For the reader and for Cory, the sense of dread and panic rises chapter by chapter, as we see her become increasingly isolated on the remote island, cut off from Wifi and her sense of self. Interspliced with these sections, we get the perspective of Emer, Cory’s mother, who is frantically searching for her missing daughter and, in the process, is dismantling her own life. “If our relationship can be characterized in any one way,” Emer tells us of Cory, “it is this:  I can’t keep up with her… When she was a preteen, dangerous moods began to overtake her. As a teen, she learned how to lie, to brush me off, affect false dignity, conceal her pain or shame, to disappear.” The prose, especially in the mouth of a desperate mother, is gorgeous and wrenching, and recalls for us the dark knowledge that women have always carried.

Fruit of the Dead, pulsing with life, is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time, and I was thrilled to talk with Lyon about it from my apartment in Philadelphia and her home in Massachusetts.

Annie Liontas: Why do we need the myth of Persephone in 2024, as told in this way?  What does the myth remind or warn us about?

Rachel Lyon: When I first began Fruit of the Dead, I was envisioning it as a beach read—a little sexy, a little light, but maybe a bit sinister at the same time. It started as a romp about a young woman who becomes involved with her employer. This was the beginning of the “Me, Too” movement, and I was thinking a lot about power dynamics and relationships, especially between men and women. And then two years into the project, I was having this conversation with somebody about the project, and they were challenging me on it, asking what makes this story different from any other love story about power dynamics.

I noticed that the shape of my book, the shape of my work in progress, mirrored the shape of this myth. So I started incorporating the Persephone myth more consciously and pretty soon it became a contemporary retelling. I think we need to be reminded that some of these cycles that we find ourselves in today are ancient stories. As human beings, we are constantly telling and retelling the same narratives, and that’s worth examining.

AL: Let’s talk about the power differential between Cory and Rolo. She is young, impressionable, eager for money, freedom, luxury. He is lonely, wealthy, accustomed to having his world view acknowledged and perpetuated. How are you thinking about power vs. choice, free will vs. the narratives that that shape us? 

RL: That was absolutely the heart of the project for me—examining these questions of freedom, power, choice, and youth. I think Cory has a different idea than her mother does about what freedom looks like and what free will looks like.

Rolo knows certain things about Cory that Cory can’t know about herself. There’s a window, I think, in the life of anyone who isn’t a cis-white man between the ages of 16 and 22 or so, where the feeling of freedom can be quite misleading and leads you into danger. The differential between your worldliness and your eagerness for freedom can be a little destructive. I wanted to examine this thorny space where Cory’s yearning for independence is actually in some ways the source of her foolishness. But she can’t know that, of course. She thinks this is a good choice, even though it leads her into some darkness.

AL: I love your description of this as a “thorny space.” I also appreciate how Cory is deeply ambivalent about Rolo. “Opposing thoughts nag at her simultaneously,” you write. “She wants Rolo to want her and she wishes he’d never look at her again.” This feels like a familiar narrative, one that Cory has inherited. How do you see it reflected in the larger world?

RL: We are told to be attractive and we are told we are not attractive enough. We’re created to be consumed, and then we worry we’re not consumable. I was very much writing my own experience as a young woman into Cory, and that ambivalence of, “Look at me/never look at me.” That’s the heart of a certain kind of young woman’s self-consciousness and experience in the world. It can be exquisitely painful to walk through the world feeling like your whole reason for being is to be consumed and to be delicious enough to be consumable, but that you’re never going to achieve that.

AL: Do you recall that viscerally from your own adolescent experiences?

RL: Yeah, I mean, I went through a period when I was maybe 19 where I really had a lot of trouble looking in the mirror. I was smoking a lot of pot, and that of course can change your sensory experience, your perception. I remember staring at my own face and my own body and being unsure what I objectively looked like. And for a long time—for years, actually—I avoided looking into mirrors for that reason. I just found it so upsetting, so confounding. I believe that’s more common than I realized at the time. The selfness of it all, the idea that we’re a container for these multitudes. That felt completely irreconcilable.

AL: Were those also irreconcilable with the world? Or do you think it was like really internal?

RL: I mean, both, right? Cory is an exaggerated proxy for me. She’s tall and she’s objectively beautiful, and she’s very bad in school and has made a lot of mistakes early on. I had that same, or perhaps similar experience, that she has of having completely fucked up before the age of 18 and having nowhere to go. Like me, she’s very gullible and seems to see the best in people to her detriment.

AL: What I love about Rolo is that, while he projects the role of Hades, he is far more man than villain. How were you able to preserve his humanity even as you revealed his flaws?  Specifically, what versions of him did you have to cast aside to get at this complexity?

RL: I think it would have been harder for me to write Rollo as a true villain, a true antagonist. I can’t imagine what that would be like, to be someone like that. It just doesn’t feel believable. Add to that, for the sake of the book and the plot, I needed him to be seductive on some level. I needed him to feel human. I mean, I had models that are despicable in the world. I watched the Jeffrey Epstein documentary—it was a horrible experience—and I read a lot about Harvey Weinstein. But Rolo is not one of those guys, exactly. Rolo is in the gray area. He falls into that general category of powerful male predator or semi-predator, but my intention was always to make him human on the page. What feels more poisonous is a self-perception that is really positive or really self-forgiving. He thinks of himself as a victim of circumstance and as someone who’s worked really hard and tried really hard, and comes from humble beginnings, and essentially deserves what he has. Those to me are the scary poisonous parts of the brain.

AL: As part of the novel’s drive towards cultural criticism, you also call out class discrepancies and capitalist mythologies. Fraud is the most common crime among men like Rolo who own such remote, private islands. “Tax fraud, bank fraud, market manipulation, securities commodities—but there is also evasion, embezzlement, falsification, kickbacks, laundering, racketeering, sedition, insider trading.” What did you uncover in your research for this book?

RL: We all take for granted that the vast chasm between the wealthy and the rest of us in this country is based on a tremendous legal sleight of hand, particularly regarding fraud and “bloodless” crimes. In my research, I talked to someone who works as the personal assistant for a very powerful person whose name you would know—one of those big, big campaign donors. The things that he told me about his work, the people at the parties! This person had a story about Leonardo DiCaprio that—my jaw just dropped. It’s not news to anyone, though, right? The flying around in helicopters and private planes, the proliferation of NDAs. These people live in a world that’s above the law. They don’t have to answer to anyone most of the time, and they don’t live in one country. Their money is all over the place. They don’t live within the same frameworks that we do.

AL: Granadone, which is a fictional powerful addictive in the novel, emerges as its own mythological artifact. What did introducing it do for your understanding of the narrative and Cory?

RL: When I started writing Cory, I was newly sober and thinking a lot about my own experiences of intoxication and the dark places that took me to when I was a young person—and then later on, too, for a while. In terms of making this specific fictional drug, I was looking at the story of the Sackler family. They’re a great epic contemporary mythological model for Rollo, but I didn’t want to comment directly on the opioid crisis, I didn’t want to write about opioids specifically. It just honestly felt more fun to me to toy with Cory’s perception in a more psychedelic register. Granadone is somewhere between the opioid family and the benzo family and the psychedelics family.

AL: What kind of world would have to exist for us to no longer need the story of Persephone?  Is there another myth, a generation from now, that we might tell instead?

RL: One of the things that feels so appealing about the Persephone myth is that inherent descent-and-rise shape. The cyclical shape. If we were to revise the myth to save Persephone from that experience—ideally, she wouldn’t have to go down there, right? But for me, a descent into the underworld is necessary. It’s almost integral to youth itself to pay a visit to the underworld. It helps you become a more whole, more compassionate adult later on.

The post A Trip to the Underworld is a Rite of Passage for Young Women appeared first on Electric Literature.

While some stories are speculative and others realistic, each story plunges you into a deeply lived world where fucked up things—be it a toxic relationship, racial objectification, or climate doom—unravel in a way that is both bold and, often, hilarious. There is a guilty pleasure in reading these stories. You feel like you’re in the hands of someone who has a sharp eye for the strangeness of existing in today’s world and doesn’t have anything she is too afraid to say.

Marshall is an award-winning playwright and she spoke to me by phone from her farm about leaving New York to become a writer, claiming space, and the role of physical labor in her creative process.

Sasha Vasilyuk: There is a line in a story called Sister Fat that says “And you will be a perfect father. Being dead, you will not interfere.” What do you think is happening to women and feminism today?

Jessie Ren Marshall: Everybody should define feminism for themselves and think about what that means. I do think that this is a feminist book because unfortunately, at this stage of literature, it is still a radical act to show the point of view of characters who are not white men. Each story in this book explores a different woman’s point of view and within that, there is a lot of diversity because I think women aren’t just one thing and feminism isn’t just one thing. The act of claiming space and claiming your voice is going to be necessarily multitudinous and weird and unexpected.

In my writing in general, I am really drawn to women’s voices and women’s relationships. Part of that is because I can draw on my own experience and it’s just kind of a selfish thing to do. But at the same time, I do see it as an act of defiance against the norm. An act of inclusion. I really love stories about women’s relationships with women as well, not just their relationships with men or being defined by a romantic relationship because we’ve all seen that story a million times on Netflix. I’m really interested in exploring motherhood, particularly non-traditional kinds of mothering, or mother-child relationships. I myself am not a mother, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t have an understanding of that relationship. And sisterhood is a huge one for me. And then of course, there are also queer relationships between women.

SV: The collection has both speculative stories (a sex bot, a woman traveling to populate Planet B) and realist ones—a woman getting divorced, a teacher flirting with a male student, a strip club dancer in London, a reluctant teen piano player—that reading those I often found myself wondering what of your own past experiences had found a place on the page? Or do you try to keep yourself entirely out of your fiction?

JRM: I kind of love the framing of this question because I think there’s a little bit of a reluctance to say this fiction is based on my life, because then readers will want to find the answer. And the answer is not this really happened, whereas this other thing didn’t happen. It’s not a puzzle in that sense. It’s more that I have experiences and obsessions that then work themselves out on the page because I think I’m always seeking to address questions and to write around questions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean answering questions on the page.

For example, one of the more speculative stories, which is told from the point of view of a sex bot, is very personal to me and I think is one of the stories that is based more on my own life experiences than perhaps something that seems more realistic. The divorce story for example, I wasn’t going through a divorce. I hadn’t even met anybody yet. I was a lot younger, but the Annie 2 story [the opening story about the sex bot] was written during the anti-Asian violence that was happening, particularly in New York City. And it was a response to that feeling of helplessness that I had, being so far away from where I felt like the crux of the violence was happening. At the same time, even though I wasn’t there, I understood that violence in a deep sense, because I had experienced it in a million different small ways. I think that’s what happens with micro aggressions: they pile up, but if you point to any one individually, they don’t seem like a big deal. But the accumulative nature of racism and sexism is a violence that I think many Asian American women would recognize. In that story, even though it’s told in a humorous way and the reader is distanced from the narrator because we are not robots, it’s that play of narrative distance that I think is so interesting to explore and to reflect what it means to be human. So I hope that a human reading that story feels the gravitas of sexism, racism, othering, even though the story itself is more speculative in nature.

SV: Have you ever dreamt of a man sweeping you off your feet or coming to your rescue? Is it a dangerous narrative for girls to grow up with? 

JRM: It is absolutely the baseline of what I grew up with. I think it is my generation’s baseline narrative of what you hope for as a young girl, and it is hard to escape. Any expectation for your life is going to be problematic. Anything that’s done by society is probably not going to work perfectly for anyone. But it is more complicated than just trying to work against this narrative of someone sweeping me off my feet, Princess Bride-style. It’s more complicated because there’s also this feminist counter narrative which was also shoved down our throats of “You need to save yourself. You need to be your own hero. Women are badass.” That is also problematic because it makes you feel wrong when you want someone to sweep you off your feet. What is wrong with wanting to be supported and saved and loved and adored? All of those things are part of human existence and I don’t think we should push them away as a kind of weakness. It’s all about balance, isn’t it? This is what being an adult is: we are trying to find a balance between what others want us to be and what we need to be in order to get through another day.

SV: What was it like coming of age as a writer in New York?

JRM: What I said before about having to navigate the trench between the way the outside world sees you and what you need in order to survive another day. That definitely applies to being a writer in New York. There was a lot of anxiety of influence that I felt when I was there, particularly in terms of the literary scene. At that time, which was a while ago, the literary world was so based in New York City, the American publishing world was not as diffuse as it is today. It felt like everyone in my MFA program was reading the same stories in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, Harper’s. We were being fed the same books and we had similar goals because what you read is kind of what you end up wanting to write. I really enjoyed the social aspect of the MFA program, but at the same time, I don’t think it was the best place to develop as a writer because of that anxiety of influence that I felt. So I overcorrected and moved to Hawaii. And that became a really amazing place to settle into my voice more deeply, and figure out what I wanted to write about or what I was interested in. Because I didn’t think about what was being published in the New Yorker that week.

SV: You live with your dogs off the grid on a remote farm on Hawai’i Island. It’s a dream of many a writer, but the reality of very, very few. What does it do to your brain to be away from society?

JRM: You’re right in that it is a very romantic notion that in order to be an artist, one has to remove oneself from society and be alone. I mean, everyone from Thoreau to Andrew Bird has said that it is a helpful thing to do. Andrew Bird, the musician, I think it was one of his earlier albums, where he just went to a cabin in the middle of the woods and knocked it out himself. There is something about the idea of being totally in your own created world that is very appealing, especially for a fiction writer because you don’t need other people to create that world. It’s a self-sufficient space. I think also being in nature is incredibly helpful for the creative process. It allows me to remind myself that I am a part of something larger than myself. And since I’m not religious, I think I need to find that reminder somewhere else and it comes from the natural world for me. In terms of not being a part of society, that has been quite difficult. I am a hermit by nature, I enjoy being alone, I don’t often long for company. But society is more than people. There is an aspect of society that I really miss, which is cultural connection, going to the theater, going to a restaurant, seeing what new things other people who are creative are creating. It’s sad to be apart from that for most of my days. And at the same time I do think one of the most wonderful things about having a book published is that it connects you to so many people in your work in public.

When your work becomes public, it’s like you’ve debuted into society. That’s actually a wonderful side effect that I wasn’t aware of is that I’m connected to all these people that I might not have met if my work weren’t becoming public soon. It is hard to be not in a city. I think when your book comes out there’s some anxiety that I feel because I would prefer it if I could have that permanent sense of community around me, of literary community, of creative community, friends and family, but at the same time, that’s what writing retreats are for.

SV: You’re working both on your farm and on your novel, Alohaland. What role does physical labor play in your creative process?

JRM: I try to spend a portion of every day doing something that is either working on the land or working on the house and both of those are definitely works in progress. I have a burgeoning garden, I build fences, I build furniture. I’m trying to make the world a little bit better, the world inside my space bubble. I’m trying to improve things and I think that that can be really useful as a writer because you spend so much time in your head creating a fake physical world. It’s nice to return to the actual physical world, where objects have permanence that you can touch and lift and move.

I think there are a lot of helpful parallels to when you look at the way that things grow and things decay and things die. There is a cycle of life to, particularly, the gardening and observing the land that keeps things in perspective. When you’re creating something like a book, which seems permanent, it seems like an object, but really everything is impermanent, because that’s just the cycle of time. So let’s not get too attached to the things that we make.

SV: Do you ever feel like a woman in peril?

JRM: I mean, I do get hurt sometimes, physically. So in those times, I think that I do curse the fact that I’m alone and trying to do things myself, but I also really like the self-sufficiency of knowing that I can lift really heavy things and, although it’s challenging, I can prevail. I think that has made the act of writing a book seem a little bit less daunting, because it is hard. It’s so fucking hard to write a book! It takes so much perseverance, it takes so much faith in yourself. And the way you build a fence is bit by bit. You don’t build it all in one day, especially when you’re doing it yourself without a lot of large tools to help you. But if you’re doing it with your own two hands, then it happens slowly and that’s the same way a book gets written.

The post In “Women! In! Peril!,” Defying Societal Norms Is an Act of Reclamation appeared first on Electric Literature.

Love the World or Get Killed Trying is a glorious, soul-shaking, vibrant manifesto of a novel. As its title suggests, it is a voice-driven testimony about how hard it can be to remain soft, while living in a world where trans people’s rights and autonomy are increasingly under political threat. 

Over a combination of email and Google Docs, Chamberland and I spoke about a range of topics including: the importance of breaking rules and bending genres, transmisogyny as a heightened version of misogyny against cis women, the uses of humor as a tool of survival and transcendence, and the manifold problems that result when straight men are unable to fully face, name and own their desires for trans women.

Shze-Hui Tjoa: What made you start writing this novel? 

Alvina Chamberland: I started mainly for two reasons. First: to survive. Ever since I was 19 and first fell madly in love, I’ve needed writing to not be driven out of my mind, and to try to make myself and my experiences of the world understood. It’s an escape route from death-spiraling anxiety, through giving the darkness form I create a moment where it can’t take over my life. 

Second: because I haven’t read many other books like this, and I need it to be out there in the world, a novel written by a trans woman that dares to be literary and poetic and abstract and realist and non-linear and dreamy. A novel which politically confronts straight men’s behavior towards us and demands change, and personally exposes both the universal and specific experiences that have shaped my life—my hope is that this vulnerability can connect and build bridges between people with very different structural positions.

ST: There’s so much humor in Love the World or Get Killed Trying! I especially love your protagonist’s quips about place as she travels – I laughed out loud to read her description of Iceland’s “Scandinavian Design temples dedicated to the fear of inflicting stains and the feeling of being dead inside.” What roles do humor and observation play in your writing?

AC: Oh my god, so many! First of all, trans girls need a wicked sense of humor in order to survive all the extremes and hypocrisies this world throws at us. In turn all these experiences make us so clever, sharp and witty in our observations. I can break down and build up social structures with my trans woman friends in ways I can’t with anyone else. This of course translates into how I write—or all the dark experiences portrayed in this novel, the humor goes even darker. 

One of my favorite terms in the world is “gallows humor,” but in order to inhabit that term, one must spend a lot of time in the gallows. I think I can say I have, and although I am dead serious and want to make a reader cry a hundred times, I also want to make her laugh nearly as much. It’s through this combination one can transcend the role of a one-sided victim without foregoing honesty, or denying the pain and tragedy and injustice of far too many things in our world.

ST: One of Love the World’s big themes is around “spotlighting straight men’s frequent and secret attraction to trans women.” And of course, the opening epigraph cites several statistics about the commercial popularity of transgender porn, explaining how “Transgender porn has presumably become the largest, most popular genre of porn among heterosexual men.” 

Could you say more about why you chose to write a book that spotlights this subject? I’m also curious about the differences between being desired and fetishized, which is one of the related themes your novel touches upon.

AC: I suppose the simplest way to describe the difference between being desired and fetishized would be: is a guy interested in me predominantly because I’m a trans woman or predominantly because I’m Alvina? The latter brings us closer to desire, as it allows me to be an individual. Of course, other factors also play in, like if the guy is keeping me secret, if he sees me as viable for a long-term relationship or just a fling/one time thing, if the desire’s solely sexual, about my body, or if it’s also about my personality etc. Unfortunately, not more than 1-2% of the rows of straight men who want to have sex with me live up to all these criteria, and straight men really have to start grappling with their hypocrisy, objectification and cognitive dissonance towards trans women. One rarely sees “feminist men’s groups” addressing these topics, rather they can often be the most silent and intimidated by trans women of all straight men —too busy pretending to “tolerate” us to ever date us. Like, my experience is that white middle class liberal northern European men may be the most transphobic in the world. 

The whole issue of straight men’s desire is of course extremely relevant to me as it encircles my, and most straight trans girls’, lives. I mean the reason trans women, especially trans women of color, are the group within the LGBTQI+ umbrella facing the most murders and extreme violence, isn’t that straight men harbor more hatred towards us, but rather that they harbor hatred towards themselves for desiring us. And yet, any and every trans girl knows just how common and normcore this desire actually is. In our current society it wouldn’t be safe for many of us to do so, but if trans women one day collectively decided to out every man who seeks us out, a full-blown revolution would ensue by nightfall. There’s just so many of them and they’re almost completely invisible.

ST: I love that phrase—“a revolution by nightfall.” What kind of revolution are you thinking of, what do you hope it will dismantle or change?

AC: Allow me to get a bit abstract here as I’m talking about something that goes beyond our imaginations of liberation for minorities/subgroups. It’s about straight men finally being placed in a position of vulnerability, outside of their comfort zone, getting into contact with our very queer life experiences and thus not staying in the heteronormative echo chamber most of them have lived their entire lives within. This carries with it so much potential for collective freedom and liberation and a radical shift of fragile masculinity, thus far built on hiding, shame, and obsession with other men’s approval. 

What may not be as revolutionary—but would cause an important shift in many trans women’s lives—is creating an understanding of what transitioning really means in a physical sense, beyond identity. Of course if someone looks like society’s definition of a man, yet identifies as a woman, most straight men won’t find her attractive. But if a woman lives up to the beauty standards for women, she’ll be desired by most straight men, whether or not she is trans. For us to be held to the same beauty standards as all women isn’t revolutionary, but it’ll at least mean we won’t have to look perfect in order for a guy to even consider a date with us in daylight. The goal however is to eradicate these cisnormative patriarchal beauty standards altogether…

ST: Your novel is so incisive about how transmisogyny is a heightened version of regular misogyny. And as a fellow writer, I’m curious how (or if) you think this dynamic plays out in the careers and public reception of trans writers.

AC:  To begin with, most well-known trans women authors and intellectuals are lesbians. That has a lot to do with the messy extra trauma and hyperfemininity straight trans girls often endure and express, which has us deemed less competent. For similar reasons trans men may be deemed even more competent than lesbian trans women by institutional powers. Us straight trans women are generally granted visibility as models, actresses, or sex workers—the desire for us is hidden like gay desire was in the 1950s, and we are largely limited to a few select occupations like cis women were in the 50s. And if we’re very beautiful, we get reduced to that beauty and accused of “pandering to the male gaze.” At the same time cisnormative society defines a successful and respectable transition as one which leads to beauty and passing. It’s a double bind, damned if you, damned if you don’t.

I notice that this doesn’t happen to normatively attractive trans men, who reap rewards in a more linear fashion. The more I’ve started passing, the more I’ve noticed that queers and feminists expect me to be a bit stupid and conservative, until I prove them otherwise. Meanwhile, straight men are now the ones who seem the most eager to give me compliments for both my beauty and my intellect. Yet, before I became beautiful in a cis passing way, they completely ignored me and my work. So, I guess beauty is the prerequisite for them to pay me any attention at all, and I still deem it unlikely that they’ll be lining up to buy my book…

ST: There are many fantasies of romance woven through Love the World. The protagonist develops all these imaginary relationships in her head—with Cristiano Ronaldo, or the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. But also, she’s in a kind of imaginary relationship with us—her readers—as she’s always breaking the fourth wall to talk to us directly. Was writing this book about finding connections, for you? 

AC: Since writing is such a solitary process, I think the real answer would be that the deepest connection I am seeking is one with myself. My hope is, however, that all this intense digging—all this openness and vulnerability and honesty—will make others feel connected to me as well. But that’s up to them to decide. I have no control over where the text goes, though I wish I could put it in the hands of more straight men, who perhaps are the ones who need to read it the most.

Most of all though, I don’t really have a target audience. I hope what I’ve written is heartbreakingly human enough and good enough as literature to traverse beyond static identity borders. And not because I’ve compromised and watered down my reality to make it more palatable—quite the contrary, real bridges are built through being adamantly real, getting humanized by showing just how human you are. 

I don’t want cis people to read this and be like “I’m a good ally, I read a novel by a trans woman, and it has nothing to do with me.” And neither do I want trans women to read and only feel empowered (although perhaps that too), but rather seen and understood in all the complexities we’re forced to live through. Or not—because in the end this is a novel, and I can only represent my own voice in it, and that voice may resonate with some and not with others. Its resonance may indeed occur in the most unexpected directions, which is the beauty of it.

ST: I keep coming back to this line near the end of the novel, which has stayed with me over all the months since I first read it: “Cool, composed, self-assured, professional—all characteristics we try to attain in order to better become machines. I don’t possess these qualities, and I have quit trying.” 

Love the World makes such intentional room for “too muchness”, instead of eliding it like other novels do. I’m curious what you feel it brings to the reading experience—or to the reader—when a writer doesn’t shy away from showing the contradictions, messiness, or complexities of their “behind the scenes” world…  because I feel like Love the World does this with such style and flair, and in a one-of-a-kind way compared to other books I’ve read. 

AC: I feel literature can capture the complexity, battles, and contradictions going on in our inner monologues to a deeper extent than more visually focused art forms. It’s difficult to make a film that only showcases what is going on inside a person, but it’s much easier to write a book based on that foundation. I find this especially important in today’s social media world where Twitter allows 240 characters, Insta-success comes from establishing a simple and consistent brand, and activists are seen as the most radical and worthy of visibility if they present themselves as 100 percent certain. The thing is though, most of us are neither simple nor consistent nor completely sure, which doesn’t mean we are total messes who can’t articulate any opinions… But honesty lies somewhere in-between and in this novel I’ve tried to enter various questions with that broad embrace. Indeed, I guess you could say I approach politics more as questions than answers…

The post Alvina Chamberland Takes a Scalpel to Straight Men’s Secret Attraction to Trans Women appeared first on Electric Literature.

Those three trips inform Gallagher’s newest novel Daybreak, which follows U.S. Army veterans Luke Paxton and Han Lee’s arrival in the weeks after Russia’s invasion. 

When we first meet the pair, they are on a bus, pitching “east through midnight black…rumbling into an alien unknown.” Paxton (Pax to all who know him) was persuaded to trade his job as a mechanic at an AutoZone in Tulsa for war in Ukraine by Lee, whose brash, unwavering confidence could crumple the front slope of any Russian tank. “Something worth fighting for,” Lee says of the war. “You know how fucking rare that is?”

Pax, on the other hand, is much less certain. One Ukrainian after another scratches their chin at his being in their country while it is under attack. “Why are you here?” The question comes at him from all sides, as ceaseless as machine gun fire. Each time you sense the emphasis on a different word. “This is not normal behavior,” his would-be military recruiter tells him. 

Part of Pax’s motivation is Svitlana Dovbush, a Ukrainian he once loved and lost during his time in the military and who he hopes to now locate. However, he is also searching for the sort of purpose and meaning that he had only found before in the military. War is a force that gives us meaning. “It baited those,” Gallagher writes, “who survived it, seduced them, deluded them, trailing like an old loyal dog until of course you turned around and said, Come on, boy.” 

Gallagher has created a fully formed character in Pax, but one sees a lot of America in him—spiritually and morally wounded by our Forever Wars, causeless, adrift, desperate to be of some help. “I might be broken,” Pax says, “but I’m not useless.” This desire to be of service is the novel’s beating heart. That impulse which led him to volunteer for the American armed forces may have resulted in his brokenness, but in Ukraine, with the world’s attention on it, he is given another chance. “It was thrill. It was fear. More than anything, Pax felt like himself again.”

In Daybreak, Gallagher provides readers with a nuanced, polyphonic, tender, and violent portrait of a country and its people rallying together to repel one of the world’s bullies for the sake of democracy, normalcy, and their very existences—ideals that Americans have historically gone to the mat for. 

However, since those early months of the war, our attention and support for Ukraine has waned. In the age of polarization and calcification, Ukraine’s existential fight against a tyrannical aggressor has become yet another wedge issue in America. But in Daybreak, through multiple points of view, Gallagher puts into human drama what the stakes are for the free world. “This fight belongs to us all,” one of the novel’s Ukrainian characters says. “It will find us all.”

Julian Zabalbeascoa: Since Russia’s invasion, you have traveled to Ukraine three times, as both a journalist and a volunteer. How was it that Luke Paxton’s story came to be the one you’d tell in fiction about those experiences? 

Matt Gallagher: I think that with each trip to Ukraine I became aware that there were interesting stories there I couldn’t necessarily source, interesting people I was meeting who wouldn’t go on the record, maybe just anecdotes being told that were second or third hand, that all carried the right ingredients for good fiction. So into the notebook they went for further contemplation and complication.

Luke Paxton and Han Lee in Daybreak are troubled men in some ways. They haven’t been able to shake Afghanistan. They haven’t been great at being contributing members to society in the States. But they still want to do some good, right? They still want to help people in a meaningful way. And you know, that’s most people in everyday life. Not necessarily literary life, where a lot of folks are afraid to go outside and get their hands dirty, but real, everyday life. They’re messed up in some ways. But they’re not bad. They’re not evil. They’ve done decent things and they’ve made mistakes, too. They regret them. They’re going to continue to make mistakes and have regrets. They possess emotional and moral nuance that’s very much not easy, nor tidy.

So I think the fashioning of these characters was deeply rooted in encountering their real-world counterparts, especially during that first trip into Ukraine when we went as volunteers. We arrived in late February 2022, alongside the first wave of international legionnaires. Many were rough and tumble personalities. Once we got [to Lviv] we kind of went off and did our own thing, working with Ukrainian civilians, were kind of in our own little silo, but even as we were busy with that I couldn’t help but think of the Americans and Brits we met on the bus ride in, wondering what they were doing, how quickly they were getting to Kyiv to participate in the fight there. I’m sure you’ve read many of those early dispatches of the international fighters. It was chaos. They were handed a rifle, maybe pointed in a direction with a team of five or six, and told to go kill Russians. The organization that we see now from the international fighters and units was a long way away.

I did not go to Ukraine with the intent to write a novel, I went to help some people in a small but hopefully direct and meaningful way. At the same time, I’m a writer. It’s what I do, how I think about and experience the world. Everything I saw or did, every conversation, notes were being taken in my head, whether I was conscious of them or not.

JZ: Throughout the book, though, Paxton is pummeled with the question by locals: “Why are you here?” Maybe I’m not alone. Maybe a lot of Americans would think, like me, that the answer would be an easy one. “To fight for democracy. To fight against one of the world’s big bullies.” And that Ukrainians would be congratulating him for having made the sacrifice. But instead they eye his decision with a lot of suspicion and skepticism. You’ve written about this for Esquire, but can you talk a little about that suspicion, about that skepticism that people like Paxton would face in Ukraine?

MG: In the book there’s both a kind of internal and external awareness of America’s role in the world, and that big, heavy question of “Why are you here?” is being experienced by Pax on the ground level. Lee is able to give a very clean, firm answer to that which is, “I’m here to fight. I’m here to kill Russians,” and that is exactly what the Ukrainian recruiter wants to hear, and that’s frankly probably what a lot of Ukrainian people want to hear, too. That’s what Zelensky asked for. Pax isn’t able to give that kind of full, clean answer, and it’s almost to his detriment that he’s honest about that. 

Getting there as early as we did, we arrived with some true believers and idealists, but we also came in with the shady business types that feed off the fringes of any war. Also some pretenders and lost souls who would only get in the way in the months to come. So the “Why are you here?” skepticism was more than warranted. We were able to answer, “Hey, we’re here to train civilians on basic self-defense. We’re not playing. We want to stay as long as we can. But we’re going back to our families.” 

That was a direct answer that also happened to be an honest answer, and it generally passed the sniff test for most of the Ukrainians who asked. Putting this question into the fiction and having these characters wrestle with it in divergent ways… was just very natural. I think it’s related somewhat to your earlier question about including Ukrainian perspectives, and how the world’s changed. Through many blunders and failures, America has earned people’s skepticism. Simultaneously, though, we can—and do—contribute and help in very real, meaningful, substantive ways. It’s not black or white. It’s very, very gray. And I love the messy grays of existence, both as a writer and as a human.

JZ: And it seems you’re drawn to these sorts of conflicts that require one to throw their body and soul into. In your novel Empire City, Mia attends a baseball game. She finds professional sports bizarre. “It was tribalism without purpose. Expression for the sake of nothing but itself…Why devote so much,” she wonders, “to something you couldn’t impact?” You see this in your characters throughout your three novels and your non-fiction, possibly even your tweets, the desire to make a difference. If you care about a thing, contribute to it. 

MG: I think you’re onto something there. I’m going to generalize now, but I did live in Brooklyn for a decade and swam in those literary waters, so I’m not talking out of my neck or anything: to a lot of people in contemporary American literary culture, the literati or whatever, they want military vets to be victims. Or dumb, simple-brained monsters. Or losers, just really old stereotypes that fulfill easy preconceived notions. But of course it’s more complicated.

That was just not my experience in uniform. By and large, both on the enlisted and officer side, I saw a lot of hard-working, pragmatic people whose faith in their country was constantly tested by the wars we were sent to, if not outright broken. But they sought to contribute to something bigger than themselves with everything they had. After we got back, people arrived at various answers to what it is we did, what our wars meant. There’re people that I spent every day with in Iraq for fifteen months who came out of it with different politics and a very different worldview than mine, but you know, fuck it, they earned it. And I think in my small way, with my writing, I’m trying to push back against those easy, lazy stereotypes that I see spread by smart people who should know better, who claim to believe in emotional nuance and use all the right buzzwords about complexity, but for whatever reason, find themselves unwilling or unable to apply that kind of generosity and nuance to military vets. Or maybe it’s just not for people in general found to be the wrong type of different.

I don’t know. I’m 40 years old now. I’m less compelled to play nice for the sake of it, have become more comfortable letting fly my cantankerous flag. I don’t want to be part of that club anymore, and regret ever trying to be part of that club. With my work, if I can push back against some of that and defy it… then good. Though of course I must be careful. I can’t be too on the nose with my frustrations, because then I start preaching too much, and it gets in the way of the story and characters and the messy, beautiful contradictions I mentioned earlier. But I’m being honest, that kind of stuff makes me angry, and anger can be good for writing. It gets you out of bed in the morning and puts you to work.

JZ: Sticking with that and with Empire City for a moment longer. In Empire City, citizens pay the war tax to not have to think about war. In Daybreak, Lee tells Paxton, “It’s all part of the social contract. We put our bodies and lives on the line when no one else would. Fucking civilians pay the tax man so they can ignore what’s done in their name.” It reminds me of something in Phil Klay’s collection of essays Uncertain Ground, “Our military is a major part of who we are as a country; it is the force that has undergirded the post-World War II international order.” Yet, as he writes later on, “though we’re still mobilized for war, [we are] in a manner perfectly designed to ensure we don’t think about it too much.” Read our military veterans, and one encounters on the page this determination by you and the others to wake the rest of us up to, in Lee’s words, “the whole puppet show.” Why do you think this is so critical for not only America but, perhaps, what it means to be an American? And how might this tie to our waning support for Ukraine.

MG: It’s a hell of a question. I think if there’s one thing that unites post-9/11 writers, whatever our style or genre or perspective, whether we’re a veteran or civilian, it’s a kind of desperate howl to get people to pay attention and care. 

The [American] war literature that came before didn’t face this challenge. Crane, Hemingway, Gellhorn, Heller, Vonnegut, Tim O’Brien … all incredible writers, transformative writers, but they could correctly assume that their subject already mattered to readers. The foreign wars that made up their worlds were so impactful on American society. They could focus on the story and created timeless literature, as a result. Whereas I do think that that our generation has an additional hurdle which is to get people to even engage with the subject to begin with, then engage with the story and engage with the writing.

Whether this is all by design or an unhappy accident of the all-volunteer force, that’s a separate question. But it’s the reality. And I don’t think it’s surprising to anybody who served in Iraq or Afghanistan and wrote about it that many Americans can’t be bothered to pay attention and care about Ukraine only two years into this thing. Outside of occasional humanitarian volunteers and occasional legionnaires, Americans are not dying there. It feels very intangible because we’re sending weapons and money and munitions that 98% of Americans will never see, never touch. It’s all very vague and ethereal.

And as frustrating as that is to me, because I would view us turning our backs to Ukraine as a deep, ugly betrayal, I can’t help but also understand that this is a byproduct of the American defense complex boxing out the American people’s attention spans and focus on war and foreign policy. People’s priorities aren’t a faucet to be turned on and off. And after years in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, too, when the powers that be in the defense complex decided it was easier and smoother to not wrestle with these hard questions that Phil is so excellent at posing to us, and then trying to get us all to engage with, well, it’s no surprise that people switched off from Ukraine. We’ve all been conditioned to do exactly that.

JZ: To that, a recent Gallup poll has 43% of Americans thinking the U.S. should help end the war early, even if this means ceding territory to the vicious aggressor. Which is interesting because, as you say, the war isn’t impacting us in any material way. Money isn’t being taken out of our wallets, money that could be put to work here in America, to support Ukraine. This is deficit spending. Do you think that lack of support is as simple as political identity? 55% of Republicans and 49% of independents feel this way, while only 19% of Democrats do. What else might contribute to it? 

MG: I think that’s a huge aspect of it. When we first came back in March 2022, there was a rare kind of bipartisan support. People that I’ve had a real hard time talking politics with over the past couple of years reached out and were very supportive. That didn’t last, maybe couldn’t last. Political tribalism is real and potent right now.

It’s strange, because here’s a conflict where America’s doing something right by and large, in my estimation, and a lot of Americans seem to not know how to handle that. On one hand, I get it. I’ve held a rifle in an Iraqi living room apologizing for raiding the wrong house. I know what wrong looks like. I’ve been part of it. This, though?  It requires some intellectual humility to accept that this is completely different. And also just listening to actual Ukrainians.

Being there in the east as a journalist, and having native Russian speakers come out of their houses to thank us for being there, even thanking our translator, because he’s from western Ukraine … it was fundamentally different than my experience in Iraq, where the only people genuinely glad for our presence tended to be the wealthy tribal sheiks cashing in on the nation-building contracts. So much of my journalism is trying to convey the human experience of life over there for people back here. And I’m pretty good at it, I think. Yet there’s just such a reflexive anti-Americanism ingrained in aspects of our culture and society, I can tell that sometimes even my best efforts are absolutely futile.

Life is more complicated than blanket reflexes. Interventionism isn’t inherently good or bad. Isolationism isn’t inherently good or bad. We have to take things on a case-by-case basis, because the world is too complicated to do anything else.

JZ: I’m going to quote Phil Klay again. This past November, being interviewed by The New York Times, he said, “Ukraine represents not a good war—because the closer you get to war, the more obvious it is that a phrase like ‘a good war’ has no valid meaning—but rather a necessary war. The clear moral case for Ukraine is about as straightforward a case of a just defense against a vicious aggressor as you could find.” 

MG: Here’s an anecdote I keep returning to. Our second trip, October 2022, we ended up outside of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine, driving through a village that had been liberated maybe a couple months prior. It’s about ten miles from the Russian border, we could hear artillery in the near-distance, and people are just—the whole village has been absolutely trashed. People are rebuilding their roofs, rebuilding their lives, best they can. We came across this family. We ended up talking to the wife’s mother, as well. She was an old woman, maybe 75 or so, and kept on insisting on speaking in Ukrainian.

Even to my ears, it was clear she was not comfortable in it. But with our Lviv-born translator there, she knew it was a way to practice. She was from this area, had spent her whole life here, had always spoken Russian. She admitted that most of her life, she thought Ukrainian was a language for peasants or troublemakers from the west. But now, she was trying to learn it, trying to rely on it, because it was the best way she could think of to honor her grandson, who’d been killed fighting in the border guard early in the invasion.

One person’s small act of change, of courage, even of patriotism, perhaps, that’s no small thing at all. She’s absolutely the type of Ukrainian that Putin says wants to be Russian, wants to belong to Russia, and maybe at one point in her life, she did. Definitely not now.

She’s just one person, sure. But she’s indicative, I think, of something that’s happening across the country. It’s something I put in at the dinner party scene in Daybreak. One of the characters says, “If we weren’t a real country before, we are now.” That’s very real. 

JZ: I see it as a great act of defiance and resistance, too. You put it in Daybreak so well, with Svitlana saying of her son, “An entire generation of children will forever have [Russians] as the enemy, and they’ll be right to. This war will not be a short one. He will grow up in it. They all will.” Should Putin get his way with Ukraine, there will be no peace. You see it today in the occupied territories.

MG: These people are going to keep fighting. So what can we do as an American to actually support these people who are living the ideals that we claim ownership of, that we claim inspire and motivate us? These are innovative, freedom-loving people. Nobody should support them more than flag-waving Texans, but for domestic political reasons, that doesn’t always seem to be the case. And yeah, you know that section you read from Svitlana, it’s very true. Based off of conversations I’ve had with young Ukrainian parents, friends that I’ve made over there who have kids about the same age as mine, this concerns them greatly. And, to be honest, I intended it as a stick in the eye for American readers. We’re so comfortable. We’re so spoiled. War for us is always something that is over there, something that we can come and go to as we please. If fiction can do anything, it’s to maybe get you to consider what it would be like to be living as somebody else, some other place, and I hope, when readers come to that section that they don’t have to agree with Svitlana’s decision, but I hope they at least understand her calculus behind it. 

JZ: Putin has unified Ukraine in a way that it never was before. You have some wonderful moments throughout the novel that illustrate this. It’s also in your reports from Ukraine. In many respects, they are a far more unified country than the United States is these days. Yet, you also show, despite this unity, that there are various factions with various interests, some of whom get in the way of this grand effort to repel Putin’s forces. Why was it important to include this aspect?

MG: I’m glad that resonated, because these are real people. This is a real society. Of course there’s friction. Of course there are factions. Of course there’s internal politics at play. Take Pax’s encounter with the Nationalist leader, Dog. I was very intentionally showing that some bad people are, in fact, fighting on the side of good, because that’s real life. We sometimes have very simplistic views of war. Is this a battle of democracy versus autocracy? Yes. But also, there’s more. The reality is soldiers are oftentimes very gruff people with ugly worldviews. They’re rough men willing to do violence on our behalf, to paraphrase Orwell back in the day. They’re not always going to be people you want to take home to your mom to have dinner with. So what does that make you feel, you know? Dog is an extreme example of that. But even Lee is a version. I think he’s a fun character. I think he’s an engaging character. But he makes people uncomfortable, and he’s kind of proud of that, and I know a lot of soldiers like that. They have a purpose in this world, are proud of it, and it’s not to talk in neat little platitudes at cocktail parties. So giving Ukraine the country and Ukrainian society the respect it deserves, to show it in its various flavors, in various hues, was vital, because otherwise I’m not writing seriously about a real war. I’d be writing kind of hollow fairy tales. Which, hey, would probably sell more copies. But then I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. 

JZ: Elon Musk receives an uncritical and unironic shout-out here, for how his Starlink satellites have allowed Ukraine to repel Russian forces. “Maximum cool” is how a Ukrainian describes him. It’s also what a Ukrainian volunteer said of you and Adrian and Benjamin to Anderson Cooper. Explain yourself.

MG: It’s kind of a funny little time capsule, because during the early part of the war, because of Starlink, he was viewed as a hero [in Ukraine.] And now he’s kind of viewed more as a traitor, due to some of his choices since then, some of the things he’s said. I wrote it to add some cultural flavor and it ended up becoming darkly ironic because, history being history, another layer revealed itself with the passage of time. 

As for the “maximum cool” line—I will absolutely cop to lifting that from the CNN piece. When he said it, I was standing right there, and it was awesome, you know. Anderson laughed at it, and of course, it made the final cut. You just have to be careful sometimes with broken English, because God knows these people’s English is way better than my Ukrainian. So you don’t want to be making fun of it. At least I don’t. I don’t wanna be doing the thing that Jonathan Safran Foer did years ago with Everything is Illuminated, kind of turning the translator into a joke because of the broken English and all the pop culture references. On the other hand, it can be a very real part of modern eastern Europe, right? So splashes of it here and there seemed okay. But I didn’t want to make it a crutch, and I didn’t want to have it done by the more prominent Ukrainian characters. Either they speak no English or they’re fairly fluent, like Svitlana and Bogdan are.

JZ: Where do you see things going in Ukraine in the near future?

MG: A lot hinges on if our Congress in the next couple of weeks can shake itself out of this funk. I do know that Ukrainians will keep fighting with or without international support. They’ll keep fighting, even if they’re losing ground. I am beginning to suspect that some kind of fake peace treaty is going to be forced upon them by the international body. And then both Ukraine and Russia will prepare for the next phase of the war … but when they say Crimea is Ukraine, they mean it. When they say Donbas belongs to us, even if it’s been in Russian hands since 2014, they mean it. I understand the Western instincts to want peace, to want this to go away, to get off our news. It’s not our land, it’s not our history. But I do think that a temporary ceasefire, and I don’t necessarily agree with it, but I do think a temporary ceasefire is something we’re barreling toward, even as both major players know it’s temporary. 

The post Matt Gallagher On Fictionalizing the Real Stakes of the Ukrainian War appeared first on Electric Literature.

The collection is populated with Pteradons and vampires, shark-children and dragons, people transformed into moths—and yet the primary takeaway for the reader is not escapism, nor magic, nor fantasy, but instead the opposite: these stories usher us into universal emotional states of grief, loss, and desire. The world we recognize is defamiliarized, made strange and new, which works to bring to the surface those conflicts and questions that are part of every human’s experience. 

Another way Sides defamiliarizes the world is through the use of forms—recognizable forms like letters, police interview transcripts, instructions, exams, and others that set up the reader’s expectations and then subvert these expectations. The result is an array of storytelling modes and experiences that feels both fresh and original and yet comfortingly familiar. 

Sides’ collection, with its playfulness and range, is hard to categorize and a joy to read. Is it realism? Is it fantasy? Is it magical realism? Comedy? Drama? Yes, all of this and more.

Darrin Doyle: I picked up a definite fable vibe in many of these stories. Some feel like allegories, while others employ fairy tale tropes like humans transforming into animals. Were you influenced by myths and fables in writing this collection? 

Bradley Sides: Absolutely, but not in a traditional sense. I really love contemporary work, so I find a lot of inspiration in today’s writers. Daniel Wallace, for example, is a huge influence. His novel Big Fish, which has mythic and fable-like elements, was the first time I saw literary magic in the South. I’ve probably read that book fifty times, and I’m serious, too. I’m also influenced by the stories of our best magical realists like Karen Russell, Kelly Link, and Alexander Weinstein. There’s so much good work out there that’s engaging with the elements you mention. 

DD: Themes of grief and mortality come up often in these pieces. Do you think about allegorical potential before you begin writing, or is this something you notice only after you’re finished drafting?

BS: Grief and mortality are two of the major focuses of my writing. I might argue they are the major focuses of my work. Many of the texts I hold closest approach both of these things so closely. Just looking back at Big Fish, for instance, the novel is largely about dying and death—our lasting story or legacy, whichever you want to call it. It’s on the first page up until the end, and I think that’s true to life. When we learn what death is, it tends to haunt many of us. We think about not only our own death, but we also think about the death of all the folks we love. It’s always there—and there is no escaping it.

I tend to let my stories develop as I write them. I’m not much of a planner or an outliner. When allegorical elements might enter, they aren’t intentional. I oftentimes learn from readers what my stories are about, and that’s usually something related to grief and/or mortality. When I’m in the process of writing, my stories are, to me at least, just stories. 

DD: What draws you to using the fantastic in your stories? Do you think magical realism can address real-world conflicts as effectively as standard realism, and if so, how? 

BS: I probably sound ridiculous saying this, but for me, the magic is the truth. I grew up on a farm in very rural Alabama. My company was oftentimes bullfrogs, cows, nighttime’s total darkness, and occasional flickering stars. There was a lot of room to get lost in that world—to let imagination take over. And my imagination felt as real as anything else. 

It still does. When I am able to travel and see a volcano, I can’t just admire the volcano. I see what it might contain and what it might be able to do. When I’m at a museum, I can’t just see a skeleton. I imagine where it was and what it did. Maybe even what it wishes it could still do.

The fantastic has power because it can’t really be contained. There’s a truth in that limitlessness that is special.

DD: I love that—the limitlessness and power of imagination. To continue the thread of grief and mortality, a number of the pieces deal with the loss of loved ones, and they show scenarios where the dead are literally brought back or visited. Not to get too philosophical, but do you think fiction is a sort of wish-fulfillment in that regard?

BS: That’s a tough one. I see fiction as being a means to explore possibilities. Maybe it is a way to give people their wishes, but maybe it is also a way to explore their fears. 

There’s power in fiction, and as readers and writers, we get some of that power extended onto us. 

DD: A number of these stories—“Our Patches,” “Raising Again,” “To Take, To Leave,” and “The Browne Transcript”—hint at the apocalypse through some kind of environmental disaster or other doomsday scenario. Obviously, climate change is a topic of some urgency at the moment. Can you talk about what draws you to this subject? 

BS: I love this question, Darrin, and I’m just now realizing how apocalyptic this collection really is. Ha! Fear is probably the short answer. The world seems to be dying, and that’s scary. Writing about the world ending gives me a way to harness that fear and maybe try to make sense of it. Or maybe even to prevent it. Or accept it…

DD: Haha, yes. There’s that wish-fulfillment again, or maybe “coping mechanism” is a better way to put it. Your stories also present “monsters” (giant lizards, vampires, dragons, Pteradons, and more) existing in “modern, real-world” settings. You seem to raise questions about what defines a monster —and by extension, what defines a human. Can you talk about this? 

BS: I am especially interested in how the two intersect. I always have been. It’s one of my major interests as a writer of weird/speculative/magical things. Humans can certainly be monstrous; they can also be good. Monsters can be humane; they can also be evil. With these stories, I want to show the various sides of humans and monsters, but I want the actual power of classification to extend a bit further to the reader—to give that person experiencing the story the agency to decide if a character is more human or more monster and for them to also create their own evaluation criteria. Maybe humans and monsters aren’t all that different? Maybe they are? As a fiction writer, I like my stories to pose questions that I don’t really answer. I’ll leave that part to the reader because that’s part of the fun.

DD: I love your use of forms throughout the collection. You have a story in instructions, a transcript of a police interview, an exam, a letter, a choose-your-own adventure, and others.  What are some advantages and disadvantages to this sort of storytelling? 

BS: Thank you. I appreciate you saying so. I wrote most of Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood during the peak of COVID. I had to feel like I was having fun in order to write because those were some dark days. If I wasn’t having fun, I wasn’t writing. It’s that simple. Experimenting with form allowed me to truly be excited in what I was creating. I wrote quickly. I was laughing and failing and trying again and succeeding. It was just a really cool writing experience that will probably never be topped, and at the end of the day, the collection does and says what I want it to. 

As for disadvantages, that’s tough. Some readers will probably just say, “No thanks.” Or they might shout, “Gimmick!” Haha! The experimentation might not be for them. No book is for everyone, and that’s just how it is. I’ve accepted it, and I’m cool with it.

DD: I’ve written in forms like these, and while it’s liberating and fun, the form itself sometimes dictates that you can’t use certain story elements such as setting or dialogue. For example, in “Nancy R. Melson’s State ELA Exam,” which is in the form of a test, you probably can’t include a lot of dialogue or setting. Was this ever a challenge for you?

BS: Very true. There are limits, but all stories have some brand of limit. Different worlds offer various rules that can and can’t be broken. The same with characters—or a multitude of other elements. As I was writing these stories, the form never came first; instead, the form was a way for me to tell the story I needed to tell. If I would’ve approached each story with a specific form I had in mind that I wanted to showcase, I would have been in bad trouble. I would actually probably still be on the first story. It just wouldn’t have worked.

With “Nancy R. Melson’s State ELA Exam,” the lack of usual dialogue could be limiting, but the story finds other ways for voices to come through, especially the titular character’s. The test and, as a result, the story both become extra interactive, and that’s because the form allows additional layers. 

Thankfully, the many forms throughout the collection came naturally.

DD: In blurbs for your previous book (Those Fantastic Lives), you’re described as a Southern writer. Do you consider yourself a Southern writer, and if so, what does that mean to your fiction? 

BS: I’m glad you asked this question. I fully embrace the label. I am a Southern writer—and a rural one at that. Like I mentioned earlier, I’m from Alabama. I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m sure I’ll die here. I talk slowly—and with a very thick drawl. I sit on my porch and tend to my little garden, all while drinking tea. For me, to be a Southern writer means to respect the place I write of and from. It means to respect the people, too. I try to capture the voices I know from down here as fully and authentically as I can. I try to treat the place with love, while being aware of the problems and flaws as well. I treat the South like it’s a character—a major one. I have to. 

With Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, I go even further in being a Southern writer, I think. Many of the stories, including “The Guide to King George,” “Dying at Allium Farm,” and “Nancy R. Melson’s State ELA Exam,” are set explicitly in Alabama and Tennessee, and even the ones that aren’t stated as being in the South still have that Southern feeling.

DD: I did notice that there’s a focus on rural settings in the collection. Aside from this mirroring your own childhood experiences, are there other reasons you gravitate toward the rural over the urban?

BS: The honest answer is that I just don’t know that world. I’ve been fortunate to be able to travel quite a bit as an adult, so I’ve experienced it. But I don’t know it. When I’m in cities, I feel like I don’t belong. It’s like when I try to write a story that doesn’t contain magic; I feel like a phony. Focusing on rural settings that I understand is a way for me to keep a sense of truth in my worlds—and, consequently, my work. I don’t really agree with the famous advice to “write what you know,” but in this case, I stick to it. 

DD: How did you decide on the title for the collection? 

BS: Man, I’m terrible at titles. I got lucky with my first book. Those Fantastic Lives was a good one. With Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood, I was near the end, and I was struggling with the title. Like really struggling. None of my stories worked as titles for the larger book. I didn’t want to go outside the stories because it would get bad. Death and Apocalypses isn’t very catchy. It’s probably the opposite of catchy. I was lost. Then, I began working on “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood.” It’s a fairy tale. It has a major flood. There’s lots of magic—and hope in the emptiness. It is a Bradley Sides story in all ways. When I finished it, I knew it had to be the closer for the collection. It feels very definite as it ends, and it just feels right in the spot. 

When I stepped away and looked at the shape of my collection, the opening story is about a flood. The closing one is about a flood. There are other kinds of floods, metaphorical and literal, throughout. Crocodile tears, those big, showy, fake things, don’t cause the floods in the collection. Instead, the floods are brought on by truths—painful and beautiful truths. I knew I’d found my title, and I never questioned it. 

DD: Which of the stories was the most difficult to write, and why?

BS: I have to cheat and pick two. “Claire & Hank,” which is about a guy and his dinosaur sister, and “Dying at Allium Farm,” which drops readers in on a vampire family’s organic garlic farm. These stories are actually two of my favorites in the book, so I ultimately feel good about the fight they gave me. But the struggle. The struggle…

As a person, I think I’m pretty funny, but as a writer, humor is tough for me to get right. With “Claire & Hank,” I wanted to balance humor and lightness with some real heaviness. With “Dying at Allium Farm,” I wanted the same kind of approach, except with a bit more humor. I wanted readers to laugh, but I also wanted them to feel something a bit heavier at each story’s end. I couldn’t get those endings right. “Dying at Allium Farm” went through roughly 20 edits. “Claire & Hank” didn’t take quite that many, but I kept reworking that last image. 

Revision. Revision. Revision. That’s the struggle of all us writers.

The post In “Crocodile Tears Didn’t Cause the Flood,” Monsters And Magic Are All Around Us in the Modern World appeared first on Electric Literature.

The stories are compact and muscular, arranged like music, and brimming with voices that shift and quake on the page, coalescing into a group of child siblings, dissolving into family members scattered across diaspora, and colliding with each other at academic conferences and hotel elevators. Gautier breaks the collection into five sections spanning a range of themes, each story populated by characters that are hungry for connection, safety, comfort, and a sense of home.

Dr. Gautier’s publicist suggested we meet at Ann Sather, a popular Chicago eatery that I recognized from its appearance in the collection. After warmly encouraging me to order the cinnamon buns, Dr. Gautier spoke to me about writing her fourth short story collection, binge writing, and looking back at the white gaze.

Stephen Patrick Bell: Do you not feel that the city makes a demand of you to just be less of a person so that you can fit in the subway cars, walk down the streets?

Amina Gautier: I feel like everyone is being less of a person and it has very little to do with cities. I feel like I’ve been writing about that for four books and it has become more and more necessary. People are not talking to each other or looking at each other. They’re just talking past each other or waiting for someone to say something so they can jump in with their soundbite. It means I’ll always have a job. I tell people all the time, as long as people continue to not listen to each other and be insensitive, fiction writers will never go out of business. It would be great if we did go out of business because people stopped doing that. But you know, there’s always going to be material. People always ask “where do you get your stories”…

SPB: The first section, Quarter Rican, feels especially grounded in New York. The characters travel to Puerto Rico but even those scenes felt like they were tethered to the city. Seeing the characters move between spaces that play on different aspects of their identity and watching them search for clues or indicators in popular culture that might help them define themselves, I wonder if identity was a central theme you sought to address when starting this project.

AG: With the second collection, Now, We Will Be Happy, I have a lot of Puerto Rican and Afro Puerto Rican characters. So, I’ve been writing around that for some time. But on a larger scale, you’re writing around the tension, or the complexities of defining yourself when other people are defining it differently— the way those definitions are not just based on birth. Emotions can help you. Emotions can direct you to one sort of identity or push you away from another one. So, in the collection, it’s not just, “were you born in Puerto Rico” or “were you born in New York,” but it’s more, “what was your relationship with those Spanish-speaking parents?” There’s not just, “oh, did you speak Spanish in the house?” You can learn Spanish in the house and have a very tense relationship with one of your parents and say, “okay, now I don’t like that.” It’s not just what you learn in school or where you are, but there’s a sort of psychological or emotional weight to how you define yourself, who you want to model yourself after, or who you want to avoid. The collection starts in Brooklyn, but it’s circles around, and it ends back up in that same neighborhood, with explorations in the middle.

SPB: Do you think about a specific audience when you’re writing your stories? I think a lot about the little white man on your shoulder whispering “this isn’t relatable.” I was curious if that’s something that enters your work at this point in your career.

AG: I wouldn’t say that I deliberately go out of my way to create an insider space, I’ve always been interested in and concerned with pushing back on assumptions. Some of the first stories that I was exposed to by white writers like John Cheever’s The Swimmer. All these stories that he’s taking the train back and forth from New York to Connecticut, you’ve got this New England experience that people are referring to—sailing and boats and things like that. And there are no footnotes. You open up the Norton Anthology.

When I was in college, I opened up the Norton Anthology and looked up James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues, I found footnotes explaining what certain things were in the ’50s. You know, since he’s Black, these things have to be explained. And there are no footnotes in Faulkner’s Barn Burning and no footnotes in Cheever, right? There’s just an assumption that you know their world, and it doesn’t have to be explained. I thought, “Okay, then I’m going to presume that my reader knows my world. And if you don’t know it, and you feel like you’re on the outside looking in, then it just sucks to be you.”

But, I do also have a reader in mind when I’m not thinking about inside and outside spaces. I do presume that my reader is literate, and well-read and has a historical knowledge of literature. So there are plenty of inside references and allusions to other literary works for that reader by so like you mentioned, Breathe, so there’s a little references to Hamlet.

SPB: How does all that influence your process?

AG: I wouldn’t say I have a strange process because it’s mine, but it’s not for everybody. I talk to other writers and hear their processes and I’m like, yeah, that would never work for me. I’ve meet so many people who have a page limit, they’ll get up early and if they get this number of pages in a day, they’re good, or they’ll have a time limit, get up early and do two hours. And I’m realizing, first of all, I can’t stop once I start. And secondly, who is trying to get up early? I don’t even know why we’re doing that.

SPB: I blame everything on capitalism.

AG: The term I apply to myself is binge writing. I like to write for as long as I can. It’s unlikely that I will write on a day that I have other appointments, because the chances are high that I’ll miss them.

SPB: One of the shifts I felt as I moved through the book dealt with racial and ethnic identity. In the Black Lives Matter section the characters are firmly grounded in and centered on their Blackness and brownness. And like, it’s not just their Blackness, it’s the terror of being Black/Brown in America, which is a separate thing. That contrasted nicely with the characters in the first section, who might appear most of white America as ostensibly Black despite their connections to cultures that don’t neatly fit within their idea of Blackness. For me, identity is often a tool that people use to kind of figure out how they’re going to deal with a person, but it’s not necessarily something that a person uses to relate to themself. There’s a fun tension your characters are exploring, when Blackness is something that you could move in and out of, versus something in which they’re firmly situated.

How did you navigate the differences between the constructions of racial identity in the U.S. as opposed to other cultures? 

AG: One thing that’s interesting to me, or that I play with in my work, is just constantly reminding people that Black people are not only the object of the gaze, that we are looking back. [There’s an assumption] that Blackness is fixed, it’s finite, and everybody else gets to move around and do a bunch of different things. I play with that, pushing back, showing the ways in which people can swim in and out of different aspects of their identity. Can you pass not necessarily for white? In the story, Elevator, she passes for Latino just to try to get away from the bad guys. I’m examining ways in which we can exercise and adopt that flexibility for safety, for strategic reasons.

SPB: I feel like lit world social media can take on a Stepford quality. It is wild how some writers are just online. It is very cool to be able to connect with your favorite writers and just say, “I liked your book.” But an element of it feels unsettling and dangerous, because it does make the world feel very, very uniform. And it kind of makes a new writer feel like “I have to be writing this way for people to see me.” I don’t take any of it too seriously, but I do see other people who I respect and whose opinions I value saying things like, “well, you know, the market says that you have to be writing this kind of thing right now” or “you can’t sell a short story collection.”

AG: Do you know how many times people have told me that?

SPB: Look at Deesha Philyaw—The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, her little impossible to sell short story collection from a small university press is such a celebrated text.

AG: Or look at me. The Best You Can Do, that’s number four. So they say you can’t sell a short story collection. I don’t know any other African American woman with four [short story collections].

SPB: And the PEN/Malamud award.

AG: I was really happy about Edwidge [Danticat] winning. So, now that there’s another Black person with a PEN/Malamud because I’m the first Black woman to win it. Woman. Edward Jones won it first and I guess I should say received it because you don’t apply for it. They just give it to you. When I received it in 2018, I was the first African American woman, first Black woman. And  Edwidge just received it in December. So now there are two of us.

But the point of that was not to brag on me, but to say, when people give you all that “advice,” fuck them —yeah, that’s an F bomb I meant—because, they want you to be unique and the same at the same time. Like, “Oh, we love this book, because it’s so unique” and then it’s like, “But whose work is it like so we can sell it”

SPB:ne of the themes I noticed was that the women in these stories are often paired with men who are not worthy of their attention. 

AG: One of the things that I’m playing with, or just sort of interested in, is the way culture infantilizes men, and investing in this sort of infantilization. I see all these commercials, and they’re just annoying. The guys are just bumbling. You know, they’re like, “where’s my shirt?” Is that what you really think that these intelligent men who go to work and somehow come home and cannot function. It makes me really angry. But it seems like this cultural moment that people are participating in. I hear women complain about having to do everything, but in a way that makes it sound like they like it: “Oh, my husband can’t do anything without me.”

I don’t know what it means, but specifically when I’m thinking about Black hetero-relationships, wondering what the connection is when we acknowledge the level of violence and scrutiny that Black men are unfairly subjected to, and then we ask what the solution is, and instead of challenging whatever external forces there are that are applying those pressures and those tensions, we just make things easier for them socially. Is that actually helpful?

SPB: that’s a good question to ask, and I wish I had an answer

AG: That’s what I’m playing with in the stories, because I’m still thinking of people in my generation, dating Gen X guys, or thinking of Chris Rock’s stand-up specials and things like that. But what does it mean when we start telling women that they should be grateful for that? What does it mean when tell women and women of color, that they should just be glad that somebody is interested in them? In the story, “Why Not?,” there’s all this sort of censure about a woman wanting more than just one basic date turning into a relationship. That’s what I’m seeing.

SPB: “Why Not?” made me very anxious when the main character’s desires and ambitions beyond settling were met with a Greek chorus of unsupportive voices. it felt like there’s this social contract in place where if you show a man attention, of any kind, even if you’re just being polite, then you now owe him an entire relationship. That is more trouble than its worth. That any man would feel entitled to that relationship based on a cursory courtesy feels deeply weird. Like, we should be allowed to be friends with each other, or at least decent human beings to each other without it becoming a contract for marriage or a long term relationship.

AG: Yeah, and how much does that false social contract have to do with our current moment of social anxiety and social isolation? These past 10 or 15 years of wanting to meet people online and have all the work done before you actually go out. You had a period where people are like, “Oh my gosh, it’s dangerous. You should never be anybody online.” And now it’s, “this is the thing to do.” And people are like, meeting online and telling people all their business and their whole life story before they decided to actually meet and go out. I thought that was what a first date was for.

The post “As Long as People Continue to Be Insensitive, Fiction Writers Will Never Go out of Business” appeared first on Electric Literature.

What at first looks like a dichotomy in terms of representation of women in the military morphs into manifold representations of women we didn’t even know existed because, among Danback-McGhan many achievements in this collection, a significant one is revealing the varying roles of women in relation to the military. 

Throughout the stories in Midwatch, we meet women like Kali, who before the Navy has inclinations toward violence that have to remain submerged. Women like Vera whose PTSD closes in on her, surrounding her at every turn. Or Dessa, whose whole life is a performance, including while at war. 

Over email, we spoke about how Danback-McGhan’s stories widen the scope of military literature, not only by showcasing women, but by showing us how women participate in war, the origins of their violence, and the hauntings that pursue them. 

Ivelisse Rodriguez: You attended the US Naval Academy and served as Surface Warfare Officer in the Navy. What brought you to writing?

Jillian Danback-McGhan: Frustration, mainly! I had always wanted to be a writer, but early in my writing pursuits, I received and internalized some pretty terrible advice, mainly that skill as a writer depended solely on natural genius. I decided to study literature instead, first as an undergrad, then in graduate school. Still, I couldn’t stifle the impulse to create. I would draft stories on the backs of scrap paper, mostly old bills and term papers. Many of the stories in Midwatch first appeared as anecdotes I scribbled in the margins of the notebooks I carried with me during my at-sea tours and deployments. 

IR: I love this image of you compulsively scribbling away, while not really believing it would amount to anything. 

JDM: In my mind, I was young, a woman, not directly involved in combat—who would want to read what I had to say?

IR: What changed your mind?

JDM: Following my at-sea tours (onboard the guided-missile destroyer, USS Farragut, for four years, where I completed two operational deployments), I was offered the opportunity to return to the Naval Academy and teach in the English Department. Fortuitously, my rotation coincided with the publication of some early works of fiction and poetry portraying the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, which are exceptional works of literature and important contributions to the war-literature canon. As I read these works, I couldn’t help but grow frustrated with their lack of depictions of women servicemembers. Moreover, it bothered me how hard I had to search to find some of the exceptional works of literature written by women during this time. I realized the stories I wanted to read already existed in fragments hiding within my old notebooks. If I wanted to see more writing about women in the military, I had to create it myself.

Being in the company of literature scholars and writers reoriented my thinking around what the practice of writing demanded. My colleagues helped me understand the craft of writing is less dependent on natural talent than, to paraphrase William Kentridge, a commitment to the image. I had a subject, and I had plenty of commitment, so natural genius be damned, I was going to write!

IR: How did you prepare to write/be a writer?

JDM: I wanted to pursue an MFA once I left the Navy, but life had other plans, so I made a point to participate in as many writing workshops, conferences, and writers’ groups as I could. Fortunately, many organizations generously sponsor workshops for veterans, and I regularly attended those hosted by Words After War, Community Building Art Works, Voices from War, the Veterans Writing Project, and Warrior Writers. Working with you during the Short Story Intensive at The Writer’s Center proved to be a turning point in my work. You provided such invaluable instruction and insight, and the stories in Midwatch finally started to take shape. That course helped me see beyond the conceits of what military fiction should be. I learned to listen to the story itself and consider how it wanted to be told, something I only uncovered by evaluating and ritualizing my own writing process. Annoyingly, my process is equal parts military discipline and creative spontaneity; once I stopped seeing these two approaches as oppositional, I gained more confidence in my work.

IR: You mentioned becoming well-versed in war literature while teaching English. What does your book add to that body of work?

JDM: In many ways, Midwatch deliberately surfaces (forgive the word choice) and expands upon themes appearing in literature written about women in the military. Women servicemembers commonly find themselves occupying a sort of liminal space: they outperform their male peers and conform to the same institutional standards, yet are still othered; they are beneficiaries of policies brought about by feminists, yet practitioners of the same militarism feminism rejects; they are considered aggressors by adversaries, yet are preyed upon by their own colleagues.

Unsurprisingly, the women in Midwatch are conflicted and messy, characters searching for a sense of completeness in a world demanding their fragmentation. I didn’t hold back from creating deeply flawed characters. Too often, women in military literature are aligned to the extremes of super-heroism or victimhood. I wanted to create characters with nuance who make mistakes and terrible decisions, who are kind of terrible at times, but are trying their best despite being trapped in this double-bind. For this reason, I tried to craft each story in a way which makes the reader feel implicit in each character’s decisions. The characters can’t escape their choices, so the reader can’t, either.

Midwatch also acknowledges the tradition of women war writers while noting there is a long way to go for equal recognition, both in life and in literature. Women have fought in and written about every war involving the United States, though historically they have rarely been recognized for it. For example, Aphra Behn wrote one of the first texts about war in colonial America. Later, Deborah Sampson, the Revolutionary War heroine who fought for the Continental Army for three years while disguised as a man, wrote an autobiography of her experience. Women played important roles as soldiers, journalists, and medical professionals in every war thereafter. Even some of the best-known American writers, such as Emily Dickinson and Edith Wharton, wrote literature which can be considered part of the war literature canon but are commonly excluded from it.

All of that is to say—women’s contributions to writing about warfare and the military experience isn’t new. Still, works of fiction by women writers remain woefully underrepresented in military literature, something I intentionally call out in the collection’s introduction. 

IR: That is a fascinating history about women writing about warfare. 

I want to go back to what you said about women in the military being perceived as aggressors while still being preyed upon by their colleagues. This idea comes through in your stories. There is an assumption of power that is associated with military members. Of course, that is not true as there are hierarchies. But I am intrigued by how there is this space that is (falsely) imbued with power, so one would think that all members would have access to that power. And, sometimes, your female characters do. But they are also subject to sexual assault, coercion, harassment, and undermining. For women in the military, power seems to be given and taken. Can you discuss the psychic consequences of this on your characters? How do the characters in your book negotiate this?

JDM: The objective of warfare is to impose one’s will on the enemy, which places violence at the root of the military’s very existence. It is dressed up in formal uniforms and restrained by rules of engagement, but that Clausewitz-esque primordial violence is always present.

What interests me as a writer is how, when constraints of discipline and oversight are eroded by misogyny or apathy or poor leadership, that imposition of power turns inward. These are the environments in which sexual harassment and assault and other forms of abuse occur. Women are left to wonder whether a word or an insinuation will turn physical. Midwatch explores what happens when women operate in these extreme environments. They risk being labeled as an alarmist if they speak up and risk their safety if they don’t. It puts them in a constant state of alert. In “Dearest,” for example, Vera becomes increasingly paranoid from being constantly on alert.

But women are also practitioners of state-sanctioned violence. They know how to impose power over an adversary, which raises important questions about the authorized use of violence when a threat comes from within. These characters interpret violence as the only language a potential threat will understand and willingly employ it, notably Midshipman Connor in “Trou”; Kira in “The Patron Saint of Cruise Missiles”; and the narrator in “Midwatch.”

IR: It seems like some of your female characters are also trying to outrun this violence. For example, Kali in your story “Dead Baby Jokes,” has multiple selves that she thinks she needs to firmly keep separated. She’s trying to constantly keep in check the violent impulses in her. 

JDM: Violence does that to a person, doesn’t it? Dissociation is a trauma response which has allowed humans to survive, yet it can often be the driving force behind why people inflict similar traumas on themselves and others. It is far easier to say, “Yes I did that, but it wasn’t really me” than it is to accept blame. In Kali’s case, societal expectations amplify this willing separation of selves; she is conflicted by wanting to engage in both destruction and creation, by seeking violence for causes she views as just, yet she realizes her inability to openly exist in a world which looks at women’s aggression as monstrous. So, she engages in a willing fragmentation of self to keep her impulses distinct.

Sentiments of moral injury or exposure violence can compound this response even further, like it does for Sam in “The Curator of Obscenities.” As a character, Sam is the complete inverse of Kali, yet their emotional responses create similar fragmentation. Kali believes the convergence of her separate selves is dangerous to others when she really fears exposure. Sam rationalizes his emotional compartmentalization to keep his girlfriend from worrying when he really attempts to protect himself from the emotional consequences of the horrors he’s witnessed. 

IR: The women in your book also inhabit different spheres of power. In the story “Hail and Farewell,” for example, the mother and daughter find power by throwing dinner parties and via their relationships to men in high-level positions in the military. Can you discuss how some of your characters create their own spheres of power?

JDM: What I find fascinating from a character perspective is what happens when people are excluded from more directive forms of power. In “Hail and Farewell,” which you mentioned, Sara and her mother create gathering spaces designed to influence their husbands’ social standing and advance their careers. This creates a highly gendered parallel hierarchy among the other wardroom wives. In “Midwatch,” Ashleigh’s relationship with her division officer affords her preferential treatment, which she protects to the point of coercion. Unsurprisingly, these characters exploit their power because they’ve essentially replicated the same predatory dynamics from which they are excluded.    

IR: In a similar fashion, in some of your stories, the idea of “pretty privilege” does not hold the cachet it holds in the civilian world. Can you discuss how some of your female characters have to re-train themselves to enter the world of the military, especially when it comes to beauty standards?

JDM: To be a woman in the military is to be observed. This is true for the entire military, certainly, but even more so for women. They are a minority in all branches of service. They comprise a minority of most military units, so they tend to stick out, even more so if you are, say, a senior woman whom younger women look up to for guidance, or a trailblazer whom others scrutinize for signs of failure or triumph. It can feel like a constant performance, a perpetual attempt to put on the best possible show for an (occasionally hostile) audience. Dessa, a character from my story “Comeback” who is a former child actor, feels this most acutely. The environment almost necessitates a performance of gender, the intent to appear masculine enough to be taken seriously. Pretty only complicates matters. Beauty can be seen as a threat to a woman’s physical safety or a source of nasty rumors. In “Dearest,” Vera recounts her experience of being stalked, which is essentially a violent mutation of observation: her stalker tells Vera she’s “the prettiest lieutenant I’ve ever seen,” a compliment which distorts responsibility for the act. In the title story, “Midwatch,” a young sailor isn’t taken seriously when she reports unwarranted attention from her division officer because she is unattractive. 

Perceptions around beauty can also lead to uncomfortable dynamics between military spouses, for example, who are concerned about their husbands deploying and working in proximity with an attractive woman, like many of the wardroom wives do in “Hail and Farewell.”

It is a no-win situation, too, as unattractiveness can manifest as a source of criticism. In “Trou,” the main character, Sofia, reflects on the sexists slurs she’s encountered in her life and notes “whatever adjective inevitably precedes it” typically involves some commentary on a woman’s appearance or weight. Really, the military gaze is unrelenting for women.

Naturally, much of the discussion surrounding the military gaze pertains to its outward direction—drone surveillance, for example. I don’t mean to minimize the implications of this phenomenon through my discussion of its inward application. Rather, it is worth mentioning how the military’s practices inevitably get turned inward. Case in point—“Dead Baby Jokes” deliberately begins with Kali surveilling a potentially hostile vessel, but the story ends with Kali looking back at herself. One ignores this reality to their own detriment, as the characters in Midwatch learn. 

IR: In the military, there tends to be a class division between those who are enlisted and those who are officers, especially officers who attended military academies. There is a strong presence of enlisted characters in your stories. Can you discuss these class divisions and how they inform some of your characters?

JDM: The intent for the two-tier system of officers and enlisted is to distinguish those who bear the “burden of authority” (officers) from those who act as subject matter experts in a type of journeyman model (enlisted). Like all systems, the idea doesn’t always match its execution.

Comparisons between the military and Regency-era social dynamics appearing in Jane Austen’s novels may not be immediately obvious, but I’ve found they’re often the best way to describe the imposed class divisions between officers and enlisted. Many Naval traditions were inherited from 18^th century British Naval customs. To this day, officers and enlisted sailors live and eat in separate spaces. Enlisted sailors are selected for Mess Duty, where they serve officers their meals in the wardroom. Family members are considered an extension of the service member—prospective Commanding Officers’ spouses are required to attend a course on proper military etiquette and are expected to host social gatherings. Different support groups exist for officer and enlisted spouses, though many units have attempted to unify these in recent years.

Honestly, the realities of the Navy make my job as a writer far too easy at times.

As you can imagine, these antiquated practices can problematically amplify social dynamics. In “Midwatch,” enlisted sailors fail to report an officer’s abusive conduct because they don’t think anyone would take the claim seriously. A Chief Petty Officer is unable to control a vindictive officer in “Dead Baby Jokes,” while enlisted members of a boarding team make immature jokes as subtle forms of rebellion. In “The Patron Saint of Cruise Missiles,” a Chief half-jokingly states her accolades aren’t publicized because she’s “not a college-educated white woman.” And a woman’s allegations of harassment against a more senior officer are questioned in “Dearest” because they could “ruin a man’s career.” 

IR: Knowing all that you know now, like Midshipman Connor in “Trou” who wonders “why try” if the navy is full of “assholes,” what advice would you tell your younger self?

JDM: This was such a tricky scene to write—I had to fight the urge to tell my former self what she wanted to hear. Though, like all twenty-somethings, I wonder if I’d listen… That said, my advice would probably be: Find your advocates and don’t be afraid to ask for help. Speak up for others when you can. You won’t change every situation, but no attempt is ever in vain. Don’t compare yourself to others or let others’ expectations dictate your own decisions. You’re going to make mistakes and will never have all the answers, so don’t be afraid to ask questions. And try to have a little fun along the way. The work of the Navy is serious, but you don’t have to take yourself too seriously. 

The post Jillian Danback-McGhan Wanted More Books About Women in the Military, So She Wrote One appeared first on Electric Literature.

In River Woman, her first novel, a mother leaves her child behind when she moves to New York; when she returns to Jamaica years later, she doesn’t know whether to trust her own daughter, accused of drowning her own child by jealous villagers. In Hemans’ next book, Tea by the Sea, a father steals away with his infant on some notion that he’s giving the young mother a second chance, instead of leaving her desperate and longing even fifteen years later. 

In The House of Plain Truth, Hemans goes back into family history even further. Pearline, its protagonist, leaves New York to retire to Jamaica, both to care for her ailing father and, finally, to return home. Instead, she discovers she needs to go as far back as Cuba, where long-lost siblings may still be living, to unearth family secrets she hadn’t known existed in the first place.

In this way, Hemans, in her third novel, deepens her investigations into the roots of the Jamaican immigrant story—or actually, given the similarities in the immigrant experience among any group not already wealthy, the immigrant story.

Pearline’s father, Rupert, was desperate to make a better life for himself and his family when he moved them to Cuba in 1917. Instead, he returns to Jamaica penniless, and is forced to leave half their children behind. 

The book also clarifies a theme that lies beneath all her stories. The House of Plain Truth demonstrates most boldly how blatant capitalism is to blame for the troubles her characters grapple with and sometimes—too often—aren’t able to overcome. 

I talked to Hemans about how the personal and political intertwines in fiction in our Zoom interview about this third novel, The House of Plain Truth.

Carole Burns: A key part of this novel comes from your own family history: two of your grandparents moved to Cuba at around the same time Pearline’s father, Rupert, does the same. What made you want to write this novel, and retell your grandparents’ story in some way? 

Donna Hemans: On my father’s side of the family, my grandparents both went to Cuba in 1919 to work. They didn’t know each other at that point, but they met and got married there and had several of their children in Cuba before coming back to Jamaica in 1931. As a child, I just knew that they had gone to Cuba. I didn’t know any of the details, any of the history, what their experiences were like. My grandmother died when I was 16 and my grandfather when I was about 19 or 20—at an age when I wasn’t ready to ask the kinds of questions that I would ask now as an adult, and as a writer. And so I wanted to try to understand their experiences and their story. 

CB: One of the tragedies in this novel is that the main character Pearline’s parents are forced to leave half their children behind in Cuba because they don’t have the money for everyone to return. Did something like that happen to your family? 

DH: No, but there’s a second part of the story: I had also heard that one of my grandmother’s brothers went to Cuba, and never came back to Jamaica. And so I was thinking about what that felt like, just completely losing touch with a family member and especially a sibling without knowing whether they were alive or dead or what their circumstances were. So I wanted to put those two things together and try to build a story around those two ideas.

CB: And then you intensified the story by changing the circumstances from a brother left behind, to three children. 

DG: And I needed to figure out why my character wanted to go back to find her siblings. That really was the driving force of the story.

CB: This is your third novel. Why do you suppose you are telling this story now? 

DH: Well, I started this story in 2006 or 2007. Throughout the years, I was just trying to find the right way to tell the story. As I started researching and looking at what the experience of Jamaican migrants in Cuba was like, I was really surprised, I had not learned any of that in school. I began to see that people were shipped back, some of them to countries they didn’t originate from. People who were invited in to come and work were then made to feel they were unwanted and they were sent back home. And then the story became clearer. One, why my grandparents left. And also, what could possibly have happened to my grandmother’s brother. He could have gotten caught up in so many things. It’s possible he was killed early on. I don’t know. 

CB: It’s a vastly complicated history, of which I was also unaware – some 100,000 Jamaicans migrated to Cuba in the decade starting 1914, and they’re really at the mercy of capitalistic forces. It makes your story completely relevant to today. 

DH: Exactly. The funny thing about it is that I had set this book aside and come back to it so many times, but when I picked it up again it was around 2016, right after the election.

CB: After Trump won.

DH: Yes. And this anti-immigrant rhetoric was coming up. What was very clear to me was that every argument being made around 2016 about immigrants and the jobs that they were stealing, certain language being used about the immigrants and the countries that they come from—it was exactly the same as I was seeing in the research from 100 years before. There was nothing any different, nothing original about the arguments that you’re hearing today. It really brings home the point that there are certain groups of people who are always, always trying to find a home in the world. They are moving from one place to another to try to find that place where they belong. And so that’s what I really wanted to hone in on in this story. 

CB: That comes across powerfully. And it feels to me that fiction often can tell that story in a much more human way than nonfiction does. 

DH: Absolutely. I think the best books are the books that talk about politics or social issues without talking about them—the ones that don’t hit you over the head with it, that undermine the story. You have to do it through the characters. 

CB: At the same time, though, I thought that you did editorialize in certain sections of the story — but quite effectively. So, for example, you have Rupert, Pearline’s father, remembering his younger self leaving for Cuba in 1917: “The young man he describes doesn’t understand American economic imperialism, the vast ways in which the United States expands its territories, or how American companies come to dominate the sugar cane estates to the northern coast of Oriente Province. But he knows the companies are advertising for labor, black men from Jamaica and Haiti and Barbados and the small Antillean islands who can cut cane. What Rupert knows is simple. There is work and money.” It’s masterful. 

DH: There are things that I knew that Rupert would not have known and even Pearline herself would not have known. And I needed to find a way to say that kind of stuff and to hint at it without it coming directly from them. Though I don’t think of it as editorializing. 

CB: It’s providing context. 

DH: Right. 

CB: Can I ask you about the title? It comes from the name of the Jamaican house that Pauline is hoping to save in Spanish, La Casa de la Pura Verdad. Obviously, she’s trying to uncover the pure truth. But I kept kind of wondering, is there such a thing as plain truth? 

DH: I hope so. 

CB: Yet the truth is complicated. So what did you mean by “plain truth”? 

DH: The unvarnished truth. In probably all of my books so far is this question of, What is truth? There are multiple perspectives to any story, but at the heart of each, there is some kernel of truth. And there is a certain truth at the heart of this story that the children don’t know, that Pearline doesn’t know, and that Rupert just absolutely doesn’t or didn’t want anybody to know. The children grew up with this idea that when they came back to Jamaica, their parents bought this land and built this house. 

CB: The House of Plain Truth.

DH: Yes. Whereas there is a completely different side to the story. What Pearline has to do is to uncover what is the actual truth of her family’s history in Jamaica. And then, what do you preserve of your history and your heritage? Do you preserve what is the true story? Are you preserving the story that makes you as a family look better or sound better? Do you know? What are the stories that we tell ourselves? And do we always tell the truth, the true story? Or do we tell the stories that will make us look good to our friends and our family? So that’s a part of what I wanted to do here, was get at what do we tell and what do we show. What do we keep to ourselves? And are we really, indeed, telling the truth? 

CB: I suppose an important reason Rupert hid the “plain truth” of that family story for so long had to do with his pride. His pride is a really interesting element to the novel. Almost a fatal flaw in a way. 

DH: Somewhere in the book, either Pauline or one of her siblings says he was a hard man. And I think that that kind of sums up exactly what he was. He was trying to do his best for his family, but there is doing your best, and then there is taking a stance that doesn’t help everybody else and refusing to budge from that. He’s stubborn. Yet at the very end, he makes the decision to reach out to his children left in Cuba—to find them. That suggests that there was some regret there all along. 

CB: Though Rupert dies in the first chapter… 

DH: Yeah, I would like to write a book where nobody dies. I haven’t quite gotten there yet. 

CB: Yes!  And yet the book is infused with him. Rupert haunts the book—both literally, as a guppie, but also through his history. It’s a very sneaky third person. It’s limited to Pearline’s point of view, but you have her imagine Rupert’s memories.  We get a lot more of his story than she could technically know. 

DH: That was a tricky part. In the initial draft the story was told partly from his perspective after he was dead. Whereas in this version in just Pearline’s point of view, I still wanted to tell a lot of that back story, Pearline was three years old when they left Cuba. This felt like the easiest way to do it, where it was both in and through this haunting where her father is just simply not going to rest until she does what he wants her to do. To her, it’s like she is reliving his experience because her father is so present in her life. And what she knows she has to do is also present in her mind. 

CB: Did you look to any particular authors or books as inspiration for that? 

DH: Beloved is the closest. That’s one of the things that Toni Morrison did, where the ghost of a child is present throughout the entire book. 

CB: That fabulous first line: “124 was spiteful.”

DH: You’re reading Beloved and it’s like this child is living with this family and in this family. You don’t make any distinction between the fact that she is a ghost and the real people.

CB: Can you talk about other influences? 

DH: The biggest influence on my career in general is Zora Neale Hurston. As an undergrad, I took an independent study class and a professor had me read Their Eyes Were Watching God. One of the things that I pulled from that book was the way in which she described community and the way she used dialect. Growing up in Jamaica, we were always encouraged not to talk in dialect. You grew up with the sense that, if you used dialect, you were not speaking proper English—it’s tied up with class and education. But here I was reading this book where the dialect just sounded so familiar to me—I felt like I was home. It was a different country, a different place, but it just felt like home. I loved what she had done in that book, the way she had built the community, explained a community. And I hadn’t really been thinking about being a fiction writer, but then, that’s what I wanted to do. 

CB: The dialect in your book is terrific. It gives us the characters, it gives us the flavor of the place. And the language itself — the phrases unfamiliar to my ear, but how specifically and imaginatively they capture the world. 

DH: One of the things that I keep trying to do when I refer to places in Jamaica is to build that sense of community in the way Hurston does. The places I write about are either the community I grew up in, or communities around that community. In this book, Mount Pleasant, where the House of Plain Truth is located, is maybe four or five miles away from where I grew up. So I keep coming back to that home, to that sense of this community and place that that I knew. 

CB: This is your third novel set at least partly in Jamaica. Do you think you’ll ever write a book that isn’t somehow about Jamaica, even if it’s not set there? 

DH:  I don’t know. I’ve thought about that. Some years ago I read that it’s easier to write about a place after you have left it. 

CB: A la James Joyce. 

DH: I think if I write a story that is set primarily outside of Jamaica, then it probably means that I have left that place. I have tried and every book comes back to Jamaica. 

CB: I live in the U.K., but I can’t imagine not setting a novel in America. 

DH: Also, so many of the novels from a certain period of time about the Caribbean were about the Caribbean immigrant in another country. One of the things I want to do is write about either the people who were left behind, or the people who returned home. And so with this particular book, I have written about the aspect of returning home. And my first book really was about the child who was left behind. I want to tell a different story, not just talk about immigration from the perspective of the new immigrant in the new country. Who are the people who are left behind? What happens when you return to a country? Can you really go back home? 

CB: I also find Rupert and his family are haunted by what you describe as a “legacy of failure.” The family, Pearline especially, is trying to overcome that. And yet I feel frustrated for them, too — it wasn’t Rupert’s fault that he failed, but the fault of the capitalistic system.

DH: I think it’s just a part of the immigrant story. When you go off somewhere to a new country or a new place, you are you’re expected to do well and you’re expected to come back and lift up the next generation. And so Rupert was looking at the men who went to Panama and came back to Jamaica with gold and silk shirts. And he came back to Jamaica from Cuba with not even enough money to book their passage back home and to take all the children. So it wasn’t his fault at all. But it really marked him and he carried with him throughout his entire life this sense of failure. How do they see you back home? Have you achieved something? Have you taken this opportunity and done something with it or have you come to America and failed? I think even today for many immigrants, that’s what it really is about.

The post A Brooklynite Returns to Jamaica to Solve a Long-Hidden Family Mystery appeared first on Electric Literature.

Kennedy, who transferred from Iowa after a traumatic incident, seeks the friendship and attention of Tyler and Peyton. Meanwhile, Agatha, a visiting professor, secretly observes the girls’ relationships and how they spend their money after striking up a relationship with Millie. All this leads to a series of pranks, revenge, and the breakdown of stability in the fragile atmosphere of college life. 

Come and Get It is an exploration of how our culture of consumption controls us and leads to the ways that people inevitably abuse power and money. I spoke with Reid about Arkansas, dorm culture, and race.

Olivia Cheng: First, can we talk about Arkansas and the university culture perpetuating big schools in the South? How did you decide on this setting for the book?

Kiley Reid: I lived in Fayetteville, Arkansas for exactly a year from August 2016 to August 2017. I went there after a big round of rejections from MFA programs, and the plan was to just spend no money and write and try and apply to grad programs again, see what happens. It was one of those things where if this time doesn’t work, I’m done with writing.

So Fayetteville is definitely one of my favorite cities. It’s pretty walkable, it’s beautiful, it’s really hilly, it has really true seasons. It has that effect that a lot of big state schools have where it’s kind of this bubble amidst a big rural area in the South. For better and for worse, I think. And I definitely didn’t know when I was there that I wanted to write about Fayetteville, but later, I really was interested in exploring the type of strange snobbery and freedom that people have when they go to certain cities and say, “This place doesn’t count. I can do whatever I want here and this can be my experimental place, but when I go back home to wherever I’m from, that’s real but this is fake.” I thought that fake-place-ness was really interesting to write about. That’s what drew me there.

OC: Did that happen often in Fayetteville?

KR: I don’t think so. I didn’t talk to anyone. I worked at a coffee shop and wrote for a magazine, but I don’t think that I dove into relationships that deeply. But it was something that I was reading about often when I was thinking about what to write about.

OC: Did the setting come first or the characters or together? I mean, Kennedy was literally a baton twirler at Iowa. How was this book conceived?

KR: I knew that I wanted to write about young people and money. I came upon this book called Paying for the Party, How Colleges Maintain Inequality. It’s written by two sociologists, and one of them works here [at the University of Michigan]. I haven’t met her yet, but I’m going to try! It’s a book about these two sociologists who do five-year long interview studies at a midwestern university, and they interview young women in dorms about money and their trajectories and their paths. They follow them from freshman year to beyond. They all start out in the same freshmen haze and end up in varied circumstances. So I liked the book a lot, and learned a lot about how careers are advanced just by knowing certain people and how they’re held back by different circumstances that I hadn’t considered before. More than anything, I really liked the premise of very academic women interviewing young women in a dorm about their lives. So that’s where the book was born.

Of course, you’re also writing a novel, and things filter in as the years ago on.

OC: Interesting that it came out of this sociology book. Now that we’re on the topic of money, because that’s so clearly a central theme of this book—who gets it, who keeps it, how people spend it. Did you do any on-the-ground research?

KR: I did a ton. With this book, much more than my first, I had the time and finances to actually hold interviews and things. That was a precursor to the plot as well, after I read Paying with the Party. I was still living in Iowa and I interviewed maybe ten students about their experience with money and the language they have around money and how they get it and what they think about it. I continued those interviews and did about thirty to forty interviews during the first two years. I also had a research assistant this time around, and it was great to be able to say, “Hey, can you give me the salaries of RAs at ten Southern schools? Can you give me last names from these origins?” and she was wonderful. So I worked with her for two years. A lot of the research was honestly just listening to people talking about their lives and I was really fortunate to have people who were willing to share with you.

OC: I noticed that the two epigraphs for this book are about Walmart. Can you tell me a little more about that decision?

KR: Yes! So Arkansas is the state founder of Walmart. Walmart started by Sam Walton in Bentonville, which is about 45 minutes away from Fayetteville. The Walton Family definitely has a stamp on the state and it almost feels like a sticker on the bottom of everything. You see the Walton name everywhere from museums to schools to theater. The Walton name is definitely very, very pervasive.

When I was doing research, I researched a lot about Walmart and I came upon Lucy Biederman’s book of poetry which is amazing. I kept it next to my bed for a very long time, and that quote really spoke to it. And Sam Walton too was a huge game-changer for Arkansas and how they see capital and what their stores look like, really for everything. This book is in many ways about buying things, and so I wanted to start it off with the king of buying things in Arkansas: Sam Walton.

OC: That definitely makes sense. Millie’s main goal is to buy a house which feels quintessentially American.

KR: Yeah, she sees buying a house and having a job in a corporation as a marker of adulthood and success and she’s very into attaining the trappings of having made it.

OC: Also prevalent in this book is the topic of race. Why did you choose to have Millie and Peyton be the two central Black characters, and what impact did it have that Peyton didn’t seem to connect with Mille in any way, but was friends with Tyler?

KR: Peyton and Millie… I was very excited to put them in a room together. Millie has this moment where she realizes her and Peyton are very similar, but still opposites. She realizes Peyton is much more financially stable, she’s not very friendly or warm in any way. Peyton is close to her parents in a way that’s different from the way Millie is close to hers. But Millie also identifies her as the one other Black person on her floor. Millie sees her and says, oh this person kind of needs a bit of help socially, and then she very quickly feels guilty for having felt this way. She wrestles with wanting to help her and fix her in a way, but also Peyton’s not really asking for this help. Millie is also looking for accompaniment and she thinks oh, maybe the other Black girl on the floor will be something, and Peyton’s like, Absolutely not, I want nothing to do with you.

I had a friend read the book and she said, I knew a Peyton, I’ve definitely gone to school with a Peyton, and her parents would drive four hours and surprise her for lunch and then they would leave. So hopefully Peyton to recognizable to other people of someone who isn’t super warm, is a bit odd, is not, I wouldn’t say mean, but you feel like she’s mad at you all the time. I had a roommate like that. I definitely knew people like that, and I was excited to include someone like that. I also think when Black people identify other Black people and want something from them that they’re not willing to give, that’s interesting. I was excited to write about it.

OC: Peyton was fascinating for someone who wasn’t on the page that often.

KR: With all my characters, I don’t want it to be like this binary of they’re good or bad or anything like that. In some pages, she’s really charming and in others, she’s super rude.

OC: Peyton didn’t seem to care that she was the only Black undergraduate on that floor. There are implicit undertones of class within that.

KR: Peyton’s financial status, in some ways, protect her as the only Black student in the room. At the same time, she has a Black mother who is very invested in her making other high-class Black connections, but that doesn’t mean she’s always willing to do those things. But I definitely believe that Peyton’s financial situation and her upbringing causes her to think about race much differently than someone like Millie.

OC: In the suite, Tyler is such a critical character, because all the other characters have this visceral attraction to her. Even in moments of crisis, she’s so clear on who she likes and doesn’t. Do you think Tyler is let off the hook at the end? And do you think she deserves to be?

KR: I try to make my novels as close to real life as possible. I talk to my undergrads about this a lot too. I want a book to feel resolved, but that doesn’t mean the characters resolve things within themselves. Some people are mean for their whole lives and they keep on doing that and keep on failing with their attitudes. Tyler is not from a super rich family, her father’s in jail and she has challenges from that, she surprises Agatha and Millie sometimes with some of her beliefs and how she sees policy and healthcare and things like that. Do I think that Tyler is let off at the end? No. I hope that none of my characters are let off easily at the end. It doesn’t always feel complete to some readers when characters don’t learn things about themselves. But some of my characters do and some of them say no, I was right the entire time, and Tyler might be one of those.

OC: Let’s talk about Agatha and murky power relationships. What was it like to write the perspective of somebody who is toeing the lines of ethics as both a writer and professor? Both of which you also are.

KR: With Agatha, I definitely relied on a lot of the information I got from certain interviewees. I interviewed journalists and professors and sociologists and just listened to a lot of podcasts with people who had the same career trajectory that she did. I love stories about bad decisions that shouldn’t put you in jail but are still not wonderful decision for you to make. And Agatha definitely makes some of those. I was interested in having a character who has a fuck-it mentality after a breakup. Millie’s relationship to money was save, save, save, Agatha’s was spend, spend, spend, and Kennedy was someone who thought that she had no relationship to money, even though who she was deeply related to consumption. And so Agatha was definitely the spend-it-all spoke of that triangle.

OC: There is something about secrets coming into real life with the shared walls of the dorm in Come and Get It and with Alix’s secret being revealed in Such A Fun Age.

KR: There is a different tone here, for sure, but I do hope to do something different every time. I was trying different things with sentences and structure and tone with this one. But I think you can tell that I definitely have the same interests like dialogue, money, embarrassment, women, cringe. In this one, I was super interested in careerism from a different lens, adulthood in a different sense.

The post When Dorm Life Spirals Out of Control appeared first on Electric Literature.

Khaled, the narrator, is a young Libyan who moves to the U.K. to attend college, but taking part in anti-Qaddafi protests in London dramatically alters the course of his life. Fellow student Mustafa and older writer Hosam, both also Libyans, become companions in his forced exile. The narrative covers years and geographies, leaping back in time and into the future, hinting at what’s to come and what could have been avoided, taking the friends all the way through to a midlife built on a string of personal choices, in the shadow of real-life events—an embassy shooting, crackdown on dissidents, Libya’s revolution, and the killing of Qaddafi. 

As the political tide turns each man must choose for himself what allegiance to their country means. “A revolution requires a great deal of imagination,” Hosam tells Khaled. But so does the life of an émigré who has had to situate himself vis-a-vis his native country and his adoptive one and learn to make a home in the in-between. For Khaled then, a return to his hometown would mean a re-envisioning of the painstakingly built sense of self. “Bengahzi was the one place I longed for the most, it was also the place I most feared to return to,” he says. 

This novel is an ambulatory meditation on the passing of lives, on being far from the homeland, and on the complexity of friendships. Here friends are receptacles of trust, dispensers of pleasure, interpreters of the world. They are mirror images, reflecting the person one fails to become just as they are custodians of the memory of our past selves. Matar’s novel is also a moving portrait of family. His characters have the sagaciousness of inhabitants of old lands, knowing what words to choose to fend off lurking danger, what words to soothe the sorrow of separation. Do you recall the old fig tree in the courtyard? Khaled’s father asks his son rather than pressing him to come back to Libya. “It’s suddenly blooming.” My Friends, at once gentle and ravaging, is a work of great beauty, and an infinitely wise book. 

I spoke with Hisham Matar on the eve of the publication of his book. We discussed male friendships, assessing history, time and temperament, the distance between one’s chest and the world, and exile as a form of death.

Ladane Nasseri: I’ve heard you say you initially thought the idea for this book came in 2012 but going through your archive you found a few lines you had written about it in 2003 already. What was the known element about this story in the midst of all the unknowns of starting a novel? 

Hisham Matar: The first idea was to write a book about friendship, particularly male friendship, and I wanted the human events to be central, but I wanted them to be subjected to history, to politics, to different desires of intimacy, the tension between feeling at home in a friendship but at the same time trust being contingent because of the situation. And also questions of competitiveness. I think on some level my work is fascinated by masculinity. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a man for a long time. These are some of the things that have been accompanying me. 

LN: It seems this book has been in you for quite some time. Why is that? 

HM: the books I write I feel that in some way I am written by them. It feels that the book arrives or suggests itself, very faintly. And it seems that it has its own way with things, its own attitude, also its own appetites, the things that it wants to think about, so it really does feel like an independent agent and that I have to lend myself to its will. The options seem limited, I either do that, or I just don’t write it. So, in the beginning it’s almost like a half-remembered dream and I’m trying to make myself available to it. It then starts to dictate its own pace and with this one it arrived very, very, slowly.

There were other reasons for the delay that had to do with history. I knew my characters had something to do with the events of the Arab Spring, and what followed and I couldn’t write in the ways that I wanted to write about them so close to the event. I’d written journalism around that time, it’s a very different register, but to write a novel time needed to pass to build a certain degree of passionate ambivalence towards these events. It’s an oxymoron—I feel you need to write about things you are passionate about, but you need a certain kind of ambivalent distance to it so as to pull in all the contradictions. The scene of the killing of Muammar Gaddafi… I would have never been able to write that closer to the event. I was bewildered. So, this book took a long time because I needed to find a way to it, but also because of history. 

LN: The events were happening as you were writing…

HM: Yes, and you would know this, if you know people really well, people you grew up with, close friends, members of your family, and you watch them as they’re subjected to these very extreme historical upheavals, you notice how differently they respond. They can start at the same place politically or ideologically or even ethically and end up in different places largely influenced by questions of personal temperament. I thought the novel is really the place for temperament. It’s very hard to talk about temperament on the political stage but it seems to me that temperament is something that’s really at play here. 

LN: This novel is an exploration of friendship, and an ode to friendship. You mentioned temperament, but I wonder whether the three main characters, or four if we want to count Rana, are not different facets of Khalid himself—all the people he could have been or that he holds within him. Did you also aim to portray the different facets of an exile? 

HM: Not consciously. I didn’t mean for it to be sort of a survey of archetypes of exile. The novel is motivated as you say, by a meditation on what friendship is because it is to me an open question and a fascinating one, and I can’t help but for the book to be on some level in critical praise of friendship. But I had so many intentions, they are hard to account for. I had an intention of writing a novel that was epic in scale, but really about the most intimate things. So, not about revolutionary political drama, but actually about the drama of the heart. I also wanted to write a novel that reciprocated some of the reading pleasure that I get from books, when you’re on the edge of your seat, you can’t stop, you want to know what’s going to happen, at the same time, for it not to do that at the expense of a meditative or a philosophical register. I wanted all those registers. I tried it in different ways, but I found that the restrictions of Khaled’s gaze, the things that he knows and doesn’t know, became incredibly fascinating to me. So, we never really meet Mustafa, Hosam, Rana. We are meeting them through Khaled, through how he sees them. The book is thinking about the distance between what’s in your chest and the world. That’s why it starts with a preoccupation, and it’s motivated by that throughout the book. The desire to know and the impossibility to know, that you can be sitting next to somebody you know very well, looking at the same view or painting and you have no clue what is happening inside their chest. That to me is such a simple, commonplace, everyday occurrence but it’s so phenomenal and bewildering. 

LN: You talked about the companionship of books. Books and writers form a thread throughout this novel. Books are physically present, like Khaled’s library or the books Hosam takes with him everywhere he goes. The characters also have a lot of conversations about authors. So, there’s the friendships of Hosam and Mustafa but also the companionship of all these dead authors and their work. Does the title My Friends also refer to these books? 

HM: Yes, very much. It’s a very good question and a good point. I agree. For Khaled the companionship has been obviously those friends, but also very much those books. One of the most moving parts when I was writing was when he discovers that he can walk into a public library without being asked anything and he then uses it as a space for experimentation. Reading has on some level always been that for me. Khaled is a curious character because he is at once very free, he feels that all culture belongs to him, at the same time, he’s very much trapped or stuck. I couldn’t quite figure out as I was writing whether this was the portrait of someone who is truly courageous or the opposite. I still don’t know for sure. I do think it’s quite amazing what he does. 

LN: How so? 

HM: I think there’s a lot of temptation in a situation like that to go into the past, or to run into the future and both seem to be incredibly legitimate things to do. It’s very difficult to remain with the present specially such an austere present. I don’t even know if that’s a good thing, but I know it’s not easy. Before I wrote books, I thought authors write books when their knowledge about the subject has fully matured, that they write out of a sense of mastery. But from my experience you write a novel exactly at the point when you don’t have words for the thing you’re feeling or thinking about. The novel is a space where all the doubts and the contradictions can be articulated.

LN: One of the main themes in your novel is exile. Some artists grapple with a serious dilemma: having the inspiration that comes from being in one’s own land or prioritizing freedom by leaving. I’ve had many conversations throughout the years about this with Iranian artists, especially filmmakers. Some tell me the day they leave Iran is the day the well dries up, and others say they must leave to be able to pursue their art. In My Friends, the main characters talk about the need to remain connected to the motherland or “the source” as they call it. What has been the role of exile in your development as a writer? 

HM: It’s a very good question, a very hard question to answer. The overwhelming majority of my life I’ve lived outside of my country. I was a young child when we left so I came of age, and I became a man abroad. And right now, I feel we need another word maybe because technically I’m not an exile if exile means that you want to return and cannot return. That’s not my situation right now. I have this bifurcated sense of identity or an accumulation of different things. I used to worry ‘am I less because of this?’ or ‘am I more because of that?’ I used to think in those terms. I don’t anymore. It is what it is and I’m certainly much more at ease in it than before. But if you’ve come of age in your home country, and your work is fed and nourished by it such as some of the filmmakers I admire, all this becomes very complicated. Anyone who judges someone for not leaving has no idea how difficult it is. It can be a form of death. But for me it’s not like that because I’ve been away since I was very young, and this book is also about my love affair with London. Although Khaled and I are very different we share the fact that London has been nourishing and hospitable. 

LN: The narrative device in this novel is Khaled’s walking itinerary in London. He steps into the past by revisiting defining places and scenes and as a reader it made me very much aware of the slipperiness of time—Time passed and time passing. This book has such an elaborate, intricate structure and because it starts with the end as soon as I finished reading, I wanted to return to the beginning and start again with this new perspective. You have said that the structure of your memoir, The Return, hardly changed compared to how you wrote it. Did you have a similar experience with My Friends? 

HM: Structure to me is integral not only to how the book is read, but to how it’s written. It’s written from its structure rather than, say, writing it linearly and then mixing it up. Obviously, there are many drafts and things move around and get cut, and other things are added. But the mode it is in right now is the mode in which it was written. In fact, the first thing I wrote was the first page and I wrote it years ago. It’s been with me for over a decade, not knowing who’s speaking, why this tone, why is this farewell so significant. But it was structurally written in that shape, and it adheres to some of the things I always think about with time. A protagonist in this book that is even more important than London is time. How it’s managed, how it exists as he is walking. 

LN: So, you were clear on Khaled’s walking meditation from the start?

HM: Yes, I knew that it’s told on a walk. I just wasn’t sure what will happen in the walk, where he will go or whether he’ll meet anyone. I was in it. I was moving with the characters. In some ways, writing is easy because all you have to do is be aware of the false notes. When you hit a false note, you take it out and try to find the right note. But there were times when I thought this is not a book or I’m not listening properly. There was a moment, about a year into the book, when I put the 150 or 200 pages I had across my studio—quite a long way into the book for you not to know whether it’s working!—I put them across the whole wall, down the corridor. I needed to see them visually, I needed to know what is happening here. So, I don’t want to give you the impression that it was just an easy…

LN: Walk in the park!

HM: Walk in the park! Exactly! But it worked as long as I stayed in that space. Not trying to see beyond what I know. It’s a bit like in any relationship. If you’re with someone and you’re constantly thinking, about whatever end target you have decided, friendship, or marriage or business partnership… it spoils it because it pre-determines what’s going to happen. 

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