In “I Saw the TV Glow,” Obsession Is a Coping Mechanism Destined to Fail

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

I occupy a corner of the internet where I’m largely secluded from a cis audience’s reaction to I Saw the TV Glow, the second feature from director Jane Schoenbrun. Instead, I see trans people dunk on fellow viewers who — with varying degrees of innocence — are unable to put their finger on the film’s central narrative. They wax on about fandom or a generalized call to action, pushing viewers to live their lives to the fullest, in whatever way that may mean for any given person. The cultural clash between how trans and cis viewers are receiving the film mimics the film’s central friendship and the characters’ respective relationships to the glow of their thick 90s television sets: comprehension hinges on the ability to see transition as a possibility. I Saw the TV Glow is about both transness and obsession. It explores where one starts and the other ends, how one can lead to the other, and how one can stamp out the other like a work boot over a small, rising flame. 

I Saw the TV Glow follows the life of Owen, a biracial boy who grows up and grows old in the American suburbs, charting his relationship with his favorite television show, The Pink Opaque, and the coinciding friendship he develops with an older girl, Maddie, who first showed it to him. The show is the metaphorical egg inside the movie’s nest: two girls, who together make up “the Pink Opaque,” use their shared psychic connection to fight monsters of the week and the big, bad, Mr. Melancholy, who seeks to subdue them and the world they occupy in “the Midnight Realm.” 

From the moment he first sees a commercial for The Pink Opaque, there is a gravitational attraction between Owen and the show and, by extension, between Owen and Maddie, as they seek comfort from the safest source available in the sprawling suburb of sameness where they spend their youth. On a Saturday night in the fall of seventh grade, after being dropped off for a fabricated sleepover, Owen walks through backyards, pink sleeping bag under arm, until he arrives at Maddie’s door to watch the show. He knows nothing of it beyond his inherent need to watch. Whether or not he enjoys it upon viewing is beside the point: he has already decided to love it because he needs it. The Pink Opaque — which Owen’s parents won’t allow him to watch because it’s a “girl show” that airs after his strict bedtime — represents one small stretch beyond the jurisdiction of the forces keeping him in a world too small for him.

The first time I saw I Saw the TV Glow in theaters, seated between my friend and boyfriend — both of whom I met on Grindr over the course of three genders — I instantly recognized Owen’s commitment to consumption based simply on the idea of what could be: an instinct he’s yet to understand, but one he’s compelled to follow. Soft and quiet tears rolled down my cheeks, my breath steady and my mind rapt, watching what felt like an archive of my own experiences projected onto a huge screen on the Upper West Side. I floated out of the theater in an afterglow reminiscent of LSD or a really good yoga class: pleased, grateful, and a little like a zealot. Much like Owen after his first viewing of The Pink Opaque, I didn’t have complete comprehension of the experience I just had, but I knew there was something tangled inside that would serve me moving forward. 

I can, with relative ease, chronicle my life in obsessive units from five years old to taking my first estrogen pill. I would set my eyes on something — a movie trailer, a song, a drug, a person — and decide to love it. Even if it turned out to be shit, I would ride it until the wheels fell off. I Saw the TV Glow is the kind of movie I would have been obsessed with pre-transition. I would’ve fallen asleep to it every night in college, and, should I still be awake when it ended, I would have restarted it. Rinse and repeat until it lulled me to sleep, stealing away the thoughts of the day and the anxieties of the night, replacing them with sights and sounds, dialogue and details. I couldn’t be as empty as I felt, filled with these things. 

From the moment they meet, Maddie paces ahead of Owen in every sense, from her budding sense of self to her knowledge and perspective on the show to her ability to take decisive action. Dispassionately, she leaves breadcrumbs, illuminating a path forward for him. Though they don’t watch the show together anymore, each week Maddie leaves Owen recorded VHS tapes of The Pink Opaque with a note in the school’s dark room. They don’t reunite in person again until two years and many tapes later, when they return to her basement one Saturday night to finally watch another episode together. He stares blankly into the TV as she stares intensely, brimming with emotion. Where the show breaks Maddie open, it numbs Owen. 

Objects of pre-transition obsession can function as emblems of hope, a glow at the end of an endless tunnel of bedtimes, curfews, and unchosen rules to live by. But obsession functions on a system of diminishing returns. Hyperfixations lose appeal through repeated exposure, slowly becoming a stand-in for the pleasures of the past. The Pink Opaque becomes less and less powerful for Owen over time, as his once porous mind solidifies over decades of shame and internalized value judgments. The thing that once afforded him a sense of being alive no longer works, like an inhaler with a limited number of puffs.

Objects of pre-transition obsession can function as emblems of hope, a glow at the end of an endless tunnel

It’s common knowledge among transsexual artists whose work I have followed that coping mechanisms are built to fail. Last month, in an unpublished excerpt from my interview with horror writer Gretchen Felker-Martin, we spoke about living through the media we consume, in reference to I Saw the TV Glow. She asserted, “Painfully, that is not enough. You cannot sustain yourself on a diet of the hidden fantasy in childhood. It’s a lot harder to have a life than a fantasy.” Similarly, Torrey Peters (who is thanked in the credits of I Saw the TV Glow) wrote in 2021’s Detransition, Baby, “The awful part [of early transition] was watching what therapy called ‘your coping mechanisms’ flame out.”

For Owen and Maddie, they literally flame out, leaving behind two sets of burning televisions: Maddie leaves hers out on her lawn after she runs away, while Owen thrusts his head through the glass of his after the show’s finale. They are, respectively, a symbol of her breaking free, and a monument to obsession worn well beyond its expiration, his rejection of possibility and a commitment to surviving on a nostalgia drip he doesn’t understand.

Shoenbrun captures the dark truth that whether you transition or not, the methods you use to keep yourself distracted or satiated will eventually fail you, leaving you as alone, scared, and discontent as before you discovered them. The film is a nightmare of grand proportions and boring days, shifting between quiet, reserved moments of loneliness and crescendos of emotional acuity that are hard to watch for reasons that feel innate rather than obvious. 

From the time I was old enough to consume media and, later (but not that much later) consume alcohol and then drugs, a constant replay of consumptive habits kept a cloud of static separating myself from the world around me — and unbeknownst to me, from the world within me. During my first year of graduate school, reflecting on two decades of obsession through a cloud of dank smoke, I began to understand the circus of afflicted women whose stories had filled me as something beyond simple (albeit, exquisite) taste. During a recent sleepover, a friend characterized this type of woman I’d always been drawn to as one who holds herself under the surface of her own bath water. The summer after my first year of graduate school, as I stood in my parents’ pool reading with the sun on my back and a blunt in my hand, a different friend sent me a text proposing that the extended joy of finishing a book could never stand up to the immediate joy of hitting my blunt. And for the first time, I decided to attempt a tolerance break, not because I felt like I should, but because I wanted to. 

The Midnight Realm is a place each of us can occupy under particular circumstances. Like a warm bath, it wraps inhabitants in comfort and familiarity, encouraging them to wallow in its basic pleasures, keeping our truer, more grandiose desires dormant. In its waters, our eyes stay glued to what’s immediately before us, obscuring the horizon of time in the distance, where there is light beyond the glow on a television screen or the cherry of a joint. Our comforting obsessions can hold us over until we have the opportunity for something greater. But if they become that something greater in and of themselves, they have the ability to hold us under the water until the bubbles stop. 

Whether you transition or not, the methods you use to keep yourself distracted will eventually fail you

After smoking weed all day for the better part of my twenties, I watched Spirited Away for the first time during my tolerance break, on a couch in my hometown with a friend I’d met on Grindr two years before. My obsessions had consisted of movies, TV shows, drugs, and at one point, this boy. Since I stopped smoking, it felt like all of those walls had fallen. In their absence, a watershed of tears fell every day. Not necessarily tears of sadness, but tears of overwhelming feeling where there was once nothing. 

As my friend fell asleep next to me, Chihiro took off into the sky, flying on Haku’s back. In the sky, a memory resurfaces in her mind of a river she fell into that carried her back to shore. “I think that was you, and your real name is Kohaku River!” she says. Haku’s dragon scales break off and spread into the air like confetti. He takes his human form once he remembers his name for the first time since becoming lost in the spirit world. The tears came, and I ran the idea repeatedly in my head for days to come in the month before starting estrogen. How lost one must be to forget something as central to the self as their own name. Realizing you’re trans feels a lot like that. Like a lost memory, found. Something so obvious finally coming into focus. Something gone that is now, all of a sudden, there. And once you look at it, it becomes undeniable. 

Once Maddie has come to terms with her own transness, her relationship to The Pink Opaque is ruptured. The chasm of transition is difficult to cross, and looking back, nothing — even your favorite TV show — is the same. In the decade after high school, Maddie returns to save Owen from the complacency of the TV’s glow, but Owen maintains, “This isn’t the Midnight Realm, it’s just the suburbs.” In all of his rewatches, he can’t see The Pink Opaque for what it is: a metaphor for the un-life he leads and the beginning of the knowledge required to get beyond it. 

In writing this essay, part of me expected to become obsessed with I Saw the TV Glow. I thought I would watch it every day for a week, and then this essay would pour out of me, filled with details and observations only a seasoned, transsexual obsessive could offer. That was far from true. What actually happened was that on my third watch, I cried for what felt like hours. That rush of tears articulated what I had felt when I first saw I Saw the TV Glow in theaters: it’s about living in a place I’m terrified of returning to. I talk about it constantly in therapy: slipping back into a life where sitting alone at home in the glow of the TV feels warmer than being in the company of my friends and family. Where if you cut me open, static seeps out instead of blood. Where I am not me, I am these things of other peoples’ creation. 

Realizing you’re trans feels a lot like a lost memory, found.

“You’re gonna love the Midnight Realm. It’s such a wonderful, wonderful prison,” says Mr. Melancholy, as the screen shows a snow globe containing seventh-grade Owen that first time he looked into the pink glow of the television: a seed being planted into hostile ground, where it will remain forever the same, pleased to have its desires played back on a loop. 

For another twenty years after Maddie returns to save him, Owen remains underground, having forgotten he is dying. The Pink Opaque appears corny to him now, a puff of his inhaler no longer brings the relief it once did, leaving him wheezing through life working at an arcade. When he finally breaks, screaming in the center of a child’s birthday party, everyone around him pauses in an unreaction. His pain, his life — the two of which can no longer be separated — exist on a parallel plane to those around him. A solution cannot be found in the material world, only the internal one. 

On the floor of the bathroom, Owen cuts his chest open with a box cutter. He stands up in the mirror and pulls his ribs apart to let the glowing static out. Relief washes over his face. It can be heard in his breath. It is everything. What’s next matters less than the fact he looked in the first place. What he saw and what he chooses to do with it is a different (horror) story to tell, one that happens far beyond the glow of a television set. What matters is that there is still time. 

9 Books That Blur the Boundaries Between Novel and Story Collection

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

Novels-in-stories contain their own specific joys. One is the sense of partnership they can foster between the reader and the book. In the “off-camera” time between story-chapters, the reader gets to fill in what transpires. As a writer, it takes trust to leave that space—a kind of trust the reader can feel. In writing my book, I knew that I didn’t have to drop into every wedding, job change, and birth—it was the smaller, more idiosyncratic moments I was interested in. Those unwritten gaps can also create a feeling of on-goingness. It isn’t a coincidence that two of the most popular examples of the genre, both Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad and Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, have sequels. The reader knows the characters’ lives are happening between the pages, so can imagine them continuing to do so after the book ends. Conversely, novels-in-stories also deliver the satisfaction of multiple endings. For me, the best part of writing my book was working toward the magic of a perfect ending sixteen times rather than just one.

My book, Choose This Now, follows best friends Val-and-Tal across nearly twenty years as they navigate friendship, art, and motherhood, as well as the intersections between them. It is a quiet, introspective book, so when readers began to compare it to the virtuosic A Visit from the Goon Squad, I suspected they weren’t referring to my Pulitzer-Prize-quality writing so much as our books shared form. Although my approach to this hybrid genre is very different from Egan’s, the comparison persists because the label “novel-in-stories” is so rarely used. Even A Visit from the Goon Squad, as classic an example of a novel-in-stories as I can imagine—each story-chapter stands on its own, but, read in order, builds to a larger arc—is emblazoned with the word novel on its cover. Ditto Olive Kitteridge. It seems defensive, as if publishers think readers won’t take a book seriously unless it is unequivocally a novel.

Listed here are ten books that read as novels-in-stories, no matter how they’ve been marketed. Rather than drawing a line around them to separate them from novels or story collections, I hope to share that they are both/and—books that embrace the in-between. 

Black Sheep Boy by Martin Pousson

Unlike many novels-in-stories that use the form to bounce between several protagonists, Martin Pousson’s book centers a single character. Boo, though, contains multitudes. Queer and Cajun, growing up in the Louisiana Bayou, he is book smart and earnest, often incapable of playing it cool, but also a fierce friend, able to unleash his voice at just the moment it is most powerful. The book gives us the multifaceted, often painful history of the world into which Boo is born and follows him from early childhood through young adulthood. As he grows, Boo learns too much too soon at the hands of older boys and men. There is a hunted, haunted terror to parts of the book where the predators come in the shape of golden boys next door and a teacher named Mr. Hedgehog, but there is also friendship, community, and connection. A poet as well as a fiction writer, Pousson’s prose ranges from raw to rhapsodic, as evidenced by the bold, beautiful rhyme that ends the book’s eponymous short story: “Under his cloak, we lay together, and no one could tell the black sheep from the white or the field of stars from the dome of night.” While each story is complete and lyrically stunning on its own, together, the atmosphere of the bayou builds to a rich context and the reader’s knowledge of Boo’s past makes each subsequent moment that much more resonant.

Night of the Living Rez by Morgan Talty

Morgan Talty’s Night of the Living Rez takes place on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation in Maine and alternates between two time frames, one in which its protagonist is a young adult, Dee, and one in which he is a child, David. In the first story, “Burn,” Dee is skulking away from an attempt to buy pot when he hears moaning coming from a frozen swamp. He spots his friend, Fellis, emerging from a stupor to find his long hair embedded in the ice. An unforgettable image, it is both slapstick and tragic. Dee and Fellis spiral through addiction, lack of opportunity, and generational trauma, getting into scrapes and dreaming up schemes. Do some of their troubles stem from David unwittingly unearthing a curse in the second story? The final chapter further complicates the book’s fragmented chronology, crystallizing an episode that casts both backward across the book and forward across David’s life, to utterly harrowing, yet narratively satisfying, effect. Night of the Living Rez can be devastating, but it is also propelled by humor, exceptional dialogue, and quick, witty writing.

Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima

Ananda Lima’s wildly inventive novel-in-stories breaks all the rules. It starts twice. It mixes genres. It is about a writer. A writer whose relationship with the Devil is almost…healthy? There are cross-outs, Zoom calls, and ghosts. Some stories are structured so tightly a writing workshop wouldn’t have a single bone to pick with them, while the story “Idle Hands” is comprised entirely of writing workshop feedback letters, each more hilarious, but also backhanded, catty, and/or racist, than the last. The story “Antropófaga” features a machine vending snack-sized Americans. The story “Hasselblad: Triptych” reboots three times, as if seen through a prism. How do these incongruent styles and structures fit together to form a cohesive novel? They don’t, and through that marvelous tension and variation, they do.

How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Each story-chapter in How High We Go in the Dark illuminates a different facet of a new world created when climate change unleashes a plague from the Siberian permafrost. A particularly heart-breaking story is set at a euthanasia amusement park where parents bring their little ones—because this pandemic hits children the hardest—for one last beautiful day. In another story, a pig engineered to donate his organs to sick kids becomes too human: verbal, curious, compassionate. These and many other of the book’s premises could be salacious or even silly in the wrong hands, but Nagamatsu’s are the right hands. The book may be science fiction (although, is it? Nagamatsu started it in 2008, but readers today have been through both COVID and the hottest year on record…), but he keeps human emotion and relationships at its heart. Whether the stories are about starships, shapeshifting aliens, or a service that liquifies bodies and transforms them into ice sculptures, they are really about death, grief, and love. 

Fiona and Jane by Jean Chen Ho

The ten stories in Jean Chen Ho’s Fiona and Jane are about those namesake characters, but the most important word in the book’s title isn’t the names—it is their connector. Fiona and Jane are best friends from the moment eight-year-old Fiona moves to California from Taiwan. While it is more surface-level similarities, like the convenience of Jane already speaking Fiona’s language, that draw them together at first, their friendship quickly becomes the real thing. The two of them are a unit. That is, until they’re not. When Fiona moves away after college, each young woman struggles without her other half, filling in the blank before or after the “and” with all the wrong people. Jane says of Fiona, “I still thought of her as my best friend, though more and more she was becoming a story to me, one whose plot I couldn’t make sense of because either I was missing information or maybe I’d forgotten something from before—something important—and it was too late to ask about it now, because it would mean admitting I hadn’t been paying attentions.” Presence and absence are themes in this book not only regarding the central duo, but also their relationships with their parents and a series of partners and friends for each of them. Never straying far from what Fiona and Jane mean to each other, Ho is still able to draw fully realized secondary characters, too. 

Structurally, Fiona and Jane falls closer to the novel side of the novel-in-stories spectrum. It isn’t that a reader coming to the separate stories would necessarily know something was missing, but when the Fiona stories come together with the Jane stories, they all feel more complete.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum

Ms. Hempel Chronicles begins with a few stories firmly situating seventh grade English teacher Ms. Hempel within her school, cementing her identity and self-conception in relation to her noisy, sweet students. So, the next few stories shock the reader just as they would shock her kids: wait, Ms. Hempel exists outside of school? She has sex? And a fiancé?  No way—Ms. Hempel was once a child herself? The book then returns to her life within the walls of her school, the small changes there that destabilize her, how she succeeds and fails, sees herself or doesn’t in the lives of the other teachers, and searches for her place in the social order just like her preteens do. The final story in the book skips ahead years, but it fills in a lot of blanks for the reader, and for Ms. Hempel herself. The book is brimming with hilarious and true depictions of teaching: “The eighth graders were banished to their homerooms. As they exited the auditorium, banging into everything they touched…” as well as the insecurities that come with it: “Amnesiac…It was a condition that sometimes afflicted her. She would turn her back to the class; she would forget everything. What is a noun? Who were the Pilgrims? And, more troubling, What was I saying? Or: How did I get here?” By the end of the book, the reader knows all of this about Ms. Hempel and much more.

Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips

Disappearing Earth opens with the kidnapping of two little girls and then builds a world around their absence. Each story that follows takes on the life of a person in the girls’ community, Kamchatka, a remote Russian peninsula near Alaska. Organized by month, the book progresses across the year after the girls’ disappearance. The mystery and tragedy around that one crime is the book’s inciting incident and impetus, but the story-chapters reveal so much more than who dunnit, their scope both broad and deep. Phillips’s writing shapeshifts convincingly, bringing the reader into the world of a student dance troupe, the resigned grief of a second-time widow, or the shock of a middle-aged woman discovering the ways her body could betray her. Disappearing Earth also delves into the racial and ethnic complexities of the region—an indigenous girl is also missing, her kidnapping receiving considerably less attention than the white girls’. The structure of the book makes so much possible, like the slow accumulation of clues accessible to the reader but not necessarily the characters and a fascinating portrait of a place and its people. 

New to Liberty by DeMisty Bellinger

New to Liberty by DeMisty Bellinger complicates the idea of what a novel-in-stories can be. If there is a traditional form that novels-in-stories follow, it isn’t what Bellinger does here, which she describes as a “novel in thirds.” Each section is set in a different decade—1966, then 1947, then 1933—and centers a different woman in rural Liberty, Kansas. Bellinger is deft at constructing unforgettable scenes, like the visceral discomfort of 1966’s Sissily, a young Black woman, having to share a bed with her white lover’s unwelcoming mother, the confusing mix of feelings 1947’s Nella experiences when a handsome white man in a Victorian wicker wheelchair whispers a compliment in her ear, or 1933’s Greta and her brother wiping dirt from the wrinkles on their mother’s face and scooping mud from the crevices of her body after she is caught in a brutal dust storm. Each of these sections is compelling and propulsive on its own, but the end of the book pulls them all together. 

Light Skin Gone to Waste by Toni Ann Johnson

When Light Skin Gone to Waste opens, Dr. Philip Arrington is driving north from New York City toward a new life for him and his second wife, Velma, in the almost-entirely-white small town of Monroe, New York. The ten stories in the book move mostly between Phil, Velma, and their young daughter Maddie, with a few other voices brought in, like Maddie’s cousin and the family housekeeper. A major theme in the book is how parents’ choices affect their children, which the reader sees through the lasting damage done to the characters by the generations who came before them. The book’s heart is with Maddie, the only Black girl in her school and town—a deeply intentional choice by her parents—who longs for her cousin’s life in the parallel world of a mostly Black Long Island community, the cruelty of her classmates’ and neighbors’ racism not stifling, limiting, and terrifying her every day. 

The episodic form of Light Skin Gone to Waste is key to the book’s power. When Maddie suffers a trauma on a family trip, it is essential that the reader knows exactly what happened while her parents only should know. Likewise, it would be easy for the reader to hate Philip and Velma if we only got their perspective on each other or Maddie’s on her parents. Because the reader has an intimacy with each of them, though, Johnson leaves the opportunity open to feeling empathy for these characters, even when they might not deserve it. 

Sarah Manguso Says Wifehood, Not Motherhood, is What Really Fucks Women

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

If Sarah Manguso’s new novel, Liars, can be categorized in any genre, it is probably best characterized as a horror story. It tells the intimate, blistering story of a marriage that seemingly begins as a fulfilling partnership between John and Jane, who ostensibly share artistic aspirations and mutual ambitions, but quickly devolves into a relationship defined by unequal domestic workloads, misogynistic resentment, and psychological manipulation. 

The novel’s evocative depictions of gaslighting and sexism will demoralize you. That John repeatedly manages to gaslight Jane into believing she is crazy and that all of their marital problems can be traced back to her will make your skin crawl. But the book’s most disturbing element is how it incisively and completely captures a truth about the structure of marriage that many of us know but would prefer not to confront. 

Written with cutting prose and sharp wit, Liars explores creative ambition, motherhood, and gendered rage. It’s an essential addition to the canon of women writers illustrating the truth behind that old feminist proverb: the personal is political. 

I spoke with Manguso over email about being radicalized by divorce, listening to our mothers, and the delusion behind women shrinking themselves to appease patriarchy. 

Marisa Wright: In an interview from 2015, you said, “It was a failure of my imagination that I couldn’t conceive of motherhood as anything but a surrender to the patriarchy.” Does this book—and how it grapples with this idea—reflect that prior view or something new you’ve come to understand?

Sarah Manguso: In that 2015 interview I was marveling about a lesson that, despite its obviousness, I’d only recently learned, which is that children are interesting. Now, almost a decade later, I’m marveling again about another obvious lesson that I learned too late, which is that a ton of apparently progressive men absolutely love patriarchy.

MW: If I understand your answer correctly, you realized there is merit to motherhood independent of the patriarchy, but that’s not necessarily so for heterosexual marriage (or if it is, it’s to a much lesser and more complicated extent). Is that an accurate description of what you came to realize, and by extension, what’s depicted in Liars?

Traditional marriage is a patriarchal tool used to control and dehumanize women.

SM: Yes, that’s apt. Traditional marriage is a patriarchal tool used to control and dehumanize women. Motherhood, on the other hand, doesn’t need patriarchy, which is why conservatives so doggedly work to convince us that it’s trivial and that mothers shouldn’t need any resources, beyond our own bodies, to survive it.

MW: Amongst other recently published books that involve divorce, your book stands out for capturing the depths of cruelty and inequality that can exist in a marriage. And while you write with incredible specificity, many of the narrator’s experiences are very recognizable to anyone who has observed or experienced psychological abuse. When you decided to write this novel, how conscious were you of how ubiquitous these experiences are?

SM: Covid exposed the fact that, to quote Jessica Calarco, women are America’s social safety net. I felt buoyed by an ocean of female rage while I was writing Liars. That ocean, that fellowship of rage, is what held me up.

You mention the incredible specificity of Jane’s account; it was important to me to build a critical mass of concrete details. Jane’s taking things day by day, detail by detail, under the burden of bromides like Marriage takes work. She’s making a good faith attempt to be a partner, to be a wife, to compromise, to sacrifice. She’s living it in real time, though. The reader knows long before Jane does that she is being abused.

MW: The marriage depicted in this book is shaped by internal forces (e.g., John’s resentment of the narrator’s professional success) and structural forces (e.g., the devaluation of writing, which means Jane earns much less than John, making her financially vulnerable). What’s the relationship between the external and internal forces that contribute to the end of Jane and John’s marriage?

SM: Jane is confused for a long time about what she senses, but does not truly recognize, as John’s resentment of her success. After all, he’s mirroring her progressive values while also somehow sabotaging her career and her ability to work. She really, really wants a supportive partner, and like many women, she’s incredibly skilled at projecting that wish onto her husband. She’s ashamed to have married a man like him, and her solution is simply to pretend that everything’s fine. After all, she knows that the entire culture is ready to blame her for “choosing” to be abused.

MW: There are moments when Jane sort of takes responsibility for contributing to their unequal dynamic by putting up with various things or letting them go because it’s more convenient. It seems possible there is some truth to this feeling, but it’s complicated by how John constantly faults her for their marital issues, even by weaponizing her mental illness, which seemingly causes Jane to internalize this blame. Is there a way to reconcile these two facts?

Women of my generation were sold a bill of goods for a new kind of progressive heterosexual partnership that, for most of us, never actually materialized.

SM: Like many abuse victims, Jane believes that she can fix her marriage by becoming smaller; that if she were a more subservient wife, John wouldn’t abuse her. Jane’s psychiatric hospitalization, which took place years before she and John even met, makes her an excellent victim—John can torture her to the point of breakdown, and if anyone raises concern, he can just dredge up that long-ago hospitalization and blame her “mental illness.”

MW: At various points, Jane laments being unaware of how becoming a wife and mother would take over her life and displace her identity. Is there anything instructive about what Jane comes to understand about the implications of marriage and motherhood on women’s lives?

SM: Jane thinks her mother’s an embarrassing anachronism; she hoards jewelry, calls herself a housewife, and openly assumes that all men drink and gamble. Jane’s mother tells Jane that John wouldn’t travel so much unless he was cheating on her. Jane wishes that she’d listened to her mother. Listen to your mother? I guess that’s the instruction.

MW: Relatedly, there’s a striking moment when Jane writes to her friend Hannah, “Even a decent marriage drains the life out of a woman.” Can you expand on the roots of this sentiment in the narrative?

SM: I believe that traditional marriage is a domestic abuse paradigm, and that in our culture, all marriages skew traditional unless you and your spouse are doing a superhuman amount of work to correct for the misogyny that’s baked into every social, political, professional, educational, legal, financial, and medical system.

MW: Even outside of John’s abusive behavior, Jane is constantly faced with the tension between her writing career and being a mother, which is a persistent theme for many women writers. What did you want to add to this ongoing conversation with Jane’s story?

My divorce radicalized me, and Liars is my first expression of that new perspective.

SM: Being a writer and being a mother are not absolutely incompatible. What we’re really talking about, in that conversation, is money, not motherhood. And I’ve lost track of the number of women I’ve heard say that being a single mother with scant resources is a thousand times easier than being married to a worse-than-useless man. To put a finer point on it: Wifehood, not motherhood, is what really fucks us. Women of my generation were sold a bill of goods for a new kind of progressive heterosexual partnership that, for most of us, never actually materialized.

MW: Your previous books have explored deeply painful or distressing experiences, but Liars feels like it reaches a whole new level in that respect. Did the experience of writing this book feel different than your previous works?

SM: While writing this book, I was undergoing an extremely rapid education. My divorce radicalized me, and Liars is my first expression of that new perspective.

MW: You have included elements of your own life in your previous books, which I’m sure leads readers to feel permission to ask very personal and intrusive questions. In an ideal world where they don’t have to think about the repercussions, how would you like to see writers respond to these kinds of questions?

SM: We’re all doing the best we can in a world that is, as you point out, not ideal. I’m not here to disapprove of other writers’ degrees of disclosure.

Over the years, attitudes seem to have changed drastically about what a writer, especially a woman writer, ought to disclose. Decades before social media, women were openly despised for acknowledging that we had bodies, that we weren’t just disembodied minds. Now, decades later, it seems that when we aren’t constantly online, fawning and sharing pictures of ourselves, we’re despised for being uppity and cold. I’m old and ornery enough to have drawn fire from both sides, decades apart. Ho-hum. I will continue to write books as long as I am able, and in the future, when there’s a whole new reason to hate women, I hope I’ll still be around to face it down.

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

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Dialing In by Heidi Diehl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He hung up. A six-minute call.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was I seeding that I couldn’t control?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I think so.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

7 Books Reimagining Queer Histories

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blackouts by Justin Torres 

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

Lesbian Love Story by Amelia Possanza

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

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman 

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

After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz

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

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

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

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

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

7 Sport Novels About More Than Athleticism

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

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

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

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

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

The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou

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

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

The Sidekick by Benjamin Markovits

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

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese

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

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

The Cactus League by Emily Nemens

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

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

Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid

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

Breath by Tim Winton

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

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

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

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

And a bonus:

17776 by Jon Bois

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

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

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

7 Thrilling Novels Set on Greek Islands

Posted on by Intern Electric Lit

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

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

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

The Magus by John Fowles

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

The Murderess by Alexandros Papadiamantis, translated by Peter Levis

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

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

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

Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne

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

The Sleepwalker by Margarita Karapanou, translated by Karen Emmerich

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

A Separation by Katie Kitamura

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

Antiquity by Hanna Johansson, translated by Kira Josefsson

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

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

Posted on by Jo Lou

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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