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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LN: The events were happening as you were writing…

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

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

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

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

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

LN: How so? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LN: Walk in the park!

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

The post Hisham Matar on Writing Male Friendships appeared first on Electric Literature.

For a large part of my youth, my “family” was a combination of people with various social and economic circumstances—some vastly different from my own. Caribbean family stories are often like that, stories of biological and found families, people who come together and pull apart for various reasons. 

Often, the novels that are most transformative for me are those that explore atypical family dynamics and transcend conventional family stories. These eight Caribbean family sagas portray families formed by biology or culture, proximity or shared experiences. 

Hungry Ghosts by Kevin Jared Hosein

The Saroop family dynamics begin to fall apart when Hans Saroop gets a new job serving as night watchman on the Changoor farm after the wealthy owner goes missing. The Changoor farm offers Hans comforts he doesn’t have at his home in the dilapidated barrack where he lives with his wife Marlee and son, and a host of other poor Hindu families. When Hans Saroop falls for his employer, he sets in motion questions about loyalty, sacrifice, and what it takes to get ahead, and upends both his biological family and the family living in the close confines of the barrack.

Land of Love and Drowning by Tiphanie Yanique

Land of Love and Drowning follows three generations of the Bradshaw family living on the Virgin Islands in the early 1900s—all descendants of Captain Owen Arthur Bradshaw whose ship sinks around the time the Virgin Islands are transferred to American rule. The book revolves around his three children: Eeona, who is exiled to the island of Tortola after her mother discovers the captain has had an incestuous relationship with his older daughter; Annette, who considers herself the historian of the family; and Jacob, born to the captain’s mistress. Each child has a magical gift that they rely on once they are orphaned, a gift that can either save or destroy their lives. 

What a Mother’s Love Don’t Teach You by Sharma Taylor

When Dinah, a domestic worker, becomes pregnant in her late teens, she gives up her baby to a wealthy expat couple working in Jamaica. The couple disappears and eighteen years later, when a young man, Apollo, visits the family for whom Dinah now works, Dinah is convinced the young man is her long-lost son. Apollo is also curious about the strange woman who thinks she knows him and his Jamaican heritage, which his parents do not discuss. Class and race collide in this saga about biological and adopted families. 

Book of the Little Axe by Lauren Francis-Sharma

Rosa Rendón would rather work on her family’s farm than do domestic work. But when the British capture Trinidad and it becomes clear that free black property owners will lose their land and their freedom, Rosa leaves the island and heads north to live among the Crow Nation in Montana. There she marries a Crow Chief but her son Victor increasingly realizes his mother has kept many secrets about his family ties from him. In this multi-generational saga, Rosa has to retrace her own journey to help her son forge his own path to manhood.

The Island of Forgetting by Jasmine Sealy

Spanning four generations, this novel begins in 1962 with Iapetus, driven mad by the memory of watching his brother, Cronus, murder their father. Cronus encourages Iapetus to forget and later takes in Iapetus’ son, Atlas. But Iapetus and each generation of his descendants remain tied to Cronus even after Cronus dies. Atlas shelves his dream to leave Barbados to study and instead takes on a role helping his cousin manage the hotel Cronus owned. We also meet Atlas’s teenage daughter, Calypso who falls for and has a child with a much older Canadian real estate developer, who is in business with her uncle. And Calypso’s son, also raised at the hotel, battles with his own sense of identity and his mother’s movement in and out of his life. With echoes of Greek mythology, this novel explores the sometimes impossible task of shedding family legacy and forging one’s own path.  

Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson

When Eleanor Bennett dies, she leaves behind a long voice recording for her children, Byron and Benny, along with a traditional black cake. Eleanor’s message describes a swimmer who escapes her island on her wedding day just after her new husband collapses and dies, and a baby born during her time in England. Estranged siblings, Byron and Benny, are both reeling with the secrets their mother has chosen to disclose only after her death, the new family stories they uncover, and their own broken relationship. The book explores how family stories can both upend and unite a family. 

The Book of Lost Saints by Daniel José Older

Marisol’s ghost wants the story of her disappearance during the Cuban Revolution told. To do so, she haunts her nephew Ramón, floating through the book and shadowing her nephew through every public and private aspect of his life. Through Marisol’s haunting, Ramón uncovers his family’s buried history, Marisol’s capture and imprisonment during the revolution, and his family’s escape to America. As Ramón learns Marisol’s story, and the reasons his mother prefers not to talk about this period in her family’s life, he engineers a family reunion no one thought possible.

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

Growing up in a struggling family in the Dominican Republic, fifteen-year-old Ana Canción is pushed into a marriage with a much older man as part of her mother’s plan to move her family from their poverty stricken community to America. Juan Ruiz, who has been living in New York City, marries the teen to obtain the Canción family’s land. When Ana moves with her new husband to New York, she finds a rundown apartment and herself in circumstances that don’t allow her to take care of her family financially as her mother expects. This family saga is one of determination and desire, and a young woman finding her way out of circumstances set up for her to fail.

The post 8 Books on Love, Loss, and Betrayal in the Caribbean appeared first on Electric Literature.

I’m in Chicago, two hours ahead of my twin brother, Christopher, in California. At eleven at night, I brush my teeth and get into bed. Then our nighttime routine begins.

I keep myself awake for the next hour by scrolling through Twitter. Christopher settles on his couch and also scrolls social media. He itches and needs to distract himself. He plays a word in our game of Words With Friends.

It’s now midnight in Chicago. I listen to a podcast to stay awake and play Words With Friends back with Christopher. I flutter my heavy eyes and play a word. I keep refreshing to see when Christopher plays one back. He’s refreshing, too, playing word after word instead of succumbing to the itch.

I spend another hour alternating between fighting the sleep, losing, and waking up again. I’ve got to stay awake for Christopher. 

Around two in the morning, my time, I can’t take it anymore. I give in to the slumber.

Back in California, it’s midnight. When the plays from me on Words With Friends cease, Christopher takes a scratch. He pours himself a small glass of Jameson and sugar-free ginger ale. He sips while he listens to a podcast and ignores his thoughts. He finishes the drink by the podcast’s commercial break and pours another. He’s finished that glass by the next podcast break. He can still hear his thoughts, so he pours another. He flutters eyes that have grown heavy.

Christopher feels warm and numb. He’s had enough when he passes his litmus test of no longer hearing himself say he doesn’t deserve nice things because he’s an alcoholic. He feels calm and safe when he hears nothing but his deep breaths. 

He spends another hour watching thoughts come in and out but not stick. Then he gives into sleep.

Twins are supposedly bound more tightly than other siblings. That was true for Christopher and me. We were linked by the same birthday, interests, friends, teachers, classes, and bedroom far past an appropriate age. Since I can remember, I felt bound to take care of Christopher. I was the older twin by one minute. Protecting him was my job as firstborn.

I took this responsibility seriously. When we were in the second grade, our teacher summoned our mother, who’d immigrated from Belize, to a parent-teacher conference. She left work right away, worried we were struggling in school.

Thankfully, it wasn’t about our performance. Christopher and I were hitting all the benchmarks. It was me. I was doing everything for him, coddling him, stifling him. 

The teacher’s efforts to address my behavior had failed. She separated us since sitting beside each other made it too easy for me. “I’ll tell them to turn to a page in their poem books,” the teacher said to our mother, “and your daughter will turn her page and then turn her brother’s. Christopher’s not learning.”

 But the distance didn’t stop me. When the teacher moved my seat across the room and told us to turn to another poem, I turned my page, walked to Christopher’s desk, and turned his. I huffed back across the class to my seat. I waited for the next instruction minutes later and did the same thing.

“It’s very disruptive,” the teacher pleaded. “Please tell your daughter she can’t do everything for her brother. Your son has got to learn to do things on his own.”

My mom waited until we got home and pulled me aside. She acknowledged that independence wasn’t valued in our Yoruba culture as much as it was in the States. But, she asked me to let him figure things out himself. Let him turn his own pages, write his own chapters, live his own life. I didn’t grasp what she meant, but I told her I’d try. 

I winced when I looked across the classroom at Christopher rifling through the pages of the poem book. The teacher’s glance implored me not to get up. I remained seated and stared at the floor, unable to bear seeing whether Christopher had succeeded.

Later that year, school got out early for an administrative day. We sat on a blue bench in front of the building. It was a hot day in Southern California, so we picked the only bench in the shade. Soon, all the other kids had been picked up, but there was still no sign of our mother. 

The teacher peered down at her watch every so often. Christopher and I sensed her impatience. She muttered about getting to her meetings.

“Don’t worry, we can make it home, Miss,” my brother assured.

It was the early ‘90s, and, apparently, that was all the teacher needed. She released us. 

“I don’t know how to get home,” I whispered as we walked away, not wanting to expose us.

“I do,” he took my hand. “I’ll lead the way.”

I squeezed his hand, and we embarked on our journey home. 

Nothing looked familiar on our route. Not the streets, houses, or businesses. With each turn, Christopher said, “Almost there,” to allay me. He led us from road to road, through crosswalks and neighborhoods. 

As we weaved around another corner, and I was sure we’d never make it, I saw, then, the blue and white garage door of our house at the end of the street. I squealed.

“See, told you we’re almost there.” Christopher hurried us along.

We scurried to the front door and rang the doorbell. My mom opened the door.

Her look of horror caused me to let go of all of the tension I had been holding. I peed all down my legs, drenching my overalls and socks. 

My mother dropped down to embrace me. She removed my shoes and soggy socks, hoisted me by my armpits, and brought me inside. Christopher walked in calmly, giggling at my mess.

The power of experiencing formative events exactly when another person does is unique. As a twin, you are alone in nothing. You have a lifelong consultant for every rite of passage and milestone. When Christopher and I turned ten, we confided we were not excited to be big kids in middle school that fall. When we turned sixteen, we wished to win the high school basketball championship blowing out the candles on our joint birthday cake. On our twenty-first  birthday, we did what I thought was both of our first shots of cheap tequila. And at thirty, we wondered if we’d ever own a home.  

For our thirty-fifth birthday, I went to visit Christopher in California. We had each married a few years earlier, but our spouses were away at work. Decades had passed since it was just us. I returned to my childhood routine and responsibilities. I looked around my brother’s apartment for confirmation that he was well. Lights were on, so bills were paid. The refrigerator was full, so he had disposable money. He looked thin, but not too thin, so I thought his health was fine.

He put the grocery bag he was carrying on the kitchen counter. A 200-milliliter bottle of Jameson fell on its side.

“Oh, is that for tomorrow’s birthday festivities?” I inquired.

My brother didn’t look at me while answering. “No. That’s to get me through tonight.”

He said it so casually that I thought I had misheard him. 

I asked him to repeat himself. He did and added: he was an alcoholic, had been for 15 years, started binge drinking to cope with being racially profiled on his lily-white college campus, and never stopped.

We talked for a couple of hours while I peppered Christopher with questions. He answered them with the same nonchalance. No, he didn’t drink and drive. No, he didn’t drink at work. No, I didn’t need to stop drinking around him. No, he didn’t drink all day. Yes, he did drink from nine at night to one in the morning because it helped him sleep. Yes, he was going to keep drinking. No, he didn’t think that was a problem. 

I acted calm while sinking deep into my chair. 

I returned to Chicago feeling heavy. So much for a special twin connection. I’d failed at the first job I ever had. 

Without thinking, I switched into caretaker mode. Christopher claimed he didn’t want to get sober, but surely he didn’t mean it. I browsed articles with headlines like “How to Help An Alcoholic Stop Drinking,” but none of the advice seemed applicable. The reports described Christopher as high-functioning, a personality trait that would make quitting hard because drinking worked for him. He had a good job, owned a house, appeared happily married—why stop drinking when things were going well? 

So, I came up with the Words With Friends solution. Since bedtime was most acute, I stayed up with Christopher, hoping to keep him focused on something other than drinking for as much of the night as possible. Fewer hours and drinks remained between him and falling asleep. I didn’t need to sleep; I needed to ensure we reached the rest of life’s milestones together. I panicked, thinking of turning forty, fifty, or sixty alone. Every night I stayed up was another chance at another night in our old age together. 

Scientists love to study twins. Identical twins are the most coveted, but fraternal twins of different genders present a unique opportunity to tease out the influence of the environment on life outcomes. Christopher and I were a useful experiment. Besides gender, we shared everything else. I could see the future study: What happens to first-generation Black girl and boy twins brought up in the same immigrant household?

The Black girl develops the tenacity she sees in her mother. Her mother, very familiar with racism, taught her how to fight it. She thrives. She graduates high school as valedictorian. She attends Ivy League schools and, already used to defending herself, pushes against racism at every turn. At every school, in every job, in every relationship.

The Black boy doesn’t think his mother’s tenacity applies to him. He has no idea how to fight off racism. It bothers him, but he feels resigned, powerless to escape it. He graduates high school with okay grades and gets into an okay college. But the racism there intensifies and infuriates him. To his fortune, the college’s binge drinking culture is the perfect coping mechanism. Most nights, he disappears at dorm room parties into a boozy nirvana. Soon, he measures his days not from waking to sleep but from yesterday’s drink to tonight’s. He marries his high school crush, who didn’t balk at his disclosure that he’s an alcoholic. She was raised by alcoholic, high-functioning parents and is accustomed to living with substance abuse. She doesn’t enable Christopher, but she doesn’t encourage him to seek recovery on his own, either. He gets a sales job where he can’t ignore the racism; he just takes it. Then he drinks every night to forget.

One weekday several months after our birthday, I called Christopher. It was part of our new routine. We talked once a week for two to three hours. I liked to keep Christopher talking, hoping he’d offer some clues about how to help him stop drinking. But he usually didn’t talk about his substance abuse.

Two and a half hours into this phone conversation, Christopher asked, “How come you’re not like me?”

I didn’t understand.

“Like, why aren’t you an alcoholic?” He sniffled. “We had the same childhood. How come I’m the only one who’s like this?” His speech was slurred as he choked up. “I don’t deserve to be happy. I’m an alcoholic who deserves to suffer.”

I hadn’t seen or heard my brother cry since we were small. I didn’t even recognize it until his sniffling became sobs.

I wasn’t prepared for this to be the entrée into talking about Christopher’s alcoholism. There was no time to pull up the websites on how to respond. I spoke from the heart. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you. You’re doing your best with what you’ve got,” I said. 

Truth was, I didn’t know why I didn’t abuse alcohol or some other substance. My best guess was that I was fortunate enough to not be a Black man in the U.S. I’d never had to appear less scary or threatening. I’d never been asked why I was in this store, this car, this neighborhood. I didn’t have to drink away those indignities to make it to the next day.

We got off the phone. Hours later, we did our bedtime routine. I struggled to stay awake to play one more word, to keep one more sip at bay. At midnight Central and 10 p.m. Pacific, I drifted to sleep. 

My mother told me recently that she’d had a separate conversation with Christopher that afternoon when our second-grade teacher called her to school. 

She asked him if he was having trouble in class. My brother said he wasn’t. Then why did his sister have to turn the pages in the poem book for him? Did he have a difficult time finding the poems?

“No,” my brother had told her. “I know how to do it myself. But Sister likes doing it for me. I want to make her happy.”

It all became clear.

In Yoruba culture, the second twin is considered the elder twin. According to the Yoruba, the second sends the first twin to judge if the world is fit and beautiful before the second twin descends.  

Here I thought I was the elder twin responsible for the caretaking. But Christopher was the older one, and he’d also been taking care of me.

I called Christopher back right away. “You deserve happiness, whether that’s sobriety or something else for you. I won’t try to do it for you—not like I could, anyway. You are capable on your own.”

That night, I fell asleep earlier than usual and missed the bedtime routine. 

I dreamt Christopher and I were on a tropical beach. We looked older. Christopher’s salt and pepper beard matched the strands of silver at the roots of my hairline.

Christopher dipped his toe in the crystal blue water. He flinched at its warmness. He was used to the cold, choppy waters of addiction. He’d been treading water for so long that he didn’t realize how much it took to keep from drowning. At least he was alive.  

He walked farther and farther into the water, mesmerized by its glorious warmth on his skin. He’d thought there existed only chilly, turbulent seas. 

He’d never experienced anything like the balm of the ocean. He kept walking until the water reached his neck. His feet ceased to touch the ground. He didn’t struggle to stay up. He was buoyant. 

I followed him out into the water, a few feet behind him, and yelled, “Lead the way.”

The post Every Night I Stay Awake To Keep My Brother From Drinking appeared first on Electric Literature.

Life Studies may have been one of the first books to introduce confessionalism into American poetry, but the term confessional is most often linked with Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and other women poets whose writing is too commonly misread and dismissed as autobiographical gushings of emotion rather than crafted, intentional social commentary. My new book of poems, DIARY, interrogates these ideas about the confessional and gender. Rather than engaging in the acrobatics of trying to come across as not too emotional, not too messy, not too personal; always measured and buttoned up and chill and universal, the poems in my book indulge in the mundane, the feminine, the bratty and sad and bodily and TMI. I’m so excited and inspired by other contemporary writing by women and gender-fluid poets who push back on antiquated and sexist ideas around the confessional by doing the same. Here’s a list of 8 books in this vein:

Gravitas by Amy Berkowitz

Speaking of graduate school, this necessary book digs into “the tendency of MFA programs to teach women that their lives aren’t worth writing about.” These crafted, conversational poems insist on the power and merit of everyday speech in women’s writing, referencing the free-wheeling poetics of both Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems and Paule Marshall’s “From the Poets in the Kitchen.” Gravitas interrogates an academic space that closes its eyes to a serial abuser professor on staff while chronically dismissing poems about the everyday by women: “Believing that poetry about the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / believing that the life of a young woman lacks gravitas / enables a certain cognitive dissonance.”

The Gone Thing by Monica Mcclure 

The followup to McClure’s 2015 book Tender Data, The Gone Thing explores family history, class mobility, labor, and loss in elegant, unflinching poems. One of my favorite things about Monica’s work is how her speaker fucks with us, calls the reader to task, and plays with our assumptions: “Yes I am talking about being poor in America / Suck my dick I am no longer poor I’m high-salaried”. Pastoral beauty and designer perfume mixes with despair, disgust, filth, and astute commentary on systemic oppression, work and labor. 

mahogany by erica lewis 

Written during the years when the author cared for her mother at the end of her life and after her mother’s death, mahogany subverts conventional narratives around grief and the confessional with haunting poems about family, loss, and the struggle to make it through each day. Lewis weaves pop culture, politics, contemporary and historical literature into poems that draw their titles and inspiration from songs by Diana Ross and The Supremes or Ross’s solo career: “my mother used to clean houses / as a child / some days I can barely / get out of bed /in my mind / she’s like diana ross / scrubbing the white lady’s stairs / in lady sings the blues / except prettier / and with green eyes”

Bruise/bruise/break by Jennif(f)er Tamayo 

Printed in vibrant full color and blending poetry, prose, photography, and other visual elements, Tamayo’s radical book connects the dots between cycles and systems of violence in U.S. history—from the genocide of native people that the country was built on to the American poetry world’s colonialist roots. Interspersed with images of U.S. immigration forms doctored to tell the poet’s own family story, bruise/bruise/break digs into familial and global histories while blasting open conventions around genre, grammar, gender and respectability. 

Bedroom Vowel by Zoe Tuck

Zoe Tuck’s poems break the fourth wall, inviting in talk about everything from work and money to friends and even commentary on the poems themselves: “I’m sick of the I / I wish I could just write about mythological and historical themes”. Accounts of everyday life—cooking dinner on a phone call with a friend, planning how to make “like $1,000 this month,” staying up late watching Encino Man—are balanced with reflections on the French Renaissance, tarot, Ancient Greece, Hannah Arendt, The Odyssey, The X-Files, “The Thong Song.” The result is a constellation of references that builds on itself into the size of a whole life. 

Killing Kanoko by Hiromi Itō, translated by Jeffrey Angles

Groundbreaking Japanese poet Hiromi Itō has been writing about feminist issues surrounding sexuality, reproduction and the body since the early 1980s. Turning away from the formal poetic conventions of the era, her poetry uses colloquial, sometimes childlike and vulgar language which brought to her being considered a “shamanness” pulling her language “from some mysterious source deep within.” In Killing Kanoko, originally published in 1980 and translated in 2009, Itō writes about childbirth, menopause, abortion, and ambivalence around motherhood in ways that still feel very much taboo even today. 

Dark Beds by Diana Whitney

Diana Whitney’s quietly explosive collection of poems explores womanhood, motherhood, grief, the spaces where being the parent of a girl child and being a woman overlap with scars left over from childhood. There’s “danger everywhere” in these moody, atmospheric poems that bring a modern, feminist spin to the pastoral as they conjure the natural world, dark skies, early morning gardens and frozen rivers. Time passes and everything grows so fast and also in slow motion—chickens, lilacs, girls, relationships strained by the years. As Whitney’s poem “The Long Goodbye” asks, “How can you savor what you have / when it demands so much attention?”

What You Refuse to Remember by MT Vallarta 

This book’s speaker tells us, “I once wrote on a fellowship application that I write poetry because it is the only way I can scream. I didn’t get the fellowship.” This is just one example of how these powerful poems exploring queer Filipinx identity, trauma, immigration, colonization, and art call into question the rules of academia and the so-called rational world. In a white supremacist patriarchal culture where science and logic are so often privileged over the spiritual, emotional, and intangible, these poems insist the full spectrum of humanity has a right to exist, thrive, and be taken seriously. 

The post 8 Unapologetically TMI Books by Feminist Poets appeared first on Electric Literature.

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After Shiva enrolls in a graduate degree in Jewish folklore, she uses her research to go to Ropshitz, a village in Poland where her family came from. There, she hopes to learn more about the generations of women before her and uncover secrets about who her mysterious and enigmatic grandmother really was. City of Laughter investigates the constellations of family and folklore, and pushes the boundary on the form of storytelling itself.

I spoke with Temim in person about all the elements of her sprawling multigenerational debut novel.

Olivia Cheng: So much of this novel is about mothers and daughters, Mira and Hannah and Shiva, and female desire. Where did this story originate from and were these always the themes you were interested in?

Temim Fruchter: I played in a band for a number of years, and we went on tour and we went to Warsaw, which I immediately fell in love with. I knew that my great grandmother was from this place called Ropshitz and that it was not too far from Warsaw. We had a van so we drove there. And I stood there and it was like the trope is you go to the place your ancestors are from and you’re supposed to feel something. And so on one hand, I really did. There’s no more town there in the same way there’s no more Jewish village there, but I definitely felt this very charged presence. Or am I just projecting that and making that up, and I’m just standing on some ground? And I was like, maybe it’s sort of both. Maybe it’s like if I insist there’s something here then there’s something here. And so I just started to really think about that. What does it mean to go back to a place that you’re sort of from? And what does it mean when what you find there is kind of inconclusive? So that was one thing.

The other thing is that my grandmother on my mother’s side was a very private, interesting, curious woman. I loved her, I was close with her, but I didn’t always know her very well. And there are these pictures of her from when she was young, and she looked just stunning. She looked like this starlet with these beautiful lips and a leopard-print shrug or something. It wasn’t until later in my life when I was out as queer and often presenting and expressing as a femme gender identity that I started to be like, wow, she kind of reminds me of myself. Or like this sort of aesthetic and way of moving through the world. This femme mischief that I aspire to. Which isn’t to say that I suddenly decided my grandmother is queer. That’s not the point at all. But what I started thinking about was even if she had been or even if any of my ancestors had been, it’s very likely I would never know. Because so many queer ancestries are kept secret and are erased, and we don’t necessarily know of them. And so I think that this book was my way into reaching back into that unknowability of my queer ancestry and my own Jewish ancestry and just experimenting and playing.

OC: Let’s talk about the messenger because they’re basically an omniscient POV. Can you tell me more about your choice to include them in certain critical sections, like when Shiva is about to go to Poland?

TF: When I started getting deeper into writing this book that was about Jewish folklore, I started to think of the novel itself as a folktale. Like a sort of massive, sprawling folktale. Often in a folktale, there’s a storyteller. There’s someone who carries the story and I already mentioned that I was thinking about this imaginary box of letters, so everything kept coming back to this idea of a courier, a messenger. Funnily enough, and I don’t know why, but I’ve had a lifelong fixation with the archangel Gabriel who is also known as the messenger. And also for no reason I can explain, I’ve always thought of the angel Gabriel as nonbinary. I don’t know why. This is why I’m a fiction writer, because maybe I’m making it up.

So I started to play with this idea of a nonbinary messenger whose role is to carry the story, but also kind of make some mischief, but also make meaningful interventions, and carry something from generation to generation that refuses to be tamped down. And so I began to include that character and realized that I want to tell this story almost as though there’s this omniscience that you don’t see, but periodically, I wanted to bring the messenger into view. And especially when I got interested in The Dybbuk and the writer of the play The Dybbuk, S Ansky, who also appears in the book. I didn’t even know that there was a character in that story called the messenger, who also signals that there is something otherworldly going on. It felt really fitting that this messenger character really signaled that even though a lot of what happens in this book is really grounded in “reality,” I wanted to signal the books’ insistence that there is something a little outside of the world we know, especially in a folktale and especially in this story.

OC: With this omniscient POV, there’s this ever-present sense of destiny. How much did your personal worldview about coincidences and destiny come into the major themes of this book?

TF: One way I’ve been thinking about coincidence in this book is that I wanted this story to be a space where if you think it might mean something, it probably means something. Where theorems of wonder get proven true. Where synchronicities are real. I remember reading an interview between Alexander Chee and Jordy Rosenberg, and it was about queer fiction. I remember Alexander Chee talking about coincidence and how sometimes things seem too wild to be true and that coincidence in fiction is often considered to be in poor taste. But queerness is also considered sometimes to be in poor taste. I don’t want to misrepresent it, but I remember reading this piece and thinking “This is it, exactly.” It’s sort of gauche to write things that work out just so perfectly and are synchronous.

But I love both a queer and a folkloric space where it’s not necessarily that everything is predetermined, but it’s that there are all of these opportunities to connect to a story that brings a lot of things together. And I think that’s what is so rich about so much of contemporary storytelling and folklore that things come together in these beautiful and surprising ways and that’s what’s so moving about so many of the books I love. It’s not like a gotcha, everything’s connected. But it’s like everything is pretty connected and so I wanted to lean into that feeling. And I believe that some things are messy and don’t align and don’t work out and aren’t meant to be and don’t happen for a reason. But I also believe that synchronicities are everywhere and echoes are everywhere and that for me at least, a worldview that encompasses queer possibility or the sort of Jewish mystic outlook I was raised with. Those things feel more possible to play with especially in fiction.

OC: How much do you think this sense of destiny is associated with Jewish folklore?

TF: A lot! The short answer is a lot. I think the thing about folklore is that like fairytales, things are flatter in a folktale. There are archetypes and journeys that end in certain places and things that you know happen from the start. But the story is so engaging that you’re thinking how is this going to happen or one of two things is going to happen: the bad thing or the good thing. But I grew up quite religious in an Orthodox Jewish household. I still consider myself a religious person. I think a lot of the magic in this book and from this worldview comes from that. Just the sense that there’s plenty out there that humans either can’t see or just kind of can’t fully see and there are bigger forces at work. In that sense, I think both the storytelling tradition of Jewish folklore and also the Torah, the sort of stories I grew up hearing, where a literal God would move things around and say, “This is what’s going to happen.” That’s not what’s happening in this book, but it gave me permission to be a little over-the-top with that stuff. I’m going to arrange things so that even though these characters are trying to run from something, they’re going to ultimately going to be drawn back to it. What happens when you have agency, but you’re still drawn to something so strongly? I wanted both of those things in there.

OC: The prologue read like a folktale.

TF: One of my favorite parts of the book. It was really fun to write in the messenger’s voice and write in this archaic, wise, slightly wily character who’s carrying cargo across time and space. It really was enjoyable to use a prologue and epilogue, which is archaic, or maybe not archaic, maybe older-fashioned elements of telling a story. I was playing with that tradition or not even playing with it, leaning into it. If this novel is a folktale, we need the storyteller to come on stage and introduce themselves and exit. We need the contemporary story to be held in the much broader, expansive frame of this generational story that’s being told. And if there’s a prologue, I have to have an epilogue.

OC: Given that there are so many different elements of this book, what did research for this look like? How did you get started?

TF: I am a really bad and disorganized researcher, so I will start by saying that. I always knew this book was going to be rooted in Jewish folklore, but S Ansky actually didn’t come up until much later as I was working with the character of Shiva. And she was so curious about where she came from and why she felt the way she did. And it was really kind of meta, because I knew about The Dybbuk and I even know a little about S Ansky’s ethnographic study, but most of what I knew was this thing I had been fixated on a long time, which was that he wrote all of these questions that were very leading and that he never got to actually administer the questionnaire, because of World War I. So all these questions just tell a story. They exist out there. I have the translated version of them and they’re just questions. And then I started reading more about him and he was this really interesting, restless, shapeshifting, political person. Some people even posited that he might have been queer. I got really excited by him, so I was like, I’m going to follow this guy and my character is going to follow this guy.

Research-wise, it was in some ways not a deeply researched book, honestly. For example, the Jewish shtetl of Ropshitz, there’s really not very much that I can find about it. So a lot of the stories that I’m writing about Ropshitz while they’re rooted in some oral accounts I’ve read about and from people who lived there in translation, a lot of it is imaginary. I wanted to be very careful, because when you’re making things up about a place that your ancestors are from and that has been destroyed, you don’t want to be callous about that, but I also wanted to lean into this tradition of laughter that I felt came from there and bring it to life in my own imagination. That part comes less from research and more from just trying to sit with what I felt like I had learned about that place from stories and from just knowing my great grandmother for the time that I did.

Definitely did a good bit of research about Warsaw. I spent time in Warsaw, but not very much. A total of a month and a half there, so I did some research about being in Warsaw, you know, using Google Earth to walk the streets there and talk to people I know who lived there. And of course S Ansky was a big point of research for me. Other than that, I think part of why I call this book a speculative queer history of my family is a lot of these questions that I was asking couldn’t be answered by research. And the questions were more interested in what story I could tell from the bare facts that I knew and what leaps I could take from there.

OC: Who were you rebelling against?

TF: One of the fundamental parts of this book is that I wanted to play with the idea of queer determinism, or not quite determinism, but there is something that refuses to die. Squish it down or tamp it down, but this queer impulse keeps coming up generation after generation. And it’s not that I believe there should be some type of queer determinism, but we live in a world where there is heteronormative determinism of a kind. Generation from generation and we make babies and things go a certain way. I wanted this to be a certain overcorrection to that. Try as you may to escape it, we’re all queer.

OC: What are you excited for in Jewish and/or queer media?

TF: There’s so much already. It’s a golden era of queer television and queer storytelling and I’m extremely excited by that. Not to sound like a weird old person. It’s like we’ve seen the final invasion, but then we see something new and exciting. I’m moved by the growing movement of anti-Zionist Jews and I’m moved by Jewish art that is diasporic in nature. I think we will see more and more Jewish art that emphasizes diasporic community and solidarity with Palestine and just mutual aid.

The post Temim Fruchter on Writing a Queer Jewish Novel Based on Folklore appeared first on Electric Literature.

The novel follows Coral, a lonely author of a dystopian novel who discovers her brother’s body after he dies by suicide. Aside from the EMTs who clear Jay’s body, Coral is the only person who knows of his death. She takes his unlocked cell phone and begins responding to his texts as if she is Jay, as if he’s still alive. None of these correspondences carry as much weight as the ones to his daughter, Coral’s niece. Told in first-person plural and set over the course of a grief-stricken week as Coral attends a comic convention and attempts to date, the novel has an eerie, otherworldly quality from the very first sentence: “We are responsible for telling this story, mostly because Coral cannot.” 

As Coral slips from reality, her dystopian novel, “Wildfire,” swirls to life, amid her attempts to keep Jay alive to those who don’t yet know he’s dead. Dead in Long Beach, California examines trauma, desire, grief, hunger, loss, and our society at large in an inventive, form-shifting novel that truly no one but the singular Venita Blackburn could’ve written. 

I had the pleasure of talking to Venita Blackburn about voice, hunger, humor, and more.  

Rachel León: The premise of this novel is compelling, and like all your work, the voice is distinct and strong. This particular voice has an enigmatic quality. I don’t want to discuss who exactly is narrating because not knowing right away makes for an alluring reading experience, but I’m curious which came first—the premise or the voice? 

Venita Blackburn: Definitely the voice came first. I usually don’t write anything without having the sound of the narrator established. The most interesting parts of stories for me aren’t necessarily plot oriented. I’m most moved by characters and relationships. No character is real enough to me to put in motion until they sound real. They have to have a speech pattern, a rhythm that matches their personality and psychoses perhaps. It’s fun.

RL: You’re such a master of voice that I suppose that first question was too obvious. It’s one of the things I love about your work. Plus you often play with form, which you do here with “Wildfire.” But I’d argue it’s used differently than most novels within novels… At what point did “Wildfire” come in? 

VB: I had the essence of the main story ready, but I did find it difficult to write much of it, so I spent a lot of the early drafting period working on the story within the story. I also wrote a lot of it during the pandemic in long stretches of isolation where I wanted to be far away from the realities of that time, so writing the “Wildfire” sections gave me that escape. I also rewatched a lot of Star Trek during that period for the same reason. Going into distant speculative sci-fi fantasy worlds offers the illusion of safety from modern troubles and makes every trauma a little more manageable because the future promises reprieve, right? Of course good sci-fi acts as a reflection of humanity and parallels most modern concerns and bad habits at the core. Eventually, I had to cut a lot of the material I wrote for the “Wildfire” sections because they were not what the real story and situation were about. I don’t have a hard time cutting, but those sections were comforting to me for a while, dreaming in a land via a lesbian assassin with a solid fashion sensibility. I couldn’t fantasize forever and had to face the hard part of the book.

RL: That blending of fantasy and facing hard reality hits at the core of the novel. I think most of us can slip into fantasy pretty easily, but Coral is the perfect character for this story. 

VB: Coral does not handle the situation well at all. What would the ideal reaction to that kind of horror be? I don’t know. I do know that every reaction is legitimate, and eventually we have to be accountable for those actions. The story though is not about healing or excellent coping skills at all. The story happens in the space between the event and acceptance, that point where our emotions, our sense of reality loses all clarity. I wanted to put images and meaning to that space of grief.

RL: I think the way the novel also explores hunger and desire somehow makes that space of grief more profound. Do you think the two are related—hunger and grief? 

VB: Absolutely. On a literal level there are probably psychological studies to confirm this link, but it is definitely something I’ve observed and experienced. Hunger is something I wanted to put language around. Coral has a real struggle to feed herself sometimes in hilarious ways, but that is a reality of grief that we’ve understood forever; it is an ancient reality that the body will not always take care of itself well under the pressure of catastrophic loss. The need to be fed will be there though, and manifests in awkward ways for Coral from standing in an alley eating cheap tacos or failing to order pizza in an almost cruel but funny way.

RL: And that brings us to the humor. While the novel does deal with catastrophic loss, that’s balanced nicely with humorous moments like what you mentioned, as well as funny insights. Was the humor always there or did it come in later? 

VB: The humor was probably always there because of my natural instincts. So much of life is absurd but we take it seriously, and that is the ultimate formula for ridiculousness. During the early drafts though I wasn’t always laughing. When writing some of the harder scenes and material where I really had to remember what it was like in my own body when experiencing the shock of grief I had no awareness of the humor taking place. During the later reads and assessment stages did I see some really wild things happening. I thought I must be insane or this is just hilarious or both. I’m fine with that too. I’ve also read some pieces to different audiences at this point and found that the audience laughs at times I didn’t think were funny, but my delivery is also part of the experience. It has been a ride going from a private idea of the story to its public presentation. 

RL: Can you tell me more about that ride?

VB: Well, this book is the first one I’ve ever written on contract where I sold it as an idea instead of a completed project, which I did for the first two story collections. So, I had expectations I’ve never had before and a commitment to a single story that I’ve never had to have before. I usually write whatever is troubling me and I either finish it or I don’t and I publish it or I don’t. This time I had to follow through with the concept and I had a lot of eyes and minds waiting on the other side. The editing process was great and super easy. I’ve been lucky to have such a solid relationship with my editor Jackson Howard. He’s young and brilliant. A lot of the emotional “ride” has been with myself in the process, self-imposed pressure. I don’t know if I’ll ever do another book under these circumstances where the manuscript doesn’t exist before I sell it. Who knows.

RL: So did this novel originate with something troubling you?

VB: Every story I write originates with something troubling me, and I encourage everyone short on content to do the same. I won’t attempt to put anything on a page unless it is material that is sacred to me, nags at my heart and brain for any number of reasons. I like to say that all stories are grief stories these days. They’re also love stories too. Having experienced significant personal loss at various states of my life, I was able to tap into those experiences to understand the emotional core of the novel, that nameless shaking place of trauma, the sudden emptying out of expectations and possibilities. The novel started with the sense of grief and loss of possibilities that I’ve had with family and circumstances then cascaded out into wider observations of our civilization.

RL: I loved those wider observations of our civilization. Like the part about human evolution and the commodification of Later, and how that both came from More and had to be filled by it. This kind of commentary adds a fascinating layer to the exploration of loss. Grief can make our world feel so small, but these wider observations offer a backdrop, or context, to the physical space we’re in as we’re grieving. Was that your intent as the novel cascaded out? Or was it one of those happy accidents that come from following the novel where it wants to go?

VB: I didn’t always know what kinds of concepts I would use from moment to moment while writing, but I knew the voice and the psyche of the novel needed to look far away from the current moment of crisis. That was in a way an act of self-preservation for the character because the crisis was unbearable if it existed alone in a bubble of time, but as one bead on a long chain of events no given tragedy seems so daunting. That’s how my mind works at least. That sense of organization is anxiety reducing though I can imagine for some it could be overwhelming and have the opposite effect. It was important for me to allow the voice, which was acting as a filter for Coral’s own mind, to travel to places where we have everything figured out, where we can quantify our madness, greed, vanity, curiosity, devotion and all the rest then neatly put them away into files. That way the worst sudden explosion of horror seems like less of a catastrophe. Even though we have to get close and feel our pain eventually, I wanted to acknowledge how for a moment that we can lean back, way back. From far away our nightmares can be funny or pretty or almost nothing at all.  

The post Venita Blackburn Thinks You Should Turn Your Troubles Into Stories appeared first on Electric Literature.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“… is that they were all healthy.”

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

“What? What is it?” I asked.

“Just go down,” she commanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-part memoir, one-part narrative nonfiction, one-part historical investigation, The Fruit Cure takes readers on a journey through the sometimes-sinister past—and controversial present—of extreme wellness communities on the Internet. With the deft of an investigative journalist, the nuance of a historical and cultural critic, and the craft of a memoirist, Alnes subjects herself to the same rigor of inquiry as the wellness gurus and devout followers she researches, asking difficult questions about responsibility, narrative, and power. Resisting a convenient slide into the very dichotomies of good and bad, ill and healed, that she unearths in these spaces, the result is a read that is empathic and tender, at times darkly humorous, and ultimately deeply inhabitable for anyone who has lived in a body and grappled with the impossibility of its control.

Jacqueline Alnes, an assistant professor of English at West Chester University, whose work has been published in The New York Times and Guernica, joined me on Zoom to discuss the moralization of food, parasocial relationships, ableism, running, and the challenge—and freedom—of writing an illness narrative that rejects inherited myths about healing and cures.

Alexandra Middleton: You write openly in The Fruit Cure about the challenge of reliving memories of your neurological illness when memory itself was elusive. What was it like for you to revisit these memories through writing this book? 

Jacqueline Alnes: Feeling like I could write about this was an interesting conversation I had with myself. I don’t have a memory of it like you would traditionally a memory. For the sake of my own self-preservation, I tried to pretend a lot of it didn’t happen. Which is part of the crux of the book: if you do that, you harm yourself because you haven’t addressed the thing that actually hurts you. Writing was a step of owning the story, saying, “Yes, this did happen to me,” then asking “What does that mean about how I feel about myself? About my body? About the way I feel I can let other people care or not care for me?” The book is an act of vulnerability, saying, “Here’s the story I haven’t told to myself for so many years.” It’s been sometimes difficult, sometimes joyful, sometimes terrifying. 

AM: A chapter in the book shares the same title as your Ph.D. dissertation, which engaged literature on illness narratives, disability studies, and women in pain: Well Developed Female in No Acute Distress. How did your PhD research inform what ultimately became The Fruit Cure?

JA: Part of it was a resistance to illness narratives. Not all of them; I don’t want to say something click-baity like “she hates illness narratives!” But many felt like the person was okay on the other side. I remember reading and feeling, “Wait. Am I not okay then? Have I just not been able to get over it?” Because it had been ten years since I was seriously ill and I still hadn’t fully left the ghost of that illness behind. The publishing industry, historically or culturally, has valued narratives where the person is an inspiration at the end. I resisted that and thought, how could I write a narrative about not being fully healed or on the other side with your feet firmly planted in able-bodiedness again? Can you still find joy and meaning, and acknowledge a sadness or grief or a ghost in your life? That was a narrative I wanted to read, and that I hope I wrote. Some of the scholarship I read during my PhD made it in because I couldn’t have written The Fruit Cure without thinking about the way we all are harmed by narratives given to us about what it means to have disability and what it means to be able-bodied. 

AM: Definitely. I think many people will identify with your story about the frustrations and grief of falling through diagnostic cracks in a healthcare system that’s not always equipped to address complex illness, not always patient-centered, not always oriented to lived experience. You deliver a critique of vigilante self-care and unregulated alternative treatments under the banner of wellness that step in to fill these gaps. And yet there’s also a sense of meaning, validation, and agency people seem to locate in these alternative spaces that’s not entirely recuperable in the traditional medical system. Can you elaborate on the rift between wider systemic issues in U.S. healthcare and the allure of wellness culture?

JA: You hit on what honestly was one of the hardest things to write about in the book. I in no way want to say either is good or bad. Thinking about how many people are failed on a regular basis by U.S. health care systems, it feels totally valid that someone would click on a link to fast for 30 days to cure their diabetes, which I react viscerally to on surface level. But on a human desperation, I want to feel well and these systems are failing me, charging me thousands of dollars a month for very little care, level? 100% get it.

Writing into it, I was trying to advocate for people to know their bodies best. Alternative healing sometimes offers that sense of agency where if you know your body well and someone else is saying, “Yes, I believe you,” there’s real power to that. There is power in the narratives you have about your own body and the narratives someone else can give you about your body. If you’re being told you’re a puzzle or a mystery, or that your pain is not real or valid, that affects you. My main critique is of people who don’t realize their own influence and power in those spaces. And when people are being harmed and speaking up, there is an alarming lack of self-reflection in some people, when you have the well-being of another person in your hands. 

AM: Yeah, absolutely. And it happens in both those worlds, too. 

JA: Right. That’s what’s hard. I totally get why people wouldn’t believe in Big Pharma. I mean, it’s, horrendous. “We’re making profit from your illness.” I also see the lack of trust of, “take this weird powder and you’ll heal everything.” Both ends are so fraught with potential missteps or ways you could be influenced in a harmful direction that doesn’t help you heal yourself. 

AM: And perhaps accumulates other things to heal along the way. In the absence of a clear path of medical treatment, you took your healing into your own hands through two means primarily: food and running. I want to focus first on food. The connections you drew between the high-carb raw vegan movement and religious ideologies fascinated me. What makes food such a compelling battleground for moral reckoning, personally and collectively?

JA: On a personal level, it came from a desire to want to be good. I no longer had external measures of grades, miles splits. I felt like if I ate these foods, I would be like they told me on the internet: a clean, bike-riding, beautiful acne-free person. In some ways they just condensed all the world’s rhetoric and gave it to me. We hear it all the time: this yogurt is “not sinful” or this is a “guilt-free” snack, or in a workout class someone’s telling you summer is coming. We’ve moved a bit past that, but I think it’s just coded differently so we don’t hear things we know were problematic in the early 2000s. My focus is on women, because a lot of the people I interviewed and who participated in the fruit diet were younger women searching for the “perfect body” and I think there’s something in that in terms of what spaces people feel like they can control. Food is available to all of us as a form of exercising control and partitioning what we do or don’t do, sometimes in harmful ways. 

AM: The historical dimensions of your research really contextualized “how did we get here?” especially as you address the whiteness of the vegan influencing world and the racist, white supremacist origins of thinness, implicitly embedded in ideals of able-bodiedness. Did anything surprise you when you delved into this history? 

JA: So much surprised me and wasn’t all so surprising at the same time. Sabrina String’s book, Fearing the Black Body, really helped me in thinking about racism and whiteness. She wrote about Lady Mary Wortley, and the idea that white women wanted to be thin to separate themselves from black women at the time. It was horrifying to read and to see the ways that framing was echoed in the following texts. I remember reading the Arnold Ehret section about how women could be more Madonna-like if they lost their periods just eating fruit. That was something he celebrated. Now we would frame that as disordered eating, amenorrhea, we need to get you restored and back to health. And he viewed it as being even more pure and holy. Those didn’t just become abstract moral concepts; they had direct impacts, again, mostly on women’s bodies. He’s not talking about men abstaining to the point of gauntness; he’s saying this is what women should do. That became fascinating in a really horrifying way, thinking about how long women especially had been hearing these messages about keeping yourself pure, not only sexually, but also religiously, morally. 

AM: I want to talk to you about influencers. I’m thinking about the double entendre of the word “follower,” in context of the relationship you point out between religiosity, morality, and extreme online food communities. Can you say more about the intersection of parasocial relationships, authority, and health in an age where so many of us are seeking answers online?

JA: There are beautiful things about social media. We get insights into each other’s lives; it’s a form of intimacy and comes from a place of curiosity. But there’s a dark side to it too. Once there’s a setup of “this is what I do, and you should also do it,” that person has a responsibility to know their rhetoric has a direct impact on another’s health, physical or mental, or perceived relationship with food. When does that responsibility begin and when does it end? Is there a way to be an influencer responsibly online, around food? As the dieticians I interviewed said, it’s not very sexy or clickbait to say “Everybody’s different, we have to figure it out with you.” It’s way more fun and engaging to say, “I have the answer. Come on, let’s go.” Our social media platforms privilege our attention to wanting easy answers rather than puzzling out all the different factors that make us who we are and make us eat as we do.

AM: You reached out to Freelee and Durianrider, the influencers behind the fruitarian community you followed, for an interview, which never materialized. So you drew upon their public profiles and content in the book, making clear you weren’t mistaking these mediations for intimacy or interiority. If you could ask them one question, what would it be?

JA: I want to know how they really feel about fruit. I have this hunch that they really, truly, did believe in fruit when they first started this diet. Are they still seeking these ideals of purity, even though they’ve changed the name of the game? Do they feel like social media has kept them beholden to these figures they’ve created for themselves online? Does it matter in the end that I don’t know who you are? In our age of social media, who you are online is a part of you. And that persona is what you’re choosing to give to me as a viewer. What am I to do with that? I guess that was ten questions for them. I hope I treated them with empathy and care because as people, I do care about them and want their perspectives and nuance to be heard. 

AM: You write about the seduction—but ultimate emptiness and sometimes danger—of dichotomies such as “good and bad” and “sick and well.” Do you think of healing and cure as existing in dichotomies of any sort? What does living outside those dichotomies look like for you today? 

JA: Some of the stuntedness of my healing came from the perception that you were either sick or you were well. I did not believe there was a gray area. Culturally, ideas of cures as a quick fix can be so harmful for that reason. It’s why we reach for them. Someone asked me recently, what ended up being the cure for you? And I said, mess, the greatest mess. Therapy and nutrition and seeing doctors who started listening to me and sitting with my own discomfort and thinking about the narratives about disability I had believed and undoing them and figuring out what stories about my body were mine, and which had come from other people, and what that meant. I love now thinking about healing and cures as nuanced, as spectrums, as being in the gray. That’s been the most honest way to find hope in my body again. 

AM: That feels so real, hopeful, palpable. Expecting ourselves to remain in one state feels so overwhelming to uphold. But if healing can be a state of flux, a state that includes what maybe we wouldn’t consider “fully healed”? That sounds so much more possible. 

JA: That’s so true.

AM: I’m curious how running figures into the matrix of healing in The Fruit Cure. There’s clearly so much passion and self-expression; running is this life force channeling through you, a reason to heal. And yet I noticed parallels with how you wrote about fruit: devotion, salvation, hunger, obsession, self-discipline. Many of us who run have some relationship with that paradox, I certainly do. Can you discuss this paradox and the evolution of your relationship with running? 

JA: A lot of messaging I received as a young runner, and I blame the system all my coaches came up in rather than any one coach, was “the less you acknowledge your body, the better.” From a formative age, I tied this dismissal of body with accomplishment in sport. When I got sick, my first instinct was to ignore my symptoms and try to keep running because that’s what my coach told me to do. My second impulse after I quit the team was to be angry at my body that I could run, which turned to: how can I punish myself through this thing I used to love? 

I didn’t reckon with the ways I was using running as a weapon and as a salve until my PhD years, almost a decade after I’d first been sick. I was chasing this version of myself I thought existed: the girl who was the inspirational end to an illness narrative. She was the fastest, strongest, never had a symptom, ignored pain. I wanted to be her so badly because I thought she did exist out there. It took finally realizing I was chasing this illusion of myself to realize I could give her up and just live in my own body and explore what that meant. I’m not going to say it was easy, but I have come to a place where if I’m not having fun, I don’t do it. I still compete, I have fun chasing goals because that’s an impulse we all share as distance runners: to keep testing your own limits. But I do it now from a safe loved place rather than from a place of fear or shame or wanting something I don’t have. 

AM: I love how the resolution of the illness narrative melds with this archetype of the invincible runner, to link back to how we began. You’ve defined your own, Jacqueline-runner now, that is a rejection of that narrative, and maybe because of that finds joy in the sport. That’s powerful for runners to read, because for many of us, if you’re in this sport long enough, it either will consume you at some point or you’ll have to reckon with these parts of yourself that are searching for something. 

JA: Right? That joy allowed me to be in community again. I run with people four times a week now. I care about them and they care about me. That has been really healing in terms of my experiences on the team, this heartbreak I hadn’t been able to address. 

AM: Reading The Fruit Cure I thought how much of a resource this book would have been for a college age Jacqueline, but also college age Allie. And for anyone living with complex illness or without a diagnosis, in the throes of complicated relationship with food, disordered eating, exercise, control, and/or under the influence of the Internet. To any of these readers: what do you hope this book will offer? 

JA: I used to feel so lonely with those feelings. But looking at history made me realize, no. There was a woman in South Africa in the 1960s, Essie Honiball, feeling the same way, due to similar cultural forces I am facing that are now just on Instagram, rather than in some pamphlet or from some pseudoscience doctor in a back room of a house. It made me feel if I understand narratives perpetuated for centuries, from biblical times, about epilepsy or neurological issues or bodies being out of control, then I can start to ask, which ones do I want to accept and which ones do I want to reject? That is true form of power. Rather than reaching for illusions of power through: “How thin can I be? How fast can I run? What kind of foods am I eating?” My hope is that people realize they’re genuinely not alone. All of us in some way are impacted by these things, even if we’re not chronically ill, even if we don’t have disordered relationships with food. We’re all shaped by the stories told to us. 

The post Writing an Illness Story that Rejects the Inspirational Healing Narrative appeared first on Electric Literature.

Cyrus Shams
Keady University, 2015

Maybe it was that Cyrus had done the wrong drugs in the right order, or the right drugs in the wrong order, but when God finally spoke back to him after twenty-seven years of silence, what Cyrus wanted more than anything else was a do-over. Clarification. Lying on his mattress that smelled like piss and Febreze, in his bedroom that smelled like piss and Febreze, Cyrus stared up at the room’s single light bulb, willing it to blink again, willing God to confirm that the bulb’s flicker had been a divine action and not just the old apartment’s trashy wiring.

“Flash it on and off,” Cyrus had been thinking, not for the first time in his life. “Just a little wink and I’ll sell all my shit and buy a camel. I’ll start over.” All his shit at that moment amounted to a pile of soiled laundry and a stack of books borrowed from various libraries and never returned, poetry and biographies, To the Lighthouse, My Uncle Napoleon. Never mind all that, though: Cyrus meant it. Why should the Prophet Muhammad get a whole visit from an archangel? Why should Saul get to see the literal light of heaven on the road to Damascus? Of course it would be easy to establish bedrock faith after such clear-cut revelation. How was it fair to celebrate those guys for faith that wasn’t faith at all, that was just obedience to what they plainly observed to be true? And what sense did it make to punish the rest of humanity who had never been privy to such explicit revelation? To make everyone else lurch from crisis to crisis, desperately alone?

But then it happened for Cyrus too, right there in that ratty Indiana bedroom. He asked God to reveal Himself, Herself, Themself, Itself, whatever. He asked with all the earnestness at his disposal, which was troves. If every relationship was a series of advances and retreats, Cyrus was almost never the retreat-er, sharing everything important about himself at a word, a smile, with a shrug as if to say, “Those’re just facts. Why should I be ashamed?”

He’d lain there on the bare mattress on the hardwood floor letting his cigarette ash on his bare stomach like some sulky prince, thinking, “Turn the lights on and off lord and I’ll buy a donkey, I promise I’ll buy a camel and ride him to Medina, to Gethsemane, wherever, just flash the lights and I’ll figure it out, I promise.” He was thinking this and then it—something—happened. The light bulb flickered, or maybe it got brighter, like a camera’s flash going off across the street, just a fraction of a fraction of a second like that, and then it was back to normal, just a regular yellow bulb.

Cyrus tried to recount the drugs he’d done that day. The standard bouquet of booze, weed, cigarettes, Klonopin, Adderall, Neurontin variously throughout the day. He had a couple Percocets left but he’d been saving them for later that evening. None of what he’d taken was exotic, nothing that would make him out and out hallucinate. He felt pretty sober in fact, relative to his baseline.

He wondered if it had maybe been the sheer weight of his wanting, or his watching, that strained his eyes till they saw what they’d wanted to see. He wondered if maybe that was how God worked now in the new world. Tired of interventionist pyrotechnics like burning bushes and locust plagues, maybe God now worked through the tired eyes of drunk Iranians in the American Midwest, through CVS handles of bourbon and little pink pills with G 31 written on their side. Cyrus took a pull from the giant plastic Old Crow bottle. The whiskey did, for him, what a bedside table did for normal people—it was always at the head of his mattress, holding what was essential to him in place. It lifted him daily from the same sleep it eventually set him into.

Lying there reflecting on the possible miracle he’d just experienced, Cyrus asked God to do it again. Confirmation, like typing your password in twice to a web browser. Surely if the all-knowing creator of the universe had wanted to reveal themselves to Cyrus, there’d be no ambiguity. Cyrus stared at the ceiling light, which in the fog of his cigarette smoke looked like a watery moon, and waited for it to happen again. But it didn’t. Whatever sliver of a flicker he had or hadn’t perceived didn’t come back. And so, lying there in the stuffy haze of relative sobriety—itself a kind of high—amidst the underwear and cans and dried piss and empty orange pill bottles and half-read books held open against the hardwood, breaking their spines to face away—Cyrus had a decision to make.

Two Years Later
Monday
Keady University, 6 Feb, 2017

“I would die for you,” Cyrus said alone to his reflection in the little hospital mirror. He wasn’t sure he meant it, but it felt good to say. For weeks, he had been playing at dying. Not in the Plath “I have done it again, one year in every ten” way. Cyrus was working as a medical actor at the Keady University Hospital. Twenty dollars an hour, fifteen hours a week, Cyrus pretended to be “of those who perish.” He liked how the Quran put it that way, not “until you die” but “until you are of those who perish.” Like an arrival into a new community, one that had been eagerly waiting for you. Cyrus would step into the fourth-floor hospital office and a secretary would hand him a notecard with a fake patient’s name and identity on it beside a little cartoon face on the 0–10 pain scale where 0 was a smiling “No hurt at all” face, 4 was a straight-faced “Hurts a little more,” and 10 was a sobbing “Hurts worst” face, a gruesome cartoon with an upside-down U for a mouth. Cyrus felt he’d found his calling.

Some days he was the one dying. Others, he was their family. That night Cyrus would be Sally Gutierrez, mother of three, and the face would be a 6, “Hurts even more.” That’s all the information he had before an anxious medical student in an ill-fitting white coat shuffled in and told Cyrus/Sally his daughter had been in a car accident, that the team had done all they could do but couldn’t save her. Cyrus dialed his reaction up to a 6, just on the cusp of tears. He asked the medical student if he could see his daughter. He cursed, at one point screamed a little. When Cyrus left that evening, he grabbed a chocolate granola bar from the little wicker basket on the secretary’s table.

The med students were often overeager to console him, like daytime talk-show hosts. Or they’d be repelled by the artifice of the situation and barely engage. They’d offer platitudes from a list they’d been made to memorize, tried to refer Cyrus to the hospital’s counseling services. Eventually they would leave the exam room, and Cyrus would be left to evaluate their compassion by filling out a photocopied score sheet. A little camera on a tripod recorded each exchange for review.

Sometimes the medical student would ask Cyrus if he wanted to donate his beloved’s organs. This was one of the conversations the school was training them for. The students’ job was to persuade him. Cyrus was Buck Stapleton, assistant coach of the varsity football team, devout Catholic. Staid, a 2 on the pain scale: “Hurts a little bit.” The little cartoon face still smiling even, though barely. His wife was in a coma, her brain showed no signs of activity. “She can still help people,” the student said, awkwardly placing his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder. “She can still save people’s lives.”

For Cyrus, the different characters were half the fun. He was Daisy VanBogaert, a diabetic accountant whose below-knee amputation had come too late. For her, they’d asked him to wear a hospital gown. He was a German immigrant, Franz Links, engineer, with terminal emphysema. He was Jenna Washington, and his Alzheimer’s was accelerating unexpectedly quickly. An 8. “Hurts a whole lot.”

The doctor who interviewed Cyrus for the job, an older white woman with severe lips and leaden eyes, told him she liked hiring people like him. When he raised an eyebrow, she quickly explained: “Non-actors, I mean. Actors tend to get a little”—she spun her hands in tight circles—”Marlon Brando about it. They can’t help making it about themselves.”

Cyrus had tried to get his roommate Zee in on the gig, but Zee’d blown off the interview. Zbigniew Ramadan Novak, Polish Egyptian—Zee for short. He said he’d slept through his alarm, but Cyrus suspected he was freaked out. Zee’s discomfort with the job kept coming up. A month later, as Cyrus was leaving for the hospital, Zee watched him getting ready and shook his head.

“What?” asked Cyrus.

Nothing.

“What?” Cyrus asked again, more pointedly.

Zee made a little face, then said, “It just doesn’t seem healthy, Cyrus.”

“What doesn’t?” Cyrus asked.

Zee made the face again.

“The hospital gig?”

Zee nodded, then said: “I mean, your brain doesn’t know the difference between acting and living. After all the shit you’ve been through? It can’t be like . . . good for you. In your brain stem.”

“Twenty dollars an hour is pretty good for me,” Cyrus said, grinning, “in my brain stem.”

That money felt like a lot. Cyrus thought about how, when he’d been drinking, he’d sell his plasma for that much, twenty dollars a trip, his dehydrated hangover blood taking hours to sludge out like milkshake through a thin straw. Cyrus would watch people arrive, get hooked up, and leave the facility in the time it took him to give a single draw.

“And I’m sure eventually it’ll be good for my writing too,” Cyrus added. “What’s that thing about living the poems I’m not writing yet?”

Cyrus was a good poet when he wrote, but he rarely actually wrote. Before getting sober, Cyrus didn’t write so much as he drank about writing, describing booze as essential to his process, “nearly sacramental”—he really said it like that—in the way it “opened his mind to the hidden voice” beneath the mundane “argle-bargle of the every-day.” Of course, when he drank, he rarely did anything else but drink. “First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you!” Cyrus would announce proudly to a room, to a bar, forgetting from whom he’d lifted the line.

In sobriety, he endured long periods of writer’s block, or more accurately, writer’s ambivalence. Writer’s antipathy. What made it almost worse was how much Zee encouraged Cyrus whenever he did write something; Zee’d fawn over his roommate’s new drafts, praising every line break and slant rhyme, stopping just short of hanging them up on the apartment refrigerator.

“‘Living the poems you’re not writing?’” Zee scoffed. “C’mon, you’re better than that.”

“I’m really not,” Cyrus said, sharply, before stepping out the apartment door.

When Cyrus pulled into the hospital parking lot, he was still pissed off. Everything didn’t have to be as complex as Zee constantly made it, Cyrus thought. Sometimes, life was just what happened. What accumulated. That was one of the vague axioms from his drinking days to which Cyrus still clung, even in sobriety. It wasn’t fair that just because he was sober, everyone expected him to exhaustively interrogate his every decision. This job or that job, this life or that. Not drinking was Herculean enough on its own. He should’ve been afforded more grace, not less. The long scar on his left foot—from an accident years before—pounded with pain.

Cyrus signed into the hospital and walked through the halls, past two nursing mothers sitting side by side in a waiting room, past a line of empty gurneys with messy bedding, and into the elevator. When he got to the fourth-floor office, the receptionist had him sign in again and gave him his card for the afternoon. Sandra Kaufmann. High school math teacher. Educated, no children. Widowed. Six on the pain scale. Cyrus sat in the waiting room, glancing at the camera, the “Understanding Skin Cancer” chart on the wall with gruesome pictures of Atypical Moles, Precancerous Growths. The ABCs of melanoma: Asymmetry, Borders, Color Change, Diameter, and Evolution. Cyrus imagined Sandra’s hair crimson red, the color of the “Diameter” mole on the poster.

After a minute, a young medical student walked into the room alone, looked at Cyrus, then at the camera. She was a little younger than him, wore her auburn hair behind her head in a neat bun. Her impeccable posture gave her a boarding-school air, New England royalty. Cyrus reflexively hated her. That Yankee patrician veneer. He imagined she got perfect SATs, went to an Ivy League school, only to be disappointed by Keady as her medical school placement instead of Yale or Columbia. He imagined her having joyless, clinical sex with the chiseled son of her father’s business partner, imagined them at a fancy candlelit restaurant dourly picking at a shared veal piccata, both ignoring the table bread. Unaccountable contempt covered him, pitiless. Cyrus hated how noisily she opened the door, sullying the stillness he’d been enjoying. She looked at the camera again, then introduced herself:

“Hello, Miss Kaufmann. My name is Dr. Monfort.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann,” Cyrus corrected.

The medical student glanced quickly at the camera.

“Erm, excuse me?”

“Mr. Kaufmann may be dead, but I am still his wife,” said Cyrus, pointing to a pretend wedding ring on his left hand.

“I, I’m sorry, ma’am. I was just—”

“It’s no problem, dear.”

Dr. Monfort set down her clipboard and leaned her hand against the sink she’d been standing near, as if resetting. Then, she spoke: “Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m afraid the scans have revealed a large mass in your brain. Several large masses, clumped together. Unfortunately, they’re attached to sensitive tissue controlling breathing and cardiopulmonary function, and we can’t safely operate without risking severe damage to those systems. Chemotherapy and radiation may be options, but due to the location and maturation of the masses, these treatments would likely be palliative. Our oncologist will be able to tell you more.”

“Palliative?” Cyrus asked. The students were supposed to avoid jargon and euphemism. Not “going to a better place.” Saying the word “dying” as often as possible was recommended, as it eliminated confusion, helped hasten the patient through denial.

“Uhm, yes. For pain relief. To make you comfortable while you get your affairs in order.”

Get your affairs in order. She was doing terribly. Cyrus hated her.

“I’m sorry, Doctor—what was it? Milton? Are you telling me I’m dying?” Cyrus half-smiled as he said the one word she’d yet to speak out loud. She winced, and Cyrus relished her wincing.

“Ah, yes, Miss Kaufmann, ah, I’m so sorry.” Her voice sounded the way wild rabbits look, just on the cusp of tearing off out of sight.

“Mrs. Kaufmann.”

“Oh right, of course, I’m so sorry.” She checked her clipboard. “It’s just, my paper here says ‘Miss Kaufmann.’”

“Doctor, are you trying to tell me I don’t know my own name?”

The medical student glanced desperately back at the camera.

A year and a half ago in early recovery, Cyrus told his AA sponsor Gabe that he believed himself to be a fundamentally bad person. Selfish, self-seeking. Cruel, even. A drunk horse thief who stops drinking is just a sober horse thief, Cyrus’d said, feeling proud to have thought it. He’d use versions of that line later in two different poems.

“But you’re not a bad person trying to get good. You’re a sick person trying to get well,” Gabe responded.

Cyrus sat with the thought.

Gabe went on, “There’s no difference to the outside world between a good guy and a bad guy behaving like a good guy. In fact, I think God loves that second guy a little more.”

“Good-person drag,” Cyrus thought out loud. That’s what they called it after that.

“Of course not, Mrs. Kaufmann, I’m absolutely not trying to argue,” the medical student stammered. “The paper must have misprinted your name. I’m so sorry. Is there anyone you’d like us to call?”

“Who would I have you call?” Cyrus asked. “My principal? I’m all alone.”

Dr. Monfort looked clammy. The red light on the camera was blinking on and off, like a firefly mocking their proceedings.

“We have some great counselors here at Keady,” she said. “Nationally ranked—”

“Have you ever had a patient who wanted to die?” Cyrus interrupted.

The medical student stared at him, saying nothing, pure disdain radiating from her person, barely bridled fury. Cyrus thought she might actually hit him.

“Or maybe not wanted to die,” Cyrus continued, “but who just wanted their suffering to end?”

“Well, like I said, we offer a wide range of palliative options,” she hissed, staring at Cyrus, Cyrus-Cyrus, beneath Mrs. Kaufmann, willing him toward compliance.

He ignored her.

“The last time I thought I wanted to die, I got a fifth of Everclear, ninety-five percent alcohol, and sat in my bathtub drinking it from the bottle, pouring out a bit on my head. One pull for me, one for my hair. The aim was to finish the bottle that way and then light myself on fire. Theatrical, no?”

Dr. Monfort said nothing. Cyrus went on,

“But when I’d finished maybe just a quarter of the bottle, I realized suddenly I didn’t want to burn everyone else in the apartment complex.”

This was true. That little flicker of lucidity, light, like sun glinting off a snake in the grass. It happened a few months before Cyrus had gotten sober, and it wasn’t until he was already good and drunk that he even remembered the existence of other people, and the fact that fire spreads, that if he lit himself on fire in a first-floor apartment bathtub, everyone else’s apartments would likely catch fire too. Booze worked that way sometimes, clarifying—briefly—what his mind couldn’t. It was like sitting in the optometrist’s office, booze flashing its different lenses in front of your face and sometimes, for a second, it’d be the right prescription, the one that allowed you to catch a glimpse of the world as it was, beyond your grief, beyond your doom. That was the clarity alcohol, and nothing else, gave. Seeing life as everyone else did, as a place that could accommodate you. But of course a second later it’d zoom past clarity through a flurry of increasingly opaque lenses until all you were able to see would be the dark of your own skull.

“Can you believe that?” Cyrus went on. “I needed to be drunk to even consider that a fire that consumed me in a bathtub wouldn’t just go out on its own.”

“Mrs. Kaufmann . . . ,” the medical student said. She was wringing her hands, one of the “physical distress behaviors” Cyrus was supposed to note in his evaluation.

“I remember actually sitting there in the bathtub, doing the calculus of it. Like, do I even care if I take other people with me? These strangers. I had to work out whether or not they mattered to me.

How fucked up is that?”

“Mrs. Kaufmann, if you are struggling with thoughts of suicide, we have resources . . . .”

“Oh c’mon, just talk to me. You want to be a doctor? I’m sitting in front of you, talking. I ended up walking myself outside the apartment complex, wet with the alcohol, though not too wet, it evaporated quickly I think, I remember being surprised at how wet I wasn’t. There was a little grassy patch between our building and the one next to us, a picnic bench with one of those built-in charcoal grills. I remember thinking that was funny, lighting myself on fire next to a grill. I brought out the Everclear and the lighter, I remember—this is bizarre—it was a Chicago Bears lighter. I have no idea where it came from. And I sat there at the bench feeling, despite the Everclear in and on me, I remember sitting there feeling, not happy exactly but simple, maybe? Like a jellyfish just floating along. Someone said alcohol reduces the ‘fatal intensity’ of living. Maybe it was that.”

Outside the clouds had grown fat and dark with rain, the whole sky a wounded animal in some last frantic rage. The hospital room had a tiny little window high on the wall, probably placed there so people from the street couldn’t look in. The medical student didn’t move.

“Do you have this organ here?” Cyrus asked her, pointing at the base of his throat. “A doom organ that just pulses all the time? Pulses dread, every day, obstinately? Like it thinks there’s a panther behind the curtain ready to maul you, but there’s no panther and it turns out there’s no curtain either? That’s what I wanted to stop.”

“What did you do?” the medical student asked, finally. Something in her seemed to have relaxed a little, conceded to the moment’s current.

“I went back inside my apartment.” Cyrus shrugged. “I wanted to stop hurting. Being burned alive felt suddenly like it’d hurt a lot.”

Dr. Monfort smiled, gave a tiny nod.

Cyrus continued: “I took a shower and passed out. I remained. But so did the dread. I thought getting sober would help, that came later. Recovery. And it did, in its way. Certainly it made me less a burden to the people around me, created less dread in them. But it’s still in me, that doom organ.” He pointed again at his neck. “It’s in my throat, throbbing all day every day. And recovery, friends, art—that shit just numbs it for a second. What’s that word you used?”

“Palliative?”

“Right, palliative, yeah. All that stuff is palliative. It stills the suffering, but it doesn’t send it away.”

The medical student paused for a moment, then took a seat on the chair across from Cyrus. She was tinted with black-blue rays from the window as if marked by some celestial spotlight. She said, very deliberately, “You know, Mrs. Kaufmann, it’s entirely possible, common even, to have psychological co-morbidities. It sounds like you’ve been getting help for addiction issues, which is great. But you may also have another diagnosis alongside it that’s going untreated, an anxiety disorder or major depression or something else. It could be useful for you to seek help for those as well.” She smiled a little, then added, “It’s not too late, even with the tumors.” It was her way of inviting Cyrus back into the performance, and he obliged. He felt suddenly flush with embarrassment.

Cyrus behaved agreeably through the rest of the act. When they finished a few minutes later and the medical student left the exam room, he wrote her a quick but glowing report before rushing out of the hospital in a flurry of shame.

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