For whatever reason, it has always seemed apparent that my friendships—if handled with devotion and care—will outlast my romantic relationships. Through adolescence and early adulthood I put as much work into these bonds, often prioritizing them over my actual romantic relationships, and finding myself equally brutalized when they occasionally ended.

Now that I am married, these same friendships provide additional outlets for the intimacy and joy that I’m also building at home with my partner, and I’ve spent countless coffee-fueled hours asking myself: why do we place so much pressure on spouses to fulfill all of our needs? Why not turn to a friend? This was the idea that inspired my novel Significant Others, which follows friends and roommates of twenty years as they grapple with change when one becomes pregnant following a one night stand. The women co-own a home, co-raise a dog, and so they ask themselves: why not co-mother this child? But before I was writing about unusually deep friendships, I was reading about them.

Below are seven of my favorite stories that remap the location of friendship in our lives, pulling it from the margins and placing it front and center.

We All Want Impossible Things by Catherine Newman

Is it possible to write a book about the death of your most beloved person that manages to be as hilarious as it is devastating?  Catherine Newman’s We All Want Impossible Things screams hard and clear: yes. Quite literally a celebration of life and friendship, the novel follows 45-year-old Ash as her closest friend Edi decides to move away from her husband and young son so that she can be near Ash in a hospice facility during the final days of her battle with cancer. Their lifelong friendship is the point from which their worlds pivot, and now Edi is choosing to come home to her best friend so that she can die. If that sounds depressing, please know it isn’t. The story is fresh, invigorating, and completely reconceptualized my understanding of what platonic devotion can look like; it remains one of my most recommended books from the last two years.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Autofiction, I am new here, and I opened this book unsure about the format and expecting an exploration of a young woman finding herself through her art. I was surprised to close it reeling, instead, from the story of a woman finding herself through friendship. Freshly divorced Sheila and her new friend Margaux share a bond that is as romantic as they come; they write each other letters and slip them beneath apartment doors, they traipse around the city talking for hours, they buy the same dress and then argue about it, they document their relationship and the impact it has on each other’s art and life, they search for and sometimes overstep each other’s boundaries, defining and redefining their love for one another again and again. Please know, the plot in this book is minimal, but the feelings its richly imagined characters inspire are maximal. More, please.

Swing Time by Zadie Smith

Two young girls in West London bond over their shared love of dance; one is gifted, the other is not, yet each will inevitably make a life around the art, and each other. While much of the narrative actually takes place during a period of time the women aren’t speaking, even through silence (and some relatable internet stalking) the friendship continues to provide the frame for both the book’s narrative structure and the interiority for its nameless protagonist, impacting how they see themselves in each other, and therefor in the world.  

Veronica by Mary Gaitskill

Before Eileen there was Veronica. While this is not the moody psychosexual romp that Moshfegh gifted us, there is certainly something unnerving at the way Gaitskill’s narrative skips through a taught timeline as it follows the seemingly unlikely bond between young up-and-coming fashion model Alison and her friend Veronica, a disgruntled middle-aged proofreader dying of AIDS. Starting when Alison is in her forties and looking back on her friendship and its longstanding impact on her life, the narrative sweeps back and forth between past and present, uncovering a devotion as surprising to its narrator as it is to the reader. Gaitskill has long been a favorite of mine, and this incisive look at connection, time, memory and loyalty sunk deep into my bones and stayed there.

The Other Significant Others by Rhaina Cohen

A startling new addition to the friendship and found-family cannon, this nonfiction book explores the uncommon stories of people who have build their lives around a platonic partnership. The author, journalist Rhaina Cohen, has spent more than a decade deeply embedded in the social science of unusually devoted friendships, and the included vignettes offer a refreshing (and comforting) alternative to the marriage model we’ve all been raised. The friends interviewed are just as deeply committed to each other as a romantic pair might be. They buy homes, co-raise kids, and participate in long term care. In an era marked by alarming levels of self-reported loneliness, might this be an answer?

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett

This gorgeous friendship memoir from the national treasure that is Ann Patchett spans twenty years in the shared lives of Patchett and her long-time friend, the writer Lucy Grealy, who passed away in 2002. It’s a gutting celebration of platonic chemistry and deep commitment in a uniquely—sometimes disastrously—close friendship. A quote: “Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.”

 Warning: this book will most likely make you cry.

The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

As a filmmaker I of course have a bias for a story about two filmmakers, but still, I haven’t seen anything that explores the intersection of friendship and creativity the way this story does. In many ways, Mel and Sharon’s deep relationship has the makings of a marriage — union, commitment, (creative) progeny — and therefore it has the complications of one too: communication, trust, honesty, devotion, doubt, jealousy.

The post 7 Books About Women Who Put Friendship at the Center of Their Lives appeared first on Electric Literature.

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.

For the first hour, I sat alone on a stool with my cheese slices, enclosed in a private corner nook of classroom A046, wearing pool sandals and a trench coat. I could overhear the students introducing themselves. For some, it was their first life drawing class; others were charcoal-cuticled vets. As the instructor’s voice expounded on the basics of sketching the naked human figure, I set the fromage aside. I found a shard of mirror on a shelf and jimmied it onto a spare easel. A plastic, legless skeleton gaped at me from the corner as I parted my trench coat and inspected my body, shard by shard.

Today’s focus, the instructor explained, would be on construction, creating the building blocks of a figure, perceiving the body as a collection of shapes—cones, cylinders, and spheres. To draw the figure as an outline, he warned, would produce a Picasso-esque rendering. “Break the body into as many shapes as you can.” A leg, for example, might be constructed as sphere, cylinder, sphere, cone. Hip, thigh, knee, lower leg.

Returning to my seat and my snack, I couldn’t help but imagine myself as a big heap of body parts; legs and arms tangled up with free-floating breasts, a foot lodged between my head and a butt cheek. Any sexuality that burdened my body de-materialized. Less form, more function. Generally, wholeness is a state of being I strive for, but this image of myself as a sexless pile of parts provided an odd relief, a strange feeling that would sustain me for the four hours to come, and bewilder me for much longer.

The murmur of the classroom faded to silence. The instructor stepped around the massive shelf serving as a makeshift wall and peered over his glasses at me. I sat there, surrounded by anatomical skeleton amputees and bins of fabric scraps, eating cheese. “We’re ready for you.”

My sandals slapped against the concrete floor as I trailed him, trench coat wrapped tight, to the center of the classroom. Two large wooden boxes draped in old white fabric served as a stage, flooded in fluorescent light, circled by easels. I waved like an idiot at the twelve pairs of eyes peeking over their giant pads of newsprint. “I overheard some of you mention in your introductions that this is your first time. It’s my first time, too. So we’re on the same page.” To the tune of a few perfunctory titters, I removed my trench coat, slipped off the sandals, and hoisted myself onstage, wearing exactly nothing. Well, except for a tampon, because of course I was on my period.

The instructor said a simple pose would work best for the first ten minutes, until the class got comfortable with construction. Tilting my chin toward the ventilation system, I tried to stand—to pose—like someone who’d done this before. Simple but not boring, like a Matisse cutout, maybe. Or a Schierbeek sculpture. I felt a little…grand. I was thirty-two and nude on a stage and yes, I felt a little grand. Graphite and charcoal whipped over newsprint on the crescent of easels around me.

I hung off the cart as Mom pushed. We trawled through the bulk section of a grocery store in British Columbia, in my small hometown of Westbank. I had Mom all to myself. I was twelve years old and wanted a giant bag of Chinese crackers, the same ones Grandpa mixed with peanuts. A woman kept staring at us across the bulk bins. She waved, motioning toward herself. “Who’s that?” I asked. Mom shrugged and walked over. I couldn’t hear the conversation, but Mom returned with a business card, brows high on her head. “That woman wants you to model.”

I knew what a model was. My favorite photo of Mom from her modeling days was tucked into a clear plastic sleeve in her old portfolio, stashed at the bottom of a drawer: a close-up of her face, eyes slicing right through the netting of her pillbox hat into the camera. Dad kept a different picture of her on his desk, framed. In it, she lay on her side, head propped in her palm, naked—save for a surreptitiously draped fur coat. In that photo, I saw an enigma. Mom reminded me of the cover models on the stack of Sports Illustrated magazines in the basement, but less beach, more Vogue. She held some intangible allure I didn’t understand, a secret. I couldn’t grasp the intersections between body and sexuality, between obscured and exposed—and I didn’t know how to connect those undefined concepts back to my mom or my dad. I just knew that one photo was public and one was private.

Mom signed me up for modeling classes. Every week, we drove downtown and back, just the two of us. The other modeling students were fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen. I was new; they were not. They reminded me of the Sports Illustrated girls too, but skinnier, taller. Tangible. In class, I learned how to walk with my torso tilted back, one foot in front of the other, as though on a balance beam. I learned to do it in heels. My face had to exude power and apathy, I was taught—impossible concerns for a twelve-year-old, but I mastered it. When a dark-haired girl asked me to teach her how to walk, I couldn’t believe it. She called me a natural. “You’re only twelve? You look so mature for your age.” Pride ran up my spine; I felt grateful for my height—five-foot-eleven, and taller still in heels—and my talent for exhibiting contradictory expressions. I stood tall and glowered when I walked.

Glossy editorial layouts plastered the walls of the agency featuring their most successful models in high-end fashion campaigns. Many of them had been discovered at an annual international modeling convention in Vancouver, where scouts from all over the world searched for fresh faces. For us models in Westbank, this was our chance.  My agent wanted me to go, and Mom agreed.

At the end of classes prior to Thanksgiving, a month out from the convention, my agent knelt before me on the plywood runway with a measuring tape. I stretched my arms out as the yellow tape circled my chest, my waist, my butt. My agent smiled and said I could eat all the turkey I wanted. I caught the look on the dark-haired girl’s face. She looked mad. Jealous, my mom would say. I was excelling.

Faces appeared and disappeared behind easels. My skin burned as students analyzed the twist of my torso, the crook of my elbow. I settled my focus on a dent in the wall. Why in the hell was I here?

When a friend told me she worked as a life model, I’d been immediately impressed by her vulnerability. I was prone to tasking myself with challenges that destabilized my comfort. Nudity itself didn’t necessarily present a challenge; I regularly stripped down at Vancouver’s clothing-optional beach, but being the sole bare body at the center of a group’s focus would be a markedly different experience. To start, I had to submit a job application. I e-signed a contract. I was added to an institutional payroll. Langara College was a forty-minute bike ride from my house. On a Friday night, I could have picked up a serving shift at my restaurant job down the street and made more money. But I chose this, to stand naked on a box in a room full of strangers.

Did I hate serving that much? Was it the alt-artsy side hustle anecdote I was after? Was I an exhibitionist? Desperate to be a muse?

I told a colleague what I was doing. They confirmed it sounded quite literally like their worst nightmare.

The hallway circled the main ballroom like a moat. Inside a fancy hotel in downtown Vancouver, on the final day of the modeling convention, Mom and I readied ourselves to storm the castle: agent callbacks. I wore the uniform mandated by my agency: tall black pumps, black miniskirt, baby blue asymmetrical tank top stamped with the agency logo, and my number, 404, pinned to my torso. It had to be visible at all times—using the washroom, running to the hotel room, stepping outside for fresh air. You never knew when you might bump into a big-time agent. When you might have an opportunity to shine solo, apart from all the other teetering, languid models. When you might be seen.

I scoured the flurry of papers taped to the wall, listings of the models that each agency wanted to meet. An agent’s interest could lead to a secondary contract, a gig overseas, the start of an international career. My number appeared on six lists. Inside the ballroom, Mom diligently took notes of the agents’ comments:

Agent 1

• Great, unique look
• Too young for Milan
• Wants to see her in a couple of years

Agent 2

• Good body
• Has editorial look
• Too young for this market

Agent 3

• Perfect measurements—she’ll need to keep on top of it
• A little young

TOO YOUNG. My body was right. My age was wrong.

On the way to my next callback, I ran into 212, a model from my agency, and blushed. Owen, a whole five years older than me, glowed after landing a million callbacks and meeting with a big-deal New York-based agent (who had already signed a twelve-year-old that year) . The hollows of his cheeks punctuated his broad jaw like reverse parentheses. Muscles punched through his T-shirt. I was in love with him, but—as everyone seemed committed to reminding me—I was just a kid. And yet Owen talked to me like an adult. I swear he flirted. He hugged me and signed a headshot. You were the star of group runway and the dancing was awesome, you will be an international guest model next time I see you! See ya cutie. Flashes of us posing together for a Gucci campaign—love and fame—momentarily blinded me.

Mom and I settled into burgundy chairs at my next callback. The agent told me to get my teeth fixed. They were straight and had a natural gap between the two front incisors. “That’s ridiculous,” Mom huffed, as we walked away. “You’re not getting your teeth fixed. Lauren Hutton has a gap.” I clutched my white pleather-bound portfolio—my business card—to my chest. Yeah, I thought. Lauren Hutton.

“Twelve?” The next agent sighed. “That’s a little young.” Mom scribbled on her notepad as the agent flipped through my portfolio. “The pictures—the pictures are good though.” Her smooth nails pressed together as she pushed a card across the table. “Call me when you’re seventeen.”

“But … I can travel. In the summer.”

The agent’s mouth thinned into a smile. “You’re going to go through puberty and your body’s going to change.” Her laugh burned my ears. “Trust me, it will be very difficult to keep the same figure then.” She shut my portfolio. Her nails left little crescent indents in the fake white leather.

When the instructor announced a ten-minute break, I broke my pose and pulled on my street clothes. I had to pee. In the hallway, a student unwrapped his sandwich. “So, what’s it like to model?” he blurted. “Does it bother you?”

It probably wasn’t a trick question; he seemed earnest. Though poorly phrased, a similar question haunted me: what compelled me to stand naked before a group of strangers?

“I’ve been to life drawing classes before, but, like, to draw,” I offered lamely. My hands tucked into the pockets of my cargo pants.

“Oh right.” Bread bits cascaded down his shirt. “You’re in a room full of artists. The context matters, I suppose.” He dusted the crumbs away. “See you in there.”

All the stalls in the bathroom were empty. I tilted and turned in the mirror, lifting and lowering my clothes to inspect different parts of myself without undressing. The single mirror threw my body back at me; my legs were hairy, my weight and body measurements a mystery. Scars from my breast reduction snaked from below one armpit, across my ribcage to my sternum, and to the other armpit. I pulled down my shirt; it was impossible to really see my body like this. I strode back to the drawing room.

Soon after the Vancouver modeling convention, I gawked at photos of Owen splashed across fashion layouts. I saw him on a mega-ad, one hundred feet tall, frozen in place, on the side of a building downtown. The whole world saw him. His face looked different though, “chiseled.” His muscles sinewy. Owen-shaped, but not quite Owen. I thought he was beautiful before. His body perfect before. But perfect wasn’t quite the right shape.

I’d been honest with the tactless student; I’d enrolled in a handful of life drawing classes over the years, as an artist. As a kid, I spent hours drawing faces and animals. In my twenties, I became fascinated with naked bodies.

In the life drawing classes I attended, sessions were timed, but the models otherwise directed themselves on stage, flowing into new shapes of their choosing. I tried to capture it all with graphite, to somehow translate the energy of their gesture—a wave cresting from finger to shoulder to toe—onto paper, make fat and skin and muscle and bone move, push a current of blood through the tip of my pencil.

What did it feel like to be a form, a movement, rather than a body, with all its weight? I had spent so much time in front of a mirror, I’d forgotten I had depth. What was a body without a mirror to flatten it? How did it stand on stage, not as a singular, fixed shape, but as a figure constructed of many shapes, protean and mutable? How did it become parts that made up a whole, an arrangement that moved and gestured?

Eventually I was fourteen—older, finally—and though my parents couldn’t afford to let me attend the modeling convention in the fall, my agency announced a local model search in City Park, just over the bridge from Westbank. The prize was an all-expenses paid trip to the convention in Vancouver.

Mom was by my side whenever I wasn’t in front of the judges, but she never obscured my number. She held my portfolio and told me I was fantastic. I felt annoyed. It didn’t matter what she thought.  It mattered what they thought. I knew I looked older—I wore a bra now—but it was the wrong kind of older. Boobs could really fuck with your measurements, exactly as that agent had warned. At least I was the tallest. Us models, we snagged glances at each other. They clomped around in their heels, but I’d been walking in those shoes since I was twelve.

I pounded the concrete runway in a skirt. In a swimsuit. My number flapped, my face exuded power and apathy. I met the judges, flipping my face into an easygoing smile. I stood taut and tall in my bikini as an agent whipped out a tape measure and cinched it around my bust-waist-hips. I knew the numbers but held my breath. “Thirty-four, twenty-four and a half, thirty-four. Almost perfect!”

I breathed out.

The models scattered off stage as the judges deliberated. While Mom and I waited, the edges of my vision went dark and I crouched at the base of a tree.

“Are you okay?” Mom’s forehead crinkled and I admitted that I needed to eat. It would be another few years before she knew about my eating disorder. Even then, I didn’t know that’s what it was, but I knew enough not to talk about it.

Ten minutes later, the other models and I posed homogeneously side by side. My agent stood to announce the results. A charged silence struck the crowd.

I won.

After a long, hungry summer, I attended the modeling convention in Vancouver for my second and last time, the shape of my body half an inch closer to perfect than it had been at the model search. But I was only fourteen. Still too young.

Mid axe swing. The class was now learning to capture movement of a figure—gesture—and I was posed as though chopping firewood.

“Draw what you see,” the instructor said, circling the room. “Not what you think you see.” The students were supposed to find the single line that flowed through the entire form, a line that mapped the course of energy. “Don’t worry about details right now. Just get the shape. The more shapes you can break the body down into, the more movement you will see.”

This made sense. To consider outer space is to be baffled. But to look up at the night sky and focus on each moving part—the moon, the sun, planets, stars, and celestial bodies, solar systems and galaxies—creates a lens through which to observe the cosmos more holistically.

In my peripheral vision, I sensed the artists breaking my body down into shapes, reconstructing the shapes onto newsprint. Building my body back up with charcoal. The timer rang, and I followed through with my swing, met gravity’s force with my own.

In high school, I dropped to 116 pounds. I was so exhausted, I could not hold my head up, let alone hold open the heavy doors of the school entrance. I slept through all my English blocks in high school, my favorite subject. I skipped most other classes, except drama, but sat in the back row because I couldn’t stay awake there, either. Eventually my teachers stopped reprimanding me and just let me sleep. My hands and feet turned purple, then white, then numb. A thousand layers of clothing couldn’t keep me warm. My lips were stained blue from an endless, bone-deep cold. When the principal’s office called because my record showed over a hundred truancies, I told Mom I always missed roll call because I was chronically late. She believed me; I was always late.

My body stopped menstruating, stalled in time on a biological level. An anxious feedback loop played in my head: when will I be warm again, when will I eat again, when will the day end? I no longer had hobbies. But I had stamina. I had integrity. I had the figure of a twelve-year-old.

Naked. The timer sounded. The scrape of conté on newsprint tapered into quiet, and I readied for a new pose. I shook out my wrists, billowed my trench coat over the stage, and sat down as though at the beach, legs out, leaning forward to admire my sandal tan. Long poses now, hold for fifteen minutes.

The stretch made my hamstrings burn. Stillness was not painless. I closed my eyes, focused on my breath. Tried to relax. But all I could see behind my eyelids was my reflection in the bathroom mirror.

What if the students were disgusted by the scars on my chest? My hairy legs? What if they fixated on my poor circulation, which turned my hands and feet a dappled purple? What if my breast looked like a home-grown zucchini from this angle?

I forced my attention to my breath. In, out. My hands were probably purple.

The year I finally turned seventeen, I didn’t return to the modeling convention in Vancouver to strut the runway, to show that agent I could keep my prepubescent figure, that I had kept it. Instead, I went to the bush. 

A close friend called my parents, unbeknownst to me, and shared her concerns about my increasingly strange eating habits, long bathroom stints, and erratic social conduct. When they confronted me, upset and already devising a plan to fix my problem, I barely protested. In truth, I felt relieved. Secrets are lonely undertakings, and mine had demanded constant attention.

They sent me to a camp for girls with eating disorders, at a lodge nestled in the woods on a lake an hour outside Vancouver. The closest thing to a catwalk was the old dock, where I fell asleep during group yoga every morning. One afternoon, in the communal area of the lodge, we were each paired with another camper. Sunlight angled through the windows, landing on huge sheets of paper taped to the walls. The counselor passed out colored markers as she explained the activity. I stood against the papered wall, facing my partner, who smiled, a purple marker in hand. She traced my body all the way around, from one foot to the top of my head, from my head down to the other foot, tracking all the space in between. When she finished her drawing, I stepped away and turned around. 

The counselor told us the exercise offered a more concrete way to see our bodies, a way to disrupt the thick film of judgment and expectation we were trapped behind. 

I hoped for a stick figure but really expected more of a crime scene situation, a rudimentary outline like the tape around a cadaver on a TV cop drama. But the tracing on the wall looked like neither—it didn’t look like me whatsoever. It was just a line, after all, a two-dimensional contour on the wall. Still, I felt my defenses swing like a metronome. I should be smaller, I thought, wondering if my partner had held the marker at an unfair angle. But what if that rangy outline was really what I looked like? Because my name was attached to it, I felt an urge to take responsibility for that line, to place some kind of value on it. 

I traced my partner, determined to capture her just as she was. We stepped back. And the contour didn’t look like her either. Glancing around the room at all the outlines of bodies on the wall, it became impossible to tell which belonged to whom. They were just shapes. Not people.

Two minutes into the pseudo-beach pose and I could not push away my concerns about the vegetable shape my boob had possibly morphed into, given the way my torso arched, given the pull of gravity. Every time I switched poses, all my body parts took on a slightly different shape, and I felt the urge to step outside my skin and do a 360° scan of myself to ensure everything looked as it should. Aside from presenting a logistical impossibility, I recognized the urge as one with incredible potential to spiral. In such a vortex, thirteen minutes would become a lifetime.

I took a breath. Pricked my ears to the constant erosion of charcoal. If my boob did look like a zucchini, at least the artists were building the zucchini out of spheres and cones, focusing on accuracy. My body was a collection of shapes. It wasn’t worth losing myself over.

At the timer, the students spun their easels to face inward. A dozen interpretations of myself surrounded me. As each artist described their technique, I faced my body, sketch by sketch.

The first easel conveyed a hunched figure, arms clutching the edge of the chair between her legs. The lines were choppy, the form rendered small. In another, exaggerated lines swelled into a wide, muscled arm and the breasts swooped away from the rib cage like birds in flight. One picture portrayed the figure on a stool. The edges of the conté had been dragged to create shadows that revealed her shape through the relief of light.

Seeing my body this way, deconstructed into shapes, arranged on paper into stacks of spheres and cylinders, calmed me. Strange relief. The way others perceived my body, I could see, had very little to do with me, and nothing to do with the anxieties that spiraled in my head. Each drawing revealed my body’s subjectivity, unveiled an alternative way to see. On the page, I wasn’t in good or bad shape, appealing or unappealing.

While the students packed up, the instructor offered a final pointer for their portfolio pieces. “As you draw, notice the contrast of the body and the background. Think about how the contrast of the negative space informs the shape.”

I recalled the conversation with the student in the hallway. The context mattered. I wasn’t twelve but thirty-two. This wasn’t a competition, but a drawing class. Here, I was not expected to scrape myself down to a razor-thin margin of acceptable measurements, draped in sample sizes. My body wasn’t up for debate; my body was the shape in question—positive space informed by the negative. Here, I had autonomy over my body’s expression; the interpretation of it was beside the point.

I dressed, packed my bag, and waved goodbye to the class. “It was nice to see you,” a student called out.

It was nice to be seen.

The post A Perfect Body Wasn’t the Right Shape For Me appeared first on Electric Literature.

The Best Way to Bury Your Husband was born of the sheer deluge and urgency of the work that followed. All authors draw from life, but this was the first time my “day job” shaped one of my novels so completely. It awakened an interest in how other writers explore the benefits and challenges of leaning heavily on experience, not just imagination.

Our work life is such a rich and inescapable source of material and inspiration, but sometimes that depth of knowledge can be just as daunting and complicated as having to invent everything from scratch. What should you put in to make the work authentic versus what should you leave out to avoid getting bogged down? How much can you borrow before you’re no longer writing fiction at all? Here are seven authors, with novels inspired by their day jobs, who are answering those questions.

Forensic Anthropologist: The Temperance Brennan series by Kathy Reichs

From Patricia Cornwell (who worked at a medical examiner’s office) to Kathy Reichs (a forensic anthropologist whose crime novels inspired long-running TV-series Bones), crime writers with a background in policing or the analysis of evidence have become increasingly common as an ever more sophisticated readership looks for greater authenticity. It’s not just the ‘telling details’ that matter—and which are easily enough seized upon—but the types of story that emerge organically from specific types of work, happening in specific contexts, within a specific professional culture. 

Counterterrorism Communications: The Chase by Ava Glass

Christi Daugherty moved on from crime reporting in the U.S. to counterterrorism communications in London, and it was this that informed her new Alias Emma series, written under the pen-name Ava Glass. The Chase sees spy Emma Makepeace (not her real name) engaged in a fraught escape across London—the most heavily CCTV-surveilled city in the world—while The Traitor follows her across Europe on an oligarch’s superyacht as she hunts a possible government mole. A female-centric spin on Le Carré, The Traitor was shortlisted for the prestigious Crime Writers Association Steel Dagger Award for its grounded depiction of intelligence work. Hailed as a “‘female James Bond,” Glass, with her keen eye for both detail and fun, brings the action—and also a depth of insight into the damage this type of work wreaks on a person’s life and psyche.

Mental Health Worker: Girl Friends by Holly Bourne

It’s perhaps not a surprise that counselling and mental health work is another common author ‘day job’ given the novel’s unrivaled canvas for exploring character interiority. Holly Bourne worked as a teen mental health advisor. Her years of experience shine through in all her novels, from her alternatively hilarious and heartbreaking Am I Normal Yet? YA series to her nuanced examination of trauma in her adult novels, most recently Girl Friends. Bourne has an extraordinary ability to switch from laugh-out-loud comedy to peeling back the layers of what’s happening to reveal the tragedy beneath, from the lies we tell ourselves to the horrors so normalised in society we barely recognise it doesn’t have to be like this.

Teacher: The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller 

A former classics teacher, Madeline Miller brought her love of Latin and Greek into her sublime The Song of Achilles, which effortlessly and accessibly renders the stories from The Odyssey into a living, breathing tale of love and devotion. It sings to the modern reader just as the original would have to listeners from thousands of years ago. Miller captures the magic of ancient rhythms and the beauty of language that has withstood the test of millennia. The swift, smooth flow, mimicking the tale’s origins in the oral tradition, saw me unable to stop turning the pages.

Journalist: The Many Lies of Veronica Hawkins by Kristina Pérez

 Like her protagonist, Pérez moved from New York City to Hong Kong, where she worked as a journalist. A tightly-structured “book within a book”, it’s clear from the start that everyone in this twisty tale is lying—but what they’re lying about, and how this relates to the death of the eponymous Hong Kong socialite, is a tangled web indeed. The sense of a dynamic place at a profound moment of change is as much a character as any of the named players, adding depth and a disconcerting vividness that makes the levels of storytelling even more engrossing.

Playwright: The Appeal by Janice Hallett 

Janice Hallett is another author with a background in journalism, but it’s her “day job” as a playwright (and her passion for amateur dramatics) that shines most brightly in The Appeal. Told through emails, texts and other documents, this is a modern spin on the epistolary novel. Hallett’s skill with capturing different voices—much like an actor—keeps the pages turning as you puzzle over the deeper meaning of a friendly sign-off versus a terse one, and whether concern over ethical and legal technicalities will prove a red herring or the key to unraveling the central mystery.

Lawyer: The Unseeing by Anna Mazzola

Lawyers  are well-represented among authors, from Charles Perrault to John Buchan, and from John Grisham to Anna Mazzola. To date, Mazzola has focused on the intersection of her legal expertise with her passion for history. The Unseeing is a dual-narrative following a young lawyer sent to re-investigate a (real) 1830s case in which both a murderer and his common-law wife have been sentenced to death: the second narrator is the condemned “accomplice.” With a sharp eye to how gaps in evidence can be as revealing as the evidence itself, Mazzola turns her lens on the way power structures don’t just shape the law as written, but also how it affects the legal system in practice. Look out for her first contemporary legal mystery in 2025 under pen-name Anna Sharpe.

Babysitter: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was inspired partly by her own experiences as a babysitter. When a Black babysitter takes the young white girl she cares for to the supermarket, she finds herself accused of kidnapping. Her horrified employer wants to make things right, but from the micro- to the macro-level that is anything but simple. The book took the publishing world by storm, ending up on the longlist for The Booker Prize among other accolades for its nuanced exploration of race, class and power.

The post 8 Novels Inspired by the Author’s Day Job appeared first on Electric Literature.

us, pottery fragments once  
dusted in warm sand—jagged,  

mismatched—today, preserved  
in glass. it began to rain while we  

walked from the bar, so we came  
here, listening to artifacts speak about  

their hieroglyphs, even after we learned
the paintings we wanted to see were  

switched out before morning arrived. yet
we wander through modernism and  

antiquity, stopping to see a vase or shield, the
faces of those bending down on the other  

side of the case. one of them reminds me
of him, you say, which is the complete  

antithesis of today’s adventure—it’s to forget,
you emphasized during our second round of  

drinks. come here, taking your hand, dull
blade of a jackknife. and we pause by a 

sculpture of a green balloon dog.  
there are no security guards lurking or  

barricades surrounding the mantle.  
push it. you’re crazy. imagine  

it’s from him, make it appear like an  
accident. you roll your eyes, but lift your  

hand, pausing by the nose, arm  
trembling, ready to spread  

god’s fingerprints with  
one small shove.

Desaparecidos (or, Memorializing Absence, Remembering the Disappeared)

installation: sculptures

see who’s next to be concealed in harsh  
twilight. stand behind statues, peephole  
through gaping exit wounds. yesterday’s  
papers flutter with mosquitos. go: crumple 

headlines together. deprived of liberty via  
a breeze and years of futile searching for the  
deafening muffle of a rooster crowing. let them 
call for those kissing palm leaves over  

mouths, the forcibly taken and disappeared, 
watch as the flecks of embers in a field of  
sampaguitas ablaze subsist through 
crush-glass rain. name, picture, remembrance. 

the disappeared are not dead, but immaterial with 
stiff heads, necks, limbs, ab- away, esse- to be 
in rigor mortis—the bodies’ event horizon—for 
absence remains: open wound, festering in 

hectares, eyes scalloped out, sockets blackened  
inkblots. watch them hold gifts, hands gripping 
golden frames which contain no archipelagoes or  
portraits, but recesses. think: deserted mirrors,  

barren caesarean, flesh turned nuclear winter. 
child wearing overalls, student in cap and  
gown, nun’s mouth calcified shut, old  
man, old woman, snuffed out by candlelight.

The post Installing Ourselves in the Memory Museum 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.

But before we reveal the winner, here is some behind-the-scenes commentary on the competition:

While we’re really impressed with how the March Sadness bracket turned out, we can’t say it matched our expectations. The EL staff filled out our own brackets, and we failed abysmally. From nearly everyone guessing that A Little Life would sweep the left side of the bracket, to being (pessimistically) certain The Fault in Our Stars would be the runaway winner, our showings were frankly embarrassing. Out of a maximum 57 points, our winning bracket (belonging to former intern, Kyla Walker—congrats, Kyla!) scored a measly 26 points. And our lowest score, by our lovely Managing Editor, Wynter Miller (sorry to call you out, Wynter), was only 12. And I, the author of this article, who by all means should be the best at guessing given that I run our social media accounts, clocked in at a (frankly embarrassing) 17 points. I thought I knew you all well, dear followers, and I’m ashamed to say I clearly do not. My hubris got the better of me. Is this what fantasy sports feels like? If so, I don’t think I like it. But… I will be playing again next year anyway. Which kind of seems to be the entire vibe of sports? Maybe we’re onto something here.

Here is the winner of March Sadness:

For those following along at home, here’s how the bracket played out:

Thanks for playing and following along! Join us again next year for another (possibly also rhyming but definitely not sports-related) March Madness bracket.

The post Announcing the Winner of March Sadness appeared first on Electric Literature.

But I’m fascinated by the places where those categories break down. Are the mice who intrude on my cupboards wild? Is my cat wild when he hunts a songbird? Are the songbirds becoming domesticated if I feed them suet? What about the microorganisms that make up much of our body mass?

Writing my book, The Age of Deer, was a deep dive into those kinds of questions, prompted by the long and tangled history humans share with deer. We’ve influenced each other so profoundly—ecologically, biologically, culturally—that the more I researched our relationship, the more the conventional lines of division between us began to seem blurry at best. Here are eight other books that examine the interconnections among humans and some of the species—or “nations,” as they’re sometimes called—with whom we share the Earth.

Winter: Effulgences & Devotions by Sarah Vap

Centered on the Olympic Peninsula, Vap’s recursive, questing book-length poem charts a radical porousness between people and whales, salmon, microorganisms: all the species that are part of our world, that influence us and are influenced (and devastated) by us. But the dissolving boundaries in this book also include those between Vap and her children and husband—the “family animal,” in her phrase, a collective organism that sleeps, eats, nurses, plays, shares thought and speech, seeps in and out of the language of the writing. The project took years to write and contains many layers of personal history and political response, but it constantly circles back to the image of a mother who is as vulnerable to the beloved interruptions of her young sons as she is to the horrors of climate change, extinction and war. The body here becomes a hinge between human and animal existence, a reminder of our inescapable (and why would we want to?) creaturehood.

Milk Tongue by Irène Mathieu

Animal life is not the overt focus of this book, but in and amongst Mathieu’s explorations of history, family, and her work as a pediatrician, wildlife is a quiet and frequent presence, inviting itself into the human world. Thrush, an infection of the mouth, is also a bird that “lands on the windowsill” and becomes woven into a complex imagistic fabric. Deer tracks are the epicenter of “a kind of country… we drew.” Mathieu’s poetry finds slippages between body and landscape, brain and culture, and locates moments when the domesticated world collides with the feral (a moth, having strayed into a kitchen, cut down by a snapped dishtowel) and those when the human is drawn forward and outward by the more-than-human: “confused animal I am,” she writes, comparing herself to “the small miracle of organization” represented by a flock of geese. 

When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice by Terry Tempest Williams

Birds in this book are messengers carrying mystical resonances, like the ruby-throated hummingbird who hovers in front of Williams as she kneels on the ground, grieving a friend. Or the owl who appears, seeming to warn her, as she follows a dangerous man into the wilderness, against her own better judgment. Her world is vibrant and full of signs, and she possesses deep recall of many moments from across her life, like a sunrise she watched with her grandmother in the Uinta Mountains of Utah, when they witnessed a golden eagle silence the dawn chorus of songbirds and grab a mouse. “Voice” here means authentic speech, speaking up or out, and birds are Williams’ guides through a life in art, activism, and family.

Yaqui Deer Songs / Maso Bwikam: A Native American Poetry by Larry Evers and Felipe S. Molina

Technically, this is an academic work of anthropology. From the first, though, it reads like a poem— fitting, since it brings forth the elegant, living body of literature created by Yaqui people in Arizona and Sonora. Yaqui deer dancers perform in order to invoke another world, the sea ania or flower world, from which deer emerge: mythic figures and key providers for humans. But it’s not as simple as calling forth the deer. The dances and music enter and honor the deer’s own perspective: the dancers wear antlers and imitate the movements of deer, while the lyrics are often cast in the deer’s voice. “With a cluster of flowers in my antlers, I walk.”  A native Yaqui speaker and a white academic co-authored the book in 1987; they fill it with images, translations and anecdotes, like a personal tour of the Yaqui world.

The Radiant Lives of Animals by Linda Hogan

From her small house in rural Colorado, the Chickasaw poet Hogan charts a way of listening and co-habiting with wild animals that is often revelatory in its simple lack of dominance. Instead of spraying wasps who nest in her bedroom, she opens the window for them every morning so they can go in and out. “Not being a person… with insect hatred,” she demonstrates that animosity and fear of the wild are choices, just as easy not to harbor. In a lilting, dreamy voice, through the Yaqui deer dances and Hogan’s ties to horses and burros, this book of mostly essays explores the enchantment that brings humans into receptivity toward many species’ intelligence—ants, elk, wolves—“all citizens here.” 

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham

Through linked essays, Lanham becomes our guide to the landscape of his South Carolina childhood, where his forebears were farmers and pillars of Black community life. Birds and other wildlife captured Lanham’s attention early; he longed to fly, tempted vultures by playing dead, and gradually realized that his religious feelings were more centered on the outdoors than on church. As an adult, he became a birder and a professor of wildlife ecology—a rarity in both largely white realms. He expands our notion of who belongs in the outdoors and who loves wild places: “I also think about how other Black and Brown folks think about land,” he writes. He’s at his most convincing when he describes becoming a deer hunter, fully and consciously involved in the life and death dance of the land he loves.

The Covenant of the Wild: Why Animals Chose Domestication by Stephen Budiansky

Budiansky, a science writer and former Nature editor, makes a case here that domestication of animal species is not a process of enslavement but simply part of evolution. Both parties benefitted, he argues, when humans began to offer food, shelter and protection for species that in turn provided meat, milk, hides and labor. He traces the long, gradual process by which “loose associations” become codified, often hinging on the trait called neoteny — a tendency to retain some juvenile characteristics even in adulthood. Both domesticated animals and humans display neoteny, and collectively it has served our numbers very well: the total biomass of land species on Earth is becoming more and more weighted toward people and the animals we control. “Wild,” then, is a contested and precarious category.

Woman the Hunter by Mary Zeiss Stange

An academic and hunter, Stange investigates a string of questions animated by the presence of the female hunter—who, she points out, is not only a modern phenomenon: in hunter-gatherer societies, women have routinely killed small animals as part of what gets labeled “gathering.” Why does anyone hunt in the modern world? What can hunting tell us about the human presence on earth, and whether “wildness,” as we’ve imagined it, really exists? When the hunter is a woman, Stange argues, she awakens fertile contradictions lying deep beneath our culture: Artemis, for example, is both a death-dealer and a protector, a patron of animals who also embodies the fact that, in Stange’s words, “life feeds on life.”

The post 8 Books about the Interdependence Between Humans and Animals appeared first on Electric Literature.

This book is her answer: turn to her community for help.

Over the course of 20 essays, each accompanied by photographs she took, Raboteau looks at different ways concerned global citizens are responding to the crises that face us, all of which are undergirded by climate collapse. Like a blanket for a new child, Raboteau’s book quilts together their wisdom. Many pieces stay close to home, as Raboteau travels by foot through various neighborhoods in New York City (most often Harlem, where she and her husband, novelist Victor LaValle, lived for many years), profiling people trying to affect change on a local level. Some are topical, diaries of the months before the pandemic, or reflecting on specific days, like May 25, 2020, when bird watcher Christian Cooper was threatened by a white woman in Central Park because his Blackness frightened her, and, later, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. And in one tour-de-force of narrative reporting, Raboteau recounts a 2016 visit to the West Bank of Palestine, where she witnesses virulent Islamophobia and colonialism that today fuels the decimation of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force.

Rarely have I read a book that speaks so vitally to our current moment, which illustrates how entrenched these social and environmental crises are. I spoke to Raboteau about parenting, resilience, and the emotional journey she took while writing Lessons for Survival.

Brian Gresko: Sometimes when the news gets too awful, I find it negatively impacts my ability to write, so I choose to disengage for a couple of days for the sake of my work. It feels like in Lessons for Survival you’ve done the opposite. I’m curious to know about your emotional journey while composing this book, and what you did to protect yourself from spiraling down while writing. (Or, if such spirals happened, how you moved through them.)

Emily Raboteau: I’m not sure I’ve done the opposite as you, Brian! Choosing to disengage from the news cycle for the sake of your work is choosing engagement of another kind–deep thought instead of reactionary panic. What is apocalyptic thinking, really? The word “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek apokálypsis “uncovering.” My friend, the writer Ayana Mathis, just reminded me of this. It doesn’t actually mean the end of the world. I wish to see things as they are, with the scales wiped from my eyes.

For me, writing these essays, most of which focus on resilience, was a way to engage with others and to keep from doomscrolling or spiraling downward, as you put it. For example, I responded to the news cycle in 2019 by keeping a kind of climate diary that gathered expressions by dozens of people in my social network about how they were experiencing climate change in their bodies and local habitats. I did that because climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe said that one of the most important things we can do to combat the climate emergency is to talk about it widely among family and friends. I feel less despairing and alone when I can study large-scale problems, and possible solutions, in community. Writing is one way of doing that.

That said, while I was editing this book, my therapist prescribed watching fun TV for the sake of my mental health. I watched Love on the Spectrum, an incredibly heartwarming show. I recommend it!

BG: I’m glad you mentioned that essay-as-diary, “It Was Already Tomorrow.” I love how it gives us a taste of your joyously busy social calendar through the year, but there was one small moment that especially stayed with me: when your then eight-year-old asks you to “rummage through my head and take out the fire thoughts and eat them” before bed. This was so sweet, that you held his anxieties in your belly. Can you talk about how you address the climate crisis with your sons, as a mother? And how that’s changed and developed as they’ve aged, and you’ve engaged more directly with the topic via writing these essays?

ER: That was the bedtime ritual for a while. He would name all his fears and ask me to eat them one by one, and I would pantomime doing so. I was his grief eater. We have to be careful about how much grief we consume, don’t you think? A diet like that can make us sick. But I also wanted to validate my kid’s fears and let him know that he didn’t have to carry them alone.

This is how I address climate change with him and his brother, too. By diverting them from the fallacy that they can fight it by themselves. We now know that the idea of the individual carbon footprint, that is, how much we are each contributing to the problem as a way of pushing us to change individual behaviors (drive less, don’t have kids, fly less, recycle, etc..) was a marketing scheme cooked up by British Petroleum. Why? To deflect responsibility from the fossil fuel industry by tricking us into thinking it’s we who need to change. The only way we can take this fight on is in community with others, on local and global scales. So I talk to my kids about what is going on in the community to fight climate change and environmental justice.

For example, in our neighborhood in the Bronx, they are in the process of daylighting (unburying) a stream as an act of climate mitigation. I try to bring the climate emergency down to Earth and out of the realm of cosmic dread. And I talk to them about historical resilience. How we come from a historically resilient community that has survived existential threats before. As they get older, I want them to know more about careers in sustainability, though the paths they will walk are their own to choose. Ours is described as the last generation who can turn things around. Their generation—Alpha—they are inheriting a terrible burden. I think a lot about intergenerational justice; about what we owe them. I’m curious, because you’re such a thoughtful parent yourself, how are you thinking through this?

BG: A lot of this resonates with me as a parent. My son is almost fifteen. His room is verdant with houseplants, terrariums, aquariums. He loves life and science. He’s also a technophile, and he believes that while things are going to get real bad, ultimately technology will allow us to survive, that ingenious humanity will find a way. I appreciate his optimism but I don’t trust capitalism or corporations, especially big tech. Have you experienced anything similar with your boys?

ER: I’d like to hang out in your son’s room. It sounds amazing. Our kids are somewhat younger than yours. They’ll turn eleven and thirteen this spring. We’ve not yet gotten into disagreements or debates about best practices moving forward, like degrowth. Maybe that will come, when they’re truly teenagers, like yours, with strong opinions of their own. Or maybe they’ll want to join task forces, like the Sunrise Movement or Fridays for Future. Who knows. Right now they’re into playing video-games.

We do try to inculcate values, like experiences and relationships matter more than stuff. It helps me to know I’m not the only one educating them, and I hope that solutions-oriented curriculum about the climate crisis will become a bigger and bigger part of their education in middle school, high school, and college. The Ecopsychepedia is a good resource I turn to for current research and thinking on how psychological factors drive the climate crisis, how the worsening crisis affects us psychologically, and what we can do about it. And I’m encouraged by the two New York State climate education bills afoot that would mandate K-12 climate education. I’m also gaining a lot of insight about parenting in these times from Anya Kamenetz’s thoughtful newsletter, The Golden Hour.

BG: This talk of parenting makes me think of Lessons in Survival’s subtitle: “Mothering Against ‘The Apocalypse.’” What does the word mother mean to you and why did you choose to use it in this context?

ER: I’m aligned here with feminist thinkers like Gloria Steinem and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who use “mother” not as a noun, but as a verb. Mothering can be a revolutionary stance on the power of nurture and empathy—an ethics of care. People sometimes forget that when Julia Ward Howe invented Mother’s Day in 1870, it was supposed to be a day of unity for peace and opposition to war. It was about coming together to combat violence. It wasn’t about Hallmark cards and roses. It was in recognition, as Steinem puts it, that “when mother is a verb–as in to mother, to be mothered–then the best of human possibilities come into our imaginations. To mother is to care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own.” Even if we aren’t biological mothers, we may be mothering.

BG: The essay “Mother of All Good Things,” where you report on the Israeli occupation of Palestine on its fiftieth anniversary, in 2017, is an incredible piece of journalism and artistry. You write that just as W. E. B. DuBois said “the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, I’d heard it said the problem of the twenty-first century was the question of Palestine.” This hit me differently now, as the occupation and total destruction of Gaza continues unabated, then it would have a few months ago. Can you tell me the circumstances that led to that piece, and also update it for us?

ER: The Question of Palestine, with a hat tip to Edward Said. I was solicited by married writers Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon to write that essay for an anthology called The Kingdom of Olives and Ash (along with a lot of other international writers including Anita Desai, Hari Kunzru, Helon Habila, Porochista Khakpour, Eimear McBride, Raja Shehadeh) to examine the human cost of the occupation. It was a partnership with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—a radically humane organization made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories, witnessed firsthand the injustice there, and conscientiously objected to it, often at a high cost.

I wrote specifically about inequitable water and electricity use in one part of the West Bank. I visited with Palestinian shepherds trying to stay on their land. I wasn’t in Gaza. I was in the South Hebron Hills. It was my first explicit piece of environmental writing, and it was about the abuse of power. I am still in touch with many of the folks I profiled in that piece. They say that the settler violence has grown much worse since I was there, and it feels like the world doesn’t care. They’re praying for a ceasefire, yet feeling despair. I’ve been thinking a lot since this war broke out about the words of Lama Hourani, a community activist I met in Ramallah: “Does the US really care about Jewish self-determination? No. They wanted an ally for resources. Their main interest is energy. The main energy is in the Gulf. All of us are suffering because of that.”

I hope this essay gives readers some context about the violence that led up to October 7.

BG: The ways in which water and access to water has been weaponized by the Israeli government rooted that essay into the collection, as so many of the pieces have water on the mind, from rising seawater to hurricanes and floods, and the ancient pond that hides in plain sight in front of your house, returning to swamp the sidewalk whenever it rains. How did you settle on topics for these pieces? They each stand alone and yet speak to one another, with recurring themes and characters, like songs on an album.

ER: Water is one of the book’s leitmotifs. I don’t know. I think I just followed my curiosity. I looked as hard as I could at the places where something was wrong, to understand how it got that way, systemically. You mentioned the pond in the street in front of my house in the Bronx, for example. It’s an eyesore and it’s surely bad for resale value. But why is it there in the first place, and why doesn’t it go away? Well, it turns out I live on backfilled wetlands, and that pond is only one of many ponds in my area, which also floods, in places. It’s the water remembering where it wants to be. And why is flooding of this kind more common in Black and brown neighborhoods like mine, that were historically red-lined? Because plundered peoples are made to live in plundered places.

I’m glad you feel that the book hangs together like an album, with refrains. There are a lot of visual refrains and echoes. I’m a street photographer as well as a writer and I included over a hundred photos in the book. The majority of these images are of public artworks that reflect on social and environmental issues. As with the pond, I had to ask, what’s that mural doing there? What is it saying? Who made it? Who was it meant for and why?

BG: Can we return to the word resilience? What did you learn about resilience in the process of writing it, and profiling people like Luz, who, after Hurricane Sandy destroyed her home, now lives as a climate migrant in an RV?

ER: Luz, in particular, has taught me a lot about resilience. I credit her for wiping scales from my eyes in terms of the merits of disaster preparedness. One of the essays profiles her story. She didn’t own her home in Staten Island. It was a rental in her brother’s name. She lost everything she owned to that hurricane. So there was no way she could get government funds to “build it back better.” Luz was forced by circumstance to radically change her life, to critique consumer-culture, to downsize. She now lives much more sustainably and happily in an RV. I’m interested in learning from people like Luz, and from frontline and fenceline communities, who have a lot to teach us about survival, and what Anya Kamenetz would call “post-traumatic growth,” even though they’re seldom treated as environmental experts. If we come from a stance of thinking of economics as the chief measure of human welfare, we are missing out on a more wealthy understanding of resilience. Setting aside financial resilience, what does it mean to be spiritually resilient, emotionally resilient? What resources and reserves of strength does it take to make it through calamity?

Are you familiar with the gospel song, “How I Got Over”? Mahalia Jackson recorded it. So did Aretha Franklin. “My soul look back and wonder, how I got over…” I interviewed a lot of survivors in this book about how they got over. I also asked people what they do with their anger.

BG: What do you do with your anger? And how do you nurture hope?

ER: For a long time I internalized it and experienced it as depression. An elder I talked to in Alakanuk, Alaska, a real ground zero of climate collapse, told me that the best thing to do with our anger is to take care of other people. That resonated with me in a deep way, as a mother. As for nurturing hope, this may sound too simple, but the purest practice I’ve found is to garden. To nurture life with my hands in the soil, and be nurtured in return.

The post Emily Raboteau on Mothering in the Face of Climate Collapse appeared first on Electric Literature.

Buenos Aires, Argentina, February 2015

Nina Lazris met her husband in the week between arriving in Buenos Aires and discovering the book that punched holes in her personal history. Besides that, she did little of note. She unpacked her bags, set up a writing space in her newly rented apartment, took long walks in the summer heat. She worked, though less than she should have, on the dissertation she had flown halfway across the globe to save. She spent too much money on fancy prepared foods before realizing she’d miscalculated the exchange rate. It didn’t matter—Nina had resources to fall back on—but she tried to live within her grad-student means. It was part of being a serious person, which she worked hard at. Before she stumbled on Guerra Eterna, it was arguably the project of her adult life.

Nina wasn’t positive her presence in Argentina qualified as serious. It was neither fully stipend-funded nor fully planned. In fairness to herself, she could only have planned so much. She’d come to Buenos Aires to study the protest movement arising from the suspicious death of special prosecutor Alberto Nisman, and he’d barely been dead three weeks. Hard to blame herself for not organizing her trip while he was still alive.

If somebody had told Nina a month earlier that she’d be spending her spring semester here, she would have laughed in their face. She had never been to Latin America before. Never traveled alone. Never imagined that, four and a half years into her doctorate, she’d wrench the scope of her dissertation open, shifting from social-media-driven dissent in the United States to social-media-driven dissent in the Americas. Of course, if that same clairvoyant person had added that she’d be making a chaotic last-ditch effort to rescue her dissertation—and with it her poor, shredded belief that she belonged in academia—she would have retracted her laughter. Fine, she would have said. Great. Cross your fingers it works.

She crossed her fingers at her sides now, waiting at the light on Avenida Santa Fe, the main commercial strip in her new neighborhood. Chic girls buzzed past in their giant earrings, hip-length hair flickering in the breeze. Sun bounced off the polished hoods of taxis, glared from bus windows, turned the street itself into a lake of glossy tar. The air smelled like hot asphalt mixed with warm fruit, dog shit, and the pleasant burnt-wood scent that wafted constantly from the pizzeria across Santa Fe. Nina had tried it two nights ago: not awful, but also not good.

She was en route to coffee with Ilán Radzietsky, a graduate of her program who now taught at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Nina was working on a Ph.D. in communications, but instead of getting funding from her department, she got it from her university’s Center for Media and Social Impact, which adopted a doctoral student every few years. Ilán had been its first. Now he was a rising academic star who researched multilinguistic online identity formation.

Nina wished she knew what type of coffee this would be: semiprofessional? Full professional? Casual but platonic? Or would it be one of those first dates recognizable only in retrospect? She had no reason to even imagine the latter. Her stubborn hope that it would be a pre-date pointed, probably, to her fundamental unseriousness. She’d never met Ilán in person. One of her bosses had introduced them, which led to a flurry of emails, and then Ilán invited her to a welcome-to-the-country coffee. All very ordinary. Nina was thinking in date-or-not-date terms only because (1) she hadn’t had a nontransactional conversation, barring phone calls with her dad, since she landed in Buenos Aires five days ago, (2) she hadn’t had sex since Thanksgiving, and (3) Ilán was hot. In the headshot on his departmental profile page, he glowed like some kind of Modern Orthodox sex prince in his yarmulke and open collar. His mussed curls practically lifted from her laptop screen. His smile was crooked, his skin perfect. Since Google Imaging him, Nina had devoted far too much time to sexual and marital fantasies in which he was the star.

A block from the Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Nina paused to lift her hair from her sweating neck. She checked her reflection in the plate-glass window of a store that seemed to sell only compressive underwear: girdles, control panties, distressing Velcro-sided bras. She reminded herself that, even if she was not a serious person, she was gifted at small talk, proficient in Spanish, and neither as dumb nor as ill-prepared as she felt. She had read every scrap of Nisman news since he died on January 18. She had educated herself on his eleven-year investigation into the 1994 car bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, or AMIA, Buenos Aires’s biggest Jewish community center; she’d read his allegations that the sitting president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, had concealed Iran’s involvement in the attack. Not even a week after he levied his accusations, he was discovered dead in his bathroom. Online, it had seemed to Nina that all of Argentina was in an uproar. Now that she was here, she couldn’t gauge how many people cared.

She could ask Ilán. In a normal way, not a help-me-my-dissertation-is-dying way. She did not plan to tell him that if her research failed here like it had been failing in D.C., she would quit academia. She would be confident. Not socially starved. Not a freak. She would not ask insensitive or ignorant questions. If she flirted, she would do it subtly. She smoothed her hair, tugged her skirt straight, and texted Ilán that she was close.

In her two weeks of feverish predeparture planning, Nina had imagined herself working in the Facultad library. Looking at the building, she had doubts. It was old and mildly crumbling, with a tiny brown garden, a drooping Argentine flag, and air conditioners dripping from every third window. An engraved stone over the door confirmed that it really was part of the Universidad de Buenos Aires, not a run-down office block. Neon-green flyers wheat-pasted to its walls declared TODOS SOMOS NISMAN; matching hot-pink ones demanded ¡JUSTICIA YA! Beneath them, long black streaks of spray paint declared the pope a fascist and Cristina Kirchner a traitor and suggested that both go suck dicks. Nina was idly considering Cristina’s facial flexibility—she’d plainly had both Botox and a face-lift; could she open her mouth wide enough to admit a penis?—when the Facultad’s iron-barred door swung open and Ilán appeared.

He was, unfortunately, even hotter in person. Significantly hotter. Nina wished she hadn’t just been contemplating oral sex. His shoulders were broad, his prayer-fringed hips narrow. The fringes themselves were somehow seductive—flickering little banners of religiousness, reminding Nina that he was almost certainly off limits. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows, revealing hairy forearms and delicate hands.

“Nina?” he called.

She waved and banished all sexual thoughts, though she did permit herself to appreciate how good he smelled when he kissed her cheek hello. A standard greeting here, but she’d assumed—ignorantly, she guessed—that an Orthodox Jew would skip it. She hadn’t been prepared.

In English, he said, “I have a very serious question to ask.”

“Already?”

He grinned. “You said your apartment is on Azcuénaga, right?”

“Right.”

“Have you been to Rapanui?”

Rapanui was the ice cream place on Nina’s corner. Every time she walked by, cold, sugary air rolled over her, heavy with the smell of caramel or baking sugar cones. She’d vaguely planned to take herself there for academic rewards: first set of research aims written, first interview completed, first real idea.

“Not yet,” she said.

Ilán looked extremely pleased. “Would you like to fix that?”

“Fix?”

“You’ll see.”

He led her down Azcuénaga, past the frightening underwear store, two parking garages, a Subway, a delicious-smelling Lebanese restaurant. Drum-machine cumbia poured from car windows. Persimmons, at the fruit stand, were DE OFERTA; Nina would have to remember to come back. She hadn’t had a persimmon since her best friend, Hazel, moved from California, where they were abundant, to New York.

“Are you liking the neighborhood?” Ilán asked.

“I like it a lot. The buildings are pretty, there’s great people-watching, it’s easy to get groceries, I’m near public transit. What else do I need?”

Ilán shrugged. “There’s not much nightlife. A couple good bars, but no clubs.”

“I can handle that,” Nina said, with a spike of self-consciousness. “Not so much of a club girl.” She’d read online that Buenos Aires was a major clubbing city, but she liked drinking and talking, not drugs and dancing. Besides, who would she go clubbing with? Her seventy-five-year-old landlady? Herself?

“Same,” Ilán said. “I live a couple blocks over there.” He waved his arm loosely toward the Facultad. “Which means I should be ashamed that I had to meet you at work to bully myself into going there.”

Nina laughed. “It’s summer.”

“Exactly. Time to write.”

She wondered if he was performing laziness—a favorite pastime of grad students; presumably young professors did it, too—or if he legitimately had a slacker streak. She hoped it was the second. It seemed consistent with the ice cream excitement, somehow. “Writing is overrated,” she said lightly.

“My daughter tells me that every day.”

Disappointment shot down Nina’s spine. She willed herself to ignore it. Ilán carried himself like a younger man, but, per her Googling, he was thirty-nine to her twenty-eight. She should have predicted that he’d have a kid. “How old is she?”

“She turned five last month. She’s very proud of it.” Ilán had almost no accent in English, but, Nina noticed now, he hissed the f in of, holding the letter a second too long. Nina knew she had equivalent tells in Spanish: letters she stretched, diphthongs she shortened. Her r-rolling was unreliable, though her dad had drilled her throughout her childhood, rewarding her with Klondike bars when she cleared the great hurdle of “ferrocarril.”

She tried to conjure up a good question to ask about five-year-olds. People liked talking about their kids, she knew, but what did they like to say? The only parent in Nina’s life was her dad. She had no siblings, no cousins on either side, so her family was baby-free. Her friends were all childless. None of them even had dogs.

“Did she have a birthday party?” she tried.

“She wanted to have a fancy dinner instead. We called it Restaurant Party.”

Nina smiled. “I like that.”

“She’s a likeable kid. An odd one.” Ilán’s tone told Nina he was prouder of the second trait than the first, which she found charming. Before she could ask, he launched into a description of his daughter’s ideas and habits: she was obsessed with dolphins and all dolphin-related content, which manifested, in part, as avid Miami Dolphins fandom; she’d struck up an imaginary friendship with Lady Gaga; she thought monsters lived in her closet, but she welcomed them and loaned them toys; she had only recently learned to separate English, Spanish, and Hebrew, all of which Ilán spoke to her at home, and was delighted with herself when she successfully communicated in one unmixed tongue.

Nina whistled. “Trilingual parenting. I knew you did research in a lot of languages, but still, that’s hardcore.”

“Or crazy.”

She waved his self-deprecation off. A small corner of her mind suggested she ask why Hebrew: religion or Zionism? But if he was a Zionist, she didn’t want to know. “Impressive,” she said. “My dad raised me bilingual, and that was tricky enough.”

Down the block, two silky women slipped into a building that Nina had realized yesterday was a plastic surgery clinic. A taxi honked at a jaywalking girl in palm-sized shorts. She swanned serenely onward, as if the noise were tribute, not rebuke. Over the horn’s ongoing blare, Ilán asked, “English and what other language?”

“Spanish. I didn’t tell you I speak it?”

“You did.” His mouth spread into a smile. “But when I lived in D.C., I met a lot of Americans who”—he clawed his fingers into scare quotes—“‘spoke Spanish.’”

Nina laughed. “I know the type. Memorized every verb in AP Spanish but can’t carry on a conversation.”

“Exactly.”

“I’m terrified of people thinking that’s me,” she admitted. “Sometimes I pretend not to know Spanish to avoid giving the wrong impression. But I do speak it, I swear. I wouldn’t call myself fluent, but I’m probably as close as a nonnative speaker can get.”

“Is your dad a native speaker?”

Nina hesitated. She half-regretted bringing her dad up. On the one hand, she and her father were extremely close, and she missed him. Talking about him at length would be nice. On the other, parent talk was unsexy. If she wanted to begin flirting with Ilán, she should steer the conversation swiftly elsewhere.

She felt she had grounds for flirting. Ilán’s elbow was extremely close to her bare arm, and his energy was not what she’d call professional. It was too bad he had a child. He was ringless and hadn’t mentioned a wife, but she still had to accept the high odds he was married. Also, he wore fringes and a yarmulke, which indicated a sincere belief that God could see the top of his head. God would not like to glance down and spot a married Orthodox man, or even a single one, flirting with an ultra-Reform agnostic.

Nina looked briefly upward, checking in. A window air conditioner chose that moment to drip directly onto her forehead. She took the oily water as a sign that God was indeed watching, and would like Nina to desexualize herself to Their servant. “He’s not,” she said, wiping her face, “but he lived in Chile till he was sixteen, so he went to school mainly in Spanish. He always spoke English at home, but he claims he couldn’t read or write it well till college.” She shrugged. “Anyway, he believes in bilingualism. He says Americans only speaking English is rude.”

Ilán made no comment on her dad’s language politics. Instead, he asked, “Have you been?”

“To Chile?”

He nodded.

“I haven’t.”

“It’s an easy trip from here. An hour flight, maybe.” He left the suggestion unspoken, but Nina could fill in the blank. She knew she should go. She also knew she wouldn’t. She wanted to—she’d wanted to visit Chile since she was old enough to know it was real—but it would be cruel to her dad. Bad enough, for him, that she’d come to the country next door.

Rapanui gleamed at the corner. Its windows were wide open, and Nina could hear pop reggaeton streaming from inside. She pointed down the block before Ilán could ask follow-up questions. “See the building with the iron balconies?” she said. “That’s mine.”

Ilán squinted at it. “Who are you living with?”

“Myself.”

She’d gotten exceptionally lucky with her rental. For $200 a month less than she was getting from her subletter in D.C., she’d landed a gorgeous, fully furnished apartment whose owner, a sculptor named Paula Valenzuela, had temporarily moved to a suburb called San Isidro to keep her daughter company through her divorce. Nina had Googled Paula’s work: her sculptures looked like Henry Moore’s, but smaller and sexier. She was very, very good. Nina wondered if she were famous enough that mentioning her would qualify as name-dropping. Always hard to tell with art.

Ilán refused to let Nina pay for her ice cream, which was unspeakably delicious. It was artisanal and somehow Patagonian, and stretched like taffy between bowl and spoon. Nina took four Lactaid pills to eat her single scoop of dulce de leche. The caramel was rich and faintly bitter, as if it had been cooked to the edge of burnt. She forced herself to savor each bite, though what she wanted to do was shove her head into her paper dish like a horse eating oats from its trough.

Their table was inside the shop, but adjacent to a wide-open window. Warm air blew in from the street, tempering the air conditioning’s chill. Behind them, a long display counter sold handmade chocolates. Blown-up photos of wild berry bushes hung by the register. Nina considered breaking her lease and moving in here, or quitting her Ph.D. and apprenticing herself to these ice cream makers, who were clearly geniuses.

“This ice cream,” she informed Ilán, “deserves the Nobel Prize.”

“Good, right?” He licked chocolate from his spoon. “When they opened, Rebeca was a baby. My ex and I brought her so often, we thought her first word would be ‘helado.’”

Nina took a too-big bite of dulce de leche, willing it to glue her mouth shut. She could not visibly or audibly react to the news that Ilán had—she presumed—an ex-wife. She wondered if he’d mentioned the ex on purpose, to alert her to his singleness. She hoped so. She hoped, too, that the ex was no longer relevant. With luck, she’d swiftly remarried and exited the scene like Nina’s mom, who’d waited six months post-divorce, then moved to Napa and married a winemaker named Todd. He exploited migrant labor and never wore socks, but, after a full quarter century, she still seemed to love him enough.

Once Nina had swallowed and settled, she asked, “What was her actual first word?”

“‘Gaga.’”

“I think that’s baby talk.”

“So did I. But her second word was ‘lady.’”

Maybe he was gay. A divorced Orthodox Jew whose child had been fixated on Lady Gaga since birth? It would make sense. Nina sat back in her clear plastic chair and considered Ilán’s disheveled curls, his movie-star eyelashes, his kempt stubble. He didn’t seem gay, but the whole idea of seeming gay was bullshit, and why else would a woman divorce a man this hot?

Nina gouged a clot of frozen caramel from her ice cream. She hadn’t mentioned her dissertation. In no way had she demonstrated that she was a serious person. She didn’t especially want to start now. Ilán was easy to talk to, easy to relax around. Nina wasn’t sure she could motivate herself to work at seriousness, or expose her academic insecurities. She wanted to have a nice time.

She and Ilán sat at their little table long after their ice creams, and the espressos that followed, were gone. He was full of ideas for leisure-time activities: museums to visit, neighborhoods to wander, restaurants to eat in, books to read. Nina tried, and failed, to resist being charmed by the associative depth of his suggestions. An indie film set in Montevideo reminded him of a book called Guerra Eterna, written by a Uruguayan Jew who was, basically, Elena Ferrante before Ferrante herself was, that Nina had to read: it was a classic, and, speaking of, if she wanted to read classic Uruguayan writers, she should seek out the Eduardo Galeano books published by Siglo XXI Press, which had a gorgeous office-bookstore in Palermo Soho—not, incidentally, his favorite neighborhood (too trendy), but it did have terrific bookstores, and if she wanted to shop for clothes or find a good yoga studio, it was, without a doubt, the place to go.

After recommendations, they moved on to academic gossip. Ilán was extremely willing to make fun of Thijs Kuiper, Nina’s adviser, whom she’d gotten stuck with after her first adviser went to teach at NYU. Kuiper was not affiliated with the Center for Media and Social Impact, nor was he interested in either of those things. He was Nina’s enemy. He rejected her core belief in connection. Nina, influenced by the French philosopher Simone Weil, felt that the true purpose of studying was to learn to pay real, sustained attention to others. Kuiper felt that it was to win tenure and publish in prestigious journals. He thought scholars should be aloof and dispassionate and not have Twitter accounts. Nina thought he was a Luddite, a misogynist, and a Grinch. One of her major reasons for continuing in her program was that quitting would please him too much. She fully intended to spite-graduate, she said, which was true, and also made Ilán laugh.

To stem aggravating thoughts of Kuiper, she asked how Ilán had liked D.C. He and Nina, it turned out, shared a favorite bar: the Red Derby, which was two doors down from her apartment. While discussing the District’s restaurants, he pried from her the knowledge that she couldn’t cook beyond eggs and pasta, and demanded that she come over for dinner before she got scurvy. She couldn’t quite gauge the nature of the invite, but the mere thought of entering his apartment sent a prickle of heat down her spine.

On her half-block walk home, she told herself to hope Ilán was gay. She felt in her bones that he was not, but also that, if he was straight, she could get herself into big trouble. Heartbreak trouble or, worse, step-maternal trouble. Already, she was imagining ways she might charm Rebeca. Contrary to parental stereotype, Ilán hadn’t shown Nina a single photo. She wondered if they looked alike.

In her building’s echoing staircase, Nina tried to remember herself at five. She remembered loving, in descending order, her dad, Scottie Pippen, and God, who she thought lived in trees. In playgrounds and parks, she’d shove her face into knotholes and root balls, braced to stare the God of her ancestors down. Eventually, she got poison oak on her forehead and renounced her search and, with it, her theological interests. She never lost interest in either her father or Scottie, though.

She wondered if her religious sureness had been a kid thing, or if it was her personality. Until her Ph.D., she had always been highly confident. She still felt that confidence operating below the surface of her mind, but her three failed case studies, combined with Kuiper’s scorn for her project, had done major damage. Once, Nina had been positive that studying social media’s political potential was her calling. Her purpose. She’d had all kinds of lofty ideals about the public benefits of researching internet dissent. Now she worried that her entire academic life was an excuse to dick around on Twitter instead of doing real nine-to-five work.

On the plane here, plunging through the dark sky over Brazil, Nina had promised herself that this was it. She was in the fifth year of her Ph.D., and now she was on her fifth possible dissertation subject. Already she had tried and failed to study Occupy Wall Street, which proved too diffuse; the opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline, which wasn’t sufficiently online; Black Lives Matter, which she’d decided it was not her place to research; and a newly formed Jewish anti-Zionist group headquartered in D.C. and on Twitter, which had been perfect until it abruptly unformed. Not Nina’s fault, but she took it as a bad sign. A cosmic alert that her work was misguided. If the Nisman protests failed to cohere into the movement she predicted and hoped for, she would take the universe’s advice. She’d admit that she was not a serious scholar, that her whole research agenda was baseless bullshit. She’d pack up and go home— and not home to D.C. either, but to Chicago. She’d admit defeat. She’d get a job.

Nina woke, on her first Friday in Buenos Aires, to a text from Ilán. He’d enjoyed spending the afternoon with her, and he’d meant that dinner invitation. Would she like to come over Tuesday? And if so, did she eat meat?

I eat everything, she replied. Briefly, she considered a winking emoji, but thought better. Instead, playing it safe, she asked, What can I bring? Dessert? Wine? Then she screenshotted the exchange, texted it to Hazel—Date or not date??—and pried herself from bed, leaving her phone behind. She would, she decided, do one full hour of work before checking for Ilán’s response.

Ilán proved to be a slow but consistent texter, which meant that Nina, adhering to her one-hour rule all day, was highly productive. She parked herself at her desk and devoted the morning to indexing internet theories surrounding Nisman’s death. In the afternoon, she messaged demonstration organizers to request interviews, then created a list of relevant slogans and hashtags. She tweeted several Nisman-related news stories to prove baseline engagement. She had yet to recapture the whole-body research enthusiasm that had brought her here, but she did feel good.

In the early evening, she quit working and took a beer onto the balcony. The sky was silky and blue, filled with criss-crossing wires and moonlike satellite dishes. Ash trees shook their green branches, stirred by pigeons and passing cars. It occurred to her that, except for her frantic week of work in Chicago, today was the closest she had come in years to the life she’d imagined for herself when she set out to be an academic. Ordinarily, her work-at-home days revolved around guilt, chores, and her vibrator; library days, guilt, Google, and snacks. She had fallen into a bad rut. Maybe coming here had snapped her free.

The next day, she worked till lunchtime, then walked to the used-book market on Avenida Corrientes. The selection was dizzying: art books, plastic-wrapped Penguin paperbacks, spooky biblical tracts, spooky sex manuals, medical sex manuals, woo-woo sex manuals, tarot guides, academic journals, encyclopedias, fancy Nobel-winning fiction, weird small-press fiction, the works. She bought a Henry Moore exhibition catalog as a hostess gift for Paula, who’d invited her to lunch in San Isidro the next day; a first-edition Spanish Valley of the Dolls for Hazel, who worked in the art department at Simon & Schuster and would love the Creamsicle-orange cover; and half the books Ilán had recommended at Rapanui, all of which she’d noted on her phone. She had to take a snack break halfway down the street, which led to a major discovery: in addition to containing the world’s best ice cream, the city of Buenos Aires was home to the perfect grilled ham-and-cheese. Her sandwich was impossibly thin and crispy, with perfectly salty ham and the exact right amount of mozzarella to pull between bread and teeth without making a mess. She wanted to eat seven more. She hoped Argentine pharmacies sold Lactaid. At this rate, she was going to run out by March. 

Nina left Avenida Corrientes content, dehydrated, and weighed down by books. Within days, she would see her walk home as a time of hilarious innocence. She’d had no idea that Guerra Eterna would be any more important to her than the six other books jammed in her New Yorker tote bag. As far as she was concerned, Guerra Eterna was relevant to her life because Ilán had told her it was good; relevant, in other words, because discussing it with him could help demonstrate she was a serious and intellectually engaged person worthy to audition for the role of his temporary girlfriend.

Nina understood that, to a thirty-nine-year-old tenure-track professor with a kindergartner, a six-month relationship might be too trivial to appeal. She understood, too, that it was unfair to hope for. It was not good—was probably objectifying, or tokenizing, or some other bad-ing—to want Ilán to be her tour guide and short-term boyfriend. It was an immature hope, a study-abroad hope. Nina disliked herself for it, and yet.

Months later, she’d admit to Ilán that she had initially wanted to date him for practice. She hadn’t had a real boyfriend since college. She’d thought she could learn adult romance, then take her new expertise back to the U.S., where, presumably, some childless, American, age-appropriate version of Ilán would await. She’d thought her fantasies about marrying him, compelling though they might have been, were just manifestations of a crush.

Walking home, books swinging at her sides, she permitted herself one such fantasy. Beach ceremony, barefoot, very small. Maybe she’d even be pregnant. Nina would love to be pregnant at her wedding. She’d always wanted kids. A whole pack of them, ideally. Her whole life, she’d wished for a bigger family than her little Lazris unit. Growing up, she’d begged for a sister, though she would have gladly accepted a brother had one been offered. Even now, she occasionally imagined her dad falling in love with some younger woman and having a late-in-life baby. Her dad, who hadn’t been on a date since he met her mother in 1983.

Nina wished she could somehow spy on her parents’ courtship. Her mom, Wendy, was perfectly fine—Nina had no bad feelings toward her; she visited her in Napa before the start of every academic year—but strenuously boring. She had the inner and outer smoothness of a morning-show host. It was impossible to picture her attending an anti-Pinochet rally or caring who Pinochet was. Maybe Nina’s dad had found it calming to be with a woman whose concerns didn’t extend past herself. All he ever said about his brief marriage was that it had been ill-advised on both his part and Wendy’s but, because it led to Nina, he was grateful for it every day.

She needed to check on her father. Make sure he wasn’t too lonely. Really, she should email Nico, both to let him know her dad needed some extra support and to invite him to visit Buenos Aires. She’d love to see him. It had been—four years? Five? Too long.

When Nina was a kid, Nico came to Chicago every summer. He brought gifts, planned day trips, hauled them across the city to eat Indian dinners on Devon Avenue, pancake breakfasts at Ann Sather’s, pierogies in the Polish Triangle. He was Nina’s namesake, fake uncle, and role model. He was the only person alive who could reliably make her dad laugh.

Nina often asked Nico for help taking care of her dad. In high school, when she decided she needed to know Andrés’s full story, she bypassed her father completely. She feared asking him to remember. Instead, she called Nico, who explained how Andrés had died, then described him when he was alive. He helped Nina imagine Andrés not as a martyr but as her dad’s wiseass friend. Most importantly, he showed Nina that her dad felt as if he’d been living the wrong life since Andrés had gotten disappeared in 1973, and that she, Nina, did not have to feel the same way. She could love her dad without imitating him. She could know her family’s, and her country’s, past without beating herself up for what she had not personally done.

Only once, in college, had Nina deviated from Nico’s no-self-flagellation doctrine. In her guilt over leaving her dad alone at home, she’d launched herself into researching Cold War–era dictatorships in the Southern Cone, with a special focus on Pinochet. She took every available Latin American history class, did two independent studies, then proposed an honors thesis. Her adviser, a sweet, bearded man named Doug Cope, supported the idea but wanted her to do original research in Chile. He was happy to help set it up, even to wrangle departmental funding. Nina balked. Later, she mocked herself for the whole plan. Studying Chilean history could not possibly have given her more access to her dad’s grief than twenty years as his only child had.

She was approaching the Palacio de Aguas Corrientes, which she’d seen on travel blogs but not yet in real life. It had been, at one time, the world’s most ornate waterworks. Now it was, if she remembered correctly, an archive, and a gorgeous one, all turrets and arabesques, high golden windows and rosy, power-washed bricks. Jacarandas shed purple blossoms on the lawn. A lone balloon bobbed from the fence. The building’s beauty returned Nina to herself. She should have been concentrating on her very lovely and completely unfamiliar surroundings, not rehashing her lifelong worries about her dad. He was, after all, a grown man. Shielding him from his emotions was not Nina’s job.

She admired the water palace a moment longer, reminding herself how lucky she was. Lucky to be here; lucky to love her dad so much, even if it brought complication; lucky to have Nico to help sort that complication out. Luckier than she knew to have met Ilán, and to have Guerra Eterna biding its time at her side. No book would ever be more important to her. In the decades of their marriage, she’d often tell Ilán that no person would ever be more important than him, but she always hoped she was lying. She never gave up believing that her sister could someday matter most.

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