In this book version, she includes her words, the “letters” from other well-known writers, as well as occasional “notes” that include suggestions displayed on an image of a spiral notebook page. There is a progression based on seasons, but the anthology is also what I think of as a writing table book, something to leave on your desk so that you can flip it open to find a burst of inspiration. 

Because 1000 Words includes Attenberg’s thoughts as well as the words of other successful authors from Alexander Chee to Mira Jacob and Elizabeth McCracken, it creates a sense of community—we’re all in this together trying to figure it out. Attenberg’s approach isn’t focused on prompts but instead employs a much more conversational style, discussing issues that her readers will confront as writers. Not only does she provide helpful insights, but she herself is a model to follow. Attenberg is a highly productive writer who has published six novels, a short story collection, essays, as well as a memoir, so who better to motivate other writers? In addition to the release of this book, her next novel, A Reason to See You Again, will be published later in the year.

Jami Attenberg and I recently spoke on Zoom about writing motivation, social media, and bringing people together.

Abby Manzella: I’ve been watching #1000wordsofsummer grow since I signed up in 2019, and I’m continually impressed with what you’ve been able to build both through social media and now with this book. For me, it was fun to read the book from start to finish to see the connections you were making between ideas, but there were points where I had to stop reading to write because what you were sharing was getting me to jot down ideas that wouldn’t wait. I know that the project began as some self-motivation and accountability, but what kept you going after it served that initial purpose for you?

Jami Attenberg: The first year everybody got so excited by it and really responded to it. Sometimes we just create jobs for ourselves. Sometimes we’re like, that is a thing that I could do—not a paid job, because that’s not what this is about—but it’s something where we can contribute and communicate and connect with people. It called on all the skills that I had, which is to reach out to people, be positive online, and access other people’s skills, too.

AM: Do you think that skill comes more from your article writing?

JA: I’m thinking more about the community aspect of it. I have this background where I worked as a producer for online projects. When I started out, it was like everyone else was the creative person and I managed them, managed their schedule, until I realized that I wanted to be my own creative person. I think there is something about me that has that capability of helping people make their art. That’s part of it, and I’ve been online; I’ve had a blog off and on, since the late ’90s, so talking to people online is something I feel comfortable with. 

AM: Since we’re living through an upheaval with social media, are you now thinking about engaging in those spaces differently?

JA: I’m finding that newsletters are actually an ok place to be. It was funny because it really started on Twitter—and a little bit on Instagram—but mainly on Twitter where the hashtag started. It was easier to find each other [then]. Everybody was still on it. Now people have gone to different places, but in terms of the literary world, it was a place. You’d have your morning coffee, get together, and chitchat, and then people would go about their day. Maybe they’d check in here or there. So, for me tweeting in the morning one day it sounded like a good idea, everyone chimed in. Now I feel like you can’t find people anymore. 

When I send out the newsletter people read it. It used to be that I had to post it on Twitter and then people would know about it and things could go viral in that way. I don’t want to say I don’t need other forms of social media because I’ll take whatever I can get; I have a book coming out. [Still, the newsletter] is pretty consistently read. I mean it’s not 100% read, but it’s like 50% or 60%. That’s a lot for almost 35,000 people signed up for it—consistently every week. Is that a brag? 

AM: No, it’s great. It makes me smile.

JA: It’s really nice.

AM: I was wondering at what point you figured out that 1000 Words was a book project? When did you decide you had to take it beyond the social media space and put it all together?

JA: It was a year ago summer, after I finished that round of #1000wordsofsummer, which would have been year five, and it felt big. We raised all this money for charity, and you could see the people on the Slack were doing it all times of day, meaning all over the world there was somebody who was writing and posting their word count. You could see people showing up, which was really cool, and I was like, is it a book? And then I thought, if it is a book, I need to figure it out now rather than later because if I write this book, I know I will have to keep doing #1000wordsofsummer for a while, so I was like, well let me think about it.

What happened was that I took all of the letters that had ever been written, I put them in by contributing authors, and I put them in a document. I needed to just read them all to see if something came out of this. I felt this surge of energy from it—not to be hippy dippy about it—but for real. Oh shit, there’s a lot going on here. All of these people have written books. All of these people have been through it, and they’re all telling me I can do it, and also they’re telling me that sometimes it’s hard to do it, and also that sometimes they feel like they can’t do it, but they have faith. There’s this incredible wave of energy that came off it, and I was like, man, I need to put these all in one place because it’s different reading them online than it would be reading it from cover to cover. But I thought, still, is it a book? I don’t want this to just be an anthology of these letters because I don’t think that’s enough. I felt like my voice needed to be a part of it, too. 

Those letters told me how to write the book because they weren’t all about the season of summer being wildly generative, because I could see all the struggles they had or different parts of their processes, and I knew what my different parts were too. Then I just thought it’s like all the seasons, and once that framework came into play, I was like, I think this would be a book. This would be worth my time; it would be worth the time of the people who would read it. You don’t want to just write something because you can. You want to write something because it really serves a purpose; it’s going to help people. 

AM: I think it’s interesting that you started with other people’s words instead of starting with the stuff that you had written first—that their words were the thing that made the project make sense to you. 

JA: Because I know how repetitive I am. I know what these letters are. Some weeks I’m like this feels fresh and brand new. Sometimes I’m hitting the same note again. I’m writing about revision again. I’m writing about how do you find the strength to finish a book again. But people reading it give it a different context. I could write about how to fine-tune and edit something and you could read it right now, but you’re just at the beginning of your project and it means absolutely nothing to you. Then, a year later, you’re revising and I write the same kind of thing and you’re like, it means something to me now. Anyway, I realized I had more to say about those other [aspects of the writing process].

AM: The blending of your thoughts with the other writers works well. The one letter that’s in my head right now is the piece by Kiese Laymon where he really took that call of the letter approach very seriously, so you feel both the publicness but also the intimacy that’s in that space. 

The other thing that piece reminded me of was the strange question of when to acknowledge COVID on the page. What are your thoughts on this issue because, while so much of the initial writing overlapped with COVID, it will now be in an anthology that will hopefully last long after this moment?

JA: I think we want to honor that because it’s like a time capsule. There were plenty that I didn’t include, but the ones that I did were really potent and still really make me think about it. The real point is that this dynamic of something bad happening in the world isn’t going away. There are always these dramatic dynamics that are impacting our attention spans, our souls, our lives, and our schedules. Figuring out where to put all that and manage all of that and still have the time and headspace for writing is why I thought it was important to include that part of the conversation. There’s always a reason not to write, unfortunately.

AM: As someone who happily has spent time in New York and now in Missouri, I was wondering about your transplanting to New Orleans from New York and how that has related to your creativity. How has that changed you?

JA: I’m glad I had my time in New York, too. I’m probably going to write about it. I don’t think I’ve talked about it in an interview yet. I don’t think I would have started this [project] in New York. I think I had to move to New Orleans to start something like this. I think that my relationship with the idea of community intensified when I moved to New Orleans, and I had a little bit more time on my hands, and life is easier here than it is in a big city like that, and so I kind of evolved into the person who could create this thing.  There’s something about this city being so much about community that opened me more up to it, but that said, I used to have a reading series in New York on the roof of my house. As Emily Flake said to me, that was the beginning of #1000wordsofsummer, you just didn’t really know it yet. 

I’ve always enjoyed bringing people together and watching what will happen. I really enjoy that dynamic. Writing is so cool, and writers are weirdos; they’re wonderful and they’re my people. It’s just very fun to make things happen. I talked to someone today who started a book during #1000wordsofsummer, and he just sold it. It was really validating for me. People who I don’t even know thank me in the acknowledgements of their books, which is totally wild. It’s so cool. 

AM: To conclude, what is the future of 1000 Words? One of the things I’m seeing from your tour schedule is your plan for write-alongs. Do you have anything to say about what that’s going to look like for the future? 

JA: One of the reasons why I started doing the newsletter year-round was because I felt like I had all this information that I wanted to share, and I’d seen so much good stuff come out of #1000wordsofsummer that I felt like I wanted to give it to people for free. Because I don’t have an MFA, there was a time when I felt like [the literary world] was only accessible to those people. The goal is to create events that are accessible to people where they can feel comfortable. 

I think the write-alongs are going to be me talking really briefly about the project, a writing prompt, and then maybe us all hanging out together. I don’t know, but I feel really positive about it. It can be whatever makes sense. It can helpful. It has to be accessible. I want to create something that invites people in as opposed to keeping people out. 

AM: Whatever it becomes, I look forward to see it, and I know that such interactive space is what people are certainly craving.

JA: My greatest wish for this book is that it will sell for a long time, and it will be meaningful for people. It doesn’t have to be a bestseller; I just want people to love it and get something out of it. That’s the most you can hope for. 

I’m excited for people to read it. It’s a simple motivational book. It has a lot of smart people and that’s what’s exciting for me.

The post Building a Writing Community On and Off the Internet appeared first on Electric Literature.

They are potent calls both inward and outward, weaving between the many textures of pleasure and rage. Brookins cruises through a range of registers, speaking directly and lyrically about harm and resistance. Everything is fair game: Will Smith’s slapping of Chris Rock, revelations about being read as male, an imagined Black future with comfort, care, and ease. 

This book is a container for the multitudinous sides of a complex voice, bringing the reader into a home where a Black trans poet’s self, along with their legacies and visions of the future, is able to unfurl. 

Joss Lake: What are the essential components of building a “freedom house” in your work and in the world?

 KB Brookins: A lot of the poems are about my personal journeys with things like masculinity. And transitioning is really important to me to be like an invisible trans person right now, because nationwide we’re a lot of places. 44 out of 50 states have at least one piece of legislation that they’re totally advanced this year that is anti-trans in nature. So it’s a lot of misinformation, a lot of people being fearful of what they don’t actually understand. I talk a lot about my personal experience as a Black trans person living in Texas, living in the United States, North America in general, and being trans, and what that feels like right now and how because we live in such a place that really discourages people from being who they are.

So it starts personal: Who are you and how much of you is influenced by what you’ve been told versus who you actually are? And then I think it’s interpersonal, like how we treat each other. You have to [think about that] before you can say “abolish the police”, for example. You actually have to be practicing that principle in your everyday life, like how you treat yourself and also how you treat others. And how do you get through things like conflict; how do you show up in romantic or physical encounters. Those are questions that I was thinking through and writing through in the book. 

And then, of course, there are the circumstances in which we live in on a national and global scale that are unnatural. It is unnatural for the climate to be changing at the rate that it is changing. And whether you live or die every day comes down to your race. It’s very unnatural for people to be so invested in things that at the end of the day don’t bother anybody, like someone being trans, like someone being queer. And it’s also just unnatural to have police and militant people who carry guns around. And it’s unnatural to have the law dictate things like putting the Ten Commandments up on every school in a state, which is an actual piece of legislation that’s trying to be passed in my state. I want to talk about these things very clearly, and I find poetry to be the best medium in which I can talk about them. Because poetry makes space for audaciousness and makes space for exploring things, maybe, in a way like you and me are talking right now. So I’m using things like metaphor, I’m using things like simile, I’m using things like repetition in rhyme and even form, ripping off the form of the curriculum vitae or ripping off the form of a legal document in order to have a conversation with a reader.

JL: A really beautiful aspect of this book is that we can move through these different layers and it doesn’t feel like anything is left out. I’m curious about how you went about organizing this vast container. How did you decide on the architecture?

KB: Let’s say, a bedroom space in which you’re having more sensitive things that you may not have in an open space, like a kitchen. You walk into someone’s house and then they’ll say like, oh, you got to take your shoes off. Or like, here’s the chandelier and here’s how the kitchen is. I was using that section as an orienting space, introducing some of the themes that will be constant throughout the book. I was thinking of bedroom spaces not necessarily where the more internal dialogue poems happen, but maybe more of those [dialogues] are in the kitchen. A lot of intense intergenerational conversations happen at the kitchen table in my family. So I was really thinking: how do those rooms function in a house and how can I display that through the poems that are in those sections?

JL: I was struck how, in another interview, you were naming the trees in your neighborhood and talking about how you commune with them. How did you come to sort of know the names of the trees and plants around you? I’ve been thinking about how we’ve lost touch with our surroundings.  

KB: If I was to make my KB school, it would definitely be a class there in which you just learn about your local environment. People think that being vegan will save the world, right? But I think actually eating local, would eliminate a lot of the carbon footprint. And most people live in a place in which they can forage in their local area. It’s really important to be in tune with what is happening around you naturewise. We owe it to the things that live that are not just human, to care for and be in communion with those things. Growing up there’s an element of nature where I think a lot about: time and who has the actual time to be outside versus who doesn’t. When I was growing up, when people would be so “pro-nature,” they would always be white, right? So I would just be like, “That’s some white shit.” And then I realize—as I grow up and learn more about the environment and about the history of environmental racism—this is very ingrained in non-white folks, that nature is not for us. 

There never was a time when I was growing up where at a certain time in the year my family didn’t go and take pecans from a pecan tree. And we always had these big bags of pecans that we picked from a specific area. And also my family went to this big family reunion every year in Waco, Texas, and I saw all these different kinds of trees and the elders that lived in that area knew what those trees were.I was always given little bits of nature. 

Then I got older and people have their section of gays, right? The “artsy gays”, the “theatre gays,” and when I moved to Austin, somehow, I got enveloped into the “nature gays.” My fiancé used to be an environmental educator and one way I got oriented here was walking around the neighborhood and her being able to name every tree. I learned a lot about my local landscape from her and other people who are invested in keeping that knowledge alive. 

JL: Are there ways that you help yourself refocus on your intended audience and away from an oppressive white gaze, or is that naturally happening for you?

 KB: In the late 2010s, all of a sudden, people were paying attention to writers of color. And the things that people were gravitating towards were always about Black abjection or like some person of color talking about their trauma and the trauma of their experience of being whatever race it was that they were. And it was just interesting because the assumed audience would always be white people that didn’t understand where they were coming from. And I wonder where that impulse came from. I found myself, once I started taking myself more seriously as a writer, when I started getting critiques, it’d be like, “I don’t understand it. So you should change it.” What is this assumption that like I could be reading Walt Whitman and you love him and you don’t want him to explain things, but you want me to explain things. We’re reading Robert Frost and John Ashbery, which are not easy reads. Robert Frost is like “Great monolithic knees.” And you’re like, “I can work with that.” That doesn’t make sense. You’re cool with that and you’re cool with figuring that out in class, but you’re not cool with me, making a reference to my hometown that people who I’m actually writing this for will understand? And people don’t have to be from my hometown to understand some of these things because Google is free, right? If you really want to know, you could just Google it. And that’s what I do when I come across texts that I don’t understand,  I just Google it, right? So or use context, close textual contextual observations. We learn that in close reading, right? But there’s an expectation in which writers of color just hand-hold and write for people that are not themselves and that aren’t in their communities.

JL: Can you talk more about this impulse to include so many different textures and layers of existence. We experience this  sense of self in such a vast and almost  encyclopedic way. Can you talk about the impulse to pull everything into your work?

KB: If I’m going to address a subject matter so large and also so mulled over as freedom, I have to bring in everything, right? And if I’m going to take it from a three-pronged lens of personal, interpersonal, systemic, I have to bring in all of the things that that might include. I’m talking about race. I’m also talking about gender and sexuality, because that’s my existence, right? We can’t really escape our context. Even if I was to write like a sci-fi book, those things would still come in. And then also talking about disability and trying to develop a speaker, I’m like, okay, is it autobiographical? Is it not? That’s kind of up to you to decide, right? It had to be like a book with a very large view. And then also, that’s just how my mind works and how these large concepts like racism work—it’s permeated within the books we pick up and don’t pick up. They get made and don’t get made. And in the environment that we see or don’t see and the interactions that we can and can’t have.

It made sense to riff off of forms. When approaching things like a CV, I’m like, “Well, what if we were really honest about what that experience at that one random nonprofit that we worked at was. What if we were more serious about and honest about what it means to be  a worker or a laborer in today’s late stage capitalism and also, what are those hidden labors?” At the end of the day, our work is emotional labor and the labor of “I just found out that someone that looks exactly like me, died in another place due to police violence. And I’m still clocked in and I still have to be clocked in.” Those large things that feel small in the moment that we have to put up with in order to continue on. Because we live in such a place where you have to prove your housing or you have to earn things like water and all of the things that we actually need to live, we have to work for and like. If I want to talk about that, why wouldn’t I literally just put it in a CV, right? Mission accomplished. 

JL: You write in “T Shot # 4,” “I want the black boy in need to be a river you can’t name even if you send sounds underwater.” Can you talk about the freedom that that can be found in illegibility or if you have a different way of relating to that particular line? 

 KB: I didn’t feel tapped into what a Black boy or Black man’s experience might be until I started transitioning. For Black men and for people who are perceived as Black men like me, there is this hyper visibility. There is a large history of a weird relationship with wanting to emulate whatever that we’ve learned through colonialism. And then there’s also this hyper visibility of everyone [outside of your community] seeing you either as a fetish or a threat. 

This is the conversation on TikTok and Twitter where people are stealing from Black culture and not citing Black people, but making money based off of things like AAVE,  Black food that started in African and Black American traditions and, slang. It’s “Twitter” slang now or “Internet” slang. But no, it’s specifically AAVE and you just took it, right? And then when it really comes down to it, you know, that white rapper or that white lady singing like Drake rap lyrics doesn’t actually want the experience of Blackness. Because the experience of Blackness comes with a lot of negativity due to other people’s perceptions due to hyper visibility. I find freedom in the idea of not feeling like you’ve got to be hyperexposed all the time and having a sense of self for Black men and Black people, which is not so corroded with other people’s ideas of who you are and not so accessible for other people to steal and pathologize. That’s happened a lot. 

Science has a very fraught relationship with Black people and we see that still negatively impacting the way Black people maneuver the health care system and other spaces. At the end of the day, Black men die at very early ages compared to pretty much every other demographic in the U.S. I was thinking about how the perception of me changing has led to some very interesting scenarios, mostly where I think that me not being completely happy, completely chipper is seen as me being aggressive. And I want to aspire in this poem to feel like you can be something that you don’t have to explain or display. 

The post The Fight for Freedom Starts With How We Treat Ourselves and Others appeared first on Electric Literature.

Though named after Liontas’ widely praised essay of the same name, the memoir never falls into the easy groove of being a book centered around a single successful idea, and resists plot summary. Using interviews with their wife, an innovative collaboration with a previously incarcerated writer, research, reportage, erasure/redaction, and song lyrics, it’s the kind of book that, when one is done, you turn over in your hands asking, how did they do that? 

Though Liontas and I are friends and neighbors in West Philadelphia, we crafted this interview together in a digital format, which allowed for a pleasant and plaintive evolution of ideas, for me to respond to Liontas’ periodic parenthetical apologies—“brain a little slow”—with explanation points and my own updates that I, in a place of grief after just losing my father, was inspired to listen—playing it loud in my office as we typed back and forth to each other—to the absolute banger that is Bruce Springsteen’s “Dancing in the Dark.”  

Emma Copley Eisenberg: Annie, you are a novelist and now you are an essayist too. What is an essay to you?

Annie Liontas: I’m thinking about Alexander Chee’s quote, “A story is something you want to run away with, an essay is something you can’t run away from.” I love your question, because we don’t really know what an essay is—is it an argument, is it about perspective, is it about making meaning through reflection—but Chee’s assertion really gets at something for me. I wasn’t consciously building a collection or memoir-in-essays when I first started, but I pretty quickly realized that this work had to be nonfiction. All of the stories we have of head injury are fiction (even when they’re not), because we don’t have the cultural framework to talk about them the way we do addiction or smoking. 

We’ve known since the Egyptians and Greeks what head injury does to the body and person, but we forget what we’ve learned, or we suppress the knowledge through powerful entities like the NFL—and that means the culture hasn’t yet had the chance to masticate and process the knowledge, or change public policy. I felt that I needed to keep asking these questions, and turning the thing on all of its faces to do it any justice. I also hold onto what Annie Dillard says about how an essay is a moral exercise that involves engagement in the unknown, that it can be about civilization but at the end of the day, what matters in this is you.  

ECE: I am always telling my students the formal choices you make in an essay will inevitably be connected to what the essay is about. I also went to a talk where Rebecca Makkai said that in every project she’s done, she’s never solved a major problem by writing around it, only by bringing it to the center. How did you think about the problem of writing about head injury/TBI in the ways it “makes things fiction” or destabilizes things? 

AL: I would have done the book—and, by extension, the millions of “walking wounded,” as survivors of TBI are called—a great disservice if I had not confronted the bodily experience of injury. The condition is really one of erasure, because it’s not a visible condition, and therefore often dismissed or disbelieved by our highest medical and legal institutions. Paul Lisicky calls it getting blood onto the page, and each time I sat down to a new chapter, I asked myself: what is happening to a body in pain? How can I more precisely capture the physical? How can I, even when I’m writing about anger and Henry VIII or Abraham Lincoln and depression or Lady Gaga, or whatever, honor what people are going through and have been going through invisibly, and sometimes for years. So I think it was mostly a gut check about being honest, and direct, and grounding the abstract and the intellectual in the felt experience.

ECE: That makes a deep kind of sense that you were trying (and succeeding) to render the bodily and physical experience because there is something absent or erased at the very core of what you’re trying to say. That does make me think of the erasure essays—there’s three I believe—in which you interview your wife, as well as some of the other craft risks you take in the book—post it chapters, super short chapters, a co-written essay, research and reporting. Were these craft choices a part of your vision or responses to problems/impasses you hit with more traditional forms of narrative? Were there other craft things you tried that you ultimately discarded?

AL: Those erasure essays were a huge risk! I had to be like: “Babe, can I interview you about the worst period of our lives and then let strangers read it?” Lol. In actuality, S and I had a series of recorded conversations, and then I gave her the transcript and a sharpie and said, cross out what you don’t want published. It was an opportunity to extend conversations we were having in our private life and marriage, but also a way to honor and recognize that, while the multiple concussions was an experience I was isolated inside of, I wasn’t the only one being impacted. She was—is—too.  I thought of all the partners and family members and best friends out there similarly suffering silently, and knew that I had to get outside of my own voice and experience. And traditional form didn’t allow for that. I had to invite other voices in. So, yes, while it wasn’t my initial vision, these craft choices are seeking to offer dynamic responses to a set of fairly unanswerable questions. As you note, I do have a collaborative essay in here, one that started as a profile, and I include other testimonies as well–people I’ve met with head injuries, for instance. The work had to expand to ensure they were all heard.

ECE: I loved “Professor X,” the collaborative essay about head injury and legal reform and the implications head injuries have as predictors for future incarceration. You said this began as a profile, can you tell us more about how this essay came to be and what it was like to write collaboratively?

AL: Thanks for asking—this piece is perhaps the most important to me because of the stakes and what it’s trying to do, and the impact it seeks to make in the world. When I was researching discrepancies in the criminal justice system and our treatment of incarcerated people with TBI, I was stunned to learn that people who are in prison are seven times more likely to get a head injury before they ever step inside a cell. You imagine that number will be high, but seven times? It’s a reminder that we incarcerate sickness, as my co-author Marchell Taylor often says. I reached out to Dr. Kim Gorgens, who is doing incredible research about TBI and the prison system—her current staggering data suggests that 97% of repeat female offenders had a head injury in the last year—and Kim connected me to Marchell, a Denver businessman and former inmate-turned-advocate. I thought I was going to write this very distanced, researched profile on Marchell, but we very quickly got close. We became friends, and the process became far more organic than simple interview. We spent hours on Zoom, during which he shared his story through oration, and then I’d work the thing into written text, and we’d go back and forth. It took many months, lots of chats and texts, and eventually some kind of barrier between us fell and we were seeing each other in our suffering. Marchell’s gift is empathy, and connecting with people, and so even though I really wanted this to be about him, he pushed me to engage more deeply, and we decided this had to be a collaboration.  

ECE: That’s so beautiful and speaks to your skill as an interviewer, a curious person excited to look outwards and render what’s going on in the wider landscape of TBI as well as look inward and interrogate what’s going on in on the level of the interior, the personal. One of the essays that especially stayed with me was “Dancing in the Dark,” about your mother and her queerness and her addiction. On the surface this one isn’t as explicitly connected to the theme of TBI and invisible injury, how do you see this one fitting within the broader things you care about in this book?

AL: “Dancing in the Dark,” at its heart, is about me grappling after forty years with my mother’s addiction and queerness. She was an immigrant who was conscripted into an arranged marriage, and while I always had sympathy for her, I think I reacted the way that many children of addicts do, which is to resist the experience and even the narrative—to say, That’s not me.  What I understood—as a queer person dealing with a chronic condition and post-concussive syndrome—was how invisible her suffering had been. I had to reckon with that, and admit my own culpability in being willfully blind. Then I learned that scientists are discovering addiction and head trauma look similar in the brain. That is, damage is damage. I was floored by this. Suddenly, my mother’s experience and my own were not very far apart, and I had to ask myself what it must have been like for her to suffer unseen.  

ECE: You write, “Never marry a writer, they live two truths at once, both the story they tell and its revision.” There’s a lot in this book about lies, doubt, duplicity, and storytelling. I was lucky enough to be on a panel with you last year at AWP called “Hide and Seek.” There is a sense of duplicity and hiding and seeking in this book in the best way. Why was it so important to you to write explicitly about lies and doubt?

AL: A couple of the pieces interrogate the relationship between our public and private selves, and how we must navigate those selves in a capitalist country that demands our full and complete participation: that is, we must at all times create an illusion of wellness and vigor, even when we aren’t well, even when it’s impossible to get out of bed. I had been taught those values, too, as an immigrant from Greece. My father was a welder, my parents were illiterate grape farmers, and no matter what was going on at home—the family, the body—you had to get up and work and produce. I think this was also the kind of erasure I was resisting with essays like “Doubt, My Love,” the fiction of the perceived self that is in service of others even when it comes at great cost. We occupy those false selves even in our most intimate relationships—marriage, for instance—because the borders bleed, and after years of training it can become almost impossible to locate the authentic self. Then one day you wake up and think, Why doesn’t anybody see me?

Most people going through TBI, especially women and people of color, are not believed. Outside of the NFL and sports, we have a very limited lexicon and almost no mental image of what “concussion” means. For instance, girls who play soccer are twice as likely as boys to get head injuries, yet we rarely discuss that. The female body is more vulnerable to concussion, and to post-concussive disorder, but we don’t talk about that, either. Instead, the medical profession and culture seem to trace this back to hysteria, calling it psychosomatic, and dismissing peoples’ actual experiences.

ECE: There’s also a great deal about other kinds of art and creativity other than writing in this collection. We get Bruce Springsteen, we get dancing (a lot of dancing!!), we get your wife the architect, we get riding a bike and a list of song titles. Is there a way in which this book is about art as an enterprise or about how brain injury impacts being a maker and receiver of good art?

AL: Yes a lot of dancing!  Where I’m from, we call it “Church”! I’m drawn to all kinds of art, as I think most artists are, so even if this weren’t about brain injury, it would have been hard to keep art out of these pages, and how it gives us our humanity.  But perhaps the inclusion of the Springsteen lyrics and these other artifacts serves as a tool to further capture the experience of injury and dislocation. On my worst days, I couldn’t listen to music, or exercise, or watch TV, or read. But on the ok days, even when I knew tomorrow was probably going to suck, I could listen to “Dancing in the Dark” and take a walk and feel like some part of me was still alive. Art, even when you’re broken, can make you feel whole.

The post Annie Liontas on “Sex With a Brain Injury” appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel opens with Marley, the wife every man wants, coaching her son’s little league team, while her husband, Waylon, hides beneath the bleachers for reasons yet unknown. The story then thrusts readers back in time, to the fateful day when Marley and her mother, Ruth, rode into town one summer afternoon and changed everything.

While the jagged edges of Marley initially seem like they might not fit into the small town of Mercury, the orbit of the Joseph family is strong enough to pull her in anyway. It soon becomes clear just how much the family was needing her when nearly every Joseph member is impacted by Marley’s sudden arrival. Spanning nine equally heart-warming and heart-breaking years, Marley and the family endure love and loss, desire and betrayal, secrets and celebrations as they try to navigate the unique demands of a family business and a working-class life.

While the story revolves around a murder mystery, after a shocking discovery is made in a local church attic, the pulse of the novel stays with the Joseph family itself. The town of Mercury, based on a real town by the same name, also acts as its own character throughout the novel. Having grown up in a similar once-industrial town in western Pennslyvania, like Burns herself, I was excited to connect and discuss her latest work.

I spoke with Amy Jo Burns over Zoom to discuss working-class family dynamics, the real cost of a family business, what legacy means for women, being the author of your own story, making peace with the past, and much more.

Sam Dilling: Mercury takes place in a small working-class industrial town in Pennsylvania and centers a dynamic family of roofers—the Joseph family. Where did the idea for this book come from and what was the experience of writing it like?

Amy Jo Burns: I come from a roofing family—my dad, my brother, my uncles, my dad’s best friend, my grandfather. I learned how to tell stories from them. They are fantastic storytellers. They’re so funny. They have a real sense of timing and surprise and how to land a punch line.

In terms of what inspired me, I had been working on a separate project for a long, long time and I had to put it aside. I really love to write about my hometown. I don’t know if you feel that way. I find it endlessly inspiring, beautiful, problematic, romantic, and haunting. All of it. So I sat down and I did a writing exercise. It was from this memory I had of being nine years old at the Little League baseball field. There was a man smoking a cigarette behind the bleachers. He said to my mom, “Please don’t tell my wife.” I always remember that. I thought it would be fun to freewrite who that person might be and what led them back there. It was interesting because as soon as I started writing, it all just tumbled out. I said he’s a roofer. He’s got this wife he really loves, but he’s not sure she loves him back anymore. Why would that be?

SD: The family orbits around the business—like it has its own center of gravity. And at times, the lines between the family and the business blur. The business acts as a proxy for the love the family shows each other. And that might sound bad—but that’s just the way of life. When you’re from a working-class family, the dynamics of work or the family business are going to influence the family itself.

AJB: It’s one of those things where I’ve left, but I don’t think that part left me. It’s a double-edged sword for me. When I think about my family, or my dad in particular, running the business like he did—never really taking vacations or days off. I see somebody who is so passionate about what he does. And so artistic, and so dedicated. I find that to be extremely beautiful that he put his unique mark on everything he did. I think that’s something my brother, my sister, and I all do in our own ways. I’m really thankful for that. I feel like that’s become an important part of who I am. But the other side of it is I don’t really know how to take breaks. I’m not very good at that at all. I hope that’s changing. When you own your own business—it’s not a job, it’s who you are. It’s kind of how I feel about being a writer. It’s why I always feel weird when I tell people it’s my job. It feels like it’s more than that and also less than that.

SD: One thing I appreciate, having also come from a working-class family and background, is the spotlight you put on the women in the story. What was important for you to showcase about these women?

AJB: Before I started writing the book, I was thinking a lot about blue-collar women. In my experience, many women who might be considered “blue collar” are women who are entrepreneurs just like their husbands. The difference is they don’t get titles, they don’t get paychecks. That’s the mindset of these women that I grew up with. They don’t even realize how hard it is because they don’t have an expectation that there could be another reality. They are the bookkeeper and they are watching the children and they’re cleaning the house and they’re cooking. These women really make the impossible possible. At least that’s what I witnessed growing up in my mom and my aunts. They don’t complain.

I wanted to show what it looks like when a woman jumps into that with two feet. I also wanted to show what it might be like when a woman says no to that, which is what Elise did. She said no to the business side, but was very entrenched in the family. These women— Ruth, Marley, Elise, Jade—they’re all in a situation where they don’t have that many choices. They’re each taking a different path. It’s not that one is better than the other, but everybody is trying to make their way. I wanted them to still have a real journey and have real pride in what they do. I wanted to talk about the women I know. Women really make it happen.

SD: When talking about family and business, the idea of legacy comes to mind. The Joseph family business very much becomes the legacy for the men in the story, and we get to see how each son feels about this being their legacy, but what about for the women? How do we define a woman’s legacy?

AJB: I think it comes through the paths they are creating for their own children. That was big for Ruth, who is the single mother. She wanted to create a world for her daughter that didn’t have so many stop signs wherever she went. I think for Marley, when she becomes a mother, she wants to teach her son how to be a good life partner. She wants to teach her daughter that she can take chances. I think that’s one piece of what legacy means is they try to give their kids some options they didn’t have.

I also think there’s something about having a legacy of when you say enough is enough. Sometimes that might end up meaning something becomes invisible. For a lot of these women, much of what they do is invisible anyway. All of these women get to a point where they say no. There’s something really powerful about a woman who says yes, and yes, and yes, and then says, “Enough is enough.” Those are quiet moments that don’t get told at Thanksgiving or Christmas. I honestly think family survival depends on that—when [women] say enough is enough. It’s kind of the opposite of the way we think of legacy, but I think it’s very powerful.

SD: Seeing that on the page is almost revolutionary considering the roles women have had to take on, and fit themselves into, for the sake of family.

AJB: One thing that was important to me was I didn’t want to make these women into cautionary tales because I feel like so often, when we are looking for a lesson, the woman becomes collateral damage. I think there is some balance between saying the right “no” at the right time and finding a voice. There’s a cascading cost that comes through generations when a woman doesn’t have a choice. It’s not just the women that it punishes. It punishes the men, too. There’s real value in a woman being able to tell her story—especially to her life partner, her spouse, her kids, and to herself. I think that’s something Marley is trying to do. She’s trying to be the author of her own story in a way that allows other people in, but she’s still the head of it. That’s something I think Elise was never able to allow herself to do. The more a woman is able to share what her life has been is a very powerful thing for the rest of the family to grapple with.

SD: Putting that into practice is a whole different beast. There is a reason so many women aren’t afforded that freedom to carve out their own place or their own story. There are so many systems in place that keep a woman stuck right where she is—that make it difficult for her to rise above her situation. Like in Mercury, when we see a young woman get pregnant and suddenly have fewer options for her own life and future.

AJB: There’s a cost that comes with leaning in. If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, and you’re going to have a career, you either gotta have a best friend or mother-in-law to help you. Or you’re gonna have to pay somebody because time and energy are finite. As much as we want to say [women] are superhuman, they’re not. We’re human. And that’s a good thing.

I am somebody that tries to do it all and then I fail at it. Anytime somebody asks me what it’s like to have this life, the first thing I say is, “Let me tell you everything that I’m not doing.” I am not cooking super creative meals, I am not scrubbing the baseboards of my house, I am not signing up to be a classroom mom. Even as I’m saying this to you, that guilt is streaking down my face. There’s something that’s ingrained in us that says we should be able to do it all. I really don’t think anyone can. I think there’s always something that pays a price. Sometimes it’s our bodies, our relationships. Maybe it is the state of my bathroom right now.

I think, at least for writers, we have to hold and guard that humanity with everything we have. And sometimes that means saying, “I’m really tired, and there’s Paw Patrol, kids.” I do think there’s something about the women that I watched growing up that didn’t expect any different because they had just never seen it. I grew up thinking, “Oh my goodness, these people are superhuman.” What you see and what the reality is are two different things.

SD: It’s interesting because men never seem to feel the need to qualify the things they’re not doing, or the things they’re not doing well. But for women, it’s like we owe the world an explanation for why we can’t magically do it all.

AJB: I would hate to have an interaction with somebody and have them leave feeling they’re missing something important because I just don’t think that’s true. You know, I’m an Enneagram Four. I don’t know if you’re into that. Fours feel like they’ve been born missing some key part of what it means to be okay in life. You’re kind of walking around looking for it. So it’s important to me, if somebody’s like, “Well, how do you do it?” I like to qualify and say, “Whatever you think I’m doing, I’m probably not.” But you’re right, men don’t do that. Men say, “Oh, yeah, I did it.”

SD: It brings me back to that idea of legacy, and even more than that, strength. How does strength look different for men and women?

AJB: When I was writing, I did think about that concept a lot. Especially since roofing is such a stereotypically macho thing to do. You have to be physically strong to be able to do this job. It’s very demanding, it’s dangerous. I think the flip side is that a lot of these characters who are very physically strong are emotionally fragile. I think that is a very authentic and very interesting paradox that exists in a lot of places.

One of the reasons I wrote the youngest brother, Shay, the way I did is that, to me, he is the picture of strength. He is somebody who doesn’t want to fit in this mold and he’s trying to be honest about it. He offers up a perspective that says, “If you do not have a sense of integrity in yourself, then what are we even doing?” He’s really wrestling with: what does it mean to be somebody who is strong? I think where he lands is it means that sometimes you’re weak. And that’s important. It’s important to let people know that you’re not perfect. He represents somebody who doesn’t fit all of these preconceived notions of what it might mean to be a roofer’s son. And yet, he is the beating heart of the book.

SD: We get a glimpse of Marley’s life two years into the future. But let’s say Marley looks back at her life 20 years from now. What does she think?

AJB: I think she is going to be glad she fought the battles that she fought. I think she’s going to look back and see that all those times where she said “no,” or she drew a line in the sand, or she left, she will see all the fruit that came from that hard choice.

Again, it’s not perfect. She apologizes for the mistakes and the things that she maybe got wrong, but there was something really healthy and life-giving in making those hard calls. I hope she feels proud of what she’s built in her business and her expertise.

There’s something really nice about being older and looking back. You can have compassion on your younger self that you didn’t have for yourself at the time.

SD: Do you look back on your own life and feel the same?

AJB: I do. I think sometimes when you’re in it, you can’t see all the pressure that you’re under. You only feel it. Then when you get older, and you look back, you think, “Oh my goodness, look at everything that young person was dealing with.” And they’re doing it. So, absolutely. You give up expecting yourself to be perfect which is a real gift.

The post The Real Cost of a Family Business appeared first on Electric Literature.

That is part of why journalist Nathan Thrall, whose earlier work with the International Crisis Group led him to write deeply researched articles on Israel-Palestine, zoomed in not just on a few characters, but one particular man: Abed Salama. In Thrall’s new book, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, he paints a picture of the modern West Bank, divided by both political and concrete walls. Salama’s son was the victim of a catastrophic 2012 school bus crash that left some fifty kindergartners engulfed in flames as desperate onlookers pleaded for Israeli emergency services to rescue the children. 

Thrall weaves together the story of several lives, each broken up by physical and social lines, and living in the shadow of tragedy and Israel’s military occupation. Thrall also faced his own challenges as he began his book tour, where he faced event cancellations, as many voices critical of Israel experienced as the war began.

I talked with Thrall about life on the other side of the wall, what this tragedy represents for Palestinians, and how this book’s story illuminates larger themes of Palestinian displacement, fragmentation, and mourning.

Shane Burley: Tell me who Abed Salma is, where you encountered this story, and why you wanted to write this book?

Nathan Thrall: Before there was the story of Abed Salama, there was the story of this accident. I live two miles from the walled enclave where the students who were on the school bus lived. In my daily life, I would pass by this walled ghetto without paying it any mind. After the accident, though, I couldn’t stop thinking of the parents and children and teachers involved. Most of them are residents of Jerusalem, people who share this same city with me but live a radically different existence. A separate and unequal existence. They live on the other side of a 26-foot-tall concrete wall and face the worst consequences of an Israeli policy of deliberate neglect. The Palestinian Authority is not allowed to come into the area in which they live, and Israel basically doesn’t go in except as a policing force. The accident was the embodiment of this policy of utter neglect of more than one hundred thousand people. 

I tried to find anyone I could who was connected to the accident. Emergency service providers, doctors, social workers, parents, teachers. A family friend told me that she was distantly related to one of the parents of the kids on the bus, and that turned out to be Abed. I drove through the checkpoint, passed to the other side of the wall, and found myself in Abed’s home. He told me his story, not just about the twenty-four hours of his life where he was searching for his son, but also his personal and family history, the story of his activism in the First Intifada, of his first love, of his arrest and torture. And I realized that, through Abed, I could tell the story of Israel-Palestine.

SB: When I was reading the book, I kept thinking about this 1952 book about the Warsaw Ghetto called The Wall. That book describes the escalating trauma of living in the ghetto, but amongst the dozens of intimate character portraits there is one character the narrative all centers on: the wall that surrounds the ghetto. And I felt like in A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, the partition wall that separates the occupied West Bank from Israel is a sort of character in this story. What role does this wall play in people’s lives in the West Bank, and how is it a part of this particular story?

NT: I’m really glad to hear you say that because the wall is its own section of the book. It’s really the only section of the book that’s not centered on a particular person affected by the tragedy. That section goes into the story of an IDF Colonel, Dany Tirza, who was the wall’s chief architect. The wall had to be a central character in this story because it dictated so much of what happened on that day. It determines so much of these people’s lives. They’re surrounded entirely by walls. They have, on three sides, a 26 foot tall, concrete wall and on a fourth side a different kind of wall that runs through a segregated road, Route 4370, famously known as the “apartheid road.” 

The enclosure of what is today around 130,000 people in the town of Anata and the Shu’afat refugee camp is the central element in their lives, separating them from their schools and health care providers and higher paying jobs in Jerusalem. The wall meant that parents who wanted to send their kids to the Jerusalem schools on the other side of it had to weigh whether it was worth the risk of their children passing through a checkpoint every morning and afternoon and being confronted by Israeli security forces. Many parents didn’t want to take that risk and chose instead to put their children in a West Bank school, a private school, to avoid Israeli soldiers.  

So the wall was important to me, not only in describing how these people live, but also why they’re circumscribed and why the wall was routed in the way that it was. The architect of the wall describes exactly the logic of how he routed it in Jerusalem and around Anata, explaining why he chose not to follow the Jerusalem municipal boundary and instead created an enclave that straddles the Jerusalem municipality. The overriding principle was to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the heart of the city, while relinquishing as little land as possible. That has driven so much of the policy of the state of Israel for decades.

SB: As you write in the Epilogue, part of how this became a story in Israel was a reporter covering the really callous social media comments that some Israeli kids made about the attack. Their ambivalence, while certainly shocking, also seems to have some relationship to the infrastructural unwillingness by Israel to provide any substantial support to Palestinians in the territories. How do those cultural attitudes relate to the structural decisions Israel is making with regard to Palestinians in the West Bank?

NT: The main relationship between the hatred and racism shown by those Israeli youth and the structural barriers that led to tragedy unfolding in the way that it did is that it is a lot easier to dehumanize people with whom you don’t interact. The reality of Israel-Palestine, of Jerusalem, of the settlements abutting Palestinian towns in the West Bank, is one of segregation. That geographic, political, and social reality of segregation is what all the characters in the book had to navigate on the day of this awful tragedy. 

One of the central elements of the book is that it’s not as though any of these Israelis as individuals actually desired that a bus full of kindergarteners continue to burn while Israeli fire trucks took more than thirty minutes to arrive. Some of the teens who wrote jubilant posts on Facebook did desire that, but the emergency service responders did not. Yet the entire system in which they operate is designed in such a way that the very, very late and inadequate response to this crash was entirely predictable.

SB: Mourning is an important part of the book, and so central to both Palestinian and Israeli lives that this may be one of the elements most shared by all the characters in the book. So, for example, we focus heavily on the way that mourning mobilized the Palestinian communities after the crash, but also meet a Haredi organization dedicated to ensuring mourning rituals are able to be observed. What role does mourning play in Palestine, and what political role does it play?

NT: The act of mourning is different depending on whether you consider the deceased to have been a victim of occupation. If there is a victim of occupation who is killed you are not supposed to, for example, do the traditional ritual of cleaning the body and other standard burial rights; instead you bury them in their clothes. So the whole act of mourning, just from the very first step of determining whether this person is a martyr, a victim of occupation or not, is of course, very political. 

The father in the book, Abed Salama, when his son died, one of the things he deeply regretted was not being able to hold his son and say goodbye to him. If they had gone by the declaration of the Palestinian Authority that all of the kids who were killed were martyrs, then Abed and the other parents shouldn’t have done any of the traditional rituals even if they could. In this particular case, Abed couldn’t have because his son was too badly burned.

SB: Your book was released just days before the Hamas attack and subsequently experienced the cancellation of many of your book events and talks, with one particularly notable example when the London police preemptively shut down a planned talk hosted by the How To Academy over alleged “security concerns.” You are obviously not the only one, there has been a massive wave of repression of critical voices in the weeks after the Hamas attack. How did the cancellations affect your promotional efforts for the book, and what has the tenor been like for critical voices since the war began? Do you think it’s becoming increasingly difficult to voice perspectives like yours? And do you think there has been a difference between how critical Jewish and Palestinian voices have been treated in this regard?

NT: The October 7th attacks and the Gaza war had a polarizing effect: on one hand, in mainstream spaces it became much more difficult to have discussions about Palestinian life under occupation; on the other, among younger people and the left more generally there has never been greater support for Palestinian rights. Gatekeepers at some large, mainstream institutions have succeeded in quashing pro-Palestinian speech. At universities, Palestinian freedom of expression has been greatly curtailed and Palestine student groups have even been banned. 

In the cultural sphere, book talks, film screenings, award ceremonies, and musical performances relating to Palestine have been canceled, including about a fourth of the events I had planned in the U.S. (and the main event I had in London, which was shut down by the U.K. police). This has affected Palestinians most severely, but the target is broader—speech that is sympathetic to Palestinians, no matter the identity of the speaker. As a prerequisite to giving a book talk at the University of Arkansas, I was told that I had to sign a pledge that I would not boycott Israel or the settlements. One could boycott virtually anything in the world—the fossil fuel industry or China or Saudi Arabia or the Republican Party—but not Israel or the settlements. I refused to sign, and the talk hasn’t happened. What many people don’t realize is that these sorts of infringements on freedom of expression were in place long before October 7th. It’s just that they have gained steam since.

SB: You and I are talking at a time when no ceasefire is in place, nearly 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, the Israeli right is entrenched and a voluntary end to the Occupation feels as far as ever. As someone who lives there and is deeply invested in the future for the people of the region, are you optimistic about that future? And what kinds of actions for those in the U.S. are most helpful?

NT: As shocking as it may be to hear this, I believe that there is a better chance of ending this system of oppression today than there was on October 6th. The reason for that is very simple. This is a contest between two grossly unequal parties. One is Israel, a nuclear armed regional power with the backing of the strongest state in the world. And the other is a party that is politically divided, militarily weak, barely holds any territory, and even what it ostensibly holds is still controlled by Israel. It really has no ability to impose the kinds of costs that would be necessary to overturn the system. The problem has been that the stronger party has not had a strong enough incentive to change the system. 

For the first time in many years, ordinary Israelis find themselves with a strong incentive to change the system that was in place prior to October 7. Change could come if the Israeli public is convinced that the price that they are paying for endless occupation is too high and that something else ought to replace it. Whether there will be a realistic or credible or decent proposal for changing it, we have to wait and see. But there definitely is a desire to change the system that seemed impermeable to change just two and a half months ago.

It will also be up to people around the world, and particularly in the U.S., to make clear to their governments that they do not support the continuation of more than half a century of ethnonational domination, that they do not support the collective punishment of two million people in Gaza. Ordinary Americans can increase the pressure on the Biden administration to demand a ceasefire right now. If Biden feels he is paying too high a price domestically and internationally for his support of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, he can be convinced to demand a ceasefire. The difference between a ceasefire today and a ceasefire several weeks from now could be the saving of thousands of innocent lives. 

The post The Physical and Invisible Walls that Determine the Lives of Palestinians appeared first on Electric Literature.

Young, upbeat Happy—an ebullient admirer of new wave French cinema from rural Punjab—goes to Europe in pursuit of riches that are artistic as well as material: he hopes to become an actor in European cinema (he is compared in looks to Sami Frey, the actor in Bande à part, Jean Luc-Godard’s 1964 film, who makes constant reappearances in the novel). Accordingly, Happy saves his wages as an amusement park worker, and pays mysterious “coordinators” to travel to Europe. Once in Europe, however, he is placed in a series of menial, low-paying jobs, in the futile attempt to repay immense debts to the “coordinators”—initially as a restaurant worker in Rome, and then as a laborer on a radish farm—even as his cinematic dream recedes out of reach.

Throughout the novel, Happy’s life attests to the sundering and coming together of nations—from the Partition of India in 1947 (during which his parents had to flee from newly created Pakistan to India) to the current migration crisis and the far-right reactions across Europe and the U.S. Yet the novel’s ambitious form—fragmented into many voices, which nevertheless knit together into a kaleidoscopic view of consciousness—at once records and seeks to mend the sundering it describes.

Celina Basra brings to the novel the intense care and attention to arrangement that has characterised her work as an art curator. Based in Berlin, she has worked with Berlin Biennale, Academy of the Arts Berlin, Arts Night London, and Nature Morte Delhi, among other institutions, and is a co-founder of the curatorial collective The Department of Love, which explores love as a mode of resistance and collaboration, and which has held exhibitions in China and the U.K.

I spoke with Celina Basra on Zoom about fragmented forms and narratives, the complicated and ambiguous trajectories of 21st-century immigration and labor, and recognizing the inner lives of marginalized characters as well as inanimate objects. 

Pritika Pradhan: Happy, the name of the novel’s titular protagonist, is loaded with significance—at once indicative of his upbeat nature and at the core of the novel’s tragic irony, where he struggles to maintain his cheerful narration amid terrible events. Could you tell us what inspired you to choose this name, and how did it influence your envisioning of the novel’s narrative and protagonist?

Celina Baljeet Basra: There is this dissonance and this allusion to humankind’s eternal search for happiness and Paradise, which becomes more pronounced if it involves emigrating. But at the same time, it is not an uncommon nickname and abbreviation for Harpreet, in my extended family, or at least in Punjab. So Happy is a name I was familiar with, and I realized that there’s something there to work with. This is how the character came to me. While the character is entirely fictional, the underlying facts and experiences are very real. And it evolved organically from there: the name played a role in building the character in his world.

PP: The form of the novel is fascinating, consisting of segments narrated from different points of view. Could you please tell us more about your choice of this specific, fragmented form for this novel?

CBB: The basic story had been percolating for a long time before I could finally sit down and move beyond, as Happy called them, the hopeful beginnings that I had stored away in my old hard drive over many years. When I found the voice of Happy, it was through the prologue—the cover letter, or letter of application—which he writes to an employee in Italy, while working on a farm. From then on, the structure of the novel, with its many different fragments, its short chapters, its different voices, and its polyphonic nature, sort of came together and it really then poured and was written fast and furious. It was the only way I knew how to write the novel. 

After struggling for some time to find this voice, I also grappled with the question of how to write this story, which is not my own. There are touching points in my family history maybe, and of course a lot of research and interest over many years. But still, this was the way I knew how to write it, because I feel some stories—especially those of flight or migration—can best be told in a scattered way. To me, at least,  the idea of a novel that is written in one sitting, with a big chunk of time, and in a linear way—that’s not how I feel about the novel. When you have to take care of people—your kid or your family—or when you have to work other jobs, life is not linear. It is a bit like opening Happy’s bag of documents and stories, half-written and unfinished, and of objects that were close to him, the objects he touched that formed his life and that he used to build his world.

PP: In the segment “The Accidental Library,” Happy describes a miscellaneous and indiscriminate collection of objects: “The Library doesn’t hierarchize, nor does it discriminate.” While reading this novel, I felt this anti-hierarchical vision is realized in the proliferation of voices in the novel, which ranges from the titular protagonist to a necklace from Mohenjo-daro, or a pigment from a Pietà. What is the significance of giving voice to persons, animals as well as inanimate objects?

CBB: What I found interesting in relation to Happy’s obsession with the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or the stuff he finds in The Accidental Library, is how accidental these obsessions are when you were a teenager. The time when I first sort of thought of this novel [was in terms of] books falling in your lap. For me, it was like the process of going to my German grandmother’s attic, where there was a big box of Françoise Sagan’s work. So I read all of Sagan—Bonjour Tristesse and so on, but without really a deep understanding. I was only thinking, Oh, this is a cool character. I want to be like her. But Happy couldn’t have been more different from this cool French girl. So I went back to that time of building imaginaries or ideas of what is desirable, and how accidental these influences can be if you don’t have everything at your fingertips—all the museums and the libraries. 

I am an art historian, and I did work, and still do work in the art world. Right now [in the Talking Objects Lab] I am part of a team that works on the idea of the retribution of colonial objects from former colonial contexts, and with African philosophy and artistic interventions that engage with the idea of what to do with these objects that should be given back, [and] how and when and why––the decolonization of memory and knowledge. As a curator, I work with objects and space, amongst others, and this also played into the novel.

PP: So much of Happy’s world is composed of imaginary voices only he can hear: the seductive, and slippery voice of “Europe,” the outsiders of Bande à Part whom he hopes to follow. What role does the imagination play in his story? How does Happy’s imagination inspire him to identify with Europe initially, and support him through his ordeals there?

CBB: The border or the difference between imaginary and real becomes increasingly blurred as the novel continues. And definitely it is always a question with Happy, whether what he hears is reliable, or does he occasionally tell himself those stories and lies in order to cope? I think that’s definitely a thing for him. 

Being born and raised in Europe, living in Europe, I often thought about the idea of Europe and what is it really? Following events like Brexit, we have the idea of Europe as something that wants to close off against whatever comes from outside, as is happening in the Mediterranean Sea. And I also read about Europe in literature and plays, as well as mythological paintings, such as of the abduction of Europe. A lot of the Europe chapters had to be cut in the end, because it was too much. And Europe is important in the novel, and I envisioned her as an HR manager for Europe in a way. I was playing around with a bureaucracy, and how opaque and discriminatory it can be when you want to move, but do not have a passport that  enables you to do so. The experience of trying to get a visa differs wildly, depending on your passport, and is impossible in some cases—which is why other paths are being taken. So there is this humorous aspect, and a dark aspect to Europe.

At the same time, Europe has aspects that are quite human. Sometimes you can feel that Europe is quite insecure—she isn’t really sure of what her image is, or what her role is anymore. She can’t really change the rules like Happy expects her to and is really quite powerless in the end. She is, as you say, this slippery, seductive voice of Europe, who urges Happy to sign the agreement. For me, Europe in the novel is an imaginary character, who is quite vivid, although she might not really exist. However, I would also encourage other readings, if the readers are pleased to do so, such as reading Europe as a real character.

PP: Happy’s only romantic relationships are also lived in the imagination – an unexpressed desire for his male friend and nemesis, Kiran, and later for his fellow farm worker, Zhivago. Could you comment more on this unspoken yet haunting same-sex desire?

CBB: It was clear to me from the beginning that Happy’s feeling of being different might be rooted in his sexuality, which needs to be repressed for obvious personal and political reasons related to the context he grows up in at that time. And that [repression] becomes so automatic that he doesn’t even question it anymore. He outsources it into his imagination, instead of sort of thinking of it as something that can be acted upon, that could be real, that could be fulfilled. And we all know that some ideas, desires, and romances that are entirely imaginary can be so intense—sometimes even more intense than the real ones, especially when you’re young or someone who is very lonely or does not have a lot of touching points with the real world, where he can do real things and act in a way that other people find impressive. Instead, he has to be impressive in his own little world. And so [the imagined relationship with] Kiran, is this classic case of wanting to be with someone with certain aspects that you find dangerous or you are the total opposite of, and someone you want to be like but could never be. 

 With Zhivago, I think that idea is much more real and actually beautiful, but it’s still not reciprocated. Happy is also at that point setting out to realize his dream [of being an actor in European cinema], only to be increasingly disappointed on encountering this big reality check, where things are very different from what he imagined them to be. He doesn’t even open that door [with Zhivago]. However, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lot [happening]. There is this eroticism or desire that is expressed through other routes he finds, such as through voices from objects like the bag of flour. And not everything is spoken about; there might be even things that I’m not aware of. Even in a diary, there are things you won’t write down. As a child and a teenager, I tried to tell a good story, but I couldn’t even write about it because there were things happening that were very dark. So you try to tell a story to yourself in a way that you can process. And I think that’s what Happy does a lot of the time. At the same time, there is an increasing divide between reality and imagination, as the novel proceeds.

PP: Once in Italy, Happy is mysteriously but irrevocably affected by powerful, unnamed forces: moved from one job to another, and put down when he tries to agitate for better conditions. What is the reason for keeping these forces unnamed? What do they reveal about the world Happy inhabits?

CBB: When Happy enters Italy, he is moved around like an object and he doesn’t know the faces of the people who are moving him around. And that’s what it is. If you are in that situation, where you are migrating to Europe—not by the books, but without the documents, then you use travel agents who then are linked to other travel agents who then are linked to agents or smugglers, whatever you might call it, because they have many different names. If you research this, you will find a million different ways to do this [migrate], and a million different stories. Some may be half-legal, others entirely illegal, so a lot of power structures come in. If you look into the food industry, or the vegetable farming industry in Italy, or southern Europe,  a lot of these migration trajectories end up pointing to the mafia. When I was researching [the novel], talking to activists and researchers, particularly in Italy, I realized that they had to be very careful due to personal security reasons. 

That’s why it’s so hard to really uncover all the threads. And it’s impossible if you are Happy, if you don’t have a lot of resources and power on your side. If you are in that situation, this is how it feels—you really don’t know [who is moving you around]. There is this entity, this big, unnamed global corportation. I played around with the idea of bureaucracy and HR, so the [movers] are called the “coordinators.” For me, this was a kind of twist because in addition to being a curator, I often worked in situations where I was a project coordinator for cultural events—project coordinators can be many things in many different contexts. So I applied that idea to this context [of migration], because in the end it’s coordination. There is this basic bureaucracy involved, no matter how violent the external context might be.

PP: Some of the novel’s most heartening (and ultimately heartbreaking) scenes ensure from Happy’s relationships with fellow workers and migrants from different countries – the servers at the restaurant where he works, and his fellow radish pickers at the farm. Could you tell us more about the solidarity and togetherness among the migrant workers in the novel across national and ethnic lines, which co-exists with their intense loneliness and enforced isolation due to their immigration and class status?

CBB: I had this question in my mind [about] how certain areas and lines of work are entirely in some nationalities’ hands, and others not at all. In the U.K., who picks your strawberries? Who picks the asparagus in Germany? And then there are Malinese orange pickers in the south of Italy. So you look into it, and then you find that you have these communities that are also sometimes quite apart from each other. At the radish farm, it becomes apparent that the Sikh workers do some work and the Eastern European workers do other work, and then there’s talk of what happens with the Malinese in the south. Zhivago links these worlds because he is moving around, or has moved around quite a bit, but none of the others do or can.

So for me, the novel was always about imagining what if? Because of course these relationships do exist, but they’re so private and so unique to each context that I just wanted to imagine: what would it feel like if Happy strikes up a friendship with a Polish and a Tibetan dishwasher in the Roman restaurant? The back of a restaurant kitchen is stressful, of course, as a working environment, and can be so ultimately unfriendly and hard to endure for any workforce, which is portrayed in popular series like The Bear. But for Happy it’s a little utopia. He will get this moment where he has friends, and becomes popular and strikes up relationships. And we know he practices his Italian because once you work with other workers from other nationalities, you will practice their language, which is quite fun to do. This is just to imagine what are the relationships like, what is the talk at the back of the back door, who shares a cigarette with whom? 

I have traveled to Italy often, and have been interested in places affected by tourism and migration. I’ve always been interested in people who work in providing other people’s pleasure. Once you have worked in a service position or industry yourself, you realize that you could just as well be an umbrella—some guests or customers don’t really see you. So it’s more important what your colleagues mean to you, and how that can empower you. Happy always tries to strike up relationships, always tries to connect to people, to please people and entertain them. And that to me was a way to make the picture of the world richer.

PP: It is significant that the voices of Happy’s family in India (in particular his mother Gul and sister Ambika) continue even after Happy has left for Italy. How does the inclusion of the homeland and family change the depiction of immigration in the novel? 

CBB: To me, this continuity was quite important, to let them speak and let us hear their voices making his absence felt. The family unit is scattered now. But it is also important to show that life at home goes on—it’s not an unmoving ideal. First we idealize the place we want to move to, even if it’s just moving to another town to study or find a new job. But then sometimes it doesn’t turn out as great, so you idealize the place you’ve left, and say, wow, that’s actually how we need to return. And then it becomes this idea where, okay, I will go abroad and I’ll make my luck and find prosperity, and then I’ll return. But then it’s not the same place that I left. You might not be able to return in that way because you’re not the same, the people you’ve left are not the same. And you can never recreate the past, because you might then in retrospect realize, oh, that was happiness. You might think, I will go back to that tree, that house, that meal, and then happiness will come. And it might, but it will always be fleeting because things are moving. To me, that was important in the depiction of places like India, which to so many people growing up here in Germany is this far off place of another imagination. A lot of people will just tell you their India story when you meet them and always the same clichés, you know? So it was important to just and try and attempt to make it complex. It is a place Happy has to leave, in order to try to realize himself. But it isn’t a place that’s entirely bleak. Though there are no prospects for him to evolve in that place in that village, there’s love.

This idea of a mother—Gul, and also [Happy’s sister] Ambika, who is also a mother—is very close to my heart. Shortly after the novel found a publisher, I gave birth to my first daughter. Then in the editing process, which was wonderful and intense and necessary for this very scattered book, a lot of these ideas [about motherhood] found their way in, and made the novel richer. We have the voices of Ambika and Gul in particular, but also the father, Babu, and Fatehpal [Happy’s elder brother] who emigrated as well, but is living his own life and is not very close to Happy, because he left when Happy was still young. They’re all scattered around now, and that’s something that I felt I could identify with. In my own family, everyone is never in one place, but there are always many. So I’m fond of these voices and how they evolve, allowing a space for absences and grief, but also hope and love.

The post An Undocumented Farmworker’s Quest for Happiness in Europe  appeared first on Electric Literature.

Ten years later, Cecily finds her nation and family on the precipice of destruction, and is determined to do anything she can to save them. Told from the perspectives of Cecily and her three children—eldest daughter, Jujube, who serves tea to Japanese soldiers and develops an unexpected bond with one of them; fifteen-year-old Abel, who has disappeared; and the youngest, Jasmin, who spends her days locked in the basement to avoid being sent to a comfort station—The Storm We Made moves effortlessly through time, building to a thrilling crescendo. Filled with unforgettable characters and beautiful, vivid language, this is a novel of family, secrets, survival, and resilience during the darkest of times. 

Vanessa Chan is one of my closest friends and all-time favorite writers. I was lucky enough to be one of The Storm We Made’s first readers. We spoke over Zoom in the fall of 2023 about the journey of The Storm We Made, how to approach research as a historical fiction writer, illuminating a deeply underexplored time in history, the fraught intimacies that can happen between colonizers and the colonized, and the power of charisma.

Gina Chung: The Storm We Made takes place across a span of several years. You weave a very tight, propulsive plot while also grounding us in historical context. For many writers of color, I think there’s this idea that we somehow need to “explain ourselves” to a more mainstream audience when we’re writing about places that we come from. Was this something you considered? 

Vanessa Chan: When I was writing it, I thought about how I would explain it to someone like me. It is true that the history of this time period in Malaysia is woefully underwritten—it’s almost not written. Southeast Asian history is really not covered by novelists or historians. I would explain things the way that the research I did through my family was told to me—where there were important explanations about dates, places, what life was like during that time. But I also balanced that with not overexplaining things that you could get in context.

I do think that history, if it’s not written, does need to be explicated, because you cannot assume that people know things that they have never had access to. And it is the responsibility, I think, of the novelist and especially of the historical fiction novelist to explain what happened during that time, if no one else has any context. But at the same time, I think things like names of food or small phrases can just be gotten in context. So I wasn’t purposely obfuscating in order to make a statement about the colonization of literature, but at the same time, I was also not trying to explain too much. I just talked about it the way that I would hear a story like this.  

GC: You give us a wide cast of characters in this novel, while also anchoring the story in the perspectives of Cecily, a mother, and her three children. Can you talk about how you created these characters? 

VC: When this book was first being written, it was initially a book about three sad children living through the war. And we need to have space to tell stories that are inherently sad, but for me personally at the time, I was going through a series of personal griefs, and it was also the pandemic. We couldn’t go anywhere, and I, a person who felt like I had no agency at the time, was writing about three children who had no agency at the time. I needed to bring myself some joy and infuse some of that into the book, so I wrote about their mother, who, as happens during the book process in ways that you don’t expect, became the main character. She’s this flawed woman who is a spy, and gets to run around and do things, both good and bad. I think that brought both myself and hopefully the book a bit more movement and joy. 

GC: What role do whiteness, white supremacy, and colonialism play in the dynamics of the novel and in Cecily’s fateful decision to become a spy for the Japanese?  

VC: This novel is set in two timelines across British colonialism and Japanese colonialism. Obviously, because the British colonized Malaysia for over 150 years, that infused everything to do with the book. But less directly, the characters in the novel are a race called Eurasian, which means a different thing in Malaysia and in Southeast Asia than it does in the U.S. Here, it means people who are mixed—European and Asian. But in Southeast Asia, it means a specific race of people who were born out of colonial intermixing—mostly Portuguese intermixing, but also some others like Dutch, the English, and the French. And because these people are born out of colonial intermixing with white people, white supremacy is inherent in that culture—the idea that the fairer you are, the closer to white you are, the better your English is, the more educated you are, the higher you are in the totem pole, the closer you are to the colonial masters and to the ideal. And all of these dynamics play a part in The Storm We Made and in Cecily’s psyche, and also her rebellion against these structures that she’s told are the way that things should be. 

GC: A recurring theme in the novel is obsession, particularly Cecily’s obsession with the charismatic General Fujiwara. She’s really drawn to the general, but she also hates that she is in thrall to him. What, if anything, did you want to say or explore about obsession and its consequences with this novel? 

VC: I think I want to reframe that a little bit. The reason that I wrote the character that way is because I am extremely preoccupied with the idea of charisma, and whether it is inherent or it can be taught, as well as the effect charisma has on people. Obsession is often the byproduct of someone’s charisma. This is a feature across a lot of my work and definitely in this novel. I think Cecily is taken in by the charisma of this general and his ideas. She’s smart enough to know that something is wrong, and she doesn’t understand why she’s so drawn and feels so compelled to do these things, but she does it anyway. I also sometimes wonder if the impact that charisma has on people is situational, which is the case with this book. Fujiwara and his charisma hit Cecily exactly at the right time in her life, because she was feeling particularly dissatisfied. I sometimes wonder if different charismatic people in history—both good and bad—had hit at different times in history, would their impact have been the same? 

GC: The world of The Storm We Made—particularly the impact of the war and competing colonial interests on the Malayan people—is powerfully and vividly portrayed. What did your research process for this novel look like? 

VC: It’s really interesting, because I think there’s this idea—almost a rule—where writing historical fiction is like, method. A lot of historical fiction writers are known to immerse themselves in a very deep way in their characters before they write them. But I started this novel in a burst of surprise, in response to a prompt, and kept writing the majority of it during the pandemic, when the archives were closed, and there was no ability to do a ton of primary research. People sometimes ask me, “Did you interview thousands of survivors?” And sadly, there are not thousands of survivors to interview. A lot of what I wrote was based on things that had followed and infused my family’s lore and storytelling over the years. I just put those on paper and realized that it was a more significant amount than I thought it was, enough to build a book, and then I went to check all of this later. I did talk to my grandmother—she was the fount of most of these stories that I had heard over the years. My father also helped me fact-check the novel, because he’s a big history buff. My uncle sent me an old book of photographs from Malaysia over the years, when he heard I was writing this book. In a way, it sort of became a family affair.

GC: Speaking of family, what role does family, whether it’s your own or just themes of familial love and connection, play in your writing? 

VC: Family is very important to me, and because this is a book about a family based on some of my family, I don’t think I could have done it without the relationships that I have with my family. Someone asked me once, “Why did you write in four POVs?” I think I wrote in multiple POVs over multiple timelines because I come from a very noisy, dramatic family that’s used to talking all at the same time—that is how I’m used to receiving information. So my family didn’t just inspire the plot, they also inspired the form. My mother also passed early on, when I was writing the novel. I had just started to write it, and I used to shamefully post, on Instagram Stories, bits that I’d written of this novel and of other stories. I would delete them quickly after, but she learned how to screenshot and expand them so she could read them, and towards the end, when she was quite ill, she couldn’t really talk that much, and we didn’t have much to talk about, because it was the pandemic, she’d make me read these bits to her, because her eyes were going. 

GC: You wrote this novel during an extremely dark period in our own history, and you’ve also spoken about the devastating losses that you experienced during this time. How did the times in which you were writing impact these times that you were writing about? 

VC: I think when I first sent this book out, agents could tell that the novel was perhaps written at two different times, because the first part moved a bit more slowly, and was angrier and sadder. And then the next part moved quickly, and people moved through time with speed. I think that is almost a direct impact of the circumstances we found ourselves in. The first parts of this novel I wrote in 2020, during lockdown. And then the world grew a little bit, when we were allowed to step outside—that’s when I wrote the part of the novel with more agency. 

I was also, at the time, preoccupied with the idea of what we do when we are faced with circumstances beyond our control and still have the minutiae of our lives to live. When I talked to my grandmother, I’d ask her, “What did you do during the war?” She’d be like, “We went dancing at the neighbors’ house. Do you think we just sat at home and cried every day?” There were some days where they cried, and other days where they would squeeze through the hole in the fence to go to the neighbors’ house and have little dance parties after curfew. I always think that if our descendants ask us down the line, “What was it like during the pandemic? What did you do?” We’d be like, “We were quite sad, but everything went on. We went to school on Zoom. We had our little petty grievances, and our lives continued. It was just overhung with a shadow of a larger world event.” I wanted to write a similar idea—that there’s a big war going on, but also you have petty nonsense going on in your life. You have family arguments, little loves, crushes, and things like that. 

GC: Your book is going to be published in more than twenty languages and regions worldwide! How does it feel to know that your book is going to be read by so many readers around the world? Can you tell us what the process of going out on submission was like? 

VC: It’s really thrilling to know that Malaysia, which is a small country, is going to have a place on bookshelves all over the world, in all these different languages. The process of selling this book was fairly chaotic. My agents sent this book out, and I had already had a trip planned to go back to Malaysia for the Lunar New Year. The manuscript went on submission, I hopped on a plane a day and a half later, and then I got back online, and I had all these messages, and they were like, “There’s been a lot of interest in your book, and you have to do phone calls with these editors.” I was on calls with NYC editors from 10 pm to 12 am and 4 am to 6 am local time. I did a number of these on my dad’s not-great Wifi in the middle of the night, while my dad tried to cook dinner and eavesdrop behind me. So it was wonderful and chaotic. The book also sold in a number of other countries at that time. The most touching, for me, was learning that the book would also have a publisher in Japan. I received a long letter from a publisher in Japan who wanted to publish the book that basically said, “It’s time for us to show Japanese people’s stories that aren’t just about Japanese soldiers going to the front and the women that they left behind, but also about the people that they impacted during this time.” I’m not a very teary person, and I was quite emotional when I got that request. 

The post In “The Storm We Made,” A Malayan Housewife Becomes a Spy During WWII appeared first on Electric Literature.

The difference between our reality and the fictional one Alderman creates? In The Future, the world ends. And the tech billionaires, through their use of an AI survival program and their unimaginable amount of wealth, leave everyone to suffer while they take refuge in a series of secret bunkers. 

Alderman brings the same propulsive prose and razor-sharp critique of our contemporary landscape that she did in her best-selling novel The Power to The Future, in which she skewers ills propagated by extreme wealth inequality. I had the opportunity to speak with Alderman over Zoom about the importance of community, the value of re-interpreting religious texts in present day, and what it looks like to maintain hope in times of deep crisis.

Jacqueline Alnes: The future, not to borrow your title, is such a rich premise for a novel. On one hand, some characters find hope and identity in the future: they spend their time imagining what’s ahead for them and work or scheme to reach those goals. For others, the future is foreboding, rife with natural disasters, pandemics, and other dangers. What was it like exploring these different perceptions?

Naomi Alderman: I have worked in technology for many years and I make games, so I often have to think about the future. In order to make an app, for example, you have to not be targeting whatever the phones are today, you have to think about what’s going to be happening four or five years from now and then try to hit that moving target. Also, I’m a fairly anxious person. Some of that conversation in the book about the future comes out of my own thinking and saying to myself, okay, maybe things are not going to be terrible. Maybe there’s a chance that things are going to be alright. It’s kind of working some hope out on the page.

I have a tendency to think it’s all going to be bad, but at the same time, working in technology, I think it’s probably going to be both good and bad, just like every other historical period. I see people talking about the book now online which is extremely exciting and fun, and I see people saying, Oh, it’s a terrifyingly real possibility and it’s a reality that just feels normal to me now.

JA: I felt like reading the book made some of what tech companies do—in terms of data or privacy—feel more real. Maybe working in tech means you have more of an ongoing awareness?

NA: On Friday, the genetic data company 23andMe announced that they had been hacked and that the hackers have released the information of all Ashkenazi Jews. I registered with that company about ten years ago. I’m an Ashkenazi Jew. God knows how that’s going to play out for me over the rest of my life. I can change everything about myself, but I can’t change my DNA. 

JA: That’s horrifying.

NA: It’s a science fiction thing, except it’s really happened. 

JA: Your book made me think about the capabilities of technology. Like the example of the CEOs controlling the weather so that we have no more floods or famine—what a great idea. But then, there’s this underbelly: if the wrong people have access to that power or if the wrong people co-opt it, it becomes a weapon. 

NA: It’s all a tool. Every single thing that we’ve made is a tool. We could decide to use it for the benefit of all other humans and instead what we’re mostly doing is making a few dudes rich and powerful in a way that is going to send them crazy.

In my previous work I’ve thought a lot about power, and it continues to be interesting to me. My conclusion is not a novel conclusion, but I think it needs to be heard every single time: It’s not about the individual person. If you make people that powerful, they will go crazy. You look at Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg challenging each other to a cage fight, you must say to yourself that they have experienced power toxicity. It is affecting their brain functioning and the kindest thing to do would be to take quite a bit of power away from them so they can return to sanity. I guess either we do that in some sort of humane way, or at some point there’s a revolution, which I don’t think will be fun for any of us to live through. 

JA: The book reveals how a fervent belief in capitalism has allowed select characters to hoard a baffling amount of wealth, power, and resources, which they hope to use to protect themselves as the world as we know it comes to an end. 

NA: Did you see Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother was trying to buy an island to set up some sort of crypto-utopia? I mean, I made the stuff in my book up, but…

JA: But it’s not entirely fiction! Maybe that’s why readers are saying it’s terrifying, because it is an echo of our reality. 

NA: I think we’re getting toward the end of the part when we can all be in denial about it. I have a strawberry plant on my patio here. It’s mid-October now in the UK and the strawberry plant is flowering, and that’s not normal. I think we are getting to some kind of point where people are going, What? What’s happened? on a lot of different things at once. That makes me feel quite hopeful. As long as we are awake and aware of what’s happening, we can really work to change it. 

JA: In the novel, there are people who can survive because they have money—they can buy anything, but then they lack any sort of capability that would help them in the real, physical world. There’s a detachment from the reality they want to keep living in, which I thought was fascinating. What interests you about the ideas of survival?

NA: A long time ago, probably the germ of the book, was a New Yorker article about billionaires having survival bunkers, which hadn’t occurred to me until I read it. One of the things that made me stumble backwards was not that it’s just so revolting, but that I recognize it from science fiction novels that I’ve read. I thought, Oh God, it’s us. I suppose what is interesting about this particular group of extremely powerful people is that they have read a lot of science fiction and they are trying to make it happen. They’ve convinced themselves, for example, that bad AI is inevitable so they’ve got to make good AI. None of that is true, but it’s a science fiction premise and they’ve convinced themselves that the future of humanity is on other planets so instead of trying to look after this one they’re going to Mars. That’s sort of interesting.

If you think about the robber barrons of the 19th and early 20th century, they had been raised on Christianity for the most part. There was a movement to get them to use their wealth for good Christian values. Not all of that succeeded and not all of that was appropriate, but some of it involved Andrew Carnegie building public buildings. What I’m saying is the science fiction community needs to come together and give these guys some exciting sci-fi ideas about what they could do with their money, because they’re not going to be moved by religious pleas. 

JA: I loved the biblical tales on the message boards in this novel, like reading about Lot as if he were a modern day man. When you read these stories in the Bible it’s always like sure, this happened, but when you re-contextualize it in the book, it made me do a double-take, like what happened?

NA: I grew up reading the Bible in Hebrew and my Aramaic is okay. Those stories are great stories. I don’t know whether you have a religious background, but I would heartily recommend the experience of telling Bible stories to people who have never heard those stories before. They come alive when they’re retold. They’re dead on the page, but when you tell somebody…I mean, if you really want a good time, tell someone the story of David, Saul, and Jonathan because that is incredibly gripping. Ages ago, I remember telling the story of Jacob and Esau to someone who had no familiarity with the Bible, and the moment I was telling it, he was like, What? What? It’s the most, in plain sight, brilliant piece of literature, but because it’s still a living part of religion it’s not taught as literature. 

JA: I grew up reading the Bible but I just glossed over so much of it. It’s so condensed that I didn’t take the time to make it come alive or ask, What does that mean, actually? 

NA: A lot of the translations out there gloss over it. You have to really have a good translation or be paying really close attention to figure out what’s going on. I was mentored by Margaret Atwood and one of our first conversations was swapping weird bits of the Bible. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there. There’s a bit, for example, where Moses is on his way back from the desert, where he’s seen the burning bush, and he’s coming back to Egypt. At a certain point in the story, and I swear to you this is there, he and his wife, Zipporah, are traveling overnight and their son becomes extremely ill. Zipporah takes a stone or a knife and removes the baby’s foreskin and then hurls it at Moses’s feet and shouts at him, “Behold, you are a bloody bridegroom to me.” 

JA: That’s good stuff.

NA: It feels like something that had a meaning five thousand years ago, that we cannot quite winkle out of it anymore because there’s some beliefs in there that we don’t have or a reference to another story that we’ve never been told, but just looking at that on its face, you go, Okay, I get it. The baby was ill, Moses had not circumcised the baby, and she just went and did it and threw the foreskin at him, almost like, You dick. You knew that your god wanted the baby circumcised, you didn’t do it, and our baby nearly died. That’s a reading of it. There are other readings. But there’s so much in there that’s mysterious. I feel like it gets taught in a way where it’s an allegory or it’s about the relationship between God and the people, but no, it’s literature. 

Respond to these stories with the part of you that knows how to respond to great writing. Reach out with your emotions, your empathy. Find what you find in it, and whatever you find in it is true for you. That’s where I am now. I have a lot of good language skills given to me by my religious upbringing and I guess I feel like I’m doing something that I would recommend to other people, which is to go back to the text, forget anything that any preacher ever taught you about it, and just have a look and see what’s there. It’s often very surprising.

JA: They are so deeply human and we are so deeply human. The context is different –– we don’t have burning bushes, necessarily –– but we do have floods and Facebook and these things that if someone read about us thousands of years from now, they might ask, What did these people do? Why did they react that way? Why aren’t people taking care of each other or the planet? 

NA: Fundamentally, having worked in tech for like twenty years now, there are a lot of people who have really good values and want to do something that makes a difference. Typically, a technology company will say about itself: We’re changing the world; we’re making the world a better place. There’s a lot of disillusionment when you start working for a company like Google, whose slogan was “Don’t be evil” and then, twenty-five years later, you’re scraping people’s data and selling it to advertising companies. I think there are a lot of people working there who really do want to be doing something that makes the world better for everyone, and I hope we still have a chance to do that. 

JA: It feels like we have the power and the resources and the minds.

NA: We do. There is enough food on this planet to feed everybody. We just don’t distribute it. That is a question that the logistical infrastructure of Amazon could be amazing at figuring out. Not in a crass way, working with a lot of NGOs who know how to do this, but it feels like there are a lot of brilliant people and good ideas. Capitalism isn’t necessarily doing a great job at getting the people who want to do some good stuff into the places with resources to do good stuff. 

JA: I was going to say that capitalism makes us feel like we have to be out for ourselves, and does not encourage a community of care.

NA: I love that phrase. I grew up an Orthodox Jew. I’m not particularly religious any more, but certainly that is a world in which being a part of a community is incredibly important. I don’t hate capitalism—I think capitalism has given us some incredible things. But I really believe in a mixed system. We don’t want unfettered capitalism. Believing that will sort out all your problems is a kind of religious impulse. When people say, Oh we just have to set the market free, that’s a belief system. That’s not science. The evidence says that capitalism works for some things, communities of care work for other things, and government intervention works for some things, and NGOs work for some things. Actually, as with most other things on this planet, diversity is great. You just have to look at what a healthy, functioning ecosystem is, and it’s teeming with different things going on. 

JA: There’s an interesting thread in survivalism about trust. If you open up to someone, it can be a form of connection, but the flip side is that they can betray you. How did you negotiate thinking about choosing hope while knowing that there’s betrayal possible? 

NA: Secretly, that’s the theme of the book. When I was writing the book on my computer, the name of the file was “Trust.” Of course, someone else has won a Pulitzer Prize recently for a novel called Trust, so we couldn’t do that, but that is the theme: How can you possibly trust anybody? How can we do that knowing all of the terrible things that can happen and all of the bad people out there? And yet, if we don’t trust, we shrivel and die. Fundamentally, that is the Achilles heel of all of those billionaires in my novel. Becoming extremely wealthy means that you need to trust people less and less because you can get so many more of your needs met without having to ask anyone else. In the archetypical friendly street in a city, maybe you didn’t have sugar for your cake, so you went next door and asked to borrow a cup of sugar. People don’t necessarily do that very much any more because we’re wealthier than we were. The wealthier you are, the less you have to ask people things and the less you ask people for things, the less you have to discover that you can trust and rely on them. Eventually, that erodes your ability to trust. Then, you’re sunk.

I guess I’m arguing for using laundromats more and riding the bus and asking for help. I am terrible at asking for help. I think a lot of people who left a fundamentalist religion end up fiercely independent. There’s a sort of rugged individualism, certainly, in American or Western thinking. The opposite of self-branding is community. Part of writing this book was figuring out for myself the absolute necessity of letting other people in and making myself ask for help and not telling myself that I could go it all alone and do it all myself. It’s better to develop the ability to trust people. Otherwise, in the end, you have lost yourself.

JA: From exploring these ideas of the future, what would you hope readers take away? Or what did you take away? Whatever feels most true to you.

NA: Number one, I want to show my reader a good time, take them out on the town. I also hope that people who read the book come away with the feeling of: It is not too late to sort any of this out. It is not impossible to sort out the weird powers of this strange global elite that we have now. We don’t have to do it in an inhuman way, we just have to have the will to change it. It is not too late to keep so much that is really worth saving on this beautiful planet. All we need to do is want to do it. 

There are a lot of ideas in the book, but one is that we are deliberately distracting ourselves because we don’t want to think about the red notices piling up in the hallway. I would like to gently say, this is your life, this is your planet, this is what your children are going to inherit, so come on now.

The post Naomi Alderman Imagines a Dystopian Future Controlled by Technology appeared first on Electric Literature.

Alternating between chapters narrated by F&N as a unit during their high school years and separate chapters from Fay and Nell fifteen years later, James Frankie Thomas’s debut novel Idlewild focuses not only on the way a seemingly inseparable pair has the potential to fracture, but also who we become by reflecting on our past selves and the friendships that shape us.

I spoke with Thomas via Zoom about uncategorizable relationships, being a theater kid, and perceptions versus reality. 

Jacqueline Alnes: I love how your novel perfectly captures so many feelings that seem specific to high school: the angst, the sometimes clumsy but earnest attempts to navigate identity, the fierce attachments that seem like they’ll never come to an end. What intrigues you about this age?

James Frankie Thomas: It’s interesting that you use the word ‘angst.’ It reminds me that one of the trade reviews of my book invoked the word ‘hormones’ when talking about my book. Obviously, as a transexual, I have a charged relationship to the word ‘hormones’ but I do feel like hormones and angst go together as go-to cliches we reach for when we talk about how teenagers experience feelings. One thing I really worked at when I was inhabiting the minds of my teen characters was I really wanted to take their emotions seriously because I don’t actually think I believe that the emotions we experience as teens are less real or less justified than the emotions we experience as adults. I say this today, when I will inject myself with hormones, which will affect my perceived reality and feelings, but I guess that’s why I’ve been thinking about the relationship between adolescence, hormones, and intensity of feeling more frequently.

I wish I could cite this, but I saw a really interesting argument on Twitter responding to someone saying that the TV show Euphoria should be set in college instead of high school. Someone responded that you could never have a show like Euphoria set in college because the very nature of high school is that you are thrown together with a lot of other random people your age for eight hours a day, every day. You can’t get away from them, you are inevitably going to have conflicts with them, and you have to see them every day in spite of your conflicts. Of course factions are going to form. You’re going to have social hierarchies, drama, sexual intrigue. That is what makes high school such a rich premise for fiction and why we all have such intense memories from high school. We were thrown together with peers at a very unformed time in our lives so maybe our impulse control isn’t the best, maybe we’re not the best versions of ourselves that we’re going to be yet, but we just have to show up every single day and see these people and live our lives surrounded by each other. In this way, high school is just the dialed up version of the rest of your life. 

JA: Fay and Nell are so attached that they almost become one entity, and refer to themselves as such: F&N. What did writing this book reveal to you about intimacy in friendships? 

JFT: Intimacy in friendships really is the prime subject of this novel, but I didn’t consciously know this for a long time. I’m most interested in relationships that don’t fall into easily identifiable categories. When I look at the book now, every single relationship is one that cannot be neatly defined. Obviously you have Fay and Nell, or F&N, who are not a couple, but they’re also not-not a couple. You have that mirrored in Theo and Christopher—like who knows what their deal is. You have the intense, magnetic draw between Fay and Theo, but it would not be accurate to say that there’s sexual or romantic tension between them. I mean, there kind of is, but neither of them is thinking of it that way, and that’s not the solution to what’s going on between the two of them. 

I think the only question that I find interesting enough to sustain for an entire novel is: What is the deal with the relationship between these two people? I think I’m exploring that in many, many different directions. I just love uncategorizable relationships.

JA: There is so much challenge wrestling with identity at that age and also in adulthood, maybe just all the time being like: Who am I? What am I? What is this relationship? What am I doing? How much of that comes from the language we have or don’t have to talk about relationships? 

JFT: It’s interesting you bring that up. Again, to bring up the trade reviews, the word ‘identity’ comes up a lot and even the phrase ‘wrestling with identity.’ Maybe you could push back on this, but I actually feel like my characters do not spend that much time wrestling with their identity. That might be something that readers project onto the book because they recognize that there is identity happening here, especially with the character Fay. I don’t think Fay actually spends that much time on the page wrestling with identity. She wrestles with a lot of things, like physically wrestling for a lot of the book. I wonder if, when we say these teen characters are wrestling with identity, what we are actually saying is that we have more vocabulary for identity now and this lack, as you put it, this lack of labels and categories for identities is so apparent on the page. Maybe that’s what’s actually happening, is this lack of wrestling because there’s just not enough words to grapple with.

JA: Maybe ‘wrestling’ is too violent of a word. I’m thinking of the scene where Fay says, “I left the Meetinghouse Loft, or rather my body did, a body from which I found myself vertiginously untethered.” She’s very self-assured and knows herself in so many ways, but the moments of violence in the book are the only ones where it seems like she is in her body, experiencing herself fully.

JFT: I always try really hard to be in my characters’ bodies and experience what my characters are experiencing. With Fay it’s a little tricky because I think I, as the author, am more in her body than she is. 

JA: This book made me think so much about growth and how much pressure we put on people to navigate life stages in a uniform way. I tell my students all the time how wild I think it is that people are expected to pick a college when they’re seventeen and know then what they want to major in or “be.” Nell views college with hope for who she might be where Fay struggles to see a future for herself. Do you think these pressures to make choices at certain points in our life make organic growth difficult in that it’s difficult to veer from what’s seen as the norm?

JFT: This is such a great point you bring up, and there are different levels to my answer. On the most surface level, I cannot possibly agree with you more—it’s so unconscionably stupid that we expect seventeen-year-olds to commit to a life path. It actually took me several drafts to decide on a life path for Fay and Nell. I think I changed Nell’s college major like seven times. It’s so random, it’s so arbitrary. On one level, when Fay is unable to visualize a future for herself, she’s partly just very rationally reacting to the insanity of that. 

That was not precisely autobiographical for me because I was constantly fantasizing about my future but I, like Fay, was resistant to the college application process. One thing I took from myself when I was writing this storyline for Fay is the way I thought about my future was just a different side of the coin: I was purely fantasizing. There was no realistic planning. I thought a lot about being a celebrity, being interviewed, being on Broadway. These are not actual career plans. You could take steps to make this happen. You could go to acting school but I didn’t want to go to acting school. I didn’t even want to go to auditions. I just wanted these things to happen to me; I still do. Fay does not have this fantasy life to distract her from the fact that she has trouble envisioning a future for herself but I think what we have in common is not actually being in the moment, not wanting to exist right now as a person going to school, surrounded by peers, making day to day decisions about the kind of person you want to be and becoming the kind of person that you’re growing up into. Fay and I were both highly resistant to the path that life had put us on.

I don’t think this is necessarily a trans thing, because I’m sure there are many trans people out there who were very excited to go to college and very excited to choose a major. Lest I overgeneralize here, all I can say is that’s how I reacted to the idea of going to college at the age of seventeen and it’s how Fay reacts too. I do highly recommend going to college in your late twenties, which is what I did. It’s so much better to go to college when you have experienced the workforce and you can just experience the pleasure of being asked to read all day. I appreciated every second of it. 

JA: Can we talk about the theater aspect of this novel? I’m not a theater kid, but something that I found interesting is the way these characters read their characters and have a grasp of who they are. They say: this is what I’m bringing to the character, this is what I’m doing. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the relationship between this ability to perform and this ability also to feel at home in yourself.

JFT: I’m amazed you’re not a theater person because that’s such a well-observed observation. A passage early on that I’ve always been kind of proud of is when the cast is having their first read-through of Othello and before they do the read-through, the drama teacher has the leads go around and describe their characters. I don’t make a big deal of it, but if you look at what all of the characters are saying, they are actually describing themselves. I don’t even know if I did this intentionally, but when it’s Fay’s turn, she says that the main thing about Iago is that he’s a gay man but he’s not allowed to be one. 

One thing I love about high school theater is it’s so rare that high schoolers are allowed to express a big emotion in front of everybody. I fell in love with high school theater when I was in the ninth grade and I was not in the fall play, I was only an audience member. I went to the high school production of The Winter’s Tale. The boy playing King Leontes, when he finds out his wife wasn’t cheating on him and he had her executed for no reason, just broke down crying, like tears streaming down his face. A boy crying, in front of everybody, in front of teachers, classmates, everybody, just letting loose on stage. It’s possible he was not actually giving a good performance, he might have been hamming it up too much, but it was incredible for ninth grade me to see. And also, all the other cast members behind him were crying too. I found out later that a lot of them were doing the Burt’s Bees trick. It just rocked my world to see my classmates crying in front of everybody. I went back and saw the play again the next night.

When you’re in high school, the most impressive thing is that bravery, that emotional courage to just show your deep feelings. When you are an adult and acting professionally, that’s not the most important thing about being an actor, and I think when we see bad actors as adults is that they are hamming it up too much or showing too many feelings, rather than realistically showing how a character might try to hold back their feelings. But in high school, that doesn’t matter. It’s about having the courage to put it all out there. 

JA: When you were talking about uncategorizable relationships, I couldn’t help but think of friendship breakups, and how I don’t think we talk enough about what happens at the end of things when it’s not a romantic relationship. I wondered what you learned from writing the end of this friendship, like this grieving of a person who’s still very much alive, still out there living their life, but without you.

JFT: I can’t remember when he said this, but I think it was my friend Danny Lavery who said once that it’s become almost a platitude that we never talk about friend breakups. People are always saying, “We never talk about friend breakups, we have no books about them, we have no vocabulary to talk about them.” And he said, is it possible that we’ve said this so much that it’s no longer true? Can we talk about friend breakups without saying we never talk about friend breakups?

JA: True.

JFT: That said, it is still very interesting to me. I’ve actually been hearing a lot from readers who reach out to me and say that this book made them think about their best friend from high school. It surprised me, because I didn’t set out to depict what I thought was a universal type of relationship. I thought that Fay and Nell were an unusual enough relationship that I could spend a whole novel exploring them. I guess it is more common than I thought, especially for queer people, to have one intense friendship during adolescence that eventually falls apart or ends in a weird way. I did sort of get at something that doesn’t get talked about very much.

I want to quote a friend of mine who also said she was reminded of a former, intense friendship while reading my book. She said she was reminded how, just like Fay and Nell, she and her friend were just in constant communication, all day long, that she wonders now what did we talk about? They were talking on the phone, IMing, seeing each other at school, and she wonders: What were we even doing? We didn’t have memes to text to each other or links to send to each other. What in the world could we have found to occupy all those hours of talk? 

This is the interesting thing that she said, which is: I think we were just using each other as a kind of repository for whatever random thought came into our head. We would dislodge random thoughts by telling them to each other. In retrospect, this was a very selfish form of intimacy because we weren’t really hearing each other, we were just using each other as a sounding board. She said, I think this is why the friendship didn’t last, because once the circumstances changed and once things got difficult or there was conflict between us, there was actually no intimacy to draw on. We had been talking at each other for several years, and we didn’t truly know each other. We didn’t have a deep emotional understanding of each other. I love that my friend observed that, because I think it’s one of the takeaways of Idlewild, it’s something that both Fay and Nell are grappling with at the end: Did we ever really know each other? 

JA: Something that’s been coming up throughout our conversation is what we impose on something rather than what’s actually there. I don’t know if it’s the age of the characters or that it’s this heightened era, but I think there’s something where you get to bring a part of yourself to this friendship, the same way that these characters see past each other. 

JFT: I actually love that you say that. The novel is about projections, and projecting onto people what you want to see in them or what you want to feel in yourself and I never do resolve the question of how much we know about them is a projection and how much is real. 

The post Going Back in Time to Relive the Ending of an Intense High School Friendship appeared first on Electric Literature.

In reviving the delicious manias of 18th-century Gothic novels and 1960s dime-store romances, Bluebeard’s Castle pays homage to genres that were often (and often pejoratively) associated with female readerships in their day. Indeed, the pleasures and perils of womanhood have always been the twin obsessions of Biller’s oeuvre. As a filmmaker, she painstakingly recreates the dreamy costumes, sets, and cinematography of bygone eras, from ‘60s Hollywood (The Love Witch) to the sexploitation movies and mags of the ‘70s (Viva). The result is a gorgeous, distinctly female gaze—but one unafraid to depict the mainstays of women’s suffering, from objectification to assault.

Even against that backdrop, Bluebeard’s Castle is Biller’s darkest work to date. Her reimagination of the French fairytale follows modern-day mystery author Judith as she falls hard for Gavin, a member of the peerage who promises her the world. But once they marry, Gavin’s charms sour, his worsening acts of cruelty seeming to channel the femicidal history of the medieval estate they call home. As Judith begins to fear for her sanity—and her life—Bluebeard’s Castle indicts a society that dares to call itself modern while violence against women remains routine.

Chelsea Davis: The Bluebeard legend is hundreds of years old. I was curious what attracted you to using it as the blueprint for a novel set in the present.

Anna Biller: It was actually a tragedy that happened to somebody that I know who got involved with a very, very bad man. And her life ended.

I was thinking about all the research on how many women are killed by their partners today—it’s such a high number. There was a story last year about a couple that went hiking. The woman went missing and they did this big search for her. When they combed the woods for her body, they found four more bodies that they weren’t even looking for. Their killers were all their boyfriends and husbands.

Growing up, I was always really interested in fairytales, and in the connection between the Bluebeard fairytale and the modern serial killer thriller. The Bluebeard stories were originally from the point of view of the woman, and it was only maybe in the ‘60s that it shifted, especially in movies. Suddenly, the point of view is all from that of the killer—especially in the Giallo films, like those of Mario Bava, and then in Hollywood films. It became very, very sadistic, and that’s still what we have: it’s the slasher, or the thriller. They say these movies are feminist, because there’s one woman who survived at the end, but in those older movies, you didn’t have to see a bunch of your friends be brutally murdered. I don’t think that’s a happy ending.

So that’s all in the book.

CD: What you’re saying is that femicide is still the status quo, not the exception. We’d like to think of extreme violence against women as being a thing of the past, but it’s not.

AB: That’s partly why I wanted to set my book in the modern age: I don’t want people to think “Oh, this is how it was in the 1950s or the ‘40s.” That lets us off the hook.

People also think of feminine women as dated, of femininity as being out of fashion. But I see more and more young women who really want to doll themselves up. They’re not doing it for a man; usually they’re doing it for fun with their friends, or to make themselves feel good. It’s in pop culture, it’s in music video culture, it’s on TikTok, but it’s still not in recent movies or books.

CD: I wanted to ask you about feminine fantasy more broadly. You’re so committed to a traditionally feminine aesthetic in your films, and now also in this novel: the lavish clothing, the sweet food, the hunky man. And each of these pleasures is actually really fun to read about. But they also end up having a dark side—the sugar crash after the desserts, or the man who ends up being, you know, completely evil. Do you think that women’s fantasy is doomed to endanger us?

AB: No, I don’t think it’s always doomed to endanger us. But do I think the Gothic is about women being entombed within a castle that’s owned by a man, under his rules and regulations. So, the Gothic is about being imprisoned within patriarchy, and about the woman either making peace with that, or escaping it.
That’s why those old-style novel covers are so evocative—the kind of cover that I copied with my book jacket, which shows the woman fleeing from the castle. It already tells the whole story, that cover: she’s fleeing from this wealth, this security, this pleasure, this dark fantasy that’s exciting. The man means pleasure, but he also means control. Are you willing to play the role of the little perfect doll to a man, and have all the money, have all the pleasure—but also be under his control? Or do you want independence, which could also mean poverty and loneliness?

Jane Eyre is a perfect example of that. Jane can go back to the castle in the end and be with Rochester because he’s maimed and blind, and therefore, they’re equal. He doesn’t have power over her because he has to depend on her to be his eyes. But if he weren’t maimed and blind, well, she couldn’t stay there with him because he’d continue to dominate her.

CD: Like he does to Bertha.

AB: Exactly. And that’s why Wide Sargasso Sea was so breathtaking for me. What that novel does is also what I was interested in doing: talking about the wife before the last wife. In the original Bluebeard fairy tale, the main character does survive. But what about the other wives, the wives that were forgotten?

CD: You have a line like that in Bluebeard’s Castle: “[Judith] always thought about characters you weren’t supposed to think about: the girls and women who are murdered in slasher films, rather than the final girl.”

AB: I like to do this obnoxious thing where I directly put my theories and ideas in the text. I know that irritates people, but that’s one reason I made Judith a writer. So she could be someone who thinks analytically like I do.

That’s also part of why Bluebeard’s Castle has so much intertextuality, so many references to other Gothic novels and films. When I’m writing screenplays, too, I’m always thinking, “What does this have to do with other works?”

CD: Do you think that having written a novel now will change how you approach writing screenplays and directing?

AB: Bluebeard’s Castle started as a screenplay. I was trying to get it made as a movie, but couldn’t get it made before the pandemic. So now the movie, if it gets made, is going to really feel like it was adapted from a novel. And if I have time, I would love to actually write a little novella of the screenplay that I’m going to make into a movie now [The Face of Horror], which is in pre-production. Charlie Chaplin wrote novels for his later movies, like Limelight. I think it’s a really good practice, because it gets you to know your characters better. And then it’s more like a memory that you lived, and you can just take the best fragments of it for the movie.

For instance, dialogue always has to be really short when you write a screenplay, because the audience gets bored and they don’t like long scenes. But with a novel, the actors can read the novel and know the rest of the dialogue because they read the book. And that informs the performance.
The screenplay didn’t have a ghost either.

CD: Why did you decide to add a ghost to the novel?

AB: I was trying to make the novel as Gothic as possible, and I was reading a hilarious article in the Guardian about what makes books Gothic. There was this whole checklist: you have to have a decrepit castle in the middle of nowhere, and this is how the villain has to be, and there has to be a ghost or monster.

CD: I do think the Gothic lends itself to the checklist approach in a way that not every genre does.

AB: Oh, definitely. The very first Gothic novel, Castle of Otranto, was already a pastiche of medieval romances, very tongue-in-cheek. And with a pastiche genre, it’s like, “Okay, I’m going to take these elements from this genre, elements from the past that already seem really quaint and outdated, and then redo them for a new audience and just have a lot of fun.”

CD: The Gothic is often about working through our relationship with the past, that backwards glance.

AB: Yes, like, “Ooh, look at how things were a couple hundred years ago—it’s so spooky because it’s the past; the castles were darker, and people were more cruel.” Now, we don’t really have the Gothic anymore as a genre; instead, we have horror and we have romance.

CD: And the Gothic, because of its melodrama, did give us access to something that the “literary fiction” as a genre or prestige category doesn’t always, which is heightened emotion, and taboo subjects.

AB: Yeah, well, maybe they’re actually closer to the fairytale and the folktale in that sense, right? Because the fairytale and folktale are all about repeating these motifs that have become like memes in the culture. Things like the Bluebeard story were invented way before [Charles] Perrault—they were old wives’ tales, they were told by the fire, and then Grimm and Perrault just wrote them down. So I think that the Gothic’s a little bit like that—this group of cliches and stereotypes that can be new each time it’s told by a different person. I work that way in my films too: I’m always trying to reference other movies and other eras of filmmaking. It’s like telling a story that’s also about all the other times it’s been told.
I read a really fascinating book called Why Fairytales Stick by Jack Zipes, and it was about how certain stories get retold over hundreds or thousands of years because they’ve got something in them that is important for people to remember or understand.

CD: Some of the social dynamics that were happening then, hundreds of years ago, are still happening now, to some extent. Children are still in danger. Women are still in danger.

AB: People are still dealing with death and neglect and abuse and rape.

CD: Does your book have a pedagogical goal, in that sense?

AB: A few years ago, when a woman was raped, everybody said it was her fault. And now we don’t think that anymore. We’ve actually changed our consciousness as a culture to realize she wasn’t “asking for it.” But we still have the same attitude towards victims of domestic violence: “She was asking for it. If she was smarter, she would have gotten out.” We think that there’s something incredibly wrong with them that they would have stayed with someone abusive. So, I hope that my book shows people how to have empathy for somebody in that situation.

But also, in terms of victims themselves, two women have already told me that they left their abusive partners after reading my book. One woman had been with her husband for fifteen years, and the other had been with her partner for five years. They both told me the same thing: “I realized I wasn’t safe.”
One of the women had a child and two cats that she’s very protective of. And she said that what made her realize she had to leave was that she wasn’t just putting herself in danger, she was putting her cats and her child in danger.

CD: Right, there’s specifically a part in the novel where Gavin becomes a threat to Judith’s cat, Romeo.

AB: You keep excusing [an abusive partner]; you keep taking him back. And I guess these two readers saw themselves in Judith, and they realized, “Okay, I’m doing this, too, and that’s not what I want to be doing anymore.” You also realize that a man like that isn’t going to change, that he’s never going to be how you want him to be.

And I think when the book switches into Gavin’s point of view is when it gets really, really scary. That’s the one part of the book that doesn’t read like a Bronte or like a Gothic—it reads like a contemporary thriller. I did that on purpose, made the language much more direct and plain and contemporary. It’s not the highly feminine writing style of the rest of the book; it’s authoritative, it’s the mainstream style that we accept as normal and fine. But that’s also the really appalling chapter, right? So I wanted to contrast that chapter with the rest of this book so that it seems as obscene as it is.

CD: I thought it was interesting that in the novel-within-a-novel that Judith is writing about Bluebeard, her protagonist gets a different ending from the one that Judith does.

AB: When I was finishing Judith’s story, I found it too bleak. I didn’t want to end it with her tragedy, but instead with her triumph. It was too unrealistic and clichéd, in my view, to give Judith herself a happy ending, considering all that comes before, so I gave the happy ending to her heroine. It’s the ending I wanted, and the ending the reader wants. It also frames the book within a fairy tale, shows us that Judith was well aware of the situation she was in, and it immortalizes Judith by ending with her writing.

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