Both/And, EL’s series of essays by trans writers of color, is going to be a book published by HarperOne—edited by our editor-in-chief, Denne Michele Norris! The anthology will feature new essays by acclaimed writers Tanaïs, Meredith Talusan, and J Wortham, alongside some of our community’s most beloved entertainers and activists, such as Peppermint and Raquel Willis, as well as essays by Zeyn Joukhadar, Autumn Fourkiller, Denny, and Jonah Wu from the original series.
Both/And will not seek to justify trans lives in a culture that remains hostile to their existence. This anthology will instead tell stories both intimate and expansive, gritty and messy, that honor trans self-determination in the face of obstacles that often seem insurmountable.
Norris says, “These essaysare intended to give voice to the complexity of our lives, while highlighting our bravery in taking center stage. We’re writing for our lives, yes, but we are also writing towards one another.”
As for Electric Literature, it’s safe to say we’ve entered our book publishing era! Both/And will be EL’s first book; we hope the first of many. Join us in celebrating this important milestone, the growth of our publication, and most importantly, our commitment to elevating trans writers.
Here are some of the writers featured in the anthology:
Denny is a writer, actor, and musician, currently working as the LGBTQ Communities Reporter at Reckon News. She has appeared in the TV series “POSE,” “New Amsterdam,” and “City on Fire.” Her writing has appeared in The Grammy’s, Allure Magazine,PAPER, and the New York Times’ Modern Love.
Autumn Fourkiller is a writer and mystic from Stilwell, Oklahoma,the “Early Death Capital of the World.” She is currently at work on a novel about Indigenous identity, the Olympics, and climate change. A 2022 Ann Friedman Weekly Fellow, her work can be found in Atlas Obscura, Longreads, and elsewhere.
Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Thirty Names of Night, which won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award, and The Map of Salt and Stars, which won the Middle East Book Award. Joukhadar guest edited Mizna‘s 2020 Queer + Trans Voices issue, serves on the board of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI), and is a mentor with the Periplus Collective.
Denne Michele Norris is the Editor-in-Chief of Electric Literature, and the first Black, openly trans woman to helm a major literary publication. A 2021 Out100 Honoree, her writing has appeared in McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and ZORA. She co-hosts the podcast “Food 4 Thot,” and her debut novel, When The Harvest Comes, will be published by Random House in 2025.
Peppermint is an American actress, singer, songwriter, television personality, drag queen, and activist. She is best known from the nightlife scene, and in 2017 was the runner-up on the ninth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” In 2018, Peppermint made her debut in The Go-Go’s-inspired musical “Head Over Heels as Pythio,” becoming Broadway’s first out trans woman to originate a lead role.
Meredith Talusan is the author of the memoir Fairest, a 2020 Lambda Literary Award finalist. She has contributed to ten other books and has received journalism awards from GLAAD, The Society of Professional Journalists, and the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association. She is also the founding Executive Editor and current Contributing Editor at them., Condé Nast’s LGBTQ+ site.
Tanaïs is a writer, artist and perfumer behind the independent beauty and fragrance house TANAÏS. They are the author of In Sensorium: Notes for My People, winner of the 2022 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and Bright Lines, a novel. They are currently working a speculative sci-fi book, Stellar Smoke, which will be published by Dutton Books in 2025.
Raquel Willis is an African American writer, editor, and transgender rights activist. Formerly, she was a national organizer for the Transgender Law Center and the Executive Editor of Out Magazine. She is the Director of Communications for the Ms. Foundation for Women. Her debut memoir, The Risk It Takes to Bloom, was published in 2023.
J Wortham is an American journalist. They work as a culture writer for the New York TimesMagazine and co-host the New York Times podcast “Still Processing” with Wesley Morris. In 2020, with Kimberly Drew, Wortham published Black Futures, an anthology of Black art, writing, and other creative work.
Jonah Wu is a non-binary and transmasculine Chinese American fiction writer and essayist. Their work can be found in Longleaf Review, beestung, Jellyfish Review, Bright Wall/Dark Room, The Seventh Wave, smoke and mold, and the Los Suelos anthology. They are a winner of Brave New Weird: The Best New Weird Horror.
I was the worst mother in the world that Tuesday night when Maggie was two months old. She was exactly the weight—pounds and ounces—she’d been the moment she was born. I boiled water for Lise’s butter noodles and wore Maggie strapped to my chest in a baby wrap, the fabric stretchy, cornflower blue and dotted with spilled milk. The wrap smelled a bit sour. For over a week, I’d been dropping milk in Maggie’s tiny mouth every ten minutes, as many drops as she’d swallow. The rest slid down her chin and neck and onto the wrap. I slept in ten minute bursts so I could feed her when the timer went off.
Still, she was starving, shrinking.
I tracked the events that led me here, a week before my twenty sixth birthday, somehow a mother of two, somehow alone, carrying this hunger the way I had for my younger brother ten years before. Back then, my brother and I survived on expired burgers I’d swiped at the end of my McDonald’s shifts. Our mother ate the burgers with us some nights, in between disappearances into beach parties and weed and warm beer, habits she’d leaned into years before dad died.
Dad had always been the Sunday night dinner parent, the one who organized holidays and getaways to the river or beach camping or sneaking into the pool at the Holiday Inn. It made sense to me that when he died, all that ended. At holiday gatherings with our extended family, when a cousin came in loaded or an aunt brought over godawful oversalted gumbo, Dad said the same thing he said about Mom when she disappeared from our family or woke me up in the middle of the night to reload the dishwasher and stood behind me, wiping her eyes and asking what it meant to have a daughter who actually loved her mother and showed it. Dad cleaned up the mess the load cousins left or secretly dumped two thirds of the gumbo in the trash or woke up to Mom’s voice, stepped between me and Mom and the dishwasher, led me to bed, and sat on the foot of my bed reminding me to take deep breaths until my body relaxed enough to fall asleep.“Can’t blame someone for being bad at something they’ve never been good at,” he said.
I turned away from the boiling noodles, tipped Maggie’s head back, and set a drop of milk on her lips with a syringe. She moved her face around my chest, looking for milk. I set the syringe against my breast and into her mouth. She swallowed half a milliliter this time, letting the other half spill out of her mouth and onto the blue wrap. More pale stains. More wasted milk.
Dad had always been the Sunday night dinner parent, the one who organized holidays and getaways to the river.
I tickled the soles of Maggie’s feet until she perked up. The water made that hissing sound, that white noise, the pre-boil. I set three drops of milk in Maggie’s mouth at a time. She drank slowly, drop by drop. One more half of the syringe. “Take it slow,” the lactation consultant had told me. “She can burn calories if she spends too much energy swallowing. Babies swallow with their whole body.”
Lise chattered a couple rooms away, talking to herself in two-year-old syllables, real words mixed with leftover baby babble. She sounded happy. I dumped noodles into the boiling water. I reset the timer for Maggie’s feeds.
Ten more minutes.
I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes.
For over a week, I had been alone in the house with the girls, pacing, wearing Maggie, pacing, following Lise from room to room, pacing, feeding Maggie drops of milk. When Lise watched a movie or slept, I unpacked boxes. At night, I slept in ten minute increments, in between feeds.
Hurst’s job at the Navy ended a few weeks after Maggie was born. For three years, I believed the Navy was the problem, with its unrealistic demands and weird control tactics. The Navy had caused Hurst to disengage, to spend his minimal time off ignoring us. The day after Hurst was discharged, guys we hired in a U-haul followed us down to Florida. A few days after we arrived, Lise came down with a snotty, sneezing cold. It ran through the whole house. When Maggie got it, she was extra sleepy, not nursing for very long, milk falling out of the side of her mouth. My breasts stayed hard, never empty. I bought a baby scale and tracked Maggie’s weight gain. She took breaks from nursing to cough and sneeze and whimper.
Her weight didn’t change for three days. “She’s not growing,” I said to Hurst. He wanted to check. Maybe I misread the scale. Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe I incorrectly wrote down her weight from yesterday and the day before and the week before that.
I called pediatricians but couldn’t find an appointment. She didn’t grow. I went to the emergency room, waited for four hours. The doctors told me, “She’s got RSV. Day 5 is the worst, and that’s tomorrow. Go home.” I went home. I called lactation consultants. They told me how to hold her, to tip her, so she could breathe easier through her stuffed nose and nurse more effectively. They told me to buy a plastic sack with tiny silicone tubes. I pumped the milk left in my breasts after Maggie nursed. I put that milk in the plastic sack and wore it around my neck. The long, thin, silicone tubes went from the sack, through my bra strap. I taped them next to my nipple, threaded them into Maggie’s mouth while she nursed. As she did, I squeezed the sack so she could get more milk.
She didn’t grow.
I returned to the ER two days later. “I think she has failure to thrive,” I told the doctors and nurses. I told them she had vomited four types of formula, could only hold down breastmilk, and barely any at that. “She has a small jaw,” they said. They kept calling her a preemie, and I kept correcting them, “She was born a day after her due date. More than 40 weeks.”
Maybe I misread the scale. Maybe I was overreacting.
I told them my breasts felt full after she nursed. They told me she may be a slow grower. Is that even a thing? They told me I must have been wrong about her due date. I must have misread the scale over and over. They told me to go home, so I did. The next available appointment for a pediatrician was two weeks away. I called a private lactation consultant. I couldn’t afford to pay her to come help us, but she agreed to talk to me for fifteen minutes on the phone for free. “Feed her every ten minutes,” she said. “Use a spoon or a medicine dropper.”
“I have one of those plastic syringes from the Children’s Advil bottle. And the one milliliter things from the hospital.”
“If she’s growing, she’s eating,” the lactation consultant said. “Feed her as much as you can, as often as you can. Try every ten minutes until she starts to grow.” She explained the way babies can lose weight if they spend too much energy swallowing. “Receiving,” she said, “is all babies have to do. It’s up to us to teach them how to receive in a way that helps them.”
That’s how we all start, I thought. Receiving.
“This will be tiring,” she told me, one minute after the free fifteen minute consult ended. “Do whatever you can to take care of yourself until she starts to grow.”
At night, I slept for ten minute increments, in between Maggie’s drops. As I fell asleep for my small naps, I repeated sentences in my mind. She will wake up all the way. She will drink. She will swallow well. She will wake up all the way. She will swallow. She will survive.
I didn’t repeat those sentences when I fell asleep accidentally, leaning against the kitchen counter, that Tuesday night while the noodles boiled. I woke up to the BZZZZZZ of the timer and Lise saying, “Mommy?” Lise stood under the stove looking up at the pot, bubbling, steaming, hissing, her arm up, reaching toward it. “Bubbles!” she said.
“NO!” I said. “Oh no. No!”
I moved in between her and the stove, hearing my own voice like it was someone else’s, a single syllable, as it turned into a growl. Lise stepped backward, stunned. I shoved the pot to the back of the stove and sat down on the floor, slowly, pulling a pre-filled syringe from the counter on my way down. Lise crouched five feet away, her eyes wide. “I’m sorry,” I tried to say. Was I even saying real words? Was it still that growling? Lise froze in her crouch, a defensive animal, staring at me. Tears slammed out of her eyes, but she didn’t blink.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice sounded human again. I put drops of milk, carefully, in Maggie’s mouth, even though my shoulders shook. Maggie drank half a syringe. Then the other half. Stay down, I thought, like my command could keep the milk in her belly.
Lise crept toward me, and I dropped the syringe and held onto her. My shoulders kept shaking, but I didn’t cry, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t put this tiny person in any kind of position to take care of me.
“I was scared. You’re safe.”
Words, but shaky. An attempt at the sing song voice the waldorf teachers told me would protect a toddler’s nervous system, the same nervous system I had just jacked the fuck up as I plowed Lise’s totally normal curiosity about the boiling bubbles into a small and scaryheartbreak. I smoothed her pale hair. “You’re safe.”
Lise froze in her crouch, a defensive animal, staring at me.
Shortly after Dad died, I found a zine in a local coffee shop about mad women in the attic. The writer had surrendered her children to the state, and she wrote about the mythological but widely unacknowledged belief that a woman’s value is comprehensively connected to her success at parenting, and of course some women scream and claw, retreating to the attic or setting the whole house on fire. The zine reinforced what I’d been hearing forever: that it’s not only unreasonable to expect my mom to act differently around us, but it was shitty to judge her for being unable to conform to the 1990s calm and predictable sitcom mother who could only really survive inside of the walls of an episode, a story written by someone else, directed, filmed, and edited to make the audience feel stressed or warm at exactly the right moments, to bring every conflict to redemption, to bring every potential despair to swift and satisfying resolution.
The night before I fell asleep leaning against the counter, Hurst went to work at an overnight security temp job and did not return home in the morning. He did not answer the phone. Four hours after Hurst should have arrived home, Cherry called me. “He’s here,” she said. “Sleeping, recovering.”
“From what?” I asked.
“It’s all so hard,” Cherry said.
I said, “Maggie’s grown a few ounces. I think the feeding schedule is working.” I paused. “Cherry,I need him to come home. I need to sleep.”
“He’s just not ready to be a father.”
I wanted to argue with her. I wanted to tell her but Hurst slept all day before his shift.
I wanted to tell her He’s been a father for almost three years.
I wanted to say, Put his ass on the phone right now.
I didn’t want to go there though. I didn’t want to let my low-class sailor mouth frustration show through. I didn’t want to command people, to tell them they weren’t loving me correctly. I said, “I really need to sleep.”
“You’re both working so hard,” Cherry said. “I’ll swing by tomorrow, bring you a treat.”
The next day, Cherry swung by. She held Maggie while I took a shower. I stood under the water for twenty minutes, as hot as I could get it. I put my face in it, sat on the floor, rested against the shower wall.
When I came out in a fresh t-shirt and shorts, my hair wet and stuck to my neck, Cherry handed me Maggie. All of the full syringes sat on the table, unused.
“We missed a feeding?”
“I was afraid to do it wrong,” she said, her eyebrows raised. She looked pitiful, concerned, truly concerned.
I glared at her, “It’s fine.” I showed her how to feed Maggie, making my voice as soft and sing song as I could, to protect her nervous system.
“I bought you a set of silverware,” she said. “It’s on the counter. Everything you might need. Expensive.”
I didn’t want to command people, to tell them they weren’t loving me correctly.
I strapped Maggie to my chest and walked into the kitchen, set the ten-minute timer, and stared at the silverware. Cherry gathered her things to leave, and I took five deep breaths.
“Thanks. It’s real nice,” I said. “When is Hurst coming home?”
“He needs a few days,” Cherry said. “Night shifts are so hard.”
I walked out, watched Cherry sort her things and move toward the front door.
“He’s a good father,” she said.
“Ok,” I said.
“A good man.”
“Right.”
“Most men would have left already, I mean really left. Two kids, and one of them…Men can’t handle it like we can.”
“Ok.”
“He wasn’t ready to be a father, you know. He didn’t know what he was in for.”
“Sure.”
“And I know you have trouble with your family. It sounded like your dad was a good person, but your mom…It’s hard to be the only grandparent around.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I bet that is really fucking hard.”
I walked past her without looking. I walked into my bedroom where Lise napped on a small toddler bed in the corner, where a noise machine played rain sounds, where I could sit and massage my hot, hard breasts, where I could seethe, where I would feel just a little bit less alone.
After nine days of the ten-minute feeds, my eyes blurred.
My vision went sideways.
Hurst had stopped by at some point, then returned to Cherry’s house to help her with some projects. “Her espresso machine, MWAH,” he said. He made a chef’s kiss in the air. He took a long shower, watched Tangled with Lise, then left.
I touched the walls while I walked to keep them vertical. I hadn’t yet unpacked the ice trays, and our belongings were a maze of half unpacked boxes. I filled random food storage containers and some of Lise’s plastic toys with water, froze it, and carried the ice to stay awake. I put the ice in my bra until it burned.
When I took my ten-minute naps, as I fell asleep, I told myself I will wake up in ten minutes I will wake up in ten minutes I will wake up in ten minutes she will survive.
Sometimes, I started to doze while I fed Maggie, a kind of darkness sliding across my eyes. I pinched my skin where it would hurt the most—my armpit, my ass, my inner thigh. I slapped myself in the hand, the arm, the face. Stay awake!
I laid Maggie on the floor and hopped around the house. I did jumping jacks. I jogged in circles. I pulled my hair. I pinched. I slapped.
I started to doze while I fed Maggie, a kind of darkness sliding across my eyes.
Lise watched Tangled like three times a day.
My mom drove up from Key West with her new husband. He was in the Navy, and they had been stationed in a big, nice house near the water. When I opened the front door, Mom handed me a giant, wrapped present. I looked at her like she was insane. There was a shiny, fuschia bow on top. I wondered how much it cost. I wondered what inspired her to buy me a present. Her birthday was exactly one week before mine. Had my birthday already passed?
“Are you okay?” she said and blew into the house. She cuddled with Lise on the couch for a few minutes then started doing dishes. “I’m making dinner,” she said. “You rest.”
She’d never acted like this before. I wondered if she’d watched a movie with one of those active, upbeat mom characters. I wondered if this was a performance for her husband or for me.
I took three ten-minute naps in between feeds and returned to the kitchen. Pots boiled. Mom’s new husband played with trucks on the kitchen floor with Lise. Mom told me to open my presents.
“I missed your birthday,” I said. “I didn’t get you anything.”
She shrugged. Years ago, this would have been basically an emergency, proof that I didn’t think about her, that she didn’t matter to me. It would take at least three hours to resolve, so many questions, so much explaining.
I mumbled that I’d paint her something and opened the present. Inside were two separate gifts. The first was a babydoll black crop top with large, white letters that said SHOW ME YOUR TIPS.
“Because you were a waitress for so long,” Mom said. “Plus the breastfeeding thing.”
The other present was a boomerang. I held it up. “Is this real?”
“Oh yeah. He thought you’d like it,” she nodded toward her husband.
“Why?”
“I have no earthly idea but it’s funny right?” She chuckled and bustled around the kitchen. Who was this woman?
“Maggie’s looking at you,” she said.
I looked down at the warm body strapped to my chest. Maggie was wide awake. Her cheeks were pink. Did they look rounder? Her eyes were bright. She cooed. She had been drinking more and more, each feed, but I was afraid to believe in the progress. I laughed once, awkward, choked, loud. I felt fists of hope and despair rising in my throat. I held them there.
I fed Maggie an extra syringe. She gulped it down. Then another. Then another. Mom appeared close to my body, her face close to my face. “I think you saved her life,” she said, her voice so sincere, so sweet.
I couldn’t look at her.
Fuck off, I wanted to say. I held onto the boomerang and felt my tits tighten hard against Maggie as she nursed on the plastic syringe.
I sat down on the couch and flipped through some hippie book about breastfeeding, thinking about how new moms read books and ask questions and research and talk and talk, trying to map out how to be the best kind of mother. It feels like we’re building a map with invisible ink and dissolving paper. It feels like every decision we make to take care of babies and children might be counted as exactly right to one person and exactly wrong to another. There’s no right way to be a mother, the ladies in mommy groups said. Just be a good enough mother.
For more than ten years, I’d tried to convince myself that my mom was good enough. It shouldn’t matter that she had failures—her addiction to cocaine, the way she left me and my brother after Dad died, the way she cut the brake lines in Dad’s motorcycle and tried to get him arrested on false charges more than once during their divorce. Those were mistakes. She had apologized for them several times over the years, calling me at two in the morning, drunk on Dos Equis, listing her failures, listing her shame. I’d forgiven her as many times as she apologized. I watched her moving around the kitchen, squatting to chat with Lise, laughing with her husband. My head felt like it was full of water.
I thought: This is what it feels like to barely make it. I remembered the way mom argued with my dad, usually upset with him for not giving her the kind of attention she expected after he got home from work. I’m not a fucking martyr, she said. I refuse to give up everything for this family.
For more than ten years, I’d tried to convince myself that my mom was good enough.
Maggie fell asleep against my chest, and I thought about Joan of Arc, the faceless, short haired gal I imagined when I heard the word martyr. She died because she wouldn’t stop worshiping. I imagined living a life that allowed me to even consider what or who I would like to worship. I wondered what the word worship even really meant. To adore something. To honor something so much that you spend all of the minutes of your life building a shrine to it, praying to it. I thought about the people who build and maintain pyramids and temples. I thought about monks and nuns. Were any of them actually living their lives? Or was it just pretend, a show, a theater production of a life to prove that their god is worth paying attention to?
I wondered what, if anything, I would worship if my kids were thriving, if my husband ever came home at all. I tried to remember my life before these ten-minute feeds. What did I do? What did I love? I nannied for other families, cleaned houses, wrote unpaid articles for a local news journal. If I wanted anything, it was more time to illustrate and write. I worked my ass off to get it. I worked my ass off to stay pregnant, to not lose Maggie the way I had lost my first, stillborn baby. I worked my ass off to pay the bills and feed my toddler and get through the next shift, the next meal, the next morning. Had I ever worshipped anything at all? I closed my eyes: don’t fall asleep wake up in ten minutes please survive.
I wondered how long our savings would last. My last shift at my nanny job happened a day prior to packing the U-haul and moving back to Florida. I wondered how I could work if Maggie didn’t start to eat like a regular baby. I wondered if Hurst would step up and enroll in college like he’d been supposedly aching to do since before I met him. I wondered how long a human body could stay awake before collapsing. I wondered if I was making choices, if I had any choices other than filling up the syringe when the ten-minute timer went off in my pocket. I wondered if either of us would survive.
“You made the choice,” Cherry said, the day we arrived in Florida, watching the movers stack boxes in the living room of our tiny, empty rental. She sounded ominous, like this was the beginning of a horror movie, and everyone in town but us knew our house was haunted. We could try to outsmart the ghosts, we could fight them with our whole bodies, we could even try to love them, to invite them in, to live alongside them, but the outcome would be the same. “This is what happens when you have babies without the money to raise them,” she said. “This was a choice you made.”
As a species, we are tortured by the notion of non-belonging: from an evolutionary standpoint, if we don’t fit in, we may just die. Many novels concentrated on the person who feels inferior and out of place—even if they aren’t novels we’d categorize as thriller or horror—result in someone’s murder. The stakes of being excluded are just that high.
You’d think it would be easy, endearing to readers, a protagonist who feels excluded in an elite space, particularly if you agree that every human being has at some point feared exclusion. And yet, I’ve noticed that audiences sometimes approach a character in this predicament with a certain stinginess, a certain lack of generosity. My working theory is that when we experience a character whose exclusion feels profound, whose envy is working on overtime, whose recognition of the divide between those who have and those who do not is ultra-clear, we, the audience, the reader, are confronted with our own terror of non-belonging. We must, therefore, intellectualize. We must find reasons why we could never, ever be the person on the page or the screen. We would not allow ourselves to be put in such a vulnerable position. We would leave the elite space that threatens our sanity, our livelihood, our life. We would be smart. Creating a protagonist who can cradle readers’ unconscious defenses while simultaneously pulling them forward is no easy feat.
My novel Man’sBestFriend follows a long established canon of ordinary people keenly feeling their lack in elite environments: Rebecca, TheGreatGatsby, The Talented Mr.Ripley, and of course, Saltburn. The protagonist of my book knows what it feels like to be an outsider. El was a scholarship kid at a tony Manhattan private school; now 30, she’s a failed actress with nothing going on for her. Until she meets Bryce, a mysterious trust fund heir who can give her the access to the life she’s always wanted. But of course, everything comes at a price…
In this reading list, I present seven novels with eight different protagonists, women and men of ordinary means who find themselves in elite spaces, in homes and universities and glittering cities with great concentrations of wealth and power. What I love about each of these protagonists is how unique they each feel; how their primary struggle is the same, but the worlds they come from and the worlds to which they would belong vary. Some of these characters primarily grapple with non-belonging around money; for others, their sense of non-belonging also encompasses their race or gender or sexual orientation. A protagonist finding themselves in a highly privileged, historically exclusionary space is an age-old trope for a reason: because even as it provokes fear, it inspires. We each have felt alien and inferior at some time or another, and might again, and, like these characters, we have only one choice—to survive.
Xoachtil Gonzalez’s excellent AnitadeMonteLaughsLast features three narrators, but only two of these are narrators who come from a place of lesser privilege and find themselves in highly privileged spaces. The first of these is Anita de Monte, a Cuban American conceptual artist who navigates the predominately white and male world of fine art in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Despite her obvious talent, Anita contends with being undervalued—even, at times, unseen—due to her marriage to Jack Martin, a famous, white minimalist sculptor. And when Anita, thanks to her unflagging commitment to her truth, does finally begin to flourish—when she begins to be seen as more than a token, as more than Jack’s wife—then disaster strikes. It’s Raquel, a Puerto Rican, first-generation college student at Brown University, who rescues Anita de Monte’s art and story from obscurity. Raquel, surrounded by Ivy League white privilege in the form of her rich boyfriend, her art history professor and some truly terrible classmates, has some idea of how suffocated Anita must have felt as a Latinx woman trying to break through in the cold drawing rooms and galleries of white collectors and curators. First-hand, Raquel witnesses the way people with power and money modify history to their liking, the way they close ranks around people like Jack Martin; it’s difficult stuff, but, as the title suggests, Anita (and Raquel) get the last laugh.
Emma Cline’s TheGuest offers little in the way of backstory about its protagonist, Alex, but the immediacy of Alex’s predicament saddles the audience to her well-being better than any sappy origin story ever could. Alex, who’s been making her living as an escort, is asked to leave the Hamptons home of Simon, her boyfriend, and she has nowhere to go. Back in Manhattan, her former lovers slash clients are through with her, and, on top of that, she stole from a man in the city who’s hunting for her. She decides the best thing to do is wait it out in the Hamptons for a week, crashing wherever she can until she can show up, oh-so-casually, at Simon’s Labor Day party. Equally if not more compelling than Alex’s encounters with the home owners and trust fund brats of East Hampton are her encounters with the other have-nots, the working and middle-class nannies and home organizers. Take this moment when a babysitter discovers Alex floating naked in her employer’s pool: “How did the look Karen gave Alex seem to contain everything? Knowledge of exactly what kind of person Alex was.” Alex’s superpower is her ability to adapt, to slip, chameleon-like, into whatever role she need play to get by: these moments when her invulnerability is punctured fascinate because they suggest that any outsider in this elite world might, at any time, themselves breach the divide between who they are and who they might pretend to be. What’s keeping the ordinary folks on their side of the line, in other words, besides a sense of obligation to the rules, to propriety? But—and one has to imagine Alex has used this very question to justify her own behavior at some point or another—why should less privileged people have to observe the rules when privileged people break them all the time? Surely it’s not a commitment to propriety that begets trust funds and oceanfront properties. Alex may not be especially knowable, but Cline makes it so we follow her avidly all the same.
Raquel Toro of AnitadeMonteLaughsLast and Samantha Heather Mackey of Bunny are both working-class students who find themselves in the clutches of Brown University. (To be fair, the University in Bunny is called Warren, but this veil is strictly nominal. Author Mona Awad attended Brown’s MFA program, so at the very least we can say Brown may have inspired Bunny’s setting.) The more significant similarity between AnitadeMonteLaughsLast and Bunny, though, is the incorporation of magical realism; in both novels the device works beautifully, though in Bunny it serves to bolster the main character’s unreliability. Samantha Heather Mackey fixates on a clique of young women, her peers in the Narrative Arts department, who all call one another “Bunny”. This feels grounded enough, until Samantha is invited to spend time with the Bunnies and learns that, coven-like, they’ve been gathering to explode actual bunnies in order to make young men appear—Hybrids, Drafts, Darlings, the men are called. And the magical realism doesn’t stop there. The reader is left guessing, until the final sentence, how reliable Samantha might be, and whether the intense isolation she describes at the beginning of the novel has somehow driven her to imagine some or all of the novel’s events. A common shape in a horror story is for the protagonist to discover that they, rather than their environment, are the locus of danger, but that doesn’t seem to be what Bunny is saying: whatever Samantha Heather Mackey’s truth, it’s obvious that the privileged environment she’s trapped in has an inherent toxicity.
In her gorgeous debut, Trespasses, Louise Kennedy gives us Cushla, a young Catholic school teacher living in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Cushla’s family own a bar in a small town outside Belfast: they’re middle-class, better off than many other Catholics in the area, though the threat of violence and certainly the threat of discrimination toward all Catholics hangs over the story. Cushla glimpses life on the other side when she becomes involved with a married Protestant barrister, Michael Agnew. Michael is sympathetic to the Catholic experience, having made a career for himself defending members of the IRA. He and his well-off Protestant friends even have a regular “Irish night.” And yet, Cushla finds herself thinking of Michael: “Did he really think they were not so different? Cushla’s grandfather had been a teenage runaway… had left the streets for a tree-lined avenue on which his Protestant neighbors considered his gains ill-gotten and kept their distance… Michael’s grandparents were likely to have been among the disapproving neighbors.” Only from a place of less privilege can one really grasp how wide the gulf really is between where one is and where one could never really belong. The descriptions of Irish Night, how out of place Cushla feels among Michael’s Protestant peers, are heartbreaking in their precision. Nothing in this novel is overdrawn, and it’s precisely this close, sensible style that makes it such an enlightening read.
Here’s a weird thing about Donna Tartt’s TheSecretHistory I really like: Hampden College, the Vermont school the protagonist, Richard Papen, absolutely kills himself to get into, is not the best of the best. It’s elite, yes, but at some point Tartt acknowledges, and Papen is forced to hear, that for a number of Richard’s wealthy classmates, Hampden was simply the best they could do. Hampden is the sort of college, for example, willing to admit someone like Richard’s classmate Henry, who only completed the tenth grade and refused to take standardized tests. This detail is so telling because it demonstrates just how much Richard’s perspective differs from that of his cohort, the sons and daughters of the very rich who make up much of the student body, and especially from the people who become his close friends, a small group who study Ancient Greek under the brilliant but cunning Julian Morrow. Richard Papen is more observer than advantage-taker among his wealthy new friends, more Nick Carraway than Tom Ripley. For his restraint, Richard is rewarded; Henry, the most well-off of Nick’s new friends, becomes very fond of Richard, comparing him favorably, it would seem, to Bunny, a longstanding member of the group who is cash-poor and takes advantage wherever he can. TheSecretHistory is a slow burn, but Donna Tartt keeps the reader engaged with her exceedingly ordinary protagonist nonetheless, exposing us to the highs and lows of adapting to an unfamiliar, overwhelming and at times dangerous elite environment.
Louise, the main character of SocialCreature, is not so much drawn into the world of the elite as she is dragged in by the throat. Not that Louise objects. She loves the obsessive attention of Lavinia, her new trust-funded friend. Mostly loves it. Lavinia can be tiring and needy, and Louise feels this even more once Lavinia insists Louise move into the empty bedroom at her place on the Upper East Side. Louise begins taking cash from Lavinia, a little at a time: in Louise’s mind, this is not stealing, per se, just a balancing of the books. Lavinia needs so much from Louise, all the time. But things take a turn, as they are wont to do in toxic friendships. An ordinary character penetrating an elite space is often confronted with a moment like this, one in which they must decide how far they’re willing to go to hold onto the world they’ve (intentionally or unintentionally) gained access to, and all the incredible clothes and the incredible connections therein. Louise, who begins the novel working three jobs simultaneously and who dreads the day when she might have to admit defeat and return to her parents, chooses to go very, very far.
Within Nick Guest’s very name, Alan Hollinghurst provides evidence of Nick’s defining role as an outsider. The novel spans a period of four years when Nick, a middle-class graduate of Oxford, lives with the well-off family of one of his Oxford classmates, Toby Fedden, at their home in Notting Hill. This arrangement is initially meant to be temporary, but Nick is so helpful to the Feddens as a minder and friend to Cat, Toby’s troubled younger sister, that he stays on. Although Gerald, Toby’s father, is a Conservative MP, he and the rest of the family are aware that Nick is gay. For much of the book, politics and sexuality are danced around figuratively (and, at one point, literally, when a coked-up Nick dances with Margaret Thatcher at a party for the Feddens’ wedding anniversary). Nick’s overall position is easy to empathize with, although the close third-person narration offers insight into Nick’s preoccupation with the material, with the Feddens’ space: one can imagine Patricia Highsmith writing these passages from Tom Ripley’s point of view. For example:
“And Nick was in residence, and almost, he felt, in possession. He loved coming home to Kensington Park Gardens in the early evening, when the wide treeless street was raked by the sun, and the two white terraces stared at each other with the glazed tolerance of rich neighbors. He loved letting himself in at the three-locked green front door, and locking it again behind him… He saw himself…showing the house to a new friend… as if it was really his own, or would be one day: the pictures, the porcelain, the curvy French furniture so different from what he’d been brought up with.”
In Nick, Hollinghurst conjures a protagonist caught, for a time, in an unthinkably exclusive world, and Nick is as obsessed by the beauty therein as he is tortured by the hypocrisy.
Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of The Rose by Ariana Reines, a poetry collection which will be published by Graywolf Press on April 15th 2025. You can pre-order your copy here.
In The Rose, award-winning poet Ariana Reines explores the intersection of rage and surrender. Drawing on the lineage of medieval troubadours’ erotic poetry, Reines employs the feminine, sexual symbology of the titular flower to also explore masculine pain: “I loved to hurt, be hurt by him. / There was a locked & secret mansion in him that I loved.” In these poems, inherited ideologies of femininity and masculinity are replaced with bold vulnerability, and the overturning of gender dynamics transforms the speaker’s understanding of suffering, desire, and transmutation. The voice in The Rose is wry and bare, dealing honestly with the connection between erotic love and spirituality. Reines approaches these themes with humor: “I want to vomit, die, and change my life in that exact order.” Investigating war, maternity, violence and sensuality, and the role of writing in magical acts, Reines is unafraid to write “the horrible / And Freudian thing” that “might ruin this poem,” and the result is a bloody and pulsing, sexy and unabashed bloom.
Here is the cover, designed by Jeff Clark.
Designer Jeff Clark: “For the first round of designs I did for the cover of The Rose, I mainly worked with an image, supplied by Ariana, of a 15th-century aquamanile (vessel for pouring water) in the form of Aristotle, on all fours, being ridden by Phyllis, whose right hand is clutching his hair and whose left hand is slapping his bottom. According to The Met, Aristotle, Alexander the Great’s tutor, ‘allowed himself to be humiliated by the seductive Phyllis as a lesson to the young ruler, who had succumbed to her wiles and neglected the affairs of state.’ I dug how the aquamanile referenced both the alleged pleasures/costs of seduction as well as the book’s Venus Williams epigraph, ‘Discipline is freedom’—Phyllis is free and Aristotle’s saddled. From one design standpoint, a ribald aquamanile and not a rose, I was thinking, would be a shrewd signal that this book is about ecstasy and its denial rather than about dead-natured, hyperpoeticized flora.
But in resonance with something Ariana writes at the outset—’I could feel him hesitating to finish a compliment I wanted to receive in words, an energy I wanted to force him to force through language. You are going to give me this compliment directly, I said.’—I also produced some cover concepts that featured roses. Cover designs that illustrate a title or core emblem of a book head on can be just as alluring as their alternatives, which maybe has something to do with the erotic nature of transparency?
The cover design that Ariana and the press chose uses a detail from a macro photograph of a petal of a rose that’s just beginning to wilt. A little death, a little life. Ariana and I worked together to manipulate the colors of the photograph, and the type I arrived at is a ‘fraktur’ face—there’s a little bit of splitting/cleavage where the thin end of a stroke meets the thick width of an adjacent stroke. Finally, the arrangement of the type has to do with rising’s antithesis: ‘Which fell one day and never rose / Again . . .'”
Author Ariana Reines: “I fell in love with this cover immediately—it’s like a portal. Jolie-laide. The more I look at it the more I see. The more it gives. And of course it’s also giving a lot: it’s giving gonad, wrinkled cheek, a genuinely fresh perspective on beauty and beauty’s many ancient tropes. What could be more overdetermined and more loaded with cliché than a rose?
The minute I laid eyes on it Jeff Clark’s genius cover shone at me as the visual distillation of a profoundly deep and knowing read of my book. I felt he also—so wittily and succinctly—linked The Rose visually to my own cover designs for Coeur de Lion (Mal-O-Mar and Fence), an earlier book that takes up medieval themes of love. One of the fascinations behind The Rose is the birth of—and the loss of—magic; the place of danger in any true magical act.
The Rose is also haunted by the notion of the erotic mistake—the idea a sorcerer can lose their power by misplacing their affections. According to several medieval tellings, Merlin’s mother was a virgin and his father was a demon; Merlin ‘lost’ his power (and Camelot declined) when Morgan le Fay, or Nimue, enchanted him away from court.
But if The Rose has a tutelary spirit, it’s probably Medea, the infamous sorceress of Colchis, whose power and rage have been so occulted the culture is still just beginning to understand her. What if sex is never safe? I feel like Jeff saw right into the soul of my book—the desire to level with and show love in an honest way: repulsive and beautiful, and, like a Vanitas painting—charged with awe in the face of death and decay and the infinite power of Nature.”
You like it when I hurt you in the dark. Hot wax, sharp slap, blindfold, belt and bite. I’m good at being bad. I play the part
of angry boss, disgusted teacher, hard- hearted lover. You live to lose the fight. You like it. When I hurt you in the dark,
I’m careful not to touch your gnarled scar too tenderly. I rarely stay the night. I’m good at being bad, except the part
that comes after the pleasure fits and starts to fade, when you turn on the light. You like it when I hurt you in the dark
and I like leaving, but leaving a mark. All my recurring dreams are dreams of flight. I’m bad at being good, I mean the part
about which wounds burn hot and which just smart. I’m doing you the wrongs you asked for—right? You like it when I hurt you? In the dark, I’m good and bad. But hard. But held apart.
Ayşegül Savaş’s third novel, The Anthropologists, is a breathtaking excavation of the wonders and intricacies involved in making a modern life in a new city, of feeling both young and adult, and of growing up while settling down.
Through afternoon walks, late-night conversations, and a series of apartment tours, The Anthropologists follows Asya and her husband Manu as they embark on the age-old quest of finding a home in a foreign place, but Savaş renders this search for belonging as something new and profound with every turn. By day, Asya works as a documentary filmmaker; by night, as an amateur anthropologist searching for the meaning of a good life among her friends and family. Changing moods, the shifting light in a room, the things we tell our grandmothers over the phone, and the things we leave out—all these become significant through Asya’s eyes. Throughout the novel, Savaş writes powerfully about how the small moments, fluctuations, rituals and routines we carry end up defining the size of our worlds, as the details become what we remember most about the ones who were in it with us.
“We accepted, children that we were, that we would remain foreigners for the rest of our lives, wherever we lived, and we were delighted by the prospect.” Taking place across neighborhood cafés and wine bars, dinner parties and lazy Sunday brunch—where conversations between friends and family as well as “foreigners” and “city natives” extend long into the night—The Anthropologists unveils the inner workings of our fragmented days through short chapters titled by the different components of anthropological fieldwork. The novel also tells a beautiful love story about living in a city far from home and how another person might just become one’s native country. Ultimately, Savaş reveals what it means to build a good life while exploring all the different shapes this may come in.
From her home in Paris, Savaş spoke over Zoom with me about little joys, parks, anchors, and the enchanting rituals of our lives.
Kyla Walker: To begin, what inspired you to pursue this novel? Your beautiful short story, ”Future Selves” (published in March of 2021) carries similar themes and ideas with a couple apartment-hunting in a city and country where neither of them are from amidst searching for permanence, belonging, and a place to call home. But what inspired you to expand on this story and why through the characters of Asya and Manu?
Ayşegül Savaş: Well, I really enjoyed writing that short story just because I thought I had tapped into a feeling of the unknown future. And I thought, I have more of this feeling to explore. But at the same time, the short story has quite a solemn tone. Also, I wanted to write a happy book. This was really one of the things I had in mind when I started writing my third novel. How do I write a happy book? How do I intimate some sort of joy of daily life into its structure? So the solemn tone of “Future Selves” really changed. But the structure of looking for a home and how that very tangible search can become philosophical was my guide throughout. And I guess the other inspiration was the certain phase of life that was ending for me and this phase of life when one is both young and an adult. I wanted to capture it in some way—the sense of being lost, the sense of being responsible and irresponsible, being both young and adult.
KW: I think that comes through so much. There is lots of joy in the novel, through the conversations and the things Asya notices about the world. And that’s really interesting—being in that ambivalent transition phase. Did you feel like that was a major theme as well—this concept of being in between places, ages, countries and cultures? Are all these characters on the cusp of something?
I wanted to capture it in some way—the sense of being lost, the sense of being responsible and irresponsible, being both young and adult.
AS: Yes. It really is a book about transition and this idea of cultural transition came a little bit later, even though it’s so central to the novel. It was much more for me about the transition into an unknown adulthood and also the transition from being students to being grown-ups. And when I started exploring that transition, I really understood that I couldn’t write about it without also writing about a certain cultural transition, which is to say, that time in your life where you really have to decide what culture you belong to and how you’re going to root yourself because you can’t be in many places for the rest of your life. You can’t be unrooted for the rest of your life.Then I started the anthropological fieldwork for this novel in which I’d go around asking our friends, our international friends, what their rituals were. Something very interesting was that lots and lots of people—because many of my friends are secular and don’t necessarily have traditional rituals that ground them in life—would say, “Oh, well, we don’t really have rituals because we live far from our homes and we don’t practice religion.” And then I’d say, “Yes, but how about things that you repeat?” And they’d say, “Well, you know what? Friday night is pizza night, or I watch this show with this person.” A lot of them said, for example, morning coffee was a ritual. So I wanted to encapsulate that secular enchantment into the novel as well.
KW: That’s beautiful. So much of this novel is about the tangential characters, the people who come in and out of Asya’s daily life… It almost feels like Asya is the readers’ lens onto this landscape of her loved ones. Right? And since she is a documentary filmmaker in the book, do you think Asya’s ever able to fully separate her fieldwork, her professional life, from her personal life? Or do you think she’s always a bit of a documentarian, trying to capture and savor all these moments with her friends and family?
AS: It’s very possible that she became a documentarian because she does want to understand how people live, because she wants to understand for herself how one is supposed to make a life. And that’s also why I think she gravitates from these larger, more important documentaries about issues of social justice to this one documentary in the novel which is about the park in the city and how people live. I think this isn’t just her professional training—this is her personal curiosity because she herself is so many things that she doesn’t know what she is and she doesn’t know which of the many aspects of her identity she should pursue in making her life. So with the many secondary characters in the book, they are minor but they also offer different versions of a traditional way to live and a way to live with poetry, a way to live irresponsibly, a way to live like you’re still a student. And these are all ways of living I think that intrigue her.
KW: Yes, that brings me back to the title as well, The Anthropologists. The title is plural—not referencing a singular anthropologist such as Asya. So is the title perhaps suggesting that everybody is an anthropologist in their own right?
You can’t be unrooted for the rest of your life.
AS: It is. It’s actually quite funny because my husband suggested the first title for this novel when he read the first draft. He said, “I think it should be called Anthropology.” Until then, the novel was called Future Selves. And when he said Anthropology, it gave me a way to think about the book structurally. And it also gave me permission to write these very small chapters and to give them titles the way one might title different components of fieldwork. So this is how the sections were formed from kinship structures and gift exchange and rituals. Then my agent said, “Well, you know, this sounds a little bit like a textbook, and we might have a hard time distinguishing Anthropology the novel from Anthropology 101 that might be on sale at a bookshop.” So she suggested The Anthropologists. But also that suggestion, I think, brought the book alive just because it’s both about how to live and the structures of of living a life and of composing a life, but it’s also about how to live in a couple. Manu and Asya are the anthropologists here, and so much of the book is about their kinship structures. But at the end of the day, it’s primarily about how to live a life with the person one loves.
KW: In your previous novel, White on White, there similarly wasn’t too much information about where the narrator was from. Actually, there wasn’t any information in White on White about where the narrator was from, or even their name or gender. But in this one we get a little bit more, though still very hazy vague backgrounds. What was the intention behind this in The Anthropologists? Have you found yourself just more interested in other parts of characters’ identities than their pasts?
AS: Yes. I think it’s interesting to me too that both of these books are set in unnamed locations. In White on White, the characters don’t have names or very distinct pasts, but for different reasons. I think in White on White, I was very interested in creating a certain atmosphere and having the liberty to create a Gothic atmosphere. And I was also interested in what it means to be stripped naked of identity markers. Whereas in The Anthropologists, I’m interested in almost the exact opposite. What does it mean to create an identity that is made up of many particular various inspirations, and not necessarily to strip oneself of identity, but to assemble an identity? And so, I didn’t want it to be a specific immigrant experience of a Turk living in France, for example, which really is a niche sort of immigrant novel. I wanted it to be about a more universal sense of being young and making a life and trying to find a home away from home.
KW: Wonderful, yes. Although the name Asya, it is Turkish, right? And her grandmother says that great line: “We named you after a continent and you’re filming a park.” I was thinking about the park a lot, and how in your novel Walking on the Ceiling, you mention the Gezi Park protests, and parks seem to have a very strong significance in your previous work. In this book, Asya captures mundane moments, but they seem to be significant markers for how to make a life and how the people around her are making a life. So I was curious about how this ties into the Gezi Park protests and how even something as calm and beautiful as a day at the park could have political implications in some way. Was that something you were thinking about while writing Asya’s character?
What does it mean to create an identity that is made up of many particular various inspirations?
AS: I hadn’t. I hadn’t thought about the Gezi Park protests actually. But you’re right. I think only because I myself am very drawn to parks. They are probably one of the first places I’ll visit in a new city. I’ll ask: What’s the biggest park? Where do people hang out to have a piece of nature? And parks are very political, even though they seem so innocent in the sense that they are democratic. They’re free, natural spaces where you can exist in the public sphere without having to pay for it and where everyone is equal. That’s why Gezi was such an important moment in its protests for retaining this piece of nature in the middle of the city, in a city that was so hierarchical and that was so based on spending. Where the public sphere was becoming less and less accessible to the people who live in the city. And that’s why I think Asya also is drawn to the park because it’s a place where many different types of people can coexist.
KW: That’s so true… My next question refers to a lovely essay that you wrote about the Blue Voyage and your family trips to Bodrum. There’s a line in it that I think relates to this book as well. You wrote: “Lévi-Strauss writes that anthropologists have been preoccupied with determining the ‘original’ version of a myth, of finding the authentic one among all its variations. But all versions of a myth are true, he continues, insofar as they grapple with the same contradictions in each re-telling.” Did this idea of mythmaking or a search for origins play a role in The Anthropologists?
AS: Yes, yes. I think part of that quote from Lévi-Strauss is also, in my mind, related to storytelling and how we form our merits, our identities, through the stories that we tell. And in The Anthropologists, it is about mythmaking. How does one create myths when there are no original myths to set off from? How can Manu and Asya create their own foundational myths without having anything to start from? So they’re really the creators, and that’s at once a great liberty but also a huge restriction or a huge responsibility because there’s so many options available to them.
KW: Definitely. I think that comes through too with apartment hunting, right? They get to peek into all these lives that they could live and follow… I thought that was so beautiful.
AS: And they have to impose a certain foundational myth on the apartment that they’re choosing, right? Because it’s what sort of people are we? What is the foundational myth with which we have set off that our identity and therefore our home will represent or we’ll mimic? And since they’re still searching for their foundational myth, any apartment could be a choice just because they could be anyone with the narratives that they choose about themselves.
KW: In a recent interview, you asked the Turkish artist and photographer Nil Yalter: “When you’re from everywhere and nowhere, an eternal migrant, what anchors you? Where or what makes you feel like less of a stranger?” I love that question and would like to ask a similar one geared towards your characters. What constitutes the foundation of Asya, Manu, and Ravi’s lives?
They could be anyone with the narratives that they choose about themselves.
AS: I think Asya and Manu would say one another. You know, Asya would say Manu is the thing that anchors her. And I feel like Manu would say the same. However, there are moments where they hope that they could say, well, our little trio with Ravi. And of course, that’s a shaky trio because by the end of the novel Ravi is going to try to find a life of his own. And it seems very unfair to Asya. She’s thinking: Well, why does he have to leave? We have such a great setup. And it’s a little bit selfish of them to think that—to think that Ravi would only belong to their small structure and not make one of his own. And I guess, for Ravi… I don’t know what Ravi would say. In some sense, I think he’s still searching. He, perhaps at the end of the novel, goes off to see whether this new configuration might give him more of the sense of anchor in life.
KW: Yeah, definitely. Asya and Manu also seem to have this childlike optimism and almost whimsical perception of being new to a country or a city where they’re not from. Obviously there is a lot of hardship in this, but there is also this excitement and wonder they seem to carry throughout. How do they find beauty in being far from home?
AS: I think this is sort of a sentiment that was prevalent in the ’90s—that it was a great thing to travel and to see many countries and to live in a country that isn’t your own. And this was encouraged. It was “the good thing to do” to be a world citizen. Manu and Asya have really had this ethos at the beginning of the novel, and also in their youth, that you can make a life anywhere and you can be a citizen of the world. And I think that thought gets questioned or that ideal gets questioned throughout the novel, like, can you really do that? And what are you sacrificing when you’re a stranger and living in different places all the time?
Everything we live through shapes how we understand and engage with institutions and social connections.
There are so many examples in history and in books of young people reckoning with institutions and dominant cultures, forcing—catalyzing—change through their actions. The beauty of so much literature is that it continues to find ways to remind us how this work has been done before —how we have suffered, yes, but also how we have made it through. That is the power of the personal.
There is no such thing as political fiction to me, because such a term feels redundant: All fiction is political. The worlds we choose to build, the histories we choose to write about—the way we tell those stories, who we focus on, how we determine who is in the room—these are all choices, made by a writer, affected by histories and institutions and the way they walk through the world. Political.
When I was writing my novel, A Thousand Times Before, I knew I was writing against histories that had been framed and reframed by people in power who could benefit from a specific style of storytelling. I wanted to write about the partition of India and Pakistan without celebration, without love for any resulting national identity. Similarly, in writing about the Nav Nirman Andolan in 1974, I wanted to balance bringing this important slice of history forward with its ultimate consequence: the devastating and shameful Emergency of 1975 and the resulting power vacuum that led to the Bharatiya Janata Party’s foothold in Gujarat and the country.
In my novel, these moments shape how characters understand and engage their countries, governments, and communities. These moments, major in political history, are prioritized in the way that they are foundationally personal for the characters. What you can afford to eat—the commodities that are available—are personal just as much as they are the result of political economics. When and how you are displaced, the violence that results from this, and the loves you lose in the process—these too are personal and still political.
Each of these books demonstrates the consequences of the world we live in, the ways that our political histories are inseparable from how we walk through the world. That the political and the personal are always, always, intertwined.
Reading this book is like moving through concentric circles, out from the middle. At its center is the Gwangju Uprising. The novel opens with the student Dong-ho’s experiences prior to the May uprising, as he volunteers at a school to help individuals identify civilians killed by soldiers. As he builds friendships with other volunteers and ponders what happens to a soul when it has left the body, the inevitable moves closer: his own death at the hands of soldiers.
For the rest of the novel, the reader moves to new narrators, some known from prior chapters, some not, as the years become further and further from the 1980 uprising. These refractions of experience demonstrate the consequences of one moment throughout the lives of Dong-ho’s loved ones, of his friends, of witnesses and journalists. The novel asks how one event might permeate through our lives—how we are all affected.
From the prologue of Brotherless Night and then all the way through, this novel puts forth an experience of conflict and history with the type of voice that makes you feel like the narrator is looking directly at you as she speaks. For Sashi, nearly 18 years old at the novel’s beginning, her four brothers and the neighbor boy, her parents and her grandmother—all fill her world with so much care, love, and joy. Their lane in Jaffna is a place of safety for so much of Sashi’s life, until the growing violence against Tamil people leads to the murder of her oldest brother, spurring both Sashi’s loved ones—and Sashi—to action.
Ganeshananthan writes in a way I can only dream of doing. Sashi’s voice engages the reader directly—indicts them. From the beginning, the novel asks, Who created the labels we use, and what happens when those labels serve to distance the observer so that empathy, humanity, and understanding are erased? And if it were you, what would you do, in order to protect the people you call home?
When Pirbhai takes a boat from Gujarat to Mombasa at the end of the nineteenth century, serving in indentured servitude to the British as they lay down railroads, A History of Burning begins its nearly century-long family history. Pirbhai’s story in this new place begins with a stain—a burning—and it will not be the only burning witnessed on the family’s path to stability. And soon, under Idi Amin’s rule, when Asians are ousted from Uganda, this family splinters.
How do you become part of a place? What does that mean you carry with you? From Mombasa to Uganda, to London and Canada, Oza writes the story of a family whose paths fork. A History of Burning is about the ways we remember, the ways we love, and how we hold ourselves together.
The Way Things Were by Aatish Taseer
A hefty novel with a love for linguistic digression—the protagonist and his father are both scholars of Sanskrit—the novel opens with Skanda traveling to be with his ill father, and then later transporting his father’s ashes to India. Meanwhile, the circumstances of Skanda’s parents’ lives are revealed, as well as the changing relationships to a ton-like social structure, against the historical backdrops of the 1975 Emergency, the 1984 pogroms of Sikhs, and the 1992 demolition of Babri Masjid.
Through their romanticization and academic study of Sanskrit, both father and son are united across time in wondering how their beloved language became co-opted by Hindu nationalism. But what happens when one chooses to study rather than make any change in their society? The novel is as much a study of a particular family’s passivity as it is begging its readers to do more.
Few intergenerational novels do it like Pachinko. Immediately, the reader is invested in Sunja’s life: from the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, her adolescence and later exploitation by the wealthy Hansu, and the marriage to minister Isak which whisks her away to Osaka. Lee lingers in early descriptions of Sunja’s fishing village, and these early moments throw her experiences during the Japanese occupation of Korea into stark contrast.
Pachinko is in many ways about the power and consequences of a secret, the way it can trickle through children and children’s children, and, all the while, the ways in which a woman might protect herself and her family.
Burnt Shadows spans nearly 70 years in the lives of Hiroko and Ilse’s respective families. Its driving premise—how did we get here?—reflects the feelings of displacement, of confusion and consequence, and a yearning for stability against the backdrop of imperialism. Hiroko and Ilse’s sons, Raza and Harry, carry forward some of the same questions that their mothers grappled with: Is it possible to escape our pasts? And how are our stories intertwined with narratives of power?
In many ways, the sheer proximity of this novel’s history is damning on its own. The family story feels inseparable from its chronology, which begins with the U.S. dropping an atomic bomb in Nagasaki, and moves later to the partitioning of India and Pakistan, the American proxy wars in Afghanistan, and 9/11.
In Exit West, the central family is a couple—Saeed and Nadia—who live in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that is suffering conflict. Violence grows as they maneuver a relationship that prompts them to live together sooner than Nadia had expected, and soon they flee together through the fantastic element of this novel: doors that are like portals to other places around the world. The two, like many displaced people, try to find a safe place to build a stable home.
Though it is governed by this speculative element, Exit West is a world that the reader immediately recognizes. The novel is about labor and class, displacement, and power—and it is also about what it means to love a person, to see them to safety, and to build something new. This book reads like poetry; it’s impossible to put down.
Laura van den Berg’s latest novel, her fifth, State of Paradise, is set in a time and place both familiar and wildly unsettling: Florida during a period of pandemic and social unease. The unnamed narrator, a ghost-writer, weathers the pandemic at her mother’s house with her husband, a historian and avid runner. Her sister lives next door and spends hours each day plugged into a MIND’S EYE, a virtual reality device that seems to sometimes actually whisk its users into another world, and which may account for the rash of missing persons in the town. Other weird occurrences happen—at one point, a downpour begins that doesn’t let up for days, flooding the town. And the narrator discovers that, after recuperating from the pandemic virus, her belly button has expanded to become a secret space within her body, big enough to hide a tube of chapstick.
Anyone who has read van den Berg’s previous books—like her acclaimed short story collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, or her novel The Third Hotel, a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award—would be forgiven for thinking this kind of dreamlike, uncanny story sounds like peak van den Berg, eerie in the best of ways. But there’s a big difference with State of Paradise, in the profound and powerful passages in which the narrator remembers her teenage years at a place called The Institute, where she spent time in treatment for alcoholism and depression. This attention to mental health and memory feels new. And for fans who know something about van den Berg—that she’s from Florida, that she and her husband, writer Paul Yoon, hunkered down with van den Berg’s family during the pandemic—they may recognize the strong undertow of the personal in this story. They wouldn’t be wrong: State of Paradise has been described as “speculative autofiction,” an intriguing and apt oxymoron.
Over email, I spoke with van den Berg about this term, and writing through the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the time she spent in an institution as a teenager, and how that shaped her understanding of time and narrative.
Brian Gresko: The last time we spoke about your work over email like this was between February and April of 2020. A tense and scary time. At the end of that interview, when I asked about how the pandemic was affecting your creative life, you replied, “I’ve been trying to just remain alert to the bewildering present tense, which is evolving in frightening ways day to day.”
I was struck by the similarity between that and this line from State of Paradise: “I start writing down one detail a day… Privately I begin to think of this project as my Florida Diary.”
Can you tell me how this book grew out of your pandemic experiences? This is one of the first novels I’ve read that feels like it fully grapples with that time, not just the illness, but the overall sense of societal and personal unease, the shaky feeling everything might collapse.
Laura van den Berg: This is amazing synchronicity, Brian—it would have been right around then that I started writing down daily meditations in an attempt to “remain alert.” My husband, Paul, and I landed in Florida, where I’m from, during the pandemic. We were sharing space with my mom for much of that time and lived just down the street from my younger sister. I hadn’t lived in Florida since my early twenties. Now I was back, with no exit plan in sight. A lot of memory was activated. The kinds of conversations with my family that would never bubble up over short holiday visits were happening. There’s a line in State of Paradise where the narrator says, “I have, to my absolute horror, all my former selves for company.” That was exactly how I felt! I’d started the year intending to work on a different novel, but found myself unable to focus on that project. So I started writing these daily meditations on personal history, family, landscape, memory. It felt important to have a record of this period of time, but I never thought that it would become a book; it was just supposed to be for me.
BG: That’s surprising to hear, because while much of the book is grounded in the narrator’s close observations, the narrative involves such fantastical, mythical elements, from the MIND’S EYE virtual reality device that whisks Floridians into a digital meditative state (and perhaps literally portals them away), to an unexplained weather event of Biblical proportion that floods the town. How did those speculative elements come into play?
LvdB: “Other worlds” became a kind of governing philosophy. Certainly the pandemic dropped us all into a different world, where once mundane things like going to the grocery store suddenly seemed perilous. And since Florida didn’t employ the same restrictions as other states, I’d talk to friends in New York City or Los Angeles and our realities felt very “split screen.”
Meanwhile, something that started coming up when I was writing those daily meditations was the many months I spent in an in-patient treatment center as a teenanger (State of Paradise is a novel but the narrator’s experience at The Institute closely resembles my own history). Looking back, I think being yanked out of the familiar world at such a malleable age totally reshaped my sense of reality. Reality became a continuum, as opposed to a fixed point; we move up and down that continuum throughout our lives, sometimes in ways that feel shocking. As a young person, I was so disconnected from the familiar world that I might as well have been in outer space. And even when I did eventually find my way back the familiar world didn’t look and feel the same as it did before. I had a hard time trusting it, believing that it was real.
This personal history was not something I’ve written about directly before, but in Florida doing so started to feel unavoidable. I think the whole process really clarified why I’m drawn to the speculative in the first place. In State of Paradise I could literally manifest “other worlds” through MIND’S EYE and also write about “other worlds” from a place of deep personal experience.
BG: It’s while at The Institute that the narrator decides to be a writer. In fact, she describes playing a game with an orderly in which she gives him a word each day that he must use in a sentence as the way she came to understand the flexibility of language. “Fuck the rules, language said to me, and find the truth.”
Can you help me understand this in terms of your origin story as a writer? You’ve described how you enrolled in a fiction workshop when you were almost flunking out of college, hoping for an easy A, and that’s where you fell in love with short stories. Was this before or after your time at the in-person treatment center?
LvdB: College came several years after. After I was discharged from the in-patient treatment center, I got my GED—I’d left high school—and later enrolled in college. I had no notion that I wanted to be a writer until I did.
After I was discharged, there was a period of time where I’d bump into a classmate from high school and they were kind of like what happened? I would either downplay things or polish a detail or two into an outlandish anecdote. Certainly this was one way of dealing with the shame and the awkwardness; the performance became a kind of armor. But I can also see that younger version of myself grasping for a way to narrate her own experiences. The facts, somehow, did not seem to adequately capture the emotional reality.
Also, this period of my life really broke my sense of time in a way that has never been fully restored. There is a three year period, from 15-17, where there are significant gaps in what I remember; part of it was feeling so eaten alive by my own interiority that my sense of the outside world was constricted. I have a lot of vivid memories from that time, many of which are in State of Paradise, but it’s hard for me to put them in sequence and there’s a lot I don’t remember well or at all. And now time in fiction is something that is of endless interest. I love to talk about it, think about it, write about it. It wasn’t until I was working on this novel that I made the connection between working with fictional temporalities and an unarticulated desire to restore my own understanding of time—which is probably beyond the capacities of fiction, but I actually think fiction has given me something even more powerful. Which is to expand my understanding of what and how time is, so instead of seeing my own timeline as a straight line marred by holes that needed to be filled I could imagine a more capacious temporal landscape that allows for these kinds of gaps.
BG: Could what you said about facts vs. emotional reality be applied to understanding the two versions of the story that the narrator tells about her relationship with the orderly and how it came to an end? That was such a bold and fascinating decision, one that defied linear logic and yet felt right. Can you unpack that for me?
LvdB: There’s a line where the narrator talks about how she’s been telling different versions of this story for years, searching for the one that could “match what it felt like to live it.” I think that’s the quest of the fiction writer, which is also of concern to the narrator, who longs to be a “real writer” (as opposed to a ghost writer) herself–and sometimes that means departing wildly from those facts. I wanted the novel’s structure to actually embody that quest, as opposed to just discussing it.
BG: What are some of your favorite novels that play with time? And what novels in particular inspired or influenced State of Paradise? (I noticed the word annihilation in the text a couple of times and thought immediately of Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, also set in Florida.)
My younger version of myself grasping for a way to narrate her own experiences.
LvdB: I’m a huge Jeff VanderMeer fan and I love Annihilation in particular. In the short form, Cortázar and Borges are two of my favorite time-bending writers. And I’m obsessed with Marie NDiaye—Ladivine is my favorite with hers, and I also loved Vengance Is Mine, the latest to be translated into English (by Jordan Stump). NDiaye distorts and twists time in surprising and deeply unsettling ways; the familiar world is always just a mask.
BG: One image that recurs in the book is that of a hole. Literal sinkholes, and figuratively there are holes in the narrator’s knowledge of her family history, and holes around which the family speaks, and then, most fascinating to me, the hole that her belly button becomes after she is sick with the pandemic virus. Even the portal of the MIND’S EYE device is a kind of hole! I’d love to know how you settled on that theme.
LvdB: Early on, in those daily meditations, certain words kept coming up—including holes, sinkholes, etc. I actually hung these little scraps of prose on a wall and highlighted words that recurred and then built off of those repetitions. How many things can I say about a sinkhole? What surfaces in the imagination and in memory if I think about this word for long enough? That was the process I followed for writing the first 50 or so pages. Later on, I was able to give more concentrated thought to the thematic implications and undercurrents of certain words. I was really interested in the idea of “word as portal.” How can one word, looked at from a variety of different angles, transport us to another place?
BG: Interesting, because especially early on there is a weaving quality to the narrative, as certain images repeat and recur, like holes, cats, runners, and knives. The narrative feels driven by images, like a poem, or a dream, and that made me think of the comparison between your work and David Lynch’s that I’ve sometimes seen, because there are moments in movies like Mulhalland Drive or Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me that feel uncanny in the same way. Do you like that comparison to Lynch, or think it a helpful one in getting across to readers the vibe of your narratives? Are there other filmmakers you feel have influenced your narrative decisions in State of Paradise or in general?
LvdB: I think David Lynch’s worlds, like Mulhalland Drive, descend into outright nightmare in a way that feels different from trajectory of State of Paradise, but the aesthetic of being in a world where something is deeply off—that’s where I see the connection. Like you are in a place that appears familiar but feels deeply uncomfortable. In different ways, I think Karyn Kusama and Jane Campion are gifted at placing viewers in a familiar-feeling place and then eroding that familiarity.
As you know from our past conversation, I spent a lot of time watching horror films when I was working on The Third Hotel and a lot of horror is very image driven, with momentum coming from the repetition of certain images and how those repetitions mutate. When I think of The Shining, for example, it’s the images that come to mind first: the twins, the blood gushing from the elevator. I’m always interested in the visual languages that films locate, and though State of Paradise doesn’t belong to that genre maybe some of the imagistic language was still with me—the tides of images that roll in and out, and reshape the landscape in the process.
BG: I saw the term “speculative autofiction” used both in the publisher’s marketplace synopsis and the book’s Kirkus review. Was that a term used to describe the book after it was complete, or was that a helpful concept for you when writing it?
‘Speculative memoir’ can use clearly made-up elements to hold all kinds of difficult human things.
LvdB: It was a helpful concept in the writing. Early on I became really interested in the genre of “speculative memoir,” and how that form can use clearly made-up elements to hold all kinds of difficult human things. Sofia Samatar has said in an interview: “it’s precisely the tropes of fantasy and science fiction that are capable of expressing trauma, it’s the impossible that conveys emotional reality, it’s the rush of imagined material that’s the actual ‘me’ of me.” Samatar’s ideas were an essential lighthouse when I was working on the book—how and why I needed the “impossible” to write into things that had actually happened. I joked for a while that State of Paradise was my “science fiction memoir,” but at the same time I am a fiction writer, that is the grammar that is most available to me, so “speculative autofiction” is more accurate.
BG: State of Paradise seems to suggest that we’re all experiencing a different truth, a unique reality, though the unifying factor is that we are all traumatized by it. Emotionally, what was it like to work on State of Paradise? Was it different from or similar to your experience with your previous novels?
LvdB: It was definitely different. My other novels have taken a lot longer to write. This one came out quickly by comparison.There was definitely an emotional rawness but also a lot of joy. I think the book is pretty funny and so a lot of play was happening in the writing. This might sound strange, but I turned in the final version the year I turned 40 and I had this feeling of—I’ve finally put down what I’ve always needed to put down and now I can really move on. I have never in my life thought of writing fiction as therapeutic but in this case there was a discernible feeling of resolution and maybe even catharsis which was a new experience for me.
An excerpt from Goodnight Tokyo by Atsuhiro Yoshida
The clock struck 1:00 A.M.
It must have been wound a little faster than the others, as the timepiece that Mitsuki was carrying sounded ahead of the countless others kept in the warehouse.
A few moments later, a deluge of tones, some low and heavy, some dry and clear, competed to announce the coming of the hour.
The warehouse, easily large enough to hold two small airplanes, was filled with near endless rows of shelves and drawers, its walls lined with clocks and paintings and calendars and tapestries and the like until there was little room for anything else.
Those shelves and drawers were filled with all sorts of knick-knacks, items of every size and shape imaginable that told the story of everyday lives in Japan for the past three hundred years.
You could find practically anything in here.
For example, if one of the directors told her that he wanted a travel trunk from the Taisho era, all she had to do was find it within the limits of this building and promptly deliver it to the set prior to shooting.
Mitsuki was what was known as a procurer, and she had been working at this large film company on the outskirts of Tokyo for almost five years.
The wall clock that she was presently carrying was for a 9:00 A.M. shoot. There were several other items that she had to prepare as well, most of which could be found inside the warehouse. The timepiece that she had unearthed was a perfect fit for the director’s requirement for something classical and with gravitas. Carrying it carefully with both hands, she traced her steps back to the assistant director in the waiting room. While everyone called it a waiting room, it was simply a small area to store props that the film crew intended to use in an upcoming shoot, not a place for actors to wait before entering the set.
Mitsuki would have preferred to work on large-scale stage sets. She had always longed for a job where she could make life-size sets that looked exactly like the real thing, to actually create an entire corner of a fictional town. But the very moment she set foot into the prop warehouse on her first day of training, she had fallen instantly in love.
The warehouse was a gigantic box crammed with every kind of object one might think of, and Mitsuki had been fascinated by small miscellaneous things ever since she was a young girl.
She remembered being particularly obsessed with old medicine chests, their lids opening to reveal bags and bottles printed with all sorts of colorful symbols and small lettering. Bandages, antiseptics, eye drops, plasters, ointments—to a child’s eye, each one had looked unique and special.
That same fascination blossomed in her heart all over again upon discovering the warehouse, to the point that she felt like letting out an excited squeal. The past itself was preserved amid the miscellany of objects here. For Mitsuki, the prop warehouse was nothing short of a time capsule encompassing a full three hundred years, and each time she stepped inside, she was overcome with an elation as if setting out on a new little adventure. Then came the added fun of seeking out the best items to meet the directors’ requests—tasks that she relished as though engrossed in a child’s game.
The only problem was that Mitsuki herself wasn’t compatible with time. Or, strictly speaking, she always found herself out of step with clocks, like the one that she was currently holding in her arms.
Clocks were her natural enemy, and the reason for that was simple enough. Her internal body clock and the laidback personality that it had imparted her with were constantly at odds with the endlessly harrying—as she saw it—clocks of the modern world. And so she often found herself bristling at the deadlines that the directors gave her.
With a dull tone, one more clock, somewhere deep in the warehouse, struck 1:00 A.M.
It was probably the slowest one in the whole collection. That one’s me, isn’t it? The slowest clock of them all.
With a deep breath, she tightened her grip on the antique timepiece cradled in her arms.
“See you tomorrow,” Mitsuki said after handing the wall clock to the assistant director, Mizushima.
She was about to call it a day when Mizushima held her back. “Actually, there’s one more thing.”
“This is everything on the list you gave me, though?”
“There’s a new addition. And we’ll need ’em by nine o’clock. A bunch of fresh loquats.”
“Loquats?”
“Yeah, loquats. The fruit. Not kumquats. Loquats.”
“I know what you meant . . . ”
So she said, but in truth, Mitsuki had never purchased a loquat before. At the very least, she had never had to procure one for work, and she didn’t recall ever having bought one personally from a greengrocer or a supermarket.
She had eaten one once, she remembered that, but the specifics—where exactly she had eaten it, what it tasted like—eluded her.
That was one of the consequences of working at a job like hers—always having to look back on her life so far, to reflect on the experiences its journey had given her and those it hadn’t.
Pressure cookers, for example. Silk hats. Unicycles.
More often than not, she was completely ignorant about the items that one director or another expected her to provide. She had lived a full twenty-seven years, and still she understood nothing whatsoever about them.
It was the same for loquats. She didn’t know whether they were even available in early summer.
“I did look into it a bit myself,” Mizushima said, as if reading her thoughts. “This is just based on what I read online, but they’re still in season, just barely. There has to be somewhere that still has them this time of year.”
“Oh, I see.” The next moment, Mitsuki’s voice picked up. “But in Tokyo?”
Mizushima flashed her a forced grin. When he smiled like that, it inevitably meant that the road ahead was going to be a bumpy one. In short, his expression just now anticipated difficulties in sourcing loquats.
“Besides, think about the time,” Mitsuki added, her shoulders slumping.
“Right, yeah. There won’t be a whole lot of greengrocers open at this hour. I’d suggest having a look in the all-night supermarkets, but there seems to be fewer and fewer of them around these days.”
Mitsuki responded with a silent nod. When society and the economy were booming, all-night shops popped up all over the place. And just as Mizushima had said, their numbers had fallen dramatically in recent years.
“Yep,” the assistant director whispered, as though his words were meant not for Mitsuki, but for himself. “Nights in Tokyo are starting to feel awful lonely lately.”
Matsui sipped at his can of coffee while waiting for his shift to start in the office’s half-lit break room.
The cab company where he worked was called Blackbird, specializing in serving customers from evening through to early morning. The cars were dark blue in tint, almost black, and the drivers wore similarly colored uniforms. Being a small company, Blackbird only had a limited fleet of vehicles, with most of its business coming from advance bookings. Recently, however, the number of such customers had been on a steady decline, forcing the fleet to turn to picking up customers on the street. And so tonight, Matsui found himself stuffing the blank reservation list into his pocket when he let out a sudden sneeze.
Maybe someone was badmouthing him around town? But even if so, it wasn’t like there was anything he could do about it. Yes, if someone was criticizing him behind his back this late at night, it could only be a customer. He couldn’t think of anyone else who would bother to go to all that effort. He had hit his fifties while still a bachelor, he had been born and raised in Tokyo, which meant that he had no other hometown he might return to, and being an only child whose parents had died young, he had spent a lifetime away from anything even resembling family.
He was, he remarked to himself, a boring man.
When asked by a colleague why he had become a taxi driver, he could answer only that he had just sort of wound up in the role.
But there was at least one small twist of fate that had guided him down this path.
As a child, he had stumbled upon a picture book titled The Car is the Color of the Sky at the local library. The main character was a taxi driver called Mr. Matsui, who sometimes picked up strange passengers like bears and foxes. He remembered positively devouring the book, all the while imagining how fun it would be to have such a job.
Whenever he closed the cover after reading the book, he would stare at the picture of Mr. Matsui in his light blue cab.
This, he thought to himself, was what he would one day become.
He remembered positively devouring the book, all the while imagining how fun it would be to have such a job.
And so he did. Over the past thirty years, he had moved from one company to the next, each time changing the color of his vehicle.
But he still hadn’t come across a sky-blue taxi.
After leaving the break room, he made his way to the garage and his parked car—not a bright blue, but a deep one, almost black. The garage was roofless, exposed to the wind, and when he looked up, he could take in the sky and a yellow banana-shaped moon. The stars were barely visible. The usual dreary Tokyo night scene.
Hmm? At that moment, his gaze passing between his vehicle and the night sky, he suddenly realized something.
“So they are the same color, huh?” he mumbled.
Then, all of a sudden, his cellphone began to ring.
He quickly pulled the device from his pocket and glanced down at the screen.
Beneath the cold anonymity of the eleven-digit number was a name—Mitsuki Sawatari.
Looks like Matsui is my only choice, Mitsuki thought with a sigh.
She felt bad having to call on him again like this. How many times now had she turned to him for help, unable to find what she needed for herself?
She hastened to lower the phone and end the call, when her eyes fell on faint glimmer reflecting from her left ring finger.
“Oh . . . ” sounded her voice weakly.
The ring had been a gift from Koichi.
Just three days ago, she had finally been able to meet her boyfriend Koichi on her first day off in longer than she could remember.
“I’m sorry,” she had said. “I didn’t have any free time this week.” “I’ve been so busy.” “Sorry again.” “Next week, I promise.”
For the past month, every time he called asking to meet, she had ended up turning him down. It was true that things had been hectic at the studio, but there was another reason for these constant postponements.
Why? Because Koichi had asked for her ring size. Her ring finger, he had specified—though he had never once mentioned the word engagement.
But he was always like that. Mitsuki could hardly stand it.
Though Koichi was three years her junior, she would have liked to say she didn’t feel the age gap—but in fact, the opposite was true. He had a natural little brother personality, and he was constantly demanding her attention or else begging for her help. Once, he had even told her upfront: “I want you to take care of me in life.”
“What’s the problem?” Aiko, a close friend of hers had asked her. “He sounds adorable.”
But perhaps because she had lost her father at a young age, Mitsuki would have sooner had a partner willing to indulge her, not the other way around.
“Then why don’t you break up with him?”
Given what Mitsuki wanted for herself, Aiko’s suggestion was no doubt the right one. Yet Mitsuki was touched by Koichi’s dedication and single-mindedness—even if that devotion wasn’t meant for her.
“One of the crows,” he began all of a sudden during their rendezvous.
He arrived at the restaurant on the top floor of a hotel in Shinjuku ten minutes late. Throughout all their years together, they had never been to a place like this before, making it a rare extravagance for the both of them. With the expansive night view outside the window, it felt like they were dining beyond the limits of the sky.
“One of the crows, it made a bookshelf.”
Mitsuki was unable to make heads or tails of this bizarre statement—but playing the role of a wise older sister, she did her best to coax out what he wanted to say.
“A bookshelf?” she repeated.
“The old crow was collecting books, you see.”
“Oh? Where?”
“On its bookshelf. It brought a piece of plywood or something to the top of an oak tree and built a shelf there. I was observing it the whole time. It started arranging all these books and magazines that it must have taken from people’s garbage. Seriously, it was one smart little guy.”
Koichi was a subcontractor brought into the Crow Control Initiative set up by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Environment Bureau. Or rather, that was his self-proclaimed role. His real job was delivering newspapers. Making his rounds during the early hours of the morning, he had developed a pronounced curiosity with crows, and before long, he took to observing their ecology. While he had no qualifications to his name, the experience and knowledge gleaned from his many years of observation had been well-received by professional scholars, with some even turning to him for his insights and opinions.
There was a park with a large grove near his apartment, a place that served as a roosting area for crows. A train line ran next to the park, and one day, the editor of a free newsletter distributed at the station reached out wanting to interview Koichi. Thanks to that article, Koichi earned a reputation as the city’s resident Crow Professor. Mitsuki had been a student back then, working part time as the editor’s assistant, and as such, she had accompanied him during the interview, later pulling an all-nighter to write the clumsy article detailing the Crow Professor’s many observations.
That was how she first met Koichi. And so the two of them had been dating for a good many years.
However, as far as she was concerned, their relationship had barely changed since their student days. Koichi may have gone to the trouble of dressing up in a fancy suit and booking a table at a restaurant in a luxury hotel, but he had completely forgotten the purpose of the dinner, going on and on and on about a crow building a bookshelf. It was no different to that rambling, incoherent interview.
“Hey, you know . . . ” Mitsuki interrupted, stopping him once the meal was over and the waiter brought out dessert. “Didn’t you have something you wanted to say to me?
There had been no real forewarning as such, but after being asked her ring size and with Koichi inviting her to an expensive restaurant, there could only be one possible explanation.
“Ah, right.” He rummaged through the inner pocket of his jacket, presenting her with a red box tied with a white ribbon. “I almost forgot.”
That was all.
Mitsuki knew perfectly well what it was, but having lost all patience with him, she asked bluntly: “What is it?”
She proceeded to tear off the ribbon, opening the lid as if it was no more than a box of caramels. “What’s this?” she asked again, yanking the ring out and jamming it on her left ring finger. Then, as if only joking, she tried to pull it off.
The ring, however, wouldn’t budge.
Huh? Tilting her head in an effort to keep Koichi from noticing, she applied even more force—but no, it was firmly stuck. She had meant to remove it right away, and even had her next words already planned out. “I can’t accept this unless you explain to me exactly what it is.”
But if it wouldn’t come off, she could hardly say anything like that.
Try as she might to remove it, the ring was fixed in place, clinging to her finger like a thing alive.
Mitsuki was standing next to a supermarket’s neon sign, lips curled in a pout, when Matsui arrived to pick her up. The taxi’s Reserved sign stood out brightly in the murky dark.
“I’m screwed,” she murmured as she stepped into the vehicle.
“What happened?” Matsui asked, watching her in the rear-view mirror.
“This is the sixth all-night supermarket I’ve been to. At least this time I got to talk to someone who actually knows what’s what when it comes to stocking fruit, but when I asked him if he knew anywhere that would still be selling them, he said I’d be hard pressed to find them anywhere in Tokyo . . . ”
“Fruit, you said?”
Matsui was puzzled as to the problem, but this wasn’t the first time that Mitsuki had called him to help in some bizarre collection task. In that sense, she was one of his few reliable repeat customers.
“Here I am turning to you again, Matsui. I’m sorry. I wanted to find them on my own this time, but I’m not having any luck.”
“And what are you looking for today?”
“Loquats. The fruit. Not kumquats. Loquats . . . Right, speaking of fruits, didn’t you help me run all over Tokyo looking for green apples once, even though they were out of season?”
“Yes, that was a real head-scratcher.” Despite his words, Matsui sounded like someone looking back over a fond memory. “But if even the store clerk thinks there aren’t any to be found, where should I go?” Mitsuki asked.
Matsui started driving. “Well, where do you want to start?”
He glanced at her through the rear-view mirror.
Mitsuki’s eyes were downcast, her eyebrows furrowed as she fidgeted with something on her left hand. “Oh, it just won’t come off,” she murmured with a sigh.
Matsui turned his attention back to the road. “If nowhere in Tokyo has any, maybe we should look outside of Tokyo?”
Leaving the city meant going either north or west. Matsui turned onto one of the main roads and began drawing a mental map as he considered which way to go. The streets were empty tonight. A lone motorcycle overtook them, speeding comfortably past.
“Ah. Can you wait a minute?” Mitsuki took her hand away from the ring, checking the incoming message on her cellphone as she nodded her head. “Uh-huh.”
“What is it?”
“Um, yes . . . ” she paused for a moment to finish reading the message. “Is the main intersection at Sakuradani far from here?”
“No. It will probably take around fifteen minutes to get there.”
“Around fifty meters from the intersection, on the road to Fukagawacho—it says here there’s supposed to be a tree there. According to this, it had loquats on it yesterday.”
“Oh? That’s very precise information.”
Matsui sounded surprised, but he couldn’t have been any more amazed than Mitsuki herself. A few minutes earlier, she had sent Koichi a text message asking if he might know anywhere that she could find loquats. She hadn’t really expected to receive a reply.
You were awake? she hurriedly texted him back.
About to head out on deliveries, came his response.
How did you know about the loquat tree?
Crows like to take the fruits once they’ve ripened.
Ah. Mitsuki was impressed. His knowledge could actually prove useful at times.
Koichi took little interest in anything other than crows. If you were to ask him what interesting experiences life had brought him, no doubt his responses would be about nothing else.
He had lived without worrying about pressure cookers, or silk hats, or unicycles. Mitsuki suspected that he had never so much as tasted a loquat.
But perhaps he was a living example that if you master one specific thing, it can lead you to so many others. Even if he didn’t know the first thing about loquats, crows, it seemed, had nonetheless led him to them.
Koichi took little interest in anything other than crows.
“Uh-huh,” Mitsuki nodded to herself in realization as the vehicle approached Sakuradani.
“We’re almost there.”
Startled by Matsui’s voice, she pressed her face up against the window to check the roadside trees one by one.
Only then did she realize that she had no idea what a loquat tree even looked like. And it was the middle of the night. The streetlamps provided some illumination, so maybe she could try identifying the fruits from their color? But it would probably be better to step outside and investigate on foot.
“I’ll wait here, then,” Matsui said, pulling over on the side of the road.
Mitsuki stepped outside and started walking, scrutinizing the trees.
But she couldn’t spot what she needed.
She began to doubt whether her memories of loquats—their size, their color—were truly accurate.
If she wasn’t mistaken, they were meant to be light orange.
The ones sold in stores were definitely that color, but maybe they were a different hue while still on the tree? Perhaps they were greener, the color of young grass, only ripening after they had fallen from the branch?
It was certainly possible. And so she set about peering into the trees once more.
At that moment, a flash of orange entered the corner of her vision.
“That’s it!” she exclaimed—when the fruit was obscured behind a dark mass. Whatever it was, she couldn’t help but feel like the thing had snatched the loquat away.
A crow? Mitsuki braced herself.
It had to be a crow. There was no question about it. Clinging to the branch, an unbelievably huge crow was grabbing the orange fruits one after another.
No, wait a minute.
Just as Mitsuki told herself that there couldn’t possibly be a crow that large, a truck passed by, its headlights illuminating the tree and revealing the identity of the shadowy creature.
It was a person.
Black hair and a black jacket. Not a man, but a woman. “Um,” Mitsuki called out cautiously.
For a brief moment, a chill ran down her spine—but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she could clearly make out a tall, slender woman scrambling further up the tree.
“Um, excuse me? What are you doing up there?”
The woman startled for a moment, but maybe this wasn’t the first time that someone had caught her in the act, as she stared down at Mitsuki and answered without hesitation: “I’m a loquat thief.”
“It’s just around the corner. Why don’t you stop by?”
Hidden inside the woman’s black jacket were magnificent loquats, exactly as Mitsuki had imagined. Naturally, she remained on her guard, but she couldn’t turn her back on this chance. So long as she had Matsui with her, she reasoned, she would be fine—and so she accepted the invitation to drop by the apartment of this self-proclaimed loquat thief.
“Please,” the woman said, and with no more warning than that, pulled out three glasses and poured them all a cup of golden loquat wine.
“Last year’s batch,” the loquat thief said in a mellow voice.
Every year, it seemed, she would climb loquat trees in the middle of the night, harvest the fruits, and turn them into liqueur.
“My brother used to do this all the time,” she explained. She looked over at a frame on the corner of the cupboard—a photo of smiling man, much younger than the woman but almost identical in appearance.
The woman looked back to Mitsuki with a faint smile. “But you’re telling me this bunch will make its way onto the big screen?”
Just one bunch would do, Mitsuki had insisted.
“Alright,” the woman answered readily enough. She seemed amused by Mitsuki’s job title of procurer. “They’ll be the stars of the show, right? They’re already stolen goods, so don’t hold back. Take as many as you want. I might have a little less to make into next year’s wine, but I’ll be able to enjoy looking out for them in a big-name film, right?”
The woman had called herself a loquat thief, and she had indeed taken the fruit without anyone’s permission. But putting aside that one small crime once a year, she was a remarkably earnest, even tireless, individual. She wore a white business shirt beneath her black jacket, and while her makeup was modest, her facial features were those of a traditional Japanese beauty—not that she was one to boast of her own good looks. No, she worked through the night day after day, hardly ever making use of her vacation time.
Tonight was a rare day off, allowing her to take on the mantle of the loquat thief, but she would normally spend these late-night hours in an operator’s room, responding to the incessant barrage of phone calls as they came in.
“It’s always some nameless person on the other end of the line. Young and old, men and women, they call in looking for someone to talk to about their problems, everything from silly life advice to serious life-and-death issues.”
Mitsuki accepted this explanation without further question. After all, it was thanks to that friendly, dependable voice that she had let her guard down even though she had never once met this woman before.
“I’m with the Tokyo No. 3 Consultation Room. If you need anything, give me a call,” the woman said, handing Mitsuki her business card. “I might be able to help with your procurement. And of course, I’m always happy to talk about love affairs or family problems or the like.”
Mitsuki closed her eyes as she savored the complex taste of the loquat wine, its wonderful contrast of sweet and sour. Matsui was still on the job, so he merely tasted it with the tip of his tongue and relished its aroma.
“Hey, Matsui?” Mitsuki asked as she leaned deep into the back seat of the taxi, cradling a handful of loquats on her lap. “I think I’m going to nod off here.”
The loquat wine was having an effect, a sugary drowsiness taking hold of her body.
“I understand. Please, go ahead. I’ll take you back to your apartment.”
“No, don’t do that. If I go to bed, I’ll never be able to wake up. Just keep driving around until dawn, please.”
“Very well,” Matsui answered, watching her through the rear-view mirror.
Mitsuki, her eyes already closed, reached out to the ring glimmering on her left hand, gently stroking its surface with her fingertip as she dozed off. Her face was as innocent as an angel’s.
For Tokyo too, it was time for the briefest moments of shut-eye.
With the city asleep, wrapped in the warm embrace of night, only the loquat fruits stood out, softly reflecting the dim moonlight.
There’s this song that I love that I listened to quite a bit in the Fall of 2021. It became a kind of North Star lyric as I was rewriting my novel, Lo Fi, as it encompassed a feeling my narrator was dealing with, fresh off a too-long situationship, trying to forget someone. I wasn’t going through any kind of breakup myself as I wrote, but I needed to channel those same emotions, so I listened over and over.
I’ve found new ways to count the days that you’re not in
And there’ll come a time when you won’t be on my mind every second
Doesn’t that count for something?
To me, this lyric in the aching title track from Madi Diaz’s History of a Feeling captures a sentiment that has given me (and I think many other writers!) endless inspiration.
I have always looked to music and books about romantic heartbreak, those songs and novels that tell you of a complicated relationship that just didn’t, couldn’t—wouldn’t—work out. Or, perhaps one of those ones that never even really got its chance. These books explore the grief of loss, the things we’ll do (often stupidly) for love, and the ways we try to move on and fail. The people or exes that we keep coming back to. If you’ve got someone like this in your life—we probably all do—these are the books you should be reading.
This excellent early-twenties coming-of-age novel set in Dublin zeroes in on a toxic, emotionally abusive relationship. Megan Nolan renders the upside-down power dynamic between the narrator and Ciaran with piercing honesty, allowing the reader to see past the blinders we turn on when we fall in love, the way physical attraction can cloud all our better judgment and the way manipulation and emotional abuse can rot a relationship or person from the inside out. “I was in love with him from the beginning, and there wasn’t a thing he or anybody else could do to change it,” the narrator tells us just a few pages into the novel—and the truth of this becomes very clear. Even at our narrator’s lowest, darkest moments (of which there are many!), I was with her every step of the way, as sucked into the story as one can get in a dark yet addictive relationship. Nolan’s depiction of sex, the body, and love—and the ways we give and take all of these—are what make this book stand out from so many others that have traversed into this territory before.
Maybe it’s Paris, maybe it’s James Baldwin, maybe it’s a perfect novel. What I would consider to be my favorite ‘classic’ novel, this taut, heartbreaking story of a covert gay affair between David and Giovanni in 1950s Paris, is one of excruciating love, regret and grief. As David sits in Southern France and tells us the story, we are clear on the stakes from the beginning. There’s much to be drawn to here: the electric yet accessible prose, the snapshots of Paris of another time (desultory, charming, even in its own depression) and of course: the endless pain of a love that could never really be. A masterfully concise read—Baldwin does in 160 pages what most writers try to do in 600—this book (as many know) is a triumph of tragedy. You didn’t need me to tell you this, of course, but after reading it three times in the last handful of years (one in a muddling French!) I’m still amazed at how universal nearly every sentence of this book is.
I read this book earlier this spring in about 48 hours, immediately drawn in by the classic premise: a young woman gets involved in a tumultuous affair with an older, married man (who just so happens to be one of her coworkers.) The affair between Hera and Arthur is mildly predictable in its trajectory—how could it not be?— but what holds the reader close is Gray’s smart, hilarious and wholly commanding voice. While these types of relationship stories typically have the same arc, as there is mostly only one way for them to end, Gray’s storytelling is anything but. I do not say this lightly: this book is laugh out loud funny, and I almost never laugh out loud while reading. The humor and self-awareness will make you root for Hera, even as she makes objectively terrible decisions over and over again—and then makes some more. The sex is good, the consequences are bad, the ending you already know. You should read every word of it anyway.
Bryan Washington’s latest novel is for me, in many ways, a story of how we get through our lowest points of grief and try to make our way to the other side of it, if there is one. Cam has moved from California back home to Houston after his partner of several years, Kai, has died. He muddles through his overwhelming grief with endless sex (and there is a lot of it), self-destructive behaviors, and begins working at his old friend—TJ’s—family bakery. Once he and TJ reconnect, the antagonistic chemistry between them crackles at their first exchange. They hate each other; they love each other. They have learned to live without each other but maybe they don’t have to. Washington writes food beautifully, sex painfully, and makes you ache on every page.
Much has been written about his recent smash success that will be better and wiser than what I could say here, and even though this book is mostly comedic, it is the hardest I have cried reading a novel since A Little Life. Thanks, Dolly. A funny, extremely relatable story of a mid-thirties break-up—told almost entirely from the guy’s perspective, Dolly gets everything right about the feelings, thoughts, and actions people experience immediately post-split. I’m talking: drinking alone midday, stalking your ex online, splitting up your shit, closing the joint checking account, drinking alone in the evening—etc.. But what ultimately moved me to tears here was Alderton’s spot-on insight into being in your mid-thirties and finding yourself in a Very Different Place than many of your peers. Everyone knows Dolly Alderton is funny, that she knows relationships better than most, but it’s the heart at the core of this novel that set it apart for me.
This was one of my favorite releases of last year, by the Australian writer Amy Taylor. A breakup tale for the digital age, the narrator, Ana, begins dating a new guy she meets online after a breakup, and she quickly becomes obsessed with his ex, whom she finds out has died the year prior. It is terrifying and compelling to go down the digital rabbit hole with Ana (we’ve all done it, right? Stalking a new lover’s old flame?) but Taylor renders it all with such an undercurrent of unease as we wonder when the narrator’s obsession will come to light, what consequences it will have. It reminded me of the delicate tension of a Ripley novel, the way Ana stalks in plain sight as we hold our breaths, wondering what she will find. I like that this book turns a breakup narrative on its head: Ana doesn’t stalk her ex—in fact, he’s never even named—instead she’s haunted by another woman, one who isn’t even alive. But the frantic obsession still occupies her every thought, making it nearly impossible to actually enjoy her new relationship. In the end, which obsession is worse?
Try not to think of Timothée Chalamet, peaches, and certainly not Armie Hammer. But instead: think of sitting in the sunshine, think of the first time you fell in love, when you were far too young to know what was going on, when all you understood was the all-encompassing sensation of dopamine and hormones, the insatiable arousal. Now, imagine you live in the Italian countryside, with endless afternoons and stretches of blue sky. It’s a perfect summer, too much time to kill. Aciman’s first person novel is so gorgeous that you should read it basking in the sun yourself if you can. The falling in love is hardly straightforward: a queer sexual awakening complicated by an age and power dynamic, among other things. But Aciman’s prose and the near tangibility of the emotions on the page make me want to reach for this book again and again. Even if you’ve seen the movie, you’ll love reading this book, being reminded of how it feels to fall in love for the first time, and how to cope with the illicit fragility of a relationship like this.
I read Ponyboy this Spring at the recommendation of a friend, and it is unlike almost anything I’ve ever read. A story of youth, addiction, love, transitioning, queerness—to me this book is the story of all of those people you can’t quite forget. Yes, that one person you loved once, but also everyone that floated in and out around. The people that destroyed you and the people that put you back together, the ones you thought would never disappear but did, and the ones you thought might disappear but didn’t. Ponyboy’s tale is harrowing and heartbreaking—and very difficult to read at times—but the prose is miraculous and the ending is hopeful. It’s poetry, really, and I underlined more than I had in ages.
Kwon’s latest is an exacting, potent book of desire. The narrator, Jin, is a photographer who we immediately see struggling to produce the photos she’s promised for an upcoming exhibit; she’s been throwing out anything she shoots for ages. Married to a man, she becomes quickly enchanted, drawn to—fascinated by—a ballerina named Lidija. The relationship is charged from the beginning (to say the least) as Jin gets swept into Lidija’s life as we watch their desire unspool. Kwon’s prose is so precise, every single word chosen with delicate attention (she took nine years to write the book, and much of it reads like exquisite poetry) but she also writes passion, obsession—yearning—so well that no matter what happens, you are still thinking about this ballerina, this relationship just like our narrator.
This Patricia Highsmith classic—an illicit lesbian affair set in the 1950s in New York. Here, we follow Therese, who is dating a man she’s obviously barely interested in while working at a department store. The beautiful, mysterious, sexy Carol comes in one day, and from there it is obvious where we’re headed. As the two women grow closer together—and decide what dangers they will wade into for their desire—the story begins to feel more like that of two fugitives on the run across America as tension rises. Accessible and page-turning, this is one of Highsmith’s finest.
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