For Three Weeks, I Was a Phone Psychic for Miss Cleo

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Dialing In by Heidi Diehl

Remembering this time feels as though I’m listening to one of the callers, to a message from a stranger who is also me. At the start of summer 2001, I responded to a Craigslist ad for “Phone Actors.” I’d just turned 20, and I needed extra income to supplement my summer fellowship at a nonprofit, which paid for my quarter of a subletted apartment on West 108th Street in Manhattan. Bennett and Frank, a couple, my college pals, had one of the bedrooms, and my friend Laura and I shared the other. All four of us were constantly seeking odd jobs. The week before, Frank had called a Village Voice listing for phone sex operators and was told they didn’t hire young people, who usually couldn’t handle the job’s pressures for very long. Lacking the performance chops for this particular field, I hadn’t applied. Even so, I should have heeded the warning. Listening is intimate too.

Being a phone actor sounded more doable to me—no sex, the ad said. The man who answered cut right to it. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Miss Cleo.” I hadn’t. The commercials for her 1-900 number were always on back then, but as a college student I didn’t watch TV, and growing up, my parents never had cable. Miss Cleo was a phone psychic so popular that the man said his company, the Network, hired a stable of assistants to take her calls. He skipped over the question of my own psychic ability—implied was that I would pretend—and hired me immediately, said it was great if my roommates were interested too. The only training he ever provided was a list of the names of tarot cards.

After we hung up, Bennett and Laura told me they’d seen Miss Cleo’s commercials; she was a commanding woman with strident charisma and a Caribbean accent. She had catchphrases, pithy promises: “You be tippin’, he be tippin.’” Laura explained that Miss Cleo meant it as a warning—if you’re cheating, you can get hurt too. Things are circular; they’ll catch up to you.

Would you trust a twenty-year-old who claimed to be psychic? Would you trust me now?

Bennett said he wanted to do it too. We had a landline, no cellphones, so we waited until late at night to avoid clogging the line we needed for the rest of our lives. Past 11 p.m., our bosses from our other jobs were unlikely to call. After dialing a 1-800 number and entering my personal code, I heard a recorded welcome from Miss Cleo; her rough encouragement helped convince me this was just a wacky experience, a good story. Then the calls started coming—maybe someone I actually knew, or else a Network call routed in. I wouldn’t know until I picked up, which I had to do in character. Thank you for calling the Network. This is Ruby. (My chosen psychic moniker; Bennett had several—Gabriel, Cassandra.) Much of our time was spent waiting for the phone to ring; anything below a 17-minute call-time average meant the Network would send fewer callers. We were only paid for the time spent on the phone—stingy, but in the end it didn’t matter. I quit three weeks later, and I never got a check.

At first Bennett and I took turns answering calls in our sweltering living room. I preferred doing it together, because then I wasn’t alone with my doubts: that I was ripping off people who likely couldn’t afford it, that I wasn’t clairvoyant, and at just a couple months past teenage, that I didn’t have the life experience to advise an adult.

Bennett took the first call, but I was too nervous to study his technique, instead rehearsing vague platitudes in my mind. I see good things ahead. I took the next one, which came ten minutes after Bennett’s ended.  “I’m thinking of moving to North Carolina,” the woman told me. The living room faced an airshaft, and noises from the other apartments carried in.

“You’re somewhere else right now.” I said this as a statement, not a question, which charged her.

“Yes!” she said, as though we were at a party together, this stranger thrilled to lean in and confide. “My friend Ash is there.”

“You want to be closer to Ash. You feel that strongly.” Riding adrenaline, I paced past our dirty dishes and library books and strewn tote bags, Bennett listening from the flowered couch.

Right, the woman said. She thought she did. Her agreement bolstered me, and we kept going like that, as I parroted her tidbits of information in confident tones, shaping her reflections into destiny. I was just helping her see what she knew already, I told Bennett after I hung up.

He was better at the calls than I was, offering concrete instructions. Take off all your jewelry and put it under your pillow. Open and close your bottom dresser drawer. That kind of specificity in the face of an abstract problem was helpful. It kept people on the line.

For the first few nights, I knelt on the floor with the phone, hunched over my list of tarot card names, which I’d printed at the nonprofit’s office. I listened and scribbled key details. Pamela, 37, Missouri. Wants to know about love life. “I just pulled The Lovers card for you,” I’d say, heart pounding as I scrambled for meaning. “This is incredibly lucky.”

Eventually I came up with a little schtick. “You’re the lone wolf,” I told callers. Today the phrase might connote a bad actor—a lone wolf attack—but back then I thought it was what everyone wanted to hear. You’re alone, but unique, carving your singular path. Really, I was speaking to myself.

“You’re up on a cliff, trying to decide what to do,” I said to Martin, a guy who, likely drunk, had started off affable as he told me about his divorce. “You’ll see what’s next from that vantage point. You have to get out on the cliff to be able to see it.”

“You’re supposed to tell me what’s going to happen,” Martin said, growing angry. “Tell me when I’ll find someone else.”

I was quiet, unsure of what I could promise. Beneath Martin’s frustration and my panic was our shared discomfort. We’d agreed to this façade, and it was crumbling.

“The cards are telling me you’re going to meet someone special,” I said. “Very soon.”

He hung up. A six-minute call.

A recent HBO documentary, Call Me Miss Cleo, traces the celebrity psychic’s fall from grace. In 2002, the Network lost several lawsuits for fraud and paid millions to the callers they’d swindled. Miss Cleo herself was never charged with a crime. In the TV coverage of her legal trouble at the time, the running joke was that she didn’t see it coming. If she were truly psychic, shouldn’t she have known she would get caught?   

I watched the documentary after Bennett posted about it on his Instagram last year. He’s one of the interview subjects, looking back from his contemporary perch. The movie reenacts him as a stressed young phone actor chain-smoking in the dark on the living room floor, tethered by the cord. In reality we had a cordless, and I think we kept the lights on. In his interview, Bennett said while of course we weren’t actually psychic, we were intuitive, good at finding details to construct a narrative. He and I both write novels now.

Twenty years later it makes for a good story—once I was a phone psychic—though I can’t quickly explain the guilt I still carry. Feelings are hard to work into the joke. When I go to union meetings these days, a common Zoom icebreaker is the “two truths and a lie” game, and this is an odd truth I think of sharing, though the remote format leaves me unsure of the tone of my colleagues’ reactions. The logic of icebreakers is that if we’re going to organize together, we need to know and trust each other. My urge to share is complicated; I want the attention this wild story will garner even though it doesn’t reflect me all that well. Would you trust a twenty-year-old who claimed to be psychic? Would you trust me now?

When Bennett told me he’d been speaking to producers with various documentary projects about Miss Cleo, I was offered a chance to be interviewed too. I considered it—the lure of divulgence, the magic of revisiting that time. In the end I said no, cautious about how they might edit my off-the-cuff recollections into a story I didn’t intend.

Call Me Miss Cleo suggests that nearly everything about her was fake: her accent, her clairvoyant ability, the details she told people about her childhood. It also fills in pieces of her actual biography, information new to me. With her background in theater, Cleo was an early character. Eventually she hooked up with the Network and became their star, but even before that, her crafted identity and non-truth telling left questions and doubts in the spaces she’d moved through, at least according to the film’s interview subjects. It’s satisfying to learn this. But it doesn’t give me a clear answer of why she did it, why I did too.

Our neighborhood had a rat alert that summer; the city left pamphlets in our mailbox that offered warnings but no promise of abatement. Maybe that didn’t matter—they knew we wanted someone to notice. Rats could climb extraordinary heights and squeeze through tiny spaces, I learned. After dark I walked down the middle of the street. Keep your trash sealed up, the city’s literature advised. Don’t leave things out or exposed.

Even in June it was oppressively humid, and since the apartment didn’t have air-conditioning, we went to C-Town in the evenings to linger in the freezer aisle. “I figured out the C stands for coupon,” Bennett said. Later that night a caller told me she’d been dipping into the register at work. “No one knows what I’m taking.”

The callers confessed transgressions whose weight I was too green to understand: infidelity in a long marriage, bad choices that had imploded a career. As a kid not yet old enough to buy beer, I responded to these mature versions of despair with a lie: “I know exactly what you mean.” Some of it was strange, like the old woman’s dirge about the dogs under her porch, and some veered toward creepy—the guy who asked, blurred and flirty, what I valued in a mate. All of it was awkward. These cheaters and lonely-hearts assumed my allegiance, impatient for my promise that the future was something I could see.

What was I seeding that I couldn’t control?

After a week or so, Bennett and I started doing our shifts separately. It was more practical that way. At first I’d wanted to perform for Bennett and share the story of our weird job, but it grew uncomfortable—both that I was lying and that I wasn’t all that good at it. It wasn’t phone sex, but Bennett said the calls were like prostitution. All that need for instant gratification, and you can’t even get a kiss. There was a fundamental disconnect: the callers wanted to go fast, but with my need to get to 17 minutes, I went slow. People cried and got mad, demanded to talk to Miss Cleo and not me. My contact at the Network had told me to pretend I was trying to find her when this happened—call her name, like you’re looking—as though she’d be there in the apartment at one in the morning, if only I opened the right door.

In the daytime, I worked for a nonprofit, where I traveled with my boss to state representatives’ offices and lobbied for environmental justice issues. My work was compiling testimonies from residents of heavily polluted NYC neighborhoods into useful talking points, and it satisfied me that someone, even a staffer or an intern, was taking notes, promising to bring it all back. I clung to this as the right kind of listening, a useful form of storytelling.

The people I worked with were driven, smart, exhausted. I admired them; they’d found a way to be meaningful adults, to live in New York City and do work that mattered. And so I didn’t tell them what I was doing at night, couldn’t explain why I was so tired.

I didn’t tell my family about Miss Cleo either, but I did tell some of my friends, the ones I thought would see it as funny, performative, good material, rather than morally wrong. The calls were like therapy, I said. It made me feel better to look at it that way, ignoring the fact that I had no training or expertise as a therapist. I also ignored the fact that calling the Network cost $4.99 a minute. I was earning minimum wage; at that time, an hour’s pay was $5.15.

The apartment’s TV picked up a few scratchy channels, and if I were going to write fiction about this time in my life, I’d play Miss Cleo’s commercials for me to watch, cementing my misgivings. But what really happened was Bennett and Frank watched soap operas in Spanish, a language they didn’t understand. Even so, there was pleasure in witnessing the drama —yelling, slapping, faces lit with anger and love—and that was usually enough to find a story.

The news broke less than three weeks into the job, nearly July: Miss Cleo, or the Network, was being served with lawsuits for fraud. When I dialed in with my personal code, the recorded greeting was no longer from Miss Cleo, but from a guy who said although Miss Cleo was facing bad publicity, psychic readings helped people; we were doing important work. His message was absurd, but the lawsuits were a relief—this problematic job would end. A force larger than me would take care of it.

That night a woman named Vicky told me her boyfriend had been hitting her. Her voice was shaky, resigned. I was stretched out on the couch, sleepy until the jolt of this stranger’s revelations.

“Tell me what you see in the future,” Vicky said. “I know he’s a good person deep down.” She wanted things to work—was that what would happen?

“I think you need to leave,” I said, sitting up on the couch. Find a domestic violence shelter. Talk to a social worker, a therapist, the police. I was supposed to frame it as a matter of destiny, what the tarot cards wanted, but I was direct, repulsed by the position I’d put myself in. This person needed help I couldn’t provide.

Vicky told me she was scared. The artifice had broken—we were just two people talking.

“Do you have a friend who could help you?” I imagined the boyfriend coming after her. What was I seeding that I couldn’t control?

“I think so.”

Good, I said. She had to tell someone who was actually there. How awful that I might be missing the chance to save her, for her to save herself.

OK, she said. And then she hung up and I never spoke to her again.

I stopped dialing in after that, haunted by my role or lack of a role in Vicky’s safety. I went back to the temp agency and asked for work. Short stints at offices meant my nights were mine again. Sometimes Laura and I went out to see bands; we met a group of musicians, and after one of them gave me his number, I called it again and again, so unfamiliar with cellphones I didn’t realize that unlike a landline, he had a record of my outreach, a log of each time he didn’t answer.

That I didn’t know this seems crazy, but we were living in a different universe, the ways we communicated and expected things from each other so unlike the ways we give and take now. That’s what I tell my students when we read articles about technology. Many of them are the age I was then. “Oh no,” they say, shaking their heads as I recount asking for directions from strangers on the street.

Call Me Miss Cleo situates her as a product of her time, spawned by the infomercial/1-900 culture of the ‘80s and ‘90s, her services a bridge to the internet era with its anonymous connection and public divulgence. Even so, we always use the available technology to mediate our identities and desires. After my brief run as a phone psychic ended, my urge to listen stayed with me, and I found new ways to indulge it.

That summer ended, and I went back to school in Westchester. In July, a temp job had taken me in and out of the subway station under the Twin Towers, but by September I was twenty miles north. I only saw the smoke from the highway that day.

My roommate Rebecca’s friend JJ came to campus; the people he’d been staying with in Brooklyn left for Vermont on September 12, and he didn’t want to leave the city. He’d traveled across the country to get to New York—arduously, hitchhiking and riding freight trains and sometimes a bike. Bronxville, the college’s suburb, was an acceptable compromise: a dining hall with open windows to climb through, a library and computer lab available all day. JJ showed up sporadically, and for some of that year we dated, if you could call it that, which I didn’t at the time.

When he went back to the city at the end of September, JJ gave me the number of a communal voicemail system so we could stay in touch. Accessed with a 1-800 number, it was a free dial from anywhere, even a payphone, and was shared by a loose community of friends he’d introduced me to. The other voicemail users lived in the city or elsewhere, and I spent time with some of them, doing things that scared me: joining hundreds of cyclists in Critical Mass rides that took over traffic, sleeping in a squat on Houston Street that’s a condo tower now. Their mode of frugality—dumpster diving, squatting, Greyhound scams—landed somewhere along the spectrum of choice and necessity, different for each person but upheld as virtue by all. I didn’t quite fit in with this group, always aware of what I wasn’t willing to do, shy about my desire to be safe. Some of them had chosen names—a rustic word, or their given name spelled backward—and they moved around a lot, so there were many voicemail users I never met, spread around the country. I never found out who paid the bill. And I didn’t learn the rules either, if there was an etiquette, if unspoken was that I should skip over messages clearly not for me.

With the password JJ eventually shared, I could listen to all the messages and not just leave one at the beep. I miss you and meet me here and the subtext of an agitated tone. A soap opera I could dip into from anywhere—my room or the payphones that were on every block, which offered something akin to the way we now stop to scroll at a red light or subway platform, for a blast of gossip or news. People left long folksy accounts or litigated their side of a romantic spat. Sometimes a dispatch was meant for one person, sometimes for the group—they’re throwing out whole pizzas on University & 12th—and the lines blurred. As a fringe member of this group, I rarely left messages, and only quick logistics. I’ll be twenty minutes late. But I listened all the time, playing through strings of 10 or 20 messages while lying in bed, my sense of not fitting in—the lone wolf, perhaps—dislodged temporarily even as it was also intensified by listening to other people open up. Their confiding took the place of my own. Remembering those listening sessions—Hi Sweetums and Not cool, man and I’m just really tired of you being away—reminds me of the queasy feeling I get now when I scroll for too long. Something far away becomes close.

I wanted something impossible—to listen without the story touching me, to take someone else’s drama without revealing my own.

The voicemail served as an early prototype of social media: leaving a message offered a way to perform intimacy for a crowd. And the communal mailbox marked a cultural shift from the more private confessional Miss Cleo offered. In the ‘90s and early 2000s, daytime talk shows exploited the thrills of voyeurism and oversharing, paving the way for schadenfreude-inducing reality TV. Maury and Montel, Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones: these hosts made public our timeless urges—to hold someone else’s drama, and to confide, so someone can hold yours.

I wanted these things too. Just like Miss Cleo’s calls, listening to the voicemail fed my appetite for narrative, and the tensions of eavesdropping were relieved by the fact that the message-leavers willingly said these things knowing other people would hear. A voicemail is meant to be a greeting for one person, but this was more like a notice on a bulletin board, a comment on a thread. Spaces that assume an audience.

I shouldn’t have listened. Eventually I heard messages back and forth between JJ and someone else, their flirtatious check-ins and shared plans. What stung was not only JJ’s moving on but also what we now call FOMO, the two of them part of this group gathering to do things I wasn’t sure I wanted to do. Loneliness is worse when you’re not alone.

At the time I felt like a victim, though I’d never pushed for a more defined relationship with JJ, infected by the voicemail crew’s anarchist vibes. How could I have expected someone to know what I wanted if I didn’t say it out loud? If I’d had one of Miss Cleo’s flunkies to confess to, or divulged my feelings on an unburdening voicemail, maybe then I could have figured this out. Perhaps overhearing JJ’s other romance was cosmic retribution for the lies I’d told for Miss Cleo, for what I’d listened to and taken from those calls. You be tippin’, he be tippin’.

I didn’t listen to the voicemail anymore after that, though I remained friends with some of the users, connections that have eroded over time. These days, our contact is mostly through social media, where I look at what they post about their lives.

Call Me Miss Cleo suggests her redemption: she became an activist toward the end of her life and found deep connections with people who, when interviewed, cited her ability to see and commune. The film doesn’t fully grapple with the fact of her dishonesty. It paints her not as an agent of her own hoax, but a pawn of the self-enriching hucksters behind the Network—really just passing the huck. 

It’s probably unfair to expect a verdict. Maybe it’s better to accept ambiguity. Or recognize that someone else may have struggled, as I did, to find the right way to listen and share. What’s surprising is that after watching the documentary, I began to feel a certain kinship with Miss Cleo, who in the past had been the con artist, the butt of the joke, whenever I talked about that job. Like me, she found a story of herself through the experiences of other people. Eventually it caught up to both of us. I wanted something impossible—to listen without the story touching me, to take someone else’s drama without revealing my own. But I wasn’t actually safe from the story. I was always part of it, even when it wasn’t mine.  

As a twenty-year-old kid, I thought Miss Cleo’s callers were naïve to expect accurate prophecy from a 1-900 number. But as a middle-aged person who’s lived through Geraldo and The Bachelor and Facebook, I see that I was the naïve one. At least some of the callers must have known exactly what they were getting, what the voicemail users wanted too: a ready stage, a mirror to serve as a guide. And now, as I write this, I’m gratifying those same desires. 

Right before we graduated, I ran into Bennett in the campus computer lab. He wanted me to join something new called Friendster. Soon after that I got a cellphone. My new place in Brooklyn didn’t have a landline, and I didn’t want to sit at home all day while I waited for calls from the temp agency. Yes, I told Regis, the recruiter at Temporary Alternatives, when he said they had lots of openings for short-term receptionists. I was pretty good on the phone.

7 Books Reimagining Queer Histories

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For me, queerness has always been related to imagination. Like many of us, I grew up without a blueprint for a queer life. In the evangelical household I was raised in, I had to dream my queerness into existence, conjure a life that was forbidden to me, claim it because no one was ever going to give it to me. This has been true for so many of us, now and in the past, as we’ve existed outside of and beyond the boundaries of what our world calls normal and good. There is a long lineage of LGBTQ+ people who came before us, crashing against the barriers erected around them and finding ways to make their own lives, communities, and loves anyway. 

There is so much of queer history we don’t know. It’s been erased, lost to time, pathologized and told by people other than us, never recorded in the first place. Each of the books on this list work to move and play within this fluidity, reimagining queer and trans history in the wide gaps between what was true and what we know. In their pages are previously untold stories, fictionalized imaginings based on real people, and present-day reflections on moments, stories, and even items from the past.

These books are flares sent up in the darkness. They are works of imagination and resistance. They plot the future forward as they dig their hands through the warm, wet soil of the past. They say the names of those we know and those who have been made invisible through time, history, and systems of oppression, who have been reduced to their carceral records or hidden inside a social worker’s report or the journal of a rent collector. They are the books that have shown me who my ancestors are, taught me about where I come from, connected me to a long lineage beyond my blood family. 

This history gives me hope. Not because it is all beautiful. But because there is beauty, love, care, and connection amidst the struggle. There always has been. There always will be.

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects edited by David Evans Frantz, Christina Linden, and Chris E. Vargas

Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects began as a series of gallery exhibitions and culminated in this book, where meaningful objects from the trans archives are paired with text by poets, scholars, activists, and historians. The book’s introduction shares a quote from writer Morgan M Page that frames the project: “Uncovering and sharing our histories is a powerful tool for helping us dream our way into futures we want to live.” The objects highlighted include a doughnut that may or may not have been thrown in a riot against the police a decade before Stonewall, a 1975 box of hair dye featuring Black trans model Tracey Africa Norman before discrimination halted her modeling career, a transsexual menace t-shirt worn at “a time when passing as cisgender was everything,” a two-thousand-year-old Indigenous clay being that confused archaeologists with its lack of conformity to binary gender, and many more. Without pretending to be a comprehensive accounting of trans past and culture, the images and accompanying writings explore, reconstruct, and reimagine trans hirstory—a hirstory that is expansive, dynamic, alive, and continues to be built today. 

Blackouts by Justin Torres 

In Blackouts, which won the 2023 National Book Award for fiction, Torres builds a nonlinear work of fiction around the history of a 1940s book that pathologized queerness, Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns. Juan Gay and the narrator, referred to affectionately as nene, met at a mental institution. The two friends reunite in the desert at a mysterious place known as the Palace ten years later when Juan is dying, and the novel takes the form of one long conversation between them. In Juan’s room is a copy of Sex Variants with thick black marker crossing through many of the lines. Through this erasure, the buried voices of the eighty queer people whose lives and histories were used to create this monstrous project are resurfaced, sharing a queer world that existed before Juan’s, before nene’s. The blackouts document pain and desire, love and fear, hope and oppression and freedom, all coming through this book that was intended to be a tool for their own erasure. 

Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza

Possanza was prompted to explore the lives and loves of historical lesbians as she craved more lesbians in her own life. She was looking to see the ways she loved reflected back to her, for blueprints of love from the past to offer a way forward in her own life. As Possanza combs through archives searching for little-known lesbian love stories, she starts to build a more visible lesbian life of her own. Her research introduces us to lesbians across time and identities, some of whom would have identified that way and some of whom never would: children’s toy inventor Mary Casal in the 1890s, dancer and activist Mabel Hampton in 1930s Harlem, athlete Babe Didrikson in the 1950s, needs-no-introduction Sappho, male impersonator Rusty Brown in the 1950s, Chicana feminist and activist Gloria Anzaldúa in the 1970s, and lesbian Amy Hoffman who cared for her friend Mike as he suffered and eventually died from AIDS in the 1990s. We’ll never really know how it felt for Mary to passionately kiss Juno in her hotel room, or Mabel to be arrested after being set up as a prostitute, or Rusty to do her Fred and Ginger act with her friend John, but through the scenes Possanza creates in Lesbian Love Story, we can imagine it all.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman 

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiences, like Lesbian Love Stories, is an intimate and heavily researched work of imagination. Hartman’s characters are young Black women in the early twentieth century. They are “riotous Black girls, troublesome women, and queer radicals.” Some of them are queer, some are not. Some are well-known, like Gladys Bentley and Billie Holiday; others are ordinary and previously overlooked, like Hartman’s “chorus,” which she identifies as all the unnamed young women of the city trying to find a way to live and in search of beauty. But all are struggling to create lives on their own terms in a world that wants to press them into the oppressive shapes and forms it already has pre-cut for them. Hartman’s writing places us inside the lives of her characters, helping us imagine who they were, what they saw, what they felt, and how they moved through the world, wayward and beautiful, to create something wholly them.

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

After Sappho blends fiction with nonfiction to reimagine the lives of queer figures like renowned performer Josephine Baker, writer and literary salon hostess Natalie Barney, and poet Lina Poletti, to name a few. Much like what has survived of Sappho’s poems, the novel is told in fragments and vignettes that circle around and narrow in on different women’s lives. At the heart of After Sappho is an exploration of women who lived queer, creative lives connected to themselves, their art, and each other. Inspired by Sappho, who Schwartz writes was “garlanded with girls” and lived “…the opposite/…daring,” the women set sail for islands, fall in and out of love, write poetry, take to the stage, leave their husbands, paint, attend salons at Natalie Barney’s house in Paris, and carve their own nonlinear paths in twentieth century Europe.

The Love That Dares: Letters of LGBTQ+ Love & Friendship Through History by Rachel Smith et al.

There is less reimagining here than in the other books on this list. The power of this book lies in two places: centering both platonic and romantic love in queer history, and inviting the reader to reimagine alongside the letters in ways other books on this list don’t necessarily give as much space for. With minimal context alongside each letter, what do you envision as you read? Who will these love letters make you think of in your own life? Who will you send a snapshot to or read them aloud with, passing the book on a picnic blanket under a tree? What will they inspire in your own life? Across these letters are portraits of obsession, love, fear, tenderness, and care. “I am more afraid than I have ever been in my life. Afraid of the totality of my desire for you,” Laura wrote to Madison in 1993. “I have always loved you, Pat, and wanted for you those things you wanted deeply for yourself,” Audre Lorde wrote to her friend in 1985. Together, the letters in this book paint a picture of the different ways love has looked—and could look—in queer communities. 

The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison by Hugh Ryan 

In the 20th century in Greenwich Village, across from the Stonewall Inn, was a women’s prison: The House of D. The prison, Ryan argues, helped make Greenwich Village queer, and the Village, in return, helped define queerness for America. Where before we’ve mostly had data instead of stories of individual incarcerated people, Ryan reconstructs the experiences of the working-class queer women and transmasculine people housed inside the now-defunct prison, bringing them to life from their carceral records. We meet Charlotte, a queer woman who fell in love with a celebrity criminal; Big Cliff, a transmasculine person who was incarcerated for his gender identity; Serena, an ambitious Black girl who would eventually end up involuntarily incarcerated in a mental institution for most of the 1950s; Honora, who was arrested for prostitution after her butch-femme relationship and the financial security that came with it dissolved, and many others.

7 Sport Novels About More Than Athleticism

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Because athleticism is often regarded as the antithesis of intellectualism (the jock/nerd dichotomy remains commonplace), books about sport get overlooked as being non-serious, non-literary, or unimportant. People think they’re just fun. And they are fun. Sports are fun, so why wouldn’t the associated novels be? And they’re usually wonderfully structured—the training camp, the game, the season: they all translate perfectly into narrative structure—which can make them a pace-y read.

But sport novels are never only about sport. As sport exists as a product of our political and politicized cultures, so then do explorations and depictions of it. Stories about sport are also stories about class, gender, race, identity, mental health, disability, or collective vs individual identity (though probably not all of them all at once). For example, a story about Megan Rapinoe would be about the women’s world cup win, but it would also be about gender, sexuality, and pay inequality in the workplace. 

My own novel, Bruise, is about an MMA fighter who is forced to retire due to injury just as he was poised to break into the big time. He returns to the impoverished town he ran away from as a teenager, where he struggles to reunite with his estranged brother and to come up with a new purpose for his life, since he can no longer do the only thing he’s ever prepared himself for. It’s about sport, but it’s also about poverty, alcoholism, the intertwining of personal and professional identity, and the crisis of contemporary masculinity. 

Sport novels have the potential to be enjoyed by anyone. However, many readers are only familiar with the classics: The Natural, Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams), End Zone, etc. which is a shame; excellent, profound sports novels are being released all the time.  

So, selected to provide a range of topics and narrative styles, here are seven contemporary novels about sport.

The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou

Sadie, a swimmer, and Digger, a wrestler, are preparing for the chance to realize their lifelong dreams: winning Olympic gold. But it’s now or never for them as athletes—being in their mid-to-late twenties already means they’ll probably be too old to compete in the next games, and this puts immense pressure on their new relationship. And that’s before tragedy strikes. 

In chapters that alternate points of view during the training and trials that lead up to the games, Sadie and Digger struggle to balance the start of their new relationship with the impending end of their lifelong dreams. This is such a smart book, demonstrating at every turn an authentic insight into the amateur sports world and the people in it. The Bone Cage is one of the most popular modern sport novels and is taught in universities around the world. 

The Sidekick by Benjamin Markovits

Brian Blum is a sportswriter whose early career was boosted by his close relationship with breakout NBA star Marcus Hayes, who he grew up with, lived with, and was like a brother to. But then they grew apart, and then Hayes retired. Now, Hayes is making a comeback, and he’s reached out to Brian for the first time in years. Despite the grand stage of the action, this is more a quiet family drama comprised of dual narrative threads. One thread is the two of them as boys, building their relationships with each other and with the game. The other thread is the two of them as men, reevaluating these relationships as they age, and making their sad, possibly doomed attempts to hold on to the power, energy, and relevance of youth.

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

Saul Indian Horse is a talented hockey player. He always has been. In fact, it was his gift on the ice that helped him survive and escape the genocidal residential school system. But an indigenous player would only be allowed so much success in the 1960s, a reality that encourages Saul’s becoming bitter, angry, and resentful, and jeopardizing his ability to play at any level at all. 

The novel starts with Saul in a rehab facility, from which he tells the reader the story of how he got there. With the telling, Saul reckons with who he has become, who he should be, and how much he was really able to leave that school behind. This is a remarkable novel, equally heartwarming and heartbreaking. It’s spare, tragic, and beautiful. 

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens

Emily Nemens was the editor of the Paris Review, perhaps the most prestigious literary magazine in the world. So I suspect it came as a surprise to many when her debut was a humorous novel about baseball. But it’s more than just humorous, and it actually reads like more of a series of linked character studies than a traditional novel. 

The narrative ostensibly hangs on the high-profile collapse of star leftfielder Jason Goodyear during Spring training, but this is only loosely followed. Each chapter centers on a new character whose life orbits Jason’s from varying distances: his batting coach, his agent, the team’s owner, a rookie, the baseball wives, a cleat chaser (a derogatory colloquialism for the women who pursue the ball players), a concessions worker in the stadium and her children. Jason, almost a mythical figure, is revealed only indirectly or in small glimpses, in moments where their lives are affected by his. Jason might be the star of this drama, but the real focus of this book is the people, humble and grandiose alike, who hold up the stage for him.  

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Straightforward and punchy, Carrie Soto Is Back is about the titular Carrie, the winningest Grand Slam champion in tennis history. She retires on top. And then, five years later, the younger Nicki Chan dominates the tour and closes in on Carrie’s records. But all the spiky, unpopular Carrie Soto really has is her records, so she laces up her signature shoes for one last season to keep what records she can and reclaim the rest. Along the way, she tries to rebuild her relationships with her father—who had been her coach once, until she fired him—with her exes and opponents, with the sport of tennis, with the concept of winning, and with herself. Who will she be when, eventually, she’s no longer the best in the world?

Breath by Tim Winton

Breath is a classic coming of age story. Pikelet is a loner. Too intellectual to fit in with the country kids, too low class to fit in with the city kids, he floats around alone until he meets another outcast, Loonie, the local wild boy, with whom he becomes best friends and surfing buddies. Eventually, the two of them fall in with Sando, an enigmatic and reclusive surfing guru, and his wife Eva, an angry and distant former athlete suffering from a chronic injury. Those relationships push the boys farther than they thought possible—no matter how dangerous that might be. Pikelet, Loonie, Sando, and Eva’s story is one of shifting loyalties and single-minded pursuits that have lifelong consequences. The descriptions of the surfing in particular paint it as something beautiful and powerful, terrible, and almost mystical.  

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

I have said that sport books often have great structures. Of all the books on this list, this is most true for Headshot. Eight of the best teenage girl boxers in the US face off in a two-day championship tournament. The chapters of the book are the matches, and each chapter goes back and forth between the points of view of the girls who are fighting that match—not just their experiences in that moment, but also in the past: what has brought them there, what has made them who they are? The writing is energetic, powerful. It lands a gut punch on the very first page and doesn’t let up. 

This novel only came out four months prior to the writing of this article. That’s not much time for historical reflection, but having read most of the best boxing novels ever written, I feel confident that Headshot will, one day, be counted among them. 

And a bonus:

17776 by Jon Bois

I know I said this list would be seven, but we’re going into extra innings. 17776 is not a novel, which is why I didn’t include it in the list, but it’s too interesting a text to leave out. It’s a digital novella, the entirety of which can be read here. 

Clever, creative, and original, 17776 is the story of Nine. As in, Pioneer 9, the satellite from the sixties, who fifteen thousand years in the future is given sentience and joins other sentient satellites in their favorite pastime, watching the many bizarre versions of football that have emerged in millennia of biological and technological progress on earth; for instance, one game uses the entire state of Nebraska as its field. 

17776 is sometimes silly. It’s definitely a lot of fun. But it’s also often strangely sweet: hurtling endlessly through space, Nine and the rest of the satellites have only each other and their distant impressions of us. 

7 Thrilling Novels Set on Greek Islands

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

It begins with a desire to escape. Travel is an elixir, Shirley Hazzard wrote, a talisman. And what is the act of opening a book, if not an act of travel, of transportation? If not, something alchemical? A charmed amulet. 

When I wrote my debut novel, The Nude, set on a fictionalized island off the southern coast of Greece, I didn’t seek to write about a wide-eyed American wandering abroad and finding her true self amongst the sparkling, specular water of a Grecian seascape. In other words, an escapist book for the sake of escapism. As The Nude circles around questions of cultural theft—namely the buying and selling of illicit antiquities—I hesitated at the idea of empty transportation, at extracting the superficial beauty from a place, without adding value back to it, or at the very least without showing all its sides, its complications, and curiosities. But like my novel’s narrator, I often got stuck in the myopia of my outsiderness. Travel is an elixir, the full Hazzard quote goes, a talisman: a spell cast by what has long and greatly been, over what briefly and simply is. That gap Hazzard describes, the difference between what has been and what is, speaks to a visitor’s greatest privilege and blind spot: the ability to enjoy the present of a place, without taking home any of its past hauntings, or current pains. 

I fear that destinations have become commodities. Things to document, to notice momentarily, and then dispose of, forget about. Onto the next. And yet—The Nude’s narrator, Elizabeth—an art historian sent to Greece to acquire a rare statue—has built a life, and career, on the act of noticing. To understand her interiority, I needed the reader to experience how she viewed Greece’s exteriority: the lights and sounds, the architecture, the food. Everything you might find on a postcard, in the kind of book I mentioned earlier. The terrain of escape. Though, as the novel unfurls, I hope Elizabeth’s point of view upends some of those expectations, flips the present onto the past, and vice versa. The idea of ethical travel is a much bigger conversation than the words I’m allotted here, but I will say that when it comes to armchair globetrotting, it comforts me to know that the following books exist, and that through them, we can experience the splendor of Greece but also its depth. So, here are seven thrilling novels set on Greek Islands that offer something more enduring than momentary reverie. Written by both Greek authors and non-Greek authors, both contemporary and not, each of these books casts a spell, and an aftershock, too, a lingering thoughtfulness, and a directive for not only departure, but attunement.

The Magus by John Fowles

The Magus follows a young, flailing poet named Nicholas Urfe, and his budding friendship with the depraved and wealthy English-born ascetic, Maurice Conchis. There’s much to exhume in this nearly 700-page tome: mythological parodies, palatial estates, and psychological mind games, all abutted against the backdrop of an enigmatic, fictional island named Phraxos. As Nicholas falls deeper into Maurice’s deception and disillusionment, the plot lopes toward the absurd. But at its core, The Magus is a book about performance and artifice, and the lengths we go to destroy, and then, remake ourselves again.

The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, translated by Peter Levis

Set on the Aegean Island of Skiatho, a woman named Hadoula understands the misery of being born a woman—and is set to, in simple terms, course correct for the future. A slim, and a biting novella that’s at once folkloric and phantasmagoric, Alexandros Papadiamantis’s descriptions—and Peter Levis’s translation—enervate Hadoula’s crumbling morality, and the island’s beguiling terrain to unnerving effect. Though written over a hundred years ago, The Murderesses’ exigent, exacting vision cuts deep as ever. 

Good Will Come from the Sea by Christos Ikonomou, translated by Karen Emmerich

Ikonomou’s Good Will Come from the Sea, translated by Karen Emmerich, is technically a short story collection. The four connected tales shadow a group of friends who relocate to an Aegean Island after Greece’s 2009 economic crisis. Ikonomou captures the milieu of Greece’s working class without renouncing the knotty truths of financial desperation—its bleakness and humor. Violence abounds, bestudding these stories with burnt-down tavernas, disfigurement, and disappearing sons. Though brutal, the collection is also soft-hearted. Every tragedy feels earned, and nuanced, and Ikonomou never turns his eye away from his characters’ pain, nor their true desires. 

Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne

Set on Hydra, Beautiful Animals circles around the story of two friends, Naomi, the daughter of a British art dealer whose family owns a villa on the island, and Samantha, her American guest. When the pair come across Faoud, a wounded Syrian refugee, lying despondent on the beach, Naomi aims to make him their new summer project. But Faoud resists Naomi and Sam’s naive abstraction of his story and life and forms a space in the narrative all his own, rendering this novel a psychologically astute, searing portrait of class division, modern tourism, the immigration crisis, and the often empty and self-serving humanitarianism of the wealthy.  

The Sleepwalker by Margarita Karapanou, translated by Karen Emmerich

Winner of France’s Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger, The Sleepwalker introduces us to a new Messiah named Manolis, sent down from an embittered God who aims to wake the island’s sleepwalking inhabitants—a mixture of expats and artists too consumed by their own quest for beauty. As we get to know these characters and their follies and begin to trail Manolis around the island—described, at one point, as a “prison smothered in flowers”—the veritable nightmare—enchanting and comedic and full of compassion—begins. 

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

A Separation follows an unnamed, cool-eyed translator navigating a recent split from her husband, Christopher. When her mother-in-law, unaware of the titular separation, pleads that the narrator go find Christopher, who has gone missing during a research trip, the narrator travels to a seaside village in the Mani peninsula. (OK, not an island, but close enough.) As the narrator searches for Christopher, she reflects on the dissolution of their marriage, on loss and absence, and the performance required to sustain a long-term partnership. Artfully tense and sharply observed, A Separation is a meditation on the parameters of intimacy, and, ultimately, love. 

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson

A novel of lust, desire, and memory, Antiquity turns its focus on a thirty-something year old narrator who inserts herself into the mother-daughter dynamic of Helena, an artist, and her fifteen-year-old daughter, Olga. The latter of which she develops a romantic and sexual relationship with over the course of a summer spent on Ermoupoli. The island of Syros comes alive in these pages, serving as a mirror and portal through which the narrator attempts to understand her own need for both belonging and destruction. And though the book—and the protagonist herself—remains aware of the unreliable, predatory storytellers that have preceded them, the delusion of Johansson’s narrator lends the novel a queasy slipperiness all its own. 

Suzanne Scanlon’s Memoir Confronts the Stories We Don’t Tell About Women and Madness

Posted on by Jo Lou

Suzanne Scanlon’s book, Committed: A Memoir of Finding Meaning in Madness, is a memoir unlike any I’ve read. Scanlon returns to the landscape of the past, reflecting on her experience of being committed in the New York State Psychiatric Hospital while a student at Barnard in the late 1990s.

Scanlon explores her own history with the granular attention of a novelist, beginning with her mother’s death when Scanlon was a child, tracing the ways this grief remade her and her family in different ways. But what I found most compelling about Committed is Scanlon’s attention to the larger narratives of madness and madwomen in particular. She reflects on her own reading in this time, writing incisively about how narratives about madness by women gave her new vocabulary in ways both helpful and harmful. Drawing from these women writers as well as her own archive of journals and hospital documents, Committed offers a timely insight into what institutionalization can make possible and how literary representation can change how we think, feel, and live our experiences. 

We spoke over zoom in May about the power of reading, the narrative demands of healing, and the challenges of writing honestly about the past.

Bekah Waalkes: I was really struck by how many texts you reference and think with: Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals, Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar. Can you talk about how you formed this personal archive, and how being a reader shaped your experiences?

Suzanne Scanlon: I mean, I wouldn’t be a writer without being a reader. I’m a reader first. It’s still the case, you know, that I am constantly thinking through ideas and having conversations through books, through thinking about artists or writers. And not just the work of writers, but also how they lived in the world, how they wrote, how they were writers over time, how their body of work developed. So my entire conception of myself as a writer has been through reading. It wasn’t something I had to make an effort to do. It’s almost as if I can’t stop from having these different writers within my own writing because it’s so central to how I’ve understood my own experience. 

BW: One fascinating strand in Committed is how impactful reading is, particularly for young people, but it feels like you problematize a straightforward attachment to books. I guess I’m asking, is reading always good for us?

SS: It’s a very hard thing to talk about, I think, because I absolutely believe in reading wildly and reading everything. But I do think that texts like The Bell Jar opened up a space for me, a space of possibility that maybe wasn’t there in the same way before. After I went with Esther through her experience, her suicide attempts, and into the hospital, that was in my consciousness, though I wouldn’t have said it at the time. Her story was very much something I’d absorbed in terms of a possibility of being human, being a young woman. And also refusing to become a woman and expressing rage at the world: I think The Bell Jar was one of the most satisfying articulations of that.

These writers were offering up ways to transcend the limits of the world they were born into.

I think the same thing with Marguerite Duras in The Lover, this desire for a ravishing and probably inappropriate and destructive kind of love affair. All these ways that these writers were offering up as ways to kind of transcend the limits of the world they were born into. 

It’s tricky because I would never ever in a million years say that it wasn’t the best thing to discover that. But I do think it’s serious, how much we’re shaped by media as they would say today. So these books were a profound merging or influence on who I was in those years.  

BW: If we’re thinking about the narrative frames you lean on as their own archives, I’m curious about the silences of these stories, the patchwork way you have to form your own archive. Can you talk about the kinds of stories we don’t tell about women and madness, about women and grief? (Another way to ask this is why do we read so many asylum stories?)

SS: When I was first trying to write the parts that are in the hospital, I was thinking so much about how this was such a formative time in my life. And it was as formative as the four years someone else the same age may have spent in college.

There’s no documentation, there’s no college reunion. There’s no way to stay in touch with the core group of people that were in my day to day life, in a way that that never happened again. I’m never in that day to day kind of living mode with anyone.

Before writing the book, I had such a desire for a reunion. But this impossibility just speaks to the fact that, first of all, many of these people aren’t alive, and if they are, they’re impossible to find.

Yet there’s no way to reconstitute a missing archive. And this became an interesting way for me to think about why I still want to write about it. All that absent archive was so much time in my life. So much. And people were there recording it, recording all of us. We were being observed day to day and yet there’s no coherent way to bring it back to life. 

BW: How did the process of writing unfold? How did you work with your own medical records? I loved when you talked about seeing this book as organized like Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, which I was definitely thinking about while reading. There feels like a clear link between the experimental treatment you received and the experiments in form and structure you engage in here. Did you know what form the book would take as you went? How did it change?

SS: I didn’t think the notebooks or the records would be that important to the book. It’s more about what’s not in them, but at the same time, they became important as material objects. Actually paying for and getting that small summary stack of the records and then looking at these notebooks and looking for something and finding little gems, even if most of it was unusable, made them important in construction the stories.

Originally I expected more of other women’s stories to be like reading, you know, Plath or Gilman or Virginia Woolf. Like I had a huge chapter about Virginia Woolf that was just totally cut. And Woolf is still in the book, just in different ways. In the proposal, the book was more about finding myself through these other  writers that I’ve read. But in the writing process, the autobiography became  so primary and that included those materials, the records and the notebooks.

We expect closure. We expect recovery. We expect narrative satisfaction. Life doesn’t give you that.

So the process was a lot of starting and stopping and circling around. I wrote a number of different beginnings to the book. It was almost like I was searching for different ways to begin and different ways to kind of find the center of the story. So I’m sure that comes through in reading. 

For some readers, maybe that is frustrating, but it was a choice I made deliberately. It links to a lot of the books that I love to read, which have more of a sense of opening and searching, as opposed to a strict beginning, middle, and end.

BW: This makes me think about writing as a form of processing your life and experience, but this is something that you really undermine in Committed. Has your relationship to writing changed? What can writing do for us?

SS: My relationship to writing has definitely changed. I was writing so intensely through the loneliest years of my life. And writing was my space to work out ideas and feelings, and it was a comfort and a place to feel like I could write back to everything that I hated about the world that I had to live in. 

But certainly since having a child, my writing has changed. It became more focused.  had a different sense of an audience. But it’s still the best thing in the world for me to write  and have something work, and have that discovery. The creative process, when it works, when I get to something, when it’s going well, that’s still the best thing in the world.

BW: How did you come to write the ending to Committed in this way? You seem to be resisting a narrative of recovery or healing, including a narrative that becoming a mother has given you closure.

SS: We expect closure. We expect recovery. We expect narrative satisfaction. And life doesn’t give you that. So I resisted for a long time. My need to write some sense of recovery was very fraught. And I went back and forth with my editor and my agent for a long time about that. And it was helpful in that it I ultimately forced me to sort of articulate my questions and problems with recovery. 

Being a mother is so important to who I am, but it’s also totally separate from like the seriousness and obsessive quality and sense of myself as a writer, which is everything to me. I don’t reject the fact of being a mother being healing. But I do reject the idea that motherhood is more important than everything else. When I’m writing, when I’m thinking , that is totally consuming and  the most important thing in my life. I just feel like we don’t often allow mothers to have an intellectual life or to let that intellectual life be as important and sometimes it’s shocking to me that we’re still thinking like that in this time. But also when you look you look at the long history of women’s writing, it’s also like, oh, that’s maybe not shocking at all.

BW: Like other memoirs of institutionalization, like Girl, Interrupted, other people in the hospital—other patients, doctors, residents—appear here. How did you think about the responsibility of  writing about other people in this book?

SS: It really was a case by case basis, but when I wrote,  I did not think about it. I wrote without thinking that I have to check in with these people. I’ve always had to write this way. And I can’t say it hasn’t gotten me in trouble. Mt family knew I was writing this book, but I didn’t run it by them. I know some people do. I didn’t do that. I believed that I had to do everything to make the book work, what it needed to be. And that included writing certain stories that people in my life aren’t going to be happy about. I have to live with that now.

I told my family that I had to bring alive who I was in that time. The perspective there, it’s not how I live now. It’s a returning. But I had to recreate that mind space. That felt like a kind of contract that I had with the reader. 

BW: I wanted to ask one last question about the ending. You write about going to see a new doctor, one who is shocked about your experience in the hospital and sort of dismissive. She “can’t imagine” why someone would need to be institutionalized so long, and you wonder if she would have such a failure of imagination if she had read some of the texts you write about: Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Janet Frame, etc. How do you think about the medical field? Do you have any hope?

SS: We’re all fucked, kind of. There’s a much stronger division right now between STEM and humanities. Students are not encouraged to focus on the humanities, on reading and writing and deep study. It’s such a technical grind if you’re interested in medicine. Our educational system is not interested in integrating these two things anymore.

But the doctor in the ending of the book was inexperienced. I don’t fault her. I fault the system. If anything, it reminds me that I was in this place where  a number of these doctors had been trained in the psychoanalytic tradition. And psychoanalysis is, you know, part of the humanities. It’s literary. It’s philosophical. 

I don’t think we acknowledge how much people need the humanities in order to make meaning of being a person, you know, make meaning of being human and living on this earth and trying to connect and go through all these experiences.

It’s a much larger structural problem, but it’s so depressing because I don’t know how I would have survived without being able to take time to just read books and to be in a classroom with professors who had devoted their lives to these ideas. 

Not All Men Are Wolves But Some Are

Posted on by Preety Sidhu

“The Cry of the Pack” by Elizabeth Garver Jordan

Mr. Nestor Hurd, our “feature” editor, was in a bad humor. We all knew he was, and everybody knew why, except Mr. Nestor Hurd himself. He thought it was because he had not a competent writer on his whole dash-blinged staff, and he was explaining this to space in words that stung like active gnats. Really it was because his wife had just called at his office and drawn his month’s salary in advance to go to Atlantic City. [1]

Over the little partition that separated his private office from the square pen where his reporters had their desks Mr. Hurd’s words flew and lit upon us. Occasionally we heard the murmur of Mr. Morris’s voice, patting the air like a soothing hand; and at last our chief got tired and stopped, and an office boy came into the outer room and said he wanted to see me.

I went in with steady knees. I was no longer afraid of Mr. Hurd. I had been on the Searchlight a whole week, and I had written one big “story” and three small ones, and they had all been printed. I knew my style was improving every day—growing more mature. I had dropped a great many amateur expressions, and I had learned to stop when I reached the end of my story instead of going right on. Besides, I was no longer the newest of the “cub reporters.” [2]  The latest one had been taken on that morning—a scared-looking girl who told me in a trembling voice that she had to write a special column every day for women. It was plain that she had not studied life as we girls had in the convent. She made me feel a thousand years old instead of only eighteen. I had received so much advice during the week that some of it was spilling over, and I freely and gladly gave the surplus to her. I had a desk, too, by this time, in a corner near a window where I could look out on City Hall Park and see the newsboys stealing baths in the fountain. And I was going to be a nun in three years, so who cared, anyway? I went to Mr. Hurd with my head high and the light of confidence in my eyes.

“’S that?” remarked Mr. Hurd, when he heard my soft footfalls approaching his desk. He was too busy to look up and see. He was bending over a great heap of newspaper clippings, and the veins bulged out on his brow from the violence of his mental efforts. Mr. Morris, the thin young editor who had a desk near his, told him it was Miss Iverson. Mr. Morris had a muscular bulge on each jaw-bone, which Mr. Gibson had told me was caused by the strain of keeping back the things he wanted to say to Mr. Hurd. Mr. Hurd twisted the right corner of his mouth at me, which was his way of showing that he knew that the person he was talking to stood at his right side.

“’S Iverson,” he began (he hadn’t time to say Miss Iverson), “got ’ny money?”

I thought he wanted to borrow some. I had seen a great deal of borrowing going on during the week; everybody’s money seemed to belong to everybody else. I was glad to let him have it, of course, but a little surprised. I told him that I had some money, for when I left home papa had given me—

He interrupted me rudely. “Don’t want to know how much papa gave you,” he snapped. “Want to know where ’tis.”

I told him coldly that it was in a savings-bank, for papa thought—

He interrupted again. I had never been interrupted when I was in the convent. There the girls hung on my words with suspended breath.

“’S all right, then,” Mr. Hurd said. “Here’s your story. Go and see half a dozen of our biggest millionaires in Wall Street—Drake, Carter, Hayden—you know the list. Tell ’em you’re a stranger in town, come to study music or painting. Got a little money to see you through—’nough for a year. Ask ’em what to do with it—how to invest it—and write what happens. Good story, eh?” He turned to Morris for approval, and all his dimples showed, making him look like a six-months-old baby. He immediately regretted this moment of weakness and frowned at me.

“’S all,” he said; and I went away.

I will now pause for a moment to describe an interesting phenomenon that ran through my whole journalistic career. I always went into an editor’s room to take an assignment with perfect confidence, and I usually came out of it in black despair. The confidence was caused by the memory that I had got my past stories; the despair was caused by the conviction that I could not possibly get the present one. Each assignment Mr. Hurd had given me during the week seemed not only harder than the last, but less worthy the dignity of a general’s daughter. Besides, a new and terrible thing was happening to me. I was becoming afraid— not of work, but of men. I never had been afraid of anything before. From the time we were laid in our cradles my father taught my brother Jack and me not to be afraid. The worst of my fear now was that I didn’t know exactly why I felt it, and there was no one I could go to and ask about it. All the men I met seemed to be divided into two classes. In the first class were those who were not kind at all—men like Mr. Hurd, who treated me as if I were a machine, and ignored me altogether or looked over my head or past the side of my face when they spoke to me. They seemed rude at first, and I did not like them; but I liked them better and better as time went on. In the second class were the men who were too kind—who sprawled over my desk and wasted my time and grinned at me and said things I didn’t understand and wanted to take me to Coney Island. [3]  Most of them were merely silly, but two or three of them were horrible. When they came near me they made me feel queer and sick. After they had left I wanted to throw open all the doors and windows and air the room. There was one I used to dream of when I was overworked, which was usually. He was always a snake in the dream—a fat, disgusting, lazy snake, slowly squirming over the ground near me, with his bulging green eyes on my face. There were times when I was afraid to go to sleep for fear of dreaming of that snake; and when during the day he came into the room and over to my desk I would hardly have been surprised to see him crawl instead of walk. Indeed, his walk was a kind of crawl.

Mr. Gibson, Hurd’s star reporter, whose desk was next to mine, spoke to me about him one day, and his grin was not as wide as usual.

“Is Yawkins annoying you?” he asked. “I’ve seen you actually shudder when he came to your desk. If the cad had any sense he’d see it, too. Has he said anything? Done anything?”

I said he hadn’t, exactly, but that I felt a strange feeling of horror every time he came near me; and Gibson raised his eyebrows and said he guessed he knew why, and that he would attend to it. He must have attended to it, for Yawkins stopped coming to my desk, and after a few months he was discharged for letting himself be “thrown down” on a big story, and I never saw him again. But at the time Mr. Hurd gave me his Wall Street assignment I was beginning to be horribly afraid to approach strangers, which is no way for a reporter to feel; and when I had to meet strange men I always found myself wondering whether they would be the Hurd type or the Yawkins type. I hardly dared to hope they would be like Mr. Gibson, who was like the men at home—kind and casual and friendly; but of course some of them were.

Once Mrs. Hoppen, a woman reporter on the Searchlight, came and spoke to me about them. She was forty and slender and black-eyed, and her work was as clever as any man’s, but it seemed to have made her very hard. She seemed to believe in no one. She made me feel as if she had dived so deep in life that she had come out into a place where there wasn’t anything. She came to me one day when Yawkins was coiled over my desk. He crawled away as soon as he saw her, for he hated her. After he went she stood looking down at me and hesitating. It was not like her to hesitate about anything.

She was forty and slender and black-eyed, and her work was as clever as any man’s, but it seemed to have made her very hard.

“Look here,” she said at last; “I earn a good income by attending to my own business, and I usually let other people’s business alone. Besides, I’m not cut out for a Star of Bethlehem. [4] But I just want to tell you not to worry about that kind of thing.” She looked after Yawkins, who had crawled through the door.

I tried to say that I wasn’t worrying, but I couldn’t, for it wasn’t true. And someway, though I didn’t know why, I couldn’t talk to her about it. She didn’t wait for me, however, but went right on.

“You’re very young,” she said, “and a long way from home. You haven’t been in New York long enough to make influential friends or create a background for yourself; so you seem fair game, and the wolves are on the trail. But you can be sure of one thing—they’ll never get you; so don’t worry.”

I thanked her, and she patted my shoulder and went away. I wasn’t sure just what she meant, but I knew she had tried to be kind.

The day I started down to Wall Street to see the multimillionaires I was very thoughtful. I didn’t know then, as I did later, how guarded they were in their offices, and how hard it was for a stranger to get near them. What I simply hated was having them look at me and grin at me, and seeing them under false pretenses and having to tell them lies. I knew Sister Irmingarde would not have approved of it—but there were so many things in newspaper work that Sister Irmingarde wouldn’t approve of. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything at all she would approve; and later, of course, I found there was. But I discovered many, many other, things long before that.

I went to Mr. Drake’s office first. He was the one Mr. Hurd had mentioned first, and while I was at school I had heard about him and read that he was very old and very kind and very pious. I thought perhaps he would be kind enough to see a strange girl for a few minutes and give her some advice, even if his time was worth a thousand dollars a minute, as they said it was. So I went straight to his office and asked for him, and gave my card to a buttoned boy who seemed strangely loath to take it. He was perfectly sure Mr. Drake hadn’t time to see me, and he wanted the whole story of my life before he gave the card to anyone; but I was not yet afraid of office boys, and he finally took the card and went away with dragging steps.

Then my card began to circulate like a love story among the girls at St. Catharine’s. Men in little cages and at mahogany desks read it, and stared at me and passed it onto other men. Finally it disappeared in an inner room, and a young man came out holding it in his hand and spoke to me in a very cold and direct manner. The card had my real name on it, but no address or newspaper, and it didn’t mean anything at all to the direct young man. He wanted to know who I was and what I wanted of Mr. Drake, and I told him what Mr. Hurd had told me to say. The young man hesitated. Then he smiled, and at last he said he would see what he could do and walked away. In five or six minutes he came back again, still smiling, but in a pleasanter and more friendly manner, and said Mr. Drake would see me if I could wait half an hour.

I thanked him and settled back in my seat to wait. It was a very comfortable seat—a deep, leather-covered chair with big wide arms, and there was enough going on around me to keep me interested. All sorts of men came and went while I sat there; young men and old men, and happy men and wretched men, and prosperous men and poor men; but there was one thing in which they were all alike. Every man was in a hurry, and every man had in his eyes the set, eager look my brother Jack’s eyes hold when he is running a college race and sees the goal ahead of him. A few of them glanced at me, but none seemed interested or surprised to see me there. Probably they thought, if they thought of it at all, that I was a stenographer trying to get a situation.

The half-hour passed, and then another half-hour, and at last the direct young man came out again. He did not apologize for keeping me waiting twice as long as he had said it would be.

“Mr. Drake will see you now,” he said.

I followed him through several offices full of clerks and typewriters, and then into an office where a little old man sat alone. It was a very large office, with old rugs on the floor, and heavy curtains and beautiful furniture, and the little old man seemed almost lost in it. He was a very thin little old man, and he sat at a great mahogany desk facing the door. The light in his office came from windows behind and beside him, but it fell on my face, as I sat opposite him, and left his in shadow. I could see, though, that his hair was very white, and that his face was like an oval billiard-ball, the thin skin of it drawn tightly over bones that showed. He might have been fifty years old or a hundred—I didn’t know which—but he was dressed very carefully in gray clothes almost as light in color as his face and hair, and he wore a gray tie with a star-sapphire pin in it. That pale-blue stone, and the pale blue of his eyes, which had the same sort of odd, moving light in them the sapphire had, were the only colors about him. He sat back, very much at his ease, his small figure deep in his great swivel-chair, the finger-tips of both hands close together, and stared at me with his pale-blue eyes that showed their queer sparks under his white eyebrows.

“Well, young woman,” he said, “what can I do for you?”

And then I knew how old he was, for in the cracked tones of his voice the clock of time seemed to be striking eighty. It made me feel comfortable and almost happy to know that he was so old. I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. I poured out my little story, which I had rehearsed with his clerk, and he listened without a word, never taking his narrow blue eyes from my face. When I stopped he asked me what instrument I was studying, and I told him the piano, which was true enough, for I was still keeping up the music I had worked on so hard with Sister Cecilia ever since I was eight years old. He asked me what music I liked best, and when I told him my favorite composers were Beethoven and Debussy he smiled and murmured that it was a strange combination. [5] It was, too, and well I knew it. Sister Cecilia said once that it made her understand why I wanted to be both a nun and a newspaper woman.

In a few minutes I was talking to Mr. Drake as easily as I could talk to George Morgan or to my father. He asked who my teachers had been, and I told him all about the convent and my years of study there, and how much better Janet Trelawney played than I did, and how severe Sister Cecilia was with us both, and how much I liked church music. I was so glad to be telling him the truth that I told him a great deal more than I needed to. I told him almost everything there was to tell, except that I was a newspaper reporter. I remembered not to tell him that.

He seemed to like to hear about school and the girls. Several times he laughed, but very kindly, and with me, you know, not at me. Once he said it had been a long time since any young girl had told him about her school pranks, but he did not sigh over it or look sentimental, as a man would in a book. He merely mentioned it. We talked and talked. Twice the direct young secretary opened the door and put his head in; but each time he took it out again because nobody seemed to want it to stay there. At last I remembered that Mr. Drake was a busy man, and that his time was worth a thousand dollars a minute, and that I had taken about forty thousand dollars’ worth of it already, so I gasped and apologized and got up. I said I had forgotten all about time; and he said he had, too, and that I must sit down again because we hadn’t even touched upon our business talk.

So I sat down again, and he looked at me more closely than ever, as if he had noticed how hot and red my face had suddenly got and couldn’t understand why it looked that way. Of course he couldn’t, either; for I had just remembered that, though I had been a reporter for a whole week, I had forgotten my assignment! It seemed as if I would never learn to be a real newspaper woman. My heart went way down, and I suppose the corners of my mouth did, too; they usually went down at the same time. He asked very kindly what was the matter, and the tone of his voice was beautiful—old and friendly and understanding. I said it was because I was so silly and stupid and young and unbusiness-like. He started to say something and stopped, then sat up and began to talk in a very business-like way. He asked where my money was, and I told him the name of the bank. He looked at his watch and frowned. I didn’t know why; but I thought perhaps it was because he wanted me to take it out of there right away and it was too late. It was almost four o’clock. Then he put the tips of his fingers together again, and talked to me the way the cashier at the bank had talked when I put my money in.

He said that the savings-bank was a good place for a girl’s money—under ordinary conditions it was the best place. The interest would be small, but sure. Certain investments would, of course, bring higher interest, but no woman should try to invest her money unless she had business training or a very wise, experienced adviser back of her. Then he stopped for a minute, and it seemed hard for him to go on. I did not speak, for I saw that he was thinking something over, and of course I knew better than to interrupt him. At last he said that ordinarily, of course, he never paid any attention to small accounts, but that he liked me very much and wanted to help me and that, if I wished, he would invest my money for me in a way that would bring in a great deal more interest than the savings-bank would pay. And he asked if I understood what he meant.

Certain investments would, of course, bring higher interest, but no woman should try to invest her money unless she had business training or a very wise, experienced adviser back of her.

I said I did—that he was offering to take entirely too much trouble for a stranger, and that he was just as kind as he could be, but that I couldn’t think of letting him do it, and I was sure papa wouldn’t want me to. He seemed annoyed all of a sudden, and his manner changed. He asked why I had come if I felt that way, and I began to see how silly it looked to him, for of course he didn’t know I was a reporter getting a story on investments for women. I didn’t know what to say or what to do about the money, either, for Mr. Hurd hadn’t told me how to meet any offer of that kind.

While I was thinking and hesitating Mr. Drake sat still and looked at me queerly; the blue sparks in his eyes actually seemed to shoot out at me. They frightened me a little; and, without stopping to think any more, I said I was very grateful to him and that I would bring the money to his office the next day. Then I stood up and he stood up, too; and I gave him my hand and told him he was the kindest man I had met in New York—and the next minute I was gasping and struggling and pushing him away with all my strength, and he stumbled and went backward into his big chair, knocking over an inkstand full of ink, which crawled to the edge of his desk in little black streams and fell on his gray clothes.

For a minute he sat staring straight ahead of him and let them fall. Then he brushed his hand across his head and picked up the inkstand and soaked up the ink with a blotter, and finally turned and looked at me. I stared back at him as if I were in a nightmare. I was opposite him and against the wall, with my back to it, and for a moment I couldn’t move. But now I began to creep toward the door, with my eyes on him. I felt some way that I dared not take them off. As I moved he got up; he was much nearer the door than I was, and, though I sprang for it, he reached it first and stood there quietly, holding the knob in his hand. Neither of us had uttered a sound; but now he spoke, and his voice was very low and steady.

“Wait a minute,” he said. “I want to tell you something you need to know. Then you may go.” And he added, grimly, “Straighten your hat!”

I put up my hands and straightened it. Still I did not take my eyes off his. His eyes seemed like those of Yawkins and the great snake in my dreams, but as I looked into them they fell.

“For God’s sake, child,” he said, irritably, “don’t look at me as if I were an anaconda! Don’t you know it was all a trick?” He came up closer to me and gave me his next words eye to eye and very slowly, as if to force me to listen and believe.

“I did that, Miss Iverson,” he said, “to show you what happens to beautiful girls in New York when they go into men’s offices asking for advice about money. Someone had to do it. I thought the lesson might come better from me than from a younger man.”

His words came to me from some place far away. A bit of my bit of Greek came, too—something about Homeric laughter. [6] Then next instant I went to pieces and crumpled up in the big chair, and when he tried to help me I wouldn’t let him come near me. But little by little, when I could speak, I told him what I thought of him and men like him, and of what I had gone through since I came to New York, and of how he had made me feel degraded and unclean forever. At first he listened without a word; then he began to ask a few questions.

“So you don’t believe me,” he said once. “That’s too bad. I ought to have thought of that.”

He even wrung from me at last the thing that was worst of all—the thing I had not dared to tell Mrs. Hoppen—the thing I had sworn to myself no one should ever know—the deep-down, paralyzing fear that there must be something wrong in me that brought these things upon me, that perhaps I, too, was to blame. That seemed to stir him in a queer fashion. He put out his hand as if to push the idea away.

“No,” he said, emphatically. “No, no! Never think that.” He went on more quietly. “That’s not it. It’s only that you’re a lamb among the wolves.” [7]

He seemed to forget me, then to remember me again. “But remember this, child,” he went on. “Some men are bad clear through; some are only half bad. Some aren’t wolves at all; they’ll help to keep you from the others. Don’t you get to thinking that every mother’s son runs in the pack; and don’t forget that it’s mighty hard for any of us to believe that you’re as unsophisticated as you seem. You’ll learn how to handle wolves. That’s a woman’s primer lesson in life. And in the meantime here’s something to comfort you: Though you don’t know it, you have a talisman. You’ve got something in your eyes that will never let them come too close. Now good-by.”

It was six o’clock when I got back to the Searchlight office. I had gone down to the Battery to let the clean sea-air sweep over me. [8] I had dropped into a little chapel, too, and when I came out the world had righted itself again and I could look my fellow human beings in the eyes. Even Mr. Drake had said my experience was not my fault and that I had a talisman. I knew now what the talisman was.

Mr. Hurd, still bunched over his desk, was drinking a bottle of ginger ale and eating a sandwich when I entered. Morris, at his desk, was editing copy. The outer pen, where the rest of us sat, was deserted by everyone except Gibson, who was so busy that he did not look up.

“Got your story?” asked Hurd, looking straight at me for the third time since I had taken my place on his staff. He spoke with his mouth full. “Hello,” he added. “What’s the matter with your eyes?”

I sat down by his desk and told him. The sandwich dropped from his fingers. His young-old, dimpled face turned white with anger. He waited without a word until I had finished.

“By God, I’ll make him sweat for that!” he hissed. “I’ll show him up! The old hypocrite! The whited sepulcher! [9] I’ll make this town ring with that story. I’ll make it too hot to hold him!”

Morris got up, crossed to us, and stood beside him, looking down at him. The bunches on his jawbones were very large.

“What’s the use of talking like that, Hurd?” he asked, quietly. “You know perfectly well you won’t print that story. You don’t dare. And you know that you’re as much to blame as Drake is for what’s happened. When you sent Miss Iverson out on that assignment you knew just what was coming to her.”

Hurd’s face went purple. “I didn’t,” he protested, furiously. “I swear I didn’t. I thought she’d be able to get to them because she’s so pretty. But that’s as far as my mind worked on it.” He turned to me. “You believe me, don’t you?” he asked, gently. “Please say you do.”

I nodded.

“Then it’s all right,” he said. “And I promise you one thing now: I’ll never put you up against a proposition like that again.”

He picked up his sandwich and dropped the matter from his mind. Morris stood still a minute longer, started to speak, stopped, and at last brought out what he had to say.

“And you won’t think every man you meet is a beast, will you, Miss Iverson?” he asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t seem to be able to say much. But it seemed queer that both he and Mr. Drake had said almost the same thing.

“Because,” said Morris, “in his heart, you know, every man wants to be decent.”

I filed that idea for future reference, as librarians say. Then I asked them the question I had been asking myself for hours. “Do you think Mr. Drake really was teaching me a—a terrible lesson?” I stammered.

The two men exchanged a look. Each seemed to wait for the other to speak. It was Gibson who answered me. He had opened the door, and was watching us with no sign of his usual wide and cheerful grin.

“The way you tell it,” he said, “it’s a toss-up. But I’ll tell you how it strikes me. Just to be on the safe side, and whether he lied to you or not, I’d like to give Henry F. Drake the all-firedest licking he ever got in his life.”

“You bet,” muttered Hurd, through the last mouthful of his sandwich. Mr. Morris didn’t say anything, but the bunches on his jaw-bones seemed larger than ever as he turned to his desk.

I looked at them, and in that moment I learned the lesson that follows the primer lesson. At least one thing Mr. Drake had told me was true—all men were not wolves.

  1. Atlantic City: A resort city in New Jersey known for gambling and entertainment. ↩︎
  2. “cub reporters”: New or inexperienced newspaper reporters. ↩︎
  3. Coney Island: A seaside area of Brooklyn, New York, with leisure attractions including a famous amusement park. ↩︎
  4. Star of Bethlehem: The star in the nativity story that leads the wise men to Christ’s birth. ↩︎
  5. Beethoven and Debussy: German composer Ludwig von Beethoven (1770–1827) and French composer Claude Debussy (1862–1918). ↩︎
  6. Homeric laughter: Irrepressible laughter. ↩︎
  7. lamb among wolves: This saying originated with a Biblical verse, “Behold, I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16). ↩︎
  8. Battery: The area at the southern end of Manhattan. ↩︎
  9. whited sepulcher: A Biblical reference to a person who appears good on the outside but turns out to be wicked inside. ↩︎

8 Novels About the Dangerous Pursuit of Youth and Beauty

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

We look at our faces so often we hardly notice them changing. I remember the shock of my first fine line, a thin crease between my eyebrows that is deepest in the morning because I grimace in my sleep. It bothered me how much it bothered me. But I was in my mid-twenties, and this was too early, I thought. 

From 2013—just after my college graduation—to 2021, I wrote and edited articles about beauty for several popular online publications. When I started working as a beauty editor, my skincare routine consisted of sunscreen moisturizer daily and Cetaphil face wash when I felt like it. Pretty soon I was bringing home piles of serums, moisturizers, and exfoliants with artful names like “Water Drench” and “Overnight Renewal.” I didn’t understand my skin type, and on one memorable occasion I removed my makeup with coconut oil, used a “facial cleansing brush,” and woke up with a face full of tender red hives. 

These experiences led me to youthjuice, my novel exploring the concept of beauty as body horror. The book follows Sophia, a young woman on the cusp of 30, who is drawn into the enigmatic world of HEBE, a beauty and wellness brand based in New York City. Named for the Greek goddess of youth, HEBE has a cult-like atmosphere revolving around its founder, Tree Whitestone, who insists she’s found the secret to eternal beauty. While Sophia quickly becomes addicted to her new lifestyle, she can’t help but notice that HEBE’s interns have a tendency to disappear. 

I like to think of The Picture of Dorian Gray as the grandfather of youthjuice—in fact, I used a quote from it as an epigraph (“The secret of remaining young is never to have an emotion that is unbecoming.”). In addition to Oscar Wilde’s only novel, here is a reading list of novels about the dangerous pursuit of youth and beauty. 

Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom 

Any time I find myself alone in a hotel room, I end up watching Botched on E! Morbid curiosity is part of the appeal, of course, but the emotional arc is also satisfying. By the end of each episode, the patient has been returned, however incrementally, to themselves. A similar impulse led me to pick up Aesthetica, Allie Rowbottom’s 2022 novel about a former influencer reflecting on her past as she prepares to undergo a procedure that will reverse her plastic surgery. Like Botched, I found it unexpectedly touching. Rowbottom handles her characters with care rather than judgment, but that doesn’t make her social commentary any less incisive. 

Rouge by Mona Awad 

Like youthjuice, Rouge dives head-first into the world of luxury skincare. The protagonist, Belle, a skincare obsessive who self-soothes by watching dermatology videos on YouTube, finds herself sucked into Rouge, the strange salon her mother frequented before her sudden death. Mona Awad uses the central mother-daughter relationship to unpack whiteness, wealth, age, and complex family dynamics, all within a fairytale dream atmosphere that lingered with me long after I turned the final page. 

If I Had Your Face by Frances Cha

The four main women in Frances Cha’s debut novel illustrate the pressures applied by Korean beauty standards and economic struggles from various angles. Through the lenses of plastic surgery, sex work, K-pop fandom, economic instability, and the art world, Cha unspools a narrative of envy and friendship between women. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 

In his relentless pursuit of unending beauty and youth, the titular Dorian Gray loses something of his humanity, but the ever-aging portrait in his attic demonstrates that sacrifice in a tangible way. It’s a classic for a reason! 

The Glow by Jessie Gaynor 

Desperate to save her career as a publicist after her work performance is called into question, Jane sets out to turn Cass, a beautiful woman running an ad-hoc wellness retreat in the country, into a Gwyneth Paltrow-esque lifestyle guru. Gaynor’s novel leans into humor and social satire, giving us truly hilarious insight into the making of an influencer. 

Monarch by Candice Wuehle 

In Monarch, Wuehle seamlessly combines ’90s pop culture and true crime references with commentary on beauty pageants, cryotherapy, and MKUltra. There are clear nods to JonBenét Ramsey and Nicole Brown Simpson, but it never feels tawdry or cheap. Instead, the narrative sparkles with compassion (and one of the most unforgettable character voices I’ve come across in years). 

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman 

The surrealist world of Kleeman’s debut novel is one of the best commentary on modern capitalism I’ve ever read. Surrealist television ads, a cult called the Church of the Conjoined Eater, a bizarre grocery store intentionally organized to confuse shoppers . . . all these elements come together to create a disorienting story that touches on body image and the pressure to optimize oneself in pursuit of perfection. 

The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin 

The Stepford Wives is about (spoiler alert) a town where the men are slowly replacing their strong-minded wives with docile robot versions that are exclusively interested in housekeeping and staying beautiful for their husbands. Even if you know how it ends, the sharp writing makes it well worth the read.

A Song of Tomatoes to My Grandmother

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

If there is a better-smelling vegetable than a tomato grown in dirt and ripened in the sun, I don’t know it. But I know I could almost conjure up that smell just from looking at my father’s old Super 8 video home movies. I think a tomato is my first sensory memory, though I’m sure having the movie available to me as a kid helped amplify this remembrance.

One of my parents’ favorite home movies of me takes place in their suburban Chicago house in the seventies. I was maybe two to three years old, trailing my mother, trying to get her attention while she worked out any stray weeds in their garden. The movie cuts, and we see my mother finally turn to me as I waddle over, this time holding a bevy of green tomatoes in the bucket of my dress, smiling and so proud: just like Mommy! Clearly she hadn’t discovered the deliciousness of the green tomato like she has now. I can almost hear Mom’s expletives in Tagalog, but can you blame me? I must have watched her pick red tomatoes all morning, and I’ve wanted to be just like her since I can remember: raven wavy hair, stylish clothes, even in the garden. What the camera doesn’t show in this garden—their very first garden in a new country, all of time stretched out before her—is a question mark of when she will see her family in the Philippines again.

In the 16th century, the Spanish brought the tomato to the Philippines, and the Portuguese brought the tomato to India, and I—South Asian Filipina—planted my family’s first tomato plants in north Mississippi in 2020. Along with thousands and thousands of people, we started tending to our gardens with a renewed sense of attention that year. We were home more often, so no more missed watering days, no excuses for letting our vegetables dry up. My husband and I had gardened together since we were first dating back in western New York, but this was to be a totally new plant hardiness zone: our first veggie garden in Mississippi.

If there is a better-smelling vegetable than a tomato grown in dirt and ripened in the sun, I don’t know it.

The fear of tomatoes goes back hundreds of years. Folks in the Middle Ages thought tomatoes were poisonous, but that’s only because they regularly ate them off pewter plates, which leached lead. In 1883, acrobat-performer John Ritchie was famously pelted with them after an audience disapproved of his performance, forcing him to flee the theater in a “perfect shower of tomatoes.” As a kid, I remember funny, garish posters that screamed: “The nation is in chaos—can nothing stop this tomato onslaught?” This was the tag line for the 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, in which tomatoes lurked in corners and swimming pools waiting to harm Earth’s citizens.

The Guinness Book of World Records notes that the largest-ever tomato plant grew in Epcot Center and produced over 32 thousand tomatoes, or over one thousand pounds of them, before it died in 2010. The gardeners pruned it as if it were a tree, with its stems utterly bare, no runners or leaves, until the umbrella of branches and fruit towered over twenty feet tall.

Food writers and cooks say the tomato represents umami flavor the best because its savory but sweet flavor comes from its high acid content. Soy sauce and fish sauce are all foods high in umami, so it’s no surprise they pair deliciously with tomatoes too.

What the camera doesn’t show in this garden—their very first garden in a new country—is a question mark of when she will see her family in the Philippines again.

For my mother, the seeds have long been planted in her mind that the garden was a sort of shelter, perhaps a way to control and think about something else besides missing her own family. Her tiny mother (my Lola Felipa) remains frozen with a perpetual soft smile in the framed picture in our living room, already a ghost for three years by the time that gardening home movie was taken, as my mom lost her just a month after she gave birth to me during a hard winter in Chicago.

I think that ghost still travels across the ocean to her granddaughter, and has been for over 49 years—this granddaughter who skim-searches the face of every elderly Filipina that she encounters for a sweet and resigned smile just like in her mom’s framed picture.

I write this song of tomatoes to my Lola and wonder if she would be amazed, if she would smile at my life, and what I’ve made with my husband and my own garden. What would the clicks of her tiny kitten heels on my paver stones sound like? And would those clicks rhyme with the bubbles of our birdbath? And would it make sense to her plumeria trees, back across the ocean and into the Philippines? Or would it be more like a joke she’s too tired to ask my mother to translate, and would she just leave me with a tired chuckle, a pat on my hands while bringing them to her face so she could smell the tomatoes she never knew how to grow?

From Bite by Bite by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Copyright © 2024 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Excerpted by permission of Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.