Paint the Corners is a new monthly column about baseball.

Baseball is infamous for making fools out of prognosticators, but there’s one thing we can say with near-certainty about the 2017 MLB season: it’s going to be a let-down. No game played this year has a chance of matching the multilayered, prolonged tension and release of the final game of the 2016 season, and there’s a good chance no game will come close for the rest of our lives. I have no allegiance to the Cubs and frankly had a slight rooting interest in Cleveland, but a five-hour, white-knuckle World Series Game 7 is the kind of thing that makes this lugubrious, frustrating sport seem like a grand adventure. We will be boring small children with the details of this game in our old age: multiple comebacks on both sides, heroics from a deserving veteran and the humiliation of an utter villain, and even an after-midnight rain delay that would have been cut from a movie script for heavy-handedness. The Cubs played three games facing elimination, and their final ten November innings ended the longest championship drought in pro sports: even the box score reads like a Russian novel.

Thankfully, baseball doesn’t require this kind of drama to be wonderful. It’s almost a relief to return to the first days of a new season, when stakes are low and enjoyment is all in the finer details: well-executed double plays, loping curve balls, no-name players finding sudden glory, beer in the sun and hot dogs under the lights. This game is all about atmosphere and small pleasures, the endless repetition of a few set movements that somehow creates a meaningfully different outcome every time. It rewards obsession, almost demands it, because context and history are its lifeblood. They are what add grandeur to the odd, pastoral scene of men in tight pants and button-up shirts attempting and failing to circle a dirt path.

And while 2017 will almost definitely lack the on-field excitement of last year, it could very well end up being an epochal season in other subtler ways. Only days after red and blue confetti blanketed Michigan Avenue, the presidential election made baseball, as everything else, feel helplessly small and potentially endangered. Whatever happens on the field this season, it will take place against a background of multiple daily unfolding scandals and moral atrocities. History and context will be everything. Major League Baseball and the larger culture around the sport tend to ignore any political discussion, but this will be the first season amid a modern political regime that is expressly dedicated to fighting immigrants and minorities. As the most immigrant-dependent and racially diverse sport in the United States, baseball seems primed to either lose its politically aloof pose at last or look progressively ridiculous. Regardless, this is a new kind of test for a game that thrives on continuity: baseball during Trump. No aspect of our lives or society is safe from politics now, or from the threat of enormous disruption, and this is true even for the sport that requires constant, mantra-like assuagements from its players that they’re “just focused on the game,” “taking it one day at a time,” or “trying to give the team a chance to win.”

Not even ballplayers have the luxury of that kind of single-mindedness anymore. Not when ICE raids are terrorizing the urban Latino communities that comprise an essential part of MLB’s future growth and outreach, and not when Trump’s approval rating hovers near that of gangrene in the densely populated regions that host pro ballparks. Perhaps in recognition of this, Trump has already forsaken tradition by declining to throw out the first pitch at the Washington Nationals’ home opener, and none of the other twenty-nine MLB teams appear interested in pressing the issue. This is meaningless but still unprecedented, and illustrates Trump’s bizarre indifference to the dream-come-true opportunities of the office; no president since Taft has avoided the supreme executive privilege to lob a meatball fifty feet and wave. Even his absence is a challenge to the game’s no-politics front.

The cracks in the façade really began to show late last season, after Trump won the Republican nomination around the All-Star break and Colin Kaepernick dominated coverage of the NFL’s first weeks. Asked why no MLB players had attempted a similar protest, Adam Jones, the black center fielder and default captain for my Baltimore Orioles, told USA Today that “baseball is a white man’s sport,” and black players don’t have nearly the sway they hold in football. He then broadened the conversation to address wider double standards: “We make a lot of money, so we just have to talk baseball, talk football. But most athletes, especially if you’re tenured in your sport, you’re educated on life, and on more things than most people on the outside. But because Donald Trump is a billionaire, he can say whatever he wants, because he’s older and has more money? And when Kaepernick does something, or says something, he’s ridiculed. Why is that?’’

Only a month later, the Los Angeles Dodgers traveled to Chicago to face the Cubs in the National League Championship Series and stayed in a Trump-owned hotel. Beloved Mexican-American first baseman Adrian Gonzalez opted to stay elsewhere, though like a good ballplayer, he made no great show of it. When the story leaked to the media through a Dodgers’ broadcaster, Gonzalez responded with the requisite caveats: “I don’t want this to be a story… I wasn’t doing it for the publicity… I don’t intend to create a political debate.” Just trying to give the team a chance to win.

Jones and Gonzalez are both wealthy veteran players, scandal-free family men, and the faces of their franchises. They should have as much clout to speak their minds as anyone in the sport. And yet both made headlines for staking out relatively cautious positions, and both expressed publicly that they are constrained in various ways from taking greater action. Given the hysterical objection that Kaepernick still inspires—including from Trump himself—who could blame them? And Kaepernick plays a game that’s majority-minority.

To that last point: baseball occupies an odd space in the spectrum of U.S. sports. It is both the most genuinely diverse game and, as a result, also the most white. According to the current Racial and Gender Report Card published by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, MLB players are fifty-nine percent white, twenty-nine percent Latino, and eight percent black. That’s more than double the percentage of white players in either the NBA or NFL and a small fraction of the percentage of black players in those leagues. Neither basketball nor football fields a statistically significant number of Latinos or Asians, and MLB’s increasing reliance on those demographics also lends it a diversity of nationalities that the other leagues can’t touch.

Polyglot rosters have been a hallmark of the MLB for ages; in the earliest days of “townball” and regional teams throughout New York state, baseball was a largely immigrant game. The most iconic teams in the modern era, the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers of the ’40s and ’50s, were, in the judgment of historian Jules Tygiel, models of racial equality. The Dodgers of that era, needless to say, fielded Jackie Robinson, while “the Giants lineup,

with Whitey Lockman, Don Mueller, and Larry Jansen—had a substantial contingent of German extraction. Sal Maglie, Carl Furillo, [Ralph] Branca, and Roy Campanella were the sons of Italian immigrants. Clem Labine was of French-Canadian heritage; Andy Pafko, Hungarian; Ray Noble, Cuban. Along the benches sat players with ethnic surnames like Abrams, Hermanski, Palica, Miksis, Koslo, and Podbielan.”

Ironically, baseball’s very diversity may account for some of its small-c conservatism and squeamishness towards social justice issues. In a locker room with that many skin tones and backgrounds, it may be hard to find political consensus, and so politics in general can become a third rail. But diversity also doesn’t signal equality, and even in mid-century, when the definition of “white” was far more limited, the sport was largely native-born white guys: “a majority of the [Giants’] players hailed from the American South and Midwest,” Tygiel acknowledges, and today, despite the MLB’s genuinely global player base and audience draw, that remains the case.

Even if a player doesn’t match that profile, there’s a good chance that their road to the majors will require them to live around people who do. Major League teams may play exclusively in urban (or at least suburban) markets, but the vast amateur and minor-league networks through which players travel upward—what Donald Hall deemed baseball’s “peripheries”—are far more rural (and far more white). Look, for example, at this map of each MLB team’s minor-league affiliates. The world-champion Cubs, trademark franchise of America’s third-largest city, draw on a farm system that plays in Peoria, Des Moines, Knoxville, and Daytona Beach. And those are relative metropolises compared to the farm-system satellites for other clubs. The Kansas City Royals, champions in 2015, incubate their talent in Idaho Falls, Springdale, Arkansas, and Burlington, Iowa.

Then there’s the so-called “JuCo” baseball circuit, the surprisingly fertile network of junior colleges that serve as de facto MLB training grounds, largely in the southeast and Gulf Coast. Ever heard of Chipola College, near the eastern edge of the Florabama line? Me neither, at least until I learned that this 2,200-student campus has supplied the world with a staggering 164 current and former major league baseball players—a list that does happen to include this past offseason’s most prized free agent (at least in his own mind), José Bautista, but also my hometown hero Steve Clevenger, who routinely crushed my own hapless high school team back when he played for Mount St. Joseph in the Baltimore suburbs. Clevenger went on to play a few years with the Orioles, but ended the 2016 season on a ten-game suspension without pay from the Seattle Mariners for tweeting that President Obama and Black Lives Matter protesters deserved to be “locked behind bars like animals.” During the offseason, he was joined by Cleveland Indians pitcher Trevor Bauer, someone who is widely known for being smart, in the pantheon of Twitter-enabled conservative baseball rubes—a gang whose North Star, Curt Schilling, played JuCo ball at Yavapai College in Prescott, Arizona.

This isn’t to say that every rural-raised American or junior-college ballplayer is a Republican or a Trump supporter, just that a good number of the MLB’s players spend their professional lives in areas far less cosmopolitan and diverse than the cities they wear across their chests in the pros. And in a country where political fate is now closely aligned with population density, baseball’s geographic, ideological, and ethnic diversity have forced it into atypical relevance: it resembles the U.S. in all its multicultural, reactionary complexity better than any other sports league.

In just the past few months, for example, the Royals lost pitcher Yordano Ventura to a fatal car crash along a dirt road near his Dominican hometown, and saw a white reliever miss spring training after tumbling through the roof of his Oklahoma barn. What other sport can claim such a broad range of backgrounds among its players? And how could such a sport plausibly claim separation from politics while our president yammers endlessly about walls and exclusion and real Americans?

Baseball, of course, isn’t nearly free of that kind of bluster, as new St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Dexter Fowler found out this winter. After daring to express modest concern about Trump’s initial Muslim ban, Fowler, who was born in Atlanta, heard a chorus of “Go back where you came from” and plenty worse across social media, as might be expected from the fans that made their own Darren Wilson jerseys in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in nearby Ferguson. Baseball has been walking this tightrope for generations, balancing between inclusivity and tradition, urban teams and rural culture, the  “America’s Pastime” mythos and the most immigrant-dependent recruiting structure in American sports. But in 2017, with these battles spilling into every aspect of our society, baseball will have no choice but to acknowledge them outright. I suspect it will not be pretty. It will certainly bum out the “just play the game” set. But the sport will be more fascinating for it.

“Is it okay that we’re already Twitter friends?” I asked my editors at this here ol’ Hazlitt Mag when they approached me about interviewing Darcie Wilder about her new book, literally show me a healthy person (Tyrant Books). I’ve interviewed a number of people for Hazlitt, but nobody with whom I was already friends, and I wanted to be transparent up front.

The problem is, literally everyone is Twitter friends with Darcie. She tweets under the super SEO-friendly handle @333333333433333 to over seventy thousand followers, sharing thoughts that could be considered jokes to a person who considers getting punched in the gut hilarious. Her fan base includes mall punks, sad people on the internet, myself, the people at MTV News (who hired Darcie to be the voice of their social media), and people who know what their moon sign is without needing to look it up.

what's the longest amount of time you've pretended someone cared about you. im like a year plus

literally show me a healthy person is very much a book of its time—the first line is “khdjysbfshfsjtstjsjts” [sic]—but it’s also an age-old story, somewhere between poetry and prose, about a young woman who is maybe named Darcie Wilder trying and learning how to be okay. Told in Speedboat-like fragments (including, yes, some under 140 characters), Darcie explores her own experiences with grief following her mother’s death, as well as recollections of lousy sex, decent sex with lousy men, and White Castle jalapeno cheeseburgers. For a book that sounds like such a bummer when I describe it, it made me laugh a whole lot.

Darcie and I spoke over Gchat, because both of us avoid talking on the phone unless absolutely necessary.

*

Anna Fitzpatrick: Hello Darcie

Darcie Wilder: Hi Anna, hello

Are you ready to talk about art, literature, and who can forget: truth?

Hmmmm *thinkyface emoji*

I think I am ready to discuss art, literature, and who can forget: truth.

If you are

Okay let’s start.

You wrote a book! You are an authoress.

*Brandy voice* The book is mine

The first time I heard someone describe literally show me a healthy person, they called it a novel. So I pictured something, like, by Dickens, because he’s who I think of when I think of novels. And in a way, your book is a little Dickensian. There is a sad child (you). But it’s not a novel, and it’s not really a memoir. What would you call it?

[Several minutes go by. Darcie does not answer.]

Do you not like this question?

You get three “passes,” like in truth or dare

JK you can have as many passes as you want

Hmmm. Yeah it’s tricky. Whenever anyone asks about it my face gets hot and I start stuttering and trailing off and they say, “You’ve really gotta work on this, Darcie.” And then I call it a novel, which is what the cover says. And it’s not a conventionally structured novel, but it’s a narrative. It’s kind of like, I guess, the literary version of an experimental documentary.

lmao lmao

You can also “pass” if my answers suck

i bet my soulmate sucks

Shhh no, we are both geniuses and we will behave as such.

Women are always apologizing for who we are. For being too confident, or too sure of our work, or for being too tall, or not tall enough, or for being somewhere in between, height-wise. So really we are feminist revolutionaries, talking right now.

Is it hard for you to talk about yourself?

Oh it’s both excruciating and the opposite of excruciating. It took me a while to realize I both desperately love and desperately hate attention in incredible, exactly equal amounts. Also I feel like you can hate attention and desperately need it, which is the case for me.

Thank you for being a feminist revolutionary with me, Anna

I mean, there’s tweeting about yourself, but that’s different. There’s a remove to it.

Yes.

Do you think about your audience when you tweet? You have a trillion followers—do you have an idea in mind who is reading what you put out in the world?

Yeah, I think about my audience all the time. I used to be more in tune with it, which would translate into being more strategic about posting, and I was better about forming relationships and DMing. But more recently I feel less in tune with it, maybe because of the swarms of bots and feeling differently about a lot after the election. I also feel like my audience is too large (please do not unfollow me) and I miss what it felt like around 2015. I don’t feel like I can be as open or fun or experimental. Now I’m like, who are these people? Why are you interested in me? I don’t get it. But I do get it, because I’ve spent years working at tweeting and writing and presenting myself in this specific way. I’ve put in a lot of labor and thought, but sometimes I just think it’s all absurd, or doesn’t make sense, which is, I think, a way for me to dismiss myself.

staying on the line with my telemarketer to feel needed

It’s kind of led to your career! You tweet for work, and there is a lot of overlap between your Twitter and your novel. Can you talk a little about how the book came to be? Were you approached about doing this?

Yes! My friend Spencer Madsen asked if I would be interested in writing a book for Sorry House, and I started assembling it (although it ended up coming out on Tyrant Books). In 2012 I started writing a lot of flash fiction and assorted small things in the same type of voice that drives the book. But I wasn’t sure what to do with it until I assembled a few pages for a zine in 2014, where I found the structure that became the structure of the book. Then with the prompt of a book, I began assembling the blocks of text and lines I had written into an arc with reoccurring themes and ideas. I looked through my tweets, too, so some of the book has been tweeted before, but it became this arc that I plotted out and filled in.

It really is a book that teaches you how to read it while you read it. At first, it seems like a bunch of loosely related thoughts, but then this story starts to present itself through these fragments. What, if any, books or movies or zines or conceptual art projects did you look to when you were working on this?

Stanya Kahn’s It’s Cool, I’m Good has been most influential on my work in general because of the tone she uses and the tension between humor and really dark concepts. I feel like there are two parts of my brain, the one that thrives off teen movies like Never Been Kissed and The Princess Diaries and Empire Records and Doom Generation and stuff, and then the other part that’s drawn to this stuff that might be difficult to sit through, like Peter Hutton’s films. Structurally, a lot of stuff that’s more lyrical like Putty Hill, or Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, which also balances that existential dread, darkness, and humor. Also, always Maria Bamford.

Also I think the way Ted Berrigan talks about death in his poem “Memorial Day” [with Anne Waldman] has influenced me a lot in the way I recount my experiences with grief, I kind of always think of this one recording of him reading it.

another guy that 'doesnt do relationships' got a girlfriend

When did you read that poem? Before or after you dealt with similar experiences of your own?

I think I found it right before my mom died, so around 2007. I originally heard the audio portion and then I found the whole poem, which was difficult because it’s not online anywhere, and there are certain lines that have stuck with me for forever, and that as time goes on I’ll stumble upon seemingly just when I need them. Like, “the heart stops briefly when someone dies, one slow stroke as they go from your outside life to your inside life. and everything continues, samely” didn’t resonate as much in 2010 as it did in 2013, or vice versa.

That line is really lovely.

But he writes these long parts about people dealing with death and the ability to love, and it reminds me of having a running nose on a cold day, and just describing these moments right after learning that there’s an incredible loss, these lists of actions that seem both innocuous and profound and I’m like: fuck, writing poetry about death and that feeling is like the hardest thing on the planet. Like it’s soft and hard at the same time.

I think there is this idea of millenials on Twitter, doing the internet today, that everything is fuelled by a sense of irony. But there is a lot of (HEREITCOMES) truth in your work. You blend sincerity with these observations about how bleak or mundane or bizarre life can be even if it doesn’t make literary sense in a traditional way. (I think that’s why your followers like you) :)

You talk about developing this “voice” in your book. Is that your voice? Is there a difference between who you are as a person and who you are when you write/tweet?

Thank you! Yeah, I think people play up how much of the internet is “irony” when they really mean “self-aware” or something? I do think this book is my voice, or one of my voices. I think it’s confusing because I’m not sure what my voice or book means to someone else, the different associations or conclusions they’re drawing, so it’s difficult for me to subscribe to that. Like in those game shows where you pick a number and the curtain reveals what could either be a brand new car or a frying pan, and you’re not sure until it’s too late. Which I think is prevalent in my work as a major theme—“do these words mean the same thing to you as they do me?” or “do these words have power?” or “can you hear me?” or “what the fuck is going on?”

But yes, I think there’s a difference between who I am and what I tweet, I’m just not always exactly sure what the difference is at any moment. There are also some word associations or sentences that should exist in the world, and don’t need anyone to @-reply with a “well, actually” or caveat to the sentiment. Tweets are an imperfect medium, so I think there’s a lot of frustrating ways they can be received.

Does it ever get hard for you, getting personal? Especially when you write about your family? Sorry, that’s such an anxiety-inducing question that makes me sound like “DARCIE, WYD?????” It’s an anxiety that I have when I write, this question of, why am I doing it? And I think for me ultimately it’s trying to understand something about myself, trying to relate to others, trying to give others something to relate to, trying to get paid, and also I like the attention. But I wonder what it’s like for other people.

Yes! Absolutely. Lately I’ve been freaking out because I really just didn’t think about my family reading it. For some reason I’m fine with getting really personal about myself, partially because if I do it and make it known knowledge, it feels more powerful and less like a secret, which feels like weakness. Even though boundaries and privacy are the opposite of weakness! But sometimes it’s hazy when my story ends and another person’s story begins, which is why I like reminding people that it’s a mix of fact and fiction.

But I learned to make art by making diary films, and would have a breakdown, like, every single time because of that “why am I doing this?”-type stuff. And I don’t know, but people tell me that it’s helpful. I mean, I’m not a journalist, this stuff isn’t saving the world, but it’s helping someone feel better, so it deserves to exist. There’s a lot of strife I could have avoided, and would be a better adjusted person, had I been exposed to the right pieces of art and writing that just helped me reconcile my feelings, and that stuff needs to be personal.

whenev u can't handle something ur body turns it into humor i havent been able to stop laughing since pre-school i am in so much pain

There’s a power in talking about yourself, though, because you are controlling your own narrative. I mean, we are the same age (you are four days older), and we grew up on the internet when it was still a place for freaks before the normies took over, and our lives have always been intertwined with that. Like, all my secrets exist somewhere in old forum posts, or texts, or Livejournal entries, or tweets, or DMs, or emails, or whatever, and I used to be terrified of being doxxed. But now I make jokes about all of my secrets: I’m a pervert! Sometimes I want to die! And then they stop being secrets and start being things that get faves and RTs. There is a freedom in putting your shit out there, and being like, “So?”

YES

Or turning it into an essay or book and getting paid for it.

I just want to say the first public thing I put online was when I was on the Alternative Press forums and I asked what nu-metal was and why everyone hated it.

omg

But also, yes—so much crap online about me. So many mistakes and fuck-ups. For me, at least.

I have posts in the IMDB forums about why Legally Blonde is subversive and feminist and Legally Blonde 2 was just capitalizing on the success of the first and is a hollow shell.

oh my god

Luckily, IMDB deleted the forums earlier this year and no one will ever see them again. Do you remember your first experiences with … THEINTERNET????

YES! I do. We got a computer in 1998 or 1999, I think. And then I was in some sort of special program in public school that gave us laptops, so I’ve mostly always had my own computer and grew up online. I didn’t know how to have a conversation IRL until post-college, and have always been more comfortable typing and having the space to think about who I am and what I want to say before I do.

But even still, I wasn’t super comfortable with it until 2012 when I started being more free—like, the first paragraph of my book is a Facebook status from February 2012, and I remember that was a turning point where I was open to sharing online instead of being scared and defensive and figuring out what I should be or do.

(But I had a million Xangas and Livejournals and used to differentiate whether they were for online or IRL friends for some reason.)

How did that feel?

It felt really freeing and different, but also scary. But once the switch flips, it was done. It’s kind of like, “what’s the worst that can happen” and “let’r rip” and “who cares,” even though sometimes I really, really care.

God it is so hard not to care. I keep trying to be cool on the internet but then I care too much and ruin it.

Ugh, same. You have to care a little, I think. Nihilists are terrible.

It’s weird because it seems that there is this crop of Twitter people who are becoming more visible who combine not caring with political activism. And it seems to be a competition about who can be the most right, or clever. And I want to ask, “but what do you CARE about?”

I identify with what you’re saying. People care about those faves and RTs, and they also care about calling out people for caring about those faves and RTs. It’s also weird that very serious thoughts and feelings are on the same timeline as jokes, etc.! I miss message boards where we separated things out more. I think people quit Twitter altogether because we are in one big room having a lot of conversations that require very different tones and moods, and it takes a lot to have them simultaneously—it’s the best and worst part of Twitter.

“death could be an alternative,” my therapist just now

Final question

DUNDUNDUNNNNNNN

omg!

How are you feeling?

In general or right now?

Yes.

Everything.

LOL

Right now I feel grateful and content because I enjoy talking to you, and this has made me remember that I like my book and my life and making work and art and writing in general. I also had a lot of coffee and nice time with my coworkers today, which are two of my favorite things. I’m also a bit anxious and scared because I always am. How are you?

I am good because the weather is getting nicer and I’m talking to my pal Darcie and she is interesting! I am a bit stressed because I don’t know where I’m going in life and I don’t know if that even matters in this current political climate. But I wrote down all the artists and poets and filmmakers and stuff you messaged above, and I’m looking forward to checking them all out later.

And I love your book and am happy you are putting it out in the world.

Thank YOU. Ugh I’m glad you like it. Recently I looked at it and was like, “Oh, I understand how someone could hate this,” and like, okay, fine.

literally show me a healthy person

“Neo-nazis love waterparks,” my boyfriend, Collin, said as three skinheads in combat boots, T-shirts slung over their shoulders, shuffled toward the ticket line in front of us. There is nothing like a blue-green swastika on a pimpled back to remind you that everything you believed was good and pure as a child was a lie.

I was twenty-seven the first time I went to a waterpark. Up until then, I’d only seen one from the backseat of my parents’ car, when the blur of treetops gave way to a life-sized toy-set in the distance. The turquoise bubble letters, the towering coil of the waterslide, was Oz-like and glistening as we passed it by. Growing up in New York City, slides dropped you off on hard cement, and family fun meant tickets to an Off-Broadway Neil Simon play starring Judd Hirsch. Fear was an unlit side-street, the third rail of the subway tracks, a rogue taxi speeding through a yellow light—a thing to be avoided, rather than conquered. That may explain why, even as an adult, I envied the kids in commercials, who dove face-first down watery chutes, plunging into pools on rubber donuts. They were fearless in their aquamarine world, and I believed I would be too.

Plus, it was hot. Our air conditioner was broken and it was mid-August in Manhattan. When I proposed driving to a New Jersey waterpark, Collin was on board. From the car window, the skyline of slides grew close enough to establish their hierarchy. Least impressive was the Lazy River, a flat in-ground pool that wound around the park. Ranked just above it was the horizontal, elevated wavy slide, and above that, a spinning red and black wheel. But the centerpiece of the park was an enormous yellow tube with a breathtaking vertical drop that finished with a series of spirals.

“I’m going to do that one first,” I announced, as we pulled into the parking lot. But at the ticket line, face-to-back with a swastika, my anxiety kicked in.

Combat boots on concrete. The ghosts of hot dog burps. The windy wails of humans turned upside-down.

Collin headed for the yellow slide, which, upon closer inspection, was taller than it seemed before, the plastic more brittle. Even the color was different—less orange juice, more sawdust.

I needed to build up my nerve, so I headed towards the Lazy River. Along the way, the concrete was spattered with dark stains—a trail of shimmery blood puddles stamped with toe-prints. A waterpark crime scene. I panicked and scanned the area. The mood was buzzy, elevated, teeming with children, flesh intact, dripping pool water off their fingers. A leaky ketchup bottle, chocolate sauce from a melting cone, that was all it was—or what it might have been, if the liquid had been thicker, darker, less blood-like. Blood blood, and still, I pretended it wasn’t.

Sitting in a rubber donut, toilet-style, I drifted pleasantly down the Lazy River until I noticed a Band-Aid floating belly-up alongside me. Paddling it away didn’t work—we were riding the same current. When I got out of the pool, my swimsuit bottom sagged with water. The Band-Aid leeched to one cheek.

I waved at Collin, his wild blond hair now soaked flat and darkened. He’d already been on the Wheel of Doom and the giant yellow slide. Twice.

A group of pre-teen boys rushed past us, pulled off their shirts and handed them to another boy in a wheelchair. The handles of his chair dangled with knapsacks. I watched the boy in the wheelchair watch his friends, one by one, shoot across the horizontal slide.

“Don’t go on that one.” Collin pointed to another ride obscured by a thin jungle of fake trees.

“Why, what’s that one?” I asked.

“I think it’s a rope swing with a large drop,” he said. “But look, people keep getting hurt.”

On cue, a golf cart ambulance pulled up in front of the ride. When the siren sounded, I caught my open mouth with one hand.

“Having fun yet?” he asked. His sarcasm annoyed me, because I knew he actually was having fun, and he knew I wasn’t. These were our assigned roles: he was the one who delighted in the absurd, I was the absurd. Once, he’d said my temperament reminded him of a horse. “Because they scare so easily.” I was tired of him seeing me this way. I was supposed to be different at a waterpark.

So I climbed the ladder to the tall yellow slide, rail by rusted rail, until I reached the platform where the view stretched all the way to the parking lot. The entry point of the slide was a slick, dark canal—a hole with no bottom. The teenager in charge was rushing riders through, one on top of the other, not factoring in the chance that someone might be stuck inside the tube. I wondered if someone ever got stuck inside the tube. “You can go ahead of me,” I told a few small kids behind me and then waited to see if they survived. The teenager said something like, “Only way to go is down,” but there was that ladder I’d come up on, and technically it went both ways. “Be right back,” I said, suggesting I’d forgotten an important slide-related device I’d return with shortly, and toed my way back down the ladder, certain I’d made the right decision.

At the bottom, a shivery little girl in a pink suit was standing there, pointing at me. “You’re the grown-up who chickened out!” she yelled, before climbing up the ladder for a second go-round.

At a table overlooking the park, Collin and I dunked corndogs in yellow mustard, and listened for the golf cart siren, reliable as a church bell chiming every quarter-hour. I told him how sad I felt for the boy in the wheelchair. “Aw,” he said, “maybe he was enjoying himself, even if he couldn’t go on the slides.” I tried to imagine this. I changed the subject.

“I don’t think I can do the yellow slide,” I said.

“You have to do the yellow slide,” he said. “That’s the whole point of coming to a waterpark.”

Early on in our relationship he’d given me a crash course on all the suburban pleasures I’d missed as a child. The first time he took me to his hometown, we found a trampoline in a wooded area and jumped holding hands, until a neighbor chased us away. Later, we visited an amusement park, an arcade emporium with go-karts, a renaissance faire, a mini-golf course on the Jersey shore. We sang “Wheel in the Sky” the whole ride there, pretending we were teenagers from another era we’d narrowly missed. Back then, it felt as if he’d found an artery in my neck that, when pressed, would let the steam out.

He moved in with me. He lost his job. He left gum balled in wrappers on the floor, and stuffed a drawer with wires, the remnants of musical instruments he’d locked away in a storage bin. Now he would wake in the middle of the night to strum his guitar. He plucked the melody to “Wheel in the Sky,” slow and sad, in a darkened room away from me. In the morning, we packed two bath-towels in a beach bag. In the afternoon, I looked up at the yellow slide and saw what he meant. The point was to reach the thing you’d seen in the distance, and to believe it was exactly what you’d hoped for, even if it wasn’t.

So I climbed back up the ladder, and when it was my turn, I laid down inside the dark, wet intestine. Inside, it smelled of sugar and cleaning agents, a mopped school hallway. First came the drop, the worst part, I told myself before mental predictions were muted by the present tense and organs sloshing, body rag-dolling, the helplessness of my own arms to steady the momentum. Slipping warps time, stretching a moment of uncertainty into an operatic final reckoning. As I slid downward, I ran through the whole playlist—disbelief, regret, flight, fight and resignation—until I was suddenly perched in the curve of a plastic tube. It was dark inside the yellow spiral, but still, unfortunately, yellow—like the unpolished insides of a child’s toy.

A wet blob of flesh pressed against my back. “Move, Move!” it said. I duck-pedaled around a spiral, then another spiral, until I was dropping again, this time, down the part of the slide that was exposed. The tube’s top half was gone, and in its place was the boundless, elevated view of a bad decision. The waterpark below unfolded like a boardgame—flat, distant, improbable. For a second, I was grateful when the slide’s top-half returned.

But the last drop was unexpected. Light broke through the tunnel. I doggy-paddled the air. The tube was now the absence of a tube. The punchline of the joke had become the beat before the laughter, when you are suspended alone, with only the echo of what you did, and not what it means. The pool smacked me good and pushed my head down. There was only turquoise and burning. I gulped chlorine. I gulped breath. A lifeguard’s hand plucked me up by the swimsuit strap and pushed me towards the shallow exit stairs.

“I think you landed wrong,” Collin said, standing on the ledge, holding out a towel. I opened my mouth and when nothing came out, I shut it again. My arms and legs ached from seizing up. My chest was heavy with the weight of something. I tried to inflate it, but my breath sputtered out. “You okay?” he asked. I shook my head, and took the towel from his hands.

We headed back towards the parking lot. The blood-stains on the ground had browned in the sun. A siren bleated. Wails whirl-pooled around us. One lone neo-Nazi finished up his Slurpee as he waited in line for the Wheel of Doom.

Every other New Year, I’ve withdrawn from the potentially memorable (or not so memorable) eve of clinking champagne flutes with strangers to rise soberly at 6 a.m. with my family in Virginia, for an ancestral food ceremony called jesa.

These early mornings usually begin darker than day; a Prussian blue while my father wakes to light candles, opening the window to call his late father’s spirit in. The table takes a few hours to set, glorified with plates of dried fish, rice wine, jujubes, persimmon, pear, liver, and rice cake soup for my grandfather. After three rounds of synchronized bows, my sisters and I sit by his portrait to whisper gratitude and think of the other Lees who came and left before us. Once our silence is pardoned, we eat. Just as everyone’s ready to be done, grandma surprises us with more food, this time, with bowls of radish soup. During the Korean War she’d known what starvation was, and since then she has made sure that no one ever leaves a table still hungry. Eat more, she always insists.

Until I’d left for college, I wouldn’t know what a New Year’s Eve party was like. Despite my appreciation for traditions now, most of my childhood battles spurred from the rigidness of my parents’ roots and a young thing’s need for freedom. In the summers, I still seek out some of the desires of my youth—sweet skin, soft flesh, and the unexpected, eating cold fruit in the landscapes of someplace new. But more than anything, rebellion is in doing the unprecedented: having no plans or edifice, to the point of averting stable bonds. Moving to New York. Leaving the only people you know with a suitcase in hand.

But sometimes, here in the city, I get homesick, wanting nothing more than familiarity and the taste of radish soup.

*

Before the early seeds of Buddha and Confucius, Korea belonged to my ancestors as a shamanistic kingdom. The Korean word for shaman, mu, comes from China’s equivalent, wu. Mu is also a name for the Korean radish, or the shorter and stouter version of its better-known twin, the daikon.

When China imported Confucianism into other regions, longevity was farmed in the soil of buried families worshipped by their children, who’d learned from them filial piety and the virtue of serving the desires of others before one’s own. Despite having these values ingrained in me, naturally I grew into the habits of Western individualism. Although I identify as an assimilated Korean-American, older Koreans like to fervently exercise the statement: But you’re not American. You’re Korean.

The binary idealism of “east and west” isn’t much different from the way one prepares certain food, the fates of a meal commonly fixed by roles that have been established for generations. The milky broth of warm cucurbit soup is served for comfort and sustenance. But when dinner’s over, the lover’s mouth is reserved for a fare of sweetly glazed pericarps—grapes, cherries, strawberries. Often handfed, a gesture underlined as erotic, fruit has a reputation for scandal and pleasure—with famous appearances in Genesis and many nude paintings. Vegetables, on the other hand, often arrive tough and fashioned plainly in dirt—masculine, lacking mystique. In the tradition of animism, I like to consider the radish a maverick and hermaphroditic deity. One with a flexible identity. A specimen born phallic that, when left past the harvest, flowers to show off new private parts. Little fruit pods.

*

Preparing a special meal is a fortifying experience, requiring strategic planning and long-term thinking. In this particular case, I not only have to give up time, but find certain ingredients that don’t have English names. The radishes that make radish soup aren’t sold in many of the usual grocery chains, so I head for the Q train to Canal Street, the one place I can trust to have every type of produce.

I begin to see Chinatown’s thumbprints around the subway station, its signature in those vibrant, red plastic grocery bags. Sanguine has two meanings. One is a shade of red like that of blood, and the other is comparable to being hopeful in times of strife. Both sentiments chronicle the shared bloodshed and poverty of our ancestors, through generations of conquest and resistance. Thanks to Confucian ideologies the dynasties shared, there was little resistance when the Hans invaded Korea in the 12th century. Aside from the way it’s remained largely homogenous, when I arrive to today’s bustling markets between Canal and Pell, there seems to be no room or time for resistance.

Chinatown’s pulse is one that thrums through its tourists, vendors, and shoppers, shoulder-to-shoulder and all pacing swiftly in the chaotic frenzy of sidewalk traffic. Sanguine store signs line its capillaries. Sidewalk carts display an abundant array of fresh, foreign fruits—rambutan, mangosteen, lychee, dragonfruit. Y’all, look’it these spiky strawberries, a man shouts to his family in a Southern accent, pointing to a rambutan stand. I peer inside a small grocery market, perfumed with coriander and an undertone of musky dried squid. Next to a dated cash register are barrels of chestnuts and boxed Danish cookies, blue and white porcelains, but no radishes in sight. I smile at the clerk, say thank you and leave.

Eventually, I come across a large Taiwanese bakery that turns into a fish market past the corridor, and for a moment I become Brigitte Lin in Chungking Express. The short fantasy ends as I walk out the exit, the evening’s rays replaced by neon violet lights. By now I’m hungry and consider going home, until I see, across the street, a sign that reads HONGKONGSUPERMARKET. It’s always when you give up on it that an answer reveals itself, I think. This supermarket smells of plastic curtains, herbal medicine in tin boxes, and candied ginger. In the produce aisle there are scallions, bean sprouts, and mushrooms of every kind. And, lo and behold, the radishes, with a sign that says 3 for $1.

*

On my way back to the subway, I pass by and notice two elderly women—one wearing a bucket hat rummaging for plastic bottles, and another waddling with a shopping cart full of quilted, unidentifiable objects. Though this sight isn’t new, in that moment I recall reading an earlier report on the rising number of elderly folks in Chinatown living alone. The forgotten ones. In Eastern countries, it’s common for adults to live at home and take care of their retired parents, but for those who’ve grown up like I have, the defiant desire to be on our own populates as we age further into our American ways. Self-reliance, consequently, unravels the thread of our once highly collectivist values more and more, leaving members of previous generations without resources to support themselves.

From China, my ancestors had learned to cultivate rice, which apart from wars and ideologies, has brought our nations and many others together. Rice paddies require many farmers to work and drain their fields at the same time, and so making autonomous choices can be detrimental for the entire village. It’s from this mode of agriculture that the differences in individualism vs. collectivism are thought to stem, named by a group of students from the University of Virginia as “the rice theory.”

I thought of this theory often when I lived with my former roommate, an Indian writer from Mumbai. The cultural dish we both shared was rice with curry. Our friendship formed by preparing this meal together. “This tastes like home,” Apoorva had said our first night. I too felt at home, having someone to regularly sit down with, easily and unintended. She ate rice with her hands, and I with my chopsticks—openly and plainly, the way our families do at home. After learning of her extensive knowledge in European literature, I ask her if she’s able to discuss these interests with her family back in India. Do you feel like they understand you and your interests here?“Yes. Well, sometimes. Even if they don’t, I think having things to bring back and discuss with the people at home is our duty as any cross-cultural member.” Cross-cultural, I’d nod and mentally repeat to myself. Words that sometimes still echo but are too often forgotten.

*

Walking a few blocks from the train, I catch a remarkable glimpse of a family in a restaurant, praying over their dinner. Family—the taxa between genus and order. I think of perishables. In this case: produce, people, and tradition. When all you’ve known is tradition, there’s a certain terror in realizing that the structures you grew up with start collapsing as you age, eventually left up to you to uphold or lose. Religion, holidays, eating dinner at the same time. But something like a brief, momentary view into that family’s evening is a still and softening reminder of how some things can stay constant.

A Taiwanese friend had once told me the Chinese word for good derives from two characters—one that symbolizes woman and the other child. To cultivate life, a child needs their mother, women need each other, and society—the standards of our ancestors. I look at my bag of radishes, the roots of my childhood enduringly rattling and carried with me wherever I go.

Inside a tight taupe leathered car, something out of a ‘70s Amitabh Bachchan movie, Jesminder (Parminder Nagra), the protagonist of Bend It Like Beckham (directed by pop genius Gurinder Chadha), sits with her sister, Pinky (Archie Punjabi), on the latter’s wedding day. They’re framed by the flurry of people behind them. Pinky asks Jess, her whimsical golden churis delicately singing as she moves her hand to push a non-existent strand of hair away from her face, “Don’t you want all of this? This is the best day of your life, innit?” Her expression is uncharacteristically twee, a star of bindis lining her acute bone structure, she smiles, broadly, as if to expect a loud yes. Instead, Jess looks at her, eyebrows narrow, pointed, and says, calmly, without hesitation or the bratty intonation Pinky usually has on lockdown, “I want more than this.”

The this is subtle, and sibilant, exaggerated like a low hum. She’s wearing a silk sari the color of dark pink roses, and it fits her beautifully—but little about the Indian wedding satiates Jess. The glamour of it doesn’t entice her, the festivities are pallid and uninspiring, leaving her disoriented and unhappy. Her dark hair is in a loose tussle, the way hair falls when it’s been primed into a neat, hair-sprayed construction. She wants more than the limits of her culture. Frozen in melancholy, she wants more than this.

Pinky falls into the category of a South Asian kid who wants what’s expected of her. She, herself, needs (and eventually has) a handsome Punjabi, Sikh husband. She wants chubby children. She craves a relatively simple life, following the trodden lead of her parents, and the community of other brown girls like her—whom she hates, but all brown aunties eventually hate other brown aunties, so it’s fine, she’s fine. She desires the script that many South Asian kids want, that of a life isomorphic to their parents’, where husbands are Indian and handsome and modern, and women can cook parathas and aloo gobi, wearing bright colored kurtas with mismatched cardigans and socks. Tried and tested equates to stability, and it’s always easier on the road more travelled. The success rate seems higher, a good return on investment.

But, what of all the rest? What of all the children who don’t fit neatly into a prescribed expectation? Children who, even when they try, clearly weren’t built for an ordinary life? Children who can’t fall into mimicry with small grace and little disappointment? Children like Jess?

*

The beauty of Jess, and perhaps one of the most relatable parts of her, is that she tries. She tries so exceptionally hard to be the good daughter that her parents have mightily intended her to be. She’s a bright kid, she respects them, listens to them, and yet despite all that, she wants more than this. She laments to Tony (Ameet Chana), her closeted Indian best friend, “Anything I want is just not Indian enough for ‘em!”

For Jess, it’s too much to say no to the way the grass feels against her feet when she zigzags across the football field, a heap of air snaking through her T-shirt as she runs past a teammate, or the way the tight plastic ball feels at the curve of her knees when she’s moving sinuously in a game, scoring a goal. Or, when she buys her first pair of legitimate football shoes with her friend Jules, a pair of black and whites, and how they sit and laugh about it in a pub in London, giddy and innocent, unwrapping the foils of paper and plastic to unleash this small pleasure. Jess doesn’t want to lie, but she’s being confronted with herself. That itch that won’t go away.

Slowly, as so many kids like us do, Jesminder begins the dire charade of lying to her family. Football, she reconciles, is not such a bad thing. It’s the frustration of just wanting to live that becomes such a burden. She shouldn’t have to lie, but alas—she takes the leap, making the decision that every brown kid is confronted with, crossing the line that feels so shameful.

The litmus test of a good child need not be “Do you lie to your parents?” Because the answer will always be a sweaty “Yes.”

*

Jess represents an area of conversation still largely overlooked in South Asian communities: the child who meekly defies cultural expectation. She’s not intensely radical, she just wants to play sports, but her small act of subversion paves a road for something more. It’s why those words—I want more than this—resonated so deeply when I first watched the film in 2002. I was twelve, and I didn’t have access to myself in an honest way, mirroring myself against half fashioned heroes that looked nothing like me. I thought I needed to be anybody but myself to be validated, to be worthy of my place in this world, this brown valueless body of mine. But Jess’s slow self-actualization made me question how following another’s dream would service me. In the end, I would have to live with my decisions. So why usurp my sanity for somebody else’s dopey, unfulfilled wishes for my life?

One of the reasons we still struggle with these realities in our communities is because our language for who we are as South Asians in the West is still so young, still so undefined. We have so much internalized hatred amongst us; the running joke in Bend It Like Beckham is that Jess can marry anyone, just not a Muslim. We’ve refused to detail our shameful and horrific interlacing pasts. That the current Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi, has been accused of participating in a cleansing of Gujrati Muslims in 2002. Or that my very own Bengali parents survived a Civil War, where three million majority Muslim Bengalis were killed by the Pakistani Army in 1971. Or that Pakistani Muslims killed Sikhs in Punjab in the ‘40s, and vice versa. Or that Kashmir is still a tentative region over a debate of religion and ownership. We don’t give voice to the hatred we have for each other, and therefore we are unable to unpack the absurdity of it, when in so many ways our histories are richer, intensified, and made more glorious because of what we’ve shared through the ages.

So, we don’t have the decades of tastemakers defining and redefining what it means to be South Asian—especially what it means to be South Asian in the West. Our trauma is so intangible, so incalculable, that we’ve refused to explore it, and now we’re full of rage, feeling stuck in the strongholds of the minority model myth.

But, when a film like Bend It Like Beckham comes out, it means that for a split second we get to see what it means to be us, not an appropriative version of us; us in full definition, spilling with flaws and curiosity, with the quintessential quirks: the way the whole house smells when your mum cooks achaar, the creepy uncles who softly touch your lower back through your salwar as you sidle by, or the loudness of the communities, the way dance and song envelop us, enchanting our functions with blurry ease. There are so many pockets across the world with an Indo-centric definition, and brown kids from Brampton might have nothing in common with the brown kids in Heathrow, yet the echo of the undefined territory booms louder than our shared similarities. As does the space, the cavity, the time that we lose not exploring it.

Bend It Like Beckham is singular. In the recent years, nothing has come so close to unpacking our nuances and smudging our dearth of realities and embarrassments across a screen. We need to understand each other to understand ourselves—or, is it that we need to understand ourselves to understand each other?

*

Next to an off-white brick wall and a framed portrait of Sikh master Guru Nanak, Jess’s dad Mohaan (Anupam Kher) pours and sips a scotch. The family is tired, feet stretched along the middle table, saris lining the floor, bellies popping out to the side. Pinky’s wedding was a success, but Jess’s mother, Sukhi, didn’t know she dipped out during the wedding to play a football final, only to have a scout offer her a full scholarship to a university in California. Jess tells her mother the truth, the first time she declares her brilliance: “I played in the final today, and we won! I wasn’t going to go but Dad let me. And it was brilliant. I played the best ever! And I was happy because I wasn’t sneaking off and lying to you. I didn’t ask to be good at football. Guru Nanak must have blessed me.”

Sukhi is furious at her husband. “You let her leave her sister’s wedding to go to a football match?!” He gets up, and paces. So rarely do we see a man wearing a turban have agency in a Western film. Mohaan is usually full of kindness, but today it’s wisdom, said through his teeth—recounting his own history of compromised self. “When those bloody English cricket players threw me out of their club like a dog…I never complained. On the contrary, I vowed that I will never play again. Who suffered? Me. But I don’t want Jessie to suffer.”

Sukhi stays on the dusty pink couch, her face a writhing mess, lined with frustration over why she has such a difficult un-Indian daughter. But in that moment, listening to her husband’s past, and knowing the weight of disappointment he carries, something turns. In some ways, he wanted more than this, too, but never took the chance to play it out. No parent is truly an oracle, but only blooming with blessings and fear.

In many ways, Jess’s fate was never up to her parents, and that’s what a film like Bend It Like Beckham declares. Our autonomy is important for our own stories, and sometimes you just need to see someone who looks like you, and thinks like you, to win. “I want her to fight, and I want her to win,” Mohaan says. “I don’t think anybody has the right of stopping her.”

4 3 2 1 feels a bit like Paul Auster going to 11. His latest novel is something of a maximalist interpretation of his lifelong fascination with happenstance, metafictional gamesmanship and American mythology. It follows the life of one boy, Archibald Ferguson, in four different configurations: spurred by the fate of his father’s furniture and appliance shop, each version of Ferguson is left to spiral out into an entirely different life, finding his own path from New Jersey youth to—well, it depends on the Ferguson, really.

Though it has lost the genre play of Auster’s early work, it has replaced it with something like sociopolitical grandiosity. 4 3 2 1 is, in a sense, [sort of] the ultimate American tale: beginning with an immigrant who bumbles his way through the processing centre of Ellis Island, it is a kind of oblique testament to the potential of the American endeavour. You really can be almost anything in this land, or at the very least be a lot of different variations on the same basic story.

With the drumbeats of history and politics marching each of the four Fergusons along, Auster takes us through almost every aspect of a Jewish New Jersey adolescence, every possibility, joy, horror, heartbreak, erection, ecstatic triumph and cruel disappointment of a young man growing through midcentury American tumult. It is a hearty scratch for anyone who has ever felt the itch of what if, a deep dive into the rocky, capricious, chaotic waters of life—and then it comes up for air and dives back down three more times.

*

David Berry: One of the Fergusons becomes a writer—well, I guess they all become writers in some capacity, but one becomes a novelist—and he describes the experience of his first review as, “five satisfying tongue kisses, a friendly pat on the back, three punches to the face, one knee to the balls, one execution by firing squad, two shrugs.” You seem to get your share of criticism these days; how has it been to wade back into the responses to your first book in six years?

Paul Auster: First novel. I wrote three books in between. I don’t know why everyone says that: it’s not as though I was twiddling my thumbs the whole time. But I don’t read too much of it. I’ve gotten some very nice responses. Some very awful responses. That’s pretty typical for me. It’s nothing in between: it’s either love or hate. What can I do? I’m a target. People are gunning for me. I find it ridiculously stupid, unfair— they don’t read my work, but they have an opinion about it. Other people are more open-minded: they see what’s there, and they respond to it. There seem to be some reviewers who want to say what the book should be, rather than what it is. It’s as if someone was to say, “Well, Ulysses, it’s so boring. Why isn’t Leopold Bloom planning a bank heist for that day? That would be much more exciting.”

To think that this one could have had four bank heists. But I’m curious, then, about what is there: what drew you to this conception of a novel of multiple timelines, or parallel lives, or whatever you might want to call it?

Number one would be this eternal fascination with “what if?” I’m always playing out possibilities of what might or might not have happened. But I think, deeper than that, was a thing that happened to me, which I have written about: when I was 14, a boy was struck by lightning next to me, and killed. That has haunted me all my life. And it has certainly changed who I am. That experience—but I wasn’t even aware of it when I started. So much is happening in the subconscious. You write your way into a certain kind of clarity. It starts as a blurry muddle of mess, and then it starts to take on definition.

The experience of writing a book might be like that, but what about that actual experience, of almost being hit by lightning? You’ve talked about it before as an important event in your life, and I feel like you could trace that through a lot of your fiction, the idea of this sort of happenstance, random occurrence. Did you have anything like that realization at the time? I mean, it’s literally a bolt out of the sky, showing you how random things can be.

No no no no no. It’s something that sneaks up on you over the years. I distinctly remember, after it happened, it never occurred to me to think, “If it had been five seconds later, it would have been me.” That never crossed my mind until years later. Because somehow, an event is an event. You take it for what it is. It’s only on reflection. This book in its entirety is almost all that reflection. Remember the conversation that Ferguson 4 has with Noah, his friend/cousin, about the two roads: You have to get to an appointment, and there’s the main road and the back road. You can’t really know if you’ve made the right decision, because you can’t be in two places at the same time. And he says that’s why we invented God, because he can be all places at the same time. These are the kinds of things that have always interested me, so I decided to play it out in a big book.

I think those what-ifs are always appealing to a certain kind of person. Although I think, in a strange way, thinking about those actually makes me feel more like a determinist. Thinking about all the things that could have been different, that were maybe just happenstance, makes me think about the ways they were actually kind of causal. I think of it almost in the Guns, Germs, and Steel sense, the way all these little things shape outcomes: if you go far enough back, I find it easy to think, “Well, what else could this really be.”

I’m not so sure about this. In my previous novel, Sunset Park, Lorenzo Michaels, the novelist, is having a conversation with his friend, and talks about wanting to write a novel about things that didn’t happen. There are many wars that could have happened, but didn’t happen. A lot of huge wars that stupidly could have been avoided—the Cuban Missile Crisis being one that didn’t happen, Iraq being one that did, for no reason. It was built on lies that the Bush administration told the American public, and has destroyed a whole country, a whole region, and we’re still paying the price for that blunder. But it didn’t have to happen. Another what-if: what if Ralph Nader hadn’t run for president? Or what if the Supreme Court hadn’t been the political hacks they were and given the election to Bush? What if Gore had been president? He never would have invaded Iraq. So likely there’d be no ISIS today. No so many things. It just so easily could have come to pass that way. I can’t believe in this determinism. It doesn’t make sense. It’s just how things fall out. They don’t have to be that way.

Right, but I think that sense of spiralling out you’re talking about, that’s what sort of trips me up. To keep on the 2000 election: sure, if those judges had decided a different way, we don’t get ISIS. But maybe you wouldn’t have been on the court, in a position to make that decision, if you weren’t the kind of person who would have decided that way. You wouldn’t be Ralph Nader if you weren’t the type of person to run a more or less hopeless presidential campaign. The tendrils seem so vast in every direction I almost feel like you have to assume it worked out that way for some particular reason—not in the sense of, like, God ordained it, but maybe just something like, “Well, it started in this position.”

I think what I want to say about the lightning experience is this: anything can happen at any moment. Period. At any given moment things don’t have to happen the way they do. It’s an accident. An accident by definition is something that doesn’t have to happen. It’s not necessary. It’s a contingent fact. The only necessary things that have to happen, I suppose, is that we’re born and we die. Everything else is a contingent fact.

Speaking of contingent facts: since this is a novel, and you’re not literally God, there are a fair amount of concordances between the Fergusons. They’re all writers, of a kind, they all end up dating or interested in the same woman, and so on. Is there something essential about a character, in your mind, when you set down to create one? As soon as you started this character with parallel lives, are there just certain ways he had to develop?

Had to develop?

Okay, fair. Was more likely to develop?

I thought so. They all share certain things. An ability at sports, a love of music, they all share an interest in literature, film, art of all kinds. They’re all erotic beings, they care about that part of their lives—as most of us do. Nearly everyone I’ve known does. Some people more than others, I suppose. All given to a kind of inwardness. Those are what I would call the genetic traits—the nature-nurture debate, which is what you’re trying to goad me into talking about. On the other hand, having lived with these boys for so long, I tend to think about the differences.

Well, speaking of those, is there any degree of wish fulfillment in a novel like this? Like Ferguson 4 says, that god-like ability to be everywhere at once, even well beyond the normal abilities of a novelist to be wherever it is he wants to be?

That had never occurred to me. I guess you could say it’s the wish fulfillment of a writer who can tell it different ways. We’re always telling things one way, even when we’re making them up. I kept finding them, to be honest: the book is largely improvised. It just kept occurring to me as I was doing it, the feeling that I was finding material just hovering above the page on my desk. I’d plan certain things out, but they just never seemed to go that way on the page. I had many more characters and stories I wanted to deal with, and it always became much more streamlined than I thought it would be.

The things that happen in any given moment. That does make me wonder: you start the book with a joke, though it’s something like the foundational joke of the family. Without giving it away, is this sort of the ultimate response to the capriciousness of life—you just have to laugh about it?

Is that a joke? At times it feels like a joke. I don’t know why I began the book with that joke. I hadn’t heard it until about two years before I started writing the book. But I knew the tone, right from the beginning, which is why I started with the joke. I wanted it to have the feel of legend. According to family legend, he arrives in New York January 1, 1900, and supposedly walks on the street and buys a tomato, thinking it’s an apple. Since when do they sell tomatoes on the street in New York in January? It’s all a blur of conjecture, legend and myth. You have to understand the humour in all this, too. There’s a jocular sense of storytelling. Even the references of the gods, from time to time. It only seems like a realist novel. I think it seeks to break all the rules of how Americans write fiction. I’ve always been writing against them. I’ve never tried to join that club. I’m not in it. I don’t want to be. I don’t want to write the way people wrote 100 years ago. It’s getting tired.

“I mean, there’s no work involved

in being a rose, it seems.

As soon as God looks out the window,

he creates the house.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Roses

“Can we complete ourselves like roses do?”

—Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Roses

A guide to making roses bloom on a specific date, for a special occasion, is divided into four elements: timing, technique, hedging your bets, and considerations. Addressed to home gardeners in San Francisco, the guide minus context is one of the two most applicable advice columns I’ve read this year, the other being an op-ed in the Washington Post encouraging Chelsea Clinton, for the sake of her “political future,” to “disappear.” For me a garden seems unlikelier to have than a political future. Still, I am interested in how roses live. I find out, for instance, that the first auroral blooms in the International Test Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon arrived by the end of March, as they did last year and the year before and as they did not in the years before that, when the seasons had order. Gardeners talking to newspapers are sometimes concerned, knowing that a backlash to the early warmth, a frost in mid-April, can blight a rose before it fully lives. By summer the bloom cycles are easier to control, and begin when the gardener “deadheads” the roses, inducing new life; when it is warmer the blooming season is longer, which sounds ideal. Not so, explains an Australian rose grower, saying that a shorter hibernation means “the roses are being put under more stress.”

This delicate internal clock is one thing that makes the rose a dread metaphor for romantic love, and for years, in fact for the first decade of my sexual life, I refused to accept a single stem from a single new lover. Timing was at the heart of my superstition, which I expressed as a resistance to clichés. Yet the week I got engaged to a man I had known for a month, I paid a studio visit to the artist Scott Campbell, whose main medium is tattooing, and who demonstrated a homemade, prison-style tattoo gun by inking, on my ankle, a classic long-stemmed rose from his repertoire. Things that were sudden also felt right to me at the time, and forgetting that I had not planned to get a tattoo, or that I would not have a picked a rose for myself, I stipulated only that Campbell draw it with thorns (no trope is more personally irritating than that of a woman who, in love, becomes defenseless). Four years later, the petals retain the impression of a velvety rubescence, despite being inked in plain black.

I feel like, what’s the point of a rose? Does the rose need a point?

* * *

Maybe my tattoo has fostered a frequency illusion, but I swear that the traditional flowerage, in traditional red, is a trend gone strong. Over a dozen or so seasons, the rose has cropped up as a motif or ingredient in runway and off-runway fashion, organic and “natural” beauty products, fragrances for people under the age of 34, and certain romanticizing strains of reluctantly contemporary art. A beloved museum show of 2016, held at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, was Alex Da Corte’s “Free Roses,” named for a dream of buying all the roses from a roadside flower-seller and giving them away. One of my favourite people is a painter, Sam McKinniss, who mixes carmine and white over silver to make livid roses reminiscent of Fantin-Latour, and if I could have any new sculpture, it would be the one by Jesse Darling involving an artificial bloom at the neck of a plastic one-litre bottle, an IV bag filled with anti-freeze, hooked on a bungee cord, and a homemade, ersatz gun, all wired together to look like a dish from an anarchofeminist cookbook. On social media, whether the feed is primarily aesthetic (Instagram), socialist and literary (Twitter), or aesthetic and literary (Tumblr), I see bright or dark red roses “everywhere,” where they used to be shunned: they are your grandmother’s and your mother’s roses, now embroidered on satin bombers or black leather winklepickers or handbags, enamel-pinned on totes and blue denim jackets, printed on slipdresses, plucked from the nearby bodega and posed in a “selfie” or still life (to me a still life of one’s posessions is also a kind of “selfie,” my least favourite word) that is taken on a rose-gold iPhone 6, the lens smeared a little with face oil for an ad hoc soft-focus glow, a picture that seems to say, “Funny. Red roses for me.”

Those are the words said to have been thought by Jacqueline Kennedy on the Love Field in Dallas, Texas around noon on November 22, 1963, when she and John F. landed and she was handed a bouquet. The state’s official flower is a yellow rose, so yellow are the roses given to visiting dignitaries, but on the second day of the President’s visit there was a city-wide shortage. Red was the next-best colour. A field called love. A wool bouclé suit in Mattel Barbie pink, originally designed by Chanel but reproduced by a Seventh Avenue tailor, a Polish Jew who immigrated to New York City in 1952, so that the First Lady could say it was “made in America.” The script by Noah Oppenheim for the Pablo Larraín film Jackie contains, in place of her thought, “a beat, as she eyes the crimson blossoms,” before she is dazed into smiling by the noise of the crowd. (Henry Green, in his 1946 novel Back, shows a soldier coming home with one leg, having lost the other “for not seeing the gun beneath a rose,” a worst-case definition of sub rosa that the dead Jackie might have appreciated. Darling’s afore-described sculpture, Gun I (2014, remixed 2016), puts it similarly.) Hours later she will begin to be grateful for the crowds, the photographed evidence for her refusal to see “Jack” as a casualty, which he is in a strict sense. Nothing’s heroic about dying in a convertible. Yet the rain had gone, the sky was clean and bright, the weather in essence was prepped for a celebration to which the witnesses had invited themselves, and so as a symbol or catalyst for the loss of “our freedoms,” few events are so endless as Kennedy’s death. Red on a sunny day remains unreal.

natalie_portman_as_jackie_w_roses.jpg

Jackie

Jackie, as played by Natalie Portman, appears like we’ve never quite seen her, a figment inferred from two startling, frangible images on historical record: the wife holding a man’s head together in a seat “full of blood and red roses,” as she’d later recall; and the widow coming home still stubbornly dressed in red-splattered pink, as if declaring her consanguinity with the man who hadn’t lately shared her bed. “Let them see what they’ve done,” said Jackie in life as in the film, though she did not know who “they” were. Everything she wanted was borrowed, even her flair for a tragedy. She was sure in her misapprehensions. She may not have remembered that it was Mamie Elizabeth Till who declared, eight years and three months earlier, that the funeral of her teenage son would be open-casket and open to press, saying, “Let the people see what I’ve seen.” Today at the Whitney Museum there is a painting by Dana Schutz of Emmett Till in repose, ripping the sight from its time and making it more awful and fresh than any black-and-white photograph. I found it impossible to look closely at the face of the boy as seen by Schutz, and kept refocusing on a big vermillion rose she affixed to the casket, a rose, not found in the photographs, that begs the interpretation: here is a Catholic ex voto, as ornate and fetishistic and tacky as anything Catholic, for a martyr who deserves to be made canonical, to be hung in museums. Considering the trendiness of roses, I felt the gesture gave credence to another reading: here is a white artist who has noticed black death for the first time as a trend in the news. I wondered, irrelevantly, how the early Christians would have reacted had the daughter of a Roman centurion learned to make woodcuts, and done the cover of Foxe’s.

By coincidence or not, the year Jackie dodged a bullet and tried to make John F. a martyr was also the year Jessica Mitford, the English aristocrat turned socialist and journalist stateside, published what remains our best dissection of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death. Mitford describes a vast coalition of florists whose profits depend heavily on people dying for others to grieve, and whose spokespeople refer to funeral announcements that say please omit flowers or in lieu of flowers, please donate to charity as being “derogatory to flowers.” She finds the President of the Society of American Florists expressing the gravest fear, that “funeral directors, as well as florists, are in danger of being swept away along with sentiment and tradition.” A little swept away himself, he wasn’t remiss: sentiment at large could be seen as embattled by common sense and matters of survival, as when Lynn Anderson sang, “I beg your pardon / I never promised you a rose garden,” and also by something strange to common sense, which we call the contemporary. A 1966 profile of Cy Twombly in Vogue, showing the artist at his Roman palazzo, noted that in “certain quarters, where it is assumed that avant-garde American artists should live in avant-garde American discomfort,” he was “suspected of having fallen for ‘grandeur,’ and somehow betrayed the cause.” Two years earlier, Twombly had shown “Nine Discourses on Commodus,” an immediate response to Kennedy’s death in which gored and dripping roses, paired up like entrance and exit wounds, figure huge; and had been dismissed as a messy, reactionary, basically irredeemable classicist by those in favour of material austerity. His detractors, like the artist-critic Donald Judd, believed they saw the future in the spirit of minimalism, but Twombly saw through the future to the spectacular decline, and turned out to be right.

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Cy Twombly

In the fall of 1986, the President, who was Ronald Reagan, proclaimed the rose to be the “national floral emblem” of the United States of America. After that the bloom came pretty quickly off the symbol. “I hate roses,” Twombly told Vogue in a second profile, this one at a Gaetan villa, in 1994. “Don’t you? It’s all right if you can hide them in a cutting garden, but I think a rose garden is the height of ick.” Vogue must have concurred, because by the time of my white suburban prom in Southern Ontario, a chronotope not rife with sophistication, everyone knew a corsage or spray of roses was embarrassingly formal, too dressy, overdetermined. A chill girl wanted a silver heart necklace from Tiffany, and later in the 2000s, living under the shared aesthetic of Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola, she wanted hand picked bunches of daisies and a white iPod loaded with post-punk. Long-stemmed red roses were about as welcome a gift as an Andrea Bocelli CD, and were used to signal melodramatic irony (see: American Beauty, a movie that can only be rated relative to nighttime soap operas) and to make, depending on the audience, a fun game or borderline mockery (or both) of heteromantic ideation (see: the central schtick of The Bachelor).

“We both know it’s not fashionable to love me,” sings Lana Del Rey, proudly, on her 2015 album Honeymoon. Were Lana’s brand of Americana to have its own flag, it would be a print on satin, not silk, of the opening shot in Blue Velvet. A film by David Lynch, released the year Reagan issued the proclamation about the rose. A white picket fence against the sky with the red double blooms, a visual on the phrase “newly patriotic.” Newly hip, too. Lana and I both know it’s trendier now to be a bit unfashionable. What she calls “my mother’s suburban glamour” and I call the “lil’ bourgeois aesthetic” entails a somewhat wishful, somewhat wry interest in signifying the deluxe, in looking like the return of the middle class to cul-de-sacs on golf courses, to white-cloth restaurants and daytime gin in midtown. Roses by other names include: rhinestone clip-on earrings, long nude nails, marabou mules, blouses buttoned all the way up or black lace bodysuits. Wristwatches with gold faces and leather bands to match slim gold-tipped cigarettes. Eyeshadow to match light blue jeans, high-waisted and cropped to make ankles sexy. I personally know five women under the age of 34 who own wool bouclé skirt-suits, and none of them live in the White House. These are women who have never been called “young ladies,” who have uneasy permalance relationships with corporate employers, who have breakfast at Duane Reade instead of Tiffany’s, and who, if they get married, do not then expect to be happier.

These are not all white women, I should say, but I should also say that my ideas of “suburban” and “middle class” were formed in whiteness and by trying to fit in. Ditto my sense of what’s fancy. To my friend Durga, whose family moved to Canada from India before she was born, roses smell neither rich nor sweet but neutral. To my friend Tara, who moved with her mother to Canada from Iran in her teens, rosewater is an ingredient slightly less common than sugar. I recently got entranced with a video in which Princess Nokia, a Nuyorican recording artist in the Bronx, makes her own rosewater facial mist with fresh petals, agua de Florida, and water to steam, poured into a dollar-store spray bottle. (“Most flowers have a gender identity,” she explains, unscientifically. “Roses are like the most female.”) Her tender, easy process gave me the meaning of “self-care,” a concept that hadn’t previously appealed to me, as it sounded like phoning and ordering flowers to your own bedside; when I saw it in practice, not exactly as preached by Audre Lorde, it looked akin to the kinds of (in)activity our mothers called “relaxing” and “mindless,” the face masks in front of the television and the forty-minute bubble baths. Self-care seems better when it means something like “tending your own garden.”

* * *

There has been, for like a hundred years, a heady socialist overtone to the subgenus Rosa. “Bread and roses,” the titular line in a 1911 ode by James Oppenheim to the American women’s movement, became a famous demand at worker’s strikes and a trade union’s motto (histories differ as to whether the union organizer Rose Schneiderman, who demanded bread and roses in a speech the same year, inspired or was inspired by Oppenheim). In the winter of 1912, women led a massive two-month textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, chanting, “Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too.” Those who are needy are also, and equally, desirous. This is a message so basic it should never have gone out of style.

The thinker and writer Jacqueline Rose, in her recent book Women in Dark Times and elsewhere, argues that the Polish, Jewish, and Marxist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg was a moral and sensual force and a changeable spirit who thought “passion—like politics—was a question of freedom.” Nicknamed “Red Rosa” as she climbed to prominence in Germany’s Social Democratic Party and “Bloody Rosa” after she broke ranks and was imprisoned for radical actions, she was described by comrades as “tiny, fragile” and “selfless” and by the prosecutors who imprisoned her as “rootless.” The image stemming from these descriptions is of a gift rose in crimson, her leaves and thorns lightly intact, living her shortened life in a vase on a pedestal. Obviously this is more romantic than accurate: Luxemburg, who has also been described as one of the twentieth century’s best thinkers, believed in spontaneity and permanent change and identified mostly with birds. Her view on the Russian Revolution was romantic and accurate at once, as like a Brontë heroine rushing to love, she could see it was doomed but believed in it anyway (or meted her belief according to the measure of its doom, depending on your reading of her mind). Rose sees the conflict between Lenin and Luxemburg in psychoanalytic terms, saying that while Lenin fixated on the size of a problem, Luxemburg laid fingers on the deeper cause, or the inner meaning, and so was “offering a counter-erotics of revolution.” Assuming she cared for her namesake flower, this revolutionary, this determined internationalist, would have been disturbed to find the rose a symbol of state and national pride, or of a woman’s welcome possession by a lover.

Luxemburg wrote in a 1911 article, “Peace Utopias,” that the war-and-peace dialectic in capitalism, responsible for an expensive international arms race that was supposed to end and be ended with “world peace,” was proof that “the roses of capitalist profit-making and class domination also have thorns for the bourgeoisie, which it prefers to wear as long as possible round its suffering head, in spite of all pain and woe, rather than get rid of it along with the head on the advice of the Social Democrats.” (Eventually it would be the Social Democrats who, two months after the end of World War One, had Luxemburg executed for her Communism. Remember the Queen of Hearts? “For painting my roses red / Someone will lose his head.”) From prison, where she spent time with prostitutes, Luxemburg wrote a sweeping piece of literary criticism in which she cast the crown of roses a little differently, fashioning an answer to Tennyson’s old “rose of womanhood” in a passage on prostitution in Russian literature. Unlike his English and French counterparts, says Luxemburg,

“the Russian artist … dignifies the prostitute and rehabilitates her for the crime that society has committed on her by letting her compete with the purest and loveliest types of womanhood for the heart of the man. He crowns her head with roses and elevates her, as does Mahado his Bajadere [in Goethe’s poem ‘Der Gott und die Bajadere’] from the purgatory of corruption and her own agony to the heights of moral purity and womanly heroism.”

It’s funny how many contradictions elicited by the rose, bred by its infamous symmetry, can be addressed by saying that the rose both has and is currency. Used as legal tender by seventeenth-century royals in Western Europe, today roses are used by sex workers online to euphemize pay, as in “300 roses per hour.” Roses in emoji form are also used, on Twitter, to signal membership in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a left-wing populist organization whose ranks have nearly tripled in the last six months, and whose agenda is more or less set against global capital. Because some of the Democratic Socialists are also members of a partly fictitious, partly metafictitious group known as “Bernie Bros,” there are liberals who think the rose emoji is to the left or the sometimes-called “alt left” what the frog emoji is to the Breitbartians (a longer word for barbarians) of the “alt right.” The idea here, if there is one, is that the rose is a cover for the stench of rank masculinity, but to think that any one group, even if it were male-dominated, could usurp a symbol so classic and storied is ridiculous. Before, during, and after Pepe, a green frog signifies little beyond the princely delusions of laughable men. A frog does not speak to human dignity. A rose still does. When a friend texts me a rose, she is saying not to worry about my worth.

As for what it says about my political or more personal nature that I prefer the newer rose emoji, thorny and dissolute and darker, visibly dying, I don’t feel like explaining it. Frankenstein said it best in The Bride of Frankenstein, iterating to his creator that yes, he understands his fate, knows which side he’s seen to be on: “I love dead,” he says. “Hate living.” I love cemeteries for being and for remaining the only solid grounds, whereas everything else solid, as you may have heard, melts into air. I love the way Twombly painted dead heads of empire in the Sixties, and the way Nobuyushi Araki, the Japanese photographer, answered an interviewer who asked how he made old-fashioned flowers look hot: “Why do they come across as erotic? Because I shot them.” I love when Lana wishes she were already dead. I know what Jacqueline Rose means when she says “capitalism cannot hide its ugliness from the world (periodically revealing that ugliness is simply the obverse of its inhuman powers of endurance).” Ugliness may be human, and more original than beauty; beauty lapses easily into cliché, but then suggests that clichés, the good ones at least, begin as efforts to describe the irreducible. I would love to buy roses to watch them die. I don’t buy them. I would never be able to throw them out.

Last month, I spent a week in Cuba, much of it based in Havana, the first time in a long time I’d travelled completely untethered from the Internet. Toward the end of our trip, outside the Museum of the Revolution, we struck up a conversation with a man from Atlanta, who wore an army-green field hat and a Che Guevara t-shirt and was clearly very excited about being in the city. He said he’d wanted to visit while visas were still available; he didn’t think Donald Trump would keep diplomatic relations open for long. I made a passing joke about all the possible things the president could’ve done since I last checked the news—five days seemed like plenty for a full-blown autocracy to settle in. “Well, Trump tore up the White House,” the man offered. “He said Obama bugged the White House and then he tore it up trying to find the bugs.”

Okay, so: not quite. But there was precisely nothing about this scenario—not Trump thinking it, not Trump saying it, not Trump turning over chairs and ripping down golden curtains with his own tiny hands—that struck me as implausible. I’ve lost my capacity for astonishment. And I can’t begin to blame that on Trump alone: Though he may be a spectacular model of egregious behaviour, he’s hardly the only guy dispensing with decorum. Expecting a standard of conduct from politicians, businesspeople, celebrities, judges, athletes, academics, or rush-hour subway commuters now seems ludicrously quaint.

It’s tempting to be sullen, or to throw up your hands, or to ask, as author Eden Collinsworth does, “where does one find solid moral ground on what is proving to be the porous bedrock of our 21st century?” but to mean that just as a rhetorical question, punctuated by more throwing up of hands. Give Collinsworth credit, then, for striving instead to find a meaningful response. In Behaving Badly: The New Morality in Politics, Sex, and Business, she canvasses a whistleblower, an army general, a Holocaust survivor, a prime minister, a video-game designer, a murderer, and Margaret Atwood—among others—to better understand how we can make moral choices in what she terms an ethically flexible age. 

Danielle Groen: When Barack Obama would address bigotry or nationalism or limitations on speech, he had a habit of saying, “That’s not who we are.” There’s an implication that citizens share a sense of morality. I thought we could begin with where that morality comes from.

Eden Collinsworth: That’s exactly where I started. My sense is that morality is an inner voice, and it’s basically what tells you not to do something, even though it’s not illegal, or you won’t be caught. I grew up with a certain sense of morality instilled by my parents. I’m perhaps one of the last generations where that occurred. My son is now a young man. I’m confident he’s utterly decent, but that’s not so much the moral values I instilled in him as it is what’s shaped his life in his twenty-seven years. There have been these profound changes, in technology especially, which have given a younger demographic more of a 360-degree view of morality. We’ve never been so connected. Here you are in a different time zone. Here I am, in London, where it’s raining outside. I can walk down the street and call someone in China. That said, we are still grappling with this instinct to retreat into what we know. In all of my travels writing this book, it seemed increasingly clear to me that we operate in cultural, socio-economic, and sexual silos. No matter how sophisticated we think we are, we fall back on that as a control panel.

But that panel isn’t necessarily fixed—fifty years ago, homosexuality was a criminal act in Canada; last year, our prime minister marched in pride parades across the country. Are moral shifts inevitable?

I think the most dramatic change in my lifetime has been the moral attitude toward sexuality. There’s definitely been a paradigm shift. I don’t think that’ll retreat. I believe it started in the courts but very quickly wove into the cultural fabric. There’s no doubt in my mind that—at the risk of sounding condescending as heterosexual—it’s been normalized. What I grapple with as a woman is why there hasn’t been an equivalent momentum with women’s rights. That’s so beyond me. I can’t quite figure that out.

Well, a man who bragged on tape about committing sexual assault now sits in the Oval Office. What happens when there don’t appear to be consequences for behaving badly?

I’ve been based in New York a great deal of my life. Virtually everyone from New York is from some other place. That’s the deal. I’ve heard obscenities and vulgarities, but I’ve never heard a racial attack. Recently, I got on the subway for an appointment uptown. I was seated, because I got on downtown; all I saw were legs and disembodied voices. Somebody inadvertently shoved somebody else, who confronted the person. The exchange turned racial almost immediately. What the man said was, “Go back to Africa.” I’d never heard that before. Maybe he’s always felt that, but now he’s allowed to express it—it’s been normalized because of the atmosphere propagated by Trump. It weaves into the fabric. It becomes acceptable. That said, with the tape, I think something mattered more than that. The fact is that people have lost jobs. Those jobs will not come back. I don’t care how many walls you build or what you promise. But if somebody promises you employment and a salary cheque, who cares what he says on a bus?

But those jobs won’t come back. And we’ve seen a bunch of major developments in the past year that hinged on misinformation. The Brexit campaign lied about how much money the UK gives the EU. Trump lied about pretty much everything, whether it’s crime rates or immigration vetting or not cutting Medicaid. Does morality rely on a shared set of facts?

That’s a fascinating question that speaks to a deeper question that is almost rhetorical: What do you want to believe? If you want to believe something, you’re determined to believe something, then there is a different method of receiving and generating news that can feed that now. I think the only thing that will change that attitude, frankly, are results. He’ll either get the results or he won’t.

How much do you imagine you’ll have to talk about Trump while promoting this book? And did his victory challenge any of the ideas you had about moral behaviour?

Truth be told, the book was scheduled for June and moved forward. The publishers asked me, “Would you please revisit the sections where you’ve written about politics and Trump in particular?” The situation has absolutely allowed a different public face to America’s morality. For whatever reason, he was a change agent. I think technology—24-hour news stations and social media—had a great deal to do with it. It enabled it. The fact is that, until Trump appeared on the scene, there was always pushback. Whether it was the church saying, “You shouldn’t say those things. You shouldn’t even think them, but you most certainly shouldn’t say them.” Or academics saying, “That’s incorrect. That’s not right.” Whether it was society in general or your parents—it doesn’t matter anymore. Those things were said and as a result it’s now acceptable to say them publicly. And social media invites participation where everyone feels, right or wrong, that they have a say.

But in collapsing that distance between the powerful and not-so-powerful, social media creates an opportunity for people to call out questionable or unethical actions.

It also informs the way we communicate and our ability to be empathetic. Even when you and I are speaking, I’m sensitive to and aware of the tone of your voice. Sometimes there’s hesitation, sometimes there’s enthusiasm. I don’t think we’re born empathetic; the only way that comes to be is by interacting with people in real time, usually in front of you. Those abilities and aptitudes are like a muscle. The more abstracted you become, the more you fall back on your own prejudices. It all moves forward so quickly. You become angrier more quickly. There’s no subtlety or way of measuring a reaction.

Any discussion of whether advances in technology encourage us to behave in ways we otherwise wouldn’t makes me think immediately of Anthony Weiner, a man who seems constitutionally incapable of not sending women pictures of his penis. Without the technological tools, though, wouldn’t his need for approval, or his propensity for risky behaviour—pick your explanation—just find another outlet?

I suspect he would have found a different outlet and it probably wouldn’t have had the same audience. He would’ve done something. He sounds frankly pathological. On a slightly less dramatic or repulsive level, I do think one behaves differently given the technological resources. Men tweet things to women they wouldn’t necessarily say to their face. People accuse people of things they wouldn’t necessarily say in person. I think there’s no doubt about it.

You mentioned problems of abstraction. What about in combat? If we take humans further and further from the battlefield and let drones do the killing for us, do we create a moral distance from our actions?

That’s the question that many people have. Are you making killing too easy? I spoke with Eric Zimmerman, who is a game designer. He talked about the magic circle. It’s where the game takes place, and you understand that the way you operate within this magic circle is not the way you operate in real life. What happens when warfare becomes the magic circle? From what I understand, the young people who are operating the drone equipment on the launch end come with a history of using these video games. They literally have the eye and agility for it. It does abstract you. But from the research I did, I promise you the people who are launching these drones don’t get a free lunch. In other words, they have problems and guilt. It’s not as if they walk away feeling like it’s easy.

Or like it doesn’t carry consequences.

I think they’re very much aware if they’ve killed people.

I’ve suddenly been hearing people cite climate change, resource scarcity, or overpopulation as reasons they’re hesitating to have a child. Is there a moral responsibility to think about where the world is heading before having a baby?

I don’t know. I’ve reproduced once and that was enough. It’s very expensive and exhausting. I don’t regret it for a moment. I think that if there’s a moral obligation, it’s to stick around and try your best to sort it out. It comes down to decency and indecency. I’ve traveled all over the world and lived everywhere under very different circumstances. I don’t need an interpreter or a priest to recognize what kindness is.

Can that kindness be programmed into robots? Can morality be standardized?

One has to put it in perspective. While we’re arguing the pros and cons, technology is moving forward. It’s the same with making babies. We can put a moratorium on altering genes, but guess what? In China, they’re going to do what they’re going to do. We might be thinking one way about robots, but in another country they’ll be programming robots in a different way. That said, it’s going to be quite a while before robots get to the point where they’re operating in ways that aren’t programmed by human beings.

But some of the technology that’s being discussed, whether it’s five or fifty years from fruition, is bananas. It stretches belief and comprehension. Is there a danger that the conversations around the ethics of that technology will be limited to the people who happen to get it?

I agree with you entirely in terms of that concern. The people who are inventing the future of technology, and as a result have so much impact on our lives, are very removed from the people who will take full advantage of the technology. All this technology is coming from publicly traded businesses. The first obligation of the CEO of a company, especially if it’s publicly traded and owned, is to its shareholders to increase value of the stock. It’s not altruism.

That’s scary. I find myself scared a lot.

Me too!

I’m scared about what strikes me as a moral failure in response to the refugee crisis. I’m scared about robots stealing my job. I’m scared that it doesn’t matter if robots steal my job, because we’ll soon have made the earth too hot for anyone to live. How do I get through that fear?

You keep thinking, this can’t get any worse, and then actually it does, or it gets worse in a different way. What I can say is that if you look for something where you feel as though you’re making a difference, that changes things. For me, it was to join the board of Relief International. You take a step back. I don’t know about the rest. I know one has to believe in the best, otherwise you just crawl under a rock. Come out from under the rock. It’s very bad for your complexion.

On March 15, 2014, my cousin Masud Khalif was murdered at a restaurant two blocks away from the building at the Scarborough intersection of Markham and Lawrence we both once called home. His killer later used Masud’s height, weight, and black skin as reasons he believed my cousin was a threat to him. This is how he justified killing him.

Masud was my first cousin, but he felt more like an older brother to me. We grew up together. We went to the University of Toronto together. We spent endless nights together bullshitting our way through essays only a few hours before their deadlines. We shared friends, and countless memories. I actually almost always hated referring to him as my cousin, because he was so much more than that to me. When he would threaten ex-partners of mine or give me money whenever I was broke (which was almost always), he was like my protective brother. When we spent nearly every weekend together out and about downtown, trying to forget the stresses of our studies, jobs, or home lives, he was like my friend. He was always great for a guaranteed laugh.

The last night I spent with Masud, we spoke about our futures. He told me that despite all odds, he was going to become a lawyer. He said this with a tone that was so matter-of-fact: you knew it would happen because he wanted it to happen. I always envied how bold and courageous he was, and how adamant he was about not letting anyone in this life tell him who or what he could be. There he was, a black man who didn’t let imposter syndrome dictate his destiny.

In that same conversation he also spoke very matter-of-factly about my future: I was going to be a writer, and a good one at that. I was twenty-four years old at the time, with one degree under my belt, working as a personal assistant, and confused about who I was or where I was headed. I always dreamed of being a writer but didn’t know how that could happen, and it meant everything to me that he had hope for something I had completely given up on. There I was, a black woman who let imposter syndrome dictate her destiny.

That night we ended a five-hour evening together with a grand hug. He told me why I was his favourite cousin. We exchanged some laughs and said “I love you” a few times before I watched him walk down the pathway of my house and onto the street.

I felt uneasy.

Two years later, in March of 2016, I walked up to a small podium in a York University lecture hall in Toronto with anxiety swimming through my body. I was there to give a keynote speech for the Black Futures Now conference. I had decided earlier that day that before I presented my speech I would ask everyone to take part in a breathing exercise. The room was dead silent, but the audience gave me warm smiles when I asked them to join me and breathe.

Collectively, we inhaled in for ten seconds, telling ourselves that we were “breathing in the new.” Before releasing our breath, we told ourselves that we were “getting rid of the old.” We did this twice, and then I began my speech.

I learned this breathing exercise during therapy in 2014 while I was in the process of mourning Masud. After the brutal murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, both black men shot by police officers last year, I wanted us to practice this exercise together. I believe all black folks—today and for the past five centuries—are in a state of mourning.

*

A week after Masud’s death, I leaned on the hood of my car and watched a group of men place his body into a grave. I don’t remember what I was thinking at that exact moment, nor do I remember what went through my head when I touched his dead body for the last time at a Scarborough masjid, a few blocks north of the building where we grew up.

For three months after Masud’s death, I had no real control over my thoughts or emotions. I would find myself crying at the grocery store while searching for ripe avocados because a Lorde song reminded me of that time we had dinner in my living room, arguing about what to play next. I found myself outside movie theatres frantically following tall black men, thinking they were him.

I found myself doing things to my body and health I never would have imagined doing before. I thought things I had never considered thinking before. I flew on planes a lot for work that year, and for the first time, I felt no fear each time the plane would push off the ground—because I wasn’t afraid to die. “If it happens, I’ll see him again,” I would tell myself in every moment when a healthy, normal person would feel concern for their life. But “health” is a normative term, and I did not feel “normal.”

After two months I found a therapist, and on a week-to-week basis, he taught me how to breathe again. I never felt like I was doing it right. I began writing, actively, for the first time in my life. After two months of breathing exercises, I quit my job, canceled my lease, and used my minimal savings to book a trip to Somalia. I had never been to Somalia, and didn’t know how to speak my mother’s tongue, yet I was convinced that it was a practical idea to move there. Months of depression had consumed me. I desperately needed to get away.

*

A janazah is a three-day period of mourning Muslims observe before we bury a loved one’s body. The first day of Masud’s janazah, my friends sat with me in a staircase in the building where Masud and I grew up. They were there for me—like black women always are for their kin and community—but they were also there for themselves: they too had lost a friend. One told me it would take a year of mourning before the pain would stop: one year for anniversaries, birthdays, and memories to pass. She said that by the one-year anniversary of his passing it would begin to become easier.

So I counted for 365 days.

Each day I searched through social media, calendars, text messages, and emails to remind myself of that particular date one year prior, and figure out where Masud had been. Did I hear from him that day? Did we hang out? Did I wake up to his loud steps in my downtown apartment?

I would actively take a walk down memory lane each day. I would smile or laugh at our memories together before I would spend the night crying myself to sleep.

By March 15, 2015—one year after Masud’s passing—I realized my friend was only partially right. When you are mourning, the pain doesn’t go away. It never does. But after some time, it eases: you learn how to live with it, but never fully escape from it. The only significant change I had noticed after one year of mourning was my breathing: the anxiety attacks began to decrease, and I found myself controlling them better than I was able to before.

So here I am now, three years after Masud was killed. I’ve slowly figured out how to peel myself off the ground and continue to live life. But every so often I find myself back there again. Glued to it. Because mourning never ends. You learn to wear it everywhere you go.

*

Jermaine Carby. Dionte Green. Mark Carson. Dontre Hamilton. Eric Garner. John Crawford III. Michael Brown Jr. Tanisha Anderson. Tamir Rice. Jerame Reid. Tony Robinson. Phillip White. Eric Harris. Walter Scott. Freddie Gray. Jonathan Sanders. Sandra Bland. India Kager. Andrew Loku. Alex Wettlaufer. Alton Sterling. Philando Castile.

Too many more.

When we see the faces of these men and women on our screens and their names in headlines around the world, behind each of them is a community of people—mothers, sisters, fathers, grandparents, friends, and loved ones—only beginning this process of mourning. They are experiencing a change in their breathing patterns. They will spend the next few days, weeks, months, or years learning how to breathe again.

I asked that group at York to do the same breathing exercise I have done since Masud was killed because, in the wake of these unjust slayings, I believe these families are not alone in their loss. And I don’t believe you need to know a black person who was murdered intimately in order to mourn their loss. I believe you just have to be black. And I believe that outside of “improvisation, transcendence and resilience,” the DNA of black people for the past five centuries has involved an intimate relationship with death and mourning. It’s an invasion of our collective spirits and ancestry.

During the Jim Crow era, on average, thirty-nine black people were lynched per year in America, and during the worst year of that period, that number rose to 161. In 2015 alone, 258 black people were killed by United States police officers. The threat to black existence and black life has never ended, thus black mourning hasn’t ended; and so long as the conditions remain that ensure black people will die for or because of their blackness, so too will black suffering. Hundreds of black women across the Americas, in this moment, are suffering: they are reflecting on how they birthed, raised, loved, and then buried their children. Hundreds of black women are trying their best to learn how to breathe again.

In the words of James Baldwin: “To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.”

When we as black people turn on our television sets and see a police officer chokehold a father to death for selling “loosies,” or shoot and kill a young black boy for playing with a toy gun in a park, we collectively experience a pain that the rest of society does not understand and cannot fully comprehend. They feel saddened while we mourn our humanity. We watch these visuals that are broadcasted endlessly and everywhere, constant reminders that we live in a society that believes our humanity does not matter. We carry the pain of those dehumanizing visuals and cries of “I can’t breathe” with us through our workdays and into our beds before we sleep. And the pain of every video or story of these inhumane slayings piles up. It piles up until we forget how to breathe.

These statistics do not take into account the black trans women, queer, non-binary and non-gender conforming folks who are murdered at alarming rates, whose deaths are never publicly recognized or collectively mourned, whose names rarely penetrate the public consciousness. Even the “data” aren’t available for those who demand statistics: there are no existing accurate public resources that provide the numbers of how many queer and trans black people go missing or are murdered in both Canada and the USA.

*

The reality of being a black person in the Americas is to live with a consciousness of being a black subject in a world of white power. I am so hyper-aware of perceptions of my blackness that when I consider demanding better service at a restaurant, I know that to the outside world I am embodying the “angry black woman,” so instead I choose to keep my mouth shut. I am aware when I walk into stores that I am under surveillance, that my black skin summons it, and so I police my own actions before someone else does. I am aware that my skin is enough for me to face employment and housing discrimination, just as I am aware that my black skin can lead to economic racism, higher charges of interest rates and fees. I am aware that as a black woman in Toronto, I am three times more likely to be carded by police than anyone else. I am aware that my black skin not only criminalizes me, it dehumanizes my life.

I am aware that because my black skin is enough to get me killed, people will spend more time deliberating why I deserved death than they will mourning my life.

I am hyper-aware that my blackness is a social uniform that functions to alienate me. My blackness is the object of images, language and ideologies that are pre-determined and constructed because of my social uniform. In the words of Frantz Fanon, “I am over-determined from without.” It is the fact of blackness.

*

But, for as long as black people have existed here, we have known improvisation, transcendence, and resilience. We continuously mobilize and strategize to challenge the system that works against us in efforts of finding black liberation. For as long as we have existed here, we have formulated black liberation movements: The Black Liberation Army, The Black Arts Movement, The Black Panthers, The Nova Scotia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, The Nation of Islam, and now Black Lives Matter. But we must be honest with ourselves about what black liberation has often looked like in the past and today: patriarchal, heteronormative, classist, cis-gendered, with a destructive focus on the humanization of black masculinity. We teach each other that black identity is singular, thus not inclusive. Our discussions of the dehumanization and invisibility of black life do not include the alarming realities of transphobia, homophobia, poverty, patriarchy, or mental health.

A fight for black liberation will not succeed without love, support, compassion and, most importantly, understanding and (re)learning. Our black liberation movements will never fully succeed so long as we maintain heteronormative, cis-gendered, ableist, classist, and patriarchal agendas. The validity of black life is not just about black men. We must be actively aware of our own privileges as we continue to combat the ongoing oppression against black people everywhere.

Black men must learn to actively understand how they contribute to a culture of patriarchy.

Black cis-men and cis-women must learn to actively understand how we contribute to transphobia.

Black heterosexually identified folks must learn to actively understand how we contribute to a culture of homophobia.

We must stop allowing our collective definition of blackness to be understood as singular, because it is not. There are no binaries in blackness. There is a multiplicity. There is infinity. And we must honour that. Learning to breathe again means learning to breathe together.

For as long as we continue to live under a state that actively chooses to disavow our humanity and believe that we do not matter, black death and black mourning will remain an agonizing reality. It will continue to chip away at our sanity, our livelihood, our families. This is how you slowly die here—if you are not killed first. With every new name that we learn of, every face that becomes painfully imprinted into our memories, we must remind ourselves that we matter—all while remembering how to breathe.

Portions of this essay were originally delivered in the speech at York University that is mentioned in the piece.

In the fall of 2006, Doree Shafrir started writing for the now-defunct Gawker, a media site that came to life at the dawn of online journalism—shifting standards for how stories were produced and ushering in a new age of media consumption. Shafrir, now a senior culture writer at BuzzFeed, lived in New York for almost a decade, where she “worked for startups, wrote about startups, had a lot of friends who worked for startups.”

In her debut novel, Startup, Shafrir draws on her experiences from both the online journalism industry and the startup scene in New York to illustrate the current state of tech startups and the strange symbiosis between app-developers, venture capitalists, and tech reporters. The novel, a satire, is eerily on-point in its illustration of this universe—especially when it comes to gender dynamics.

Hope Reese: Your novel illustrates the frantic pace of online journalism today. Can you talk about your own experience of this? And is there something specific to tech journalism that separates it from the media industry as a whole?

Doree Shafrir: The first time I really experienced this was when I started working for Gawker. We had quotas for how many posts we had to do a day—I think I had to do six posts a day. Some of my colleagues had to do like ten or twelve posts a day. It was a lot more aggregation at the time, but still, that’s a lot. It was just this sort of constant frantic-ness. Once you’d finished something, it was, “What are you going to post next? When is it going to go up? Are we late on this?” There was a lot of pressure to have stuff up quickly.

Is it worse in tech journalism, specifically? I mean, I don’t think it’s better. It’s something that is endemic to online journalism, certainly. One thing about tech journalism is that it is a pretty insular world, in the same way that a lot of other areas of journalism, like music journalism or political reporting, are. You know all the people in your world, and I think there’s just a lot competition within each circle.

If you had to give advice to someone entering a career in journalism, like the character in your novel, Katya, do you say, “Okay, go compete, and you have to be fast”? How do you navigate that world if you’re twenty-four years old today?

One thing that we’re seeing now is the industry is changing really fast. When I started at Gawker, the shift from print to online was still not complete. Obviously, Gawker was always just digital, but there was still this question: How long will Internet journalism be around? How much do we have to invest in it? So it wasn’t taken very seriously by a lot of companies. A lot of websites were considered second-tier, and for people graduating, there was still this idea that going into print journalism was more prestigious.

Of course, that all changed pretty quickly, and you’re seeing a similar thing now with video. There was a lot of skepticism about video. People thought it wasn’t serious, or that online video wasn’t ever going to be invested in as much as TV was. All things that remind me a lot of what people were saying about online journalism ten years ago.

Companies are laying off people who are only writers, saying that they’re going to concentrate on video. That’s something that’s been set in motion. It’s just really important for young journalists to learn as many skills as they can, whether it’s audio or video. The days when you can get away with just writing are going to be over pretty soon.

And as someone who is just a writer, I see a world where I could be writing my own demise, but that’s just reality right now.

What made you set the story in New York? What’s unique to that city’s startup scene versus Silicon Valley?

So, for one, I lived in New York for about nine years and worked for startups, wrote about startups, had a lot of friends who worked for startups. When I wasn’t working for startups, I definitely considered myself startup-adjacent, and so pretty well versed in that world.

I also thought it was a fascinating world that no one had really captured in fiction. So much of the pop culture around tech is centered on Silicon Valley, which makes sense because it is the epicenter––but Silicon Valley is also a place where tech is the only game in town. New York has this burgeoning tech scene, but there are so many other well-established industries in New York. Startups don’t quite yet have the same social capital that, say, Wall Street or fashion or even media do. So I wanted to explore that tension a little bit.

Do you watch the HBO show Silicon Valley? I’ve heard people in the tech industry say they can’t watch it because of how on-point it is. Your novel is similar—it really captures the startup scene so well.

I really enjoy Silicon Valley—I think it’s so smart and funny. But it started as a very incisive satire, and now it’s kind of hard to tell who they’re satirizing. So much of the tech world in San Francisco and Silicon Valley loves the show—they even have cameos on it. It’s like, what is the relationship between the “real world,” and the show? And who is the show targeting?

So, who is your book targeting, would you say?

My book is targeting the startup world as a whole. And, particularly, men in the startup world. It’s also targeting hypocrisy overall, whether it’s coming from a man or a woman.

People in Silicon Valley like to say that they “move fast and break things,” and I want to show how that maybe isn’t the best way to conduct yourself. And there’s this idea that what they’re doing is just for the good of humanity, which can mask some not-so-great behavior. And that this supposedly “brave new world” has nonetheless taken on some of the worst aspects of the old way of doing things.

You describe this “team spirit” workplace culture that demands coworkers engage in things like sunrise workout raves and pole dancing classes. How does this compare to what work was like when you were in your twenties?

It seems like my younger coworkers are all friends, and they’re always meeting up. There are always emails going around of like, “I need a new roomie.” I know that some of them live together, some of them date each other. It just does really seem like their personal and professional lives are just completely one.

That’s not the way that I need to spend my time. But now there are more people at BuzzFeed who are in their thirties, even in their forties—and there’s not the expectation that I need to participate in that kind of stuff. But if I were on another team where people were a lot younger, and the participation in these, let’s call them “extracurriculars,” was expected, I might feel alienated.

Do you think this is a generational thing, or does technology have an impact on it?

Tech enables it, no question. Instagram feels very aspirational to me. Tumblr is the place where you might go to be sad, but Instagram is the place where you go to show off all the great things in your life. I think that it’s definitely exaggerated by social media.

I think people do age out. A big reason the character of Sabrina in the novel feels so alienated is because she has two kids and a husband who’s not particularly helpful, so she has to be home at six o’clock every night to relieve the nanny. So not only does she have to leave work earlier than all of her colleagues, but she can’t go out with her colleagues after work. So there’s a difference in lifestyle that has made it so that she really can’t participate on this level with her younger co-workers, even if she really wanted to.

Even though in New York, like you were saying, there is this extended adolescence, eventually a lot of people do get married and do have kids, and their lifestyles do change. So I think getting older does mean that you’re probably not participating in these events as much as you used to.

In Startup, everyone is constantly using apps, like a Tinder for apartment rentals, many I’d never heard of. Did you make them up? If so, some of the ideas are brilliant!

Any that are not immediately familiar to you are ones I made up. That being said, several times, what has happened since I finished the book is I’ve seen stuff about apps that sound very similar to apps I made up. So it just kind of says to me that A, there are no original ideas and B, I wasn’t that far off in my making up of these apps.

You explore socio-economic status in the startup world. Can you talk about that?

New York is really expensive to live, and yet a lot of young people want to live there. So it can be confusing as a young person to look around and to see your friends, who you know probably don’t make more than $40,000, maybe $50,000 a year, and think, “Huh, that’s weird—they have a one bedroom apartment in Williamsburg. How do they afford that?”

There are these moments when you realize that your friend is an heiress, or has well-off parents who are paying their rent. It gives people this leg up, and they feel they’re just entitled to it, but it makes it so much harder for everyone else. If you’re paying student loans and you’re not getting help from your parents and you are making $40,000 a year, how are you living? How does that affect your quality of life? How does that affect your mental health? How does that affect the kind of jobs you can get? How do you feel when your friend whose parents who are paying their rent invite you out to dinner and they choose a really expensive restaurant because they can just put their share on a credit card, and you don’t have a credit card?

Also: you always are jealous of the people who have more than you. From the outside, Sabrina is doing fine. She and her husband own an apartment in Park Slope. She has a job, her husband has a good job. They have all the trappings of a typical upper-middle class life in New York City. But all she can think about is her very successful friend from college who has a brownstone, and gets obsessed with her friend from grad school who wrote a best-selling series of books and is also super rich. There are always going to be people who have more than you, so one thing that I finally learned when I was in New York is that it actually will bring you down and impede your own success if you are just constantly letting that stuff get to you. It can really get to you. But if you’re just always focused on other people you’re not going to work on yourself.

Same with the Katya character. Katya definitely sees herself as this scrappy outsider who went to public school, got a scholarship to NYU, lived at home. And certainly she is from a middle-class, even working class background—but she also has privilege that she doesn’t always want to acknowledge.

People are often blind to their own privilege, no matter where they land on the spectrum.

In the novel, you illustrate two workplace relationships that turn romantic or sexual. What makes this kind of thing different in the digital age?

I wanted to show how intertwined the personal and professional lives of people, especially people in their twenties, are now, and how a lot of those boundaries get blurred. And I wanted to show how there is a lot of this confusion, I think, especially in these companies that don’t have HR departments. HR is often the last department hired, so you can have a 50- or 100- even 200-person company with no HR department—and stuff’s gonna happen when there’s no one there to say, “Hey, this is not supposed to be happening.” I think that leads to a lot of confusion.

I’ve certainly witnessed enough situations where an older editor is behaving inappropriately with a younger writer, and there’s a power imbalance that, sometimes, the younger writer isn’t fully aware of, or thinks she’s in control of—and she’s really not. I wanted to explore that.

There’s a scene in the novel, in a meeting full of men, where one guy says they’re living in a “male-hostile moment.” It’s a hilarious term—did you make it up?

I did. Certainly, if men are having those conversations among themselves, I have not been privy to them—that’s kind of what I wanted to get at, that this is just a conversation amongst men, and they feel very free to say things that you and I would be horrified by, and challenge. But everyone in that room is like, “Oh yeah, totally, totally, nail her.”

You see sentiments like that expressed on Twitter or Reddit—you know, men re-conceiving themselves as victims. I wanted that to be an aspect of the story, too. How the men in this story know that Mack’s behavior reflects badly on the company, but they’re not really saying that what he did was so terrible. They’re just like, “The optics of it are bad, this is a bad moment for a white guy to be accused of sexual harassment, so you gotta kind of chill.” But the actual actions are not really condemned.

In light of recent allegations about discrimination against women at companies such as Uber and Google, the story feels especially timely.

When I started it, the two big sexual harassment in tech things that were going on were the Whitney Wolfe Tinder lawsuit and the Ellen Pao Kleiner Perkins trial regarding a gender discrimination suit she filed against her then employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. I was kind of like, well, these situations are a bit at the forefront of my mind, but there was a part of me that was like, “Hmm, this book might feel dated by the time it comes out.”

So on the one hand, it’s great to feel like the book is very of the moment and exploring new themes and issues that people are really talking about right now. On the other hand, it is really fucking depressing that this book is so of the moment. Why is this stuff still going on? This is crazy to me.

I obviously had no idea that these sexual harassment allegations at Uber or any of these other places would come out and that people would really be talking about gender discrimination and sexual harassment in check and that it would still be such a hot-button topic. But when are we going to figure this out? Come on.

My older sister Jessie and I loved to dance in the living room to Amy Grant’s 1991 hit single “Baby, Baby.” Hopping around on the salmon-colored carpet as the hot Texas sun streamed in through the bay windows, we’d coo, “Baby, baby, I’m taken with the notion, to love you with the sweetest of devotion.” We synchronized our actions. Swinging our arms like they were cradling a baby and thumping our hands over our hearts. “Baby, baby, the stars are shining over you and just like me I’m sure that they adore you.” We spun and held our hands over our heads, wiggling our fingers, like twinkling stars in the sky.

Homeschooled and raised Evangelical, we were sequestered from the world. We had no way of knowing it, but that year, every young girl was dancing to “Baby, Baby.” The song was a hit on both Christian and pop music charts, making Grant one of the first successful crossover artists. But I didn’t listen to pop radio. My siblings and I weren’t allowed to. It wasn’t considered godly. Instead, we danced alone on salmon-colored carpet, feeling like we were the only girls in the world—just us, Amy Grant and the thumping of our hands over our hearts.

“Baby, Baby” was the first hit single from Grant’s Heart in Motion album, which was released when I was just nine years old. I idolized her, crimping my stick-straight hair every Sunday to mimic her moussed up curls. Grant rose to Christian stardom in the 1980s as a girl with a guitar from Tennessee, singing simple songs about Jesus. But by the early ‘90s, she was dressing in leopard print and singing about love, and not just the kind one had for their Lord and Savior. She was both holy and wholly her own. Grasping at success, reaching for something more than what she’d been given—Amy Grant was the soundtrack to my rebellion.

*

During our morning Bible reading, I sat with my siblings at the kitchen table, our seven little faces popping up over the oak surface that was crusty with the remains of breakfast. Devotionals happened right before we began our day of homeschool. There, our mom read to us from the Bible, lingering over lessons she thought we needed. “And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you.” And: “Do not return evil for evil or insult for insult, but give a blessing instead.” (We fought a lot.)

Another common lesson was from Philippians 4:8. “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.”

There were many things not covered in this category of “excellent or praiseworthy”: the word “butt,” for example, or the covers of magazines that our mother flipped over in the checkout aisle of grocery stores, huffing to the shrugging teen clerk. “How can this be appropriate for children?” Before she hid them we saw patches of flesh, sultry lips, although other times there were soldiers without arms or legs. The Gulf War was happening, but we didn’t know—the news was not one of those “such things.”

It also applied to the books on ghosts and witches I frequently snuck out of the library and hid behind the potted plants. “These are not good things,” my mother said, whisking a Goosebumps book from under my pillow. “These are things that will let the devil play with your mind.”

Most importantly, this verse was applied to music. There was little music that met the Philippians standard held fast by the adults in our life—my parents, my Sunday school teachers and the parents of our friends. The music that was allowed was mostly classical, though there were also contemporary Christian artists such as Petra, Twila Paris and Michael W. Smith, and a few secular exceptions—The Eagles, The Beach Boys, Carole King and James Taylor. These were holdovers from my parent’s pre-Christian years. Little pieces that they couldn’t let go of.

“You don’t have to sing the name of Jesus to be a holy song,” my mom told us as we danced, polishing mirrors and dusting lamps, to “Little Deuce Coup” on cleaning day. “But you do have to sing about good things.”

My mom was a musician. She gave music lessons to other Evangelical kids from our church. As we sat in a circle around my mom and her guitar, we learned “I’ll Fly Away,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “This Land Is Your Land.” The parents of the other children must have been blissfully unaware of Woody Guthrie’s socialist agenda, but my mom knew. I know she knew. I asked her about it years later and she laughed and winked. “Socialism? It was just a song about America, just a lovely song.”

And so, even after the leopard outfits, after Grant’s divorce and her complete embrace of pop music, after she was banned from Christian book stores and all the other God-fearing homes around us, we still listened to her music. My mother knew about the controversy, but the music remained, slipping through the dissonance between the world she wanted to create and the world that was.

*

Six years before Heart in Motion, when she was only twenty-five, Amy Grant released Lead Me On, an aggressively mainstream album. The album was her first crossover success, due in part to the spunky rhythms and the soft pop melodies. The cover of the album shows Grant with big hair, jamming out in jeans, a modest blouse and a cougar print jacket. It’s so aggressively normal, the pictures could be photos from your ‘80s-themed nostalgia party.

It was a deviation from her earlier albums, with their quiet songs about Christ and praises to the Lord. By contrast, the lyrics in Lead Me On rarely mention the name of God. For many Evangelicals, this fact alone was akin to Peter denying the Lord all three times. Add in her sultry eyes and a shoulder peeking out from an ‘80s-styled sweatshirt, and the album caused ripples across the jean-jumper, Bible thumper crowd.

That year, in Rolling Stone, Grant recounted nude bathing on the beach and confessed that she wanted to be more than just a Christian singer. “I mean, everyone’s got something to say,” she said, “but I feel like I have something really good to say. It makes me want a lot of people to hear.” And it was this, her simple desire to be heard, that made them ultimately kick her out. “How could she be a Christian?” Adults and my older sister’s friends would say in church. And what I heard was, “You can’t be holy if you are a woman who hungers for more.”

For a pop star in the 1980s, this was all tame. Madonna was burning crosses and singing about being “like a virgin.” Pat Benatar was calling love a battlefield, and it’s safe to assume that her idea of a battle was not a fight to keep herself pure for marriage. And of course, Annie Lennox was strutting about, looking like a man (grab your pearls). For the rest of the world, Amy Grant was the patriarchy—her soft pop tunes were what other women rebelled against. But for a girl home-schooled and raised in a conservative Evangelical community, Amy Grant might as well have been Andrea Dworkin—radical, aberrant, and frustratingly idiosyncratic.

*

After we had polished off the post-church lunch of brisket and rolls and the kids had gone off to play kickball, while the mothers cleaned up the dishes, I often lingered to hear the fathers talk. They discussed theology, what was happening a few miles away in Waco, which Clinton was the anti-Christ and the dangers of Amy Grant.

“She’s compromised her Christian witness,” our pastor said, wiping brisket grease from his lips. “She is dressing immodestly and she is putting fame before Christ.”

I was insulted and immediately felt defensive, but I knew better than to say anything. The last time I had asked this pastor a question about the nature of God, he laughed, patted my head and said that the job of a woman was to “just believe and submit.”

I understood in that moment that by wanting to defend Grant, I had failed, but that perhaps I wanted to fail. I wanted to be good, but I also wanted to be heard. I wanted more than to just believe and submit. When you aren’t allowed to speak, you try on the words of others. For so many years, Amy Grant’s songs were my voice.

From then on, when I found myself sent to my room for mouthing off, for questioning, for reading Goosebumps, I’d shove my face in my pillow and cry, dramatically sobbing out the words to “Father’s Eyes.”

I may not be every mother’s dream for her little girl.

Grant goes on to sing that despite her failings, she has the eyes of her Father, God—eyes that find the good in things, eyes that find the source of help, eyes for love, compassion. It’s a sentimental song. But that sentiment gave me the hope that perhaps I wasn’t all bad. Perhaps, I too could be redeemable.

*

That summer I was nine, my older sister had her friend Esther over to play. Esther’s parents were followers of Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles, now made famous by the Duggars. Esther always wore skirts and her hair was long. She’d once told me that my short bob was a sin. When my sister went to put on “Heart in Motion” so we could teach her our choreography, Esther left the room crying. Our mom came back with Esther and explained that her parents didn’t want her listening to Amy Grant. Amy Grant was a sinner. She was compromising herself for her ambition and she was too “worldly.”

I remember rolling my eyes at Esther and her tears. “Does everything have to say the word God to have God in it?” I said. Esther cried harder and my mom called Esther’s mom and had her picked up.

Esther’s parents and our pastor weren’t the only ones criticizing Amy Grant’s worldly appearance. In Christian circles, “worldly” is shorthand for being of the world. In Romans 12:2 the apostle Paul encourages Christians not to “conform to the patterns of this world, but to be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Many Christians interpret this invective as a call to eschew popular culture. When Cabbage Patch dolls were popular, many of my friends weren’t allowed to have them. Same with Teddy Ruxpin and listening to New Kids on the Block. Engaging in popular culture, we were told, was like shaking hands with someone who has a cold—just by being near them, you risk exposure. And for the faithful, it’s not your immune system at risk, it’s your mortal soul.

Only I wonder, thinking of us little girls dancing between the sunbeams on the salmon-colored carpet, if our bodies aren’t more complicated than just a simple input-output system dueling between good and bad. There on the carpet I see us—our bodies both awkward and full of grace. We’d leap and then fall, little bruises we never even noticed forming and healing all on their own. Tiny little scars, rug burns and scrapes, we’d wash in the bath that night and wonder how we got them. We were always bumping into things—bruises and freckles colliding on our bodies, evidence of days lost in sunshine and forts built out of sheets. Hours spent spinning and dancing to music we barely even understood. Those seven layers of epidermis holding in the entire universe of ourselves as we danced, thumped and fell in a little room that was both our whole world and only the very beginning of it all. So how can it be that just one thing corrupts or one thing saves? Perhaps our wounds and our healing are the result of many things seen and unseen, the ordinary miracles of falling and leaping up happening without us even noticing. Music at that moment was just an accessory of our joy. We couldn’t understand the backlash.

Grant didn’t either. In an interview with People, Grant noted dismissively, “Christians can be sexy. What I’m doing is a good thing.” In response to the backlash over her flirting with a handsome man in her “Baby, Baby” video, Grant told Woman’s Day, “The whole thing just seemed very boring to me. Besides, shooting the video was a blast. It is fun to flirt if you’re a happily-married woman.”

The video is very boring. In it, Grant wears modest clothes: a pair of shorts that fall mid-thigh, a dress that looks like it was plucked from a catalog for Fundamentalist Mormons. She laughs and does the chicken dance with a man. At one point they lie on the floor and roll a ball to one another. If that is a metaphor for something awful, even now as an adult, I’m not picking up on it.

Grant’s 1998 song “What About the Love” feels like a partial response to the criticism. She sings of a meeting a preacher who tells her to deny sin, pray for forgiveness and tithe. In response, she wonders if that is the answer, “just the letter of the law?” The song is fast-paced and earnestly plaintive. “What about the love?” she asks in the chorus, a line that is repeated over and over.

*

That same year, in response to the uproar over Amy Grant’s worldliness, the Dove Awards—the Grammys for the born-again—redefined eligibility by defining what it meant to be Christian music. The songs had to be based on the scripture, Christian testimony, clearly influenced by a Christian world view and/or an expression of praise to God.

Amy Grant’s best songs didn’t qualify by those standards—when it comes to Christians, even songs about heterosexual and monogamous relationships aren’t holy enough. I imagine stern-looking men sitting in a room, trying to decide how many times a song has to mention Jesus before it is holy enough. Five times? Six? What if they only mention God and not Jesus? Does that mean they are not born again? Does that make them Catholics? What if they’re Unitarian? What then? They open the Bible, parsing out scripture to find the answers they hope they are hidden in there. They use the Old Testament laws of sacrament like a secret code for translating the foreign world they find themselves in.

What was behind the desire to take a girl with an unruly mop of curly hair and a jubilant enthusiasm for music and faith and make her into public enemy number one? What makes any of us into enemies? In my more petulant moments I believe only that it was because she was the bearer of a vagina and dared to be human. But in my better moments, I know that it is the grasping fear of someone holding onto the pieces of the things they understand, afraid to have to let them go and have nothing left, only that deep blackness that faith tells us to face but the laws of religion seek to control.

I know this because I too hold onto my tiny pieces of knowledge, constructing small unstable worlds until they are toppled. What fragile worlds we create that they can be destroyed by smiling girls and their curly hair. How powerful those girls must be to destroy our worlds. Both things are true. The worlds we create crack, bleed, and contradict, and in those fissures, somehow women live. But dissonance is not an easy place to live and so, in 1988, the rules were changed. Old lines reinforced. Territory marked. This is what it means to sing about God, they said, and quantified it for us all.

1998 was also the year Grant got a divorce. For many Christians that was it. In their eyes, Amy Grant was not a Christian anymore and she never could be. A girl in my youth group, whose parents let her listen to Amy Grant, told us that perhaps Grant’s husband had been abusing her. There is little evidence to support that accusation. But I understand where her parents were coming from. That was, after all, the only “good Christian” reason for divorce. Maybe they wanted to exonerate her. Maybe they wanted to protect us. But few Christians in our circle tried to defend her.

There was speculation that she had been having an affair for years with Vince Gill, the man who would become her second husband. This rumor still circulates. Often-cited evidence for this theory are the lyrics of the Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant song, “Faithless Heart,” which talks about temptation and adultery. I often wonder why Michael W. Smith never faced this same scrutiny. Why is this song not evidence of an affair he had? The answer is obvious—he was a man, his job was a worship leader.

Like Grant, Smith also tried to become a crossover artist, releasing “Go West, Young Man” and working with Jim Brickman on “I Will Be Here for You.” But he wasn’t as successful. Maybe that’s it: Amy Grant was a beautiful woman, she was successful, she didn’t hide her ambition, and she didn’t apologize for making a modest dress look sexy. She did more just believe and submit.

*

Like Grant’s, my revolutions were as equally bland as they were radical. I went to a college that was Lutheran, not Baptist. I watched the Vagina Monologues, I skipped school to play tennis and read The Communist Manifesto. I smoked cigars when I was eighteen, I said the word “fuck” a lot. I know, I know. I kissed a boy I barely knew at a concert. But most revolutions happen in inches. They might appear small but they are no less fundamental. Amy Grant became the vehicle through which I was able to see myself as something more than the lines of orthodoxy that had been drawn around me. Grant was a woman with ambition, true, but she was also a girl who just wanted to sing about her faith and her God, and somehow wound up inside a revolution. I felt that way too. I was just a girl who wanted to read books, and somehow that forced me into a fight I hadn’t bargained for. What we both learned was that finding joy always seems to be a political act for the women pursuing it.

Today, both Grant and I have a home, we have husbands and children. It is so conventional and boring. Sometimes, as a married woman, I flirt with waiters. And yet, last year, I tried to reach out to some of my friends who were in the same homeschool group as me back in the early ‘90s. Almost all of my outreach went unanswered. Finally, a girl responded. It was Esther, the girl whose parents refused to let her listen to Amy Grant at our house.

“I’m concerned,” she wrote, “about your life and the choices you’ve made. They seem so far from God.” I didn’t really know how to respond, so I didn’t. What could she have meant? The blue streaks in my hair? The profanities I dropped on the internet? Sharing links that advocated for universal health care? Or maybe the fact that I wear skinny jeans and lipstick and drink whiskey and still say “fuck” a lot. I’m sure there is a reason. But I am also sure that, again, I’ve stumbled upon the lines of someone’s orthodoxy. The pieces of the known that they are holding onto, afraid of letting go. I know because these things are my little convictions—these profanities my dogma, my hair a tenet of my belief. And life is full of colliding creed.

I am not the first girl who has lost and then found herself in the lyrics of a song. And I won’t be the last. Everywhere, even now, little girls are dancing on living room rugs, twirling and thumping their chests to music. Who knows what those songs mean to them? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. Maybe the words will help them synthesize the disparate pieces of the world that they hold in their wiggling, dancing fingers. Maybe each chest thump will kick-start a small revolution in their hearts.

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Mouthful is a monthly column about the author’s relationship with food, ten years into recovery from anorexia and bulimia.

I’ve been thinking about my failures, especially the ways I’ve failed other people. A year before my novel Binary Star came out, I began interviewing people for a nonfiction book about eating disorders. The protagonist of Binary Star is an anorexic college student and I had drawn heavily from my own history with anorexia to write her. I felt in my writing I was finally able to translate into language what I had been carrying around as a shapeless trauma. But once I was finished, once I’d satisfied myself with a psychological portrayal of the disease, I began to crave a more scholarly understanding.

In retrospect, what I truly wanted was some authority outside of myself to validate what had happened to me. Having relived the trauma of anorexia in my writing, I wanted to verifiably attribute it to some cause other than an inborn deficiency—point to a reason that was larger than me. Give my pain context and meaning.

I framed my project as a search for the biological and cultural roots of disordered eating because it seemed to lend the endeavor credibility. I began to aggregate research online and in books. Then I sought out interviewees.

Over the next several months, I interviewed probably fifteen people who were struggling or had struggled with food. Some spoke on condition of anonymity, others wanted to take credit for their stories. Unsure at first whether the project would in fact be a book as I had planned—perhaps it would be a gallery show?—and feeling that, because of the subject matter, I should pay close attention to body language, I recorded the interviews with a Canon 7-D camera mounted on a tripod. I shot video. Most of the people I interviewed were friends, or friends of friends, but one of them wasn’t: M. She responded to a call I placed on Craigslist.

*

M. lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment near Hunter College. She was twenty-two and dreamt of studying marriage and family counseling, but was waiting until she was sufficiently along in her recovery from self-harm and binge eating disorder to apply for grad school. She began sneaking food when she was ten or eleven years old as a way to cope with her parents’ arguing. By then, she had already been told she had high cholesterol like her father and needed to change her diet. But her reliance on food escalated when her father killed himself that year. When I asked her why she turned to food during that time as opposed to some other outlet, she told me, “It’s just the one thing that I had.”

For a few reasons, I was uncomfortable talking to M. I had scheduled the interview in the evening and then arrived late, which I feared made me look unprofessional. On top of that, my camera quickly ran out of memory. I made several attempts to fix it, and then called my husband, who told me that I had erased the previous interview files incorrectly after exporting them, and that they were still taking up space on my memory card. There was nothing I could do, so I recorded the remainder of the interview with my audio recorder.

But also, I was uncomfortable because M. was the first person I had interviewed about overeating; all of the others before her had been anorexic, bulimic, or crash dieters. I felt that those interviews had gone well, even if I hadn’t decided yet how I was going to use them. I’d instinctively known how to steer the conversations. I recognized the stories I was hearing in my own.

On the surface, anorexia is the opposite of binge eating. M. told me about the difficulty she’d had trying to replace ice cream with smoothies. That going to the supermarket was always a disaster, whether or not she went in with a plan to buy more nutritious food or a plan to buy junk. She told me that, in middle school, she’d hide in her locker the lunches her mom had packed her and eat junk food instead—and that, after a period of doing this, all of her school guidance counselors, along with her mother, had had to force her to clean out her locker because it was infested with bugs.

At a glance, M.’s behavior was everything I would never do as an anorexic person. Alongside pity, a feeling of revulsion came from the part of my brain that reacts emotionally to food, that dissociates from painful feelings via hunger and is destabilized when the hunger is satiated and emotions come flooding back. It’s cunning and automatic; I’m not always aware that it’s been activated.

The curiosity I’d felt in past interviews with individuals who’d struggled with restrictive eating disorders seemed grotesque, even cruel, in the context of M.’s story. Though her coping mechanisms were motivated by many of the same objectives as mine—at one point, she referred to her binge eating as a “slow suicide”—the questions I’d asked in previous interviews about goal weights and advertising and amenorrhea seemed unrelated to what she had been through. I had based my research on my personal theories about the origins of disordered eating, which pertained to my own experience, and though I performed objectivity, in actuality it was impossible. I needed something specific from M. I needed her to confirm the private truth I thought I’d discovered writing Binary Star. But her truth didn’t sound like my truth. Over the hour I spent interviewing her, I was often at a loss for what to say.

*

Near the end of our conversation, I asked M. if she had experienced any health consequences as a result of her eating disorder. “No,” she told me. “But I live in fear of them. I freak out every time my heart starts racing, that I’m having a heart attack, or my head starts hurting, that I’m having a stroke. Because I know that if I keep going like this, it’s a definite possibility.”

I then asked her if she minded me asking how much she weighed.

“Yeah,” she said. “I guess.”

I paused, noticing that her tone was slightly defensive. This was not a question I’d asked other interviewees. “You don’t have to say,” I said. “How do you feel, I guess, about where you are today as compared to where you have been? Heavier or lighter?”

“I’m heavier than I have been,” she said.

“Is this the heaviest you’ve ever been?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“OK. Is there anything else that you wanted to convey?”

“No.”

“Thank you so much,” I said.

That was the end of our conversation. I have no excuse for why I asked these questions at the end. I offer this story as an example of earning someone’s trust and then breaking it because I failed to acknowledge my own limitations. I had assumed the role of an expert but in fact would have needed to spend years researching in order to write the book I wanted to write. I gave M. the impression that it was safe to open up to me, and my last questions for her were exploitative and dehumanizing—I could see it in her face; she shut down. Her story had thrown me into a state of mind where old survival techniques took over: my anorexia needed a number to explain what it was hearing, to make it safe again. I was weak and unprepared. I fell back on bad patterns.

I felt overwhelming guilt as she walked me to the door. I searched for anything to say that could undo the damage I had done, but there was nothing. I didn’t contact M. again. I abandoned the project soon after.

*

Recently, I went looking for these interview files in my old hard drive. I do this every so often: revisit failed projects to see if there are any coals still glowing in them. I searched through the contents of two former computers but could only find one interview file: M.’s. I searched through my email and was able to excavate a few more.

Then I remembered that my husband had offered to store the interviews. The camera was his and he knew how to operate it better than I could, so he offloaded the files. He had more space on his hard drives than I had on mine, so he kept them for me. I texted him asking if he could send them to me but he hasn’t responded. My husband and I broke up three months ago. He now lives in California. We’re not speaking.

We aren’t speaking because, in inexcusable ways, we have failed each other and ourselves. We’ve broken each other’s trust.

We aren’t legally divorced, yet, because the paperwork is overwhelming to me and I can’t afford a lawyer. I’m also busy. The relationship is painful to think about, and yet lately it’s all I can think about. I want the split to be over and done with but the process is too much for me to handle on my own right now.

I started seeing a counselor two weeks ago. For a day or two after seeing her, I find myself in a dissociated yet emotionally fragile state, given to weeping and drinking heavily. I’m familiarizing myself with the symptoms of PTSD. I can’t focus on a book or my writing, so I’ve fallen behind in my work. Today, I completely missed one appointment. I can’t sleep.

In my everyday life, in small ways, I’m failing.

I can’t speak for my husband, but I can say that I gave up too much of myself in our marriage. I know this because, now that I’m alone in the world for the first time—I haven’t been single for more than a few weeks since I was in high school—I’m finding it difficult to articulate what I want and need. Certain aspects of who I am are suddenly in flux. I’m finding that I haven’t known myself like I thought I did. I’m facing my shortcomings, and taking steps to change the less admirable parts of my personality. It’s daunting. It’s exciting.

*

In the midst of this, I started seeing someone new. She’s beautiful, kind, intelligent, and funny. We have great sex. We go on marathon dates to museums and the movies, eat oysters, drink Scotch, give each other much-needed massages, cook healthy meals, lie in bed for hours, make banana bread, and make coffee first thing in the morning after staying over. Last night, we parted ways, at least for now.

We agree it’s for the best. I recognize my limitations, she recognizes hers. I need a lot of space and I’m enjoying being alone. I’m having a difficult time trusting new people. I’m interested in seeing people other than her. I’m not interested in traditional forms of commitment. This doesn’t align with what she wants and needs, and that’s okay. Letting go for now, disappointing as it is, is the most loving thing we can do for each other.

*

As a culture, we’re addicted to love stories that end at the zenith: the moment of the most intense connection, when pleasure hormones flood the brain and life is a constant orgasm. Love is offered up as a solution to every problem. We’ll never be alone. True love will never hurt us. Inside love, we’re safe, because love can save us. It can even save the world.

Marriage is presumed to be forever. After we married, my husband and I drove to Malibu and sealed our vows inside a bottle, and tossed them out to sea. In our minds, they were promises made like offerings to the universe. Our marriage was a sacred bond between us, so pure, the purest form of love we’d ever felt. We thought it would last for eternity.

In these stories, we never see what happens after the zenith, how we sustain this verve. We look to our cultural standards: love is a single-family home, love is having eyes only for each other, weathering every storm together, leaning on each other whenever we need support, raising a healthy family, never losing interest, finding each other perpetually fascinating. In true love, two people are everything, always, only for each other. If they can’t be, it isn’t love.

In our stories, every moment before this sustained zenith diminishes in importance if it isn’t leading to the zenith. Eternal love is the goal. If you don’t find it, then you’ve failed. If you’re not even looking for it, then you’re missing out on life. Relationships that aren’t pointed toward the zenith aren’t significant. We shouldn’t take them as seriously.

I want to propose an alternative story in which we can find love anywhere we want to find it, in any form. Right now in my life, I’m letting go of the zenith. The love I have in my life now is beautiful even if it doesn’t look the way I thought it would. Love is never going to act the way I tell it to act, anyway. That doesn’t make me a failure.

I can let go of patterns that hurt me. I can let go of unrealistic standards. Now that I recognize these standards, I can choose to set my own. I can make new patterns that are healthy for me. I can be honest about how I feel. I can ask for what I need. I can let go when I need to let go. I will still be here. Love will still be here.

*

Before asking the questions that I regret, I asked M. about her earlier statement that she was waiting until she was sufficiently into her recovery to apply for graduate school. She had told me about the day when she hit rock bottom. She was struggling with self-harm at the time, along with her binge eating. “I’d gotten to a point where I ended up self-harming really badly,” she told me. “Not badly enough that I needed to go to the hospital, but enough that I felt like I’d reached a new limit that I never wanted to return to.”

She emailed her therapist and told her that she was ready to try something new. Since then, she’d been taking antidepressants and working on identifying her emotions, and learning new ways to cope with them. I wanted to know whether she thought there would be a point when she could say, “Okay, now I’m recovered.” “I don’t think there’s going to be an ‘a-ha!’ moment,” she said, “but I think that there’s going to be a point where you have more good days than bad. And where you can get up in the morning and hopefully you’re not thinking about food, or you can say, oh I’m thinking about this but I’m not going to anymore, I’m going to move on.

“I want to be able to say that I can fully handle this,” she said, “and feel confident in my abilities to cope effectively. That’s my goal.”

Collage by Sarah Gerard.

In 2012, an eccentric Alabamian named John B. McLemore approached Brian Reed and This American Life with two stories about his hometown. One was about a Sheriff’s deputy who routinely used his position to commit sexual assault. When this story turned out to be true—the deputy was tried and would eventually be convicted—it piqued Reed’s interest, and he began to investigate the other one: McLemore believed that a man had beaten another man to death and that he had used his family connections to avoid the consequences. A small-town establishment closing ranks around the son of a rich man whose business—K3 Lumber—was literally named for a white supremacist secret society… or at least this was what McLemore suspected. Crime, cover-up, conspiracy, corruption, it had all the elements of southern noir, and McLemore believed there was a big picture to be found: “Something’s happened,” he tells Reed. “Something has absolutely happened in this town. There’s just too much little crap for something not to have happened.”

McLemore had a few pieces of the puzzle—he knew some of the “little crap”—but he deferred to Reed’s expertise. This, he said, was Reed’s “stock in trade. … We need people like you to come down to this pathetic little Baptist shit-town and blow it off the map.”

Reed did not blow “this little Baptist shit-town off the map,” as it turned out; if anything, he put Bibb County’s Woodstock, Alabama, on the map. He was fascinated by John, by John’s friend and apparent heir Tyler Goodson, and by “Shittown,” McLemore’s favorite epithet for his home. If McLemore wanted an outsider, an NPR journalist who could bring Yankee disdain for the south to bear, what he got was a fascinated ethnographer whose voyage into Trump’s America never found its heart of darkness. John B. wanted condemnation. But in the seven-hour epic podcast that he eventually made, S-Town, Reed gave him empathy.

*

Flannery O’Connor once wrote that “anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” A northerner can make two different errors of proportion in misapprehending the rural south, in other words: they can caricature what is normal and they can normalize what is outrageous. In S-Town, Reed does not make the first mistake. Despite McLemore’s best efforts, he refuses to find Shittown grotesque. He attempts to demonstrate to John and to his listeners that the inhabitants of Bibb County are just people like anywhere else, and that, from their perspective, it makes perfect sense to do the variety of things they do.

So when, for example, Tyler Goodson describes and defends his intention to cut off the fingers of a man he suspected had stolen some valuable property from him, Reed is shocked and horrified, but won’t pass judgment. “I’ve tried to understand his justification for some of the choices he makes,” Reed says, opting not to solve the mystery of why Tyler thinks it’s okay to maim someone who has stolen something from him. And when Tyler asks if Reed thinks he’s a bad person—explaining that he wants to know what people think of him—Reed again refuses judgment. “No, man, I see you as a complicated normal person,” he says. “I disagree with some of your decisions. But you’ve also had a very different life experience than I’ve had.”

The way that Reed says “man” in that moment—the “man” that one man says to another man to remind them both that they are men, together—speaks to the social bond they’ve built, as a subject and an informant have also become friends. Tyler is testing that bond, asking Reed to stand in for “what people think” and pass judgment on him, inviting him to choose between saying what he really thinks—that such violence is horrific and indefensible—and in re-affirming that they are buddies, and that no explanation is necessary. Reed takes the latter path. He does not call Tyler innocent, but neither does he say that it is vile to cut off a man’s fingers because you think he stole something from you. Put differently: Reed holds Tyler to lower standards than the basic decency of not dismembering other people. Tyler, you see, has had “a very different life experience.”

Withholding judgment seems like a key part of how Reed gets informants to open up. This is the approach he takes atThis American Life, where, as he’s explained, “Every kind of interview is trying to understand people’s experience, no matter where they are.” This gets him access to a variety of different people with different agendas; he convinces them all that he is listening, sympathetically, to them.“If you listen to them a long time,” he says, “and not cut them off, that builds trust, and, just in general, try not to be shitty to people and try to be up-front about what you’re doing, and be honest.”

*

I want to suggest another interpretation, one that Reed’s closeness to Tyler does not allow him to explore: Sometimes judgment is warranted. We know Tyler runs with a rough crowd, but Reed presents that “roughness” in terms of colorful eccentricities. When Reed interviews the crew that gathers at Black Sheep Ink, we see them in the same gentle and charitable light in which they cast themselves: they are cast out, maligned and despised, social outcasts. And yet the story of the snippers in the shed tells us that Tyler can be violent and dangerous. What if he doesn’t see it as a decision he needs to justify, and doesn’t worry all that much about the ethics of crime and punishment? Reed portrays him as haunted by fears that he’ll turn out to be like his father, and perhaps this is true. But it also might be that Tyler knows how to tell a story in which he is the victim of great oppression, and that he’s very, very good at telling that story—and it might also be that he knows exactly the kind of story Reed wants to hear. It might be that he was testing Reed to see if he would buy that story, and if he would fall into the second trap that Flannery O’Connor described, of looking at something legitimately disturbing and refusing to call it what it is: grotesque.

It might be that he succeeded in utterly controlling the story that Brian Reed told. It might be that the price Reed paid for access, the exchange he made for his subject’s trust, was becoming “trustworthy,” becoming someone that would tell the story the way someone like Tyler Goodson would tell it.

*

Here is the context in which I heard these voices.

I grew up around Confederate flags and rednecks, in a part of the country where getting in the car, now, means taking a tour of Donald Trump yard-signs. I wasn’t born there and I didn’t stay there, but I spent my primary and secondary schooling in a place where being beaten up by a redneck was a latent structural fact of life. When I first listened to this podcast, I was absorbed and transported by its familiarity: the craft is magnificent and its construction sublime. It’s also incredibly real. Every voice sparked memories; John might seem like a one-of-a-kind, but hearing him instantly reminded me of any number of gifted hillbilly eccentrics I’ve known, red-state liberals whose local roots run deep and murky.

And then a friend sent me a link to Tyler Goodson’s Facebook page, and the spell was broken. I looked at Tyler, and instead of hearing his voice, I saw someone who looked terribly familiar. I saw someone who, when I was eighteen, I would have feared. I saw a redneck, and I remember being afraid of violent rednecks who called me things like “bitch boy.”

I think that John did too. When he tells the third-hand story of Dylan Nichols’ beating, he imbues it with half-spoken implications about how masculinity is policed, and of the kind of violence that a boy who is any kind of queer learns to be afraid of. I’m not gay, but it was through fear that I learned to act straight, and I remember what happened to kids whose masculinity didn’t measure up.

I moved away when I was eighteen, but because John remained, he must have gained a perspective on the young rednecks of Shittown that I was never able to acquire. Through all his anger and contempt, he saw them as redeemable. John’s insight into Tyler’s background and upbringing gave him the ability to see past his flaws, and to work to help him become a better person. John might not have been religious, but there’s a Christianity to that which I cannot help but admire.

Empathy will help you understand how people see themselves and tell their story. But it takes a little skepticism and a little fear to track when that story becomes self-serving bullshit. 

But just as “S-Town” is a version of “Shittown” that you can say on the air, the Tyler Goodson we hear is an airbrushed version of the real thing. At no point does Brian Reed mention the Confederate flag tattoo on Tyler Goodson’s shoulder; you have to go to Tyler Goodson’s Facebook page to see it, along with pictures of his children sitting on a Confederate flag blanket and an image of the Confederate flag with the caption “It’s a Goodson thing, you wouldn’t understand.” Perhaps Reed decided that the Confederate flag is “heritage, not hate”; perhaps he realized that his listeners would be less likely to see Tyler as an unfairly maligned outcast if they saw him wearing a symbol of race hate on his body. Perhaps he thinks we wouldn’t understand this “Goodson Thing,” and so he protects us from it.

The Confederate flag is complicated. It’s hate, but it is, also, heritage: I grew up with people who would insist that it had nothing to do with racism, and I understand why an uneducated white person would cling to that story of himself and his place in the world. Self-respect is precious, and there are precious few ways to get it in a world that doesn’t value you; until you understand how un-valued a rural, uneducated redneck is—how much contempt they feel pouring onto them every time they open their mouth among their betters—you won’t understand that side of what “heritage” means.

But “it’s complicated” works both ways. If it’s heritage, it is, also, inescapably, hate. That’s the bargain. And heritage-as-hate is dangerous and violent. Heritage-as-hate is why Donald Trump is president, and why his attorney general is a vicious racist from Alabama named Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, as authentic a son of the soil as any other. It’s why the fear of what might be done to me when I was in school—in the playground, in the hallway, and after school—has become a latent structural fact of American life today (particularly to non-white people, but not only to them, either).

“Empathy for the Trump voter” might be an important part of any account of the world we are living in, but it’s not the whole story. Empathy will help you understand how such people see themselves and tell their story. But it takes a little skepticism and a little fear to track when that story becomes self-serving bullshit. When those for whom heritage is hate are in charge, you learn that whiteness is complicated, but it’s not that complicated. I don’t think Brian Reed ever learned that. He has described being “a white, straight dude, so I have a bit of luxury of getting into places like that and not having to change all that much…I have the luxury of not having to do that.” But there are all sorts of lines he was careful not to cross; he had to hide his wife’s race and his own Jewish ancestry. He had to withhold his judgment, and remain silent. He had the “luxury” of keeping silent, of keeping his Facebook profile private.

Not only journalists keep silent. For all its faults, the most interesting and powerful part of Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels is the moment when, after months of carousing with bikers, Thompson tells a man who is beating his wife that he’s a “punk” for doing so, and, in response, the biker viciously attacked him. It’s the climax of the book because it reveals the limit to the access he acquired: He threatened the man’s masculinity, and he was brutally beaten for doing so. Thompson’s field work ended here. When the beatings begin, you learn just how much protection your “empathy” will provide. You learn that while the bully can tell a story about their own humanity, the person on the receiving end doesn’t have that luxury.

I find myself remembering where I’m from, these days, after many years of putting it behind me. I find myself remembering what I had known when I was growing up: that whiteness will always find someone to violate, and that nothing is more violent than an insecure masculinity.

Brian Reed might have learned something if he had been honest with his interlocutors, if he had told them he was Jewish and that his wife is a black woman. He might have gotten a glimpse of the violence that makes places like that what they are.

*

Reed was working on his podcast for years—years in which few anticipated a President Donald Trump, or the kind of license he would give to violent ethno-nationalism. I’m sure he never expected the resonance that his story would suddenly acquire, a moment in which empathy with Trump voters has become a journalistic staple, and in which books like Hillbilly Elegy and Strangers in their Own Land have become the keys to understanding red-state America. It nevertheless joins that emerging bibliography: because S-Town was released in a moment when the violent impunity of whiteness is in full bloom, when many white people are learning that their whiteness will not protect them, and when it has never been more important to understand the violence of a wounded masculinity, it cannot help having something to say about it. And yet it tries. It tries very hard not to.

Reed has nothing to say about whiteness. Everyone in the podcast is white, but with a stereotypically Connecticut politeness, Reed avoids bringing it up. He doesn’t mention, for example, that both the Sheriff’s deputy and the woman he was prosecuted for raping are black. And maybe that’s the right choice; maybe it isn’t pertinent. But it certainly ispertinent that everyone in the podcast is white, and Reed doesn’t mention that either. He doesn’t have to mention it because whiteness is the default, which is extremely pertinent. And the most pertinent fact of all is that this podcast could only have been made by a white man, which means that the perspective it takes of its subjects—the care and empathy it lavishes on them—produces an audience, in turn, as white-by-default as its subjects. As Maaza Mengiste observed, this is a podcast for white people.

When a southerner insists that a Confederate flag is a symbol of heritage, not hate, they are insisting that the flag means what they say it means: while you might take it as the symbol of the confederacy, the KKK, lynching, Jim Crow, and segregation—and while you might see a threat against your life (if you happen not to be white)—they will insist that it means none of these things, that it’s simply an expression of pride in being Southern. Perhaps this is what Tyler would have said that his tattoos mean; perhaps he is not a vicious bigot like his partner (“Bubba”) in the Black Sheep Ink tattoo parlor, and perhaps he’s just a good old boy who loves the place he comes from and honors his heritage.

If you’d like to extend the argument to the swastika as an expression of German heritage—not hate—you are welcome to do so. In the real world, we know what the Confederate flag means, and what it means to tattoo one on your white skin. No one knows this better than people running a tattoo shop in Alabama. There is an obvious reason why Bubba, as Reed notes, “displays a rather fluent knowledge of various white supremacy groups,” after all: white supremacy has a detailed iconography, and if you’re going to stay in business, a smart tattoo artist serving that clientele will learn to tell a Celtic cross from an Iron Cross from the crossed pair of pistons from the crossed Stars and Bars of the Confederate battle flag and the swastika. There are differences; of course there are differences. But there are also similarities.

Reed doesn’t ask Tyler what his tattoos mean—or doesn’t share his answers with his audience—and leaves the meaning that tattooing has for his subjects as unexplored as he does their sense of race. We learn that McLemore hated tattoos but had himself tattooed, and Reed implies that John B.’s whip-lash tattoos were, in some obscure sense, an engagement with the southern legacy of racial slavery and atrocity. But we certainly never learn what meanings the rest of this tattooed group of black sheep have elected to inscribe onto their skin. We never learn what whiteness means to them, or to the people they might have hurt.

I wonder if the man whose fingers Tyler proposed to cut off was black. Probably not, right? Brian Reed would have surely mentioned it, and he doesn’t say anything about the man’s race. But because he doesn’t say anything about anybody’s race, I wonder if he asked. Not that it matters. Racism is the tool and the opportunity for those whose heritage is hate. If they don’t find that one, they’ll find another one. There’s always another one.

*

By the end of the podcast, you realize how wrong John B. was when he suggested that digging up dirt was Brian Reed’s stock-in-trade. For all its magnificent intricacy and beauty, the show he produced is a work of creative non-fiction, not public-interest journalism. The difference matters. S-Town is literary, explicitly patterned after novels, and utterly successful at what it does—as an exploration and imagination of character, it is engrossing and deeply moving. But it doesn’t pass muster as journalism; it is, at best, journalism-adjacent.

It is, in this sense, a lot like another This American Life production: Mike Daisey’s exploration of abuses at the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China—which Brian Reed produced, and which is also, at best, journalism-adjacent. When it was revealed that Daisey’s theater piece was composed out of significant fabrications, Daisey insisted that nothing was wrong, by clarifying that “What I do is not journalism”: “it uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story,” he explained, “and I believe it does so with integrity.”

Brian Reed’s podcast might also tell its story “with integrity.” But what does that mean? When Reed chose to put an off-the-record conversation with a dead person on the record—rationalizing that it was okay because that person was dead and didn’t believe in the afterlife—he made a choice that a lot of journalists might not have. Maybe he made that choice because he’s not a journalist. And maybe, like Mike Daisey, he takes dramatic license with the facts in service of the real story. With This American Life, these distinctions can get blurry, which is why Daisey’s one-man-show created such a controversy. On the stage, we don’t expect everything to be fact-checked; on the radio, in a time slot somewhere between All Things Considered and Morning Edition, we might expect exactly that.

On This American Life’s “About” page, we find this clarification: “We think of the show as journalism,” it reads, though the journalism they do also “tends to use a lot of the techniques of fiction,” and “the fiction we have on the show functions like journalism.”

Does that clarify things? Or does it muddy them beyond recognition?

*

For all the magnificent, clock-like precision and construction of its storytelling, it’s the questions it leaves unanswered that make S-Town what it is.

I wonder, for example, what John B. McLemore’s relationship was with the police. In the first episode, in a scene that Reed almost plays for laughs, we hear McLemore complaining that the “praetorian class” are in his yard, at 1 a.m., attempting to search his house without a warrant. It’s a hilarious turn of phrase to use for redneck cops, and it serves to sketch out John B.’s characteristic mode of ironic locution. But why were the police in his yard at one in the morning, and what were they trying to find? Did Reed ever learn? Did he ask? When he spoke to the county police, and when they told him that they had investigated Kaybrum Burt’s beating of someone named “Dylan”—which did happen, even if it didn’t result in the boy’s death, as John B. initially alleged—did he simply accept their explanations that no one wanted to press charges, and so there was nothing to investigate? Did he ever speak to the Dylan who was beaten? Did he find out what really happened?

How quick was he to accept the story he wanted to tell, and how hard did he work to disprove it?

McLemore was many things, after all, but one of them was a paranoid. He believed in crazy, paranoid things like global warming and police corruption; as he once quoted William S. Burroughs, a paranoid is someone who “knows a little of what’s going on,” And John knew more than a little. But Brian Reed isn’t interested in John’s theories. “If I was making it for him, it would be three chapters about peak oil,” he said of the podcast. “But I’m not making it for him. I’m making it about him.”

Brian Reed is definitely not a paranoid. When John B. McLemore proposed that Reed write a journalistic expose of a small-town conspiracy of silence between police, powerful business interests, and respectable citizens, Reed debunked that theory by interviewing the supposed killer and the killer’s father, scanning the local press, and having a conversation with the police. This puts his mind to rest: on the basis of their say-so, he is convinced that nothing is amiss. And yet it takes only a small amount of paranoia to suggest that maybe the cops were lying to him—the fact that “nobody wanted to press charges” is a good, official way to close a case they don’t want to pursue. It takes only a small amount of paranoia to suggest that Kendall Burt’s statement that he would never try to cover up his son’s crimes is something less than an iron-clad piece of evidence. I am paranoid enough to think that Kaybrum Burt’s own account of how he “beat the piss” out of another boy is almost certainly not the only side of that story. I would have liked to know what the kid he beat up thinks about it.

Stories may be like clocks, but lives are like time: they vary depending on how you look at them, and can be measured in any number of wildly different ways, each uniquely true and utterly irreconcilable.

It may or may not be relevant to note that the hour-long segment of This American Life that Brian Reed produced on policing in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—what he characterizes in S-Town as a segment on “police abuses”—is entitled Cops See It Differently. When I listened to it, it sounded a lot like embedded journalism. It’s a segment in which cops believe what they are saying, and in which the liars turn out to be black people hiding a gun in a crib; it is, as its title suggests, a nuanced exploration of how things look from the police side of the blue line. It’s a story told with integrity, about how the man who re-introduced Stop-and-Frisk to Milwaukee is a liberal reformer. In response to Black Lives Matter, it is a work of narrative empathy with police.

It makes me think about another choice that Reed made: when John B. McLemore presented him with two stories, Reed chose to pursue the one that he could disprove, rather than the one that was true. But if a journalist working in the public interest might investigate police corruption and violent abuse of power, it’s not surprising that an entertainer would look for the kind of story that would make us feel good; it’s not surprising that he was most interested in a colorful eccentric southerner, and in the grotesque southern noir that turns out, in the end, not to be anything of the sort.

*

The “something” that John suspected of happening may not, in the end, have happened that time, or in that place, or that way. But John was right, in a larger sense. Something definitely happened. It’s happening all the time. Sometimes it makes the news when an openly queer teenager is murdered—one county north of Bibb County—but sometimes, we can be sure, it doesn’t. When the sheriff investigating the murder of Nicholas Hawkins told the press that it wasn’t a hate crime, it turns out that this knowledge is based on the fact that “we haven’t discussed that with anybody yet, about the motive.” The sheriff seemed in no hurry to ask those kinds of questions.

A lot of knowledge is produced in just this way, by not asking questions. And for all its careful exploration of John B. McLemore’s psyche, there are so many questions that S-Town doesn’t ask. It will eventually transpire that the town clerk who apparently spoke to John B. just before he killed himself made a point not to call the people he had asked her to call; it will transpire that John B.’s cousin Rita thinks Tyler killed John B., somehow, and that his horologist friends suspect foul play as well. They all have good reasons to be suspicious: everyone knew that John B. had a tremendous amount of un-banked gold, possibly millions of dollars, and that gold was never found. We know that John B. had a deep grievance against the patriarch of the KKK Lumber—how did Rita come to sell his house to that very person? It seems clear that when Tyler was stealing from John B.’s property, the police were explicitly helping him do it—what sort of criminal conspiracy was this?

When we hear that Tyler has four children by three different women, and that he loves his children, and struggles to support them, we hear nothing from the women themselves about whether this is true.

More worrying, considering the focus on the disposition of John B.’s property: Reed doesn’t give us the voice of its actual owner, John B’s mother, Mary Grace. This is a remarkable, consequential omission. The entire story revolves around her, in a concrete way, but we never hear her side of it. We are told by Rita that she is doing much better, having been removed from the care of John B., but we do not hear confirmation of that fact. We do not know what happened to her at all.

*

Clocks are built: clocks have a purpose, and when they break, they can be repaired. A life is not so simple, and neither is a town. Every story hides three more, and each of those stories cover over a dozen others. Stories may be like clocks, but lives are like time: they vary depending on how you look at them, and can be measured in any number of wildly different ways, each uniquely true and utterly irreconcilable. A clock takes the vast infinity of time and makes it into a simple continuum of numbers. Like a clock, a story is a machine for excluding everything that isn’t part of it.

Paranoia is knowing a little bit about that process of exclusion, about the way that stories are composed by leaving things out. And just as it’s rational to observe that climate change is real—however paranoid it may make you seem to rant and rave about how the world is ending and no one is doing anything—it’s equally reasonable to anticipate that the police will lie to a reporter digging around on a cold case, or that a young man might be less than forthcoming when asked by a stranger about the time he bragged about killing another boy. It might be paranoid to suspect that a local paper wouldn’t include any mention of whatever it is that happened, but it’s far from unreasonable. It’s not paranoid to suggest that someone who co-owns a tattoo parlor with an avowed white supremacist—in Bibb County, Alabama—might also be a white supremacist. Tyler might not have maimed that thief with a pair of garden snippers that time, but will the next suspected thief be as lucky? Was the previous one?

A paranoid assumes that everyone is lying to them until proven otherwise, and perhaps even then; to John, everyone was a little bit full of shit. But Reed sees every glass as half-full—he is credulous, empathetic, and gentle to his sources. When Reed listens to Tyler and then Rita describe the days immediately following John B.’s death, he observes, with amazement, that everything they say matches up—that the facts are all in alignment, even if the stories they ultimately tell are different. This demonstrates to him the dangers of being overly suspicious: “Going to Bibb County taught me something about people—at least, the people of Bibb County—and that is that people’s minds will go to paranoid, conspiratorial places very easily,” he says. “I was surprised at how quickly very reasonable people would jump to be suspicious of others.”

*

S-Town isn’t fiction—we can probably assume that the facts, as we are given them, are “accurate.” But mere accuracy doesn’t make it journalism: the private details of private lives have no clear public interest, and Brian Reed never seriously argues that they do. It’s creative non-fiction, then, a category whose very name is composed out of negations: not fiction, but not non-fiction, either; true, but created. And so the fact that he never finds anything—that nothing happened—is what he finds at the end of his investigation, the discovery that the very opposite of something happened. He finds that something didn’t happen, in a half-dozen different ways, and that it didn’t happen for everyone in a variety of fascinating ways: the murder, the gold, and the conspiracy of silence… He finds none of it, only the story of how he set out to look. And then out of this series of negations, he wraps it all up, neatly, so that we can all go home, entertained.

By the end of the podcast, you come to realize that the monologue that opened it—a monologue about clocks and how they are reconstructed—is really about Brian Reed’s own process, about reconstructing a life. “Sometimes entire portions of the original clockwork are missing,” he says, “but you can’t know for sure because there are rarely diagrams of what the clock is supposed to look like. A clock that old doesn’t come with a manual.” John B. McLemore is the clock, and the testimony Reed has gathered, over long years of work, are the “witness marks” a clock-restorer uses to guide their way, “impressions and outlines and discolorations, left inside the clock, of pieces that might’ve once been there.”

“Fixing an old clock can be maddening,” Reed says. “You’re constantly wondering if you’ve just spent hours going down a path that will likely take you nowhere, and all you’ve got are these vague witness marks which might not even mean what you think they mean. So, at every moment along the way you have to decide if you’re wasting your time or not.”

Reed did not waste his time; S-Town was a smash from the start, a career-making triumph. But in their original function, clocks are not made for entertainment. Clocks are tools that make social life possible. A clock makes time, and organizes it, and time is, ultimately, a social medium: we use it to coordinate with others and to communicate; a sense of shared time helps us meet each other and find each other and arrange the stories that we tell about each other—it allows us to take our turns speaking and listening, and it allows us to put things into their proper perspective. Without clocks—or without some sense of shared time, however constructed—society, as we know it, would not be possible.

John lived in his own time zone, literally: as Reed mentions, John B. McLemore’s house did not observe daylight saving time, so depending on the season, the time at his house might be an hour different than the surrounding area. It’s a good reflection of his relation to his world, his insistent eccentricity reflected in his own, personal, zone of time. It’s a good joke, a playful irony, even a self-consciously Faulknerian expression of being southern, a quiet little rebellion against unification under the guise of turning back the clock. It’s also totally ridiculous, which John surely understood: since all time is social, the idea of having your own time zone is absurd, only meaningful in the irony of its meaninglessness.

Moreover, for all his scrupulous attention to reconstructing the original function of a clock, the irony of clock restoration is that John didn’t repair clocks for their original function. His clocks were repaired to be old, to be antiques: the point of “restoring” them was not simply to make them work—that’s easy enough to do—but to make them work exactly as they once did. That’s why John hand-ground a gathering pallet from scratch. “They aren’t trying to simply make the clock work again,” Reed says of the fraternity of horologists. “Their goal is to preserve and reconstruct the original craftsmanship as much as possible.” Recovering and replicating the inspiration of the original clockmaker makes them valuable enough to sell, but it’s the sale that matters.

After all, clock restoration serves no useful function in a world where we all have clocks on our phones (the same phones we might use to listen to a podcast). In a world where networked clocks are everywhere, an antique clock is so big, heavy, and fragile that it isn’t useful in that sense. Instead, an antique clock’s eccentricity becomes valuable because of how odd it is, how particular, and how much work goes into restoring it. When people pay for a restored antique, they are paying for an incredibly laborious lack of useful value: so much work went into making them work again, but because that work is totally superfluous and unnecessary, it is thus, perversely, worth paying for.

If an old clock is valuable because of the perfectly recovered eccentricity of its original intention, the same could be said about John B. McLemore’s own perverse life, and for that matter, this podcast. So much work went into making it, but what, after everything, is this podcast actually for?

When John B. McLemore heard the earliest draft of Reed’s program, the story of the murder of that didn’t happen, his reaction was disappointment: “I can’t believe how much you’ve worked on this son of a bitch and at the same time,” he sighed, “my god.” Reed wanted him to be relieved, to be happy about the work, and is audibly upset that he isn’t. Perhaps John B. was in a bad mood, even a depressive episode; perhaps that was why he wasn’t sufficiently appreciative. Perhaps his original fit of enthusiasm for activist journalism had long passed—it had, after all, been years since he originally contacted Reed—and he had a different perspective on the story Brian Reed was telling. When Reed observes that “I am not saving the world over here,” John’s retort that “You are definitely not saving the world!” is delivered with a peculiar, bitter intensity, the laugh of someone who once thought it was possible, perhaps, but no longer does. What’s the point of all that work if it can’t save the world?

John B. isn’t cruel, though: “I think you’ve done pretty goddamned good,” he says, finally. And he’s absolutely right—one can only admire how well Brian Reed reconstructed his clock. But what is the point of it? What does it do?

I am writing this and you are reading it because we are sharing a moment: we have all listened to this podcast, the timepiece that Brian Reed built to bring us together. But what do we do with this unity? Across the seven hours of Reed’s production, we are told a story in which we all can understand each other, talk to each other, and hear each other: we can unite in admiration for John B., for the genius that was born to Mary Grace, for his voice, and for the power of storytelling. We can hear his voice and be united in our appreciation for his existence. Is this what we need now? Does it tell us our time? Does it bring us together? Does it help us understand what it means to have Donald Trump as president, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions as the most powerful cop in the land? Or is it simply a nostalgic exercise in anachronism, like a perfectly restored antique? Is it something we value because it does something, or because it feels old and authentic?

I don’t know. In the end, all it offers is questions.

On June 1, 1967, Satyajit Ray landed in Hollywood. He had travelled there on receiving the news that Columbia Pictures was willing to support his latest project, The Alien. The Alien was based on a story Ray had written and illustrated for a children’s magazine some years before, in which a small extraterrestrial creature, with identifiably human traits, ends up in a forest in rural Bengal and finds a friend. The script had been prepared in February, just four months ago, after a man named Mike Wilson—an American living in Sri Lanka at the time—had written to Ray, expressing his interest in co-producing such a film. Ray had no reason, then, to decline. Wilson had written to him again, this time from Hollywood, telling him that Columbia had agreed to back the film. Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen were both eager to play the American engineer in the script; Saul Bass was overseeing the special effects. Earlier, in April of that year, over lunch with Ray and Wilson in Paris, Peter Sellers had seemed open to playing the Indian businessman. Now Sellers was in Los Angeles, shooting The Party. He was keen to meet Ray again.

All of this was strange to Ray—theatrically bizarre. He reached Hollywood, as he wrote later, “with the hum of the machinery in my ears.” He had become used to certain modesties in the profession: reasonable production costs, decent returns, standing ovations in European film festivals, and courteous criticism. During production, he preferred to rehearse on finished sets and edit the rushes as they were filmed: seldom did he shoot anything in excess. To be picked up, then, from the airport in a Lincoln convertible, checked into a cottage in the ritzy Chateau Marmont, and taken later to a gathering in a mansion that had once been owned by Greta Garbo and was now frequented by Rita Hayworth, William Wyler, Jennifer Jones—Ray found Hollywood rather perplexing. But Wilson was at hand, shadowing him everywhere, eager to drive him to these meetings and parties. “Don’t worry, Maestro,” he told Ray. “Columbia has made an advance against expenses. You can’t afford anything but the best, you know, you made the Apu Trilogy!”

Ray did not see a cent of that advance, nor did he met Brando or McQueen. Peter Sellers, he soon learned, was happy impersonating Indians and Frenchmen in blockbuster franchises, where the humour, if any, was of the toilet kind and the point was to convey a set of cultural incongruities. But what rankled Ray most was the discovery that the script of The Alien was no longer under his name. Duplicate copies, on a desk in his Chateau Marmont cottage, bore an unexpected credit: “Copyright: Mike Wilson and Satyajit Ray.” Beyond the one or two suggestions he had made to the dialogue of the American engineer, Ray did not recall Wilson contributing in any significant way. When asked about the credits, however, Wilson was not worried. “Two heads are better than one, Maestro.”

Columbia disagreed. It emerged that the studio was interested so long as Wilson could be persuaded to sign away his rights. Ray left Los Angeles without making any progress. But it was in London, later in October, that he understood what Wilson’s expectations were from the project. In Ray’s telling, Wilson is almost a stand-in for the archetypal Hollywood studio head—sly, and predictably paranoid:

On my way to the airport Mike had commissioned a Rolls with a built-in cocktail cabinet for the journey. A sheaf of papers was slapped down on my knee. “If you would just sign here, Maestro.”

I said: “I’m sorry. I can’t even read what I’m supposed to sign.”

Mike zipped out a pocket torch and flashed it on the top page of the bunch.

“It’s just to say you and I are partners.”

“I can’t sign anything in a car, Mike,” I said. “Not even in a Rolls Royce. Send the papers over to me in Calcutta.”

The papers never arrived, according to Ray. The Alien remained unmade.

*

Even though Wilson, a maverick, appears more responsible for The Alien’s demise than any studio or star system, it is unlikely that Ray would have done well in Hollywood. His career, until then, had been marked by instances in which institutions were successively sidestepped; never had he compromised his vision, nor had there been a case of blunt confrontation. The impediments at every stage—the fear of being stymied by the carelessness and the lacklustre equipment and the general contempt for cinema as an art that, he wrote, made all serious Indian filmmakers vulnerable to heart disease—Ray had negotiated these problems quietly with persistence and imagination: he had managed to not become a renegade or a stooge.

At twenty-one, Ray had dropped out of Shantiniketan, the idyllic university Rabindranath Tagore had set up in Bengal’s countryside. Returning to Calcutta he had not hesitated, despite being a student of painting, to join an advertising agency as a junior visualiser. He worked there for thirteen years. In 1952, he borrowed money to begin shooting Pather Panchali, the first film in the Apu trilogy. The idea was to film some footage to get producers interested. Ray, and the crew he had gathered for the project, were by and large cinema enthusiasts with scarcely any experience in the business. They would learn while on the job; and it would take more than two years to procure enough funds to complete the film. And even after, the first public screening of Pather Panchali was held not in Calcutta, or Bombay—epicentres, respectively, of Bengali and Hindi movies—nor, indeed, in Hollywood, but in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, as part of an exhibition of Indian textiles and ornaments. Along with his editor, Ray had scrambled to meet the Museum’s deadline and consequently the audience in New York that evening sat through a black-and-white Bengali picture for two hours without any subtitles. Ray was not present at his first international premiere.

Quite apart from his history with institutions, there was also the question of how films were made and packaged in Hollywood—what Ray might have meant by the “hum of the machinery in my ears.” Where Ray wrote his own screenplays, preferred to operate the camera as often as possible, composed his own music, designed publicity posters and fonts, the studios of the West Coast were known for the scale of their operations and compartmentalised efficiency, so that by the time a film went to the floors its appeal for different audiences would have been sorted out, and everyone in the cast and crew—from the director to the actors to the set workers and sound technicians, all protected by their respective unions—everyone worked in fixed roles to advance that appeal. What has worked once will work again, the Hollywood credo went; prior success was desirable because it could be endlessly replicated. Hollywood, like every longstanding establishment, had a house style guide.

In so far as Ray’s films had a style, it was one of profound synthesis, where script, sound, image and technique come together to achieve a self-possessed density. He believed that cinema was unique because it was capable of “absorbing and alchemizing the influence of inferior arts.” A Ray film is immediately recognisable from its stills, despite being based often on a Bengali short story or novel. His method was so refined, from Pather Panchali onwards, that his appeal was crudely attributed to the strength of his images. Pigeons dispersing from a roof at the exact instant that Harihar, Apu’s father, is breathing his last; the opening sequence of Charulata (The Lonely Wife) in which a bored Charu is shown flitting from window to window alone in the afternoon, tracking the movements of random people in the street: sure, many of his early triumphs may seem visual. But they linger precisely because in these moments the other aspects too are functioning at their best. It is the accompanying sound of the flute, after all, that makes Harihar’s death scene so redolent of a line spoken by Vladimir in Waiting for Godot: “The air is full of our cries.” And it is the camera swooping down on Charu’s hands and face, while simultaneously situating her alone in every single room—the camerawork conveys her restlessness so perfectly that the voices from the street outside seem like looping vibrations in her head.

*

This synthesis was instinctive, fuelled as much by the evenings he had spent watching the latest American releases during wartime in Calcutta as by the years in Shantiniketan, which he later credited with instilling in him “an awareness of our tradition.” His attachment to western classical music was strong, having been exposed to Beethoven and Mozart as a teenager. At the same time, his talent for Bengali and English calligraphy, his work as a designer, illustrator, and writer of detective stories—all of that he seemed to have inherited from his father. East and West: the twin myths had cast lasting shadows on his mind. But there was also a third myth, not inextricable perhaps from the other two, for the period of Satyajit Ray’s trials as a filmmaker happened to overlap with the early years of India’s nationhood. When Ray and his crew were making the rounds of producers’ offices in Calcutta, showing the parts of Pather Panchali they had shot on their own, Jawaharlal Nehru—the first prime minister of India—and his cabinet were resettling the eight million refugees left homeless by the bloody partition of the subcontinent, or debating, with other elected representatives, the shape of the new republic. Nehru, like Ray, had grown up with the glories and contradictions of both the East and the West: born in Allahabad, a pivotal town in Hindu mythology, the future prime minister was educated in Harrow and Cambridge. Together with Gandhi, he had been at the vanguard of the long non-violent campaign for self-rule, and when the British finally left in 1947, Nehru was chosen to be at the helm. Independence had meant division: Pakistan was formed, on the western and eastern parts of British India, as a separate homeland for Muslims; more than 500 scattered territories across the subcontinent were controlled by monarchs who were free now, at least theoretically, to branch out on their own. Yet Nehru envisioned a united, democratic country, where the rights of an individual were progressive and paramount; which would not align itself to either of the Cold War power blocs; and where every religion, caste, and class would be respected and treated equally. Ray would often remark that while shooting he had the whole film in his head at all times—“the whole sweep of the film.” Nehru, in those first overwhelming days of freedom, appeared to have the whole sweep of the nation in his head.

To the extent that independent India was a film under production, Nehru was the veritable auteur—and, as with any auteur on set, his idealism in the face of odds must have proved hard to resist. Ray, in his Lake Temple Road apartment in Calcutta, was far away from Nehru and the other leaders in New Delhi, but perhaps he too had subconsciously imbibed the idea that things would work out well in the end. When we last see Apu, he is bearded, lugging his estranged little son on his shoulders, and grinning through his teeth. The son rests his chin lovingly on his father’s hair; the camera, capturing the moment from below, makes it seem as if the child is the crown on the father’s head. What warrants this happiness, one wonders? Through the three films we have seen Apu lose his sister, his father, his mother, his wife, all in an untimely manner. Who is to say that the son won’t die early as well, or that he will grow up with his father by his side? Or think of the final scene in Mahanagar (The Big City). Husband and wife, both unemployed now, have arrived at a mutual understanding for once, and are seen crossing a busy road together while, above them, streetlamps and office windows flicker after sundown.

Many of Ray’s early films end hopefully, even in their ambivalence. Charulata, for instance, doesn’t conclude so much as come to a standstill with a series of photographs: Charu’s half-lit face; her husband’s half-lit face; their hands not quite touching, but reaching out hesitantly. But given the loss of trust in their relationship, would the hands have been extended at all? Ray seems naïve in this light, despite his superior sensibility. Perhaps he thought he could work for a while in Hollywood and return unchanged.

*

The film he made first after returning from Los Angeles was a children’s musical. It wasn’t until 1969 that he released another film for mature audiences. Aranyer Din Ratri (Days and Nights in the Forest) follows four Calcutta men on a holiday away from the city. The men are under the impression that by travelling to a tribal hamlet they have escaped from the constraints of human civilisation. All ties have been severed, they assume; and by refusing to shave, burning a newspaper, drinking local liquor, and howling like Tarzan on their afternoon treks, they convince themselves they have become “hippies” at last. But urbanity is ultimately a way of being in the world, and the four of them, even by their silly standards, are hopeless as hippies. They offer cash at the simplest of provocations, and are always looking to be a little more comfortable. The moment one of them sees two city women—“saree and slacks”—he rushes to shave. The two women are the Tripathis; they own a farmhouse not far from where the men are boarding. Though also from Calcutta, they seem to move in this new environment with the composure it demands. It is the women’s self-awareness, the willingness to reckon with their own deeper feelings and desires, which embarrasses the four men. They realise, possibly for the first time in their lives, how others may view them; they cannot escape anymore from their inadequacies.

Two scenes are especially memorable. One afternoon, the men and the Tripathi women get together in a sort of impromptu picnic. They settle down on bedsheets under a tree and, after some chitchat and snacks, decide to play a memory game. The game itself is innocuous—each player gets to add the name of a famous person of his or her choice after recalling, in sequence, the names already said—but Ray portrays it with the intensity of a poker session in progress. Often, the camera will stare at a player from a second player’s shoulders; or it will swivel from face to face as the choices are being recalled, like a referee looking for signs of foul play. The names that they choose—Tagore, Karl Marx, Helen of Troy—reveal not only their individual personalities, or the preferences of cosmopolitan Calcutta in those years, but also clarify many of their earlier private conversations. In the background, we hear the low rustling of leaves, the occasional murmur of insects from the forest. It is almost as if the audience is also being lulled to forget.

In a later scene, Ashim, the winner of the memory game, is walking with Rini, the younger of the Tripathi women. They stop near the window of a cabin. The cabin belongs to the watchman of Ashim’s guesthouse. All through the film the four men have put the watchman at considerable risk. From staying illegally in the guesthouse, to coaxing him to prepare meals for them despite his wife’s illness, to bribing him each time he so much as demurred—the watchman’s future has never been a qualm. Now Ashim, following Rini’s lead, peeps inside the cabin. In the dim light they can see some naked children wailing. The wife is in bed, breathing heavily, and fanning herself with one hand: it is clear that her fever has increased. Rini and Ashim move on, unable to watch any longer. She asks him if he knew about the extent of the wife’s sickness. “Somewhat,” Ashim says. “That is why I have avoided coming this way.” But before he can even complete his response, she nudges his shoulder in excitement. “Look there!” she says, pointing to the forest. Two deer are prancing merrily in the bushes. Ashim and Rini have distracted themselves again. They need not worry anymore about the watchman’s sick wife. The children, too, can be forgotten.

That people in cities have become too used to distractions is skillfully conveyed in Aranyer Din Ratri. So accustomed are Ashim and his friends to their metropolitan diversions that, outside of Calcutta, they remind one of the alien from Ray’s unmade film. The film verges on this apprehension, and yet it is the apprehension that tinges it now with a retroactive innocence: it seems not as much the thing as the foreboding of things to come. The innocence would evaporate in the films Ray made next. Pratidwandi (The Adversary), Seemabaddha (The Company Limited), Jan Aranya (The Middleman)—all three stories take place in Calcutta. But it is not the Calcutta where Apu, despite struggling to make rent, spent all his time reading and playing the flute; or where, just over ten years ago, Ray had quit advertising to become a full-time filmmaker. The city now belonged to those who had pared down their ambitions—indeed, to those who were prepared to forget them. The male protagonists in all three films come to see apathy as the only remaining mode of survival. Years of escaping responsibilities have made them inept, blinded them to more imaginative options. Their convictions ring hollow to potential employers: a job is now the outcome of competitive grit, predicated on the ability to compromise. There is no space in the city for idlers and daydreamers, for those who are both impoverished and unwilling to work. The Calcutta Trilogy—as these three films were called—questioned the open-minded stance of The Apu Trilogy. Ray was growing aware of the pitfalls of synthesis: that it is dangerous to live always in your head.

*

Columbia Pictures did not forget about The Alien. From time to time an executive would write to Ray, or appear at his door, imploring him to urge Wilson to pull out. Peter Sellers pulled out, in July 1968. He told Ray that his role did not seem “complete.” Ray expected Columbia to withdraw as well, but they remained enthusiastic so long as Wilson wasn’t involved. This meant Ray couldn’t really move on. In a letter that year to Arthur C. Clarke, a mutual friend of his and Wilson’s, Ray appears to be both confessing and asking for help. The visit to Hollywood, Ray wrote, “was the beginning of a period of profound uneasiness…For one thing I was too deeply disturbed, and for another—I was in a strange sort of way fascinated by the sinister turn of events and waited to see which way and how far it would go.”

Such a fascination might not have been wholly inappropriate. Clarke replied that Wilson had shaved his head and become a monk: he was somewhere in the forests of south India, meditating. But other events around Ray were also drifting course. Nehru had died in 1964, and in less than two years, his daughter Indira Gandhi was prime minister: democracy could now accommodate bloodlines. There were food shortages and popular movements of unrest in many states. Wars with China and Pakistan had thinned resources. Closer to Calcutta, in the district of Naxalbari, a group of peasants had taken up arms to overthrow the feudal ownership of lands and forests. Naxalism, as the insurrection came to be called, spread rapidly; and soon factory workers in Calcutta were agitating for better wages and rights. The city, once second only to London in the British Empire, was now paralysed by riots and clashes. Shops began closing early in the afternoon; streets were quiet in the evenings, and policemen entered homes and colleges to arrest and kill radicals. Conditions only worsened when East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971, and refugees, escaping bloodshed in their hometowns, trickled in from across the border. Ray would later say that he contemplated leaving Calcutta during this period—especially after his son, Sandip, was mobbed and threatened with a knife. But he stayed on.

Siddhartha, the central character in Pratidwandi, seems to be waiting to see how much more desperate his situation can get. Having dropped out of medical college after his father’s death, he wanders about the city looking for employment. He senses a pushback at every bend: inside a public bus where standing passengers refuse to move, so that he is forced to travel on the footboard; outside a job interview where, for a single opening, too many candidates will show up; even from a well-to-do friend who brazenly steals change from a Red Cross donation jar, and calls Siddhartha a “thinker,” not a “doer.” His younger brother is preparing to join the insurgency. His sister must fend off her boss’s suspicious wife. All the older diversions have been exhausted. Bombs go off inside a cinema hall in the middle of the afternoon; while Siddhartha’s veiled resentment of modern women masks a fear of sex in the most expected of ways. He copes by regressing into his childhood frequently, or by recalling an old college professor pontificating on the female anatomy. That Siddhartha will have to leave Calcutta is evident from the first fifteen minutes of the film. We keep watching to see when.

The job interview in the opening sequence is a tour de force. Ray brings to the moment a marvellous sense of compression. We recognise Siddhartha as someone too sincere and lacking in tact: asked to pick the “most outstanding and significant” event of the previous decade, he chooses the Vietnam War. But we can also tell the interviewers are incompetent in their own way, alert not as much to the potential of a résumé as to the potential red flags. As soon as they wonder how the Vietnam War could have been more important than the landing on the moon, we know that, whatever Siddhartha’s reasons, they already consider him a “communist.”

Where Siddhartha would have found himself agreeing with the conscientious objectors of his generation in the US, Shyamalendu, in The Company Limited, would not have bothered much with Vietnam—or, for that matter, Naxalbari. He is, as a British reviewer pointed out, what Siddhartha might have become if he had impressed his interviewers: a successful corporate executive. He lives with his wife in a lavish apartment furnished by his firm. Their son, though only seven, is away in a boarding school ten months of the year. Shyamalendu has one good reason for each of his choices: why he must incite a labour strike in a distant factory; why his child cannot go to a school in the city; why his parents, despite being in Calcutta, cannot stay with him and his wife. The reason is, of course, his job, his position in the company. He has become his work.

The film portrays this seclusion by narrowing the frame throughout. We seldom see Calcutta, except as a backdrop to Shyamalendu’s meetings and lunches. While travelling he looks not sideways at the streets, but at the insignia to the front of his company car. Though he enjoys exclusive access to clubs, cabarets and race courses in the city, he visits them mostly to hobnob with people from work. Only once does the camera depart from his perspective, panning across the empty living room after he and his wife have left for dinner. We see the furniture all spic and span, the books prettily displayed in shelves. A wind is blowing in through the open window, and yet it upsets nothing but the curtains. The cushions and sheets are impeccably arranged; every nook is well-lit and organised. The couple seem to live not in a home, but in an ad for Shyamalendu’s firm.

But it is in the third film, Jan Aranya, that Ray makes his sharpest statement. The protagonist, Somnath, is a synthesis of Shyamalendu and Siddhartha, a thinker and doer in equal parts. Somnath does not leave Calcutta when faced with the prospect of unemployment after college. He becomes a broker. Everything—“from a pin to an elephant”—is up for sale in a crumbling, corrupt society, and everyone—father, lover, teacher, friend—is implicated in the rot. The costs of staying on prove morally steep.

Around the time Jan Aranya was released in 1975, Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties and imprisoned thousands of opposition leaders across the country, declaring a state of internal emergency. Newspapers were told to submit every article for prior approval. Men were picked up routinely from their homes and given forced vasectomies. Indira’s India was far from the nation Nehru had imagined at independence; it was the opposite of synthesis. The dreamy Apu had no recourse now but to admit defeat like Siddhartha or turn self-serving like Shyamalendu—or, like Somnath, deliver his best friend’s sister to a client for sex. Like Ray, they had realised there was nowhere else to go. The endings of the films hinted as much. Pratidwandi concludes with Siddhartha in a shabby hotel away from Calcutta, having accepted a medical sales job in a small town, Shyamalendu is last seen seated in his living room, under a ceiling fan manufactured by his firm. They will languish in their jobs, Ray suggests, getting by in a narrow sense, unlikely ever to escape.

*

The Alien was finally abandoned after Ray watched two films by Steven Spielberg—E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. E.T., especially, seemed very familiar. There was the overall friendliness of the creature, its naïve curiosity about life on earth; there was also the fact that the film began as a project for Columbia Pictures, before being passed on to other studios. The size of the alien, and many of its special attributes, appeared to have a precedent in Ray’s screenplay. Until his death Ray would insist that E.T.“would not have been possible without my script of The Alien being available throughout America in mimeographed copies,” though he never took the matter any further. Spielberg, on the other hand, felt he was too young to be influenced. “Tell Satyajit,” he apparently told Arthur C. Clarke, “I was a kid in high school when his script was circulating in Hollywood.” But that isn’t exactly a denial, as Andrew Robinson suggests in his biography, Satyajit Ray: The Inner Eye. It “hardly resolves the doubts,” Robinson writes, “especially as Spielberg was already an adult and getting started in movies in the late 1960s.”

Such doubts, however, distract us from what is most significant about The Alien. It is the closest Ray would come to accommodating a global audience for his work. His films were, at best, regional successes in India; and all the acclaim in Venice and Cannes seldom showed at the box office. Yet, to Ray, it seemed natural to be in Calcutta and continue making films in Bengali. Anything else would have made his method inorganic:

The moment you’re on set the three-legged instrument takes charge. Problems come thick and fast. Where to place the camera? High or low? Near or far? On the dolly or on the ground? … Get too close to the action and the emotion of the scene spills over; get too far back and the thing becomes cold and remote.

This is Ray describing the first day’s shooting of Pather Panchali. “Near or far?” he asks—not “Calcutta or Hollywood?” One is a question of popularity; the other, of process. Ray was, from the beginning, more committed to the process.

One night, Scaachi Koul lost patience with her Twitter trolls and began lobbing lines from Good Will Hunting at them in response to their tweets, to see if they’d notice. Surprisingly—and yet also not—they failed to. With her first book, One Day We’ll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter (out today in the U.S.), Koul nails hardballs into the abyss, one essay at a time. Excepting a few passages, there’s little mention of “them apples.” Instead, the collection traces the (sometimes literal) waxing patterns of her life: from growing up in a mostly white suburb of Calgary, to visiting family in India with her infant niece, known tenderly as Raisin, to reorienting herself after the ruinous actions of a friend.

Koul is the former managing editor of Hazlitt and currently a Culture Writer at BuzzFeed, where she writes perceptive and hilarious essays on the likes of summer camp for adults and the Rock. She is unabashed in discussing how sexism and rape culture pervade our environments, and the corrosive properties of racism and white supremacy. Her writing can cue laughter, illumination and shame in the same moment—a rare gift.

We have been friends since 2013, when I visited the Hazlitt office and promptly demanded that she Google image search Ron Perlman as the original live action Beast, whom I was certain she’d find hot. Recently, we met in a noisy Toronto bistro that Koul assured me would be quiet. I gave her guff, and she gave me guff for giving her guff, which is how we sustain our beautiful relationship.

Naomi Skwarna: So, let’s start from the top. How’s your niece, Raisin?

Scaachi Koul: She turns seven tomorrow.

Does she know about the book? Does she know that she’s in the book?

Mmmhmmm. I went home to Calgary a little while ago and she asked me what it was about and I said it was about her. Then she asked me if she could read it.

It does feel very much about her, or for her, maybe.

I said she could read it when I was dead. Her mom bought her a copy that I signed and will give to her when she’s 700.

Ah yes, I can just imagine her being sixteen and reading the essay about how she was a racist baby.

I hope she enjoys that! And the dumb shit she said when she was five that I’ve recorded forever. I’m sure she’ll appreciate it. She’s known for being really magnanimous. I can’t imagine that’ll get worse as she hits puberty.

Very good. My next question is: you’ve mentioned on several occasions your admiration of the writer and humourist—

Please don’t do that—

David Sedaris—

[Dangerously] Please don’t do that.

Which? Talk in that voice?

Yeah, don’t hold the paper aloft and talk in that voice. That’s a one-two punch I didn’t sign up for.

All right [inaudible grumbling]. ANYWAY—something that has been remarked upon about Sedaris is that the essays often come from a place of pain.

Oh my god, he had a really rough life!

He was so funny about it! Even when he writes about being addicted to crystal meth—

And he thought he was an incredible artist, and he was burning little toy soldiers in the microwave and thought it was great art.

There’s this point when I’m reading him where I’m thinking: someone else could tell this story and it would be brutal and tragic.

You can tell a story that’s unfortunate, and if you can tell it with your lip curled, why not? I don’t really want to hear about your strife if you don’t have any perspective on it. I have a really hard time reading memoirs that are just about raw tragedy. Trauma porn is not interesting to me.

Did you approach certain essays differently to ensure they didn’t express themselves as trauma porn?

The last chapter was really challenging, the one about my dad giving me the silent treatment, “Anyway.” I also didn’t have any closure with it, which was difficult. That one sucked and I was upset most of the time while I was writing it. I was miserable while I wrote certain chapters. The hair one was fine. Maybe I’m over those issues to some degree; I think less and less about my body hair the older I get. The shopping one is mostly for laughs. But the stuff with my family was complicated. I was like “I don’t really want these people to read it.” But if they do—okay. It’s honest.

That essay with your dad was somewhat recent, the events that you wrote about.

Yeah, we weren’t speaking when I wrote that. And I had no guarantee that we would eventually start talking. So, what happens if we don’t? I wasn’t ready to write an essay where I say, “well, that’s it,” because I also knew that wasn’t likely.

Something I appreciated about that essay was how you acknowledged a very obscure familial fact, which is that there can be severance without a precise making-up—

And there wasn’t.

It’s still there for both of you but you’ve also somehow moved past it. That was the thing that really touched me, the quiet reconciliation.

It involved both of us swallowing things. I think I swallowed more than he did. I’m younger, I’m spry. But at the time I had no idea, and I was sad all the time. When I finished the essay I remember thinking “I don’t really like this one that much, it’s not funny.” But I was still [experiencing] it, so there was nothing for me to find funny. It is the least ha-ha of the collection.

It also feels the most present.

It is the most recent one. The India chapters, the first drafts also weren’t funny because I really had a hard time on that trip. So when you come back and you’re trying to write it, you’re like, “This trip was not funny. I did not have a good time and I’m mad about it.”

Yeah, and you didn’t even write about the best McDonald’s sandwich you ever had.

I should’ve mentioned it. At the airport in New Delhi, I ate the Indi-McSpicy, which is a chicken sandwich at McDonald’s, and it is the hottest thing I’ve ever eaten. I got through two weeks in India without getting sick, and then the whole plane ride back I was pooping my butt off. I was so sick. [Nostalgically] My only regret was that I didn’t eat two of them, because they were so good.

Something about your writing, the essays in the book and then also the ones that you have published elsewhere, they often involve you selecting something that you will then have to endure.

Hmm.

Is that something that you’re aware of? And if so, how do these things attract you?

I’m guessing you’re talking about the summer camp story I wrote for BuzzFeed Reader? What else have I endured? No I mean, I guess you’re right. Even spiritually. Well, okay. I don’t … enjoy things naturally. I’m uncomfortable when things are going well. So it’s difficult for me to do stuff, because if it’s going well then that means I’m going to die. But if it’s going horribly, that means I’m not having a good time. I can’t win.

I think you have a real capacity for joy!

The things that I’m forcing myself to do are the things I’ve been told, historically, are good for you. So with the summer camp story as an example: I don’t make friends very easily, because I’m mean. Lots of people would agree—I’m a challenging person. And I don’t engage with people like a normal person, and I know that. So I’m trying to morph into something that will fit. But it won’t, and I’m okay with that. I don’t stay up night thinking about “what does it mean?!”

[The server approaches as if to take away Naomi’s plate, which contains several fry shards.]

[Alarmed] We’re still working on this!

[Server retreats.]

By the way, eat some more of these tiny little guys.

Li’l nubs.

Yes, those nubs are for you.

I’m eating your nubs. When I was younger, my mom would tell me to be nice. I’d say things not knowing they were mean. I just was not conditioned in that way as a kid. Now as an adult, I’m like “maybe fight against your instincts.” Because my instincts are mean! I was mean in high school, and I didn’t know at the time that I was mean. I thought that everyone was being mean to me!

When you say mean, though, were you just defending yourself?

No, I was a bully. I think in some cases I probably was being defensive. I grew up in a town where I felt very separate, and that’s, like, half the book. But I also have the capacity to recognize that I think sometimes I was just a shithead. There are people I would apologize to if I were a stronger person. But I’m not, so I’m going to hide from them. The older I get, the more I’m trying to not engage with that [meanness], but sometimes it’s necessary. I’m not aiming to be nice, but I’d like to at least be thoughtful.

How many of us were as children?

Right, and I think that’s what I get caught up with, like when I’m doing a piece that feels like “this is a pain” and I’m not enjoying it. I’m trying to be better at thinking that there’s something about the exercise that’s worth pulling from. The summer camp one was such a weird weekend. I went, and I wanted to be fun. I wanted to be a fun person, but I’m not! I thrive in the dark. Like a weird bug.

You are fun!

I’m not for other fun people. I’m fun if you’re kind of a dour weirdo yourself. You and I get along because you also have a problem, like, that’s unavoidable.

[High, piercing laugh] What’s my problem?

You’re weird!

I’m not that weird! It’s true, you’ve told me this before.

You are. In a very charming way that I like. I’m not friends with shiny, beautiful people, because I don’t really get it—this is such a weird tangent. This interview’s going to be a mess.

Thank god for editing.

Meanness is a complicated thing when you’re a woman. Men aren’t mean if they act like me. Not at all.

I think a man needs to be a real asshole before anyone says anything.

Yeah, he’s got to hit you. Even then, I think people might be like, “What a cad!”

Have you watched Good Will Hunting since the night you replied to Twitter trolls with lines of dialogue from it?

No! I have that fucking movie memorized now.

What’s your favourite li—

“I swallowed a bug.” Minnie Driver says it when she’s in the car. Why? Because it’s stupid, and I know the line now, that’s why. [Snickering] That was a good night! I gotta say, of all the dumb things I’ve done on the Internet? That one felt really good.

What was it like working on this book with your editors [Kiara Kent, Martha Kanya-Forstner and Anna deVries]? How collaborative was the process?

Well, Kiara had a really good eye for telling when I was lying.

Can you think of an example where she wouldn’t let you?

There were two that Kiara had to do a lot of work on. The first one was “A Good Egg,” which features our dear friend [CBC technology reporter] Matthew Braga.

He’s no friend of mine!

Sorry, your nemesis, and my adopted son Matthew “Baby” Braga. Initially when I’d written that essay, it was skating over top what I was mad about—the loss portion [and the story about my violent then-friend Jeff], which was really difficult to talk about. When she got the first draft, she was like, “Yeah … but.” There was a lot of that, a lot of, “yeah … buts”: “I’m sure this is a part of the story, but you’re giving me like thirty percent.” I think that was true of “Anyway” for sure, when things weren’t really going well. It felt like something I wanted to write about, but I just didn’t have the tools, maybe, or I just wasn’t getting there. So there was a lot of talking about giving an audience closure without having any closure myself. Somehow.

Yeah, not faking it just because it’s the end of the book.

Exactly. And I think the initial draft was a lie, where I was like, “Everything is fine, don’t worry about it.” And then after that, I wrote another one where there was no closure around “life is hell, and then you die,” which also isn’t right. Many of the essays don’t really end, right? Like, I’m going to go back to India again, and I’m going to have to watch another wedding. My family’s not dead. My dad’s still difficult; my mom’s still like this. How much closure can I give you? There’s a lot of balancing between giving someone an answer and recognizing that I don’t really have one. Kiara was really good at figuring out where that line was.

It’s interesting that you mentioned “A Good Egg,” and the sense of loss. That essay, I felt like I was holding my breath throughout.

Writing that one felt like a risk the whole time. The feeling that if you do something risky, say, if I’m riding my bike, and I’m being an asshole and I run a red light because I think I can make it? The feeling of being between cross-streets, where you’re like, “I’m not sure I’m going to get through this one. This might’ve been stupid.” That was the feeling for the entire duration of writing that essay.

That essay felt like it was about grief.

It was about grief. There was a huge grieving process. [Jeff] was my buddy, so I lost my friend. Then I lost all of my other friends in really quick order. And then I also lost a piece of privacy, because people knew, or they didn’t know, or they knew something. I lost privacy because then I had people asking me what had occurred, and I was still lying for him, so I wasn’t really clear. I just kept losing things.

And it doesn’t seem like you were able to find much compassion in your immediate community.

If you just heard about this guy who knocked me around, oh well. That doesn’t mean anything without context. So I wanted that essay to read like you were me, and you knew something was coming. The story started when I met Jeff, when Braga and I were babysitting him [when he was drinking] and all that. And then when it happens, there’s still half the essay to go, because then it’s me picking up pieces—rebuilding and trying to make sense of all those people who vanished.

It’s so tempting to get stuck in the moment of injury.

And so often the moment of injury is the only thing that people want to read. So if I only give you the moment of injury then you might not pay attention to the rest of it. And quite frankly, the second half of that essay is more important than the entirety of the piece, because the second half is rebuilding. Nobody was asking me how I was doing. And the few women I was sure knew—they sided with him. Because he was fun. He was really fun.

Jesus, that’s chilling.

Inevitably, and this is not a reaction that I would condone, or that I would hope to do again consciously, but my reaction was extra-aggressive, because I didn’t have any other recourse. You’re just mad. We were just talking about how the gendered expressions of meanness are received so differently—people talk about this related to someone like Mel Gibson, or Casey Affleck. Male aggression and violence—whether it’s sexual or otherwise—is so quickly forgotten and apologized for, especially if they come out smiling afterwards, unashamed. So as a form of protection, [women] end up angry, and then people, both women and men wonder “why’s she so mad? What’s eating her?”

[Server nervously delivers coffee to the table, then flees.]

Besides writing, and besides being a … [whispers] literary darling—

I will divorce you.

A darling of—

It sounds like an illness.

A bon vivant! She just dropped her spoon into her cappuccino with disgust. This is a verbal note for myself. Okay, but really, what do you like that isn’t writing—

I hate this question, because [shrilly] I don’t have hobbies!

[Shriller yet] I’m not asking you for hobbies! Listen to me!

What do I like to do? I like watching trash TV.

No, listen to me, LISTENTOME.

Okay, I’m sorry.

I want to know … when things make your heart feel kind of full and good, what those things are. It doesn’t have to be hobbies. Like, Raisin, your cat, all that shit. You like dresses—

[Laughs]

You like having shiny hair—

[Continuing to wail with laughter] I like watching movies on planes, because they make me cry, and I don’t often have the ability. There’s a study, when you watch a movie on a plane, something happens with your hormones because of the high altitudes. It makes you more likely to weep. I like crying on planes. I like wine. I like falling asleep with the TV on. That’s one of my favourites. I like enamel pins, and rings—especially old jewelry. I don’t really like diamonds. I don’t get it, I don’t understand that pull. I love flossing.

Here’s something I know that you really like—

Is it you?

You tolerate me. Sometimes there’s a flare of affection.

I throw you a bone every so often. What is it?

You like buying inexpensive glasses on the Internet!

I do love hoarding glasses. I found another website called Polette, they’re $29! It’s going to be a real problem.

How many pairs of glasses do you have?

Twelve? That I can wear. Some have an old prescription, so I donate those.

Oh my god, that’s so kind of you—

Yes, as opposed to throwing them into the street and stomping on them.

You’re a philanthropist.

Yeah. You know what makes my heart sing? Donating old glasses.

Do you ever imagine a baby wearing your big red plastic glasses? How cute is that?

Yes, I imagine running into a child wearing my old glasses. [Scathing] That’s my dream.

A frequently asked question over the past year is what role sound plays in works that tell the stories of the silenced. Much has been written about the particular sound of Moonlight, the pop music coversof Westworld, the plainspoken horror of Get Out. Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale appears caught between having quality instruments at its disposal—its actors, its score, its sound effects—and thinking it best to play them all at the same time at varying, narratively questionable amplitudes.

“Recursive” is an appropriate word for the soundscape of the show, one filled with echoes and the potential for infinite diminishings. Chanting appears often throughout the show. It greets viewers early on when women are forced to shame a fellow handmaid for her gang rape, later, when they encourage her to breathe, hold, and exhale while giving birth, and again when the wives of the commanders say the new baby’s name, “Angela.” The aural smash zooms that narrow into a roar—where the world becomes simultaneously very close and very far away at emotional apexes (such as in the moments before Offred attacks an accused rapist)—appear again and again in the lives of the handmaids. Philip Glass’s dependable, swirling arpeggios and a dampened version of Blondie’s “Heart of Glass” underscore one of the most moving moments of the show to date. In Gilead, repetition is life, a form of control and ownership. Say something enough times and the programmable routines formerly known as women might begin to believe it.

The adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel of patriarchal totalitarianism arrives at a perilous time for American civil liberties. It has been praised and criticized for its visual aesthetics but, because the series centers silenced women, the show’s aural components are equally compelling, uniquely poised to play a significant role in conveying the horror and limitations of life in Gilead.

Handmaid’s first episode is hydrophilic, thematically binding itself to water at every turn. Always, there is the sense of sinking, the memory of splashing, the distinct otherworldly maneuverings of caged aquatic life. The show’s message is clear: For women, once there was the sea; all that remains now is the absence of air.

*

“I thought about it like waves of sound, waves that slowly grew in volume and dissonance until it overcame the senses,” said composer Adam Taylor of Handmaid’s theme. “One idea for the score was to reiterate sounds and instruments through processes to the point where there was loss in fidelity, like a poor quality photocopy.” Jóhann Jóhannsson, composer for the Oscar-nominated 2016 film Arrival, employed a similar effect. “What you’re hearing is very old-fashioned, in a way,” Jóhannsson said of his widely discussed score. “It’s layers and layers and layers of piano—but without the attack. It’s like piano wire. You’re hearing just the sustain of the piano.” Both are at least somewhat indebted to Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room,” where in 1969 the composer recorded himself reading a short text, played it again and re-recorded that, and continued the process until his speech, now indiscernible, became nothing more than a drone. Tape looping is the sound of a person becoming a ghost, something other, haunted.

The aural world of Gilead is rarely presented purely diegetically (i.e., sounds actually taking place within the settings of the scene). In the second and third episodes, the score overwhelms almost every potential dialogue exchange. Sometimes the placement is effective; mostly, it chokes the scene. The score and its content, in turn, eventually cease to matter, increasingly taking on the role of a subliminal message rather than an auditory intertitle, something speaking not for the characters but to the audience—feel scared, feel sad, feel, now.

In The Handmaid’s Tale, the score is the “tell,” of “show, don’t tell,” while the ambient diegetic sound is the “show.” Actors generally have to interact with the physical space they inhabit to convey both the story of that space, and their own story within it; it is how a creative aural narrative is formed in film and television. In a scene in the third episode, when Offred and Mrs. Waterford converse toward the end of a visit to Ofwarren, the off-screen screaming baby is the “show.” It is out of their control, out of their periphery, yet affects both in distinct ways. It speaks to Mrs. Waterford’s desire for a child, Offred’s fear for Ofwarren, and the memory of Offred’s own stolen offspring. The scene is wholly present, devastating, and depressingly rare.

Often, though, the crux of Handmaid’s aural storytelling falls upon the show’s score and licensed music. And while both can complement the show’s many riveting scenes, they tend to supplant the quiet exchanges and shattering of worlds taking place before our eyes. More than anything, it feels like a missed opportunity, a chance for art to comprehensively let women do the real howling for once.

In February 1996, the writer David Lipsky went on a road trip with David Foster Wallace. Wallace had just published his thousand-page magnum opus Infinite Jest and was finishing up a three-week book tour; Lipsky was there to chronicle the trip for Rolling Stone.

The article would never get published. Lipsky was sent on several time-sensitive assignments following the road trip, and by the time he got around to writing his profile on Wallace, too much time had passed and his editors decided to kill the piece. But when Wallace died by suicide in 2008, Lipsky pulled out the cassette tapes he had saved. The transcriptions from those interviews would become a book, Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.

The book served as the basis for The End of the Tour, a 2015 film directed by James Ponsoldt, with Jason Segel starring as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg playing David Lipsky. Though several aspects of the movie have been dramatized, almost all of Wallace’s dialogue has come directly from his real life conversations with Lipsky.

The film was recently screened in Toronto, as part of TIFF’s ongoing Books on Film series. Lipsky was there to introduce the film, and followed the screening with a conversation with CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel. We met the next morning to talk one-on-one before he had to go back to New York. Sharing a smoke outside his hotel before we began, he peppered me with questions about what it was like to be a young writer in Canada today. “I think Hazlitt assigned me this interview because I wrote something about Infinite Jest for them once,” I said, as he lit my cigarette with a match. “Well, it was sort of about the book, but it was mostly about myself.”

“Yeah, that happens,” he laughed in response.

The real David Lipsky is nothing like Eisenberg’s mildly neurotic portrayal in the movie. He is tall and solid, with a focused gaze. He speaks in paragraphs, picking his words carefully, and can recall precise literary quotes perfectly. He’s also a lot of fun to talk to, both open to being challenged and willing to challenge my own ideas. During the hour we spent in the lobby of the Hyatt, I do a lot of things you’re not supposed to do when interviewing another person. I interrupt him, a lot, and talk over myself, in a way that would later become a mess to transcribe. I was excited to have him hear my ideas during the limited time we had; during our hour-long interview, his publicist comes over and politely informs us no fewer than three times that his driver is outside, circling the block, waiting to take him to the airport.

When I turn my recorder on, he asks me about the transcription program I use. This is where our conversation starts.

*

Anna Fitzpatrick: You can just transfer the recording to your computer, and then I do my own transcribing, which is why this [gestures to his book] looks like a nightmare.

David Lipsky: [laughs] It was actually very fun.

Not the conversation. But listening to your own voice.

It’s like a video game. You get the transcriptions back from the people at Rolling Stone, and they would often get things wrong.

Like Lorrie Moore and Jay McInerney. [In the book, Lipsky points out both their names were spelled wrong by his transcribers.]

Exactly, yeah yeah yeah.

You have this comment, like, that’s the extent of literary fame.

The transcribers don’t know who they are!

I’m going to keep shoving my recorder towards you.

Yeah, I know, of course. When Eisenberg and I were talking about him being in the movie and he was asking how to seem like a journalist, I said the key thing you want to do when you’re interviewing somebody, when they’re saying something that you think is good, what you’ll do is you’ll look down quickly to make sure [the recorder is] getting it, and the audience won’t even realize they’re noticing you doing it, but they’ll know you’ve liked something because you’ll look quickly down.

After last night’s screening, during the question-and-answer portion, people were like, “That character seemed shady,” and someone yelled out, “He seemed manipulative.” And I’m like, no, he’s a reporter! He never lied, he was never undercover, like, “I’m here to be your friend.” He was, from the beginning, there to do his job. People have this idea that what he’s doing is shady, but I’m like, “You would have read the article. You saw the movie. You’re the consumer.” People don’t question how reporters do their job.

That’s interesting. That was one of the things I think I was saying yesterday. I think Eleanor Wachtel asked what the piece would have been like, and I said one of the things I loved about it being like this, you’ll know from doing this piece, the transcript will be about 9,000, 10,000 words if you’re lucky. It might be worse. And then you will write like, a thousand words, 1,500 words. There’s a lot of stuff I’ll say, and you’ll just decide which one sounds better for the piece.

And I will make myself sound better too, by cutting out a lot of interjections.

Exactly. But this, it was just like, here’s everything he said. I’m not going to say, “I think this is where he’s really saying what he feels, and when he said this here, he didn’t really feel that.” So I kind of love that.

Do you meet a lot of hard-core David Foster Wallace heads, doing this?

I do. But I had met them before this.

And you were one.

Of course. And that was the only nice thing about his not writing anymore—suddenly there were conventions. People started to get together to talk about his stuff. I hadn’t been aware of that community before. Although there was a community that actually existed for a long time. It’s called Wallace L, it’s a listserv. Do you know what listservs are?

I know it’s an Internet thing.

It’s a shared email group where people will talk to each other. And I think that’s been going since about 2000. And I read once that Wallace went on, checked it out, it was very weird for him, he got off very quickly.

I read Infinite Jest two years ago; I’ve only read the whole way through once. And I kind of binge-read it, I just went for it, almost in one sitting. When I was doing some research last night, I was trying to remember some of the characters, who was who. And I Googled, and there were so many glossaries and page-by-page breakdowns of who everyone was.

Isn’t that wild?

When did you first read it?

I was reading it before I got assigned to Illinois. I think I started reading it the day it became available. I was just reading it as a fan. I think February 6, was when I got it.

You were interviewing him two weeks into the tour, so you had to power through it.

But I had been reading it before, I guess the movie is wrong about that. He’s reading it reluctantly, but it was more, “Hey, his book is out, thank god!” You were saying it seems like New York is a bigger literary world than Canada, but it’s pretty similar in that you’re aware of books coming in.

I go to New York a couple of times a year, and everyone knows everyone.

Exactly. And we had heard, when the book was turned in, that they thought it was too long. And so then, it was held—we had heard it was going to come out in 1995, so we were all very excited about it. People I knew were reading him, and then it was delayed, so that gave us a chance to try to get him on the hot list, which was kind of nice, and then it when it came out I just ran down to Barnes and Noble and got it and was just reading it very happily.

You were immersed in it?

It was great. It was very funny.

He says in your interview, it takes two months to read well. I read it in three days, but I read it like cocaine. I woke up—I mean, I was crazy at the time—I woke up and just started reading it, right until I went to bed, and then woke up again. It took a few days like that. And it’s what you two talk about in the book, about finding the right addiction. Not being able to look away. For a short time, that was it for me.

It was very funny to leave Illinois and then end up in Seattle, living with the needle addicts [for Lipsky’s following piece in Rolling Stone], because … now we’re around people who are actual addicts. But yeah, if you’re liking the book, you’re going to want to read it as quickly as possible. So I wonder if the book is really working if a person could do it in the two-month version that he would love. I hadn’t thought about that.

How long did you take to read it? It must have been pretty quick.

About a week. And then when I’ve read it since, I tend to read it in a week or two. I think that my cumulative reading time, though, may add up to two months. Maybe I’m doing it in the way he wanted me to do it.

When you’re reading something quickly, with all the characters, you have to flip back a lot, but you’re so immersed in that world. It flows a lot better.

It’s very funny. That has never been my reading experience, two months. Let’s say I’ve read it … [pauses, thinks] I’ve read it four times. Let’s say the outside reading is two weeks, that means it adds up to two months. As long as I don’t read it again, I have hit the two-month mark that he wanted.

You picked Jesse Eisenberg for the movie. He doesn’t look a ton like you. In the scenes in the movie where you see the older version, he kinda reminded me of Jonathan Franzen.

[laughs] I can see that.

What drew you to Jesse?

He’s a writer. If you were going to be doing that role, you had to seem like you really cared about words. I read his pieces in The New Yorker, but I also knew that he wrote plays, and from talking to him I could tell he was somebody who really cared about how he really sounded on the page and also in person, and cared about words. And so I thought that if he was talking, in a movie that was going to be people talking about words all the time, it had to be someone who knew how that felt. In a way, that was the only choice.

What about Jason Segel, did you have any say in that?

Yeah, we talked about it, it was great. He is physically right. You wouldn’t think there would be a connection, but when I had seen I Love You, Man, one of the things that had really struck me about that movie is in that movie he dresses very much like Wallace. Wallace very much loved to wear really soft things. Friends of his would say if they had a really worn T-shirt, he would say, “That’s a good looking T-shirt,” and suddenly he would say, “Could I…?” And then years later, he would be wearing that T-shirt. So I remember watching that movie when it came out in 2006 or 2007, and thinking God, Segel moves and is dressed just like David.

There was pushback when he was cast. People were like, “Oh, this comedy bro is playing this literary genius.”

I remember when that happened—there was that photo of him at the Mall of America. I thought that was funny, because that’s one of the things the movie ends up being about, and one of the things David talks about. One of the things that he talks about in the book too is, people have a strange idea of how writers look, you know what I mean? Jason Segel has written his own movies, right? He’s obviously an intelligent person. But their idea of someone who should be a writer is, I guess, someone who would look like, very heavy glasses or something like that, who’s dressed in a tight fitting—I guess I’m visualizing Max Perkins. I’m visualizing an editor and not a writer. But in a way it showed one of the things the movie is about in a very fun way, which is, writers aren’t really the way you’d expect.

Did you ever watch Freaks and Geeks?

You know, all my friends loved that. People I’m very close to are always telling me to watch that show. I didn’t like it for a very strange reason. It’s a problem that I also have with Stranger Things. Movies or TV shows that are set in the past, sometimes the people who do the costume design, I guess they’ll look at old footage and they’ll get the clothes right, but the clothes will always look like they were made somewhere that day and they were just opened. And so in your brain you’re like, okay, every scene that’s taking place in the morning, you have to add the one hour shopping everyone did, because what everyone’s wearing in every scene looks new. I find that very distracting.

The reason I was asking about Freaks and Geeks is because Becky Ann Baker had that role in the movie—she plays the mom in Freaks and Geeks. When she and Jason Segel were on the screen together, I didn’t know if that was like, a reference.

I wonder! You know, [director] James Ponsoldt is someone who loves that kind of thing. He did that kind of stuff with the soundtrack. One of the things he was very proud of was the REM that you hear, the ones [from] Murmur? So I bet that would be like a smile of his.

Well, there is that moment where you see Jason Segel, the actor known for Freaks and Geeks, playing David Foster Wallace, talking about Blade Runner, while “Gold Soundz” by Pavement was on the radio, and I thought, “This is every Gen X stereotype.” And I thought it was funny, because he was sitting next to Jesse Eisenberg, who is famous for playing the Facebook guy, which is such a millennial role.

So the two generations shake hands.

And now we do have this constant stream of information, we have a reality TV star who is president. What do you think David Foster Wallace would say about today?

He said that in the thing—he said if America went through a bad period, there would be some knuckle-dragging fundamentalist saying all the old bad stuff. So he gets it right. I kept thinking about that part throughout the campaign.

There are so many prescient moments in the book. Some of his predictions are so accurate, but others—it’s a very pre-9/11 book. He talks about how there’s this moment in every generation that forces them to wake up, and he’s writing a book that’s so contemporary but very much of the ‘90s.

He was right about that, wasn’t he? But do you think 9/11—you’re saying, it seems pre-9/11. You think if he were writing it now, he would take it into account—in the time after 9/11, there was a great deal of conversation about that. But then it just disappeared.People don’t talk about 9/11 anymore in a way that I actually find strange. In a way, it’s created the historical version of a fad. We were thinking about that a lot, and it’s one of the ways we remember that period. But it didn’t seem to have the effect really on the culture.

But even if we’re not talking about it, it’s still—I mean, I was a kid when 9/11 happened. I didn’t get the magnitude of it at the time. But I feel a lot of the big pop culture moments of the late ‘90s, things like Fight Club and other movies are all about, “What’s our purpose?” and “What are we doing?” But in the 2000s there’s a lot more about, “We’re at war, we’ve gotta fight the terrorists.” People don’t talk about 9/11, but we have a president who based his campaign on fighting “bad hombres.”

After 9/11, people started saying it was the death of irony. But there was a moment people were saying a lot of the stuff in the culture isn’t really worth our time. Time is limited, and this is a world where if we have excess time we might want to put it in things that are valuable and meaningful. And then the explosion of the Kardashians would end that decade, suggesting that 9/11 had moved out of public consciousness. David’s funny about that too because he said you don’t want to be serious all the time, and sometimes a good commercial novel is just what you have the perfect mental budget for. But it was nice to think of people saying, “Look, if we’re going to have a book, it would great if it was stuff that was actually really good.” And then it was just like, “Hey, the Kardashians are pretty fun to watch.”

I’ve read some great writing inspired by the Kardashians.

Like what?

I’m biased ‘cause I feel like I have such a different relationship to culture than you because I grew up with the Internet, and I grew up in this different world. But I like this idea that Kim Kardashian is someone who was famous because she had this sex tape leaked, and she repurposed that into building this empire. It’s very capitalist, but she kind of took the narrative back.

That’s amazingly cool, right? That’s a little bit like an Edith Wharton character, Undine Spragg, who was the lead in the book The Custom of the Country. That kind of stuff is great. It’s not that things shouldn’t be fun, it’s just like … so I mean, you’re saying you like her achievements, right?

I’m not a Kardashian fan. Like, I’ve never watched the show, or paid attention to their interviews. But I’ve read a lot of smart cultural commentary, because they’re connected to everything now. I was watching the OJ miniseries on FX…

That’s a very funny scene!

And they’re very involved in every pop culture moment! They’re this dynasty, the family is so large. Every news item … last week, everyone was talking about that Pepsi commercial controversy with Kendall Jenner. Then there’s Kim, who’s married to the most famous rapper alive, and Caitlyn Jenner who has become an icon of trans rights but also a major Republican—

So remember when you were asking about Wallace’s predictions? Isn’t that like a Wallace novel?

That’s just it! When you ask if I like the Kardashians, I think that’s irrelevant. They’re the best indicator of mainstream culture in 2017, of where we are now for better or for worse.

That’s true. But you can say certainly that they marked the end of seriousness, of where we’ve taken the culture after 9/11.

Sure.

But they are a really good indicator in this sense of where the culture is going. But that’s right, there’s an overall cultural theory of the Kardashians. There was a very funny chart someone once made of, there’s a very old show called St. Elsewhere.

Is that the one where it’s all in the guy’s mind at the end?

For fun, a lot of show runners have linked, they’ve used law firms that were mentioned on St. Elsewhere, or characters that were mentioned—

Like, crossover episodes.

Yeah. They’ve done that long after St. Elsewhere, which suggests there’s a unified theory of all television pop culture that’s all taking place in this kid’s mind as he’s watching the snow globe.

I don’t know anything about that show, but I’ve heard that theory.

That is the conceptual version of the Kardashian domination of North America.

In the movie, they have it that Jesse Eisenberg’s character, it’s weird to call him “Lipsky” in front of you, he was trying to sell Rolling Stone on this pitch, but in real life you were assigned it. You’ve said you were reluctant to take it because, what if you didn’t like him the way you liked his book? But a lot of the film is about you trying to impress him, and him trying to impress you. Was it just that you were scared of not liking him? Were you also concerned about him not liking you?

In this kind of transaction, right, let’s say you don’t like me. I’m supposed to be talking. You have some sense of my personality. So if it’s like, “That guy sucks,” [laughs] do you know what I mean? But if you get the sense that I walked away thinking, “I didn’t like Anna,” right? Well, it’s like, “I wasn’t really being me anyway. I was partially being me, but it was an hour inside … not even a coffee shop, a split glass table bar that’s closed at the Hyatt, and that wasn’t really me.” You know what I mean?

But I’m a writer interviewing a writer. Even if you don’t get a sense of who I am, you’ll know my professional skills, and I want you to be impressed by me.

But when you were sitting down, when you were thinking about this, it wasn’t like, “I hope he has a warm impression of me.” Your thinking is, “I wonder if he says some asshole thing. I’m going to have to listen to him on tape.” And if you’ve read someone’s books and you love them, you don’t want to then look at that part of your bookshelf for a while. Like, I think Martin Amis is a really, really great prose writer. But a friend of mine and I went to a cocktail party in the middle part of the ‘90s when a big book of his was coming out, and my friend was a producer of a PBS show about writers and Amis had cancelled that day because he was ill or something. Then we went to that party and there was Amis. And Amis looked at my friend, and he didn’t say, “I feel better.” What he said is, and I can’t do his accent, [does an incredible Amis impression] “Sorry I cooled your show.” And that made it hard to read him for a couple of years, and I really like reading him. So that’s one of the things you would think, if there’s a writer who becomes, you know, there are—with TV, there are five hundred, a thousand channels. I don’t know how many channels are up here—

I don’t own a TV. Not in a David Foster Wallace way, I just have the Internet.

I had the same thing, I was in the hotel this morning watching TV. I thought, “I never watch TV this way! I’m watching the news! This is fascinating!” But for reading it’s very much the old system, like you have one of those channel changers you have to turn with your hand. You maybe only have five or ten channels. So if you lose a channel, something that you love to read, that can be a serious problem. He was doing great stuff, and so the idea that I might come away from that thinking “I don’t like this person” meant that there was something I love to read that I couldn’t read anymore. And also, now that I’m thinking about it, if I also had the impression that he didn’t like me, that would have made it a social embarrassment, and that also would have been a reason not to read. If I had gone there and thought, “God, this guy is really dismissive, and he didn’t seem to care about my opinions, or he didn’t care about whether I was having fun…” But he was an excellent host. It’s very early in the thing, but I had gone to his class, and he came and he brought me a glass of water. That’s one of the things he was very smart about. If you have extra brain capacity, if you just turn it inward, it can be very painful in a way. That’s one of the ways I understand depression. But the other way you can use it, which is kind, is you can just become an excellent host.

“Morality is what you don’t feel bad about after.” Who says that again?

That was Hemingway. [Real quote: “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.”]

I find it rare to really love a writer. But I always find that I’m overwhelmed with things to read, and maybe it’s an Internet thing, maybe because I know what’s out there, or when I scroll through Twitter I’m clicking on links of things to read. This is a specific experience, but I find there’s this idea of people looking for excuses to cast certain writers aside. David Eggers had this piece, that you only have so much time to consume so many things in a day. When information is accessible, you’re aware of what you’re not consuming, what everyone is reading and you’re not. So if you can be like, “Well, I was going to read him, but he’s an asshole, so I’m not going to.”

What do you make of that?

Well, I’ve done it too! I read The Corrections when I was nineteen or twenty, and I didn’t really relate to it. It opens with Chip as a professor, and he’s talking to his student that he wants to sleep with—

Melissa Pacquette.

I remember relating to her the most, more than Chip.

Melissa’s very cool! She takes him down.

I just wanted to read more about her. I just didn’t get immersed in the rest of the book.

Huh. I love that book.

Everyone does! It’s a book that’s been canonized, it has won awards. I read it because of the hype. But I didn’t love it. I didn’t love the writing. I didn’t have a desire to keep reading him, at least not at that point in my life. I thought, maybe I’ll revisit when I’m older. Within the next year, Freedom was coming out, and everyone was talking about how you have to read this book, and I didn’t have any interest in it. But then people started to be critical of Franzen, because he became this symbol for the white male literary establishment. He said a few things that weren’t bad, just a little tone deaf. And suddenly my view was less, “I don’t connect much to Franzen, so I’m going to choose to read these other writers instead,” it was, “Franzen is bad and also old, therefore I don’t have to read him.”

Do you think that will change?

I think it’s good that people have more options, and that they don’t have to read the one writer everyone else is. But because of Franzen, I know who Nell Zink is, and I love her.

That was very nice, wasn’t it?

I’m grateful to him for that!

And she likes his stuff! She reached out to him.

A lot of my friends love him.

There are two things I want to say about that. One is, I was talking to an interviewer last year and they were saying that they hated Franzen and I asked why, because I was thinking some of the same stuff, not as well as you were putting it just now. They were saying he’s bad for young writers. And this guy said, because he speaks badly of Twitter, and he can do that because he’s established. But in this world where there are so many channels right now, one way that people who aren’t being supported by magazines the way he was being supported, one way they can do it is by getting their name out on Twitter. And for him to say he doesn’t like it or you shouldn’t read it is a way of almost cutting out almost a whole generation of people who are trying to get their names out.

The only reason I have a job is because of Twitter. I was … eighteen? … when I made my account. Almost nine years now. Jesus.

My guess is, he doesn’t know that. Because it hadn’t occurred to me.

I don’t think he said anything truly offensive. He’s not Donald Trump, you know? But I think maybe a lot of young writers don’t connect to him, or maybe he’s speaking to a certain generation, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing either. Not every writer needs to be everything for everyone. But I like that there are more options. When I was in high school, I learned the greats were Hemingway and Salinger and Fitzgerald. Dead white men.

And not Lorrie Moore and Alice Munro and Joan Didion and Renata Adler.

I’m Canadian and I didn’t read Alice Munro until I was in my twenties! Hemingway drives me crazy, but I love Hemingway. And Fitzgerald drives me crazy, but same. All these writers I think are both frustrating and great at the same time, they don’t have to be everything.

Going to the initial thing you were saying, you won’t just say this guy’s a bad writer, or this woman is, her novel didn’t work. Like Lorrie Moore’s last book, A Gate at the Stairs. The first part was great, and then … well, I won’t say anything bad about Lorrie on tape. But then the second half wasn’t that great. And you could just say, you have to read Lorrie Moore’s stories. But instead of saying that, you could say Lorrie Moore’s politics are bad, or she’s bad on this issue, and that’s why you shouldn’t read her. I think that kind of thing is not entirely a new thing, and the reason why that’s reassuring, it means that kind of thing goes away sometimes too. There’s a writer I love named V.S. Naipaul, who is a great writer who is very smart on colonialism.

You quoted him last night. “Writers are not their work, they’re their myth.”

Joan Didion was a big fan of his, and she was reviewing a book of his, in I think ‘79 or ‘80. And I went back because, here’s a writer I love writing on a writer I love, that’s always a great thing. And she said, look, we’re in one of those periods right now where all reading is political. And that will change, and then people can just talk about whether they like their work or not. And I didn’t think about that time as being a time when people were picking the writers they were going to listen to for political reasons. That was fascinating, because that means by the later ‘80s, certainly by the time David was writing, that was gone. Which means, this cycle might be gone too.

I think politics are linked to writing in a lot of ways, too. The way I see it, your politics are related to your beliefs and your writing is related to your beliefs—

But you like Fitzgerald, right?

I do. And I like Joan Didion, and a lot of her politics I disagree with.

But her basic politics I agree with. She was very smart on 9/11. She wrote a great piece on 9/11 which was published independently. It was in the New York Review of Books in 2003, it was very smart on the issue. With Fitzgerald, one of the few novels I will read from the ‘30s is Tender is the Night . Have you read that book?

Is that the one with Dick Diver?

Yes.

I remember that because it’s a good porn name.

Did you like it?

Again, I don’t like talking about books I liked or didn’t in such an either/or way.

Fine. Did you enjoy parts of it?

I enjoyed parts of it. I got stuff out of it. I’m glad I read it.

That’s one of the books that’s still alive. One of the ways I think about movies and books is, is it still alive, or is it not still alive? Like, Lord of the Rings, when you were a kid, people were talking about those movies? They aren’t alive anymore. No one’s watching them. The Matrix, great movie, is still alive. The sequels do not seem to be still alive. Fitzgerald’s work is still alive.

When he wrote Tender is the Night, he spent five years on it. Getting that book written under the circumstances he got it written under is an act of heroism for a writer. When he came out, The New Republic, which was the main reviewing organ at that time, they didn’t review it saying, “Is it good, is it bad, are there things we like in it or didn’t like in it?” They thought it wasn’t sufficiently anti-capitalist for the way the political environment was. So their lead, one of the things in the first paragraph was, “you can’t hide from a hurricane under a beach umbrella, Mr. Fitzgerald.” Which strikes me as not always the right way to read something, but it also tells you it was a time of very political reading in the ‘30s, going into the early ‘40s, then that changed. And then we got the Salinger stuff or the Nabokov stuff in the ’50s, which isn’t being read politically. It’s being read as, there are politics, then there is writing, and this writing can be very nourishing for your brain and how you want to act to people. Now your politics can be in there too, but this will be a different kind of nourishment for you. But by the ‘70s then, Joan Didion is saying we’re back in the cycle where all reading is political again. Then that cycle goes out and you have writers like Lorrie Moore, and writers like Franzen, and writers like Renata Adler in the later ’70s, and like Wallace.

Renata Adler, she’s also a Republican, right?

My guess is that she would be centre left. Is she a Republican? That’s what I mean, you don’t want to know that about someone.

I’ve only read Speedboat—

An amazing book, right? There’s a story of Wallace’s called the “Suffering Channel,” it’s like his last very long piece. You would love it. It’s the last story in Oblivion . Throughout my book, I keep trying to tell David, you should read Renata Adler. It’s a great book. And he’s like, “Okay, maybe I’ll read it, if you read The Screwtape Letters, I’ll read Speedboat.” And I never knew if he read it or not, but I visited the Ransom Center where they have his papers, and they had a mock up of his bookshelf. There was Speedboat. So I asked if I could look at it, because I was curious about whether he liked it. I took it out, and what was thrilling to me was, you know how in the opening of a book you have these blank pages? He had written sentences and paragraphs for “The Suffering Channel” in Speedboat while he was reading it. Since that’s the last story in his last book of fiction, I felt kind of great about that. It was like, wow, he liked it after all. And it led to something else of his I like to read.

When you were talking about a political critique of Tender is the Night, you said people had a problem with the fact that it wasn’t anti-capitalist enough. But when I think of a political reading of Tender, I think of how he took so much from Zelda and then sort of cast her aside. That’s how I think political reading has changed. Like, Infinite Jest was the first thing of Wallace’s that I had read, and everyone was telling me, “Oh, you gotta read his nonfiction.” So I read Consider the Lobster, and it starts with “Big Red Son” [Wallace’s essay on attending a porn awards ceremony]. And I found it unbelievably frustrating! I found he had projected a lot. I counted the pages until he actually talked to a woman in that piece.

Yeah. I’m trying to think of a woman he talks to. Maybe people in the booths?

He makes so many assumptions about the porn stars and performers. And it was in many ways a funny piece, with a lot of great portions, but what I loved about his fiction is the way he was able to get in the heads of so many people. I love Infinite Jest so much, but I had to put his nonfiction aside for a while.

That’s what I was talking about, when I was talking about meeting authors.

There are two things I want to say, and I want to get back to Fitzgerald. If you look at the stories in Girl With Curious Hair, which is the first way that we started reading him, that was great, because it was really funny, and really smart. But his work got really lush, five or six years afterwards, and then it got great. The period when he is about halfway through Infinite Jest to the end of his career, his work is great, but it makes a huge jump, and that kind of thing can happen when you’re writing more. If you read A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again , you see how he’s writing in 1993, which is his first Wallace-y essay he writes for Harper’s, and then you see what he’s writing by 1996, you see an amazing development in three years. You will not like as much the earlier pieces. If you think, would I really be following this writer? I’m not sure what your answer would be. But by the end you think, this is the best person writing prose right now. So those things can be very quick. I think for him, he found the writing of Infinite Jest so immersive that it made his reading and it made his writing unbelievably stronger. And that happens when you spend that kind of time with him.

The second thing has to do with what you’re saying about Tender is the Night . You were angry at him for using Zelda—

I wasn’t angry —

But you were aware of that. It was part of your interrogation of the novel. You were aware of his situation with Zelda. There’s a very funny thing that Philip Roth, who used people in his life as fictional fuel, likes to quote by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz: “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” You know that quote, right? Every time Philip Roth would go on CBC or on NPR, he would find a way to bring that in. You would hear about two minutes before, when it would occur to Philip Roth to use that line, and then within about 120 seconds he would say, “Well, Czesław Miłosz says…” And I remember thinking about Roth’s family, or the people that Renata Adler knew, and there are some scenes that seem to be from her family life in the early part of Speedboat. Like that thing where everyone kisses the pig, because that’s one of the ways Austrians celebrate the New Year. I assumed her family is Austrian. I thought about John Updike, and I thought about how well I had gotten to know his family from reading. And I thought about “Pigeon Feathers,” these dark funny stories. He grew up sort of poor, in rural Pennsylvania, outside of a small Pennsylvania city, in a place called Plowville. I think it’s called Firetown in the books? But that still exists. He’s dead, his family’s dead, but like Zelda, we know about Zelda because Fitzgerald wrote about her in The Beautiful and Damned and This Side of Paradise and Tender is the Night . So it’s not when a writer is born into a family, the family’s finished: When a writer is born into a family, the family is saved, because their life and what they’re like as a person can be preserved.

She was saved until she died in a mental institution fire.

Of course. But she still exists because he wrote about her, what he loved and didn’t love about her. And that’s one of the reasons, if he had only written about her positively, or hadn’t written about her at all, she would have been lost.

But she wrote, too. I don’t think she was as strong a writer as Fitzgerald. I think very few people are. But she wrote, too.

I’m smiling because I saw … I didn’t want to read gossip. But you know how the algorithm shows what you want to read? One of the things that my phone was offering me was Dominick Dunne, who’s a writer for Vanity Fair, his feud with the Didions. It was John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion, and I kind of loved that, because in that partnership, John Gregory is not nearly as strong a writer as Joan Didion. So you were saying, you’re not sure if she was as strong a writer as Fitzgerald—

But she was still writing. I think, you say, people know her because of F. Scott, which is true, but people know his interpretation of her. I think a lot of her self got lost through that interpretation, even though he was a strong writer. She’s known through her association with him, and I think part of that is a consequence from having a relationship with someone famous, but I think a lot of it really is that people don’t remember women as much.

Have you ever read Elizabeth Hardwick? She’s a great essayist.

I haven’t.

There’s a book she writes about this topic called Seduction and Betrayal, and she has a great essay about Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, exactly talking about what you were discussing. It’s thrilling to read, by the way.

I think there is a lot of vindication happening right now, with a lot of feminist theorists rereading and re-examining the women in certain men’s lives, especially women writers.

You would love that book, especially about Dorothy Wordsworth. I mean, it’s a thrilling essay. There are two essays that are thrilling in that book. The other is about the Carlyles. Carlyle was a right-wing historian who everybody [loved]—like, Emerson loved him. But the Wordsworth one, it’s almost a weird duplication of the Fitzgerald situation in a way. Like, she had an amazing ability to perceive how rocks looked, or how it felt to be walking up a hill, but she didn’t have her brother William’s grasp of the right words to express that. So in a way, one of the things Hardwick is arguing is that, the work is kind of joint, in a way. But on the other hand, and she argues this too, like, that wouldn’t have existed at all without him—William and Dorothy always shared quarters and stuff. It is very much on what you’re talking about. And Zelda, they coauthored, if you know their lives, they coauthored a lot of stuff. And one way that Fitzgerald helped her to get her pieces in was saying, look, if you want to publish me, she hasn’t been writing as long, and so you have to publish her as well. She wouldn’t have published as much, and she wouldn’t have published Save Me the Waltz with Scribner had she not been married to him.

But it still happens, like—okay, this is more complicated, because you knew these people, but if you look on Mary Karr’s Wikipedia page, under “personal life,” it says, “She had a short relationship with David Foster Wallace. He tried to push her out of a moving car.” And that’s the whole section. [Note: Her Wikipedia has since been updated.] And she’s doing fine telling her own story, but when I read that, I was like, “Wait, what?”

So the main thing in “personal life” is about somebody else.

It’s one sentence, and it’s about being pushed out of a moving car. That’s fucked up.

But the great thing about Wikipedia is you can add more about her personal life if you want to.

You’re right. But to bring it back to Fitzgerald, I don’t think this is about him being a bad person—I mean, we all know he had his problems. I don’t think he was bad for writing about Zelda. I don’t think that people of that era were bad people for being more interested in his work than hers. I just think it’s all just parts of a whole, the way certain voices get prioritized in history, and others tend to be less amplified. I think that is changing with how people approach things politically, and the Internet making resources available, and … you look like you disagree. [laughs]

I was thinking, you really should read that Elizabeth Hardwick book.

I will!

Here’s what I thought. I thought, “Anna’s not going to read that book.”

I’m going to read that book! I know New York Review of Books republished a bunch of her stuff recently, and I love them.

They republished Seduction and Betrayal.

I trust everything they publish.

If you have a subscription with NYRB, you can just go online and download that essay on Dorothy. But I don’t think that’s an issue about politics. I think that’s an issue about the mercilessness of talent. Like, I read things Joan Didion wrote in 1965, don’t care about the politics anymore, I just want to hear her voice. I was reading an essay that she wrote—has a great title, it’s called, “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind”—about the movie industry. I’m just reading it because I want to be inside her head. It’s about these movies that I’ve never watched or would never watch, like Judgement of Nuremberg or Ship of Fools, but I just want to have the pleasure. Like, I haven’t read Joan Didion for a few days, and my brain is telling me in this piece she’s especially funny or especially alive, and I want to be back in that headspace, and so I’m going to reread it. And John Gregory Dunne was also a writer, and he was writing novels and essays throughout that period. I’ve never read one of his books. I don’t think it was especially hard for him, being her spouse, I just think, my sense of what I want to read is leading me toward Joan and not toward John. And that is a mercilessness, in a way, about talent.

But not every talented person is going to get published.

That’s what Hardwick’s essay is about. [laughs] So, my mom has been on a 19th century jag for a while. She didn’t necessarily want to read Middlemarch because it’s very long. And she very much loves Emerson and Nietzsche. I kept saying, “You really should read Middlemarch.” And then she read it, and she was fucking thrilled. And she read Mill on the Floss, she read Daniel Deronda, she read—

She had to use a male pseudonym to get those books published!

But here’s the thing! Everyone knew that she was George Eliot. I mean, the weird thing is, I’ve forgotten her real name.

Mary … something. [laughs]

Mary Evans, I think? But she found a way. Like, she had to publish under a male name, as did all the Brontes. Currer and Acton Bell. But they found a way to get their work out, even when it was much harder. The other way to look at it is, even though it was much harder for a woman to be a writer in the 19th century, their talent found a way. So that’s why, in a situation like Zelda, it’s like, if the Bronte sisters could find a way for all three of them to publish, I imagine that we’re getting the best sense of Zelda’s talent, even though it certainly wasn’t great being married to Scott Fitzgerald. And it wasn’t just like, that’s just a weird taste we have now. George Eliot was seen as the preeminent writer of that era. Do you know what I mean?

I do. But I’m saying it’s harder for her than it would have been for a man.

But she got it done!

She did get it done. Marginalized voices are always getting it done. I’m just saying, there are more barriers.

Imagine what it took for her to convince people to publish her, right? And not to do poems. I went and saw the Emily Dickinson show in New York. They have the first show of her manuscripts right now in the Morgan Library. It was hard for her to publish in the way we’re talking about. George Eliot was writing mammoth books. That must have been difficult for people to take a buyer on at that time. But for every group that’s in the process of not being as marginalized by these shitty people that control stuff, the people like … for Henry Roth to be publishing in the 1930s, or Philip Roth to be publishing in the ‘50s, that was hard. Or for Richard Wright to be publishing in the ‘40s, or James Baldwin as a gay black man to be publishing in the ‘50s, their talent finds a way to push through it. That’s a great thing about libraries. In a way, they’re democracies of talent. It’s one of the reasons I feel, when I visualize an ideal Borgesian library, it feels like a democracy to me in a way that it doesn’t feel like a democracy to you.

It’s a democracy to an extent. But I feel there are writers that we’re never going to get to know. Again, I don’t think it’s an either/or thing, where it’s either a democracy or it’s not.

Do you remember when Gay Talese said a very strange thing about female nonfiction writers last spring? He said, “I like Joan Didion, but I like people who hang around with those characters.” And it’s like, Joan Didion, she was hanging out with the Manson family! When did you hang out with the Manson family? But like, Joan Didion, have you read The White Album?

I have.

Like, she’s hanging out with the Panthers. She’s being waved by a guy armed with a shotgun up to a room with other people with shotguns, and that would have been hard for her. Would have been hard for me. But she really wanted to write that piece. I guess I may have more faith in editors and readers than it seems like you do.

I think talent will prevail, but not always. I don’t want you to think I’m this cynical person. I’m a little cynical, but also optimistic about a lot of it.

Okay, but I was talking 19th century British fiction, and it’s very funny because it’s like, aside from Dickens, anyone who was writing British fiction who was any good was a woman. It wasn’t because people wanted to highlight female voices. They did the best work. And that’s what I mean. Think about how stuffy Victorian Britain was. That wouldn’t be how they wanted to present themselves, but it’s very hard to be dishonest with yourself about your taste. I don’t watch Freaks and Geeks because it irritates me that their T-shirts are too fresh, right? People’s reading tastes, even at the time, they were like, “This is the best stuff we’re going to read.” So I do have a lot of faith in the honesty of people when they’re reading alone with a book, and they’re looking at the page, and they’re thinking, does this feel alive to me, and does this make my own life alive to me?

There’s this great thing that Proust said about writing. He said he meant his long book to be an optical instrument in which the reader would read their own life. Isn’t that great? That is what books do. They give you a way to read your own life. If the lens, if what Proust called the optical instrument, if it’s not working, you don’t see the writer’s life, and you don’t see your own life, and you can’t really lie to yourself about whether that optical instrument is working or not. And that’s why you would end up, with 19th century British fiction, with all the writers aside from Dickens being female because they were doing the best work, because they were the ones who let you see the world and your own life more clearly than you could without it.

I start to ask him what he’s reading right now, but his publicist approaches us again. We are twenty minutes over the time limit, and he has to go. As he’s putting his coat on and going out the door, he tells me about J.M. Coetzee’s latest and the new Laura Kipniss, and, also, that I really should check out that Elizabeth Hardwick.

Between worn arms, near the dark stove, 
     Orange ears twitching, weaving cat dreams; 
Sawdust-tailed beggar, warm friend to all, 
     To be again graced, the scarred seat waits
— “Red,” by Gene Hall, 1995

McSorley’s Old Ale House, the Manhattan landmark where my father has tended bar since 1972, has always attracted poets, but my favorite verse about the pub wasn’t written by any of the heralded bards who drank there over the years. Not the E. E. Cummings one that begins “I was sitting in mcsorley’s. / Outside it was New York and beautifully snowing. / Inside snug and evil.” Not Reuel Denney’s “McSorley’s Bar,” which contains a couplet whose beauty never fails to leave me gobsmacked: “The grey-haired men considered from their chairs / How time is emptied like a single ale.” Nothing by Dylan Thomas, who never published a poem about the bar but who drank there often enough to get eighty-sixed once upon a time. Not Woody Guthrie, a poet of sorts, who visited McSorley’s in 1943, when LIFE magazine photographed him strumming his guitar for a group of workingmen huddled over mugs of ale in the front room. And not Joseph Mitchell, whose New Yorker prose about the bar carried the simple beauty of poetry and perhaps best captured the essence of McSorley’s.

The poem that has always sent me reeling with joy and heartbreak and nostalgia wasn’t published anywhere, and it was written by Gene Hall, a McSorley’s character best known for fixing anything that broke inside the bar with gaffer’s tape. Clocks, chairs, typewriters—it didn’t matter. Tape was the answer. Gene was a retired member of the merchant marine who lived in one of the apartments above McSorley’s. During the couple of decades he spent at 15 East Seventh Street, Gene functioned as a quick-fix handyman who could be called downstairs at a moment’s notice to patch up minor malfunctions around the bar. Perhaps as a testament to the practical skills he picked up during years at sea, or maybe because it took a full-blown catastrophe to get anyone at McSorley’s to call a professional plumber or electrician, Gene’s short-term solutions often became semipermanent. Gene was quiet—it’s easy for me to recall his black mustache and dark bottle-cap glasses, but I can’t remember speaking to him once during my childhood, when my father would bring me to work on Saturday mornings. But my father and the other bartenders I looked up to talked about Gene with a measure of reverence that made it clear he wasn’t just another local screwball who hung around the bar to pick up odd jobs. And even if Gene and I never shared a face-to-face connection, I felt like he was whispering in my ear every time I read the poem he wrote in memory of Sawdust, the McSorley’s cat I grew up with.

“Red” is a four-line poem about a bar cat, an orange tabby named both Sawdust and Red. My dad and I called him Sawdust because his fur reminded us of the wood chips the waiters spread across McSorley’s floor every morning. Some of the old timers preferred a simpler nod to his color: Red. He was the last great cat to spend his entire life—1985 to 1995—at the bar. I grew up dangling strips of cold-cut ham and turkey for him to claw out of the air, then sitting beside him and petting him in his favorite spot, a chair behind the potbelly stove. He was fearless and outgoing—my father could set a mug of water on the bar and Sawdust would leap up and start lapping it up between amazed customers. He was daring—my dad loved to tell the story of the time Sawdust sprang from a hidden, dark corner of the bar to sink his claws into a banker’s thigh, right in the spot where a roach had passed moments before. Mischievous and tender and ever ready for some new friend to scratch behind his ears, Sawdust was adored by pretty much every person who met him, and he died too soon.

When my father returned from work one Friday evening in 1995 and told me that Sawdust had developed some form of feline cancer and had to be put to sleep, I remember thinking it was impossible. He was only ten. At home, my family’s neurotic house cat Bismarck (obtained through a McSorley’s cat litter and distant cousins with Sawdust) was ancient, nasty, and showed no signs of slowing down. Why’d we have to lose Sawdust?

Gene must have felt the same way, because he typed four timeless lines about the cat, which were then framed and hung on the wall behind the stove, just above the chair where Sawdust loved to sleep. The final image in Gene’s poem, of the empty seat, marked by Sawdust’s scratches and awaiting an impossible return, brings the image of the cat coiled in slumber straight to the front of my mind, as if I’m seeing it in real life. And at the same time, it reminds me how forevermore I’ll see Sawdust only in my memories.

I love this poem because it connects me to a specific time in my bar upbringing. If not for that overpowering bit of nostalgia, though, I’d choose any of my father’s poems as the most vital bits of McSorley’s verse ever put down on paper.

*

My father grew up in Euclid, Ohio, and moved to New York City in 1967, when he was twenty-two. He got drunk in McSorley’s on his first night in Manhattan and wound up moving into an apartment above the bar in 1970, which led to him working there a couple years later. His first decade in the city was defined by books and booze. He arrived in New York a heavy drinker, the habit passed down from an abusive alcoholic father, and before long my dad settled into a routine of polishing off one quart bottle of cheap vodka or brandy per day, plus a round or two of McSorley’s ale whenever he passed through the bar.

He kept himself together enough to hold down his shifts at McSorley’s and to enroll in the MFA creative writing program at City College, whose faculty back then included Adrienne Rich, Joseph Heller, and the two authors in charge of my father’s seminars, Anthony Burgess and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. After nights of slinging ale and cheddar plates served with raw onions and a sleeve of Saltines, he’d trudge upstairs to his apartment and peck away at his typewriter until five or six in the morning, fueling himself with sips of Tab and brandy. His first completed manuscript was a 900-page epic—a father-son coming-of-age tale mixed with a spy thriller and framed by the Jason and the Argonauts myth. Then, my father attempted a stream-of-consciousness novel written from the point of view of two brain-damaged stroke survivors that, in the style of Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s Her, contained no punctuation. His next project was less formally daring but still plenty imaginative: a futuristic dystopia in which New York is overrun by giant, man-eating rats.

None of my father’s manuscripts sold, and as years passed his ratio of time spent drinking versus time spent writing tipped heavily toward getting soused. After spending a drunken night in May 1975 standing on his fire escape, looking down at the sidewalk in front of McSorley’s, and thinking he should throw himself upon it, my dad decided to get clean. He began attending twelve-step meetings and gave up writing, which was tied together with his romanticized self-image as a depressive, alcoholic writer.

In 1976, about a year after my father got sober, he traveled to Vancouver, British Columbia, to visit Cates Park, where Malcolm Lowry wrote much of Under the Volcano. It was an alcoholic’s final pilgrimage, my dad’s chance to pay his last respects to this patron saint of drunkards. When my father was drinking, Lowry had provided him with a fatalistic ideal of how addiction, even at its most destructive, could produce something transcendent. Sure, Lowry drank himself to death. And by most accounts, he sank into abject misery as his alcoholism progressed and gradually overwhelmed his literary talent. But along the way, he wrote Under the Volcano. Was that not worth it?

When my father was depressed and drinking, the answer to that question—fucking A it’s worth it!—seemed clear. When he saw no way out, when he assumed he’d just keep boozing till he died—the dead alcoholic son of a dead alcoholic father—that inevitability could even feel inspiring: I know I’m screwed. My dad fucked me up as a kid and I’ve only fucked myself up worse. But while I’m around, maybe I can create something that matters.

So when my father stood along a path named Malcolm Lowry Walk on a raw and gray Pacific Northwest afternoon and looked out on Vancouver Harbour, not only was he saying goodbye to the vodka-infused self-hatred that he’d carried throughout his adult life, but he was also walking away from the writerly ambition that had been his sense of purpose in those years. That creative impulse had kept him from being just another Bowery wino, but the practice of writing had become too tangled with the habit of drinking for my father to give up one and continue the other. To have a shot at a better life, he had to quit both.

So he wrapped rubber bands around his manuscripts, shoved them inside leather portfolios, and shoved those inside shoe boxes: the Argonautica novel; the punctuation-less screed about bedridden stroke victims trapped in their own minds; the sci-fi tale of New York terrorized by two-hundred-pound rats. He locked them away in file cabinets and put his energy toward staying clean, working at McSorley’s, and devoting himself to family life. He married my mom in 1979 and they had me three years later.Besides love notes to my mother and birthday poems for me, my father gave up creative writing for the better part of two decades.

But he never let go of the written word. When I was young, the first thing my friends would say upon visiting our apartment was always, “You have a lot of books.” My mother, who’d left the hotel and corporate kitchens she had cooked in before I was born to teach hospitality management and culinary arts at a CUNY campus in downtown Brooklyn, had a wall of cookbooks opposite our front door. Each room in our place had its own mammoth bookcase—a shelf for my father’s accumulated dictionaries, musty Modern Library editions of Crime and Punishment and Moby-Dick with their onionskin-thin pages, a corner filled with novels and essays and letters by Lowry, Vonnegut, Norman Mailer, and other practitioners of the virtuosic, manly prose my father admired in the seventies. Even the TV“entertainment center” in our living room was more bookcase than anything else. The floor-to-ceiling complex of shelves and cabinets was entirely stuffed with books, except for a small, square space in the middle to house a television set.

Although I don’t remember seeing my father sit down at a typewriter when I was a kid, I understood that he’d been a writer, saw his creative writing MFA diploma hanging on our wall, and heard about his unpublished novels. He tried to build the foundation of a literary sensibility in me, insisting that we spend Sunday mornings reading Huckleberry Finn aloud to each other as soon as I got far enough in school to speak full sentences. It didn’t work. Twain time might as well have been Sunday school to me, and until my mid-teens I pretty much always chose going to the movies with my mom or playing pickup basketball over cracking open a book.

At times, I could even be contemptuous of my father’s passion for reading and writing. I have no clue what motivated this occasional nastiness, other than the wanton tantrums of adolescence and the impulse to lash out at one’s parents. It was during one of these moments when I committed what I now think of as the most shameful act of my youth.

I was nine or ten years old. It was a Sunday afternoon and my parents took me to a diner a few blocks north of our apartment for lunch. I can’t remember what, if anything, made me angry that day. Probably, my dad had called me out for getting outhustled on a rebound during a rec-league basketball game that morning. Late in the meal, as I picked over my remaining french fries and avoided a mayonnaise-oozing cup of coleslaw, my mother asked me about a recent playdate with a friend from elementary school, inadvertently hitting a nerve with my father.

After the playdate, when my dad had come to pick me up from the other family’s apartment, my friend’s mom gushed to him about friends of theirs whose son would soon publish his first book. The kid was the same age as me, and his forthcoming book was some cutesy how-to gimmick about growing up in New York from the point of view of a real third grader. The notion drove my dad crazy. The child author’s family was wealthy and connected: address on Park Avenue, Dad in finance, Mom a high-powered media somebody, attending the prestigious and completely unaffordable Dalton School. He was the kind of kid whose parents dress him up in Brooks Brothers suits—and who actually likes it. He was the type of character guaranteed to rankle my father’s working-class sensibility. And because this kid’s family knew everybody who was anybody, this nine-year-old was getting a chance to achieve a dream that had eluded my father.

“Next time Rafe goes over there you better pick him up,” he told my mom. “I don’t think I can take that again.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Well, I walked up there and the girl’s mom wouldn’t stop jabbering about some other kid they know who’s so brilliant and who’s going to publish a book. Give me a break. It’s just some rich kid whose parents pulled strings.”

Even at that young age, I felt aligned with my father’s sense of class conflict. I’d never met this boy, but I didn’t like him, either. But I was still stewing over our basketball argument, so I decided to say something I knew would hurt my father: “You’re just mad because he has a book and you don’t.”

As soon as the words jumped off my tongue, I knew I’d crossed a line. My chest tightened, and I felt like a fist had risen up from my belly and lodged itself in my throat. I stared down at the paper place mat in front of me, filled with little square ads for neighborhood dry cleaners and bakeries. I couldn’t look up at my dad, who didn’t even respond. He didn’t show anger or sadness or disappointment, and that made me curse myself even harder. Why the hell did I say that? Why would I call my father, whom I loved and just about worshipped, a failure? I didn’t even believe what I’d said, but I said it because I wanted to stick it to him. He probably doesn’t even remember that moment, but now, almost twenty-five years later, I feel sick thinking about the silence around that table and the look on his face when I raised my eyes from the place mat. His face was empty—just numb. As if his only thought were, How could my son do this to me?

*

My jeers that day were especially hurtful because during those years my father had begun to consider changing careers. He was a little more than twenty years into his tenure at McSorley’s, and many of the guys he’d worked with and grown close to in the eighties had left the bar for more fulfilling lines of work. Noone gave up his front-room waiter shifts to become a college math professor; another waiter, Fuller, got hired as a manager at the flagship Barnes & Noble bookstore in Union Square; Farnan, one of my dad’s partners behind the bar, married a surgeon and moved to Connecticut; and there was Bart, my father, staying put behind the taps and wondering if he should also try something else before it was too late.

He got close. For two years, he rode the train up to Hunter College on his off days to take graduate courses in education. He earned the necessary credits for a degree, wrote his master’s thesis, and gave serious thought to becoming a high school English teacher. But he couldn’t complete the program and receive his certification without a half-year of student teaching experience, and that would require him to quit McSorley’s and spend six months working for free. He could have made it work—my mother’s City College job was secure, and because she and my father had already paid off the remainder of the mortgage she and her previous husband had taken out on our West Village apartment, my parents were carrying hardly any debt.

But the prospect of not earning for half a year made my father question how badly he wanted to run a high school English class. On one hand, he was eager to try something different and he believed he could develop into a great teacher. With his passion for the written word, his ability to read people and treat them with appropriate levels of compassion or toughness, and his bar-honed street smarts and sense of humor, he knew he had it in him. But was it worth everything he’d be forced to give up? It would take years before his teacher’s salary caught up with the money he was already taking home from McSorley’s. He’d no longer be able to work nights—a schedule that allowed him to spend time with me in the afternoon and attend nearly all my basketball games. And what if he got stuck in one of the city’s underserved and overwhelmed public high schools, forced to spend his class time maintaining order among forty or fifty rowdy, hormonal teenagers instead of teaching the work of the novelists and poets and journalists he loved?

In the end, it took two years of course work and arriving right at the edge of a decision to leave McSorley’s for my father to realize he wanted to stay at the bar. He didn’t need to change careers to find satisfaction. He just had to find a way to inject the bartender’s life with a greater sense of purpose. The solution was obvious: He had to write again.

My dad likes to say that the novels he wrote in his twenties never got published because he wasn’t sober and clearheaded enough to complete a fully realized work of fiction. That theory is as good as any, but here’s another: Those books were all some form of imitation. They didn’t really spring from my father’s experience and imagination. The reimagining of the Argonautica myth was a nod to James Joyce and Ulysses. The stroke novel was a stab at Ferlinghetti’s avant-garde formal experiments. The attack of the giant rats book is tougher to trace, but its blend of sci-fi absurdism and sense of impending doom could have been influenced by Vonnegut and Burgess, my father’s grad school instructors. My father had spent a decade working on three books, but not one of them was truly his.

It took those unrealized novels, plus a couple of decades at McSorley’s and an aborted attempt at changing careers, for my dad to finally settle into his voice—that of a wizened, slightly weary everyman bar poet. After he decided to junk the plot to become an English teacher, my father began work on The McSorley Poems.

During my last few years of high school, he was nocturnal. On Sunday, Monday, and Thursday nights, he’d arrive home from McSorley’s around 2 a.m., take a shower, and then park in front of our family’s massive desktop computer. His workstation was set up in a corner across from my bedroom, and I got used to waking up in the middle of the night and seeing the glow from his monitor creeping toward me through the crack at the bottom of my door. I’d fall back asleep to the staccato clack of his fingers on the keyboard.

He went on like this—stealing hours on the graveyard shift, writing and revising and refining between two and six in the morning—until one day I woke up before school and saw a binder on the kitchen table, right where I usually sat down to eat my cereal. I flipped it open and found an early manuscript of The McSorley Poems, by Geoffrey Bartholomew.

*

I don’t really like poetry. I blame myself, not the poets or the form. Maybe I’m too impatient, maybe I’ve got the wrong temperament, or maybe I’m just too simpleminded, but I’ve always been the kind of reader who prefers plain, straightforward writing about a subject that interests me. There may be beauty and mystery in some poetry’s broken syntax and delicate metaphors, but often, by the time I’ve decoded a line’s meaning—if I’ve decoded its meaning—my first response hews toward, “Why bother?”

But The McSorley Poems spoke to me. Feel free to chalk that up to filial piety—I was going to find a way to like the book even if my father had decided to write the entire collection in nineteenth-century Gaelic. But from the first pages of the manuscript, I found myself engaged. In every line of every poem I recognized the artifacts and characters I’d grown up around and felt them come alive with language.

The first third of the binder described various McSorley’s artifacts—the turkey wishbones that had been dangling above the taps since 1917, when a group of regulars hung them for good luck before shipping out serve in World War One; the stuffed jackalope behind the bar; Harry Houdini’s handcuffs dangling from the ceiling as if the great escape artist had been hanging there with them, freed himself, and left behind a souvenir. The middle section consisted of poems devoted to “Unsorted Regulars, Misfits, Liars, Heroes & Psychos.” The language was raw, peppered with black humor and full of tragedy—a reminder that for all the laughter and communal goodwill I associated with McSorley’s, the men and women who are drawn into the bar’s orbit typically arrive with some scars. These were my father’s people, the alcoholics and loners and deviants he made his life with, and even at their darkest, the poems shined a light on his characters’ humanity. The first stanza of his poem for a deceased former coworker named Doc Zory made me feel as if I’d finally met a figure who existed in my head as some kind of long-lost uncle:

Big Z was my old man 
first Gypsy violinist 
     to play Carnegie Hall 
Ma died young on us 
so he taught me the axe 
honing an edge to call shadows 
until beauty was airborne 
I’d hear him at wolf’s hour 
     that moan of catgut 
     barely touching 
then madly bowing 
wrenching their love 
when he died 
I joined the Navy

The plainspoken lines were a step and a half removed from prose poetry, and my father was telling the stories of a career’s worth of bar denizens. The manuscript was a history as much as it was a collection of verse, with the third and final section reaching back to portray Old John McSorley and the bar’s founding family through a blend of archival research and my father’s imagining of the emotional lives of the Irish clan that came to the United States in the 1850s and opened the bar under its original name, The Old House at Home.

He put the finishing touches on the manuscript in 2000, my senior year of high school, and gave the book a title: The McSorley Poems: Voices from New York City’s Oldest Pub. Twenty-five years after he’d earned his master’s in creative writing, my father found his voice, and it happened to be in the bar where he drank on his first night in Manhattan, back in 1967. McSorley’s cast of sad sacks and strivers was a perfect fit for my father’s storytelling poetics, filled with the pathos and hope and explosions of humor that made pub life so rich.

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My mother reached out to the handful of friends she’d made over the years who worked in publishing. Regulars at the bar offered to pitch The McSorley Poems to their cousins and nieces who worked for the Times and public radio. Fuller, the former waiter who’d left to work at Barnes & Noble, vowed to give The McSorley Poems choice placement near the front of the store whenever the final product was released. Despite the best efforts of the McSorley’s extended family, however, my dad’s poetry never found a publisher.

My mother and I ended up feeling more disappointed when publishers shunned The McSorley Poems than my dad did. He approached the project with a practical understanding of how difficult it was to publish any book of poetry, let alone a collection written by a fifty-five-year-old first-time author who hadn’t been part of the literary or academic poetry scene since the late seventies. While my mom and I licked our wounds and snuffed out our fantasies about Clint Eastwood growing a mustache to play my father with tight-lipped dignity in a Hollywood adaptation of my dad’s life and career, my father was researching how to self-publish the book. He found a printer who specialized in small press runs and had experience with other poetry collections. He registered The McSorley Poems with the Library of Congress and applied for an ISBN number. He even lined up a deal with a local book distributor to have the book sold in New York bookstores, including the Barnes & Noble where Fuller worked.

He printed up the first batch—a run of two thousand books—near the end of 2001, and the following February he held a launch party at McSorley’s. That night, he stood on a table in the back room and read “Minnie the Cat” and other selections for a giddy crowd of regulars, coworkers past and present, and unassuming drinkers who just happened to pick the evening of a book launch to grab a pair of ales. Over the next few months he was written up in community newspapers and did readings and interviews for a handful of talk radio shows.

My father planned to sell the book at the bar, on a McSorley Poems website, and at bookstores for as long as they’d keep it on shelves. Hopefully, he’d manage to sell out the entire first print run. Well, The McSorley Poems is now in its fifth printing. A reporter from the Los Angeles Times stopped by the bar in 2010 and wound up profiling Bart the bartender poet almost ten years after the book came out. After the first run, my dad has sold the book mostly in person, at McSorley’s, at a rate of about thirty copies each month. When he reaches the end of the current batch he’ll have hit six thousand sold. Unless you’re the poet laureate, those are damn good numbers, better than what some nationally recognized poets sell.

Over the years, as he sold and signed copy after copy of The McSorley Poems while working his shift, the rest of the staff noticed an unfortunate pattern. Whenever would-be buyers asked to peruse the book, it had an uncanny knack for opening to page fifty. While that’s not the exact middle of the book—the page count is 112—it seemed that some physical characteristic of the binding made page fifty the most likely to open first. We inspected the main bar copy for dog-ears, strategic bends, or some other kind of manipulation meant to increase the odds of the book opening there: nothing. The paperback showed no signs of tampering, and besides, the pattern held true over multiple copies of The McSorley Poems. Somehow, with mysterious frequency, when customers first picked up the book, the first poem they saw was right there on page fifty. Its title: “Rectum Lips.”

There are probably a dozen poems in the book that are darker and more graphic, but none with such a smutty title. It’s a short, three-stanza story written in the voice of a meek gay customer who gets caught peeping in the men’s room. It ends tenderly, with the character criticizing the bartenders’ nickname for him—Rectum Lips. It isn’t apt, the character says, because “I just like to watch.”

It’s unclear how many sales my father has lost to “Rectum Lips” over the years. The other barmen have taken the book’s stubborn insistence on opening at page fifty as further proof that there is no governing superstition at McSorley’s more powerful than Murphy’s Law: If anything can go wrong, it will. More often than not, however, The McSorley Poems overcomes its first impression, and the customers flipping through the book absorb the language and decide whether or not it sings to them.

The McSorley Poems never led to a Clint Eastwood movie, but it marked a far more meaningful achievement for my father. He’d turned his creative energy into a work of art that deepened the bond thousands of readers already felt with McSorley’s, and he made the leap from being a guy who always dreamed of writing a book to being an author.

*

I wasn’t able to attend the book launch of The McSorley Poems in 2002. I was in Illinois, a second-year journalism student at Northwestern University. I thought I’d skip a couple of days of class to fly home and see my father’s reading at the bar, but just before I had planned to book my ticket, I bombed a statistics midterm. It was the first time I’d screwed up on a test I had studied for, and I panicked. I called home, asked for advice about what to do, and talked myself into staying at school to focus on pulling up my grade. I got an A in the course, but looking back on that winter, the only thing I can remember is sitting through stats class the Tuesday morning before my father’s reading, and hating myself for missing his moment.

Fortunately, I got a second chance. In October 2012, my father released The McSorley Poems Volume II: Light or Dark. He’d spent much of the previous five years chipping away at a second volume, which he planned to sell from behind the bar alongside the first book. Volume two begins with a miniature epic—a fourteen-page, 160-couplet poem depicting historical events in and around the bar from 1854 to 2011. From there, the collection features a familiar mix of verse devoted to McSorley characters and antiquities. The book is dedicated to me, and my father asked me to introduce him at the launch, another back-room Tuesday-evening affair at the bar.

That night, I stood on a bank of seats in the corner near the kitchen and told a crowd full of McSorley’s regulars who’d known me since I was a toddler how proud I was of my father’s work. Then he stood up and read “Fathers and Sons,” which now trails only Gene Hall’s “Red” as my favorite McSorley poem:

When I turned twenty-one 
my Dad took me here 
we got a good buzz on 
we actually talked, too 
I don’t know about what 
women, a job, the future 
the big hazy things that 
you don’t listen to your 
old man about anyway

Well, ten years later 
I got the call to meet him 
he said to get the same 
table, if possible, and I did 
the one by the coal stove 
it was early November 
a gray quilt on the city 
I got cancer, he said 
it’ll kill me but not yet

You pick a special place 
to tell your son you’re 
dying, it’s that simple 
he knew I could go back 
and back again, though 
it’s not much to hold onto 
sit down with a couple ales 
and wonder at how fast 
all this shit disappears

It’s probably not a perfect poem. But damn if it ain’t true to life. Every McSorley’s barman and woman has a story like this: the time a customer brought his ailing brother for what might be their last drink together, and the front-room waiter cleared an entire table of its customers so they could have some peace and quiet. McSorley’s is a place for rabble-rousing, a place where you can get kicked out for not drinking to excess, but it’s also a place where people come to share some of the most intimate moments of their lives. I don’t want to think of the day when my dad and I have to have a talk like the one in “Fathers and Sons,” but if it comes, I know where it will happen, and I know how much the time we spent working behind the bar together will have meant to us.

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Adapted from Two and Two: McSorley’s, My Dad, and Me by Rafe Bartholomew, published May 2017 by Little, Brown and Company.

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In the morning the waves glowed like uranium, a deep sweat coming up off the seafloor. It was beautiful but it was nerve-racking too, being that close to the future.

Then a bloom of moon jellies drifted in, their tentacles dragging behind them like purses. I thought it was a sign, some kind of big money omen, but Joelle said we should get ready to move on, start trucking north—where we were really headed.

For the past month we’d been “down beach,” less than a mile from Atlantic City, camping out in a mail-order bungalow belonging to Thea’s sun-shriveled grandfather. Me, Thea, and Joelle—we’d had it to ourselves—one hundred square feet of no electricity, plus the washed-out fire pit and jack pines.

“I want to try the Taj,” I said. “I have that feeling.”

That feeling had done well for me so far.

At least it had kept Thea and Joelle in tallboys and blobs of Coppertone, and that day, for lunch, we had lobster from a shack that seemed too legit to be real—a wonder that in between the boardwalk’s Shoot the Gimps and the constant grind of tattoo joints we’d found J’ean, the Lobster Man, two samples from his morning’s load of big’uns in his baloney-colored fists.

J’ean was headed north too, back up buggin’ lobster on Eastpot.

“New Jersey lobster?” said Joelle. “How shitty does that sound? I mean, by comparison.”

J’ean just shrugged. “Goin’ to breeze up today,” he said through the slice of his hand.

That put an extra volt through me. I loved storms. I turned toward the ocean. It was still August but now the waves looked like sandwich foil that had been crumpled up and hucked away. I was in a hurry. The boardwalk was an ongoing line of cracked wood; it stretched forever.

“Let’s take a cart-pusher,” I said.

A rickshaw cart was extravagant, but we were leaving soon. Joelle had a job to get to in New York—she referred to it vaguely without offering even one giveaway detail—and Thea’s sister had just popped out twins into the Grey Goose-saturated swamps of western Connecticut.

Babies! How wild. We bought them pint-sized T-shirts and joked about their names. Felix. Maude. We loved them already as an idea.

Thea was a week late for her obligatory nanny gig. No biggie, she said. That was Thea. We’d been something two years ago, had been so looped on pints of tequila and what she called sloth weed that neither of us remembered much. The non-memory was connective.

BEACH! Thea had said on the phone, a month earlier. She knew I was depressed in New Brunshwick. Bored and hot. Joelle’s here, she said. You’ll like her. You’ll see.

But Joelle was different. My crush now seemed like something I’d been born with. Plus Joelle was smarter than me: her brain had that slaughterous left hook.

“The Taj,” I said, aloud.

The long line of cart-pushers stretched toward the casino action. It was a casual, twenty-four-hour kind of job. We passed two snoring against the cracked vinyl benches of their contraptions but the next guy along looked scarily awake.

“I haven’t slept in three days,” he said.

“Awesome!” said Thea.

“Really!” he promised.

He must have been fifty, a meth-head probably. I assumed they all were. His hair was sticking up but he had a nice face.

*

There was a haze over the boardwalk. I couldn’t tell if it was the heat or the breeze up, sucking aloft those clouds of sand. I felt clammy pressed in between the two of them. A line of sweat slurred along my chest binder. There was a time when I was sure I would get surgery, when I stayed awake late staring at the plaster wall. I’d made an appointment with the surgeon even, checked the box: payment plan. A giddy, raw feeling. How could it not mean change?

The cart jerked forward. I stuck my palm between Joelle’s jean shorts and the seat. We hadn’t been alone together since we first mashed faces two nights ago, which meant sex with our clothes on, a bunch of fingers, punk shots at best. We lay next to each other in the violet half-light of the bungalow’s only room—not caring much about Thea but pretending to care, keeping sort of quiet. We were accelerating particles about to separate. Soon we’d be peeled apart.

“It’s just a body,” Joelle had said, when I bucked her hand away from where she was trying to insert it.

“Sure,” I’d said, bleakly.

“Okay, yeah, it’s internal. But it doesn’t have to be domestic.”

I rolled away from her, from the king-sized futon the three of us shared, our only furniture, the raft in the middle of our floor. I tugged the sweat-stained material back into position over the slack mounds that on good days I pretended were giant pecs. Joelle leaned down and put her thumbs against my temples.

“It’s Thea, right?” she whispered. “You’re so shy!”

“Yeah,” I said.

This had nothing to do with Thea, but then again, I hoped it did. I was a concrete bunker pretending to be a friendly, all-access picnic area. I scrubbed a small pile of sand across a floorboard. Joelle was naked more than not.

The next time it happened, she stared at me from far away.

“Why don’t you just cut them off?”

*

Our cart neared the strip. First was Bally’s. Bally’s had a Wild West front, with sheriffs and hookers painted all over it. It was ridiculous but secretly it turned me on.

“Yee-haw,” said the cart-pusher.

“Get a room,” said Thea, elbowing me.

My body was trying to wedge itself underneath Joelle’s. It must have been something floating from her pores.

Two teenagers ran out of the air-conditioned saloon doors, flinging off their Nets jerseys when they hit the hot. I stared at the bank of their bare torsos. There was a sink in my old studio building with a sign hanging next to it. “Black Mold,” it said, a Sharpie-drawn arrow pointing down into the dirty plastic interior. My painting summer was gone and not much to show. I’d drawn exactly one still life: an oyster and a flattish grape.

“Can’t go in Bally’s anymore,” said our cart-pusher, nodding it by.

We were cruising faster now.

“When I started this job I was pants size thirty-eight,” he huffed. “Now look at me, I’m thirty, thirty-two!”

He wore his expression like a founding father. Someone you could trust.

*

In the Taj Mahal, gold chandeliers spaghettied from the ceiling, gaudy and awful. I played Frontier, drawn into the vortex of radioactive desertscapes and howling coyotes, and then immediately hit it big on MJ’s Moonwalk. A thousand bucks on my second spin, zing zing zing! “Billie Jean” exploded from the speakers while a rocket sprayed MJ with moondust.

Joelle sat next to me, smoking.

“Let’s get a room,” she said.

When you score like that the hospitality staff comes over—they don’t want to let you alone. We stared up at two managers and a tired-looking hostess whose sole job it was to get me drunk and playing again, tout de suite.

“We’re very happy to have you here, Mr. …” They trailed off. “Very happy.”

The manager in charge smiled olympically and handed me a plastic card.

“We’ve put you in the Chairman’s Tower,” he said, “ocean view.”

“Yeah sure!” I said, chewing my lip. I was sweating but I wasn’t sure why. Everything was the same, but outside it looked very dark.

“Do you have any tequila?” I said. They hustled it over to me in a plastic Taj cup. It must have been a slow day. Thea had evaporated, probably reading at the bar, and I thought about strolling over to her and swinging her around as the skirt-thing with legs she’d recently been wearing swooped. I’d always been comfortable and drunk with Thea, half-blind, in a warm cave.

Then Joelle and I were in the elevator, grinning, pressing all the buttons at once. I clamped my voucher ticket. A thousand bucks, we said back and forth to each other. A thousand bucks! It was that free kind of money that you could do anything with. Joelle wanted me to cash it in so we could throw it all over the bed.

“Just for fun,” she said. “Then you can call that surgeon.”

I thought about the old Biggie video, the stacks of cash flying everywhere, the helicopters, the epic yacht.

“It’s only fifty twenties,” I said. “Is that really enough?”

*

Our room faced east as promised. There were smudges on the mirror and cigarette burns pocked into the heavy carpet. We sat at the little coffee table and I stared at Joelle. My neck felt prickly. She’d gotten tan, really dark. She was Italian. Her Italian-ness and double-jointed thumbs seemed like perfect chemistry. She wiggled them idly as she smoked. Now the water looked like a series of yellow planks and the sky was hot and gray. Joelle took off her shirt in a motion so convincing I wasn’t sure she’d ever had it on. I wanted to ask her about the job in New York but stopped. The room felt thick after all our time out on the beach. The wall-to-wall. The so-far-undented carpet space near my feet where we should fuck, astral wand, blow our minds et cetera, after, and only after, we did it in the shower and on the ample bed. I twisted my plastic cup of warm tequila.

“I should get some ice for this,” I said.

In the hall I began to walk toward the elevator. Soon enough, I was back downstairs. Grit had settled on the machines in my brief absence. I re–fed in my ticket and thought about moon jellies. They were see-thru but vacant. It’s just a body, said Joelle. On the screen, the aliens and their queen, Michael, were changing colors and shapes before my eyes.

The $1,000 became $963. A minor subtraction. I would’ve spent it anyhow. Plus, I still had that feeling.

When I looked up again, it said $815 in the lower left corner. I should find Thea, I thought. She’d love this. I wanted to show her the whole ticket, the $1,000. I increased to MAXBET. Wind blammed against the boardwalk-facing plate glass, the windows of my chest.

MAXBETMAXBETMAXBET.

There was no one around; the place seemed practically evacuated. This is how the game works, I told myself. If you quit now, it’s got you, you’re a real loser. In front of me, craters opened up in unison, spewing confetti. Each eruption seemed like a sure win. But still the left corner dwindled. I began to think of Joelle, topless in the room. It seemed dumb that I had left. Worse than dumb. Abyssal.

I knew I should take the ticket out, but I couldn’t. The lizard part of my brain kept saying: the next spin is the one. I had another tequila. Then a few more.

I knew a guy back in Albuquerque whose foot went numb from a skateboarding accident, then turned an angry celery color. Eventually they had to cut it off. He was okay through the operation but in the recovery room, goopy with anesthesia, he became obsessed with wanting to keep the foot. He was going to taxidermy it from toenail to ankle, he said, and freestyle it into a lamp. The surgeons gave it to him reluctantly. After all, it was his foot, what could they do? He stuck it in the freezer and five months later, when the taxidermist was ready, he got the lamp.

“What happened next?” said a voice next to me, a bun-sporting granny zinging away on Miss Kitty.

“Nothing happened,” I said. “He was a real weirdo.”

“Well, did the lamp work?”

“Yep. He said it had a nice homey glow. But then one day he came home from work and his dog and the lamp were gone.”

“Did he put out an APB?” She hit a LITTERFEST!, and the siren atop her machine flashed like cherry Jell-O.

“He did,” I said. “Except it was just part of him that was missing. A missing foot report. They found it down by the viaduct, the place the accident had happened to begin with.”

I paused for effect.

“Well,” she said.

“It was gnawed to pieces,” I said with relish.

It reminded me of a dream I’d recently had where a shark circled my chest hungrily and I felt relieved.

The coins from LITTERFEST! stopped ringing and she began to hum.

“Lord, I should cash this,” she said.

She flashed me her sleeve hem and no fingers, just a cauliflowering stump atop her old wrist, the skin fused to itself in tight folds.

Then she was gone.

*

I was sweating swimming pools. What’s that horrible sound? I thought. But it was just the deafening silence of Moonwalk. I stepped into the bejeweled elevator with an awful chewing in my gut. There were a million times I could have stopped. It wasn’t free money. It was a chunk of something.

I fiddled with the floor buttons but this time they were sticking in their slots. I was there in the mirror—my sloping body, my very own continental shelf. They hadn’t found the dog after all, that was the sad part. It had just loped off. Already I was begging Joelle to forgive me. On the closed face of the elevator doors, a prayer from Emperor Shah Jahan floated over a flat Taj Mahal:

The sight of this mansion creates sorrowing sighs;

And the sun and the moon shed tears from their eyes.

But in the room, Joelle was missing. The cleaning service was vacuuming up our nonexistent mess. I sat down on the bed.

“He was in here,” said Joelle’s voice. She was talking to Hotel Management in the hall.

“He was just sitting there like a total SOB.” She moved through the gold-trimmed doorway.

“Oh,” she said flatly, “it’s you.”

Apparently some skuzzbucket had entered our room while I was gone. Had sat down on the bed, just like I was doing. When Joelle came out of the bathroom, he was flipping the channels.

“This asshole?” said Hotel Management, pointing at me.

“No, not that asshole,” said Joelle.

Now she was livid.

“I’ve charged some things to the room,” this new Joelle told me. “Majorly $$$ things.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

“But you can cover it, right?”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

The TV was still on. The news anchors were saying things like “level two” and “hurricane” and “South Carolina.” Was the Chairman’s Tower wobbling?

“Don’t leave,” I said to Joelle.

“This is still our room, right?” I said to Hotel Management.

*

I went in search of Thea. She appeared, a bright hole in the gloom, at the Rim Noodle Shop bar.

“You look like a train wreck,” she said. “No. More like a train who, for no reason, stopped and then tipped over. What happened to you?”

“Two tequilas,” I managed, to the barman. Boy was it dark.

“It’s a hurricane out there,” I said. “A big one. If it’s not here yet, it’s coming.”

“Uh-hm.”

Thea seemed skeptical, but I sensed a radical shifting of things: a new world order.

“Thea?” I said.

I had a decision to make but I wasn’t sure what it was. When I leaned over and tried to put my mouth near hers she hit me.

“You idiot,” she said. “You idiot idiot idiot. You NERD.”

*

I took the same cart-pusher back to our bungalow. Rain globbed against the sand. I was hoping Joelle and Thea would be there—at least, I thought I was. My skull was hot.

“Found you!” he said, elated.

What a great new life without sleep, I thought. We rolled on. Caesar’s, Trump, Tropicana.

“Can’t go there anymore,” he yelled at each one over the thump of the tires.

“Why’s that?” I yelled back.

“You drink?” he said.

“Who doesn’t?”

“They kept handing me screwdrivers, buying me stuff with Visas, Mastercards. Everything premium, I was happy as shit!” He paused. “Shit went south real quick.”

I nodded. “It usually does,” I said.

“I was running,” he said, “as fast as I could. But after a while, I just stopped. I got right up into those pigs’ faces. I really wanted to know.”

The light was gone. Between the drops, the beach stretched out, a fossil of itself—all wear and cruddy ridge.

“Know what?” I said.

“I mean, somebody had to have the answer!” said the cart-pusher, doing his best George Washington. “They had me by the short hairs, I was bawling like my life depended on it, but I had no idea what for!”

*

At home, Joelle and Thea were on the phone, which meant crouching in the bog bushes behind the cabin. It was the only place with reception. I followed their voices and the blue cellular glow.

“It’s Thea’s sister,” Joelle informed me, glaring. “The twins are sick. Their fevers are climbing past a hundred and four.”

I lay down on the sandy wash. It was intuitive, canine. The lower to the ground I got, the better. I wanted to pull Joelle down on top of me and bury my face in a hunk of her rain-sticky hair.

Thea covered the phone with her hand. “I can get a flight,” she said. “But there’s a weather advisory? I have to go now.”

“Can you help her?” said Joelle, looking at me hopefully for the first time since Moonwalk. Joelle had money but it was all glommed up in something, her father probably.

I thought about my empty wallet, my art school economy. I scrubbed the ticket out of my pocket and handed it over slowly.

“Three dollars and twenty-four cents?” said Joelle.

I’d painted the Taj Mahal once in a class. My dome had a nice full onion shape but those moon-facing spires that lined the central tomb had confounded me. Somewhere around their midsection they’d rebelled—sticking in every direction but up. My art teacher threw out his hands.

This is all about Love! he’d said, pacing. And Sacrifice! You’re so terrestrial. You’re scared to leave the ground!

I looked at my spires, their tips lopsided and heavy, tugging down toward earth. Boobs, I’d thought. I was too embarrassed to say my Taj was already on the moon, that’s how I’d understood it in the first place.

This story appears in Large Animals: Stories by Jess Arndt, published in May 2017 by Catapult. Photograph by Jess Arndt.

The sticky, insufferable sensation that art is a status reserved for a select few is the raw emotional material that Edan Lepucki’s second novel, Woman No. 17, draws on. The book is concerned with the lives of a woman, her new nanny, and the relationships, or lack thereof, that these women share with their mothers.

S., a painter turned photographer and nanny, is often criticized for a lack of depth in her work. Lady is too readily encouraged to pursue writing. The women toss and turn over their creations, and this only escalates as they butt heads with an artist whose work is validated by the outside world. While S. opts to slap impostor syndrome in the face, Lady fumbles. As she has in her earlier works, Lepucki’s latest magnifies the interior worlds of these women and their struggles.

*

Rachel Davies: How did your writing process for Woman No. 17 compare to that of your first novel?

Edan Lepucki: I had about 100 pages—I actually just went to check to see how much I had—I had a little over 100 pages of Woman No. 17written before California came out. My friend, the young adult and comic book writer Cecil Castellucci, gave me some advice, that Aimee Bender gave her, which was to try to finish your next book before your first book comes out. So I didn’t quite reach that goal, but I tried to get as much down as I possibly could so that I would have a manuscript waiting for me before I finished with whatever happened with California.

I was really happy I did that, because I didn’t have to come back to a blank page, which is really my worst nightmare. So my writing process, honestly, was not very different, and I’m writing a third book now that’s the same. I don’t do very much research, I always write in order, I write in the order that I perceive the book to be read in, so I don’t write random scenes. So pretty much, my process is not very different despite the fact that my stories are quite different.

The interior spaces characters occupy, or have occupied, seem to play a crucial role in your writing, be it the second childhood home of Joellyn in If You’re Not Yet Like Me, living in the woods in California, or Lady’s mother’s house in Woman No. 17.

Confined spaces, and domestic spaces are really interesting to me. In my spare time, I read design blogs religiously, even though I don’t really have anywhere to decorate at this moment. I love to go to open houses, even if I’m not looking for real estate, I just love to be in spaces, and see how people do them. I’m kind of obsessed with staging as a thing that people do to sell a home, and what kind of fantasies are projected onto those spaces, and how they raise the property rates even though it’s just a performance.

I think homes have always been the number one place that I write about, so, I mean, that’s obvious if anyone’s not writing something super adventurous, but I feel like all of my work deals with domestic space, a confined space, and what happens there. Also, just how we identify with certain homes, and interiors, and who they make us think we are, even if we’re not that. So Joellyn thinks about this empty space she had as a child, and she’s ashamed of the apartment that she has, and Zachary’s going to go see. Then in Woman No. 17, Lady lives in this mansion now, and not that long ago she lived in a one-bedroom apartment as a single mom with her son. Now she’s the owner of this glorious Hollywood Hills mansion, and she has impostor syndrome there, I think. It just keeps coming back in my work, I never thought about that.

Lady has this distinct sense of wealth that’s amplified by her memories of living in that one-bedroom apartment with her child.

I wanted one of Lady’s crisis-points to be class, even though I don’t ever say that outright. She was by no means poor growing up, she had a nice house, but I think she has kind of fallen from that, and when she started dating Karl he rescued her from that, and she has all of these privileges to deal with, and I don’t think she knows what to do with it. I think she doesn’t feel that it’s a part of her identity and who she is, yet at the same time she’s very comfortable. I think S. also is straddling these two worlds, her father lives in this very nice house in Berkeley, and her stepmother pays for that house, but it’s still the lifestyle that her father enjoys. Her mother is at the whim of the landlord, and she could be kicked out, and she has to fire her housekeeper if she’s off the job, and if she stays off the job for too long then that will be a financial disaster for her, there’s no safety net for her. She’s really aware of those differences. It’s interesting because in early drafts, people referred to S. as “rich,” and I wasn’t sure where they were getting that from. So I tried to add signifiers later on to signify that that’s not the situation—not that she’s by any means in danger, but that she has college loans, and she needs money to buy art supplies. I thought, maybe it’s the artmaking that makes people think she’s privileged, that she’s privileged to become this artist as she sees fit.

You edit for The Millions, and occasionally write non-fiction. What do these other projects and outlets offer you alongside your longer work?

The Millions, for a long time, has been a lifeline for me. I have been working for The Millions since 2006 or 2007, and I didn’t publish my first book for seven years after that. So I felt like I was labouring in obscurity for a long time, all the stuff I was writing really wasn’t seeing the light of day, and I wrote a first novel that never sold. Even if I published a story here and there, to get it published would take nine months, and then it would come out in this small magazine. It was kind of before the time where everyone was publishing fiction online. The Millions really allowed me to interact with the literary community online, to share my voice, and hone my opinions about a lot of fiction that I was reading. It released something for me that—I mean, I was already frustrated, but I felt like I would have been more frustrated without that community. Now I feel similar, that the novel takes so long, it takes years to do, but the nonfiction pieces I spend between a few days, or a few weeks, which is a short amount of time, comparatively. So that’s a nice difference, in terms of reaching out to people, getting feedback, and feeling like I’m engaging with the literary community.

Right now, it’s kind of fun. I just wrote this piece that I published—it seems like forever ago, but I think it was yesterday [laughs]—about when I modeled nude in college. I knew I could write about it related to my novel, and there’s this idea that you should be publishing a lot around when your novel comes out to just spray your name everywhere. From a mercenary aspect, I was thinking I should write about it, and connect it to my novel, but of course when you’re actually writing these pieces you don’t want them to be promotional because that’s dumb, they don’t need to exist then. But writing that piece sort of helped me understand why I wrote the novel in the first place because I got to write about how much I liked modeling, and photography, and stuff about the body. All of this stuff does relate to my fiction, and allows me to understand what the hell I was doing in my fiction, which I don’t think about too much when I’m writing so that I don’t overdo anything.

Woman No. 17 manages this tussle of identity that the characters experience, especially S., with such nuance, and a big part of that is reflecting on the characters’ creative projects. What was it like figuring out who these people are while also figuring out how they want to be seen through their art?

It’s going to sound crazy, but I didn’t do it on purpose. Not to say that I have no intentions when I’m writing, but I think if I had sat down, and said, Okay, I’m going to try to present these characters in one way in this regard, and another way in this regard, then you’re not really sure who they are. I think I would have been paralyzed, and I wouldn’t have been able to go forward. So with both characters I just started with voice, especially with first person narrative, I tend to think of them as entirely performance anyway. So I think most of my first person narrators, the deeper subject is always about how they present themselves, and how they see themselves in the world. I’m especially interested in how people think of themselves in the world, and how that might not be totally accurate, or they’re willfully not seeing what you want them to see. So I think that’s already built into the first person narrator, so thematically it already came with the package. But as soon as I started writing both characters, they were doing all of this strange dodging from the truth, or saying one thing, but doing another thing. The novel has this kind of hysterical house of mirrors quality that I did not do on purpose, but when I noticed it I leaned into it, where Lady would do something, and I would switch to [S.’s perspective], and there would be some sort of echo of Lady’s behaviour. Lady had a former boss who was an actress, and S.’s story with Lady is kind of like Lady’s story with the actress, she worked with this rich lady in this big house. But I didn’t intend for that to happen, there would just be echoes like this that would happen, and the representation, the mixed representation, the art—all of that stuff thematically serves the work together, but I didn’t do it on purpose.

How did you determine what S.’s art projects would look like?

That part, and Seth’s disability, were the two biggest challenges for me as I worked on the draft. I spent a lot of time thinking about every project she would do before she did it, as she’s in the midst of the project—I have her detailing how much she’s had to drink, she has the breathalyzer. At a certain point I needed for her to do more, and I thought of her painting herself but not figuratively, and I didn’t know where to take it, so I had to think of a different direction. I tried to work into her narrative some of that processing, and brainstorming. I honestly thought the Tevas part, where she describes the Tevas art project, would be cut. There’s so many parts of everything I publish that I think, Oh, this’ll be cut later, and then it isn’t. I think it’s a way for me to write without worrying—I tell myself it’ll be edited out. I was writing this thing, having the time of my life writing it, and nobody told me to take it out, and some people really liked it, but I had to figure out how to make it relevant to the whole story without just being a comic interlude about bad fashion in Berkeley. I did see connections between the project she was doing in the current part, and that part of the book, and also her reaching out to her old boyfriend, but trying to draw it all together without boring the reader was really hard.

Texting and tweeting play a large part in how the characters communicate with each other in the novel. Sometimes I feel like tech-speak can come off too stiff in literature, but I think you pulled it off in Woman No. 17. What was the experience like getting used to talking in your character’s online voices, and seamlessly integrating it into your prose?

I’ll say ahead of time, after writing California, I knew I wanted to write a book that had technology because I’m tired of having so many books that don’t have technology in them, or that assiduously avoid technology even though it’s such an integral part of our lives. I have a lot of angst about my own technology use, and what it’s doing to my brain, and how it makes me interact with the world online, and how we present ourselves online, like you said. I really wanted it to be a part of my book, and I also wanted to make sure that it locked into the plot. Not only be like background, I wanted it to have some way to tell the story. I had my sister who’s ten years younger than me just read the book specifically to help me, to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid. She would tell me little colloquialisms that I was being too formal with. [laughs] I wanted to make sure, obviously, that her dad would be very formal in texts. When Kit writes her email, and random stuff is capitalized, I was inspired by Miranda July’s project [We Think Alone] where she had people’s emails. Every day you would get this email, that was a series of [a random person’s] emails–I loved this project. I wish it would go on and on forever. I loved how Kirsten Dunst would randomly capitalize stuff, it was so bizarre. You see that sometimes with people, they randomly capitalize things, other times people add apostrophes because they don’t know what they are used for so they just add them like a little piece of jewelry. I love that stuff, I love how much it signifies.