me in the dark. 

I’m pleased to find that I’m still feeling good! I know it’s only been, what, 10 days? And I did start Lexapro, but I doubt that’s already kicking in. Did I tell you about that by the way? Yeah, Rachel and Hannah are on it, too, and they love it. 

I am on my way to, yes, the gro sto. I’m going to make collards tonight. I also need to get—you know what, I was just about to tell you and I realized who in their right mind cares about someone else’s grocery list? Probably no one.

I’ve kinda been thinking about that, though, this idea of shared banality versus intimacy. It feels related to that thing you said about arguing and emotional stimulation—I think arguing can be mistaken for passion. I really don’t want to believe that whole thing of being drawn to what we know from childhood even if it comes from a totally uncomfortable situation. But growing up there was a lot of shouting between my mom and her boyfriends and my relationships have all featured like, big arguing. I hate to think relationships are just inherited convictions.

Oh god! Thank you, by the way, for reminding me of my own favorite movie. Or one of them—I found out last night I am still a sucker for “When Harry Met Sally.” That line: “When you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.” I bawled. 

Anyway. I love you and it’s . . . illuminating! Update me please!

Alanna: Hey, again, sorry, but while I was in the grocery store, I heard these two women talking—I couldn’t quite figure out their relationship, it didn’t seem mother-daughter, but there was an age difference. The younger one was breastfeeding and the older one was saying how everybody needs at least one person that they know really loves them unconditionally, and that’s their tether to the world. I thought that was a good way to put it because, never mind hard moments, I can be standing in a beautiful moment or somewhere spectacular, and it’s like my mind detaches me from the world or somehow diffuses me into it . . . into the ether. Not in a good way. But with a tether, if a tether is tied to you, you’re something solid that can be pulled back.

And lately, bizarrely, I’ve been so worried by the idea of my mom dying—she’s in perfectly good health. So I’m thinking maybe part of my worry is that I don’t have, you know, a spouse, I don’t have children. And I love my sister, but . . . she has Ted, the girls . . . .

So, I guess I’m saying that outside of my mom, I feel like you’re my tether. And I hope you feel that way, too, but even if you don’t, thank you for being mine. 

Yeah, so, I hope you’re having fun with Paul, and talk to you soon.

Alanna: Just to say, in case what I said before left you feeling an immense amount of pressure, um, yeah, Hannah is also like a tether-style friend too. Um, but, just, yeah. I realize that’s probably a lot for me to say to you, so. Anyway, still dying to hear about the trip. I hope it all went well. And, I will talk to you soon. Okay, love you, bye!

Alanna: Hi. Hey. This is so fucked up and stupid, I know. I don’t know when they deactivate your number. Like how . . . I have no idea how any of that works. Fuck, this is weird, this is weird.

Alanna: I don’t know why I’m doing this. I don’t want to pretend I’m talking to you, Zoe. Acting like a crazy person who thinks they’ll get something back. The dumb thing is, if you were there, you’d help me figure out the fucked-up reason I’m doing this, but if you were there, I wouldn’t be sending this message at all. 

I don’t know if I miss you yet. You weren’t there when I left a bunch of dumb messages about a bunch of stupid shit but I didn’t know that. And now I’m just leaving you another dumb message, so do I suddenly miss you? Just knowing?

I love you. I love you so much. I love you and it’s . . . in a way that I will never be able to say. I tried to. But I know it’s exactly the way you love me. Loved. The way you loved me. The way I loved you.

7 Novels From the Perspectives of Multiple Women

Posted on by Jo Lou

Novels with multiple points of view aren’t telling one story, but many. They appreciate an important life principle: anybody can be a hero given the right opportunity. Even when focused on  the same event, each recollection is different, tinted by each person’s experience and knowledge. These perspectives might corroborate or contradict, add another dimension, form a more complete story, or even alter the meaning of an event. There’s a delicious thrill in deciding who’s telling the real version—or if such a version exists at all.

When I started working on my Shakespeare-inspired mystery Hollow Bones, I wanted to tell Isabella’s story in a contemporary setting, but after finishing that draft, it felt incomplete. It took me months to finally realize that this wasn’t just Isabella’s story. This was a tale of three women and how their lives are changed by one fire.  

These seven novels below all feature multiple women with their own versions of events. They cover a wide range of genres, from historical fiction to psychological suspense. One might even be called prose poetry. They are all generous, though, in the way they elevate their characters, including the quiet ones who might be easily forgotten in real life. In these books, each thread adds an important element to the page, complicating what we think we know, to eventually become a tapestry that holds the entire story together. 

The Arctic Fury by Greer Macallister

In 1845, explorer Sir John Franklin attempted to chart the Northwest Passage, but he and his ship were lost. In response, his wife Lady Jane Franklin funded several expeditions in hopes of bringing her husband home. In Macallister’s vivid imagination, one of those expeditions is composed of twelve exceptional women. Unfortunately, they don’t all return, and their leader Virginia Reeve is put on trial for murder. What happened out there on the ice? All twelve women share parts of the story, which creates both an entertaining and moving account of their tragic adventure.  

The Bennet Women by Eden Appiah-Kubi 

I appreciate retellings that go beyond the source material, probing new questions and exploring new possibilities. Appiah-Kubi does this well, offering sharp cultural insights with a light touch. In The Bennet Women, we meet EJ, a residential advisor for an all-girls dorm, although residents are fined a quarter if they call themselves “girls” instead of “women.” Her chapters alternate with (mostly) ones from Jamie, a transgender woman who’s transitioned and ready to indulge in some normal activities like shopping with her mom and dating somebody cute. She gets her wish in both regards, but of course, this wouldn’t be a retelling of Pride and Prejudice without some obstacles to those happily ever afters.  

The Secret Place by Tana French

This is the fifth book in the Dublin Murder Squad series, and it almost seems as if French was challenging herself to do something different. Rather than a single detective’s perspective on events, this book has dual timelines, one the current police investigation and the other a year in the past. That year follows four friends at a posh boarding school. Their seemingly unshakeable bond is challenged when a boy at a nearby school is murdered. The book has all the elements of a straight-forward mystery: crime, investigation, and solution. But it deliberately goes beyond the case to offer a nuanced look at growing up. What changes us as we hurtle toward adulthood? 

Madeleine Is Sleeping by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

This novel, composed of short vignettes, also uses dual timelines: one in the real world and one in a girl’s dream world. In Madeleine’s mind, she joins a circus, travels to Paris, and falls in love with a man given to excessive flatulence. Back in reality, Madeleine’s mother is at first pleased by the good luck that seems to accompany her daughter’s comatose state. Eventually, though, she mistreats her unconscious charge the way she mistreated her when awake. This book is bewildering, bewitching, and quietly devastating, especially as the two worlds start to overlap. If you like strange, dark, lyric tall tales, this one’s for you.

Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal

According to the Goodreads reviews, I’m not the first reader to be surprised by the actual erotica in this book despite the obvious title clue. Nikki, a daughter of Indian immigrants, signs up to teach English at a Sikh temple in London, but her students, a group of Punjabi widows, do not care for the course materials aimed at children. Instead, they start to write their own racy works, which are woven into the narrative. While perhaps not a traditional multiple POV novel, the women’s stories add a unique touch to an already impressive genre-bending book.

True Biz by Sara Novíc

The title of this novel refers to a slang phrase in American Sign Language popular amongst the teens at River Valley School for the Deaf. It means “seriously” and can be delivered in a range of tones from sarcastic to, well, serious. It’s a perfect title for a story that has the same range, encompassing both teenage crushes and destructive anarchy. While the novel has more than two perspectives, the ones I remember the most are Charlie, the new girl at school who struggles to fit in for a number of reasons, and the school’s headmistress February. Charlie’s eager to learn better ASL and make friends while February’s determined to keep the school funded and her students out of trouble. Neither character has an easy path, but Novíc has such a light, believable writing style that even the violence feels inevitable rather than tragic.

Kismet by Amina Akhtar

Akhtar is one of the most original voices in crime fiction writing today. I love that you can open one of her books and have absolutely no clue what’s going to happen. While reading her debut #fashionvictim, I found myself rooting for a serial killer. With Kismet, I was wholly #teamravens.  Yes, the ravens get their own chapters, carefully keeping track of who treats them with kindness and who treats them with disdain. In the book, Ronnie Khan relocates to Sedona hoping to reinvent herself, but she soon learns that might be more dangerous than she anticipated. The novel flits between perspectives, favoring Ronnie’s voice but sometimes offering a bird’s-eye view from the killer and other times a bird’s-eye-view from, well, the birds.