Her father’s drum sounded. The first powerful beat reverberated like thunder.

14 years later, my mom sits at her desk, a mosaic of script pages laid out around her. She’s studying the opening scenes, the interviews, and the movements of the music. She’s finalizing what will become the documentary of my great-grandmother’s symphony. She looks up from her tiles and tells me, “This must happen now. People need to hear this music again.” The footage for the documentary has sat unused, dormant for all these years. Until now.

That spring, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, police officers murdered George Floyd in the streets of Minneapolis. Protests erupted around the country, and cop cars burned in the streets of Seattle.

My great-grandmother was 83 years old when she commissioned The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land. She had been troubled by the world. Back then, in 2001, the news was all about George V. Bush’s war on terror. She saw beyond the fear. She saw a country divided, the wars across the ocean and the violent injustices in her own streets. She saw that the people had lost their way. She believed so deeply in our people’s stories, the teachings inherent in them. She knew that no one would listen to an old Indian woman, that she would have to reach them another way. Somehow, she arrived at what she called highbrow music: symphonies. This came as a shock to us. My great-grandmother hadn’t grown up with this kind of stuff. She loved square dancing and Elvis. But she believed this was the way, that if all people could experience our beliefs through song, the music could heal the wound. She needed something that everyone could hear. She called a famous composer. “I need you to write a symphony,” she demanded, “and to perform it at Benaroya Hall.”

The composer turned her down.

But weeks after the call, he couldn’t get this 83-year-old Indian woman’s voice out of his head. He called her back and together they collaborated on a symphony, the first to be based on Coast Salish spirit songs with lyrics in Lushootseed, the traditional language.

In our longhouse ceremonies, songs hold a spiritual power. There are certain songs for prayer, for healing. My great-grandmother had a cassette tape with recordings of two spirit songs: one belonged to a beloved cousin, and the other was Chief Seattle’s thunder spirit song. She entrusted the tape to the composer with instructions to listen to but not share them. She wanted the songs to guide him as he wrote the symphony. She hoped that the healing power of these spirit songs would take shape in the symphony and that when people heard it, they might be touched by that power. She was hoping for medicine, for a world that could change.

On a hot summer day in 2020 I stood thronged in protest, in collective grief and anger. We yelled, we chanted, we demanded justice. I raised my cardboard sign that read in bold letters indigenous solidarity with Black Lives Matter . But it didn’t feel like enough, would never feel like enough. Weeks went by. Weeks of flash-bangs and tear gas. Weeks of protesters being arrested and assaulted, until finally the people took over the precinct. With the police gone, the organizers secured six Seattle city blocks, declaring it the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. There were medical tents and tables of free books on political education. People brought crates of food to share, while others held demonstrations. My partner and I walked the streets of a free Seattle, watching films being projected onto buildings, seeing murals painted over boarded-up windows. There were large plastic bottles of hand sanitizer duct-taped to telephone poles.

It seemed as though the people had created a utopia. Until it didn’t. We turned a corner to find the park in the center of the autonomous zone in full-blown festival mode. Kids in droves wielded glow sticks. It looked like Coachella. It looked like Burning Man. People were drunk, waving selfie sticks instead of placards, wearing angel wings and carrying Hula-Hoops. Is this what change looked like?

But in the middle of the intersection, we found a gathering of Coast Salish people. I watched as men laid out large cedar boughs in a circle. Then women entered carrying burning bundles. The cedar smoke wafted over the crowd, the tents, the abandoned precinct. They were sharing their medicine.

When the first speaker approached, he asked that any and all Coast Salish and Indigenous people come forward to the edge of the circle. He asked that the white people step back for us. I looked at my partner, who looked at me, then gently let go of my hand. A young woman stepped away from her girlfriend and together we both stepped forward, away from our white partners.

“Before we begin here today,” the man with the mic yelled, “I want to honor our elder Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert. It’s important we remember her, here on her land, for the work she did for the Coast Salish people.” The man spoke in Lushootseed and in English. He introduced a group of Coast Salish singers. They made a half-moon around the burning cedar and hit their drums hard. I closed my eyes and saw my great-grandmother as she stood on stage at Benaroya Hall fourteen years earlier. I saw the painted drum, heard its heartbeat as it boomed like thunder, as it called out for change. I hadn’t heard my great-grandmother’s name, her Skagit name, the name we shared, spoken in a very long time.

The symphony had been her last project; she passed away before the documentary could be made. But right up until the end she went to gatherings, to speaking events, events like this. I had seen her small and frail but still so powerful when she spoke. I thought of her here today in this crowd and shuddered at the imagined worry. Even amid the threat of this pandemic, she would have been here. I let the drums wash over me as I cried, transporting me to the smoke-filled longhouse, my great-grandmother’s hand on my shoulder as we listened.

Throughout this pandemic I return to the books my great-grandmother made, the ones that house our language and our stories. Some days I spend crying, curled in the crook of my partner’s lap as the cats and dog wander the house, charged with an animal anxiety. Some days I make salmon and black coffee, simply to fill the house with the familiar aroma of my great-grandmother’s kitchen. All these white women on Pinterest are baking loaves of sourdough, and I am trying to time travel.

We climb out onto the roof of my house and watch the sky change. The world has stopped, but it feels even more frozen on the reservation. I have good days and bad days. We make a game out of our once-a-month grocery shopping. We call it the Hunger Games. We call it the Soft Apocalypse as we wait in line outside the Trader Joe’s, masks on and six feet apart from everyone but each other. We dress up at night, light all the candles in the house, eat the fanciest meal we can muster, and drink wine like expats in Paris.

We spend the summer locked inside, only able to be outdoors for 15 minutes at a time. Beyond that it’s too dangerous, as the smoke from the wildfires ignites my asthma. I boil pots of cedar and rosemary to help me breathe. And still people are dying in record numbers. We are losing our elders and I try to find my breath. I look for a mountain I can no longer see, its peak enveloped in smoke. A thick blanket of haze conceals the islands I know are out there dotting the waters beyond the shore.

On election night my partner and I sit barefoot on the floor, nervously checking our phones. We scroll. We put them down, then anxiously pick them up again. We do this until I can’t take it anymore. “How is this even an option?” I hold up my screen showing the very close count. I am afraid as a Coast Salish woman, a female-bodied person, a queer person. I am afraid for the people still being murdered by police, for the elders still threatened by the pandemic. I am afraid for how many times I might have to endure another aggression from a person who refuses to wear a mask but still clings to their MAGA hat like it was a prayer. Would I feel safe again? Would the world feel safe again? My partner picks up his guitar and strums the opening chords of one of my favorite Ramones songs. I join in off-key and giggling. By the time we reach the chorus we are hysterical, barely able to get the lines out. We make it through the song only to roar with laughter and begin again. There is a power in the repetition. We let the song transport us. In her own home on election night, my mom is not scrolling the news. She is pressing play, pause, and rewind, busy transcribing interviews, busy sorting through the raw footage of that day at Benaroya Hall. Again and again, her grandmother illuminates the screen, paused in smile, in speech. Occasionally the music floats through, the symphony inspired by a Coast Salish spirit song. In the interviews my great-grandmother talks about her anxiety for the world, her rising concern, but there is something confident in her smile, some glimmer of hope when she speaks about the power of song.

“People have lost their way,” she says. “They need to be reminded to take care of one another.”

There is a belief in my Coast Salish culture that songs have the power to heal, that they can be medicine. My great-grandmother wanted to share that knowledge, she wanted to remind people to have compassion, she wanted to change things. I don’t know anything about symphonies or orchestras. I don’t know any spirit songs. But as we sing out loud until two in the morning on election night, we are no longer checking our phones. We are not thinking about the president or the pandemic. We are laughing, lost in the music, lost in trying to get it right, lost in a brief moment of hope. We are singing, we are dancing.

We are trying to heal.

Excerpted from Thunder Songs: Essays. Copyright © 2024, Sasha taqwšəblu LaPointe. Reproduced by permission of Catapult. All rights reserved.

The post My Great-Grandmother Knew Our Indigenous Songs had the Power to Heal Our World appeared first on Electric Literature.

I tried to enter her mind in the days before, and then in the moments before. How she had prepared to face her own death, as across town my sister and I prepared to face math worksheets and a mandatory bedtime. I tried to enter her parents’ minds, too. What could their conversations be—what dialogue can you speak in a house that has become a crime scene? Among my peers, the story of the girl’s death became a grisly mystery whose strangeness was unfolded again and again, like a contraband book of scary stories.

The eleventh most common cause of death in the United States, suicides have the unsettling feeling of whodunits that arrive solved, but still invite obsessive puzzling. If we could only write down all the clues and signs, parse out the timeline, give language to our supreme devastation, we imagine, we might begin to make sense of things. Then formless grief might take the more comforting, familiar form of a book. 

Sloane Crosley’s arch, elegiac new book Grief Is for People is the latest entry to a genre for which there is an endlessly, nightmarishly growing audience: books about surviving another person’s suicide. Grief is for People joins a bookshelf crowded with memoirs and non-fiction works about loss to suicide. In recent days: Molly by Blake Butler (2023), Sinkhole by Juliet Patterson (2022), Stepping Back from the Ledge by Laura Trujillo (2022), Certain and Impossible Events by Candace Jane Opper (2021), and Life After Suicide by Jennifer Ashton (2020). Clancy Martin’s How Not To Kill Yourself (2023) and Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End (2019) concerned both the writers’ suicidality as well as the suicides of their family members. Anne Sexton’s daughter wrote a book about her mother’s suicide. So did Kurt Cobain’s cousin, and David Foster Wallace’s wife. “Doesn’t the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?” asked David Sedaris, writing in 2013 about his sister’s suicide. After a suicide, I’ve seen communities announce the intent to “pull together,” and then all too quickly rush the bereft to move on, or “remember the good times.” These books pause time, stretching out the memorial or wake or shiva long beyond the hour final mourners would linger.  

I come back again and again to these books about life after another person’s death, amazed by the precision with which they capture the sensations of grief, the many ways they find to say accurately and exquisitely what has been said before and will be said again. “My friend was alone when he was murdered,” Crosley writes, then repeats the same line, as if eager to watch the ink seep into the page, to make a tangible record of horror, and step back to marvel at it. It reminds me of being a child, trying to understand a child’s suicide: alive, then dead. Here, then gone. Forever? Forever. 

In claiming public attention for their specific pain, these writers carve out a public space for practicing grief. They disrupt the obliterating silence that has historically accompanied a suicide. Crosley, an essayist and novelist who has made a career of unsentimentality, devotes herself to full-throated mourning, and to making an accounting. Her book is a ledger of what has gone missing, and an argument for keeping talley. “If I do not capture what I have lost,” she writes, “it will be like losing it twice.”

Written in the immediate aftermath of the loss, Grief is for People records the thoughts and actions of a person who is almost willing herself to be haunted. “My initial grief, which I thought might be taking a manageable shape, has mutated,” Crosley reports, at the point when friends and acquaintances begin to tacitly demand that a grieving person move on or at least fake it. “It’s colonized my entire personality. Any word that comes out of my mouth that is not Russell’s name is a lie.” Russell is Russell Perreault, the executive director of publicity for Anchor Books. He was Crosley’s best friend, former boss, and father figure, and he killed himself in 2019. 

A longtime humorist, Crosley turns as unsparing an eye on grief as she has often trained on New York neighbors on dinner party drama. She captures the abortive moments of empathy, when onlookers try to relate to her grief through anecdotes about their ‘father’s law partner’s wife’ dying. “I have perfectly edible yogurt in my fridge, purchased before my best friend hanged himself, but do go on,” she snaps internally. (“There is no good language when it comes to the unspeakable,” Li writes in Where Reasons End.) As if daring the reader to chastise her, Crosley devotes nearly equal on-page real estate to a home invasion, one month before the suicide, which relieved her of all of her jewelry. “If I can get these items back, I can get my friend back,” she reasons. “I would sooner be separated from this logic than from my own skin.” Both events leave her unmoored, missing something precious, and laboring in the delusion that if she would only retrace her steps, everything might be put to right. Perreault, Crosley writes, “believed in the souls of objects.” He would have perfectly understood the intertwining of the two losses. Books written about a beloved person’s death are not strictly for readers—we trespass in the margins, peering into scenes of devastation. The ideal reader for this book is dead, these writers suggest. The reader is invited as an impossibly distant second place. 

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living,” wrote Camus, “amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” This is interesting in theory, but not relevant at 4AM when you’re going back through a newly dead person’s social media profile, looking for clues. In the wake of a suicide, the mind wanders away from the elegant logic of philosophy, and towards the truisms of Tumblr memes and suicide prevention slogans: You are not alone. You are loved. There is hope. The cliches of grief feel belittling, as if another person’s death has parked you permanently in a high school counselor’s office. 

Books about another person’s suicide veer away from politeness into the realm of nightmare, resurrection attempts, and magical thinking. There is great comfort in reading descriptions of a grieving person crawling up the walls of her own addled, grieving mind. Carla Fine, the author of No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One, tortured herself with thoughts that she might have been able to prevent her husband’s death if only she had “been more insistent about our going out to dinner together the night before.” Trujillo’s book opens with the author gazing down at the spot where her mother fell to her death. Li’s narrator, in the space of three pages, references Flaubert, offers the Latin root for the word “stupid,” and recites lyrics from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera: “Wishing you were somehow here again, wishing you were somehow near.” In life, our experiences of other people’s grief are often limited to tributes: an anguished Instagram caption, a glimpse of a tattooed date under a rolled-up shirtsleeve. In memoirs, the oddness of grief and the unpalatable behavior of the bereaved become the reader’s business.  

When Carla Fine’s husband killed himself in 1989, she told all but her closest loved ones that he died of a heart attack. The shame was too enormous. She mourned in solitude. 

“I did not have the stomach to face their real or imagined accusations, blaming me—or blaming him—for his death,” she later wrote in her book No Time to Say Goodbye: Surviving the Suicide of a Loved One. 

A month later, she ventured into basement support group for people grieving suicides. But she balked—before even taking off her coat, she was stealing from the room, wanting to get away from the odd and unidentifiable expressions of other people’s grief. A man, the group’s facilitator, approached her as she made to leave. 

“Please stay here with us,” he said. “You’re among friends.” 

To read these suicide memoirs is to feel yourself to be among friends. The writers are people who are not quite on the side of the living. They articulate the sweet, sickening nature of mourning, the wild attempt of a living person to claw under the dirt with the dead. Crosley narrates for the reader how her friend’s death becomes more real to her than her own life. “I have the strongest sensation that if I only knew where to push, I could reach through and pull him back,” she writes. “By living, I am, by default, leaving him.” She offers a stunning image of cradling herself in her grief like a child. Taken by the mournful sound of a singer’s voice, she writes, “I imagine this moment holding me up on its hip, bouncing me. Wave goodbye to Russell! Say: Bye-bye, Russell!” In the book’s final pages Crosley speaks directly to Perreault, as she commits going forward in a life without him. “I know you,” she reminds him. The reader knows him a little, too. The moment bounces us on its hip: we sit with Crosley, waving goodbye.

What can books written by people grieving loss from suicide do for us? They revive the dead in the brief space between the front and back cover. They let us sit with a stranger’s familiar grief for a while. We are invited to an open-casket viewing of the writer’s most vulnerable feelings, so that we may recognize our own mourning, or save the image as a roadmap for a future grief.

What I remember now about the suicide of the little girl was the silence that accompanied it. It felt like a hand had been clasped over the community’s mouth. Surely, people did not wish to reproduce stupid platitudes about dying—“She’s in a better place!”—or to cheapen the moment with gossip. But I think just as likely the parents of the community were experiencing a sense, itself child-like, that to acknowledge a suicide too loudly would make it more real. Speaking about it would crack the door open and allow the specter of suicide to venture into your own home, to sidle up to your own children. Decades later, I’m moved by the profusion of suicide memoirs, even as I feel panicked at rising suicide numbers. These books take the opposite approach to the cold silence that often falls over a suicide—they pour words into the wound. 

In Miriam Toews’ 2015 All My Puny Sorrows, a novel written in the wake of Toews’ sister’s death from suicide, the family works round-the-clock to keep Elfrieda, or Elfie, from killing herself. She is able to kill herself by convincing her husband to go to the library to get her some books. 

“Well, Elf, I thought, you’re so clever,” her sister reflects. “Getting him to leave you alone on the pretext of getting books. Of going to the library. Of course he’d do it. Books are what save us. Books are what don’t save us.”  

Books about another person’s suicide save us from going through it in silence. 

The post Grief Memoirs Are for the Living appeared first on Electric Literature.

The plan was to connect in Dallas from Arizona and land at LaGuardia (that would be the worst part), pick up a rental car at the airport, and have a chill drive to Hudson, New York, land of millennial weddings and trendy second homes, about two hours away. 

But, as too many people had already hinted, the plan was far too ambitious—I’d started feeling sick two cities ago, and I was generally broken down, unraveling in airports. Whatever. I’d started taking mood stabilizers before my tour and was invigorated by the promise of such an extraordinary idea, a stabile mood. 

I’m always excited when I RSVP. 

Another problem with the plan is that it was 2017, which meant that for the past two years, anytime I drove alone at night, anytime I saw blue lights in the rearview, anytime I drove alone on a highway at the mercy of unfamiliar landscapes, and actually, every three days in between—brushing my teeth, or taking my meds, or seeing a bumper sticker about my life mattering, or seeing a commercial about mental health mattering, or if my mind wandered to any future beyond tomorrow—I thought of Sandra Bland. 

On the Dallas flight I could not get water. Twice, I asked the Dolly Parton–blond flight attendant and after making eye contact, she legitimately looked away. After the third time, a young mom in the aisle seat had mercy enough to be a White Savior and go to the back to get me one of those little half bottles. 

From Arizona to Dallas, my requests were ignored to my face—my requests for the one inalienable requirement for being an alive person. I was too tired to feel slighted and invisible, again, in transit, helplessly gawking at the rampant preferential treatment around me, the data and disappointment. And when I was on the ground, what I did every day was perform. I cried in the Dallas terminal bathroom after a white woman bumped me as she passed and didn’t apologize. 

LaGuardia was LaGuardia—I heard someone once describe it, perfectly and hilariously, as akin to a hallway. My plane is hours late and I arrive at the rental car place at almost midnight, tired enough to get a bottle of Coke from the vending machine, and there’s a whole drama in there— a full and properly inconvenient breakdown, everything covered from fear of lifelong loneliness and aloneness, the heaviness of expectation, the self-punishment, never admitting I’m tired, punking out. I had created the mess I was in, and worse, I had created the kind of life that could reap this kind of mess. I even called my parents for an extra serving of I-told-you-so. 

When I finally get my rental car, which is decades younger than mine and too “smart” for me, I seem to circle the same two blocks of Queens in the pitch-dark before pulling over and crying again. It’s pitiful. I hate myself for it. I can’t get the Bluetooth thing to work, I get obsessed with trying to make the Bluetooth thing work, I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t think my lights are on, this car is not on my side. I wonder if I should or can or will fold on the wedding. I realistically do not know how to use this car, it is the middle of the night, how shitty is it to cancel right before a wedding? They’d probably already ordered my food, right? 

I don’t want to fail just because I’m alone. I say a bunch of mean things to myself until I decide to go back to the plan. 

Finally on the dark road heading upstate from Queens, empty but for a few semi-trucks, I was scared, hesitating even as I sped up. The whole day was bullying me to give up. Into giving up on myself. I didn’t want to prove myself right. 

It was starting to look like wilderness, which is to say I started to think about Sandra Bland. As I drove I worried: If I were to slip up handling the unfamiliar vehicle and its screens and buttons. If I started frantically and idiotically crying again. If I got tired and drove too slow. If I tried to keep up with other cars and went too fast. If I were to pull over. If I were to be pulled over. If the cop happened to be a white man from the wilderness. No witnesses, one subtle movement in the deep dark, and just what am I doing out here driving this road at this time of night? Why was I alone, where was I going, why are my eyes so red? If they claimed I killed myself, it would be believable, everyone knows I have suicidal thoughts. 

Anything could happen. Anybody could say anything happened. 

After her death in 2015, Sandra Bland visited my thoughts daily; now I’m down to just once a week. I google her name, irrationally hoping the cause of death will have a different word after its colon. It’s not just that she was around my age, it’s how the death ruling is so effective and final. It’s her smile, and how the word suicide shut her up for good. How she was starting a new job the next week. How she acknowledged her mental illness. The video she posted, eloquent and passionate and proudly Black, condemning police brutality. She was pulled over for a broken taillight (ain’t it always that?), and after that, “hanged herself” in a cell at the empty jail. 

I already knew the stakes of Driving While Black, how they fluctuated county line to county line (that part we’d known since Till), how important it was to be faultless, and how that probably wouldn’t matter in the end. When I see someone’s on my tail and I’m already doing close to eighty, I just think, that person must not be Black. 

Risk. Our particularly heightened sense of doom produces in us a skill for continually and quickly evaluating risk. An additional region of the brain is devoted to this analysis, gathering sensory information in order to be one step ahead. Two or three if you can make it. Otherwise, hide. You never know what they can get away with in the dark. 

Every Black person has a victim who hits hardest. Whose death at the hands of the police changes everything—about how and how often you step off the front porch, how you interpret every gaze at the grocery store, whether or not and whom you date, the list of ambitions you hope to accomplish before it’s your turn. 

Back at the rental car office, I admit defeat and return the keys. That night, instead of staying with friends, I sleep at a hotel in Flushing that’s also an all-night karaoke bar. 

I’m what you call a “high-functioning” depressive. Which is a fancy way of saying I can “pass” as someone not having a nervous breakdown, even when I am, that my depressive episodes seem, for other people, to come “out of nowhere.” Being a Black woman is another way to say I can “pass” for someone unneeding and undeserving of help. A high-functioning single Black woman: redundantly no one’s concern. 

The next morning it’s back to the suitcases, all the effort, no witnesses.

Excerpted from You Get What You Pay For copyright © 2024 by Morgan Parker. Used by permission of One World, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. 

The post The Stakes of Driving While Black Are Unconscionably High appeared first on Electric Literature.

If you answered Poor Things, you’re right. If you answered Barbie, you’re also right.

Both films have been applauded as expert examples of empowering parables about the adversities of being a woman. However, their critiques of capitalism and patriarchy —packaged in delicious pastels and tightly wrapped with a coquettish bow, and delivered with a cutesy wink—are ultimately shallow. Hailing either film as a feminist triumph would be like saying “WAP” solved misogyny in hip-hop or that Lean In eliminated systemic sexism. 

Don’t get me wrong, I loved both movies. Mark Ruffalo gave one of his best performances as the delightfully louthe Duncan Wedderburn in Poor Things, while Barbie perfected the cotton candy landscape of my dreams. But despite the enchantment of watching them on the big screen, I couldn’t help but lament the misguided nature of calling either film a “feminist masterpiece.”

In Poor Things, a sexy and pregnant Bella Baxter (Emma Stone) is revived from a suicide attempt by a maimed surgeon (Willem Dafoe), who transplants her baby’s brain into her skull to revive her, essentially rendering her both mother and child. 

Let’s dissect that: A man neglects an unconscious woman’s bodily autonomy by cutting her open and further violates her by sticking her unborn child’s brain in her head. And he’s supposed to be one of the sympathetic ones! There’s also the fact that for most of the film, she calls him God. 

The film starts in black and white and transforms into opulent vibrancy with Bella’s first orgasm. There are interesting threads to pull on: How would a woman without shame, a hedonist who follows pleasure and indulgence—eating pasteis de nata until she pukes orange sludge, rubbing her clitoris at the breakfast table—perform in polite society? How does shame get instilled throughout our upbringings and reinforced via social disdain? In what I consider one of the film’s biggest missed opportunities, Poor Things avoids delving into these provocations, instead focusing on the transformation of her obsession with sex from pure pleasure to labor.

During one extended vignette, Bella works at a brothel in what is supposed to be a celebration of her cavalier attitude toward sex and a symbol of her increasing agency. It’s the oldest profession, why shouldn’t she engage in the simple demand/supply of it all? “We are our own means of production!” Bella shouts at Duncan, in what is supposed to be an empowered cry of agency. However, the film shies away from actually analyzing the circumstances that often force women into sex work, as well as the dangers that often befall women in the industry; her foray at the brothel is depicted as without consequence, frivolous, played for shock value alongside the repeated gag of Bella’s bored face during a male client’s furious humping. 

Barbie is the sanitized sibling of the often-crude Poor Things, and suffers from a similar depthlessness. While behind-the-scenes female involvement incorporated more interiority (Poor Things was written and directed by men, based on a book by a man), Barbie is at its core a feature-length commercial proselytizing Barbie’s official slogan: You can be anything! But what this hackneyed message airbrushes is the lack of agency millions of women face due to inequitable social systems. The women who don’t have the privilege of choice.

Instead, Barbie exults: The world would be a utopia if women were in charge! Yes, capitalism is bad, but not if we had more female millionaires! The system isn’t broken but only cracked around the edges; gender equality is the caulk to seal the world back together. 

Of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In, the prolific cultural critic bell hooks wrote: “It is as though Sandberg believes a subculture of powerful elite women will emerge in the workplace, powerful enough to silence male dominators. Her optimism is so affably intense, it encourages readers to bypass the difficulties involved in challenging and changing patriarchy so that a just moral and ethical foundation for gender equality would become the norm.” hooks may as well have been talking about Barbie. 

Much like Barbie, Bella is treated as a doll—an object to be played with and rendered silent. When the impolitely candid Bella makes a scene at dinner with her displeasure for the food and her desire to sock a crying baby at a neighboring table (honestly, relatable!), Duncan pushes her against a wall: “You will rejoin the table and will confine yourself to the following three phrases: ‘how marvelous,’ ‘delighted,’ and ‘how do they get the pastry so crisp?’” Once Barbie’s Ken learns of patriarchy in the Real World, he returns to Barbieland, evicts Barbie, and transforms her Dreamhouse to a preposterously hyperbolic bachelor pad known as the “Mojo Dojo Casa House.” Men in these films are so cartoonishly villainous that the best ones are seen in a compassionate light simply because they are not as bad as the others. Ramy Yousseff’s character—God’s protege and Bella’s betrothed—is a “good guy” simply because he does not condemn Bella’s sex work. The standards we have for men are so low!

Both films portray patriarchy as simple, straightforward—all wolf whistles and ass groping—as if the daily fear of men that women live with in the real world is not insidious, textured, and often times subtle. Although not without its flaws, the 2020 film Promising Young Woman deftly shows how sometimes the most dangerous men are the self-proclaimed “nice guys” who own koozies embroidered with feminist slogans. Or “Cat Person,” the viral New Yorker short story turned film, which catalogs the dark psyche of a man who does not get what he feels entitled to. 

Poor Things is supercilious yet silly, cramming in a bunch of sociopolitical topics without dedicated dissection. The frivolity makes the 2.5 hour run-time feel like a slap in the face. As Bella becomes progressively progressive, she donates to the poor, attends socialist meetings, and blithely comments on the fragility of hysterical men. All this evolution gets undermined when the film ends with her sipping a cocktail with her queer lover while commanding a zombie Bella 2.0 to fetch more drinks in her cloistered, opulent mansion. 

Similarly, Barbie ends with the titular character’s voluntary transformation into a real girl. The evil Mattel executives agree to produce a “regular Barbie,” a doll that eschews beauty standards because the concept will make the company boatloads of money. Barbie apologizes to Ken, men are included in Barbieland, and everyone kumbayas that cooperation is the antidote to an unjust society. 

That both films end with the enlightened dolls recreating and upholding the same systems that they spend the entire plots undermining is a convenient absolution. Are Mattel executives forgiven for the damage they’ve caused through endless endorsements of unrealistic beauty standards because it cheekily pokes fun at itself through the film’s depiction and recognition of their boardroom sausage fest? Does the male gaze in Poor Things get a pass because the woman in question is a libertine exhibitionist, unashamed and unabashed? These happy, Hollywood endings promote the feeling of victory without asking who the true winners are. 

While I thoroughly enjoyed both movies and would happily consume their cotton candy fluff again, upholding either as the zenith of feminist commentary disallows a future where truly nuanced films don’t get their due credit. For all of its preoccupation on Bella’s vagina, not once do we hear of her ability for menstruation or motherhood; there’s a singular shot where she lingers on the cesarean scar that birthed her but that introspection is not deepened beyond the discovery of her origin. And despite Barbieland’s representation of plus-sized, Black, Brown, Asian and disabled women, it is important to remember that diversity (especially when most of them are silent and perfunctory) does not equal inclusion. I want a Poor Things where Bella discovers the horrors and joys of menstruation for the first time! I want a Barbie where two Barbies kiss! Namely, I want films that paint the whole messy mural of feminine spectra. To settle for anything less would be a disservice to whichever plastic dream—or real—world we exist in.

The post I Loved “Barbie” and “Poor Things” but Neither Film Is a Feminist Masterpiece appeared first on Electric Literature.

This year Lunar New Year is February 10, ringing in the Year of the Wood Dragon. 

While the other eleven animals of the Chinese Zodiac are real creatures, the Dragon alone is extraordinary, a creature of the imagination, unbound from reality. An idea in its purest form, the Dragon can represent, be, and do almost anything. 

Dreams loom large under the Dragon, and our visions for “what might be” take hold of us. Our imagined worlds become more vital, more urgent perhaps even than reality. Art takes on a life of its own that can energize or overwhelm.

Wood too, is an artist’s element. The first of the five Chinese elements, Wood represents new beginnings, a child’s mind. It is receptivity, curiosity, and an inexorable thrust towards being. When united with the Dragon it represents propulsive force, endless possibility, an explosive spring after a long winter. With the Wood Dragon our lives may seem to rush ahead of us, our minds not catching up until the Wood Snake arrives next year to contemplate how far we’ve come.

Here is a look into the kind of fortune the Dragon might portend for writers of every zodiac. 

Rat

Birth Years: 1924, 1936, 1948, 1960, 1972, 1984, 1996, 2008, 2020

This year is a deluge of possibilities. Even as countless projects demand your attention, it is important to slow down and appreciate the little things. Indulge journal entries, pet projects, scenes that make you smile, and little treats. 

With both the North Triangle and your Canopy Star (or Arts Star) coming into focus for you this year, you are at the height of your artistic powers. Dream big, and then split those dreams into concrete, manageable steps. It’s a year to move mountains, but the biggest gains start small.

Ox

Birth Years: 1925, 1937, 1949, 1961, 1973, 1985, 1997, 2009, 2021

This is a year diligence pays off. The ideas that have been percolating inside you are ready to come to fruition. All it takes is showing up each day. Consider setting a timer for the work you want to get done.  Start small and manageable. The first fifteen minutes are the hardest, so start there. Once you complete them you may find yourself ready to tackle more.

When you find your stride don’t be afraid to take risks with your work. Make bold choices, take big swings, shoot for the moon. Cut scenes, upend storylines, push to publish. If you miss you can always pick yourself back up and keep on running.

Tiger

Birth Years: 1926, 1938, 1950, 1962, 1974, 1986, 1998, 2010, 2022

Wood is the Tiger’s native element, particularly the bold variety expressed this year. When things are going well you will feel unstoppable, eager to make everything perfect. But being too inflexible can make minor setbacks feel like earth-shaking disasters. 

It is okay for things to go wrong. When a problem feels unsolvable, consider this may be because the problem is bound to something central to your project. What may seem at first like a problem may actually be an extension of what makes your work unique. Perfection is an illusion, but texture gives you something to say.

Rabbit

Birth Years: 1927, 1939, 1951, 1963, 1975, 1987, 1999, 2011, 2023

As the year of the Water Rabbit ends and your Age Star passes, you are entering a new stage in your life. As we enter the Rabbit’s native element, it is a good time to clear out the old and make way for the new. A sense of curiosity and play is a good guide. What excites you? What do you want to learn, about a character, project, or genre? Follow those you trust. Teachers, friends, favorite authors, favorite books. 

The Dragon and Rabbit are often said to clash, as the Rabbit’s tender heart is upset by the Dragon’s bluster. When you feel the world’s edges fit uneven against your own, pay attention to the discomfort. What does it say about the world, or about yourself? There is catharsis and genius alike in naming the little frictions that others overlook.

Dragon

Birth Years: 1928, 1940, 1952, 1964, 1976, 1988, 2000, 2012, 2024

When a Zodiac reaches their own year, they are said to meet their Age Star again, and enter a new phase of their lives. It is a time of delicate transition, and yet Dragons have little desire to be delicate. Something big is on the horizon. Perhaps you are chasing a new idea, starting a new project, or are about to make a major breakthrough. Consolidate your gains as you make them. Back up your work and then make dramatic cuts and revisions without fear.

The Dragon is also their own Canopy Star. This year it may become easy to lose yourself in your work. Ride the momentum when it feels right, but don’t forget to check in with yourself. Do you need a rest? Food? Water? A friend? The body feeds the mind, and you’d be surprised how some inspiration strikes only when away from your desk.

Snake

Birth Years: 1929, 1941, 1953, 1965, 1977, 1989, 2001, 2013

A Wood year feeds the Snake’s hidden Fire element, and a curious mind can feed your passions. Take stock of all you have achieved. What in your life and process do you really value? Chasing a distant goal can be exciting, but it is how you live from day to day where sustainable happiness lies. 

Decide what parts of your process make you feel whole and live by them. Is it working a specific amount, in a specific way, or in a certain location? Is it about an act of play, or justice, or discovery, or expression? How can you feed that which speaks to you? You cannot guarantee your destination, but you can make sure you approve of the journey.

Horse

Birth Years: 1930, 1942, 1954, 1966, 1978, 1990, 2002, 2014

High highs and low lows are the year’s theme. Don’t kick yourself for exhaustion, burnout, or slowing down. Writer’s block is not failure, it is process. Set clear boundaries between work and rest. Perhaps you only write before five pm, or never write on weekends. Setting these restrictions enshrines a time where you can be away from the desk without guilt, and incentivizes making the most of work hours when they arrive.

Don’t be afraid to have fun, waste time, see friends, watch a movie. Cultivating life away from the desk is necessary for life at the desk to be sustainable. 

Goat

Birth Years: 1931, 1943, 1955, 1967, 1979, 1991, 2003, 2015

This year you may feel pressure from the people around you. Perhaps they are flourishing, achieving great things, and making you feel doubtful about your own decisions. Or perhaps they are struggling, and leaning on you for support. Remember that your first obligation is to yourself. Take stock of what relationships bring you joy, and which ones make you unhappy. You can decide what you feed, and what you let fall away. 

People also make good inspiration if you pay attention. What little joys, little difficulties surround them. What makes these interactions potent? Unique? Universal? These nuances give writing the bite of the real.

Monkey

Birth Years: 1932, 1944, 1956, 1968, 1980, 1992, 2004, 2016

As the Monkey and Dragon make two points of the Northern Triad, the Water element is potent for you this year. You may find yourself prepared to let things go. What paragraphs, scenes, character can you cut? Like pruning apples, cutting some lines will let those that remain grow sweeter. When in doubt cut, that way you can see what you miss.

The Northern Triad is also associated with the mind and the hidden. Take this time to trust your subconscious. Let your writing get weird, follow impulses, explore “vibes,” magical realism, scenes or symbols that feel right even if you couldn’t at first explain why. You might surprise yourself.

Rooster

Birth Years: 1933, 1945, 1957, 1969, 1981, 1993, 2005, 2017

As the Rooster leaves behind a troublesome Rabbit year, they come into their own in the year of the Dragon.

When paired with the Dragon, the Rooster becomes the Phoenix, symbolic of royalty, femininity, and the sky. With the Dragon’s support the Rooster also creates an abundance of the Metal element. Fourth of the five Chinese elements, Metal is symbolic of division, definitions, boundaries, and management. You can chase this energy with attention to concept and detail. Do line edits. Do revision. Ask yourself, what is this scene, this chapter, this project, really about? You don’t have to answer right away – you might not know until a first draft is done, and maybe not even then. But If you can find the central question of your work, a second draft can be honed with a sharper cutting intent.

Dog

Birth Years: 1934, 1946, 1958, 1970, 1982, 1994, 2006, 2018

The Dragon and Dog stand on opposite ends of the Zodiac wheel in fierce opposition. The Dog is humble while the Dragon is grandiose. The Dog defends boundaries while the Dragon ignores them. In a Dragon year, the Dog’s interests in keeping the world comfortable, secure, and known will come under fire. Your writing may turn messy, spill over its boundaries, or go to raucous, uncomfortable places. Vulnerability and shame may be sources of worry. 

Opposition years are a challenge by nature, but they are not inherently bad. Opposing animals have the most to gain if reconciled, representing a full spectrum of experience. If you can allow yourself to write work that embarrasses you, you free yourself from self-imposed shackles. Lean into it, and you might be surprised how many possibilities you did not allow yourself.

Pig

Birth Years: 1935, 1947, 1959, 1971, 1983, 1995, 2007, 2019

You’ve worked hard to arrive where you are today. Let that knowledge carry you forwards, that you’ve earned this, that you have achieved something. You may feel new ambitions stirring this year, desires for accolades or success that didn’t move you before. Hunger in moderation can be good. It is a thrill that can feed passion. Just don’t get so caught up in your goals you lose touch with the work itself and why it is meaningful to you. 

If you feel yourself giving in to pressure or despair, take some time to unplug. Forget about the world, and remember what is for you. Write only for yourself. The world will still be there when you get back.

The post Your Horoscope for the Year of the Dragon appeared first on Electric Literature.

A year ago, this announcement would make her tense up: her shoulders might have jumped half an inch toward her ears and the trace of blue in her neck would spasm like a fish quivering under a thin sheet of ice. Then I had top surgery. After ferrying me across Brooklyn, across Manhattan, to and from New Jersey—before the surgeon even had a chance to remove the thin plastic tubes hanging out of my chest—she’d found that her desire for me, for my body, had coalesced. A dense swirl of light at the center of a newborn solar system. “Not that I didn’t find you attractive before,” she says. “It’s just now…” 

I get it, I say. 

And yet. 

She’s heard this complaint half a dozen times. We rehearse the same lines, the same call-and-response:

HER: What do you want out of T?

ME: My voice is so high-pitched.

HER: You can train it lower.

ME: It would be nice to fill out. To get stronger.

HER: Do you want the facial hair?

ME: I already have facial hair. I already have to shave.

HER: Do you want to pass?

ME: I don’t know.

HER: Do you want the face-shape stuff?

ME: No.

HER: Do you want the skin stuff?

ME: No.

She knows what to expect: a few days of wallowing before I admit that no, I’m good. Early male-pattern baldness runs in my family. There’s a thin spot blossoming on the back of my brother’s head, and he’s only 25. I’m too vain to lose my hair.

We always just call it T. A secret weapon. An old friend’s nickname. The callsign of some vintage, West Side Story gangbanger. A mere ingredient. One more thing to pick up at the store.

Before I had surgery, we talked extensively about our fears. These were primarily logistic. But occasionally the conversation drifted. Dot dot dot hung in the air, palpable as rain. I had convinced a whole succession of psychologists that my discomfort was real and persistent. Even when my last psychologist, a gentle man badly scarred by acne, who by all rights should have been gay but wasn’t, reassured me that it was alright to have doubts; that anxiety about the procedure or the outcome was normal and admitting it wouldn’t disqualify me; even then I was resolute.

I’m not concerned about regret, I said. But to her, I added, What if it’s not enough?

What if I do this and I still feel unfinished? What if I need more and more…

Is it possible to get addicted to masculinity?

By “masculinity,” I mean a mode of expression, a movement that adheres to the surface of the body.

Unfortunately, past a certain point, to affect the surface of the body—its form, its contours—you have to operate from the inside out. You have to take the subcutaneous approach.

Jack Halberstram published Female Masculinity in 1998, when I was four years old. At the time, Jack could still assert, in the course of introducing his book, “I was a masculine girl, and I am a masculine woman.” I read Jack’s work like an instruction manual tossed out the back of a fast-moving boat. I’m bobbing around in the wake, watching Jack speed into the horizon. I know that, at some point, in some shape or form, I’ll almost certainly have to swim out to meet him there.

Because of its reliance on notions of authenticity and the real, the category of butch realness is situated on the sometimes vague boundary between transgender and butch definition. The realness of the butch masculinity can easily tip, in other words, into the desire for a more sustained realness in a recognizeably male body.

— Jack Halberstam, Female Masculinity

In a strange way, it has become harder to be butch.

This, despite the slew of statewide protections that have come into effect over the last twenty years; despite a seismic shift in public opinion; despite a record number of young people identifying as LGBTQ+; despite Obergefell v. Hodges; despite Bostock v. Clayton County; despite new rules requiring many insurers to cover gender-affirming healthcare; despite the proliferation of pronouns in email signatures; despite Target’s gender-neutral children’s clothing line.

When I say harder, I don’t mean more dangerous. I don’t mean that life as a butch person has become tougher. With the relative paucity of beatings and arrests, my personal experience of gender nonconformity (compared to, say, Leslie Feinberg’s) has been pretty mundane. Rather, at some point over the last few years, it became more challenging to be recognizeably butch. And butchness, like all modes of gender expression, must be apparent and legible in order to be meaningful when moving around in the world. Butchness, like all forms of female masculinities, is a relative counterproduction of gender. And when it becomes easier to modify or mask the way we look (boobs, beards, height, hips), it means that, for those who can’t or don’t want to medically transition, the butch “lifestyle” is reduced to something like dress-up. A game of pretend.

Then again, maybe I just never had the butch swagger. Maybe I simply couldn’t carry it off.

Jack Halberstam would be the first to retort that masculinity doesn’t have to be naturalized in the body to be made apparent. The biological is not the arbiter of realness (as in drag realness—a measure of authenticity which is anything but, which is assumed, donned, applied). Halberstam, for instance, trawled drag king competitions to study how masculinity could be outdone through parody and imitation. But other examples of “denaturalized identification” were popping up elsewhere. They were busting out of late-night subcultures. They were appearing in kids’ films. Take, says Halberstam, the 1995 movie Babe. The one about the pig. 

“There was a time,” a deep voice intones, “not so long ago, when pigs were afforded no respect, except by other pigs. They lived their whole lives in a cruel and sunless world.”

I wish I had a voice like that.

Babe is narrated from a kinder future. A more enlightened future, one in which pigs are no longer confined to spotlit patches of straw in a Benthamite industrial farming warehouse. A version of the future that has never come to pass.

For what it’s worth, I don’t eat pork. This probably makes my viewing experience a little bit easier. It means I can focus on the fact that Babe is obviously, clearly, a butch-trans allegory instead of rethinking my dinner plans.

TITLE CARD: “The Way Things Are”

(Babe)

I am reading this film on the surface. I am not inspired by its unconscious processes. I will not claim that the film is “symptomatic” of the repressive cultural impulses which police non-normative sexualities and genders. I am asserting that the film is what it is, and what it is is gay and trans.

In the darkened barn, Fly, a Border Collie, inspects the newcomer.

FLY: What is your name?

PIGLET: I don’t know.

FLY: Well, what did your mother call you to tell you apart from your brothers and sisters?

PIGLET: My mother called us all the same.

FLY: And what was that, dear?

PIGLET: She—she called us all ‘Babe.’

I waited until almost the last possible moment to tell my mom I was having surgery.  She said, “Oh.” I added that I wouldn’t be coming back to California for the holidays. “Oh,” she said again.

The sage Clydesdale watches the piglet snuffling in the straw.

“I want my mom,” Babe sobs.

“Perhaps we shouldn’t, uh, talk too much about, uh, family,” says the horse.

Here are the broad strokes of the film. Babe, the titular pig, a small orphaned runt, is won by quiet and eccentric Farmer Hoggett at a county fair. He’s soon adopted by Fly, a sheepdog, and her litter of puppies. Babe has no notion that pigs are “for” eating. He has no idea that the helium-voiced Mrs. Hoggett is eagerly fattening him up for Christmas dinner. Babe is too busy getting to know the other animals on the farm—including Ferdinand, a duck who is trying to out-rooster the rooster, and a kindly flock of sheep. The sheep live in terror of the sheepdogs tasked with herding and guarding them. These “wolves,” as the sheep call them, are cruel and haughty and won’t hesitate to bite. Whereas the sheep, Fly explains, are “definitely stupid.” Just like pigs.

Babe is keen to imitate Fly, but he has no natural aptitude for herding à  la dog. He’s too gentle, too sweet. The sheep, however, like Babe. He’s courteous and good-natured and they’re happy to do whatever he asks. When watchful Farmer Hoggett begins to suspect that the pig has an uncanny knack with the sheep, and an uncommon bond with the sheepdogs, he enters Babe into the national trials—but not before a jealous housecat informs Babe of a pig’s true “purpose” on the farm:

CAT: The truth is that pigs don’t have a purpose. Just like ducks don’t have a purpose. Oh, alright, for your own sake, I’ll tell you. Why do the bosses keep ducks? To eat them. So why do the bosses keep a pig? The fact is that animals that don’t seem to have a purpose really do have a purpose.  Bosses have to eat.

Babe runs away. He’s found the next day, wet and shivering. Hoggett nurses Babe back to health, and he goes on to win the herding competition. Presumably, he has earned himself a permanent place on the farm. Babe “the sheep-pig” will be allowed to live.

And oh, isn’t it just too nice that a film that invokes transness culminates in a sporting event?  And that a key delay would hinge on Babe’s contested eligibility? After all, “What’ll we have next year, eh? A laughing hyena doing show-jumping I suppose.”

Babe does not ask to be called a sheepdog. He asks to be allowed to perform sheepdog. At the same time, Babe’s attempt to actually do sheepdog is hilarious to everyone—humans, dogs, and sheep alike:

MAA: Young’un! Stop this nonsense. What’s got into you all a’sudden? I just got finished telling what a nice young pig you be.

BABE: Maa, I was just trying to be a sheepdog.

MAA: Hah! ‘Nuff wolves in the world already without a nice lad like you turnin’ nasty. Ya haven’t got it in ya, youn’un.

Babe can do the dogs’ jobs, but not like a dog would. In Halberstam’s words, Babe does “‘dog’ with a difference.” In this sense, “dog” isn’t just a role, but an activity, a posture. Dog is a process, a mode. Sheepdog is an end, a vocation; dog is one—but not the only—means.

“I can do boy, I’ve got the teenage boy thing down,” I say to her. “I just don’t think I can be a man.”

“Yeah, well,” she says doubtfully, “You’re not.”

Babe is supposed to be a funny movie.

A straight, cis audience understands the film to be hilarious because the central conceit is so outlandish. (“If it’s not a duck that thinks it’s a rooster, it’s a pig that thinks it’s a dog!”) A trans audience is not so sure. A trans gaze can’t help but linger on the cross-stitched adage framed in the shack where Farmer Hoggett processes the unfortunate animals slated for slaughter: “What you eat today walks and talks tomorrow.”

A trans viewer knows that any boundary, whether social or biological, isn’t ever as impassable as it might seem. 

Early in the film, a “terrible crime” is committed. The crime is trespass. Terrified of being replaced by Mrs. Hoggett’s new alarm clock, Ferdinand the duck cons Babe into infiltrating the farmhouse to steal the “mechanical rooster.” Together, pig and duck enter a forbidden zone, the domestic heart of the farm.

Species distinctions are enforced at the entrance to the farmhouse by humans, dogs, and cats alike. What butch hasn’t been there with Babe, standing confusedly outside the doggie door, the bathroom, or the changing room stall, waiting for permission to join the others inside?

“Respecting the rules,” Rex says, means adhering to the farm hierarchy, the distinctions and divisions between companion animals, working or laboring animals, and livestock. It means accepting, for instance, Babe’s intended fate furnishing the Christmas table, or the “natural” consequences of a duck’s limited use-value. Upsetting these divisions results in the destruction of the Hoggetts’ sitting room—including the dollhouse Farmer Hoggett has been meticulously assembling. Babe and Ferdinand’s “crime” not only brings anarchy indoors, but also trashes the domestic ideal made manifest in Hoggett’s model home.

There’s restorative, liberatory potential in a scene like this. Queers bash back! The trouble is what follows. The other shoe always drops; the social mandate is violently re-established. Rex decrees:

Being a duck, [Ferdinand] must behave like a duck. None of this crowing nonsense. He must accept what he is and be thankful for it. That goes for all of us.

Babe and Farmer Hoggett are brought together at a charity booth at the local fair when Hoggett is asked to guess the pig’s weight. Their partnership begins with an act of observation and estimation. Hoggett is, essentially, asked to “read” the pig. Nervous, the little piglet begins to pee. As the camera pans down to show a splash of urine landing between Hoggett’s leather brogues, the farmer quickly revises his guess. “Sixteen pounds, five…two ounces.” Hoggett is minutely attentive to Babe’s embodiment. At no point, from that moment on, will he forget that Babe is a pig. (“That’ll do, Pig,” is his favorite refrain.) But Hoggett’s attention isn’t just precise. It’s also flexible, responding to an unexpected change in Babe’s body weight. Hoggett wins Babe because he is able to describe Babe exactly as he is at that moment in time.  

The first few days after my surgery, I was still too drugged up and sore to do much on my own. A scopolamine patch caused my pupils to dilate so widely I couldn’t read; I could barely see. My love took everything in hand. She sat me down, every two hours, to empty the red fluid collecting in the drains. The hospital had sent me home with a little plastic measuring cup. She’d hold it up to inspect the units printed on the side, and carefully note the volume. Everything, those first few days, was incremental: standing, eating, bleeding. She was patient and exact. She’d make a fist to expel the air out of the rubber bulb at the end of each drain before replacing the stopper. The bulbs squealed when she did that. I watched her, eyes hopelessly wide.

As the herding trials approach, Hoggett faces an ethical dilemma: choosing a name for the pig. Hoggett, a Kantian through and through, is disinclined to lie under any circumstance. Luckily, the entry form for the National Grand Challenge sheepherding trial only asks for the NAME OF ENTRY.

NARRATOR: He had been worried, for he was a truthful man, that the heading might say “NAME OF DOG,” and then whatever he put would be a lie. But as it happened, luck, for the moment, was running with him.

Hoggett’s name-of-entry for Babe, “PIG,” follows the one-syllable naming convention of working sheepdogs. It publicly commits him to a reinterpretation of Babe’s role on the farm, and to a deconstruction of the significance of the species labels “dog” and “pig.” Like a teacher using a student’s stated pronouns, or a parent adopting their kid’s chosen name, this comes with its own risks. Now, it’s not just Hoggett’s wife who finds him odd or deluded—everyone can see that Hoggett is actively subverting “The Way Things Are.”

48 young pigs played the role of “Babe.”

For visual consistency, each pig had to be 18 inches tall. Because pigs grow so quickly, this meant filming could only take place when the pigs were 16 to 18 weeks old. Six Large White Yorkshire pigs were bred every three weeks to meet the production team’s needs. 

Babe, the pig, is a composite—they are properly plural.

Although all the pigs that appear on-screen are female, the film never specifies Babe’s gender.

Sometimes it is not a question of what the visible hides but how it is that we have failed to see certain things on its surface.

—Anne Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility”

Forget the popular narrative that the trans experience is one of confinement and interiority, of “being trapped in the wrong body” like a freak matryoshka. Transness is superficial in the sense that it plays out in a hall of mirrors. Transition is the process of modifying one’s reflection. And yet, transness and trans narratives present a paradox when it comes to surface reading, the critical practice of apprehending “what is there” instead of excavating, unearthing, or querying what is not.

I said I would read Babe on the surface. I said I would affirm the obvious, the evident. On the one hand, surface reading asks us to accept gender as we see it expressed—and to acknowledge transness where we encounter incongruity. But it’s easily corruptible. After all, when a transphobic reader clocks a person visibly assigned female at birth wearing “men’s” clothes and adopting a “male” affect, what they see is an unsuccessful act of subterfuge. Surface reading erases anyone who passes and fails everyone who relishes the in-between.

Babe’s “species dysphoria” is plain. The butch-trans dynamic of the film is overt, unhidden; it leaps out to a trans viewer, to a fellow sheep-pig. I walk around Farmer Hoggett’s yard. I stop and peer inside the farmhouse door. But, if surface reading asks us to accept the literal meaning of a text, then it also means missing genders and sexualities that have been historically defined by subtlety and discretion, symbols and codes.

Does no one know how to read me anymore? Is everyone so unsatisfied with the way things seem that I have to double, triple down on masculinity in order to be legible?

I’ve spent years cultivating, performing ambiguity. Is that what I stand to lose if I go on T?

Does Babe ever get tired of doing sheepdog, and, to simplify things, decide they just want to be a dog?

We are rewatching Hitchcock’s Suspicion. We are an hour and twenty five minutes into the film. Dinner is in progress. Johnnie (Cary Grant) and Lina (Joan Fontaine) are visiting Isobel, a local crime novelist, in her country home. They have been joined by Isobel’s brother, a tweedy pathologist—and a woman in a black tailored suit.

You can tell it’s tailored when the camera lingers on her as Isobel describes how a piano could be rigged as a murder weapon. The shoulders slope neatly; there’s no gape behind the collar, which is pinned into place behind a sharp black tie. She has parted her hair down the center and twisted it back into a low, unobtrusive bun. The waves slicked around her forehead gleam with Brilliantine. 

She barely says anything at all, although she does call Johnnie, “My dear chap.” Isobel, casually, affectionately, calls her, “Phil.”

We have a few pet names for one another. Because I gave her some homemade bread on our first date, I was entered into her contacts as “Brioche Boy.” When she texts me, her name still shows up as “Aileen from Lex.”

But mostly, we just call each other “Babe.”

In 1998, the same year Jack Halberstam published Female Masculinity, an international bunch of film aficionados got together on Google Groups to discuss the possibility of a lesbian couple in Suspicion. 

Kari S., from Turku, Finland, writes:

I think I’ve found something in Suspicion that I hadn’t noticed before.

The dinner scene at Isobel’s (the mystery writer) house raised some questions.

There are five people in that scene: Grant, Fontaine, Isobel, a man who is identified as her chemist brother (who Grant tries to pump information concerning no-trace-leaving-poisons from)

AND a woman wearing a men’s suit, complete with a tie. She is not identified at all.

She takes part in the conversation and fills the wine glasses [sic] so one kind of gets the impression that she’s the man in the house…

I wonder if anyone else has noticed this.

Poor Kari S. is quickly shot down. A Dutch man named Michel writes back: 

Lots of heterosexual women wear suits. Lots of homosexual women do notwear suits.

Lots of heterosexual women take part in conversations and pour wine. Lots of homosexual women do not take part in conversations and do not pour wine.

Lots of heterosexual women act as if they are the ‘man’ in the house. 

Lots of homosexual women do not act as if they are the ‘man’ in the house.

Are you telling us something about that film or about yourself?

Am I saying something about a film, or something about myself?

In the 1940s, queer women, especially prototypical butches, wore signet rings on their pinky fingers to signal to their interest in other women. Patricia Highsmith wore one. The ring invites an alternative reading of the wearer by those in-the-know. It is subtle, but it is there, worn outside the body, the signifier of a discrete but not-so-secret code. The ring is a confirmation of what otherwise might only be intimated or suggested. You were right the whole time, says the ring. 

I take a screenshot of the dinner scene, and blow it across my laptop like this is an episode of NCIS.

Phil tips the wine out of the carafe. Everything is black and white. The wine is a ribbon as dark as Phil’s suit. There.

A ring winks brightly on the pinky finger of her right hand.

Some things, whispers the body, are exactly as they seem.

Note: The author of this essay has since gone on T. It feels amazing.

The post Babe—the Pig From the Movie—is Gay and Trans and So Am I appeared first on Electric Literature.

In trying to think of more positive portrayals, only one immediately comes to mind for me: the 80s sitcom The Golden Girls, about four older single women—Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and her mother Sophia—who live together in Miami following their husbands’ deaths, or, in Dorothy’s case, after her divorce. Ever since it first aired in 1985, The Golden Girls has been telling aging single women what the rest of the world never has: that our lives are just as interesting and worthwhile without a man in the picture, that as women we’re capable of providing as much if not  more comfort and assistance to each other in our golden years than a partner ever could. When the first episode aired, Estelle Getty, who played Sophia, told the New York Times she hoped the show would kill “the notion [that] the world is Noah’s Ark and no woman is worth the powder to blow her to hell with unless she’s attached to a man.”

My friend Janis would allay her fears of being alone with the argument that it would all be fine because she and another good friend of hers would “just live in The Golden Girls house together.” The concept of a house filled with one’s closest friends who live together and take care of each other in their senior years is an enduring source of comfort for her—as it has been for many women who worry they will end up spending this time in solitude. There is something inherently soothing about the show, particularly when confronted with a stressful, uncertain future; a friend recently told  of The Onion’s famous front page after 9-11, showing a TV schedule with The Golden Girls on endless loop.

In a Huffington Post article last year entitled “My Friends And I Are Going To Live In A ‘Golden Girls’-Style Situation After We Retire,” the millennial writer Ashley Brooks talked of setting out initial plans for a Golden Girls-style house with her female friends later in life. “Why couldn’t we use Blanche, Rose, Dorothy and Sophia as a model to plot our own post-midlife sorority setup?,” the author asked. Among her friends, she had already picked out who would be the Blanche and who would be the Dorothy.

The idea of a Golden Girls house is not just appealing to longtime single women or divorcés, but anybody who fears not being able to meet this unrealistic expectation of lifetime partnership or afford living on their own in their last years. Given the average life expectancy today and the rising cost of nursing homes and long-term healthcare, living alone in our last years is a luxury few of us will be able to afford; financial magazines from Forbes to Kiplinger’s have billed Golden Girls-style houses as a more affordable, less lonely option into retirement.

While I do have several issues with the show itself—namely its reliance on racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic humor that cannot be dismissed with the old “it’s a product of its times” excuse—I admit that as a single and childless woman in my mid 40’s, I have considered a Golden Girls house as a viable solution to my own questions about who will care for me and keep me company in my final years, in the absence of a child or partner.

I discussed the concept of a Golden Girls house the other day with an older friend of mine. “I mean, it sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Who doesn’t want to hang out with their friends and eat cheesecake for the rest of their lives?”

“You know,” she said, “the only thing about The Golden Girls…”

“—is that they were all white wealthy women?” I finished.

“… is that they were all healthy.”

In the last months of my father’s life, my mother converted the basement floor of our house into a mini hospice, hiring round the clock, in-home care to assist her and ensure there would always be someone by his side at all times. The one who stayed with us up until the end was a no-nonsense older nurse who interfered with our lives upstairs as little as possible, took direction without complaint, and worked tirelessly. At the time she was taking care of my father I would have offered her anything, and now I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember what country she was from or what her name was—I had to ask my mother later. Agnes watched over my father night and day, changing his diapers and feeding him until he drew his last breath. I was in the living room when she ordered me downstairs that day, the one and only time she ever raised her voice.

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“Just go down,” she commanded.

On the basement floor where we had set my father’s bed up, my mother was already there, with her arms around my father. He had died just moments before. I began screaming as I clutched at my mother. My knees collapsed a little. My mother’s arms left my father’s body to wrap themselves around me.

“What is this? What is this?” the nurse asked. I sensed that she wanted me to be stronger for my mother, pull it together—after all, she was the one who cared for him day in and day out, who had fed him for weeks on end. She was the one who watched him take his last breath while I was upstairs. All I had to do was drop by once a day to visit with him for an hour or so before escaping upstairs to watch TV.

We had to dress and change my father before he could be picked up by the funeral parlor, and as the nurse heaved my father’s body to the right and the left, rubbing him down with a warm, damp cloth, I tried to assist as much as I could. Mostly I just stood there, afraid to touch my father’s body, to know what it was like now. I had attended funerals before, but never experienced the death of someone so close to me. Onscreen, people just trickle out of hospital rooms after their loved one passes, and it’s assumed some faceless hospital staff or hospice care worker takes care of the rest, whatever “the rest” entails. Agnes set about it as if she had done it a million times before, lifting up my father’s legs gently but firmly to wash him, removing his shorts and putting on new ones. I am no longer convinced there is any dignity in death; the horror lies in the witnessing of this loss. And yet, Agnes had enough dignity to make up for what I lacked, and for what my father’s death had erased.

As I lifted my father’s arm to help Agnes dress my father, I couldn’t believe that it was his anymore; it was flesh hanging off bones, light as a bird’s wing. Were these the arms that once held me back from running into the street? I was surprised by how strong he was back then, wrapping his arms around me, a vise from which I couldn’t escape. I put on his socks now, lifting each cold foot to stretch fresh cotton knit over his heels.

The story of The Golden Girls, to paraphrase Joan Didion, is a story I tell myself in order to live. It works until I think of my father’s last days, the anguish of his death and the days that led up to his passing.

There was a reason the Girls were all relatively healthy until the last season when Rose goes into cardiac arrest: They weren’t that old. I always assumed that they were in their 60s, except for Sophia, who I pegged for early 80s, but when the show began, Blanche, Dorothy and Rose were only in their 50s, tiptoeing toward but not quite having reached their golden years. In Season 2, Episode 8, “The End of the Curse,” Blanche experiences menopause for the first time.

What is never shown and only hinted at in The Golden Girls are the later years, when the women become fully bed-ridden and incapacitated, when they can’t feed or bathe themselves or go to the bathroom without assistance. Rose goes into cardiac arrest near the end of the last season and undergoes triple bypass, but she makes a lightning fast recovery in time for Dorothy’s wedding. It wouldn’t make for much of a sitcom if the characters were gravely ill—although death is still present enough, roaming their lanai like the unnamed fifth roommate. The Girls discuss their fear of death and aging, donate kidneys to siblings, mourn ex-husbands and friends who passed, and encounter terminally-ill friends who wish to end their lives early.

It’s interesting that in all the articles I have read pushing Golden Girls retirement homes, no one ever talks about the “Sophia’s Choice” episode from Season 4. I had forgotten about it, until a recent rewatching. After Sophia rescues her friend Lillian, who suffers from dementia, from a poorly equipped nursing home, she takes her back to the house to live with her and Blanche, Rose and Dorothy. The Girls don’t make it two days with Lillian.

“I just cannot believe Lillian has only been here for 24 hours,” says an exhausted Rose, as they all slump over the kitchen table.

“I cannot believe Mom thought she could handle her alone,” adds Dorothy. “I mean, it’s almost too much for the four of us.”

Agreeing that they can no longer take care of Lillian, Rose finds Lillian a nicer nursing home and Blanche pays for the next few years of Lillian’s bills with a bonus check from work that she had set aside for a breast enhancement. Prompted by the experience with Lillian and fears of their own experiences to come, they decide to make a pact to “always take care of each other, no matter what.”

If you could fast-forward to the next decade or two of The Golden Girls, I wonder if it would show these women diligently taking care of each other in their incontinent years, when some of them may as well need 24-hour care like Lillian—or if it would show the at-home nurse in the corner, wiping cheesecake crumbs off their faces or on hands and knees, cleaning the toilet? Imagine the curtain pulling back to reveal the immigrant caregiver at the nursing home, doing what some of us can’t or don’t want to do round-the-clock, lest it disrupt the responsibilities and lives we already have.

Which brings us to another aspect of the show: I am far from the first person to watch The Golden Girls and wonder where all the brown people evaporated to, considering this show is supposed to take place in Miami, a city that even back in 1980 boasted well over twice as many Hispanic people as white folk. What are the implications when we write the immigrant worker out of the storyline, both on screen and in our own lives? I loved the 2022 movie Triangle of Sadness not just for the easy schadenfreude of watching spoiled rich people come undone, but for that shot of the hull of the cruise ship, where they housed the Filipino cruise workers in a modern-day version of Downtown Abbey. As a Filipino-American, I always thought I was more sensitive to the unseen immigrant labor from poorer countries like the Philippines that keeps Western countries afloat. However, in my own life, I had failed with Agnes.

In the end, it was really she and my mother who did most of the caring; we were fortunate enough to be able to afford long-term health care insurance for my father, so my mother could get someone in to help. Otherwise, I would have needed to step in far more than I did. Would I be able to care for good friends better than I had my own father? And is this something that one gets better at with age and more death?

I want to believe that my girlfriends and I would take care of each other until we died, but I have also seen the distancing of friends when they have partners and children—this is their new unit, their main focus, and time with friends must be fit in between their child and household duties. I have seen it in myself when I get a boyfriend and see my friends less than I did before, clearing the weekend for days with my new love, prioritizing my time with him. I have started to question if a Golden Girls house is the ultimate goal or just a backup plan for when our partners fall short or die off first—and if it’s the latter, how strong this ideal is when so many of us have spent the bulk of our lives prioritizing traditional family units or “significant others” above all else.

Over twenty years ago, I suffered from a severe depression that rendered me unable to care for or watch over myself. My father didn’t drag me home, where he knew I feared I would backtrack. Instead, he closed up his practice and flew to New York, where I was living, to care for me. My greatest shame is that I do not think I did a tenth as much for him when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s seven years later, or in the ten years of suffering he would endure following this diagnosis, as his mind and body slowly shut down from dementia and then cancer. I think about this now when I call my mother from London, where I currently live, and she asks me how long I plan on staying there and when am I coming home, and I tell her that this is where I live now, this is my home. I have wanted to live abroad since I was a kid and have spent the last thirteen years taking on a variety of jobs that would lead to a long-term visa, and yet when I say to my mother “London is my home now”, it sounds trivial and silly, like I’m an 18-year-old college kid extending their study abroad too long instead of a 47-year-old woman who has been planning this for over a decade. 

I wonder if it would sound more acceptable if I had a husband with a job and children who were in school here, all of whom could never possibly be as easily uprooted as a single, childless middle-aged woman. To my mother, it probably wouldn’t; she would then just wonder why her grandchildren had to live all the way in London instead of closer to her. And yet sometimes I can’t help but think that it does—if not to her, then to others, to society, to me, even. I think of my trips to the Philippines, a country which is still very much a collectivist vs individualist society, and where cousins of mine grew up in multi-generational family compounds in Quezon City with kids, grandparents and parents looking in on each other every day. I think of all the nuclear-family Filipino homes I’ve been to in America, with room for Mom, Dad, a few kids, and always an extra room for Lola. I think of all this as my mom and I talk to each other on our iPhones from our single-occupancy homes, over 4,000 miles and an ocean apart.  

How much of our lives and our independence are we willing to sacrifice to care and comfort those closest to us? Where do we draw the line, and what does that say about us?

If I needed to fly back and give immediate care to my mother or sisters I would, and yet how quickly, sometimes without realizing it at first, one can slide into thinking of oneself in the role assigned: the selfish single woman who chose not to have children and who clearly hasn’t put anyone but herself first, versus a selfless mother who already has shown how giving she is with her children and just needs to extend this innate generosity to others in the family. (This scenario is also untrue: statistically, unmarried adults are more likely than married to provide most of the care to a parent.)

For most of us, it will not be merely a question of how selfless we are but how much money we make and how much care we can afford. Our country may be one of the richest in the world, but we have not set ourselves up to provide nearly enough public funds to help care for the number of aging baby boomers that will require nursing or in-home care—a 75% increase from previous generations.

There is no talk of what to do when the Golden Girls can no longer fund Lillian’s nursing home, but you can squeeze the entire long-term care crisis into that gap. The beauty of a 30-minute sitcom like The Golden Girls is that topics like these can be touched upon and eased with humor, just in time for commercials. We are not given such reprieve in real life. The show did its strongest work not in proffering the concept of a Golden Girls house but in providing a brief window into questions about the human limitations that we cannot always answer but must ask ourselves anyway. It was far from a perfect show, but in some of its grossest omissions is where some of the most important questions lie. 

At the end of the Sophia’s Choice episode, the Girls decide to assuage their fears that they’ll end up like Lillian, with nobody they can rely on to take care of them or keep them company in their final years. They decide they will all go together to the nursing home if they have to.  It’s a reassuring thought—until Rose asks, “But what happens when only one of us is left?”

For a few seconds, there is nothing but silence. The silence will eventually be disrupted by a snappy one liner from Sophia, but for just a brief moment, the human fear of death and dying is allowed to assume the frame. It crowds out the set’s pastel couches and wigs, extinguishes the comebacks about menopause and ensuing laugh tracks. There is no cut to commercial.

I am back in my parent’s house, walking downstairs to see my father one last time. The house is still. Light filters up from the room below, guiding my way down.

I do not feel comforted. I am not supposed to be. 

The post We All Want to Live in the Golden Girls House—Don’t We? appeared first on Electric Literature.

This advice came from other mom writers. I paid close attention, weighed these warnings in my hands. Was I being given sacred protection? Or was I a wayward mother being gently policed, shepherded back into the claustrophobic box of “good mother”? I understood I’d strayed. A “good mother” doesn’t write about the way her palms sting from slamming them on the kitchen countertop. This is not a story mothers publicly claim. It’s a story we whisper. I’ve never been good at being quiet, or subtle, so, of course I wrote the book. I used my name. And despite the high probability of it blowing up in my face, I took my two elementary-aged kids across the country for an 8-day book tour. 

I knew my kids would be tired from the time-zone change, disregulated from the dissolution of routine, and that they’d likely rip loud farts at my events then cackle with delight. Even with my husband doing most of the parenting, the week would be exhausting at best. Still. This book is a career highlight! I wanted to celebrate it with my family. I fantasized that the tour would be a key experience my 6- and 10-year-old would remember. Totally worth missing school for, I said to myself as I sat in the principal’s office filling out the extensive number of forms for kids missing more than five consecutive days. 

I’ve wanted to be an author for as long as I’ve wanted to be a mother, which is to say, forever. I didn’t anticipate that the two identities would end up in competition with each other. I stopped writing for years because the creative labor of mothering took every piece of me. Once I was able to write again, I found I did my best work away from the children. I tried writing in my bedroom, but their presence permeated the locked door. I left the house and wrote at coffee shops, but only ever had a couple of hours before mom-life beckoned. I crossed bridges and counties to attend artist residencies, needing to transform out of my mother-self to be my best author-self. For years I mothered and wrote like this—separately.

It’s been a decade since I began splitting myself into parts. Writing a book about mothering was a way to put myself back together. I thought bringing my kids on tour could be the next level of integration. I was ready—eager—for my children to see me as other than mother, as more than the Maker of Meals, the Bedtime Routine Warden, the Afterschool Pick-up Driver. I know I will always be a big somebody to my children, the way that all parents loom large and take up space in their children’s psyches (for better or worse), but I wanted my children to see me as a big somebody in the world. I wanted them to see how someone so ordinary—the person who smears peanut butter and honey just right on their rice cakes (only Quaker brand, plain, and lightly salted!)—can also be the person on the stage in front of a roomful of strangers. I wanted to be a model, so that they might see that their own ideas are worth cultivating and amplifying. That they too deserve an audience and a microphone. That they don’t need anybody else’s permission to step outside the box of social acceptability, to choose a wayward path, to take up space, to be humongous.

As our family book tour approached and I prepared for my readings, I came up against a new challenge—the content of my book. My children know what my book is about. We’d had age-appropriate conversations about mom rage. My son, the 10-year-old, once ticked off a list that went, “Racism, sexism, mom rage,” which told me he had a general understanding that mom rage is a societal issue steeped in oppression and power dynamics. But it’s one thing for my kids to experience me losing my temper. It’s another for them to listen to me describe my fury and to hear themselves referred to as “rage recipient,” and then to do it again the next night, all in front of an audience. How could I be true to my craft—a good author—reading and discussing honestly the terrifying rage I write about, and also be a good mother, protecting my children from unnecessary harm?

On the plane, my children happily inhabited screenland while I scoured my book for sections that ticked all the boxes: appropriate to read in front of the kids, 7 minutes or less, engaging for an audience. By the time we landed, I’d dog-eared every engaging, child-friendly page in that book. There weren’t many. But there were enough.

The morning of my first reading, I sit with my kids at breakfast and tell them what they can expect that night. I explain that I’ll have a “conversation partner.” We’ll talk about the book itself and also about my experience of writing the book, and at some point I’ll read a section or two, and then take questions from the audience. 

“I want to ask a question,” my son pipes up. 

“Sure,” I smile, hiding the heat of my flaring anxiety. I have a flash fantasy of him standing up in the crowd and asking, Why do you yell at us? (a legitimate question, but a tender conversation I’d prefer to have with him privately—not in front of an audience). “Do you want to tell me your question now so I can be prepared and do a very good job answering it?” 

He thinks then says, “I want to ask, ‘Have you always wanted to be a writer?’” 

I nod and look away, blinking back impending tears. This child. He disarms me. He isn’t concerned with the content of my book. He is curious about his mother—the author. I may feel fragmented, but he sees the whole of me. 

“Yeah, okay, great. You can just raise your hand when it’s audience question time. I’ll call on you,” I say with a grin.

That night at the bookstore, I do one of my “child-safe” readings about my complexities slipping away once I became a mother. I read that even my name disappears with everyone everywhere (at the gym, the playground, the pediatrician’s office) suddenly calling me “Mom.” My son is in the front row. When I finish reading, his hand is first in the air, arm straight, eyes set. I gesture towards him, ready for his rehearsed question. 

“Why do you think everyone was calling you Mom?” he asks. 

Surprised, I pause. The answer is complicated, and the section I just read basically answered it. Seventy people hold their breath waiting for my response. I buy time. “That’s a really good question,” I say slowly. The audience lets out a collective exhale with a small, knowing laugh. Then I answer his question as best I can. He nods. Energetically the audience nods too. 

A few nights later, I sit in front of a crowd of mostly strangers. Someone asks about the different trends in mothering that have occurred over time. I explain that when I was a child in the early 1980s, the reigning trend was “custodial mothering,” which was a more low-key, hands-off kind of parenting than today’s “intensive mothering” era. I share, “My parents were involved in my life, but my mother wasn’t cutting my peanut and jelly sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter.” My 6-year-old daughter, who’s been drawing in a coloring book on the floor at her dad’s feet until this moment, shoots up with a whoosh and pierces the air with her slender arm. 

“Yeah?” I say smiling at her.

“You cut my sandwiches into heart shapes with a cookie cutter!” The whole room laughs. My daughter recognized the way I mother her, and she unwittingly called me out! 

“Yes, I do cut your sandwiches into hearts,” I say to her, then turn to the audience as my daughter returns to the floor with a proud plop. “As mothers, we don’t necessarily agree with the ideas behind intensive mothering, yet we’ve internalized the expectations as ideal, then find ourselves pureeing baby food from scratch, freezing it into ice cube trays, laundering and air-drying every cloth diaper, and cutting our kids’ sandwiches into hearts with a cookie cutter!” I laugh and look at my daughter. She beams. I look out at the audience, which is 98% mothers. They beam too.

In Mom Rage I write, “Motherhood is so public, and everyone has an opinion.” Yet somehow, I hadn’t considered that bringing my kids on tour would result in the public display of my mothering. My children’s presence ended up transforming my events into live enactments of some of the main arguments of my book. By interacting with my kids in loving ways I was embodying the idea that a person can have mom rage and still be a good mom, a message that everyone in those audiences and every mother who rages needs to hear, especially in a culture that views angry mothers as moral failures. And by reading from my book and discussing mom rage in front of an audience that included in my children, I was demonstrating how we can drag mom rage out of its shame corner by talking about it with our friends, our partners, and even—with care and nuance—our children.

I suppose by bringing my family on tour, I set us up to be…judged, yes, but also witnessed—by the audiences but also by each other. I witnessed my husband laden with bags of books, art supplies, candy, and other child-appeasing items, doing everything he had to do to keep the kids happy so I could completely inhabit my author self. As a mother, it was the exact support I needed. In those moments when my children refused their social mandate to sit quietly, when my daughter jumped up with excitement and my son ditched his rehearsed question for the one that bubbled up inside his good heart, they were celebrating with me, showing me that they wanted to be part of the conversation with their author mother. They raised their hands to be witnessed for their own brilliant, bold selves. They too want to be humongous. They were telling me they already are. 

The post I Brought My Kids On Tour For A Book About Motherhood appeared first on Electric Literature.

But this is not the case with writer Anthony Veasna So, who died in December of 2020, from an accidental drug overdose when he was only 28 years old. Here, the sting is never far off. 

So passed nine months before his first book, Afterparties, would be published. That book would go on to win the NBCC John Leonard Prize for a debut novel and the Ferro Grumley Award for LGBTQ fiction and receive wide acclaim from critics and readers around the world. While some of the stories inside Afterparties had been published previously, such as “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts” and “Superking Son Scores Again,” most readers were already encountering So’s incredible voice for the first time after he was already gone.

This is especially jarring because So’s writing is so particularly alive, so boisterously funny, so sparklingly real, and so sharply contemporaneous—there’s nothing that feels posthumous about his work. It insists that So is very much here, and very much alive. Only when you come to the end of the last story in Afterparties is it crushing to realize there will be no more.

Except, there is more—at least a little. 

This month, Ecco Books is publishing a second book of So’s, Songs on Endless Repeat, a collection of his essays and “outtakes.” 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin by saying that the essays are their own delight: So’s pop cultural criticism of Crazy Rich Asians and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy come together with deeper, personal memoir pieces about his father’s life as a landlord and the loss of a dear friend to suicide. According to editor Helen Atsma at Ecco books, it had always been So’s goal to publish a book of essays, and his eye had been on doing so after he finished his novel.

His novel, you say?

Indeed, the “outtakes” mentioned earlier are not fragments or drafts of other short stories, but actually eight linked pieces of So’s unfinished novel, Straight Thru Cambotown. 

In the foreword, author Jonathan Dee, who served as So’s advisor at Syracuse University’s MFA program, writes beautifully about what it was like to work with So on some of these pieces of Cambotown, which formed the writer’s graduate thesis, submitted only about nine months before his death. 

In emails to Dee, So described the book he envisioned as being stylistically and structurally inspired by “Helen Dewitt’s The Last Samurai, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.” He wrote that these three were the books he kept coming back to for inspiration as he wrote. 

As Dee explains, this high bar that he “cheerfully set for himself” was typical of So. He wonders if, at the time So emailed with this ambitious plan, a single word of the novel had even been written.

But then So wrote—with all the “deceptively casual, humor-cloaked command” that Dee and others at Syracuse had come to admire. As Dee notes, the pieces of the novel that we have are incomplete but never rough. So was a “perfectionist about his writing—not in the self-paralyzing way some writers can be, but just made restless by the idea that something good could almost always be made better.” Knowing that the pieces in Songs on Endless Repeat would have likely undergone extensive revisions still, it is only more remarkable how strong they are.

Dee mentioned that it contains parts of the novel there that he’d never seen before, seemingly newly penned since their work on his thesis had concluded.

In the eight pieces of Straight Thru Cambotown that are included in the collection, readers will get some sense of how So intended to triangulate between DeWitt, Márquez, and Toole, and how the novel would continue the project he began in his short stories, to as one reviewer put it in the LA Times, “immortalize Cambodian California.” 

This is a worthy goal, a “hole” that So intended to fill, according to Dee. But So’s work, and Cambotown in particular, doesn’t feel like an act of preservation so much as an invitation (at times a demand) to immerse yourself in the world he loved. If that immortalizes it, in the process, then so much the better.

In an opening section, “We Are All the Same Here, Us Cambos” So writes in a lush first-person plural, present tense. “Just look around and listen to the talk. Him, her, them. Those fools over there blasting Tupac like they actually get it, because in a way, beneath the yellow-brown-light-dark surface of their skin, they do.” 

Verbally, So soars around Cambotown, hovering over the Mings and Bas and Mais and Pous and Gongs, “Heineken for the humble; Hennesey for the ballers.” He wants to distinguish them from other Asian cultures “two thousand miles away from Cambodia” (look at a map, he urges) even as he outlines what lumps all “Cambos” together: “In Cambotown, we are all the same—same stories, same history. Or lack thereof.” The awful bonds of displacement, and of having descended from the survivors of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime, are for his generation, badly tangled up with the false promises of the American Dream. He concludes, “That’s why we’ll never leave this place—not truly. […] We’re with you, have always been so. Let’s be messed up Cambos together.”

So addresses the audience in other places in the other fragments of Cambotown, but more rarely, making way for highly specific third-person portraiture of his characters. We settle into the year 2014, a decade after a financial crisis that lingers on in this corner of the world. So introduces a central cast of characters, described in So’s obituary as “three Khmer-American cousins—a pansexual rapper, a comedian philosopher and a hotheaded illustrator.” 

These cousins are bound together in their grief over the death of their aunt, Peou. In a fragment named “Peou and her Kmouys,” So describes the legendary Peou, a mathematical prodigy whose skills, others imagined, would have made her a great businesswoman, or possibly a winning contestant on The Price is Right. Her sudden death in a fatal car crash rocks the community and brings her “kmouys” together. 

The “comedian-philosopher” is a nephew named Darren, who picks up the next section, set three days after Peou’s crash. At Peou’s funeral he shrewdly observes the art on the walls, the silly minutiae of the ceremony. “There’s a joke in this,” he thinks to himself, as he takes it all in. 

Darren’s brother Vinny is “the first Cambo rapper to break into the hip-hop scene.” (One of Vinny’s songs, “Sachkrok Thom” is a rap ballad to Asian dicks, capable of curing all the world’s ills—if only the world would stop marginalizing them.) He is irreverent and headstrong, a fine contrast to the cerebral Danny, and the two read like twin sides of the same coin, perhaps of So himself, whose work never stops ricocheting between those qualities. 

The third kmouy is niece Molly, who writes Peou’s eulogy while lamenting her own ongoing forced sabbatical back in Cambotown. After having once escaped to NYU and a Gallatin School bachelor’s degree in “Illustrating the Political Self” that “totally kicked her ass,” she got laid off from the non-profit where she’d worked and sent home saddled with $200k in student loans. Molly is wearier, angrier (justifiably) and sees things a bit more clearly than Darren or Vinny do—a third side of So’s personality that readers will find underlying the essays in the same collection.

Later sections, like “The Roses” take us back into Peou’s life, and others go forward to Peou’s funeral and the weeks beyond. Between the eight sections we only get about 130 pages of Cambotown, but it feels like much more. (When I compare it to something like Fitzgerald’s The Love of the Last Tycoon, which was cut off around a similar length, Cambotown feels both technically stronger and far fuller.)

So’s characters crackle with life, humor, pathos, fury, and desperate dreams. Their struggles are generational, historical, local—epic and personal. What we get in 130 pages is so much more than simply track being laid for what never was written. These chapters are full and satisfying, a whole world unto themselves rather than any kind of mere roadmap. 

Still, it cannot be denied that it comes to an end that is painfully premature, with incredible potential energy that is still not yet kineticized. 

Because So guides our imagination so skillfully towards the future, when the past catches up to us at the end of the final fragment, that loss crashes over us like a tidal wave—maybe not so unlike the way it crashes onto his characters, and onto everyone in Cambotown. It resonates deeply that Peou’s own funeral, and absence, is at the center of this novel, and that the incompleteness it brings cuts through the lives of Daniel, Vincent, and Molly. 

You want there to be more, because you want to know that they’ll be OK—what else can you say about the experience of reading a truly great novel but that?

So’s literary agent, Rob McQuilkin recalled how Mark Krotov described the day he first met Anthony at the offices of n+1, where he “came in off the street” and immediately projected the warmth and irreverence found in his fiction. Krotov placed his story “Superking Son Scores Again” at the magazine, a bombastic tale of tough Cambo boys who work out their aggressions through harrowing games of badminton. With an intensely sincere absurdity, the story charmed McQuilkin as much as Anthony himself, and they began working together on the collection of stories that would soon become Afterparties. 

It sold to Ecco Books as part of a two-book deal, “heavily tilted” towards the still emerging Straight Thru Cambotown. “At that point Anthony had maybe fifty pages of it written,” McQuilkin recalled. “A couple of chapters and a memo with his intentions for the rest.” The story collection came together rapidly and was, he recalled, a very “light lift” editorially speaking, meaning that the work was already very polished as it went to Ecco. 

So’s editor, Helen Atsma, confirmed that very little work had to be done on Afterparties beyond settling on the best ordering of the pieces in it. And yet, So’s instincts as a “hefty reviser” were not settled. Even the story “Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts,” which had already been through extensive editing before publication in the New Yorker, seemed to So in need of another look. Dee recalled how hard So had worked on the piece even before that. “I can’t tell you how many versions of ‘Three Women of Chuck’s Donuts’ I read,” but also that So was never “the type of student who would email something and then email again six hours later with a different version of it.” If So was feeling anxious, Dee said, it was only because of his correct perception “that the stakes were now higher.”

Atsma remembers him as “one of those writers for whom the finished line is hard to accept,” but feels that So’s perfectionism was evidence of how deeply he “loved tinkering at the word level.”

But as the publication process went on, McQuilkin said, Anthony had frantic periods, driven by his own perfectionism, trying to make big changes even as the book headed into production. Anthony was having a hard time during the early months of COVID. Even as his own star was rising rapidly, he was mourning the recent suicide of a dear friend and classmate at Syracuse. The essay So wrote about his friend, originally titled “Songs on Endless Repeat” was later published at n+1 again as “Baby, Yeah” (the name of the Pavement song that he and his friend listened to over and over) and that piece now concludes the collection.

So’s plan, McQuilkin explained, was to get back to work on Cambotown in the new year, once Afterparties was finally set. After So’s overdose that December, McQuilkin said that it took him a long time to finally sit down and go through the work that So had left behind before he passed. There was, understandably, the obstacle of his own grief over the loss of So, but also the significant challenge of dealing with these partial materials all alone. 

“Usually there’s this dialogue with the writer,” McQuilkin explained, “instead of me just talking to myself.” 

He found significant, new pieces of Cambotown in the papers, along with So’s notes and other writings, enough to begin working on a sampling of the parts that felt the most polished. He estimates that he and Atsma were able to use about two-thirds of what So left behind to form the eight sections now in Songs On Endless Repeat. These were “not remotely ready, in a finished sense,” he felt, but set amongst the essays So had written, there was new “value in the refractions between them” that came out. 

“We wanted to touch as little as we could,” Atsma said. Though it was a “minimal edit” she said that she “never felt the weight more,” in knowing the importance of sharing his final work with readers. “It didn’t feel lesser than to me,” she recalled, “If they had, we would never have published them.” 

In the end, McQuilkin thinks that the 130 pages of Cambotown might represent about a quarter to a third of the ambitious plans So had for the novel, and, of course, there’s no telling how much of these sections would have endured to the final manuscript, especially as So’s keen, perfectionist eye went through them in future drafts.

How do we face trauma with humor? This is one of the subjects that kmouy Darren says he wants to write his philosophical treatise on. Cambodians love to laugh, he points out to Vinny, as they mill about at Peou’s funeral. Sometimes that’s a reaction to the absurd horrors of the world and of history, but sometimes it’s just for the love of laughing. Vinny, characteristically, cracks a joke back, accusing his brother of selling out, his over-academic analysis is just about “following the money.”

There are themes, in So’s work, McQuilkin said, of reincarnation, and of all the repetitions in all the minutiae of every human life. Storytelling persists because our time alive is always too short, whether it ends after twenty-eight years or a hundred. What we make, and leave behind, at least can always be started over, read again, played on loop.

In the foreword to Songs on Endless Repeat, Jonathan Dee encourages us not to think of So as just another “promising young writer” as these, to be honest, are “never in short supply.” 

If So saw a hole in the world that he intended to fill with his words, then his death inarguably leaves too much of that hole still open. But through the writing collected in this second book, So inched his Californian Cambodian characters not just closer to some kind of immortality, but into the world itself. All of this, carried along in So’s unforgettable voice, leaves us all much fuller than we were before.

The post How Anthony Veasna So’s Unfinished Novel “Straight Thru Cambotown” Became a Collection appeared first on Electric Literature.

Cover your ears.

My entire life, I’ve prided myself on never being an angry person. My parents rarely yelled at me, and I rarely yell at anyone. I’ve never been in a physical fight. In my dreams, I sometimes try to scream at someone, but I can’t. I try to hit someone, and my arm hits soft like a child’s, or my fist dissolves into smoke. In these dreams, I’m angry about my weakness. When I’m awake, I’m not. The symbolism is, of course, obvious.

But six months after my daughter was born, something changed. I’d been up all night, every night, Googling every terrifying thing that could happen to our precious, perfect baby. I’d fallen in love, and was obsessed with the many possible ways I could lose her. If I read enough, fixed everything, controlled it all, she would be okay. A false, impossible hope, I knew—but I didn’t care that my worry was beyond logic. Sometimes, in the middle of an article on the Mayo Clinic’s website, I’d realize I’d read it before—many times before. None of it helped, and yet I kept on. Was the swaddle too tight, was her room too cold, was she wearing too many layers? Was her cough okay? Was this rash ok? Was that other weird sound okay? Was she eating enough? Was I playing enough? Was I playing too much?? COVID anxiety multiplied my new-parent anxiety. At the start of the pandemic, the rhetoric for parents of young children was that they could and maybe would die from COVID. Public spaces (which I avoided as much as I could) were almost intolerable. Someone coughing made my adrenaline jump like I’d seen a bear. Even on walks with my daughter in the stroller, anytime another person passed, I worried about the air we breathed. I suffocated. Later, that rhetoric about COVID changed, but my body has never quite forgotten it.

One night, changing the laundry over for the hundredth time, my fist connected to a basket of laundry. I found myself throwing it across the room. I write “Found myself” because my body felt like the time I’d accidentally grabbed an electric fence—my chest pained and buzzed and my arms became locked and tough, tingling all the way down into my fingertips. I wanted to make a loud sound, wanted to keep myself from disappearing, fury without a target (the laundry, sure, but not just the laundry). Another night I went to my car and screamed. The sound was so loud it pierced my own ears like a needle; the bear was back and it was me. I couldn’t remember ever screaming like that. And once, after putting my daughter down for bed, she was asleep, but my ankle cracked and she woke. I got her back to sleep, and then I closed the door a little too loud and she woke. I tried to get her back to sleep again and failed. I couldn’t shut my brain off until she was asleep and I needed her to sleep and she needed to sleep and I set her down in bed just a little too hard and left the room. Over and over, I slapped my face.

My anger had at last forced me to look at it. I wasn’t even sure what I was raging about. It was never rage at my daughter. I loved her so deeply even something as small as the precise sound of her tiny teeth crunching an apple made me ecstatic. I try, every so often, to write about my love for my daughter, but I always fail. Instead I build a garden around it; I cannot get to the heart of it with language. I worried I could not stop the world from taking the best person I knew, that they would never know her either. I don’t even like writing those sentences. We’d planned for and wanted this child. I had a supportive and devoted spouse who loved being a father. We had every privilege imaginable—whiteness, steady money, family support, maternity and paternity leave, health care, a safe home. I had no right to feel rage. It was me, I thought. My fears were wrong and had broken me somehow. I was determined to figure out why. I was determined to fix myself. Didn’t my daughter deserve a happy mom who didn’t need to go scream in her car? I watched the way my daughter felt my moods, the way I felt sunshine, wind, rain. I watched her begin to imitate my walk, the inflection in my voice. If I was a mirror, I didn’t want her seeing her reflection in such a broken one.

I went to therapy, of course, and I turned to books. I don’t know if there are actually more books about mothering being published now, or if, like playgrounds, I am simply more aware of them because I am one. I thought my rage was new, that I was a violent monster, but the books I read taught me that monsters are everywhere. Even if the rage was new to me, it was not new to parenting. Talking about it, publicly, is new.

I read Rachel Yoder’s 2021 excellent, darkly funny novel Nightbitch first. In the novel, a new mother’s rage becomes so great she turns into a kind of werewolf. And, eventually, she likes it. The sentences are long, looping, delicious. The main character does not have a name. She is just “the mother,” or later, “Nightbitch.” I felt like I was reading the inside of my own mind—if I allowed it to truly do what it wanted, pure instinct, feral. (Of course, what mother can allow this? Even now, here I am hiding in a parenthetical.) I devoured the book, read pages without realizing I had read pages, the way I hadn’t read since I was a child reading Harry Potter. Yoder captures the precise monotony of having a young child, but more than that, helped me discover something about my anger: it was not new for me. Here, Yoder’s narrator describes her first real rage:

“Her child’s screams fanned a flame of rage that flickered in her chest.

“That single, white-hot light at the center of the darkness of herself—that was the point of origin from which she birthed something new, from which all women do.

“You light a fire early in your girlhood. You stoke it and tend it. You protect it at all costs. You don’t let it rage into a mountain of light, because that’s not becoming of a girl. You keep it secret. You let it burn…

“Her anger, her bitterness, her coldness in that darkest part of the night surprised even her. She wanted to think she had become another person altogether the night before, but she knew the horrible truth, that Nightbitch had always been there, not even that far below the surface.”

I recognized the flame. I thought about when my younger sister sat in my room pushing every button the way only siblings know how to do. I picked her up and threw her bodily from my room.  And later, the many touches from men I didn’t want. I knew I couldn’t get angry, or lose control. Before I ever nurtured a child, I nurtured anger. Now, I am the thing to be feared. Yes, I thought, reading Nightbitch: I am an animal. I am only now failing to hide it.

I turned to Minna Dubin’s 2023 nonfiction Mom Rage: The Everyday Crisis of Modern Motherhood to think about why. Mom Rage is a vulnerable, deeply researched work that locates mom rage by describing a “basement” of systemic issues that can underpin moments of rage, wearing on mothers long before an angry outburst. Dubin describes many of these issues as different versions of a lack of “mothercare”—a capitalist system that punishes women for leaving the workforce to do care work; a racist and ableist healthcare system that does only the barest of medical minimums for mothers; a governmental uninvestment in providing universal, quality childcare; the dominance of the nuclear family that erodes the “village”; a pervasive, social-media influenced belief in what mothers “should” do and look like, which demands mothers subdue their anger. At the same time, there is little incentive to fix these problems—why would we? The entire system is balanced upon mothers providing free childcare at home. As Dubin writes, if mothers blame themselves for their anger, and society blames them too, then the larger society needs to take no responsibility. The problem of mom rage is mothers’ own problem to fix. 

After that, rage is physical: the nervous system responding to constant stimuli of small children, lowered coping ability from sleep deprivation, and the high stakes, for giving a shit about what you’re doing. In her book Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control, Amanda Montei locates motherhood’s trajectory through a lifetime in the body, and through touch. Dubin also writes, “Mom rage lives in the body.”

Rage seems inevitable—the standards are high, the hours are long, the demands immense. Of course we rage. Dubin also shares her own moments of rage, and the subsequent shame. I saw myself there, too—the electric limbs, the Nightbitch—but I knew how other mothers would react. I saw them on Goodreads, on Instagram, in the New Yorker’s review of the book: how could a mother act this way? It makes sense—mothering and caregiving are burdened by many of the same difficulties no matter who you are, but the web of experience is so unique it’s impossible to fully see yourself in other mothers. There were many other mothers who saw their rage in the book, too, many still who felt this rage unfathomable. They did not think Of course we rage. They thought, as I feared my daughter did: How could you?

Even with all these books, we are still circling the question of what to do with this rage. In the New Yorker’s review of Mom Rage, Merve Emre writes about Dubin, “She sensed that her reactions were excessive, but she made no real effort to understand. Understanding was not the point of her essay. The point was to unleash the primal scream of a mother who had regressed—spectacularly, obscenely—into a tantrumming child, not unlike the three-year-old who had spurred her rage in the first place.” When I raged, I threw things. I screamed. But inside, I felt older than ever. I did not feel like a child. The review is steeped in the kind of misogyny, infantilizing, and judgment that mothers and caregivers rage against. The review was clear: even in 2023, this is bad, monstrous, not allowed.

When I told a male friend about my anger—peripherally, for I chose not to share the whole truth—I told him how hard I worked to not yell at my daughter. He laughed. “I yell at my kids all the time,” he said, shrugging. I didn’t ask him if he feels shame about it. He doesn’t seem to, and I’m pretty sure I know the answer: no shame in yelling for many fathers.

Mom Rage was a candle held out—yes, thank god, it isn’t just me. But there was still too much of myself in the dark. I still didn’t yell at my daughter, or at my husband. After reading Mom Rage and the New Yorker review, I understood—there was no appropriate place for me to feel rage. Like Nightbitch, I feared I was bad at the core. I was not able to let myself be feral. I was not allowed to be angry. I was a bad mother if I was angry. With nowhere else to go, I turned my rage inward. I raged at myself.

In my post-rage, post self-harm shame, when my husband tried to help and understand me, I would often tell him I was a bad mom, a terrible mom. “Please get her a better mom,” I told him. “Send me away.” I said it as a way to punish myself further. The next two books I read played on that ultimate fear—that your child would be taken away from you. One of the mothers sharing their rage stories with Dubin for her Mom Rage interviews hesitated after Dubin’s question. She wanted to make sure Dubin was not going to take her child away. Early in my pregnancy, I’d listened to a story about a woman experiencing postpartum psychosis who was separated from her child in the earliest, most tender days. I didn’t think this was me, maybe, probably not, but the thought was there—what if?

Next I read Jessamine Chan’s 2022 The School for Good Mothers, a novel about a dystopian system for the punishment and “retraining” of mothers who have been, subjectively, bad. If they do not pass the tests at the end of their retraining, the mother (and a few fathers) have their custody revoked. I read it like it was true crime. When Frida, the main character, sees a therapist who makes her list her fears, the list is so large and random that it reveals nothing useful. Yes, I thought. And despite those fears, Frida makes the mistake of leaving her daughter alone for a few hours anyway. Agents from the school then install cameras in Frida’s home to monitor her behavior. She wonders how a mother separated from her child should behave, sit, eat. How often she should cry, rage. Social workers interview her, asking her a barrage of questions: 

“Frida’s motives. Her mental health. Whether she understands a parent’s fundamental responsibilities. Her concept of safety. Her standards of cleanliness. The social worker asked about Harriet’s diet. Frida’s refrigerator contained takeout boxes, some sweet potatoes, one package of celery, two apples, some peanut butter, some string cheese, some condiments. Only a day’s worth of milk. The cupboards were nearly empty. Why wasn’t she paying attention to Harriet’s nutrition?”

I recognized this voice, this surveillance over the thousands of decisions I made every day, how every decision seemed poised to shape my child forever, and mold me in the shape of “good mother” or “bad mother.” Yes, I heard the other mothers on Instagram, in the moms group, what Dubin calls a “cultural mandate to be hypervigilant” (39). But for me, that surveillance was internal. That questioner was myself. My fear and anxiety came from constantly surveilling myself against a standard built from a lifetime of absorbing the mothers around me, the mothers in pop culture, all of it. My own mother tells me, “You’ve always been a mommy, always taking care of other kids.” But I don’t remember this. I wonder if this is fiction, made to make me feel better. 

On some days, I thought the way Frida thinks about herself: that she’s not as bad as “those bad mothers” in the news, the ones who set their houses on fire, or leave their children on subway platforms, or strap their children into car seats then drive into a lake. While I read the scene where Frida’s daughter Harriet is taken from her arms, separated, likely forever, I cried enough for strangers to glance at me. My heart was in the story, but I was reading The School for Good Mothers on a beach in Mexico, celebrating my sister’s bachelorette party, thousands of miles away from my own daughter. I ordered another mimosa. I dried my tears. On my worst days, I thought: Maybe I am just as bad. If there was a real School, I belonged there. Not for retraining, but for punishment.

But there is no School. The world, as it is, trains and punishes mothers.

This is a love story—if you can believe it. After all that obsessive reading, all that punishment—I fell in love. I read Yael Goldstein-Love’s 2023 novel The Possibilities. In this novel, Hannah has an eight-month-old son, and she remembers two births: one, where he survived because she insisted on a C-section, and one where he did not. The intrusive thought of his tiny, lifeless arm stays in her mind, sticky in a way that makes her feel like she did actually see it happen, even with her living, breathing son right in front of her. She describes these moments as a “car-swerve feeling”: 

“Like when you have a near-miss on the road and seconds, minutes, maybe even hours later you’re still waiting to feel relieved not to have died in a fiery crash…Not because you aren’t grateful to have escaped. And not because you aren’t certain that you did, in fact, avoid becoming roadkill—you haven’t lost your mind. But, rather, because you feel in a deep, primal, hard-to-describe way that the crash came too close to occurring. Because it didn’t seem a simple yes or no in those car-swerve moments, did it? A simple it didn’t happen or it did? Instead it seemed, in those moments, that the way things could have gone had some lingering reality, some awful stickiness that clung now to the moments carrying you away from when you might have crashed but didn’t.”

Goldstein-Love captures the exact way my anxiety felt—the idea of a near miss. That even if something hadn’t actually happened to my daughter, that something else was bound to. And then, I understood my rage as a response to my powerlessness. My rage was a response to the avalanche of worry that you cannot help but absorb as a parent. As Goldstein-Love writes, after a while, I cannot take “The agonizing need to keep this someone safe, a need as bodily and insistent as hunger, thirst. But impossible to satisfy because, deep down, you knew that you were powerless: against accidents, disease, an active shooter. Against your baby disappearing from his crib without a trace. Surely every parent felt this. It was too much, the hugeness of what we’d opened ourselves up to. A child was too much to have at stake” (131). No matter how perfectly I loved my daughter, I could not protect her. This infuriated me. 

Because she saved him once, by insisting on a C-section, she wants to trust her fears, rather than push them away as irrational. Hannah feels like the only thing separating them from a different reality, a worse reality where her son died, is her. Her instincts had saved him; how could she ignore that twinge of worry? Many, many times I’d thought about bringing my daughter to the hospital, then thought irrational. Until the moment she had an allergic reaction severe enough to prescribe an epi-pen. That time, I knew to go to the hospital without hesitation. How could I talk myself out of fear, when it had protected my daughter when she needed it?

And then the character Hannah’s son starts disappearing. At first, just from Hannah’s view, and then from the world at large—Hannah’s therapist and her ex-husband also start to forget her son. Soon, Hannah discovers that her visions of her son’s death are not “just” hormonal, are not postpartum anxiety, but instead are real, happening to their child in a parallel reality. Both she and her estranged mother have the ability to see “the possibilities.” They have the ability to jump between them and protect their children in multiple realities. Hannah ultimately chooses to stay in her own reality, and to protect her child in the reality she knows, but that doesn’t make the other possibilities less real, or less powerful. 

So much of my life and my mothering has been denying my anxiety, denying my anger. Irrational; you worry too much; you can’t control it, so don’t worry about it; overactive imagination; mommy brain; just the hormones. Like Frida in The School for Good Mothers, my fears are boundless, but unlike Frida, they are not random. My fears aren’t of kidnappers, really, or Red Dye #40. They are of the things that can happen to children no matter what, even inside my own care. I fell in love with The Possibilities because, instead of telling myself my rage and anxiety were worthless, I now felt my worries did have power. My worry could bend time, reshape reality; my love could traverse a universe. My fears still arrive, urgent like Hannah’s, a feeling that there is something that I can fix, and that I must do it, “[l]ike a muscle memory of the mind” (101). But instead of shoving them away as irrational, I honor them. As if there is a reality in which they really could happen. That reality is this reality. Then, the rage goes away.

This doesn’t erase the very real dangers for women, caregivers, and children. This doesn’t erase the lack of mothercare in the United States. This doesn’t erase the paradox of having children: you spend your life trying to keep them safe and alive, and you will always fail. It’s telling that I found the most solace in a work of fiction, in a world that doesn’t exist. I always felt like I was missing a mother’s instinct. But perhaps this is my version of it. While I hope for and work toward the possibility for a world with fewer fears, and better care of children and caregivers, right now I honor my worries. For now, I will feel powerful in imagining all the possibilities. 

The post My Mom Rage Is a Response to the Avalanche of Worry That Comes With Parenting appeared first on Electric Literature.