“Hey, where’s your ring?”

Jeremy sat on the counter in front of the microwave. He was supposed to be finishing up the day’s dishes.

“Sold it,” I said. I was crouched in front of the open oven, steel wool in one hand, degreaser in the other. Ten minutes of spraying and scrubbing had barely made a difference on the greasy orange glass.

“Sold it?” Jeremy echoed. “Ain’t you supposed to be getting married?”

I sighed. Sam had gone to jail only two months earlier, but it felt like a lifetime ago. “Not anymore.”

“Well, shit,” Jeremy said. “What happened?”

I was surprised by Jeremy’s attentiveness, that he’d ever even noticed my engagement ring in the first place, let alone that I wasn’t wearing it anymore. Even when he wasn’t high, he was usually off in his own world, humming or daydreaming or doodling on the back of the notepad we used for catering orders.

“Sam went to jail,” I said, still scrubbing. “For child porn.”

I was too embarrassed to disclose that fact to most people, but for some reason I told Jeremy without hesitation. It was still a shock that I’d spent four and a half years, most of my adolescence, with a man who’d been preying on girls even younger than me, and even more a shock that I’d discovered this only when he was arrested days before our wedding.

Jeremy’s mouth hung open. “You’re shitting me.”

“I wish.”

Jeremy’s face hardened. He balled up the dishrag in his fist and squeezed. “I fucking hate motherfucking pedos, man. Scum of the earth,” he mumbled. I’d never seen him look so serious. After a moment his voice got softer, and his eyes followed. “I hate that that happened to you.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I started to say something about how it was part of God’s plan, but didn’t. I’d heard that phrase a thousand times over the years: God uses all things for your good. I wasn’t sure I still believed that. In the dark reverence of a church sanctuary, it was easy to glorify pain, assign it a divine purpose. I was trying to cling to the idea that there was a reason for my hurt and heartbreak, that I was becoming stronger, but I wasn’t convinced. So I said nothing and kept scrubbing.

Jeremy still seemed bothered. He sat on the counter and swung his legs, passing the balled-up dishcloth from one hand to the other, while he stared out the storefront window into the dark. It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Finally I asked what was on his mind.

“There’s somewhere I wanna take you,” he said.

“Where?” I asked.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, hopping down from the counter with a clunk. He always wore steel-toed boots to work. “It’ll be fun. Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

And for the first time ever, Jeremy washed all the dishes without my prompting.

After we locked up, we headed toward the parking lot. It was empty except for our cars. My old Subaru was nothing to look at, but Jeremy’s Honda was comically hideous. Every surface—hood, roof, trunk, and doors—was banged and scratched and dented, as if someone had beaten the car with a baseball bat. It was spray-painted matte black, but the patchier spots revealed the original silver underneath. The hubcaps were missing. The tires were so bald that the wires peeked through. The back windshield was busted out and covered in purple Saran wrap.

“I call her the Baby Car,” Jeremy said. He ducked through the driver’s side window feetfirst, explaining that the door was permanently jammed. “Because she’s so tiny.” His knees splayed to each side of the steering wheel. “Death trap” was the phrase that came to mind, but I stooped inside anyway.

Jeremy stuck the key in the ignition. Before he turned it, he warned me to cover my ears, saying something about a straight pipe, which meant nothing to me. I cupped my hands over my ears. He turned the key. The engine came to life with a violent shudder and monstrous ripping roar that made me jump in my seat. Jeremy grinned so big I could see all of his teeth. The Baby Car quaked as it idled, and when he shifted into first gear, it gave an explosive lurch forward.

“Where’s the seat belt?” I yelled over the noise.

“What?” Jeremy yelled back.

“SEAT BELT!”

Jeremy grinned bigger.

We rolled out of the parking lot and onto the road. When Jeremy hit the gas, the car somehow got louder. He saw the look on my face and threw his head back in a laugh I couldn’t hear.

The sun was long set and the town was dead, but I still felt conspicuous in that ugly, blaring hunk of metal. A couple months earlier it would have been unthinkable for me to be in a car alone with a man other than my fiancé. Now I was tearing through the night at full volume and full speed—Jeremy hit the highway doing 80—and no one knew where I was or what I was doing. I had no one to answer to. No one to make me feel guilty and dirty and sinful for having a male for a friend or riding in his car. Liberation seized my heart. I felt free and wild and terribly strange, doing something that would have once brought great consequences but now brought none at all.

We hit a stretch of empty highway. Far from houses and people now, Jeremy flipped a switch on the floorboard and brought the subwoofers in the trunk to life. The mirrors and dashboard vibrated. I could feel the bass in the pulps of my teeth.

Jeremy hadn’t stopped smiling. “HAVING FUN YET?” he yelled. I nodded and felt myself smiling, too.

Jeremy got off at the next exit and headed toward the lake. The road was narrow and winding and he took the curves way too fast, but I couldn’t bring myself to feel afraid. I let my long hair out of its modest bun. It whipped around in the rush of air, tangling into yellow knots, and I stuck my head out the window to let the cool wind assault my face.

Soon I started smelling water and fish. Jeremy slowed down when he hit a gravel road. He parked close to the lakeshore, right by the dock. When he cut the engine, the silence was so sudden and loud that my ears rang. Without the car’s vibrations to dictate my heartbeat, my chest felt hollowed out, abruptly and achingly empty.

For a while neither of us spoke. Slowly the frogs, which had been startled to silence by the noise, started peeping again. The black lake water lapped softly at the grassy shore. It was a cloudless night.

“Let’s look at the stars,” Jeremy whispered, climbing from his seat to the hood.

We reclined against the windshield and looked up at the sky. It was still weird to be in such proximity to someone who wasn’t Sam, so I gave Jeremy a wide berth, scooting as far as I could to the opposite side of the hood. The stars above us were as bright as the moon. Jeremy pointed out constellations. He traced them slowly with a tattooed finger. I followed along with my eyes.

“What else do you think’s out there?” he asked after a while.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Like aliens?”

“No,” he said. “Like God.”

“Oh.” That caught me off guard. I hesitated. “Why do you ask?”

Jeremy put both hands behind his head. His eyes were far away, beyond the sky.

“You seem like you would know,” he said. He turned his face to me after a moment, to the Jesus fish necklace resting on my chest. Even though it was a gift from Sam, I couldn’t bear to part with it.

Jeremy went on. “I think about it a lot. I mean, there’s gotta be something, right? The universe is so big and we’re so small . . .” 

He trailed off into deeper thought. “There’s gotta be something,” he said again finally. “Something bigger than us. I just don’t know what it is.”

I wasn’t sure how to respond. I hadn’t been expecting Jeremy—Jeremy, who was always high and giggly and lost in some faraway dreamworld—to pose a serious theological question. How did I explain God, creator and keeper of the universe? How did I explain God at all?

Despite a lifetime of church, I’d only ever had an abstract understanding of God. And now, after everything that had happened, after weeks of pain and fury and unanswered questions and prayers, I was completely unsure of who he was, what his role was in my life or anyone else’s.

“There’s something,” I affirmed very slowly. “But I’m not sure what it is either.”

It was the first time I’d ever doubted God’s existence aloud.

I half expected a lightning bolt to strike me dead that instant. But the cloudless sky stayed dark and quiet, and my blasphemy went unpunished. Jeremy laughed a little.

“I figured you’d give me a whole damn sermon,” he said. He scooted a hair closer to me. “Maybe you’re finally loosening up after all.”

I held my breath nervously, the way I always did when my Subway coworkers got too close. It was a knee-jerk reaction to keep from breathing in their sin. An absurd reaction, I realized then. I exhaled and then inhaled again, long and slow, as if to prove to myself that nothing bad was going to happen by breathing the same air as Jeremy.

The cool lake air filled my lungs. It was fishy and salty, sweet and biting. There was another smell, too, fainter—weed and old carpet, engine oil and cherry air freshener. The scent of Jeremy’s car and clothes. It was oddly soothing. I wanted to bottle it up. Take it home. Maybe even wear it myself.

I scooted an inch closer to Jeremy and breathed in deeply once more.

A few days later after a Wednesday night youth service, I went up to Pastor Will and asked for prayer.

“I need to hear from God,” I said vaguely. That was nowhere near the extent of what I really needed.

Since I’d admitted my doubt to Jeremy, it had grown and grown and grown, taking up more and more space in my mind until I hadn’t been able to think about anything else. Now it was unrestrained, a wild, creeping thing.

That Wednesday night prayer request was a desperate attempt to find something to still believe in. A God who was good in spite of all the terrors he inspired. A God who, in his incomprehensible wisdom, had orchestrated my life down to the very second, good parts and bad, for some great divine purpose. A God who was still in control.

Beneath that, and perhaps more urgently, I was searching for a connection to who I’d been just a couple months earlier. I felt severed from the core of what I’d unconsciously started to think of as my “old life,” which had revolved entirely around Sam and God. Without them, who was I?

Pastor Will stood in front of me and laid a hand on my head. Jared and Whitney and a few other youth group volunteers I was friends with circled around me, laying hands across my back and shoulders. At first their prayers were whispers, delicate and barely audible, but they grew louder with each sentence, until I was surrounded by half a dozen shouting voices commanding a renewal of the Holy Spirit inside me.

While the prayers flowed, I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to talk to God. I tried to force my own prayer, but my mind remained empty, as if I’d forgotten how to speak English. Surrounded by the most faithful people I knew, I felt more aware than ever that my own faith was beyond retrieval. Frustration rolled over me in a hot wave. I started to cry.

“Thank you, Father, for remaining steadfast in Emilee’s life.” Pastor Will mistook my tears as a sign that God was working inside me. “Even when she can’t hear you, I pray she always knows you’re there.”

The voices descended into a chorus of “amens” and the hands fell away. Whitney hugged me. Jared offered me a tissue.

“It’s going to be okay. God is always with you,” Whitney said. She paused, then spoke again more quietly. “I’m sure things have been hard lately.”

The subtle allusion to the breakup was more than anybody else had given me. Surprised, I could only nod.

“Sometimes it’s hard to hear God when you’re living outside his will,” Jared added. I sat down on the stage and wiped my face. He and Whitney sat down on either side of me. Pastor Will and my other friends took seats in the front row. “It’s like a check-engine light. Except instead of a neon sign, you feel overwhelming silence. You feel so, so far away from God. That’s because he’s trying to get your attention.”

I nodded at Jared. Overwhelming silence was exactly what I felt. It was an awfully cruel way to get someone’s attention, I thought. Yet I couldn’t say it hadn’t worked: I’d been thinking about God—raging at, pleading with, and doubting him—nonstop. It was just like when Sam gave me the silent treatment. I would stay on edge for days, worrying about what I’d done wrong and how to fix it. How to be better next time so I wouldn’t have to face the torturous silence again.

“What am I doing wrong?” I asked Jared.

“You just have to keep praying until God tells you,” Jared said. “And in the meantime, you have to examine your life. Are there areas you’ve been disobedient? Has God told you to do something, but you’ve defied him?”

“He hasn’t talked to me at all lately,” I said. I was embarrassed to admit that, worried it revealed my lack of faith.

Jared considered this for a moment. “Your soul is volatile right now,” he finally said in a pensive voice. I looked over at him. He was gazing toward the back of the room, eyes growing distant.

I knew this look. It always came over him when God was revealing some kind of wisdom or knowledge. 

After another moment, Jared turned to me suddenly. A change had fallen over his face. It was as if he were gone and somebody else were behind his eyes.

Jared opened his mouth slowly, then issued his command.

“God will return to you when you return to Sam.”

I said nothing.

I could think of nothing to say.

It was one of those moments in which time moves both fast and slow. I was shocked first by hearing Sam’s name aloud—hearing someone within those church walls acknowledging that he’d actually existed, since until then they’d all refused to talk about his arrest and everything leading to it—and then at the actual statement itself. How could Jared suggest such a thing? He knew what Sam had done, all the secrets and lies. He’d been present for the entire police investigation, which had happened in that very room. He knew more than he would ever tell me.

How could he suggest I go back to Sam?

How could God?

I didn’t know whether Jared was speaking as himself, or if God was speaking through Jared, or if I even still believed God spoke through people. None of that mattered, though. What mattered was this idea that my cold, dead faith could only be renewed by returning to God’s will. Which meant—if Jared could be believed—marrying a man who had preyed on me, controlled me, lied to me. Hurt me beyond reckoning, or forgiveness.

“I don’t know if that’s what God wants,” Whitney protested softly, speaking more to Jared than to me. He cut his eyes at her and she fell silent.

For a few miserable seconds, I waited for someone else to speak. 

I waited for someone to suggest a more reasonable solution to regaining my faith. Pastor Will and my friends only watched wordlessly, gauging my reaction, and I realized that this was the consensus: My faith was suffering because I hadn’t married the man God had told me to.

Suddenly I felt very far from myself. I felt I didn’t know this place, these people. I felt I’d never really known them. Just as I had never really known Sam.

I couldn’t go back to him. Not running, not walking, not crawling. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. I was too far gone now, too uncontrollable, changed on the outside and changing on the inside in ways I couldn’t explain.

I was changed enough, at least, to not even consider the option.

From All That’s Unseen: An Appalachian Memoir by Emilee Hackney, to be published on July 28, 2026 by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2026 by Emilee Hackney.

The post Leaving My Fiancé, Losing My Faith, and Finding Freedom appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Rivers are roads which move, and

which carry us whither we desire to go.”

— Pascal

We’d been driving in silence for some time. Nothing was wrong—nothing we could point to. It was early autumn. The larch trees had begun to yellow, and there was new snow in the mountains. We drove with the top down and the heat on high. The cold air and artificial heat struggled for power—one moment hot, the next cold.

We were on one of our Sunday drives. There was no destination. We’d gone south on 93, out of Missoula, down the spine between the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains. As usual, Max drove and I sat passenger.

He was in a mood, as he often was. Too much Reddit and ragebait, the news was too bleak, the job too jobby. It was an existential grumpiness. He drove to escape it. I would have liked to stay home and take up some unperceived space in our one-bedroom apartment, but I joined him for the drive. If he had to escape, I wasn’t going to be left behind.

I was in charge of music, and the music I chose had the big job of speaking for us. I played a band I knew he liked—Counting Crows. One of his favorites. It was worth my suffering if the music cheered him up. His lips began to move along to the lyrics. Do you see yourself in me? We’re such crazy babies, little monkey. I let my hand rest open near the console . . . God, we’re so fucked up, you and me . . . but he didn’t take it in his own, as he sometimes would.

Just ahead there was a sign denoting river access. He asked if I wanted to check it out, and I agreed. The access road was steep, unpaved, and knuckled with rocks and roots. We parked the car and walked to the riverbank.

By now, the sun was a narrow line of light on the river’s face. Clouds gathered heavily above us. The bright summer days were over. It was autumn, and soon it’d be winter. In the winter everything would feel forever long and gray. We’d been together for less than a year, so each season was our first. Did that also mean the summer of our romance was over? That we were entering the long, gray winter of disenchantment? I had the sense that the seasons had to be gotten through. That it proved something to have fought to the next one. Already, we’d put so much fight into our relationship, both of us resisting his suspicion that he “might not be cut out for domestic life,” that he “couldn’t hack it.” The thought that he was losing interest in our life and might soon go in search of another exhausted me—perhaps even more than the relationship itself.

No. We would trudge on. Together in his bug-eyed ’91 Miata convertible, our hair (equally long, his a little more lush) twisting in the Montana valley wind, soundtracked by Counting Crows, pointed away from whatever it was that chased him. I was determined. If we stayed together, at least then we wouldn’t have to trudge alone.

We removed our boots and socks, and rolled up our pant legs. I followed him in. The water came from a glacier, and was starting its return to ice. It closed tight around my skin. I felt my bones. I felt my blood. Then I felt nothing.

He ran ahead, balancing on river rocks and running across logs without looking back. Even from a distance, I could tell his mood was lifting. He moved loosely and with confidence as the space between us widened. I took a step, and a rock turned underfoot. I always stepped on the wrong rocks. I caught myself, stabilized, and pulled in a sharp breath.

“How can you go that fast,” I yelled, laughing. I was scared. “It’s so fucking cold.”

He turned back to look at me, his face full of boyish glee. He cracked a huge big-kid grin, and then theatrically adjusted his expression to one of pity and adoration. He shoved his lower lip into a pout.

“Oh, sweetie,”—when he called me sweetie, it was always with the same sweet voice. Oversweet, a voice we used alone together—“Is it too cold?”

“Kinda,” I said. Why was I also speaking in the sweetie voice?

It was too cold, not kinda too cold. But I didn’t want to ruin the moment, neither his nor ours. Cautiously, I continued. He watched me take a few steps, and then, satisfied that I’d be fine, he ran on.

“I grew up on the water, baby,” he yelled over his shoulder. “I’m a river man.”

I tried to find his source of vigor. Behind him the clouds broke down and fell back into the sunset. Against that distant light, he spread his arms for balance and ran across a fallen tree. I watched his silhouette and knew I would see this image when I thought of him, sometime in the future: a shadow balanced against the sunset. I was breathless but I fought the current, feeling the river close in around me. Keep up, keep up. This felt important, my ability to keep up. The sun slid down. I knew that if I stopped paying attention for even a moment, I would trip.

When I reached him, his face was full of abundance and gratitude. I’d been able to keep up, and this meant something, it was important. He kissed me.

When I moved to Missoula, I was told I had to learn how to fly fish. There was “good water” five minutes in any direction. But I had little interest in the sport. It looked a lot like standing around. There were other things to do, things I already loved to do. Rocks to climb in Kootenai Canyon and Lolo Pass, horses to ride across the hills of Pattee Canyon, mountains to hike in the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Plus also a job—the reason I’d moved out there—working on a graduate degree and teaching undergrads. It was the same reason Max had moved there, and it was in that context that we met, became friends, and then slowly, intensely, fell in love.

Max was a fly fisher. In the beginning, when we could barely spend a moment apart, the necessary separation that fishing provided was romantic. He fished, I did what I wanted to do, and then we found one another—tired, windswept, desperate for each other.

But now we were starting to run out of ways to spend time together. I didn’t want to fly fish. But I loved him, and he loved to fly fish. So I decided to learn. I wanted to figure out why he loved it, what he loved about it. Or perhaps I wanted to associate myself with this thing he loved, in order to be closer to him—closer to his love. In order to be proximal to the object of his love.

As soon as I told him that I wanted to learn, I knew he’d been waiting for me to ask.

“You don’t really want to come fishing with me,” he said.

“I do,” I insisted. “You’ve never asked.”

He looked at me seriously, much more seriously than when I’d agreed to move in with him a few months prior, or when we’d nearly taken the highway exit for a Las Vegas chapel. His face—broad, strong-jawed and suntanned—was grave. He took a deep breath, and looked me in the eyes.

“Will you go fishing with me?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Everything took on a new shine as my “yes” landed between us. He grinned, almost absurdly joyful. His cheeks rippled from the hugeness of his smile, and his blue eyes filled with childlike delight.

His Miata was in the shop, but he didn’t want to put off our first day of fishing. There was a sense of urgency. Maybe he feared I’d change my mind. That night, he rented a truck for next-day pickup and purchased my fishing license online. He printed the license and carefully cut it out, bringing the paper very close to his face while he did. His eyes went a little crossed. When Max was invested, he performed every action with intense focus. He slipped my license into his wallet, behind his own. We went to bed early and slept perfectly. All night we held one another, never too hot or too cold.

The next morning, we woke in the dark. He was tender and careful with me, like the morning after a fight. I opened the front door to feel the air. It was cold. Streetlamps shone in our alley, and beyond the mountains, the first flat blue light stained the sky. The grass was tipped in thin frost. I ducked back into our house and told him it was cold. A little whine of hope started up in the back of my head: Maybe we could stay home.

“Sweetie,” he said in his sweetie voice, wrapping me in an embrace, “I won’t let you get cold.”

He chose our outfits. A technical fleece for me, and for him, a red hoodie and a yellow baseball cap. Because his chest waders were leaky and I had none, both of us wore duck pants. His river shoes were old tight-laced Stan Smiths that smelled like hell from getting wet, drying out, and getting wet again. I had Chacos.

He called us a cab and paid for the rental. He was taking care of everything, like a real first date. He’d decided to take me to his favorite place out past Lolo on the Bitterroot. I’d been expecting a long drive, but we arrived in just over half an hour. This unnerved me. Often he was gone fishing for full days, and whenever he was, he felt a great distance away. Now I understood that sometimes he was only a half hour from home.

We made it to the riverbank by half past nine. The sky was mottled blue and white. I didn’t carry anything except my backpack with our sandwiches, sunscreen, and water bottles. He had the fishing rod and the net, which was slung over his back. Without hesitation, he stepped into the water and walked until it was up to his knees. Then he stopped and turned toward me, smiling, and shouted over the current, “Come on in, baby! Water’s nice!”

The river was a shock when I first entered, and it felt wrong to let my pants soak up the water and gain weight. They tractioned down on my hips. I waded to him, the bones in my feet groaning in the cold. He gave me a huge, perfect kiss.

“Let’s keep going a little bit. There’s a fork up here where I’ve had some luck.”

We walked together upstream. The river water was dark green and glossy toward the central channel, where it was deep, and a translucent yellow toward the shallow edges. Glossy green trees reflected onto the glossy green river, and their reflected spines shimmered in the current. The wetness traveled up the fabric of my pants and suctioned against my legs. Ahead of us was a funnel of blue sky, wedged between the treed hills.

After 15 minutes, we stopped at the fork in the river.

“We’re gunna stand here,” he motioned to the crotch between one leg of water and the other. “And cast where the waters meet.”

He stared into his little plastic fly box, trying to decide what fly to start with.

“Look around, baby,” he said. “What do you see?” 

What did I see? I saw everything: I saw a bridge, I saw light on every dimple in the water’s face, I saw no people except the person I loved. I stared at him, while he peered up into the sky, full of pinlike insects. They darted around, sometimes landing in tiny rippled pools on the river. He motioned for me to lean closer.

“That’s our guy,” he whispered, pointing to a speck of wings on the water. “The trout are coming up like crazy for him. See?”

Now that he said it, I saw the occasional burps that disturbed the still line of water. He thumbed through his box and pinched at a tiny fly. Holding it up to the light, he showed it to me. 

“What do you think?”

“Seems probable,” I said.

He got to work securing the fly. I watched as he wet it in his mouth and strung it, his hands deceptively nimble. How did he do it, with big hands like his? He worked the line through a loop of wire, pulling gingerly, staring very closely at his task, eyes crossing. The only way to say it was that he tied the fly with love. He tied it with care and devotion. Using a tool like a nail clipper, he clipped off the excess tail.

Once he got the fly threaded, he positioned his body so that he was shadowless. You had to be sure that no movement you made above was visible below, he told me. He asked if I wanted to give it the first go, but I declined. I wanted to watch him fish, I said, for research purposes.

“Okay, baby,” he said. “Then come stand over here.”

He motioned to his left side.

“Always stand on my left so you don’t get a hook to the head on my back cast.”

He began, first slowly and then with speed, letting out a little line. Then he pulled the line up and danced it back and forth, drawing loops against the sky. He followed the motion forward, as if he were hesitant to give it away. The fly landed gently in the water. It floated down the current. We were still, watching it float. I could see that he made fine adjustments in order to reduce his impact on the fly’s natural movement, or to give it some subtle signs of animation. When he ran out of line, he whipped the fly out of the water. The nylon caught light as he flung it back, and water drew off the line and skipped in the white sun. Then he started over. He pulled the line, slapped it down, and watched it glide like a snake in the water. He went a few more times and caught nothing. Then it was my turn.

“Hold it like this,” he said, taking my hand in his and wrapping it around the handle. I resisted making a quip about holding his rod. He was very serious. He loosened my forefinger from the grip and placed that, like the barrel of a gun, down the rod. Then he planted my thumb on top of the handle. “Like you’re pointing your thumb right where you want the fly to land.” 

He took the rod and he stood behind me.

He stayed where he was, behind me, with his hands on my hands on the rod, and showed me how to follow the trail of a fish. 

“Go along with the current,” he said, “like you’re just a little fly who landed on the water . . . you’re being carried along by the current, yes, good . . . and you can make a little flick now and then because you’re a bug and you’re alive. Now start to let out just a little line, yes, gently, not too much . . . .”

I leaned forward, trying to follow all the way to the end of my range, as he’d done. With his help, I pulled the line down with my nondominant hand, ripping the end out of the water. The motion looked visceral, medical, like a burst stitch.

“Don’t just give it up, honey, you have to keep a handle on its backward pull, right, and just give and take the line, yes, that’s it baby,” he said, guiding my hand and controlling the motion. I had little or no role in our performance—it was almost as if he were talking to himself. 

After he was satisfied enough with my form, he let me do it on my own. I was in a pleasant mood. I’d stopped feeling the cold and was enjoying the novelty of standing in a river. But after about four rounds, as the fly traveled down the seam once more, he gasped, “That’s a trout! Set the hook, baby! Get him!”

“How?” I yelled, frantic.

An intense wash of dread came over me. There was something out there, something on my hook. Maybe it would get away. Would he be disappointed if it did? So I should try to get it, though I didn’t really want it? Then he was behind me again, hands on my hands, and he jerked the rod up deftly. There was tension on the line. I looked back at him for reassurance, but he was staring straight ahead. His face was jubilant and focused. We were fighting, I realized. We were engaged in a very subtle war.

“Hold it up, like this, yes, don’t let go,” he said. We stayed there. He eased the pressure toward us. Removing one hand from mine and putting it on the crank, he said, “Now, can you let go with your left hand and start to reel with me?”

We reeled. In a moment the pressure lightened dramatically. Then I saw the trout. She didn’t seem to be resisting, at least not anymore. Max reached in and snatched her from the water with bare hands. What a beauty, he said, look at this, have you ever, you caught this, baby, look at this beautiful fish you caught. He told me to get the net off his back and I did. He gently lowered the fish into the net and then lowered the whole bundle into the water so the trout could recline there as we observed her.

Beneath her jaw was a deep red print of color. Her eyes were hollow black, with a ring of white around them as if they were glowing. She was freckled all over, and her freckles were black with white edges, like her eyes. The green fishing line pulled at her mouth. Max reached into the net and removed the hook. Then he lifted her.

Beads of water stood on his hands and cascaded off her shimmering flanks. He held her body knowingly, firmly, but with respect.

“Get a photo!”

I dried my hands and took a picture. In it, he didn’t smile, but stared with intensity at the fish. Then he hurriedly lowered her back into the net and gave her an intermission in the water. Now it was my turn to get a picture with our catch.

I bent, grasped her, and straightened. We had only a moment of stillness before she sensed my lack of control and slipped wetly from my palms. I laughed, and then heard the violent slap of her body on the water and flinched. She flashed away. I could see Max was disappointed. We’ll work on a gentle release, he said, don’t worry. He showed me my photographs. The first was as expected, my hands clasped around the trout’s body. In the second, there was air where the trout had been, a ghost of her belly between my hands, and she was mid-flight, her tail flexed in effort.

“You caught that,” he said. He prodded me lovingly in the chest. “You caught that, sweetie.”

But he’d caught it. Actually, I wanted to make a point of that—I hadn’t caught the fish, it wasn’t me, it was him. It was his eye that saw the fly go down, his hand on the rod, ripping us up to set the hook. Though I knew he was bestowing an honor when he insisted that I’d caught this fish, it felt, as he said it, like an accusation.

The first fish is terrifying because if there isn’t another, it’s the only one you got and now it’s gone. It was only after his second fish that he began to smile. And the second fish established the possibility of a third; the third a longing for a fourth. It went on like that for hours. My bones ached and my stomach growled. I remembered our sandwiches and wondered when he’d think of food. I fantasized about a shower, dry clothes, the warmth of our bed. When it was my turn to fish, I scanned the surface of the water. I tried to follow the fly, but all I could see were sparkles of light. I began to shiver. He noticed and he pressed a thumb against my lips, which he said were blue. He gave me his sweatshirt. The clouds were bearing down on the sun, and only the most distant reach of river was lit, shining, beaconlike. I longed for that distant reach. Every step I took was a fight. 

“Honey,” I said, shyly, “can we go soon?”

He looked at me, surprised.

“Yes! Of course we can go, we can leave whenever you want,” he said. Then he thought a moment. “There’s just one more hole I want you to see.”

We walked 10 minutes and stopped at the bottom of a cliff. He examined the sky and the surface of the water, and chose a new fly to tie on. On his first cast, he caught a trout. I thanked the trout for her expedience, and began to look for an easy exit from the water. He released her, whispering see you later as he let her go.

Then he stood, dropped the fly into the water again, and began to arch the line back for another cast. 

So, I thought. It would never end. His hunt would keep going, with or without me.

The sky was all gray now, crinkling like the current, and he was a small man out in a big river. I noticed more yellow larches than I’d seen at first.

“I’m getting out,” I said. “You don’t have to, I can wait in the truck.”

He looked back at me and pouted. “Oh, sweetie,” he said, in his sweetie voice. “I’m done, I promise.”

He told me to take the scree path up to the bridge, and we could follow the road back to the parking lot. I waded out of the water alone. He was right behind me, he said. 

Scrambling up the scree was humiliating. Each step I took, the rocks gave beneath me. I moved slowly and low to the ground. My hands and knees, wet from the river, were now crusted in dirt. At the top of the hill, I stepped onto the bridge and walked to the middle. I was wet, cold, and I stood on a beautiful arching bridge that overlooked the Bitterroot. I watched him down below. He was right there, but felt far away. The mountains were black now, the river a reflective black, and the river rocks whitely piled in a path to me while the river blackly flowed away. As the dark descended, his casting became desperate. He fought time as I waited for him up above. I knew he could feel me watching.

The green neon line rears back like a whip. Then it flicks forward, floats on the air, and lands imperceptibly on the river’s face. He watches the invisible lure, following its invisible path. I watch what he watches, I try to see. A great rock wall takes up all the sunlight. There’s a log down at the edge of the water. We stare at its black belly. Now the invisible thing travels through the log’s shadow. In that blackness, we’ll have our best chance. I catch sight of the fly, get cocky, and then lose it again. He never loses it. He sees it the whole time, while I strain my eyes, scanning the surface of the water. I take a step forward. Silt swirls around my wadered legs, disturbing our camouflage. He glances over at me, and I notice the frustration on his face before he can control it. We wait for the silt to settle. He casts again.

The winter was long, and the Clark Fork turned into a solid serpent of ice. Without rivers to move him, Max took to the highways. He drove for hours in any direction. The destination didn’t matter. It was the movement he sought. Our home was too small, the walls were too solid. He felt trapped. He was beginning to get the old itch, he told me. The need to move. He wanted to go back east. No big deal, I said, we’d go back east. But he wasn’t sure he could be depended on. He was afraid to make any promises. What if he couldn’t find a job? What if he didn’t want to find one? We’d both go east, but maybe it’d be better if I made my plans without him, he said. We’d stay together, of course, but things would be better if the pressure was off. 

I wasn’t sure. I had a feeling that the pressure was the only constant we had left.

One night my mom texted me. She said there were predictions that the Northern Lights might be visible from Montana. I told Max, and he brightened. This gave us a purpose. We would find the Northern Lights, it was settled. We would find them, and when we did, they would tell us something.

We drove for hours, farmland on both sides of the road. Because he was driving, my job was finding the Northern Lights for us. If I could find them, they might say the things I knew he’d like me to say without having to say them. 

I looked for greens, pinks, yellows. I squinted in determination, sometimes gasped, is that it? Over there . . . ? But the sky was black.

After a couple hours, we abandoned our mission and began to head back to town. As the modest skyline of Missoula came into view, he put his hand on mine.

“Do you want to tell your mom we found the Northern Lights?” he asked.

On his birthday we had a fight about our future and then went fishing. I didn’t want to fish, but I didn’t want him to be alone to think about our fight. If he thought of the fight alone, then he thought of the future alone.

Because it was a special day, we drove to a faraway spot. It was April. The air was cold, and I knew the water would be colder. In the nudity of early spring, the place seemed tangled and devoid of color. Leafless trees reached with witchy knuckled fingers.

I’d never been here before. He led me through impossible brambles and trailless woods. We bushwhacked, anemic branches snapping against us, until we reached the riverbank. Logs had fallen in a grid over the water. We had to cross them. Max ran without trouble, but I couldn’t stop imagining slipping off the side, a leg going down the crevasse. When Max wasn’t looking, I got on my hands and knees and inched my way across.

And then we were in the river. The speed and slowness of it, the absolute solitude of it. The only sounds were distant April birds, the chime of water turning stones. The glacial snow was melting, so the river was high and opaque. We’d made it through the winter. This was our spring. 

We stayed the whole day. For our final location, we waded down to a pebbled beach. The sky was pink black in the setting sun. Then the sun set and it was just black. I sat on the beach and watched him. The moon rose bright white. He fished in its beam.

There was something depressing about the undulations of these days. His sharp hot joy when he caught the largest rainbow he’d ever caught. The cold white of him in the moonlight as he stood there, frozen in the river, imprisoned by the possibility of another catch, casting spells against the sky with his silver line, whipping it back and forth as if cursed. 

He was agitated and restless, like a trapped animal. I wondered whether he felt trapped by his fixation, or trapped by my gaze. Sometimes it seemed as though he wanted me to leave him there alone. But why did he invite me? Maybe he wanted me to see this—the shame, the pride, the determination. He was trying to tell me something without having to say it out loud. It was something he knew I needed him to say.

On a gray day in late spring, an existential grumpiness befell me. Max asked me if I wanted to join him fishing, but I didn’t.

I was pleased, a little guiltily, to find his absence left me feeling light. As soon as he drove away, my mood began to shift. 

When he returned a few hours later, I was feeling more like myself. The sun had come out, and I’d gone for a hike on the mountain behind our house. Now I sat on the couch, unlacing my boots. He stood in the doorway.

“I have something for you, sweetie,” he said. He didn’t say this in his sweetie voice, but instead, carefully, gently, like a grown-up.

He brought a hand out from behind his back. It was his down jacket, bundled up and tied into a knot. He placed the bundle on the kitchen island and began to untie it. I came and stood beside him. Folding back the panels of the jacket, I saw what was inside. A beautiful, good-sized rainbow trout. I gasped.

“I thought you weren’t allowed to keep them?” I asked.

“Technically you can keep a few. But it’s not open season, so I had to sneak this one out.”

He scrupulously prepared the fish on our wooden cutting board. The deboning was a delicate job, but he was thorough. I watched him work, his hands bloodied, the fish’s silk pink insides exposed. He cooked it on the stovetop in butter and we ate the meat, unseasoned, at our little kitchen table.

When the fishing got bad in the early summer, he packed all his belongings into his Miata and left. The fishing getting bad and him leaving weren’t directly correlated, but they kind of were. There was no longer anything in this life to hold his attention.

After he left I fished one last time, to prove I could. My friend’s boyfriend was a guide, and the three of us went out on a boat. They took me to an area you could only float, a place Max had always wanted to go. 

We explored narrow stretches of the river. The water was low and warm. I didn’t catch one fish. I didn’t care. Now that Max wasn’t here, the absence of a catch didn’t mean as much. I’d been “skunked,” my friends told me. It meant that we fished all day and caught nothing. In the shy heat of early summer, we took off our shirts and swam in the river.

I couldn’t see it then, through the shock of being dropped back into the real world, hurt but whole. But later I understood that I’d held on to him because I was afraid to let go—not because I thought I had the real thing. I’d fought so hard. To let go didn’t feel like freedom; it felt like defeat. The idea of starting that fight all over again, with someone new, scared me.

At the end of the day, my friend and I waited in the drift boat while her boyfriend brought the truck to the ramp. We sat together in silence, tipping in a still pool. White river rocks, warm brown water, a blue jay in flight, dark green trees. The river, a taut cable of light, pointed to the distant heap of Bitterroot Mountains. I wasn’t really here to fish, but if I’d never asked to fish, I wouldn’t have this moment. Deception leads us to beautiful places. Why does it look less beautiful when we realize we were deceived to get there?

Watching Max on our days in the river, I learned the art of a respectful release. He reached into the trout’s gaping mouth and freed what he had caught, as if he were her savior rather than her hunter. As he held her facing upstream, she seemed to visibly revive, her fins swishing. She gulped, gathering strength. Then he opened his hold so gently it was as if he never had a hold at all, and she swam away. She slipped like a silk ribbon through the water. 

I imagined what she must have felt when she was released. Some kind of relief. The relief experienced after having come to the surface to feed, only to be suddenly pulled by the lip toward an unimaginable fate of waterlessness. She fought, was caught, and was let go. She swam away, still hungry, but now suspicious of her own instincts, wondering, if fish can wonder, What happened back there? Now can I eat, or will it happen again? This had to be a complicated kind of relief—if fish feel relief at all.

Catch-and-release is considered the most sustainable fishing practice, when done properly, and Max released everything he caught. But Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks (FWP) estimates that almost a quarter of some of the most-fished trout species in Montana die of sublethal injuries after release. Poor release tactics—like losing hold of a trout from several feet out of water, as I did that first time—are the most common cause. These mortality rates vary by species, and are further compounded by injuries, exhaustion, and trauma. A 2005 publication by researchers Aaron Bartholomew and James Bohnsack includes a cumulative mortality model, showing that on top of these factors, “total mortality rises rapidly in response to repeated releases.” Fish die all the time from natural causes, but a cutthroat trout in the Yellowstone River can live over a decade. Cutthroats have a 22 percent chance of dying after being caught once and released; one cutthroat caught 10 times won’t survive. Research shows an individual cutthroat may be caught up to 10 times on the Yellowstone during one fishing season. A decade-long life expectancy could be reduced to 40 days.

What’s the alternative? To stop fly fishing—a sport that has been around since the end of the second century? To catch only what you’ll eat—a rule impossible to enforce in our maximalist culture?

The clear answer is to require all who fish to learn the context, consequences, and best practices of the sport. “Real” anglers are committed to releasing fish as painlessly, and as kindly, as possible.

A couple months after Max and I had split up, I saw him on an app. I was swiping quickly and decisively, barely looking past the first card. I almost swiped left on his profile. But I recognized him and stopped myself in time. It gave me a small thrill to nearly left-swipe my own recent ex. I tapped through his photos. Most of them were several years old—except one of us in his car, with me cropped out—and none showed him fishing. In the two years I’d known him, Max had fished almost every day. He had a camera roll of recent, attractive photos of himself—all with trout. Perhaps he intuited that fish pics aren’t particularly good bait on a dating app. 

Part of the game of dating apps is about presenting what our ideal mate might be attracted to. We know there is deception at play on both sides, but we overlook it. We swipe on people looking for “short term relationships” (what constitutes “short term”?)—then we’re hurt when they ghost us after a night of fun. We swipe on 10/10 influencer babes (perhaps they’re ready for someone nice?)—then we rage when they’re a catfish or a bot. In his essay “Alder Fork,” Aldo Leopold says, “How like fish we are: ready, nay eager, to seize upon whatever new thing some wind of circumstance shakes down upon the river of time! And how we rue our haste, finding the gilded morsel to contain a hook.” Sometimes we can’t even admit that it was our willingness to be deceived that contributed to our harm. Likewise, we refuse the blame when we deceive others, knowing we aren’t what they’re fishing for, but trying anyway, hoping that if we set the hook, they’ll stay. But of course they’ll get free, and they’ll set us free. Or one of us will consume the other. 

Leopold writes that there’s virtue in risk, no matter the outcome. “How utterly dull,” he says, “would be a wholly prudent man, or trout, or world!” 

I have a close friend, a woman, who is a fly fisher. As we hiked down a coppered trail in the Adirondacks, I asked her about her attraction to fishing—a male-dominated sport. Max, I explained, couldn’t let go of the possibility of another trout, if only he cast on the right fly or in the right shadow. I asked her if she got that way too—if she couldn’t stop fishing once she started.

“You mean, what creates the need for just one more?”

“Yes.”

Our trail led us into a clearing where the grass was tall and yellow. Pebbles crunched under our hiking boots.

“Is it an addiction to the thrill of the catch, like it was for him?” I prompted.

She continued to walk in thoughtful silence.

“No,” she said, finally. “For me, it’s about the fight.”

I imagined her in the rivers of Alaska and on her father’s fishing boats off La Push. I saw her in gray waders, standing her ground against some mysterious force, feeling the subtle pulls, listening, knowing when to resist and when to give, motivated by the nuance of figuring it out. Not just holding on, but understanding how to hold on.

“Once the fight is over, I lose interest.”

If there’s an art to the catch and an art to the release, there’s also an art to the fight. In “Alder Fork,” Leopold tells the story of a difficult capture. In an unfishable hole concealed by branches, he saw a single trout. There was an opening 20 yards upstream. Though he knew it was unlikely to catch a trout by fishing downstream, he tried anyway—“Now for the long chance!”—and through patient, tactful play, he reeled the fish in. That day, he caught only three trout, and none were so large that they required folding or beheading to fit in his creel. “What was big was not the trout, but the chance,” Leopold writes. “What was full was not my creel, but my memory.” 

I step in silt and it swirls around my waders. I stare into the agitated water, wait for the whirl of organic glitter to settle and clear, and in its settling I have a distant perspective. I look down upon a planet from outer space, and the swirls of silt are clouds. When they calm, a life is revealed beneath the disquiet. Something constant. I’m down there, under the turbulence, solid in my boots. When I look up, I see a white house at the top of a hill. Larch trees surround the house. There are no other houses within view. Who lives there? What is their life like—alone on that cliff, looking out on us, alone in the river? Alone except for the people in that house, who can see us kissing in the current, reading on the rock, catching fish and letting them go again? Looking up at that house on the hill, I have a strange sense that it is me living there, and that I’m not being watched by a girl in the house, but that I am both the girl in the river and the girl in the house. I imagine all that I want from life, and I wonder if I’ll get it. I think I might.

The post I Didn’t Want to Fly Fish, But I Loved Him Enough to Learn appeared first on Electric Literature.

We are in couples therapy, have been for many years now. The current cadence is once a month. In this season of my 30s, dry and lacking direction like I’m in the deep desert of Arrakis, a month can feel like a year. So much effort but no change. All pain and no gain.

Powerless, like many men tell us they feel.

Not long ago, after hours of writing classes on Zoom, I sat down for our telehealth session needing to talk about how the two of us can be in the same room, refilling the Brita, emptying the dryer, and I can feel totally alone. It’s made worse that we feel like soulmates when my childhood wounds aren’t inflamed.

Our therapist started by asking if there was anything either of us wanted to discuss. I rubbed my eyes, fake-smiled, and said no.

Lying, as dudes do about height, dick size, drugging wives.

The couples therapist asked how it’s going with my writing career. This annoyed me, the need to download him on the bad news, to re-process what I’d processed to pieces with his colleague, my individual therapist Matthew. As I replied about agent this, editors that, and he asked questions that I thought would lead to validation, I closed my eyes, tired from screen time. I knew I was being rude, but I had the excuse of the classes, self-improvement—I was being a good man. He asked if I was okay, said that something felt off with me.

Annoyed with the line of questioning, feeling like he wanted me to blink, I said, “Are you prompting me to talk about the suicide stuff? I’ve talked to Matthew about it. He said he’d pass it on to you. I had to sign a form and everything.”

 “Oh! No,” he said, likely shocked but acting composed. “It’s the first time I’m hearing about it.”

So I talked about the weeks of suicide ideation. I used the phrase “end of my rope,” which felt macabre, on the nose, I don’t know. I’d told my other therapist and my partner on separate occasions, but this time, in a Zoom room of three, I was both more detailed about those weeks in the hole (when I was alone, disassociating in traffic, I’d imagine crashing into the divider) and more keen on assuring them that I was okay (our therapist asked me to imagine what would cross my mind the second before impact and I said how foreign the thought experiment felt—more proof that I hadn’t gone farther than thinking about it; then I said I don’t know, maybe that I’d die and it wouldn’t really matter).

Those weeks when the thoughts flitted like flies, I felt out of hope and cut off from purpose. I’d done everything I was supposed to do to publish a book. I’d put in the work, paid my dues. I had tried to make a difference, be great. Was I not good enough or was this injustice? Is it a liability to be an Asian man? I thought society didn’t care about people like me. I believed it was easier for Asian women to publish. I had a hard time telling up from down.

Every time I reach the next rung of the ladder, it breaks and I fall to the ground. Rejection’s broken my back a few times. With the help of my therapists and partner of 10 years, I’ve pieced my spine together straighter and sturdier. I no longer doubt the quality of my writing, the value of what I have to say. I believe in the merit of my work. What hurts most this time is the lesson that merit doesn’t matter. At least it doesn’t guarantee a book. Nice sentences and a message don’t count when “the market” wants “easy” and “light.” Can you blame anybody? Things are heavy and hard. My friends tell me to keep going, but I’m not strong enough to hang in there much longer.

That’s the fear, at least. After all, am I really a man? I like dicks and quads and pecs. I love a good handbag. Once in a blue moon, I wear skirts and dresses. I’m often in designer, always stylish. “[F]or a man to dress too fashionably,” writes critic Julian Randall in GQ, “to be so fluent in fashionspeak that he can correctly pronounce Loewe and Jacquemus is to diminish his romantic prospects, apparently”—with women, implicitly, of course.

When this nation panics about masculinity, hand-wringing about isolation, radicalization, my gay ass receives no compassion. If the term “heteronormative” has ever felt abstract to the point of alienation, look no further for examples than the coverage about masculinity in every magazine with “New York” in the title. You’d think from reading these articles that only straight men want to be swole. No one else embodies masculinity. At the risk of sounding like a lib, it hurts to consume media that pretends like I don’t exist.

Because I have shoulder-length hair, when I sit with my back to the room, waiters greet the table with “ladies.” I don’t use “they/them” pronouns, but the way I move through the world says the same thing. I learned that gender is more performance than biology my first semester at elitist Brown. I epitomize the manosphere’s problem with America. Well, I would except I am Asian, which disqualifies me from the whole “man” conversation. Case in point, K-pop stars are one of the few subsets of Asian men that some Americans find desirable. At the same time, in the comments, trolls ask, “Why are Asian guys all always pretty like girls?” We’re the last people who’d be called “masculine.”

So I don’t worry about “acting like a man.” I sang along to a love song at the Florence + The Machine concert and I cried in my car playing back Everybody Scream. GQ tells me that “if you truly are cool, you don’t care about a magazine’s cookie-cutter mold of masculinity.” Thanks, sis.

But let me not lie by omission. I put creatine in my shakes. I have the best legs in the gym though it’s partly cuz I grew up fat. Even though I drink too much to have a six-pack, I run shirtless whenever I can.

Notice me! Want me. I am a man after all, demanding everyone’s attention.

There’s been so much content about men. “You can make good money telling men that they’re the truly oppressed sex,” writes Helen Lewis in The Atlantic. Even coastal elites’ glossy magazines are cashing in, making readers feel bad for men, many subscribers likely liberal women.

This essay started out as a defense of the witches in the lambasted Wicked: For Good. I didn’t want to write about masculinity. I thought we were polarized enough. But a new friend and my long-standing editor encouraged me to zoom out.

Defined by Lewis as “a movement to fight back against the advances of feminism and reassert the primacy of men . . . masculinism has become the single most force uniting the American right.” In GQ’s special report on “the state of the American male,” there’s a roundtable of “8 voices spanning the great masculinity divide,” from a family therapist who calls Trump “a celebration of shamelessness” to a venture capitalist who says Donald has “a lot of balls.” I resonated most with Jerrod Carmichael, the Emmy-winning comedian, a Black man who came out as gay in an HBO special. “[I]f I say something violent, that is motivated by fear, wanting to be seen, to feel brave, to not acknowledge the fear—it’s not truthful. Trying to make work about my biggest fears actually feels more dangerous than the dangerous stuff,” a reference perhaps to transphobic rants, straight-comic fodder. In the course of revising this essay, it became about my biggest fears. Trying my best and failing. Feeling like I’ll never be enough. These are the “genuine feelings of ennui experienced by many young American men.” The manosphere, in Lewis’s words, “lays the blame at the feet of the elites.” In particular, these men believe “[i]t’s the women who took their status,” says Laura Fields, author of Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right. Some of these men are so impotent, they work at the White House.

People whose belonging is actually up for debate—queer men of color like Carmichael, like myself—hold the power to lay bare a community to outsiders as well as the in-group. I want to talk here with men, especially those of us who feel different, and I want to do it without pointing fingers. If there really is a crisis among men, let us talk through it intimately.

The headlines run the gamut. Men in overalls, pink sweaters, and Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel all spawned so much coverage. Speaking of clothes, the “I’m elegant, I’m classy” TikTok by @whois.jason, the Black man who made quarter zips viral, sounds a lot like @joolieannie’s “very demure, very mindful.” It’s a clear example of how culture originates with trans women. Then there’s the obsession with the male-loneliness epidemic. NPR complicates this, noting “there’s only a 1% difference in reported loneliness between men and women” but flagging that “men made up nearly 80% of the suicide rate in 2022.” Men also go to dangerous lengths for a square jaw and broad shoulders. The New York Times Magazine calls this the “Testosterone Moment.” It’s authorized by the worst Kennedy, amplified by bad podcasts, and put into action by average Joes on Reddit. Libtards, ofc, have low T, which is “synonymous with low status, weakness and sexual inadequacy.” Even the abandoned monkey who didn’t know how to make friends carried around a “stuffed orangutan toy to build muscle strength,” says the Times.

These stories fill the paper of record even though most of them come out of TikTok. I didn’t see the same rampant interest in the killings of three Black women by their male partners, all in the span of four weeks. During this time, a man killed eight children and shot two women, including his wife, Shaneiqua Pugh. This was “[t]he deadliest mass shooting our country has witnessed in two years,” notes scholar Brittney Cooper. Black femicide was not all over my feed. Neither was CNN’s investigation of “a hidden, online world” where “men encourage one another to drug and assault their wives – and swap tips on getting away with it.”

When the “grab ‘em by the pussy” president rage-baits by tweeting policy, it’s hard to tell which crises are real and what’s just algorithm and vibes. Contributing to the confusion is liberal media’s endless reporting on the far right’s male influencers. I learned about “AWFULs” in The Atlantic and “mogging” in The New Yorker. ICYMI, “AWFUL” is an acronym for “Affluent White Female Urban Liberal” and “mog” derives from “AMOG,” which is short for “alpha male of the group.” Platforming the extreme makes it mainstream.

As alarming as the headlines is the collective shift they reveal: an undoing of painfully earned gains, a rewriting of what defines worthiness. After Time’s Up and summer uprisings, all that reckoning with systemic injustice, men are rewriting the story, this time emphasizing effort and how we deserve to be at the top. As though wanting something badly, hungering and hunting, justified every kill. 

Men are using the scripts of meritocracy—I worked hard for this so I deserve it—to reinstate patriarchy. They’ve internalized the language of identity and grievance, which had made them feel like the enemy, and rebranded themselves the real victims. The right has taken the tools of the left. They’re beating us at our own game.

This switchback in common sense has shown up all over culture. New York Magazine ran a piece about “penis anxiety” in which a guy who runs a “girth-enhancement clinic” says his clients “leave his clinic emotionally healed.” Pumped with scrotum filler, they gain what he calls a “more natural way of perpetuating dominance, this dominant alpha-male persona that begins to come from within.”

A grievance-lacquered sense of entitlement also clouds my judgment. I’m the wrong kind of minority, not one whose suffering matters. What can I put on or take off so that people see me, choose me, read me?

I’m getting ahead of myself. Now that we’ve seen the lay of the land, let’s take a step back and ask how we got here.

By the time of #MeToo, certain feminist critiques were part of everyday chatter. Think “male privilege,” “manspreading,” and “rape culture,” all ways of naming entitlement that fell under “toxic masculinity.” As nonbinary author Jacob Tobia puts it, “We went from proclaiming men as sometimes wielding a toxic substance to proclaim[ing] men as a toxic substance.”

Once “men” was synonymous with “problem,” the rehabilitation project began: reading lists and earnest how-tos about being a good man. Except the internet had no time for articles like “The Reality That All Women Experience That Men Don’t Know About” or “I Won’t Tell My 4-Year-Old Son to ‘Man Up.’ Not Now. Not Ever.” In mockery of the defensive “But not all men,” it became standard to insist “Yes, all men,” to double down on the systemic over the individual, the view that all men were puppets of patriarchy.

I went out of my way to be the exception. Whenever I ended up behind a woman on the sidewalk, I slowed down enough to increase our distance or got off the curb and sped ahead. On dates, I’d ask guys question after question. The next day, between sets of deadlifts, I’d complain to my trainer Rachel about self-centered men, not knowing I was closed off, emotionally unavailable.

Even now, there are efforts to rebrand masculinity. In the UK last year, Esquire relaunched under a new editor and introduced the “Better Men Project.” On all three covers, the messaging’s the same: “Not perfect, just better.” In contrast to the sincerity of print media, the “performative male” popped out of TikTok like a jack in the box. To be “the antithesis of the toxic man,” says the Times, these Gen Z men acted out what they thought would appeal to liberal women, sporting “on-trend markers for softness, stylishness and a feminist leaning that he may or may not actually possess.” These props included matcha and a tote bag and the bell hooks bestseller All About Love. At the same time, “[a]lmost a third of generation Z men and boys think a wife should obey her husband,” according to a survey of 23,000 people conducted by the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership. Compared to 44 percent of Baby Boomers, 57 percent of Gen Z men agree that “we have gone so far in promoting women’s equality that we are discriminating against men.” It tracks, then, that in a survey conducted by a Manhattan surgeon specializing in men’s sexual health, “Gen Z reported the lowest confidence in their penises.”

The trend of reading in public to court women gave rise to the term “performative reading,” a phenomenon as old as Infinite Jest, the thousand-page novel that turned 30 this year. David Foster Wallace, my first favorite writer, killed himself on my birthday my first semester of college. 18, wanting to be great, but far from calling myself a writer, I took the coincidence as a sign from the universe that I’d inherit his status as a genius one day. People would study my every word, just as I was idolizing his.

Fast forward to adulthood. Writing workshops, publications, a PhD. Yet it still feels impossible to publish a book. So I started a Substack read-along of Wallace’s 1996 compendium of loneliness and addiction. I e-mailed writing friends and mentors about it, even my two therapists. One kind friend said she was excited about my book club while reminding me, because I had known, that Wallace was a known abuser of Mary Karr, a professor and bestselling writer. I proceeded with the Substack, setting out to examine the man’s magnum opus.

In 2018, Karr tweeted that Wallace “tried to buy a gun. kicked me. climbed up the side of my house at night. followed my son age 5 home from school. had to change my number twice, and he still got it. months and months it went on[.]” This was not new information at the time. “The horror stories had simply been subsumed into the broader story . . . of Wallace’s personal genius,” writes Megan Garber in The Atlantic, “as evidence of his uncontainable passion, of the singular depth of his wanting.” 

My post-Wallace literary favorite was another code-switching, MacArthur-winning nerd. Junot Díaz is a brown immigrant, a self-professed intersectional feminist. Díaz was a role model during my 20s. I was teaching high-school English in LA, creating a safe space in my classroom. Everything was new for this kid from the suburbs. Díaz showed me a way to be down beyond the male bravado of the ’60s, raised fists and tests of endurance. He seemed so at ease in vulnerability. In his image, with my friends, I organized to make ethnic studies a graduation requirement. After championing my students’ right to learn their own history, I left my job to pursue writing.

In January of 2018, fresh off of grad school applications, seeking guidance on becoming a writer, I drove early from LA to San Diego to get a good seat at one of Díaz’s talks. After, signing my copies of his books, he complimented my outfit, like he’d done at the last talk I went to. In March, fans filled my local indie bookstore to celebrate Díaz’s new children’s book. I spotted his partner and friends off to the side. In April, he wrote an essay in The New Yorker “detailing the sexual assault he experienced as an 8-year-old boy.” In May, the New York Times published an article. “The Writer Zinzi Clemmons Accuses Junot Díaz of Forcibly Kissing Her.” Since then, on the rare occasion I see his byline or blurb, I look away, curious but ashamed. 

This spring, in light of well-documented allegations, the founding chef of Noma, once the top restaurant in the world, stepped down from a Los Angeles residency. In the same month, after the Times’s delicate and harrowing investigation, California announced plans to rename Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day. To echo Garber, the “dangerous romance of male genius” unravels seasonally, but it always seems to re-form.

It’s hard to care about “the state of the American male” when monsters’ heads always rear.

It’s hard to valorize greatness when skeletons fall out of closets.

We’ve talked about where things stand and how we got here. The big question is, what’s the problem? 

From the darkness of the manosphere to the lights of movies’ biggest night, something pernicious is happening in culture. Fuck goodness. Men are doing whatever it takes to be great.

In what already feels like the worst timeline, everything seems to start and end with Joe Rogan and his disciples, men with expensive equipment and costly opinions. They interview looksmaxxers, weirdos dignified as a movement by liberal media. An offshoot of “involuntary celibates,” these guys “accept the premise that appearance is destiny but reject the incels’ resignation to congenital ugliness.” Instead, The New Yorker reports, they break their face with a hammer and take testosterone until they’re infertile. They do so to “ascend” to “Chad” status, the highest on an eight-point scale that “sorts men into three tiers.” Clavicular, the nom de guerre of the figurehead, an AI-looking white guy that Armie Hammer might enjoy as a snack, says the scale is “all very objective . . . all very well researched.” Armed with outlandish jargon, looksmaxxers insist that beauty is scientific. They’re just cracking the code. In reality, Wired reports, their judgment is far from neutral. Harassing Black looksmaxxers, trolls post in the comments “Jbw,” an acronym for “just be white.”

In this corner of the internet, it’s accepted that the world is unfair, but men are the victims of injustice. “One of masculinism’s central claims,” Lewis observes, “is that no one is talking about men.” The fervor of this grievance burns through any arguments about privilege and patriarchy. There but for the grace of God go I.

In another moment and milieu, maybe “looksmaxxers” could have “called folx in” about “pretty privilege.” But nowadays, new norms dictate that anybody can look good. The New Yorker reports the options: “Rhinoplasties, jaw surgeries, ab implants, limb-lengthening, whatever.” Appearance is everything in an age of optimization, screenshots, and Zoom. If you want to look better, you’ll do what it takes—and actually, it might not take all that much. Just ask Chat. In the permission structure created by GLP-1 pills and protein lattes, which make the unattainable seem within reach, people who don’t get what they want, with their outdated talk of injustice, are just losers who won’t go the distance.

Rob Rausch went all the way. He’s the latest winner of The Traitors and “a preeminent internet boyfriend.” Alan Cumming, the host of the campiest game of Mafia streaming on Peacock, called Rob one of the best Traitors in the history of the show.

People kept bringing up Rob’s appearance. Interview Magazine says he’s “blessed with devastatingly good looks.” Honestly, guys, he’s just white, which is how he got away with dressing so badly on what’s functionally a show about style. Asked if he ever got “the sense you’d sort of cast a spell over everyone,” Rob insists he won because he made “strategic decisions.” A stable genius, “I’d get home from my Traitor duties and I would lay in bed and close my eyes . . . I would say, ‘What if this happens?’” Rob’s saying he outworked and outthought. He won cuz he mastered the craft. It’s not because he’s straight and from a red state. It’s got nothing to do with the minorities he played to claim the $220,800 jackpot all for himself.

Thankfully, not every man gets his way. My friends, it’s time to talk Chalamet, who’s generated so much discourse. I use that word not just in the colloquial sense of online chatter. I also mean the ingredients in the making of common sense. Everything that we’re tracking, down to Punch the Monkey, reshapes social norms: what’s permissible, what’s thinkable. By paying attention to discourse, we see where society’s headed. We decide when to step in.

The Atlantic calls Chalamet “the movie star for this social-media-obsessed, parasocial-relationship-building moment.” He’s been playing on a loop. Citing the writer Hunter Harris, Vulture points out that Chalamet’s “essentially been on a never-ending publicity tour” since Wonka opened on Christmas in 2023. Even his courtside appearances at Knicks games were a reset before the third Dune. 

What a hard-working man. From the queer-coded confectionary eccentric to the fiercely straight table-tennis player, he’s played “characters defined by otherworldly gifts, monomaniacal drive, and a cold-blooded disregard for the concerns of others.” So, he’s been playing himself. One performance gave the internet pause. In his 2025 acceptance speech for Best Actor at the SAG Awards, he said, “I’m really in pursuit of greatness. I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats.” 

Then his loud ambition turned all the way up doing press for Marty Supreme. In case orange blimps and throwback windbreakers didn’t get this across, the movie’s about a little guy who’ll do whatever it takes for the world to recognize his—wait for it—supremacy.

Orange and ego-driven. Sound familiar?

All of Chalamet’s publicity stunts, from staging a marketing meeting on Zoom to shouting at the top of the Sphere, formed what Vulture calls a “I Am My Character” campaign for the Oscars. Chalamet was talking his shit even before the movie’s Christmas release. (We get it, Timmy, your work is a gift.) In a posted-then-deleted YouTube interview, he said, “[I]t’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances . . . The discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things,” key terms when talking meritocracy, “I don’t want people to take for granted. I don’t want to take for granted.” I talk this way to myself, but I’d never say it aloud. He told Good Morning America, “I’m confident I know what it’s gonna be by next summer.”

Less than a month before the Oscars, he took “shots” at ballet and opera, calling them “things where it’s like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive.’” He triggered a backlash.

The week after Chalamet lost, it was spring and hotter than summer. I have a hard time believing that slighting pursuits of greatness associated with women was the silver bullet at his once-foregone golden statue. He’d already forsaken the gays, the ones lured with Call Me By Your Name, catching a Chanel contract along the way. Then he was “getting overly familiar with the trappings of inner-city Blackness,” says the critic Craig Jenkins. “But in dialing his tastes and mannerisms back,” swapping streetwear for Givenchy suits, “he exhibits a luxury not available to the people whose culture he champions.”

Betraying sexual and racial minorities didn’t stop Chalamet’s ascent. I don’t have reason to think the Oscars were holding him accountable for belittling women.

It wasn’t just him. While Chalamet was building his grindset, film critics were tearing women down.

Consider the uncanny parallels of these three films’ trajectories. Disney’s live-action Snow White remake seemed doomed from the casting announcement. Rachel Zegler, the Colombian American star of West Side Story, would play the titular heroine. This made MAGA see red cuz Snow White had to be white. Then the internet left got blue in the face because former Miss Israel Gal Gadot was playing the Evil Queen. By the time that I saw the trailer, including the seven CGI companions excised from the title, skipping the movie was a no-brainer. I’d forgotten all about it until talking with a friend about this essay. He said Snow White was actually pretty good. Alison Whitmore at Vulture said it’s “totally about lefty infighting”—would watch. 

When I saw the first trailer for The Bride!, I took it as yet another take on Frankenstein, this one directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, featuring actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard. I didn’t recognize the actress in the lead role. Then my partner and I watched another movie that I knew little about, only that it’d somehow connect to Shakespeare. For most of Hamnet, I expected a movie about a male genius and his canonical play even as he kept leaving behind Agnes, his wife, played by Jessie Buckley, the star of The Bride!. She’s why we ended up seeing Gyllenhaal’s movie. 

In the theater, I got so fed up, I thought about walking out, but that would’ve embarrassed my partner. After the credits, driving to the bar, we had a hard time finding the words. Gyllenhaal’s feminism, with a reference to #MeToo, got the best of the movie. She felt too strongly about the material to make edits. Why didn’t a reasonable person take the wheel? It’s not smart to work with your brother and husband. Pinpointing the flaws of the movie, we heard our misogyny loud and clear. When critics posted their reviews, I was relieved that we weren’t alone. “I Have No Idea What The Bride! Is Trying to Say,” Whitmore wrote, “But It Sure Is Loud About It.” The movie’s at 57 percent on the Tomatometer.

The last time I came across a Rotten Tomatoes score that low for a movie I’d watched, it was Wicked: For Good in the mid-60s. That’s a D and not the fun kind.

Leading up to opening weekend, I came across mean headlines on Insta, squirming as I scrolled past. The New Yorker posted a picture of Glinda in her new Good Witch gown for the sequel, frowning amidst piles of propaganda painting Elphaba as the Wicked Witch. The title? “Wicked: For Good Is Very, Very Bad.”

This insult got in my head. Part one of the musical-turned-film was deftly satirical, the laughs many, the tone wonderfully strange. I grew attached to Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. I wanted the sequel to do well, be great, so the bad reviews worried me. Their schadenfreude made me defensive. This bad weather followed me into the theater for the adaptation of Act II. I kept looking for problems like I was squinting to pass an eye test.

After the movie ended, adjusting to the bright hallway, I told my partner what I thought might be wrong with the movie.

 “I mean, I guess she was doing a lot? And the whole thing has soap-opera beats.”

When I finished, he said he was surprised. “I thought it was great. What do you mean?”

I told him about the reviews, the little I knew.

 “I’m so glad I’m not online like that,” his social media usage limited to academic LinkedIn and a YouTube that’s equal parts Ts Madison and Dune.

The rest of the way home, we went back and forth about the sequel, concluding it was even better than the first.

As awards season unfurled, Hollywood turned out to be as confused as I was. After the blitzkrieg of negativity, the American Film Institute and the National Board of Review both recognized For Good as one of the top films of the year. The Golden Globes nominated both leading ladies for the second time. When the Oscars released its shortlists, For Good was on eight of the twelve, a feat matched only by Sinners.

In a final reversal, For Good received no Oscars nominations. The Hollywood Reporter called it completely shut out, an outcome that masculinism explains. By the end of For Good, the green witch turns the ginger beta into tin and the mogging heartthrob into straw. Talk about dehumanizing. And who ends up on top but the pink witch, the AWFUL who deposes the Wizard. For Good is the manosphere’s bogeywoman. F1, the Brad Pitt vehicle, was nominated for Best Picture. 

While many of the reviews talk about the Wicked sequel as the lesser of the two films, they disagree on where things went wrong, which layer of the palimpsest is cracked. The 2003 musical that the movies are based on. The 1995 novel that the musical adapted. The 1939 classic that the novel complicated. The 1900 novel that the film brought to the screen. Could any adaptation of Act II have soared or is the source material that shaky? This archaeology resembles the question of the times. Where did the US go wrong? How did the country once again become the home of the Wizard?

The industry’s flip-flopping about Wicked is consistent with the ongoing struggle over myths. Which origin story is valid? Can anyone’s telling be just? Trump is dismantling the education department over these questions about history and narrative. Storytelling relies on heroes and villains, a binary that’s gendered and racialized. Changing a character’s race inverts the gravity. That’s why Hamilton still moves me. When people of color fill the cast list and when Black people take center stage, white audiences predictably lash out.

Revision is no simple matter. It determines who belongs.

Snow White, The Bride!, and For Good all contend with the canon. Updating narratives that are practically myths, the trio is intimately aware of stories’ influence on culture. What the Wall Street Journal says about the Disney remake is true for all three. There’s a “tension . . . when remaking beloved movies made at a different time with different social norms,” whether that’s changing Snow White’s lore so her name’s no longer about the whiteness of her skin to casting a queer Black woman alongside a white pop star to examine the construction of American morality, the tension between goodness and greatness.

These are all stories about power. They center women and care about justice.

Critics berated these movies. Meanwhile, lauded as “a movie of our moment” by The New Yorker, directed by a man whose white-male “films are studies of American loneliness,” One Battle After Another won Best Picture. Weird connection: OBAA director PTA studied creative writing with DFW. Are initial bros a thing? Idk. Jbw.

A culture with limitless grace for “great” men and endless content about bad ones has no patience for stories about women. Contributing to this climate, Vanity Fair dedicated a whole issue last year to “our new class of leading men.” In “The People’s Princes,” writer Ottessa Moshfegh says men ranging from Jonathan Bailey to LaKeith Stanfield represent “the almost approachable, appealingly authentic modern actor.” They are all Internet boyfriends—so many boyfriends!—“accessible, kind, vulnerable, and recognizably human,” the same qualities that drew me to Wallace and Díaz. I took after Dave’s long hair and Junot’s speech patterns. “The true internet boyfriend doesn’t want to be mothered. He already has a mother, and he loves her.”

It’s a good thing that Chalamet didn’t win the Oscar—this child who diminished the artistic communities his mother and sister belong to for the sake of appealing to men. Even better, Chalamet lost to a man who brought his mother to every award show.

The story of celebrity pageantry may seem distant to the point of irrelevance. To me, they’re a statement of values. Whether a receipt or a budget, I’m not sure—how things should be versus how they are—but Michael B Jordan’s recognition matters. He who played monster and men.

There’s an Internet theory about Sinners. Before Jonathan Majors attacked his then-girlfriend and was found guilty of harassment and assault, the former Marvel villain might have played Jordan’s twin in the vampire movie.

As I remember Majors’ rise, there was a point that crystallized his image as an artist, an actor’s actor—a good man rocketing to greatness. The Times published a photo shoot of Majors and Jordan side by side, in embrace. As publicity for Creed III, they showed a form of male friendship that was tender and unguarded. I revisit the portrait now. Majors’ arms slung around Jordan, their cheeks pressed. Their gaze directed at mine. Jordan’s brows arched like a wave. I see an intimacy that I long for. I wish I held onto men with such ease instead of thinking I’m unworthy of touch. In couples therapy last week, I said aloud for the first time something I’ve believed most of my life. If there’s a man I find attractive, he would never look my way. Since saying this, I’m coming to realize that my assumption may not be true.

A friend told me about the Sinners theory. Rasheed Newson, a showrunner with a new novel called There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood, traced the images of Jordan and Majors to the closeness of their predecessors, Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte. Jordan thanked Poitier in his acceptance speech for Best Actor. Meanwhile, Majors’ next movie is produced by manosphere mobster Ben Shapiro. In another Choose Your Own Adventure, Timothée Chalamet will return in one of the biggest movies of the year. Armie Hammer appeared in one thing last year. There weren’t enough reviews of it for Rotten Tomatoes to give a score.

These splits in the road are stories about good guys and bad. It’d be easy to say I’m on the right side of history, disidentify from the “geniuses” whose violence gets folded into creativity. The men whose ambition writes a permission slip for carelessness and exploitation. Whose “loneliness” is cover for societal sabotage. But if I’ve learned anything from the discourse about men, it’s that I’m not so different from them. I fear I have no place in society. It got so bad, I imagined my death.

With that said, so do men who do the unthinkable. The father who killed his own children had told family members about suicidal thoughts, reports the Times. But, as Dr. Cooper argues, mental illness is a spurious cover for “a patriarchal reset, in which men are heads of household and women and children are their willing and devoted subordinates.” To get in the way where we can, I hope the left takes more seriously how our excesses and hypocrisies brought these nightmares to life. To echo Julia Gillard, the chair of the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership, how do we “dispel the idea of a zero-sum game in which women are the only beneficiaries of a gender-equal world”? What’s a rhetoric that’s got more meat on its bones than the skeletal logic of grievance? This discursive work is urgent because, as Lewis reports, masculinism “is a movement with real policy goals,” including “affirmative action for men.”

The other day, at the end of a long week, my partner and I went to the bar to reconnect. Hoping it’d go well, I chose a seat in the middle of the house. Then we had our version of a fight. We sat side by side, unable to speak, making our bartender friends uneasy, maybe. I was sick of pouring my heart out only to find a blank slate. He was sick of doing his best only to hear it wasn’t enough.

We chose to meet each other where he was at. I explained that my unease with silence had more to do with my parents than it did with him. He said that if I ever felt neglected, bring it up in a light way on the spot. Then we closed out and made it to the theater in time for Project Hail Mary, a heartwarming sci-fi blockbuster that shows Ryan Gosling, no longer Ken, is not only redeemable but fundamentally good. Two incompatible men can learn to be close, even a hunky scientist who wears chunky cardigans and an alien rock that speaks in animal sounds.

Other standout movies this year include Is God Is and The Drama. Young women, twins and a bride, navigate what’s good and what’s wicked in the wake of male violence. Both films are formally inventive and tonally expansive, as entertaining as they are smart. In a year of too-big-to-fail tentpoles like The Odyssey and Avengers: Doomsday, let’s keep an eye out and our minds open to women’s ambivalence and ambition.

Personally, I’m letting go of wanting to be great. I’m learning more tender reasons to live. I fail and find I’m still worthy.

A man who is not a man, I peel myself open again and again, hoping for my other’s touch.

At night I rest my hand on his side. In the dark we write our own story.

The post We’ve Made a Mess of Masculinity, but I Believe It Can Change appeared first on Electric Literature.

They started watching Normal People, like everybody else, during the first lockdown. They’d been married three years at this point. She’d read two of Rooney’s novels, and both of her published stories (as well as much of the criticism) so she knew it wasn’t going to be socialist in any major way––knew, too, that everyone was tired of Rooney’s women, with their self-loathing, masochistic (anti-feminist?) tendencies. But her real problem with the young Irish bestseller was the extent to which, despite her proclaimed Marxist politics, Rooney’s writing remained deeply uncynical about love. 

Perhaps, there was a touch of envy in K’s assessment. At university, she’d read Laura Kipnis’ Against Love, after a particularly heart-wrenching breakup; she’d written a whole essay, in fact, looping in Freud and Marcuse, to argue that modern romantic love was just a manifestation of capitalism (it was something about consumerism, obviously, but also about how “true-love” transferred the work ethic to the bedroom; something too, if she recalls, about perpetuating a sense of scarcity, and Protestantism, and rationing harmless immateriality, an idea inspired by Terry Eagleton’s writing on the rise of literature; also something, she thinks, about perfume). The high mark she’d received had taken the sting out of the breakup––there was a thrill in transmuting her embodied and largely trivial-seeming pain into intellectual pleasure. 

Off the back of this, K’s lecturer had encouraged her to apply for the MA at Cambridge; she could develop the piece into her application submission. Only, not long after that, she reconciled with the ex-boyfriend and, restored to his warm arms and weed-drenched Saturdays watching The American Apprentice in bed, could no longer understand Marcuse’s notion of “profitable conformity” or what it had to do with a “true-love myth.” She failed to expand the essay with sufficient passion and rigor and when that boyfriend dumped her, again, some months later, she took it as a double blow: the loss of both love, and of intellectualism’s promised protections. She came to acquaint the softening of her heart with a sort of intellectual softness, and henceforth never fully trusted romantic attachments, nor her capacity for critical thinking.

So how had this happened? This marriage, with Matt? Six years on, there had been a house party, then a dinner, but really it was the holiday in Greece, a romantic island for rock climbers where the sunsets, mojitos, and cheese-on-fire, as well as the heightened stakes of being held, via rope, off a cliff face, by a man you’ve barely met, came together in an irrepressible sense of destiny that defied all critical theory. 

Now, eight more years on, aged 34, married, and with a toddler, but without much of a career, or the time required to develop one, she found herself vacillating between two contradictory positions: that love is a pro-capitalist, pro-patriarchy myth that doesn’t serve a young woman’s interests; that love is everything, all you need, life’s one purpose. So naturally she’d enjoyed the passages in Rooney’s first novel, Conversations with Friends, that lightly satirized this way of thinking, like the one where Frances (the narrator) and Bobbi (her best friend and one-time girlfriend) debate the politics of love over instant message:

Bobbi: if you look at love as something other than an interpersonal phenomenon 

Bobbi: and try to understand it as a social value system

Bobbi: it’s both antithetical to capitalism, in that it challenges the axiom of selfishness

Bobbi: which dictates the whole logic of inequality

Bobbi: and yet also it’s subservient and facilitatory

Bobbi: i.e. mothers selflessly raising children without any profit motive

Bobbi: which seems to contradict the demands of the market at one level

Bobbi: and yet actually just functions to provide workers for free

me: yes

me: capitalism harnesses “love” for profit

me: love is the discursive practice and unpaid labour is the effect

me: but I mean, I get that, I’m anti love as such

Bobbi: that’s vapid frances

Bobbi: you have to do more than say you’re anti things.

She’ll admit it, it annoyed her—that Rooney had managed to turn these contradictions into literary gold dust, while she found herself here: married but confused, concerned about her hypocrisy, raising her child without undue regard for the profit motive and yet not feeling blessed with any of the selfless axiom-challenging—stuck. K’s “anti-love” position had seen her rejected by ex-boyfriends as cold and unnatural; her “anti-capitalist” stance had found her out of a job; her decision to marry, largely for the purpose of creating a solid family base, seemed somehow both naive and cynical, in the harsh light of parenthood; Rooney’s ability to mine these sorts of contradictions, clever and playful, precise and heartfelt, had got her a two-book deal in a seven-party auction. 

It was April 2020. Since the pandemic shuttered their nursery in late March, K and her husband, Matt, had developed a routine that involved her working between six and 10 A.M. and then again after four. This was by far the most childcare he had provided since their son’s birth, over two years ago, but somehow even this niggled: how long it had taken him to offer some relief; how scarce the time still felt, given she had two years to catch up. 

Their son, Leo, had only recently begun napping reliably, in the early afternoon. On weekdays, she used this time productively. But after lunch on Saturdays and Sundays, they would take turns to walk the pram once around the park, and when his thin purple eyelids flickered shut, somewhere between the sycamore blossom and the lime trees, they’d park the pram in the hallway, close the door on their son’s sweaty-headed snoring, and hit play on the remote for their wall-mounted smart TV.

Whoever said “there is no more somber enemy of good art than the pram in the hall” (it was Cyril Connolly) presumably had somewhere better to place their baby whilst he napped.

The TV show was the third outing of Normal People’s protagonists. As well as this BBC/Hulu version, and the novel, there was a story in the White Review, “At the Clinic,” that introduced the two main characters. 

Normal People, the book and show, follows Marianne, wealthy but unpopular, and Connell, the popular and quiet son of her family’s cleaner, who begin a love affair in high school. Marianne’s family are cold, so she is too; there is the sense Connell is embarrassed by her––he encourages her to keep their relationship secret. When they find themselves at the same university, the balance has shifted, with Marianne thriving and Connell, subject to more financial and different social pressures, isolated. Connell’s passion for Marianne is deeply-felt but confusing to him. Both are very smart, book smart, politics smart; less smart, perhaps, about the workings of the heart.

Matt had never read the book and had no preconceived notions about the show. K had seen the promo material before the show itself; the soft-focus vision of the two leads, in matching school uniform, or nuzzling in long grasses, conjured for her such a strong sense of nostalgia. Yet it was one that couldn’t altogether be trusted: Since she’d gone to an all-girls school, where no boys shared the uniform, this didn’t relate to her own youth, but rather a shared imaginary past where one could expect to love innocently and be loved innocently in return (and where your capacity for love, perhaps, renders you beautiful). In other words, the show promised everything she hated––and loved––about “true-love.”

Because these were their only windows of off-duty time––and because the enforced lockdown stymied all other forms of entertainment, or indeed, social engagement––the culture they consumed in these charmed hours took on a significance, and a dreamlike hue. It would follow them through the days and into the nights, and over the weeks. It would lodge itself in their subconscious.

The thing that surprised her, in the early episodes, was how hard her husband fell for it. Matt seemed to see a lot of himself in Connell: the inarticulateness of the smart boy; his vulnerability to group social pressure. 

They’d been having precisely the amount of fun you might expect for a couple three years into marriage, with a two-year-old son, in a pandemic.

Partly what had caused their rift—besides her husband’s enviable freedom to work outside the house—was her sense that he was a cold person, that he didn’t feel anything deeply. While Connell worries he is “emotionally empty,” her husband often claimed, half-ironically, not to have a subconscious.

Privately, she thought he was also rather like Marianne, with her problems giving and receiving love. Perhaps Matt’s coldness had roots in his family history. In his older brother role, he’d been forced to adopt a certain early self-sufficiency; his mother had gone back to work when he was small. His parents had separated when he was in his teens. He’d gotten used to fending for himself, emotionally, and fending for himself had been encouraged. 

She also found herself relating in certain ways to Marianne. K had attended her all-girls private school, part-funded by a scholarship, so knew the double-edged sword of intellect, the way it lifts you up, but also marks you out, especially as a woman, and the way being marked out can come to define you.

If one has been defined at a young age, as K, and Marianne, and presumably debate champion and multi-bestseller Rooney have, by their intellect, that must also inflect your approach to romantic life. You might enjoy the release of supplication. You might find refuge in the “subservient and facilitatory” as a form of rebellion, or of masochism. You might thrill to the sense of your rational mind being overthrown by embodied passions. Or you might feel wary and mistrustful of affection, both others’ and your own, and attempt to puncture it with defensive behaviors, barbed comments and intellectual provocations. (No doubt she had some issues with her parents, too!)

Episode Six: a party, of sorts. Marianne leans back in a chair, a challenging glare in her eye. Connell hovers at the fringes, awkward. He’s outside the social sphere, this is not his world. They are sleeping together, have been since high school, the power shifts between them like a see-saw. Or a set of scales. For there is some balance here: In a patriarchal world, he holds the power of being the man; in a capitalist world, she of being wealthy.

Back when K and Matt first got together, she thinks, things had also felt more balanced. But now he earns so much and she earns nothing. She wonders how many other relationships over-topple this way, when children are born.

Marianne was hurt by Connell, back in high school; she doesn’t want to let herself be hurt again. At the party, she quilts protections out of her critical distance, hides behind her feminism. He seems to have real feelings for her now, compared to the sketch in the White Review story—the focus seems less on his being “emotionally empty,” more on the fact that he worries about this—and he knows he can’t claim her or anything (it’s a sort of classic set up, he doesn’t think he deserves her but also doesn’t want the inconvenience of having to make himself worthy of her . . . ).

He’d been preparing to leave Dublin for the summer, accepting that might mean they’d break up, but he’s lost his job, can’t afford to stay, too proud initially to ask her for financial help. (Rooney is great on this, the way economic necessity embeds bad patterns of relating.) 

But Connell is considering it––he cares for her, she likes him—when Marianne says, “Men seem more interested in limiting women’s freedoms than exploring their own.” Does he receive it, as she perhaps intended, in good spirits, a gloss of cynicism? Does he hear it as a test? It’s the turning point, the point where he must ask her if he can stay with her, or walk away, wounding them both (the wounding has been foreshadowed by broken glass in the sink). Connell doesn’t speak up, and in the living room, one evening, baby fast asleep upstairs, K found herself gritting her teeth, “Why doesn’t he just communicate?” 

“Because she said that thing about limiting freedoms,” her husband replied.

She asked the question rhetorically. 

The critic Jessa Crispin considered the party interchange bad dialogue. Specifically: “The TV show analyzes itself for you with these offhand comments by the characters, so you don’t have to do any of the hard work of thinking, and they don’t have to do any of the hard work of delving into the complexity of contemporary heterosexuality.”

But Crispin understates the way this mode of relating is key to the main characters’ dynamic, and the unfolding narrative. 

Marianne doesn’t think her words will affect Connell. Yet in one reading, they change everything. It is her words that mean that Connell doesn’t show vulnerability, doesn’t ask for help; that they break up, rather than stay together. 

This interaction might be a key part of the writer and directors’ “delving into the complexity of contemporary heterosexuality”: the way we hide behind our politics; the way recourse to this sort of glib political aside can be a sign of emotional damage, or repression, in a world that values stoicism and independence over intimacy and communication. 

And when, watching this episode, K realized that her husband’s inarticulateness might be in part a reaction to the things she says; that his inarticulateness was not his fault alone; that two people, in a couple, are symbiotic, she felt the possibility of repair to some small wound in their relationship.

As soon as the moment of salve suggested itself, she was keen to puncture it. “Let’s not be like James Corden and say Normal People changed our life.” 

He shot her a look: Hurt? Annoyed? “Let’s not bring James Corden into it.” 

Between episode Eight and Nine.

They went to the forest. They parked on the golf course side, the rickety pot-holed road near the old-people’s home, not by the tree on the hill now purple with blossom. They breathed in the green. Ate sandwiches out of Tupperware, high on a hill, bagels, with limp Edam, turned stodgy in the humidity of the box.

She can’t recall what game they played that day, perhaps they were hunting for bears as their son ran stumble-trip over the tree-roots. Perhaps they were spotting squirrels or wading through mud enticed by small animal biscuits half-dipped in chocolate. She had the feeling not of being happy exactly but of making a truce, in the war that raged inside her all the time, contentment versus dissatisfaction in the name of self-betterment.

She watched her husband chase after their boy, tickling him until chuckles fell like blossoms from his mouth, and thought: What was the problem?

Her husband, she thought, was insufficiently feminist. That was the problem. He believed (or so she believed) that the things she found difficult were things she had chosen (the drudge of childcare, maybe, or the struggle of freelancing). He didn’t seem to understand how her efforts were affected by systems. He was supposed to be a socialist, despite his job in corporate banking. Yet he seemed to believe, within the home unit, that adults should take care of themselves. 

On return to the car, he unhooked their son from his carrier—asleep—and tried to place him—still asleep—in the car seat. He felt a stab in his abs, which didn’t go away even after he stood up. Briefly his pained expression invited her to imagine what it was like to be him: He presumed the problem was muscular. And felt a lot of things all mixed together. A kind of hermit anger looking for a home in blame. A feeling of losing control, things spinning just beyond his grasp. Annoyance at having had to twist to put the toddler in the car, that parenthood is not ergonomic. He felt stress at how he was going to cope, already exhausted from the month since nursery shut. Also, he had a professional exam coming up. That was one of the places he got self-esteem from: taking tests, receiving high marks. Transmitting his intellectual skills into external awards. Being good at something, objectively good. The exam represented a necessary tension relief. 

At home, baby transferred successfully to pram without waking, Matt lay on the floor, on his back, frozen peas on his stomach, holding his eyes as his face changed color; he held his eyes as though he could squeeze the tears back in, as Connell talked to his therapist.

Before the baby, K had only seen him cry like this once. When his younger cousin died suddenly of Deep Vein Thrombosis and she found Matt in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, trying, and failing, to comprehend the incalculable shock of the loss.

On the TV, Connell’s friend had just committed suicide, and Connell was talking to a therapist about feeling isolated and unliked. It wasn’t clear whether it was Connell’s predicament or his own pain that caused her husband to cry, but perhaps the physical pain was giving him a context to cry; the physical pain allowed him to relate to Connell more freely than he might otherwise have done.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“It’s just a very good portrayal of men’s mental health,” he replied, sobbing. 

When the episode finished, he retreated to their bedroom, vomited, then called NHS 111. At that point in the pandemic, they were avoiding unnecessary interactions, but he believed in his pain the way she never had hers, so he took a cloth mask stitched by his mother and tapped his phone to summon an Uber. 

At the hospital, a doctor did checks, gave him painkillers, and diagnosed a suspected gallstone.

At home K moved around her baby, cooked some convenient dinner, tried not to panic.

While Matt was at the hospital, she put Leo to bed for the first time in months. Co-sleeping had been their solution to the long stretches of broken nights, but their son had become “too attached to the breast,” so they’d separated him into his own room a couple of months earlier, and Matt had taken on night duties, first settling him in the evening, then shushing him back to sleep when he woke. 

And that night, even though she resorted to giving him a feed, when she watched his eyelids flutter after the third recitation of The Snail and the Whale, she felt proud. She was asleep when Matt, numbed by drugs, got home, and the next day he got up and returned to the hospital for a scan. 

In her husband’s absence, she took Leo to the empty park where the benches were all taped off. 

A discarded mask flapped around her feet.

She washed her hands after taking the kitchen rubbish out. She hadn’t realized till then that the easiest way to get rid of the guilt about resentment she imagined her husband felt for always having to do the bins was by taking them out herself.

Later, she washed her hands again after taking out the bin from the bathroom. Her hands were sore from so much washing, like the paper cut feeling of postnatal mental illness. 

Wash your hands all the time, the midwife at the prenatal classes, had said. Before you eat, after you eat, before nappy changes, after nappy changes, before breast feeding, after breast feeding, to which the doctor in the hospital, observing her stitches, had added, before and after you use the loo. Within weeks she no longer recognized her skin, wizened like a crone’s. She resisted hand cream, for fear it would somehow get inside the baby. 

She placed a new bag in the bin. The bags were from Simple Human, a name that evokes the affirmative joy of something functioning as expected. The ergonomics that parenthood lacked. They always arrived as if by magic, delivered by fairies. Or elves. In fact, her husband had them on some sort of “subscribe and save,” like the nappies.

In his absence, she found herself feeling grateful for how much Matt did around the house. She had always resisted housework, a protest against the domesticity she saw as threatening the last reserves of creative energy, or a tribute to people like Virginia Woolf or Jean Rhys or Doris Lessing, whose Golden Notebook makes an appearance in Normal People’s early scenes; what she didn’t realize was how much she also resisted gratitude. 

And perhaps this resistance had prevented her from correctly quantifying the value of the tasks performed by her husband—how taking care of the house was one of the ways Matt showed his love. 

But there’s something disgusting about gratitude, about earnestness; there is something soft about it, like a stale biscuit—something dangerous too—a slippery slope. Day one, you feel grateful. By day five, you might have submitted totally to the other person and—then? What’s left?

She wanted to watch the finale, so hoped Matt would get home in time for Leo’s nap. 

But shortly before midday she received a text, “Just spoke to the doctor. Probably appendicitis but need to see another doctor and probably get another scan. Also saw some legions on my left fema bone so will need to see a specialist about those too, which sounds scary. Tumour or cancer or infection maybe?” 

She had to read the message a couple of times, thrown by his misuse of the word “legion” which conjured hordes in armor; thrown also by the intrusion of the real into their constructed life. The real was less the possibility of cancer than his admission of finding something scary. That was new. And destabilizing. The last time that had happened they’d been in the labor ward, worrying she was going to die, or possibly the next morning when she handed him the baby and he handed him straight back again, fearful that his shaking hands would drop him. 

Rooney writes about this of course, the way that pain crises can crystallize the things that really matter, can slough off some of the resentments and grudges that calcify on a relationship.

In “At the Clinic,” Marianne’s physical (unchosen) pain softens something inside Connell, allowing him to better consider the pain he believes she has chosen:

Connell . . . lacks focus and thinks recurrently about Marianne’s pain. Marianne involves herself in things that are bad for her. That’s an opinion Connell feels really guilty about.

At the same time, Marianne’s pain—or the numbing medication—allows her to temporarily shrug off her characteristic coldness, as though coldness were also a sort of pain.

In Conversations with Friends, Frances conceals her physical pain, caused by endometriosis, from her lover Nick, as well as the true extent of her romantic feelings, until a gynecological emergency breaks through. 

In the first two thirds of the book, whenever Frances feels physical pain she tries to distract herself from it; the same is often true for her emotional experiences.

She distracts herself with physical sensations, whether “breeze [which] felt new,” food which “tasted impossibly good, as did soft drinks,” or even incidents of mild self-harm: When her lover’s friends joke about “some women [liking] married men,” she steps “on [her] foot so hard the pain [shoots] up [her] leg.” She also takes comfort from intellectual achievement: “Whenever I got a ‘brilliant’ I took a photograph of it on my phone.” These strategies work for Frances, up to a point.

Through juxtaposition, the reader intuits the way her coldness and detachment are related to the techniques she used to distance herself from her (alcoholic) father’s moods: “I learnt not to provoke him. I was cold as a fish.” This line is followed, after a section break, with the decision to visit him and “I could feel a headache developing, like it was coming down from the sky directly into my brain.” Love, in its complexity, and its absence, causes physical pain, but interestingly, intellectual pursuits which she calls “morally neutral at best” also produce a “fine, shrill headache.” In this way the work of feeling, and of thinking, in Rooney’s work are joined in their capacity to bring about physical discomfort. 

There is also an economic component to this. Frances lives in a flat owned by her father’s brother. The reader is invited to consider how this continued financial enmeshment might prolong her reliance on the emotional strategies she developed in her adolescence.

In both “At the Clinic” (a title that invites associations with more private settings than the dentist’s, and more sex-inflected conditions than an infected tooth) and Conversations with Friends, the pain crisis functions as a way of mediating between subjectivities that might otherwise be too submerged, and separate. Physical pain becomes a way of contextualizing, externalizing and measuring emotional discomfort. 

It is ultimately her endometritis that forces Frances to be vulnerable with Nick. When he learns of her condition, he comes over. She notes that he looks at her differently now: “in a way that was not at all vulgar, the kind of look you can give someone’s body when you’ve seen it many times and it has a particular relationship to you.” Letting her former girlfriend Bobbi care for her alters their relationship too: “The time she ran me that bath had changed something, had placed Bobbi in a new relation to me even as we both remained ourselves.”

Perhaps it takes a pain crisis to remake habits formed in youth, patterns of self-reliance, self-control and detachment designed to protect oneself but that no longer function. 

Matt would need to stay in hospital, until his appendix could be removed. Keyhole surgery was banned due to Covid, so he’d be having the general anesthetic. 

For now, he was in the green zone, non-Covid. 

“The food guys are all air hostesses,” he texted, “They’re bringing some good energy.”

K imagined the BA stewardesses, delivering walnut slices and fantasy templates. 

She sent him photos of their living room, kitchen and dining room which she had cleaned extensively. 

That evening he was moved to the red zone (Covid and non-Covid). “The guy in the bed next to mine refuses to wear a mask . . . keeps coughing.”

Covid ward. She’d heard stories. The perfectly healthy-30-year-old who gets the coronavirus, and against all odds, dies; who goes into hospital for a routine operation but because of the viral load comes out sicker. And what about the tumor? That was bad luck, alright. Or was it more than that, some sort of perverse, ironic punishment, for her coldness, her dramatics?

Perhaps she cherished even this little mental drama because it re-centralized her in the action: her husband, the one in the hospital during the pandemic; her husband with the maybe cancer. 

She bit the flesh around her fingernails, willed their baby son asleep, and sat beside his cot bed in the dark, thinking how ironic that just as Normal People showed her what kind of person her husband was, enabling them to love each other better, he gets sick, then cancer, then Covid . . .

One time, she’d had a terrible pain in her abdomen. It hurt so much she couldn’t walk, couldn’t sleep. It throbbed. She wanted to go to the hospital, but Matt had asked her how the pain had ranked on the pain scale and she’d said nine, and he’d given her this little look, like it was an exaggeration. Told her to keep drinking water. Later when it turned out that she’d been retaining urine, probably the side effects from coming off long-term migraine medication, and she needed tests to assess the kidney damage, he was apologetic, but blamed it on a mathematical confusion, between logarithmic and exponential scales, also a miscommunication about whether it was “the worst pain ever felt” or the “worst pain she could imagine.” Perhaps that was the problem, her imagination was so much bigger than his. 

One time––they’d been going out for six months––they took part in a Zombie Chase adventure on the Isle of Dogs. They were put on a team with three strangers, a middle-aged couple and their teenage daughter, and she had felt responsible to this ersatz family, the daughter especially––it reminded her of the ramshackle family groups you find in real horror movies––and unwilling to leave them behind. Games ensued: groaning victims in dimly-lit shipping containers, dropped Tic Tacs representing medicine, “mental patients” locked in cages, hordes of racing “zombies.” She had watched enough horror movies to know that strategy and teamwork were valued ahead of self-preservation; that’s why there’s always a final girl, because she has a balanced portfolio of skills, not just brute strength and self-interest, but care and cunning too. But Matt was less of a movie fan; he ran and ran, and as the zombies picked off the rest of their team, she felt herself getting madder and madder; when the zombie “bit” her and she got marked up with the UV pen, she felt annoyed too that the game hadn’t found a way to put an ironic twist on it. That unlike the movies, the game rewarded what society often seemed to reward: each man for himself.

Of their team, only Matt survived. 

Following the appendix surgery, Matt spent the night in hospital. He’d forgotten to take anything, a Kindle, a charger, headphones. Luckily, some nurse took pity on him; he managed to charge his phone. 

The next morning, she began another day of “nursery at home,” following the instructions sent by email from his preschool. 

In the park, K and Leo fought about a straw for his juice. 

He screamed and sobbed and she found herself exhausted. 

“I was trying to help you,” she heard herself desperately explain. 

“Oh,” said her two-year-old, “I did not know that was what you were trying to do.” 

Where did it come from, this perfect emotional literacy? More crucially, where did it go?

Matt got home late and limped around the house, skin pale, speech slurred from the last drops in his blood of anesthetic. 

She asked about the sexy flight attendants. 

“No,” he replied, laughing. “They were all guys!” 

He described how in the green zone, when a medic entered and saw Matt in his mask, they pulled theirs up, sheepishly, like kids caught with their hands in the sweet jar. In the red zone it was a different story: The surgeon was armored in full-bodied PPE, like he was off to Mars. 

Together they watched the finale. 

Marianne pushes Connell to accept an MFA in New York, forcing a breakup. 

“She’s punishing him for applying to the MFA without telling her,” said K.

“That’s the sort of thing you’d do,” said Matt. 

He was disappointed, he said, the couple hadn’t made it work. 

They both were.

She accompanied Matt to the bathroom where he peed, still woozy from drugs. She sat on the edge of the tub and thought about what to say.

The surgery had been a success, from a medical standpoint. Although he’d have to go back for scans every few months, the doctors weren’t overly worried about the tumor. His initial Covid tests were negative and even though it was possible he’d caught it, they weren’t in a high-risk group. 

She felt herself a little fizzy. Sad. Desperate.

Pain crises didn’t seem to work for them the way they did for Rooney’s characters. They were rarely so healing, so generative. 

There was the urinary retention, but there were also a myriad other times in which she had felt pain that had been downrated. Perhaps the thing that had looked most like a pain crisis in their recent life was childbirth—that acute, life-altering agony—but one whose potential to bring change was perhaps nullified by its status as meaningful, productive work. Labor. A pain she had chosen. 

And the various pains that followed it—the suspected De Quervain’s tenosynovitis, the agony at the base of her spine when breastfeeding, the feeling that her brain was shattering under the strain of accommodating everyone’s needs and opinions—they were of the chronic sort that easily fall within the tide of acceptable discomforts under capitalism. 

They hadn’t achieved Rooney-levels of crisis-inspired empathy. She could see his old self-protective walls coming up.

He told her the surgery had revealed the appendicitis hadn’t been very advanced. “The nurse said I had a stronger reaction to the initial incident than most.” 

“Do you think you have a low pain threshold?”

“I don’t know if that term has much meaning really.” His voice wavered. “It’s all about nerve endings, where you feel the pain.” 

She thought of masculinity like a giant suspension bridge, the way it quivers actually being in the design, the way it burns off nervous energy and releases tension, not a sign of real vulnerability, but of strength.

“I read an article recently that said redheads are more susceptible to pain than other people,” she said.

Matt finished peeing and staggered towards the basin.

“I’m blonde,” he said.

Rooney portrays characters who believe in “small jobs, like raising children.” In Conversations with Friends, Bobbi suggests “spontaneous consent” as an answer to the disempowerment encoded in conventional monogamy, but: how to square this with simply being “humans, struggling to create happy children and families?”

In fiction, pain crises can be the catalyst to new ways of relating, but K and Matt weren’t fictional people. They were just normal people, muddling through. 

The post What Sally Rooney’s Fiction Illuminates About Real-Life Marriage appeared first on Electric Literature.

One fall I took many Amtraks. It was two trips per week or four trains. I was teaching at two different colleges, in two different cities. Most semesters I commute only to one school, so one trip per week or two trains. In total, I have taken hundreds of Amtraks and receive daily emails from them about my next trip or to give feedback for my last.

“We would love to hear about your boarding experience!” Select a number between 0 (not satisfied at all), or 10, (extremely satisfied). Sincerely, Amtrak Research.

I’m always tempted to write in my feedback. Dear Amtrak Research, you have sent me scores of enthusiastic emails I have never reciprocated. Like an avid admirer, you are constantly in my inbox. So it now feels disingenuous to respond with only a number. How would you differentiate a five from a six? And with only whole number intervals, which integer truly captures the weighted average of all my boarding experiences on your trains and others? 

Between New York and Philly, I take the Keystone, or the Pennsylvanian, or once, by accident, while trying to get on the Pennsylvanian, the Carolinian. Between New York and Boston, I take the Northeast Regional, never the Acela which, while marginally faster, is more often delayed. I also don’t like the light inside the Acela, garish, or its assigned seating, and the cafe car is less comfortable (stools instead of benches, to discourage you from sitting there and to encourage you to go back to your assigned seat). The business class of the Northeast Regional also has assigned seating (coach does not). So, why does the more expensive ticket restrict your freedom when one of the joys of train travel, as opposed to planes, is to be able to sit where you like? My last memory from the Acela is sitting in my assigned aisle seat, under that garish lighting, diagonally from a very tall man in sunglasses and a white alligator print suit. This outfit wasn’t funny to me, just strange. And I thought because he was so tall, his suit should be of giraffe print, not alligator. That same morning on the Keystone, I had sat behind a stout man in a brown suit, wearing teal socks printed with his infant’s face. This outfit was funny. Unless the infant was not his. Even so.

The Keystone doesn’t have a cafe car, but is more on time than the Northeast Regional. On the latter, I sit in the cafe car and work on my iPad, as I’m doing now. Without the tall seats, this car offers a panoramic view. The view going north into Boston is the most beautiful, especially as the train cuts through huge pastures, past rocky harbors dotted by white flat-faced houses with red doors, especially in fall, during misty rain. I never used to write outside of my own room or desk. When I wrote, I required total silence. But that severely limited my writing time and made the activity feel sort of precious. So, it’s best for a writer to learn how to write under any conditions and trains forced me to adapt. In terms of noise, the cafe car is the opposite of the quiet car. Families sit here. Today, a boy is throwing a tantrum. He shouts that he is having a panic attack and that no one cares about him, while across from him, the mother eats her sandwich wordlessly and beside him, the younger brother plays cards. I then make up the rest of the story. They’re on their way back from vacation. The father left early for work, or is not in the picture. The younger boy is easier, happier, thus the mother’s favorite, which causes a negative feedback loop for the older boy to keep throwing tantrums in public. 

Coffee and tea cost the same on the Amtrak, but hot water is free. When I first learned this, I thought of my parents who, at every public venue, even in summer, ask me to ask someone for hot water in a paper cup. They would like the Amtrak for this reason alone. Then while sipping their free hot water, they would complain about how slow the train was going.

Trains in China are much faster and when they reach top speeds, display that number on digital overhead signs. Trains in Europe are also faster but don’t display speeds, just the time and next stop. Signs on the Amtrak say EXIT in all caps, then in much smaller font, either “restroom this end” or “restroom, the other end” but because the signs are at the end of each car, you have to walk to one end anyway to confirm or negate a bathroom’s existence. Not all train doors open at every stop and if the station is particularly short, like New London, only three doors will open, it’s up to you to figure out which three. The intercom system is sometimes too loud, too soft or not on at all. I prefer the intercom too loud. When the train stops for no reason, I like loud conductors who update us frequently with clear information like “hi folks, it’s single track ahead, so there’s train traffic but we should be moving momentarily.” I much prefer that than sitting there for 10, 20 odd minutes, without news. 

In general, I have terrible travel luck. Across the board, with planes, trains and automobiles. If I can, I walk or bike. Both those modes of transport give me total control of time. 

My own horror stories: There’s a person on the tracks. A deer. A car. Another malfunctioning locomotive. Once, my train was stuck in a tunnel under Penn station. It was my last Amtrak of spring semester and I wouldn’t be taking more until fall. I was so close to arriving home, in the city, where to celebrate, my husband was waiting for me at a theater where we had tickets, booked ages ago, to see a play. My train was stuck in the tunnel for some time before we were told that we had not come in on the right track and now had to back out of this tunnel to pull into the right track, but we couldn’t back out now as there was train traffic behind us, constant traffic, and not enough tracks, so we had to wait. An hour passed with no movement, and then we were told that because of poor service, the chip reader of the cafe car had stopped working, so only cash, which I didn’t have, and another hour passed, in the same tunnel, the windows pitch black, I felt claustrophobic, I felt like I had been buried alive, and then another hour passed, before it was announced that the cafe car had no more food, and tragically no more alcohol to sell, before finally, we pulled from the dark of tunnel into the dark of night and then back into the dark of tunnel on the right track, at which point once the literal and metaphoric light of the platform pierced through the windows, people started clapping, laughing (from delusion) and I was hungry, sober, still cashless and I had missed the entire play. 

That night, I was kept up by my rage and the next day I received an email apologizing for the inconvenience, along with some points added to my Amtrak rewards program. 

Since then, my heart rate jumps whenever the train enters a tunnel and stops there, as it does at Providence, a station surrounded by solid concrete under which there is also no cell service. Large stretches of the Northeast corridor have no service and sometimes I wonder how that is possible. This corridor is the busiest passenger rail system in the country, running, as their website states, 2,200 daily trains serving over 800,000 daily passengers, and yet when my phone goes down to no bars, I look up expecting total wilderness only to see lit houses and telephone wires right off the tracks. 

On my most recent trip back to China, to Nanjing, where I was born, I was amazed that I had service on the subway, hundreds of feet underground. Amazed that I could text and send photos to my parents in America, and in a few seconds, read their reply. But in my awe, I was also irritated because how many times had I been told during my upbringing in the West that I had come from a backwards, third world country, and how many times had I been conditioned to think that America was the better place, though now with the asterisk that public transit is not where this country excels. I think it is a known fact that the quality of American train travel, above or underground, has fallen far, far below that of Asia or Europe. Because in America, you drive cars. And take highways. Or freeways. To be, literally, more free. Not lost on me is the irony that my father has worked, for over two decades, at General Motors.

I did have one terrible train experience in Germany. I was there for a December destination wedding, and the lesson learned is to not go to a December destination wedding in a Northern Hemisphere country. For the three days we were there, Munich experienced its largest snow storm in 20 years. The airport closed and our flight, along with hundreds of others, was cancelled, then rebooked, then cancelled, but not rebooked. The stranded slept at the airport and the German groom told me I just needed to wait for officials to sort it out. But there was no clear timeline for the wait, customer service hotlines had indefinite holds, and help desks could only offer a physical postcard to mail in for a possible refund. The only route back to New York was to fly out of Frankfurt, which was a train ride away, but the Munich train station was also not functioning. Boards posted arrivals but no trains arrived. That night, I spent hours in that station, in freezing weather, trying to translate German to see which trains were actually coming (hint, none). Yet like a frantic, gambling idiot, I blew hundreds of dollars buying mobile tickets, until finally, I admitted defeat and found a hotel nearby. The next day, there was one train leaving Munich to Frankfurt! We boarded it in a sprint, as I was still buying the tickets, but seriously how would anyone have checked our fare? The train was so packed that at every stop, the conductor announced we were dangerously over weight, and those crammed in the aisles had to step off for exiting and entering passengers. For three hours, my husband stood in the aisle and I folded myself under the luggage storage space, under a set of metal bars, where I couldn’t have written but I did think that for as much praise as there is for German punctuality and German efficiency, the Germans like things done a correct way, or no way, for which the only solution is to shut down and wait for the snow to melt. At one stop, a panicked woman’s shouts wafted over my head. “I need to get off! I need to get off!” and her suitcase was crowd surfed down the car, but it was the wrong suitcase so the right one needed to be crowd surfed again. The entire car laughed. So, an upside is that trains can boost camaraderie and remind us that really, we are all in this together.

But sometimes trains do the opposite.

I have a distinct memory of my grandmother, who I saw once every three summers, who is now bedridden and no longer recognizes me. My memory is of her running to the end of a platform, wiping her eyes with one hand, and waving at me with the other, as I board my train from Nanjing to Shanghai to fly back to the states. 

Traveling alone in Greece one summer, as a college student. Two memories. The first of me in a train compartment alone, then two young men enter and close the door, lock it. The men start asking me questions like where I am from, “no, where are you really from,” and me saying that if they don’t open this door, I will scream, which I do, and they open the door, run off. The second, me in a full train compartment, surrounded by older women. I don’t know what they’re saying but a steward is called and they’re all shouting and pointing at me. The lady next to me is the most incensed. Whenever her pant leg touches my bare calf, she runs both hands down that leg, as if it has just touched dirt. Later the steward explains to me, kindly, slowly, in English, that I’d bought a second-class ticket, which doesn’t guarantee a seat. So, I cannot be in the same compartment with first class passengers who paid for seats. I leave and afraid to cause any more trouble, sit with my dirty legs tucked in, on the floor of the aisle. From that experience, I learned that if I am going to travel, I am going to travel with money.  Money doesn’t buy happiness, but it buys you the privilege of not being told to leave, which for me is a kind of happiness.

My husband says if he had the same experiences that I’ve had on trains (and he did in Germany), he would never ride trains (and he hasn’t since Germany). So why, besides pragmatics, do I keep coming back to them? And why despite all the problems, do I subconsciously look forward to a train travel day? 

Trains often appear in one’s formative years, in books, on television, as toys. Some of us grow out of it. But some of us don’t. 

Math problems can involve trains. Train A leaves from town A towards town B. Train B leaves from town B towards town A. At which point in their journey will they collide?  I excel at these calculations. Collide! Collide! And imagine how easy the world would be if there were only 26 cities, letters A through Z, and only 26 trains. 

A moving train is often used to teach the invariance of the speed of light. In classical mechanics, shoot an arrow from a moving train and that arrow flies with the additive speeds of itself and the train. But if the train moves at the speed of light, an arrow shot from it travels no faster than the train, which violates common sense—as light often does.

Beyond math and science, another part of my education was to learn that in America, the Chinese built the railroads. I was taught this in social studies, across several grades, usually in one textbook paragraph that read something like this. From 1865 to 1869, 12,000 Chinese immigrants made up 90 percent of the workforce that built the Western section of the transcontinental railroad, or approximately 690 miles, while facing extreme prejudice, terrible work conditions, and lower pay than the white workers for more dangerous tasks like blasting through the Sierra Nevada mountains. What an extraordinary feat! These are not my ancestors but such information would always prompt some male classmate to ask me how much of the railroad I had built to be allowed to stay in this country. A joke. Don’t take it the wrong way, Comrade Wang.

Though to have railroads and trains is an extraordinary feat. Propulsion comes from the diesel engine. More electricity from the third rail. Friction between the wheel and track is minimal. To glide heavy loads over long distances. 

I would argue that a magical train trumps a magical car, a magical plane, and even a magical carpet. This is because a train inevitably sends me back to that industrious childhood of Thomas the Tank Engine and The Little Engine That Could. When I first read Harry Potter, a permanent hook was that at the start of each school year, the kids must rouse up enough courage to rush through that brick wall onto Platform 9 ¾ and board the Hogwarts Express, on which a Trolly witch serves you chocolate frogs that do not wish to be eaten. Each December, I watch The Polar Express and consider if one uncertain, sleepless night, a gigantic locomotive appeared in my street and its conductor berated me about Santa Claus, would I willingly get on? I think most writers would actually. Certainly Kafka. So, there would be a car full of feral children drinking hot chocolate and behind it, a car full of existential writers, collecting material about their youth. The part in that movie where the train steers itself across ice, with no tracks is impossible. Then the must-know-it-all-kid in me went down a rabbit hole to see if that stunt was actually possible and came across long online posts about how it was, if the train had differentials that could control the left and right wheel sets separately. But didn’t I just ruin a part of the movie for myself? The whole point is that the Polar Express runs on magic.

You know this image. I know this image. A train curves around a dramatic 21-arch viaduct (Glenfinnan Valley) such that for one moment, the first car can glimpse the last. Made famous by those same Harry Potter books and movies, but also travel shows urging you to, at least once in your lifetime, see the Scottish Highlands, because this so called “Harry Potter Train” is really called the Jacobite Steam Train and is a real working steam locomotive that pass the viaduct twice a day.

I dream of a house large enough to fit a nine-foot Fraser fir and around its tree skirt, a choo-chooing Lionel O gauge in red. Better yet, I dream of a house large enough to have one room where I can build an entire miniature train world, like that of the Holiday Train Show at the New York Botanical Gardens.

A trip I would like to take, for some big future birthday, is the Andean Explorer that runs from Lake Titicaca up through the snow-capped mountains.

I also like mysteries that take place on trains. Murder on the Orient Express. Or zombie outbreaks. Last Train to Busan. 

So it would be even more exciting if for that big future birthday, I was on the Andean Explorer, while also solving a murder or fighting zombies. A big ask, I realize.

In cars, planes and boats, I get vertigo. Strangely, I’ve never gotten sick on a train. Which means I can read, work, and I have, for unending hours, departure to arrival, but during that fall of many trains, instead of checking off tasks, I began listening to audiobooks of old classics, an act of sheer boredom prompted by the slow cell service and intermittent wifi. One chapter of Wuthering Heights became two, three. I’ve written about overworking before. I am very, very rarely not typing, teaching, multitasking, that to the person sitting across the cafe car table from me, the Weike just with her AirPods in, just with her audiobook and still hands, must have seemed dead inside (and I probably was, listening, several hours later, to Heathcliff dig up Cathy’s coffin. “I got a spade from the tool-house.”) But I wasn’t staring at my table companion intentionally, just through and past them, into a white space on which I was visualizing the words as I heard them. “Punctuality is the thief of time,” The Portrait of Dorian Gray. “It takes brains not to make money! […] Name, for example, one poet who makes money.” Catch-22. “My mother’s face, anxious and sallow as a slice of lemon,” The Bell Jar. “There is a loneliness that can be rocked.” Beloved. “Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read.” To Kill a Mockingbird. Listening, as opposed to reading, was different. It was rhythmic, hypnotic. Eavesdropping, in a way, on someone else’s interpretation of books I thought I knew well. And through this process of having the familiar made unfamiliar, I discovered, magically, that alone on a train, but also not alone, being read to by a stranger relaxes me. 

Then what un-relaxes me is watching, at lunch time, that cafe car queue get 20 people deep and go to the end of the car. 

Or when the train stops on a tilt. 

We are now passing through that dead zone of the Northeast Corridor with the most beautiful views. Corridor is an apt word—imagine a long, narrow hallway that leads off to many rooms. The water in my left and right rooms shimmer silver. The sky room up above is grey. The lunch queue has subsided and the tantrum throwing boy from earlier is asleep and rain streaks silently across the windows in gorgeous parallel lines. Here, I am reminded of college ruled notebooks, and of writing by hand, which I haven’t done since, well, college. Here, I usually think of that scene from Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping in which a train, called the Fireball, shoots across a bridge, into a lake that will freeze and entomb it, no survivors. “The engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it, into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.” I remember sentences like these for their verbs. The engine nosed over, as if catching a smell. The train slid in, as weasels do, but also as divers do from those ten-meter platforms, scoring perfect marks by making no splash. Am I romanticizing perishing in a catastrophic train accident, a “spectacular derailment” and being buried by water? Yes, probably, so let’s not manifest that. No murders. No derailments. No runaway trains. No collisions. No zombies. Except in the fiction room of my own head.

Though there was a recent explosion in Penn Station. Two maintenance trains collided and five workers were injured and a long, long day of transit chaos ensued. I should have been on a train that day. I was not. Lucky break. But when I saw the headlines, saw that picture some poor, stuck passenger took from inside their car out to this huge underground fireball, I thought how insane it was that something like that happened, then, I thought, well, what else was supposed to happen. Penn Station isn’t really a station or a tunnel. It is a volcanic lair of an aggrieved city dragon, that once in a while, must let off steam.

“How likely are you to recommend Amtrak to a friend, colleague, or family member.” Select a number between 0, not likely at all, to 10, extremely likely. Sincerely, Amtrak Research.

Dear Amtrak research, there are lots of reasons not to take the train. Possible accidents. Possible fires. And the much higher chance of not arriving on time than on. So, right, it is not for the travel anxious or those with specific needs. A train is a public space and when traveling alone, I am more vigilant of my surroundings and the security of my things. I don’t strike up conversations with strangers, unless it is an Amtrak employee, the cafe car worker for example, who kept saying “long story short” but then told me a long story about how the funeral home had misplaced (he thinks sold) his mother’s ashes, given him someone else’s ashes, and how, thanks to a distant cousin who saw a poster about his mother’s unpaid debt, he had heroically gotten his mother back. I told this employee I was a writer. It was loud that day in the car, and he replied, “I’m glad I’m talking to a lawyer.” As the writer-lawyer I’d become, I wondered was there a market for other people’s ashes? And how do you know the ashes that you do have are the real deal? But for every one of those conversations, there are plenty of less memorable ones about luggage etiquette or sharing a charging port or accidentally kicking your neighbor, while stepping over them to exit. In every train, I have had to sit next to someone. Usually, I choose a person who seems innocuous and quiet, which usually means another Asian woman. I never sleep on trains. I never nap. Even on overnight trains with bunks and clean, white duvets, I don’t sleep. I don’t because vigilance plus insomnia equals hyper-insomnia, and because, out of subconscious expectancy, I don’t want to. I’m afraid I will miss something. A view. An event. Santa Claus. A jumping chocolate frog. A dragon. Long story short, I don’t want to miss that. 

The post Why Do I Keep Coming Back to Trains? appeared first on Electric Literature.

My daughter was born gasping. Throughout the first 14 hours of my labor, Nora was in the ideal position for birth: upside down and facing backwards, towards my spine. But as she entered the birth canal, she corkscrewed. As though she wanted one last look around the only home she’d ever known, she turned her head and slowed everything down. The doctors kept telling me “one more push” for four hours. They hadn’t meant to lie to me—Nora just kept turning, rolling, delaying. But her own stubbornness worried her too. She released her meconium, her first bowel movement, while still in the birth canal. A stress response. She aspirated the sticky, green-brown waste while being born, and so when they put her in my arms, all gray-pink and big, much bigger than I expected, she was gasping and coughing, and they had to take her away after only a few minutes to give her oxygen.

The hospital room filled with people. Dazed, I pushed out the placenta and lay there while they stitched me up, my daughter somewhere beyond the wall of doctors at my feet. My mother took photos of what I couldn’t see: Nora on a warming pad as they measured her blood oxygen level, eyes closed and brows dark, not crying, passive. They brought her back to me with a thick, ribbed tube strapped to her nostrils and told me she would need to spend some time in the NICU to receive help breathing and ensure the meconium did not lead to a lung infection. Because I had asked her to beforehand, my doula took photos throughout my labor, delivery, and aftermath. There are photos of me, naked and sobbing as I hold my newborn daughter, bombarded with my first rush of maternal terror.

In my early 20s, I became anorexic without realizing it. Because I was not a teenager skipping meals, because I was eating organic and local and homemade, because I was lifting heavy weights and doing yoga, I did not think I had a disordered relationship with my body or with food. I failed to recognize it when a depression formed beneath my breastbone or when my period stopped for a year and a half. Even when I began binging, my starved system grasping for the things I was depriving it, I considered this shameful development a product of my weakness. I didn’t keep anything binge-worthy in the house. No sweets, of course, but no bread or cheese, either. But instead I binged on apples, almonds, Wheat Chex. It was only when I started doing undeniably absurd things—microwaving a coffee mug of flour and water to binge something approximating bread—that I began to wonder if I needed help.

I was eight years into recovery when I got pregnant, a planned and wanted child with my husband, Sean. I had been in therapy since I was 25. Before getting pregnant, I talked extensively with my therapist about what it might be like to gain the baby weight, to enlarge intentionally. 

Some pregnant women, when they first begin to show, gain an obvious pooch in their lower abdomen which no one could mistake for fat. These women, usually petite to begin with, look like their normal selves with a round protuberance out front, like they’ve swallowed a beach ball. That was not me. Late in my first trimester, my bulge was not obviously from pregnancy. I joked—“joked”—that I wanted to tell every stranger I passed that I was “not fat, just pregnant.”

Once my second trimester ripened and it was clear I was pregnant (not fat, not fat), for the first time I could remember, I actually, improbably, genuinely liked how my body looked. I wore bodycon dresses, which I’d previously only dared to do when underweight. I gave into cravings for Dairy Queen with minimal guilt. I received more compliments on my appearance than at any time since my anorexic period, when I was almost universally lauded for my weight loss. You see, I was supposed to be big now; I was encouraged to grow. Despite being a decade into recovery, the validation was just as potent as when I was anorexic. 

Though I had many other worries about the demands of motherhood, I felt prepared to protect Nora from the inevitable body shame that would come for a girl in 21st century America, having clawed out of the cold pit of an eating disorder myself. I imagined talking to her from the earliest possible age about valuing and nurturing her body—how it is her vehicle through life, how eating is one of the beauties of existence and food is pleasure as well as fuel. I knew what I would need to say, because it was what I had needed.

Then, during a routine prenatal visit late in my second trimester, my obstetrician found my fundal height—the measurement of my stomach bulge—a little low. For the second time in my life, I was too small. I scheduled an ultrasound to check Nora’s growth, where the OB told us Nora was in the 14th percentile for size, right above the danger line. In other words, Nora was fine, “just a petite little girl.” 

Despite my relief, I was shaken by what should have been an obvious possibility: Nora might not look like me. Her body might not be like mine. I was born weighing nine pounds. Throughout my childhood, I was never one of those wispy little girls, all legs and elbows. I was stocky, solid. Chubby, yes, at times. Sean was also a chubby child before puberty reworked him into a slender colt, so we both expected a doughball daughter. I was aghast at the possibility that I might not be prepared for my daughter’s body woes after all. Instead of spending a lifetime trying to be smaller, she might be one of those girls I envied, the ones who couldn’t put on weight, who wished for bigger boobs or rounder hips. It was the first rebuke of my parental projection. I tried to learn from it.

At the hospital, the attending staff told me I could nurse once I was moved out of the delivery room. Sean spent the day of Nora’s birth wheeling me to and from the NICU so I could breastfeed her. Nora latched well despite the heartbreaking nest of tubes and wires attached to her, which tangled or dislodged as I negotiated her to my breast. A little cyborg baby. Still, I loved breastfeeding. Friends of mine recounted excruciating pain, but I was never uncomfortable. It was like having a superpower. If Nora cried, I had a foolproof answer. And while I envied Sean’s ability to sleep through his off-shifts while I had to pump, I pitied him for not having this built-in pacifier, let alone this primal-spiritual ability to feed our daughter from his own flesh. Plus, with breastfeeding, the pregnancy weight would surely melt off.

I “fed on demand” as I’d been instructed by the lactation consultants. They’d even praised the amount of colostrum, the earliest milk, that I’d produced. But at her first pediatrician appointment, the doctor expressed concern over how much weight Nora had lost since birth and advised supplementing breastfeeding with formula. It seemed I was no longer producing enough, and there was no discernible explanation. Only out of the haze of the doctor’s office did I realize I may have been to blame. 

By nightfall of Nora’s first day, Sean and I were nearing almost three days straight without any sleep. The prospect of waking up multiple times that night to breastfeed was crippling. We opted to feed her on donor breast milk overnight, not realizing that since I also didn’t wake up to pump, I may have signaled to my body that there was no demand, stagnating my supply. 

Or maybe not. I don’t actually know. My impulse is to blame my own choices rather than entertain in this new context the lesson that recovery taught me: the willfulness of the body, its refusal of transactionality. In the weeks following Nora’s birth, I did everything short of the pharmaceutical to increase my supply. I ate brewer’s yeast and flax seed, I drank Guinness, I pumped after every feeding, as often as five times a day and at least once overnight. I never pumped more than three ounces, from both breasts combined. I envied the women in my new-mom group who gathered that much from leakage alone. With perspective, I can look back at my post-labor exhaustion and see that my choice of sleep probably didn’t doom my milk supply, which should have increased with the demand that came mere hours later, when I resumed nursing Nora. Should have. But didn’t. My body, which had formed Nora’s perfect bones and flesh and hair, decided that that was enough.

In the early days of my recovery, as I haunted eating disorder support blogs, I’d come across a sentence that settled into me like a stone in the gut: You can’t fight your body because your body will fight back until you die.

The first time Nora refused to nurse, she was just under two months old. I knew she was hungry, but when I put her to my breast, she only cried harder and turned her head away. It was baffling; Nora was far too young for a “nursing strike.” When offered a bottle instead, she guzzled down the formula like she’d been starving. 

My doula, who was aiding in postpartum care, told me it’s easier to drink from a bottle—they don’t have to suck as hard, so bottle-fed babies may refuse to nurse in favor of the easier option. I worried it was my low supply. Nora was getting bigger, and I just couldn’t keep up. I tried to suppress my irrational devastation, but Nora’s refusal to nurse felt like a repudiation.

Soon after, she began to periodically refuse bottles too. We were forewarned about “the witching hour,” the tendency for colic to worsen at sundown, and indeed, as each afternoon wore on, Nora cried and cried, and when we tried to feed her, she cried harder. She seemed to fight us, her back arching, her little limbs striking out. We would swaddle her tight to calm her, and then, sometimes, she’d eat with an air of exhausted submission. We warmed the bottle. We gently rubbed the nipple—flesh and silicone—over her mouth. We tried to put the nipple in her mouth, as we’d been shown by the hospital staff. Nora cried around it. One afternoon, as I held my sleeping daughter on the rocking chair in her darkened nursery, my phone in one hand, I did what I’d done so many times these past few weeks: I researched.

Prior to this point, I had been prone to attempting to research my way out of what was, essentially, normal newborn behavior—such as quizzing my doula and combing Reddit and baby-care blogs for tips to find out why Nora’s naps were short and erratic, not recognizing newborn naps usually are short and erratic, and all I could do was endure. But this was something different. I searched baby refusing to eat and found a term I’d never heard before: feeding aversion. One of the results was an e-book by an Australian nurse, Rowena Bennett, called Your Baby’s Bottle-Feeding Aversion. I read the sample chapter and realized no other explanation fit so well: “appears hungry but refuses to eat . . . becomes tense, cries or screams when a bib is placed around her neck . . . takes a few sips or a small portion of milk and pulls away or arches back and starts to cry . . . feeds only while in a drowsy state or asleep.” That last one really got me. Nora did only feed well at night. When she woke from sleeping and I breastfed her, she displayed absolutely no tension and drank long and eagerly. According to Bennett, the root cause of Nora’s aversion was a negative association with feeding, brought on initially by something like reflux or gas and reinforced by parental pressure to eat when she wasn’t hungry. Nora fed well while drowsy because her defenses were lowered; she was too sleepy to resist.

I bought the book, and as I read on, I sank into a disorienting mix of relief at having figured it out and utter, utter shame. I had pressured my tiny baby daughter to eat. I had created an aversion to food, to eating, the most basic of human activities, the very thing I was so staunchly determined to nurture. I was ready to shield her from all the negative cultural forces that would come for her young, too young. But I never imagined this could happen before she was able to hold up her own head. Feeding my baby was one of my only jobs as a new mother, and I’d fucked it up.

I manically explained all this to Sean once Nora woke from her nap. He stood, grimly changing her diaper while I laid out the evidence. I said, “I actually feel better, having figured this out.” But as we reeled with understanding, we also grew angry. Feed on demand, we were told, and newborns demand a lot. Feed before naptime to prolong the nap. Feed every three hours, even if the baby is not cuing hunger or is sleeping. Place the nipple into her mouth. A lactation consultant all but shoved my breast into Nora’s face. “Is that too rough?” I asked. “No, she needs help finding it,” the consultant said. Nora’s previous tendency to calm as soon as I put her to my breast was smiled over at my new-mother’s group, agreed to be a universal panacea. Nobody told us that, at a certain point, Nora would need to be the one to choose when and how much to eat.

Treatment for a feeding aversion is painfully simple: When the baby refuses to eat, take the bottle away. All the things Sean and I had been advised to do before, we were to stop doing. Instead, when Nora exhibited hunger cues, we were to show her the bottle or breast. If she opened her mouth, we could place the nipple inside. But if she cried, turned her head, or arched her back, we were to remove the bottle or breast from her sight and wait at least half an hour before offering it again. If she refused a second time, we were to wait until the next feeding. Even if she cried, even if she exhibited all her hunger cues, if she refused to eat, we were to remove all pressure. Eventually, the infant will see that the negative association she’s formed with feeding—the parental pressure—is not being applied, and she will eat voluntarily.

One of the core tenets of eating disorder recovery is to get reconnected with the body’s “natural” hunger and satiety cues. Every therapist, every therapy group, every recovery-oriented book will at one point argue that we are born with the ability to know how much and how often to eat, along with what to eat. Then outside factors—a parent, a sibling, peers, pop culture, addictive processed food—begin to interfere with those biological signals. Many people with eating disorders lose touch with these cues to such a degree that they no longer feel them. When I was in the thick of my anorexia, I temporarily lost the sensation of hunger. Food knotted my stomach. I wasn’t otherwise sick, and the campus health center doctor didn’t see anything wrong with me. I didn’t realize at this point that I was anorexic, so I was disturbed by this strange vanishing of appetite. Though I’d severely restricted my diet, I still relished the foods I did allow myself. I had developed a Sunday-dinner ritual of making a large bowl of oatmeal with chunks of peach and strawberry (before I banished fruit for having too much sugar, then carbs for being carbs). The combination gave me an intense pleasure that I now chalk up to the extreme constraints I’d imposed on my palate. Losing my appetite for my limited safe foods shook me.

My satiety cues, on the other hand, were long since dampened. As many of us were, I was raised on the “you must eat X bites of your vegetables before you get dessert” model. Dessert foods, then, were placed into a covetous, rarefied category, enshrining them as high-value and making any consumption of cookies or ice cream before dinner feel thrillingly naughty. It’s not our parents’ faults. This thinking saturates American culture—this sense that, if given free reign, children will eat nothing but sweets all day and wither from nutrient deficiency. Their eating habits must therefore be regulated by adults. In childhood, we learn to calculate the social risks/benefits to eating certain foods (parental disapproval, peer judgment, etc.) at certain times (no desserts before dinner) and in certain quantities (clean your plate), with taste and degree of hunger as second-tier concerns. I had a brownie with lunch so I should just have a salad for dinner. We learn to distrust our bodies.

Regaining that trust is an essential part of eating disorder recovery. I had to shift my conception of my body from a bad child who must be controlled to a partner, or, as Mary Oliver put it, a soft animal to care for. The orthodoxy of recovery would argue that, in its pure state, our bodies want fruits, vegetables, and lean proteins because we are wired to crave what we need. But the bloated processed food industry has made billions counting on the opposite: our craving for sugar, fat, salt. Once the body gets rewired by whatever—social pressure, junk food, starvation—can it ever be trusted again? As a child, I sought opportunities to eat high-value foods in secret, where I wouldn’t be judged. I scarfed Gushers and Hot Pockets in the unsupervised hours after school. Somewhere along the way, merely eating unwatched and unjudged became enticing, no matter the food. I would binge baby carrots, not knowing why.

A NICU stay and “anxious parents” are two high-risk factors for the development of a feeding aversion in an infant. Nora was only in the NICU for three days. “Only” is a traitorous word. It was hell. I can’t bring myself to call us “lucky,” but at least we got to hold her, to feed her, albeit tangled in the webbing of wires and tubes. But the first time I saw my daughter after they took her away post-birth, she was under glass, mouth agape, nostrils intubated, and I sobbed all the way back to my recovery room, Sean pushing me in my wheelchair. Later, when recounting this to a friend, he referred to it as “trauma,” and I realized with blank surprise that, yes, that’s what it was.

The stoic Midwesterner in me urges me to qualify the statement—we saw so many parents who’d been in the NICU for weeks, who had it so much worse—but Sean and I were traumatized by our first and only child experiencing danger and precarity from the first moments of her life, and this, no doubt, made us more anxious than we would have otherwise been for her to eat, to grow, to thrive. It made us more insistent. It made us want control. 

A cliché regarding the origin of mental disorders is that “environment pulls the trigger, but genetics loads the gun.” I don’t know of any blood relatives who had an eating disorder, but the reverberations of the Great Depression still ripple through my family, making us abhor waste, cherish possessions, and value self-denial. When the terms “ancestral trauma” and “scarcity mindset” entered my lexicon, suddenly the orderly hoarding of my grandmother and great-grandmother made sense. The Depression generation initiated the “clean your plate” rule because there weren’t just children starving in another part of the world—there were children starving here. If you were lucky enough to get your hands on something sweet that couldn’t be saved for later, you devoured it all, right then, because scarce opportunities must be seized. These were our great-grandparents, our grandparents, the ones who raised the ones who raised us. I’ve often wondered if the real scarcity they experienced mixes with the bone-deep deprivation-based genetics of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, sieving through the Anglo-American, Protestant work ethic and turning us into an unbearable contradiction: gluttonous ascetics, Puritan sugar fiends. 

In the weeks before I made the call to a mental health center on the suspicion I might need professional help, my deprived body and brain pushed the pendulum the other way. I was binging almost daily on pasta, chocolates, ice cream, French fries, donuts. After entering recovery, my therapist instructed me to make a “reverse map” to trace and identify the actions and emotions that led to a binge so, ideally, I could subvert it next time. My risk factors included being at home, being alone, and feeling a need to relinquish my tightly-held self-image of competence and control, to let go.

At first, the idea of a newborn being emotionally susceptible to any kind of pressure seemed absurd. It sounded new-agey, eye-rollingly hippie-ish to say that my little baby, who sometimes couldn’t even locate my nipple while I was placing it into her mouth, could be put in charge of her own eating. While anticipating parenthood, I’d formed staunch ideas about enforcing future boundaries. I was one of those non-parents determined not to make a separate dinner of hot dogs and mac and cheese for my child.

Now, to treat her feeding aversion, I was supposed to defer to my newborn’s desires. But I was desperate and depressed. Pushed beyond the normal baby blues, my propensity toward anxiety compounded into a miserable fragility. I didn’t want to take Nora outside for fear of some calamity. Though chronically sleep-deprived, I couldn’t rest. Our house was littered with barely-drunk bottles of formula. I cried many times a day, more than I did when Nora was first born. I remember saying dully to Sean, “I’m not happy,” and registering that I was frightening him but being unable to conjure reassurance for my unfailingly compassionate husband, unable to support him as he was supporting me. We had to do something. If we followed the program, eventually the baby was supposed to learn that she will not be pressured to eat if she refuses. She will regain trust in her parents, and she will eat.

If I accepted this argument, I had to accept that by trying to control her eating, I had broken trust with my child who wasn’t yet three months old—that a newborn was capable of trust. That she had full, autonomous personhood even as she relied on me for everything. I, in turn, had to trust that Nora knew when and how much to eat, even at this minuscule age, even if it was less than I thought she did. When I brought Nora to her pediatrician to ensure there was no physical reason for her feeding aversion, the doctor assured me there was nothing wrong with Nora and to “follow her lead. She’s not going to starve herself.”

Once, years before Nora was born, my therapist asked me, “Colleen, do you trust that things are going to be okay?”

I thought about it, and I said, “No.”

It got worse before it got better. If Nora gave any negative reaction to being fed, we removed the bottle or breast, even if I knew she was hungry. Her conflicted behavior increased: She would eagerly suck for a few seconds, then pull off with an agitated cry. 

It felt cruel. It was agonizing to hear Nora cry, to know I could alleviate her hunger, yet not to feed her because she had, in essence, said, No. The first day, Sean found me weeping in the nursery with our weeping baby in my arms. We’d planned to have two kids, but as Sean took Nora from me, I said, “I don’t think I can do this again.”

Before Nora was born, therapists suggested antidepressants to me, and I always demurred. I had nothing against them in theory. In fact, in considering myself a mental health advocate after defeating my eating disorder, I was vehemently anti-stigma. But I’d never felt I really needed them. The first six months or so of E.D. recovery were the lowest of my life to that point, yet they were also buoyed by profound flashes of hope. I was fighting an enemy I’d finally unmasked. I was allowing myself to feel all the emotions I didn’t realize I’d been repressing. It was like being a teenager again, with all the exhilarating highs as well as the deep lows, which themselves had a kind of sweetness because they felt like progress. Since then, I’d learned that eating disorders are actually anxiety disorders, and when I had amassed enough tools to close off one avenue, my anxiety found others. My heart began inexplicably racing, and I would be overwhelmed at random with a profound sense of wrongness. When my psychiatrist asked if I’d ever considered an SSRI, I told her I didn’t want to make a semi-permanent solution to a temporary problem.

In the throes of Nora’s feeding aversion, I went on an antidepressant for the first time. I didn’t have the time or the stamina to rely only on the painstaking work of talk therapy to conquer this specific iteration of my demon. I needed to get better now, for my daughter’s sake and mine. Fortunately, because my primary care physician is also my daughter’s pediatrician, she knew exactly how miserable I’d been and validated my suspicion that I was suffering from postpartum anxiety. She gave me a prescription for a low dose of sertraline to be filled the very day I asked for it. I was told it could take several weeks to kick in, but I began to feel better almost immediately. I’d worried that I wouldn’t feel like myself, that my emotions would be dampened—at the time, my emotions were so distressing that I was okay with that—but the medication made me feel more like myself than I had in months. I felt better.

And Nora began to get better too. After the miserable early days of the non-pressure method, Nora’s aversive behaviors mildened. Soon, she began to eat more, and her pattern began to regularize as she could go longer between feedings. Her mood markedly improved, and so did her colic. I was still anxious, reluctant to allow anyone else to feed her for fear they’d pressure her and trigger a regression. I would hover when my parents, my in-laws, and even my own husband fed her, monitoring and issuing meticulous instructions. I was afraid that if we didn’t do the program perfectly, if we accidentally pressured Nora or misjudged her cues, we’d ruin the whole thing and be careened back into the terrible times. But along with the medication, I resumed therapy and continued to work through my anxious instincts. There were setbacks caused by travel, teething, sleep interruptions, but Sean and I had already seen how effective the program was, and we stuck with it. It required of us no further products, trainings, or consultations. No acceptance of elaborate parenting philosophies. Just trust.

By the time Nora reached her sixth month, there were no traces of her feeding aversion. 

My sense of normalcy returned when Nora began to sleep through the night. Only then, when I too was getting more than three interrupted hours of sleep per night, did I feel like I could write. One unseasonably temperate Sunday afternoon in February, I sat on the porch to make my first diary entry since the early days of Nora’s life. In recounting the feeding aversion saga, along with a muted reliving of the suffering of those days, a new emotion surfaced: pride. 

“We figured this out,” I said to Sean, who was sitting with me in the breeze while Nora napped, “and we fixed it.” 

While it was trusting Nora’s body that made the final difference, I can’t deny that it was my disorder-born knowledge that gave me the awareness and tools to locate the problem and address it. After I’d been in recovery long enough to fully reject my eating disorder’s unhealthy premises, I said to my therapy group that it felt like waking up from the Matrix while everyone else was still plugged in. Like Neo in the film, I’d been given the gift and curse of wising up to a malevolent, omnipresent force and suddenly thrown into a fight against its overwhelming strength. I began to see that U.S. food culture is founded on several disordered tenets which even the non-disordered perpetuate, believe, and practice. People talk of “burning off” sweets or fats as if exercise were penance for a sin. They banish entire food groups from their diets or practice “intermittent fasting.” How can you win when everyone around you serves the enemy?

I thought this cursed knowledge forearmed me to raise a daughter behind enemy lines, but it rendered us both vulnerable in a way I’d never anticipated. Yet if I had not already known of these weaknesses and dangers, how much longer would it have taken me to recognize them in this new form? How much more would I have stumbled while my daughter cried? I can never unlearn the fact that shrimp is the lowest-calorie animal protein and that a short sprint will burn more fat than a long jog. I can never turn off the alarm that chimes in my head when someone refers to eating as “being bad.” I will bring all this with me to the dinner table every time I sit with my family to eat. What knowledge hurts and what knowledge helps on any given day will always be in flux.

When we introduced solids to Nora, I took great comfort in her eager embrace of all kinds of foods. For a while, peas were among her favorites. Her daycare teachers told us that she was the “best eater” in the infant room. Now she is a bona fide toddler, and she has begun refusing fruits and vegetables, always preferring meats, carbs, and fats. Her first food word was “cheese.” She chugs her whole milk, scarfs a fistful of shredded cheddar, and before she’s even swallowed, asks, “More?” Yet some days she wants almost nothing, taking a few bites and then vigorously shaking her head when Sean and I offer her favorites. This is, of course, an almost universal toddler-parent problem, and our painful experience reins us in from counterproductive displays of disapproval or enforced “X number of bites” rules, but we can’t help ourselves—when she won’t even taste the generously buttered broccoli, when she says “all done” after two minutes, we still ask, Are you sure?

The post My Newborn Refusing to Eat Challenged Everything I Thought I Knew appeared first on Electric Literature.

We are born into good times. “Dream big,” they tell us. “The sky’s the limit.”

We are lied to.

One day at school, I’m shepherded into the band practice room, the TV set rolled out of the closet and switched on. On the screen I see smoke billowing from familiar buildings, the broken body of a plane in an empty field, reporters screaming, everything veiled in dust.

We start to fear.

The whispers of war crescendo and no one seems to realize that the people who attacked us don’t come from the small country we now wish to invade. I sneak onto my family’s computer and read article after article, trying to make sense of what we are about to do, but it can’t be made sense of.

Liza and I cut class and load into my mother’s car, certain we are about to change the world. When we show up, there are just a handful of people shouting slogans at harried passersby on their way home from work. We return to where our car was parked to find it has been towed. My mother picks us up from the impound lot across town and drives us back to the suburbs in silence.

We are too young to know better.

My parents manage to save enough for college. The money is the accumulation of so many years, missed dinners and band recitals. It’s swallowed whole; the rest I will pay in parcels for the foreseeable future, the total sacrifice unknown. But I needn’t worry, I’m told, my future is bright and my dreams will all come true.

We sign on the dotted line.

In the exit counseling session, just before graduation, we’re taught about the dangers of default—wage garnishment, impacted credit score, imprisonment, depression, anxiety, loneliness, death . . .

I manage to earn enough for my expenses with nothing left over. My friends work in retail and tutor and crowd their parents’ basements. I couch surf with relatives and then pay my friend’s mother 200 dollars a month to live in his little sister’s bedroom, under a pink comforter, with her basketball trophies and stuffed animals gazing upon me.

One day at work, I see bankers carrying boxes down the elevator of my 20-story office building, a look of terror and exhilaration in their eyes. The markets have crashed; the bankers take off like bandits.

We are easy marks, open targets.

All of my friends lose what few jobs they have, their parents’ companies fold, childhood homes are foreclosed. I recall the small, scared look of my father—the only black man in his division—when his company announced layoffs.

But something is stirring in this country. There’s a name on the lips of our friends.

Years ago, he spoke at my college, and on the day tickets were given out, the line stretched from the box office clear across the main quad. I snuck into the building before the event began and crouched behind the wall of the balcony. I listened to him speak. My friends take jobs on his campaign and move to towns I’ve never heard of. The night of the election I go to my neighborhood bar, the place that plays old‑school hip‑hop on Thursdays and golden soul on Fridays. When the result is announced we scream and embrace each other; I call my parents breathlessly, text disbelief to my friends. We rush out onto the street, to sidewalks packed with strangers of every color; a bus drives by and inside, lit up, all the passengers are dancing.

We let ourselves hope.

I go to graduate school. My friends find new jobs, and I find new friends. I put money away, but it is always eaten up. The city becomes too expensive, so I move to a smaller city, and when that becomes unaffordable, I move to the countryside. Then to another coast. Our lives are shuffled around in boxes and, in between self‑storage lockers and garages, some items are lost in transit. A paperback lovingly creased and annotated, a photo of long‑gone friends, a family heirloom.

We learn to let go of our attachments to material things.

More murders are publicized, more every year, so many that they begin to punctuate our lives. I hear news of a teenager in Florida, killed walking through his family’s neighborhood, and it brings our parents’ warnings to life. How could that face mean anything but innocence to anyone?

Our outrage becomes mundane and soon we don’t even realize we are numb.

When the country elects a reality‑TV star we are shocked but not surprised. When I lived in the countryside, I saw white people living in rusty trailers and broken‑down shacks, saw their anger at being left behind. One of them asked me to my face, Why would you want to live here? I had no reply, unsure of how to explain that I’d been disappointed, too.

We realize we’ve been sold false hope.

I go away one weekend and return home to find the grocery store completely emptied out, nothing at all left on the shelves—a zombie movie come to life. I sell off everything that won’t fit in my car, load in my husband, my dog, and the handful of belongings we still hold dear: my mother’s wedding ring, an old teapot, a flower pressed between glass.

We spend months indoors, watch the world reorient around a new, darker loneliness. Every day, someone dies, and sometimes it is someone we know. We live side by side with death, begin to see it everywhere. We cry until we can’t anymore, drink until we make ourselves sick. The world expands and contracts, and I contemplate which is worse: death or exile? Oblivion or rootlessness?

We are finally set free, and the world instead turns inward. Time zips by with the speed of a thumb on a touchscreen. A smiling family dancing in unison to a Top 40 song. A mother pleading for formula to feed her daughter. Here are five things married people do. Here are five vegetables to plant in your backyard garden. Here are five steps to financial health. A sea of tents amid the quad I used to cross on my way to the library. The police are called. The protesters are beaten, locked away, doxxed, deported. “This is not about free speech. This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States.” We shiver with recognition.

We know that a house is made of bricks and mortar and can collapse, but every day I dream of a little bungalow just big enough for my love and me, a set of pots to make him dinner, and a garden to catch the sun—that no one can take away from us. Once, we brought a sick bird inside and it flew away the next morning, healed by safety.

What happens to fear without four walls to keep it in? I know. We’ve always known, it’s just that no one has believed us.

— California, 2025

From Freedom by Zinzi Clemmons, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Zinzi Clemmons.

The post Americans Have Been Sold False Hope appeared first on Electric Literature.

In every speech kid, I see a version of myself that I love with frightening intensity: 14 years old, a closeted freshman at Liberty High School with long curly Weird Al Yankovic hair, thick glasses, blisteringly cheap dress shoes, and something to say. 

It was the second week of the new millennium. The Columbine massacre was less than a year old, its aftershocks still rumbling in my hometown, Colorado Springs. That Columbine High School was still holding its annual speech-and-debate tournament struck my whole team as unlikely and courageous, a tribute to the value of our shared nerdy passion. Everyone had signed up to compete in at least one category, motivated by reverence, ambition, and, at least in my case, morbid curiosity. I imagined inspecting the walls for bullet holes and the corners of the halls for spent casings, a different sort of forensics.

This line of thinking was a distraction, though. Mostly, I wanted to win. Columbine was a Denver tourney, and Denver tourneys were a big deal: swanky, prestigious, competitive. I had never been to one, nor had I ever competed in this category, Original Oratory. Mostly, I had done Interpretation of Humorous Literature, putting on a little one-man show called “Bloodless Macbeth: A Humorous Reading or Skit.” It didn’t know exactly what it was, and neither did I, but I did okay with it. I placed third at a couple of novice tourneys, got Honorable Mentions at two varsity meets, but had yet to distinguish myself among the big dogs. Original Oratory, I thought, might be my chance. 

The Friday night before the tournament, I went down to the basement in my black pleather loafers to practice my speech. At the bottom of the stairs, an unplugged treadmill gathered dust, its belt stained from our dog Max’s pee from when my older brother, Mike, tried to make him run. The basement was Mike’s territory. His windowless bedroom occupied one corner, and a mess of his unfinished schoolwork, football equipment, and dime bags covered the green baize of our secondhand coin-op gulley table. To my great relief, Mike wasn’t home, leaving me free to rehearse in the empty family room.

I laid all five pages of my speech on the pool table beside Mike’s bong and set the timer on my digital watch. Despite the five A.M. wakeup call, I stayed up till at least midnight delivering the speech over and over to the basement walls. When Mike fought with Mom, he would sling the Bakelite balls into the plaster; I used the dents to practice my eye contact. My speech would be judged on thesis, evidence, word choice, and organization, but delivery was the most important, I knew.

Here’s what I remember of the speech, 25 years later:

The Gift of Individuality

Ah, individuality. Perhaps no gift is more precious. But wait a minute! Why do we treat it like a sweater from that aunt nobody likes?! [Pause for laughter.] Our individuality should be recognized for its value, both monetary and otherwise.

[walk left]

Individuality can be quite profitable. Take Macy Gray, for instance, the chanteuse whose inimitable, scratchy voice made her the subject of mockery as a kid [source: VH1, Before They Were Stars]. Or what about Tyra Banks, top modèle, whose classmates would make fun of her beanpole body and enormous forehead [ibid.]? They capitalized on what set them apart as individuals, and did it ever pay off.

[walk right]

Individuality can also help you resist people who want to take your money. I’m sure you’ve seen those horrible GAP commercials where a bunch of expressionless oatmeal-colored models sing Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” and then the screen says “Everybody in cords”? If you asked the average high schooler their opinion on school uniforms, 99 percent would probably say no way, Jose—because they want to “express themselves.” But do they really? Or do they just want to wear the uniform worn by the majority and enforced by corporate masterminds just trying to make another buck? As James Frank Dobie put it, “Conform and be dull.”

But conformity doesn’t just make you boring and take your money. [walk toward audience]

It takes your very soul, as exemplified in the poem “The Man in the Glass,” by Anonymous:

You can fool the whole world down the pathway of years

And get pats on the back as you pass

But the final result will be heartache and tears

If you’ve cheated the man in the glass.

[return to center]

In conclusion: a metaphor:

A butterfly flutters toward a soothing white light. All the other bugs are doing it. Then: bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt [convulsions]. The once beautiful butterfly has become a fuming, indistinguishable corpse underneath a bug zapper. Don’t be like the butterfly who flew too close to the light. Revel in your individuality. Celebrate your true identity. And, as Fiona Apple so eloquently put it at the 1997 MTV Video Music Awards, “Go as yourself!” 

The real thing was better, I promise.

It had to be memorized, and it had to be under 10 minutes and 15 seconds; otherwise, I could not be ranked first in the round. By the time I finally went to bed, it clocked in around 10:10. It wasn’t perfect, but I slept with the satisfaction that I had authored it. It was complete, original, and mine. 

When my alarm screamed me awake at five A.M., I put on my not-altogether-very-formal tournament garb: an orangey plaid button-down tucked into wheat-colored corduroys fastened with a brown web belt that clashed with my black loafers. No blazer, no tie. I scarfed a bowl of Great Grains, threw on my thrifted houndstooth overcoat and backpack, hopped into a teammate’s car, and boarded the District 20 schoolbus idling in a Ramada Inn parking lot, packed full of teens from four different high schools, all of them in blazers, most of them in ties, spewing exhaust into the freezing morning air. The sound of my speech reciting itself in my head drowned out whatever was on the radio. 

When I remember forensics, I picture the Columbine cafeteria on a Saturday morning, suddenly and completely taken over by teenagers reciting their speeches to the walls between piles of backpacks and snacks and good-luck stuffed animals and Rubbermaid tubs of evidence for cross-examination debate, waiting for the nine A.M. Round One postings, which they will scan for their speaker numbers and disperse, antlike, to their sections’ designated classrooms, where they will each speak, clap for each other, and hope for the One, a digit their judge marks on a ballot designating them as the best, the funniest, the most eloquent. 

At the heart of every speech kid is a conflict between competition and care. Their world runs on ratings, rankings, ballots, and trophies. They disparage rivals who break to semis despite the corniness of their interpretation of ’night Mother or the shallowness of their views of South American trade policy. And yet, of the thousands of students in their high schools, they alone have read ’night Mother or have anything to say about South American trade policy. They care about clarity and storytelling and connection. They care about foreign and domestic policy, utilitarianism versus altruism, definition versus evaluation, comedy versus tragedy. They care about domestic violence, terminal illness, genocide, and structural racism. Most of all, they care about their teammates. They melt into little business-casual cuddle puddles on the cafeteria floors. They watch each other’s final rounds and applaud raucously at the awards ceremonies often beginning well past nine P.M. They share hotel rooms and bus seats and secrets. They cry into each other’s shoulder pads when they don’t break to semis or finals or nationals. They know the depths of this sorrow runs deeper than this one exclusion. 

Around the time I turned 11 or 12, Mike started calling me his little sister. He was disgusted by my soft, unathletic body, my love of jigsaw puzzles, my belief that it was past time our country had a woman president. He and his handsome friends would corner me at the bus stop and squirt lemonade onto my glasses. Eventually, I became too inured to wipe the syrup off the lenses. I was far from popular in middle school, but I was mostly left alone. My only real bullies were my brother’s gang, who, unfortunately, followed me home. My bedroom adjoined the driveway, where they would play shirts-and-skins two-on-two with the hoop mounted above my mom’s garage and shout taunts through my window whenever they caught me watching. “Like what you see?” some shirtless Justin would ask, tracing his nipple until I grew so full of rage at him and myself that I punched through the screen.

When I saw pictures of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, I saw my brother and his friends. They dressed similarly, backward baseball caps and Old Navy plaids unbuttoned over Unionbay t-shirts. I thought about their delight in cruelty, their love of first-person shooters. Their smiles were sneers. I was glad they were dead. I’d wished I’d killed them myself.   

But then I thought about punching through that screen. Or the time I lost it in the back of the R.V. on the way to my grandparents’ 50th wedding anniversary, whaling on Mike in a sort of fugue state, snapped by some forgotten jab. I knew what it was to hold something unspeakable, to be pushed too far.

My speaker number at Columbine was 26B, one of about 70 Original Orators. I would give my speech in three prelim rounds for three different judges as part of three different groups of five other speakers, some of them very good. Luckily, tournament rules kept me from competing in the same prelim section as 26A, Maria Bennett, a Liberty junior whose speech was about persevering through the adversity of a dance injury and nurturing her other talents. She had placed in every varsity tournament that season, and she was poised to continue her streak. Each judge would rank the group of six from one (the best) to one of three fours and assign us speaker points from 50 to 35. The six orators with the lowest cumulative ranks at the end of the prelims, with ties broken by speaker points, would advance to Finals. 

Round One was in a sunny room with Spanish conjugation posters. I wrote my name, code, and speech title on the whiteboard with a black dry-erase marker. First in the speaker order, I took my place at the front of the classroom and got it out of the way, managing not to stumble once for the entirety of the speech. While I spoke, I watched the middle-aged white judge give time signals—three fingers for seven minutes elapsed, two for eight, one for nine. My speech ended right when he gave a fist for ten minutes. I soaked in the polite applause and sat down to enjoy the rest of the speeches. One of them was an incredibly moving story of the speaker’s childhood in Vietnam, the legacy of the French and American wars there and how they affected her family. She won the round, I was certain.

Round Two was in a choir room with tiered seating and no desks. The first speaker, a greasy-haired white boy, clutched a few sheets of notebook paper and droned a speech in favor of the legalization of marijuana that he had very obviously written in green magic marker. Everyone else had their speeches memorized. He seemed to be competing under duress. It was as if my brother had been conscripted onto the forensics team as part of some community service. He saw speech-and-debate as he saw me: derisively feminine. He bragged about the time he improvised a mock Poetry Interp performance in his English class after a female classmate had practiced her competitive interpretation of “Annabel Lee” for extra credit. “I can get up and pretend to be tragic, too,” he said after she ended her piece. Then why don’t you? his teacher asked, expecting, probably, for him to either chicken out or make an ass of himself. Little did she know how much he enjoyed the latter. He got up in front of the class and free-styled some lines about wilting flowers and bittersweet kisses, punctuating each sentence with a sweeping arm gesture or arabesque. To hear him tell it, the class’s applause after he took his final bow was deafening—and I didn’t doubt him. Had my brother had any actual interest in performing, he would’ve kicked ass at Humorous Interp. I told him as much, not to recruit him, but to corner him into some sort of appreciation for what I loved. If it worked, he kept it to himself.

Between rounds, I cruised the halls of Columbine, the pleather of my loafers digging into my heels. The library was still under renovation, paint tarps and plywood panels marring the face of the school’s otherwise spotless, airport-like interior, its almost Grecian color scheme of light blue and silver. I didn’t know a school could be this beautiful—how wide and clean and sunny its hallways, how spacious and modern its restrooms, how posh its jewelry-making studio! I had only ever competed in tournaments in Colorado Springs and farther south in Pueblo. Pueblo’s high schools seemed out of the ’50s; Colorado Springs’s, the ’80s. Columbine felt like it came from the future.

Round Three must have been in an art history room, for there was a poster of Van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night, unless, I thought, this school also taught Dutch, which wouldn’t have surprised me. 

It was in this round that one of the speeches finally mentioned the massacre. I had expected more of this and was pleasantly surprised by my competitors’ reticence on the topic. I couldn’t quite suss out what this speaker, let’s call her 14C, was arguing by bringing it up, but the rhetorical gesture was, essentially, wow. “Look where we’re sitting today,” 14C effused. “Doesn’t that say it all?” 

I was confident I placed higher than 14C—her and Marijuana Boy—but the rest was up in the air. My respect for my competitors grew with every round. They were sharply dressed, smart, funny, sociable kids, most of them older than me and most of them girls, juniors and seniors at their schools all over the Front Range. They spoke eloquently about ideas I’d only ever heard discussed on 20/20: race, consumerism, environmental peril, foreign policy, workaholism, how to live a life well lived. Their brightness and sincerity were better responses to the shooting than any memorial I could have imagined.

By the end of Round Three, about five P.M.., the sun had mostly set over the Rockies. Satisfied but pessimistic about my hopes for advancement to Finals, I walked down the huge set of stairs to the cafeteria, which looked like a mall food court with all the storefronts grated. I gravitated back to my team’s tables, empty for now. Everyone was off in their own little worlds, finishing the prelims of their own little categories: Extemporaneous Speaking, Dramatic Interp, Lincoln-Douglas Debate. In the cafeteria men’s room, I adjusted my web belt, pushed my hair out of my eyes, breathed on my glasses and untucked my plaid to wipe the lenses. I bought a slice of cheese pizza from the Snacks table, chomped on some chocolate-covered espresso beans, and waited for Finals to be posted. Who knows? I thought. Stranger things had happened.

The Thanksgiving before the tournament, Mike got me drunk for the first time. My mother and soon-to-be stepfather were off on vacation with his family in Durango, leaving us full reign over her house, where it was Mike’s wont to throw keggers in her absence. In the empty garage, surrounded by a circle of dozens of Liberty football players and cheerleaders and burnouts and high-achieving stoners, I downed a foamy red Solo cup of Fat Tire, relaxing my throat as Mike instructed so the beer could pass freely into my body. His cheering when I dropped the empty cup was more intoxicating than the alcohol. His friends chanted James, James, James, and I felt like I did onstage at the end of a forensics tournament: accomplished, included, free.

What I didn’t want to admit about my brother at the time was how much I loved him, how much I wanted to be him. He was beautiful in high school, a varsity offensive lineman, well-built and mischievously handsome. He did not have my scoliosis; his acne was less severe than mine; his hair was straight, ruly, center-parted, mahogany brown. I would overhear girls in my class giggling about him during study hall—perhaps they didn’t know he was my brother, our last name being so common and our bodies differing so markedly. But in that garage, for the first time in years, I felt like his brother, not just in blood but in spirit.

Later that night, after three more cups, I was ready to barf. Mike taught me how to do this, too. Bent over Mom’s kitchen sink, he stuck his first two fingers instructively down his throat and regurgitated the better part of the Thanksgiving dinner we’d eaten together at our father and stepmother’s house that afternoon. Mike ran the tap, flicked on the garbage disposal, and left the sink so I could take my turn.

I woke up Friday on the living room couch next to a cluster of half-empties on the coffee table and my brother’s handsome Iranian friend Arya, who had passed out shirtless on our fireplace. “The brick feels good,” Arya explained. “Cold. Nothing worse than hot when you’re hungover. And nothing better than hair of the dog.” I looked over at Max, our black Lab mix, with a touch of concern before Arya picked up a Solo cup with an inch of ale flattening at the bottom and downed it like a shot. In the center of his chest was a deep concavity. I imagined filling that concavity with beer, lapping it up like Max did the night before when my brother filled a frisbee and set it on the ground of the basement like a water dish. Max got so drunk he started headbutting the closed door of my brother’s bedroom, desperate for the dark and quiet. I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh.

Arya picked up another half-empty and handed it to me. “Down the hatch,” he ordered, and I obeyed. 

Lying down in a pile of bookbags, blankets, and peacoats in my team’s corner of the Columbine cafeteria, unshod, waiting for Finals to post, I took a moment to appreciate that I was coming of age at the dawn of a new millennium. The VHS was giving way to the DVD. The 13-note Nokia ringtone had invaded every public space. Britney Spears had declared she was “not that innocent.” I, too, was changing. 

I’d been growing my hair out since the beginning of freshman year, when I’d been cast as Riff, a guitar-toting beatnik in the fall musical, The Nifty Fifties. At the first read-through, I hammed up every syllable of dialogue like Ned Flanders’ dad. In rehearsals, I belted all four lines of my solo in “Rebel with a Cause.” One of two freshman given a speaking role, I got taken in by the theatre and forensics upperclassmen as a sort of pet. By January, my frizzy pouf had grown to a weighty, chestnut, ringleted mane I let my new friends run their fingers through. 

One of those upperclassmen was Matt Lira, a senior and speech team captain who T.A.’d for my Honors Algebra II class and took me under his wing. Matt competed in Foreign Extemp, the most hardcore of the speech categories. Extempers spent all tourney in the school library (or, in this case, the teacher’s lounge); for each round, they drew three choices from a pool of prompts, picked the one they wanted to speak on, and then had 30 minutes to research, outline, and rehearse a seven-minute speech, which they finally recited to a judge. “How will Ecuador’s economy react to the transition to the dollar?” “What is the future of English foxhunting?” That kind of thing. The best extempers’ delivery sounded completely fluid, as if they had written, revised, and memorized their speeches months in advance. Matt was one of those extempers. He’d gone to Nationals twice. He told me we were going together that summer.

Maria Bennett and Matt loathed each other—something to do with a friend of Maria’s whom Matt had spurned—and, because I had become Matt’s protégé, Maria was not too fond of me, either.

Around 6:30 P.M., when the O.O. Final Round roster was finally taped to the big plate-glass windows of the cafeteria, it was Maria who joined the mad huddle to scan the six finalists’ codes while I lay on the team coat pile and watched, too unsure of my odds to risk the disappointment. For about a minute, the crowd jockeyed for view, the din of the cafeteria punctuated every few seconds by a squeal or “Yes!” Maria’s voice was not among the squealers. She shouldered through the others and limped back to our team’s outpost.

“Check the posting,” she said, taking off her heels, her eyes refusing to meet my own.

By the time I made it up to the little white sheet of computer paper, the crowd had dispersed. Fifth on the list was a 26—and a B next to the number. 

I stared at it for a while. At first, I still thought it was Maria who’d made the cut and I had misremembered my own code. Maybe her disappointment and shoe-doffing were an elaborate ruse designed to humble me. But it didn’t take long to set in: 26B was me. It had been all along. And there I was, in Finals, at Columbine, with a speech I’d never competed with, never even rehearsed with our coach. 

The elation of this news was tempered by the realization that I had work to do, and soon—Finals started at 6:45. I noted the room number, found Matt and threw my arms around him (he’d made Extemp finals, of course), slipped my loafers back over my raw ankles, and offered Maria some breezy condolence before I clambered up the stairwell to give my speech. From the balcony above the cafeteria, I heard her let out a deep, primal “GODDAMMIT.” And I didn’t blame her.

I don’t have the ballots anymore, but I do remember my rankings for each of the prelims: one, two, two. A cume of five, just low enough to make the final cut. Maria got a one, two, three. There’s something sweetly sad about my retention of these numbers, evidence of a worth I still struggle to internalize. The facts are still so meaningful, so helpfully determinate of how good I was and, perhaps, still am.

It was around this time that I began to realize my memory made me beautiful in a way my brother’s social skills and athletic prowess and good looks made him beautiful. I had no trouble learning my lines for the Nifty Fifties, off-book by the first read-through. I soaked up the vocab lists for my French classes like a nice crouton in a crock of onion soup. And beyond words, I remembered feelings. I remembered the rules of the gameshows my brother would set up for me in the basement of the house dad and mom shared before the divorce, throwing paper airplanes at rows of toys worth 10, 20, or 50 points the farther they were from the staircase. I remembered him playing host, like Mike O’Malley on Nickelodeon’s Get the Picture. “I wrote this song,” he sang to me in the middle of the show, “to make you hap-peeee!” And I remember feeling very, very happy.

But I couldn’t remember feeling anything about Columbine—the shooting, not the tournament. Or, rather, I could remember feeling nothing: a certain nothing, an emptiness I have come to know intimately over the course of the 574 school shootings since April 20, 1999. It’s an emptiness roughly the shape of the cave in Arya’s chest. It’s an emptiness I have filled with beer and smoke and forensics scores from 25 years ago. It is beautiful in its inwardness, its frailty. And it’s never going away. 

The final round was, oddly, in the smallest room of any of the four rounds I competed in that day, a windowless nondescript mathematical-seeming room tucked away in some corner of the second floor. Of all the categories in speech-and-debate world, Original Oratory has among the most competitors but among the fewest observers. They flock in droves to final rounds in Humor or Drama Interp—people want to laugh, to cry. O.O., at its best, makes you go huh!, a sensation with a small cadre of appreciators. Such a cadre filled this modest classroom, making it seem even smaller than it was.

I was the fifth speaker of six in the final round and the only boy, including the panel of three judges. All six speakers were white. The judges took their time penciling in our names, speaker numbers, and speech titles in their packet of ballots before the oldest judge finally called the room to order with a round of applause for the finalists for advancing. She identified which of the judges would be giving time signals, the woman seated farthest in the back, and the round began.

The first speaker was a bob-haired, pants-suited gal I’d had in my first round. She was great—her speech had to do with not wasting too much time at work and spending more time with your family. “You can’t take it with you,” basically, was her thesis. She had the warm, professional cadence of a teenage Diane Sawyer. I felt proud to see her there, proud to be among such good company.

The third speaker was a tall, athletic blonde in a gray skirt-suit. Her speech was on the dangers of consumerism. Midway through, she cited the same GAP commercial my speech did, for more or less the same rhetorical effect: “Don’t be like those weirdos.” I saw the first speaker’s eyes dart toward me when the third speaker made the reference. She remembered my speech from Round One, I deduced, flattered.

The fourth speaker was dressed in a black top, gray skirt, black leggings, and black Doc Martens. Her speech was about the plight of the American Indian. It brought up the Trail of Tears and broken treaties and her experience volunteering on a reservation. It ended with about 10 seconds of her making the sound of a drum gradually fading into silence: “RUM pa-pa PUM, pa-pa pum, pa-pa pum.” She looked toward the carpet as her foot punctuated the final pum.

Thunderous applause. 

Two minutes or so of chicken-scratching while each judge fills out her ballot. 

The syncopated whisper of paper against paper as each turns to the fifth page of the packet. 

Finally, one calls for 26B. 

I take the front of the classroom crowded with applauding spectators. 

“Judges ready?” I ask, de rigueur. They nod. 

“Audience ready?” I ask. Unanimous nods.

Begin time.

I gave the speech I memorized, of course. But here’s the speech I should have given:

The Gift of Individuality

About a year ago, my brother pushed me down the stairs into our basement.

Well, kicked, actually. We were at mom’s house that night. She was working the graveyard shift at Lockheed and left Mike and me with a blank check for Domino’s, as usual. When the delivery guy rang the doorbell, I couldn’t find the check. I remembered calling in the order, cradling the receiver in my shoulder, writing down the total in digits and letters. I checked the dining table, the kitchen counters, in between the couch cushions, all the usual places.

The doorbell kept ringing. 

Mike stomped up, answered the door, asked the delivery guy to hold on, and told me to go downstairs to get a 20-dollar bill from a birthday card in his bedroom—he’d turned 16 a few days earlier. 

As I lifted my leg to step over the dog gate, Mike kicked me squarely in the ass.

I fell—onto the gate first, then sideways down the narrow well, landing against the treadmill at the bottom.

I could stand. I could walk to his room to find the card on his nightstand and pluck the bill from the sleeve with my grandmother’s handwritten declaration of pride. Holding onto the railing, I could walk back up the stairs and give my brother his money for our dinner. I could take a couple of slices out of the box to my room. I could lock the door.

Why did he do it? You might ask.

Because he could. Because he didn’t really like me all that much. Because somewhere, somehow, he learned that enacting his anger is better than questioning it, holding it in. Because my back was turned. Because no one was there to stop him.

It doesn’t matter why he did it. It matters that I survived. 

I don’t remember crying. I don’t remember hating my brother or wanting to hurt him back. What I remember feeling most distinctly was—nope. Nope: that most positive of negations, with its terminal plosive. No-p.

This won’t do at all, I thought.

I started spending more time in after-school activities:

• Theater rehearsals, where I was funny
• Forensics practice, where I was heard
• French club meetings, where I was talentueux
• AP study groups, where I was smart
• Choir trips, where I was loved.

Mom told me she was proud I was coming out of my shell. She didn’t know—and neither did I, exactly—how necessity drove the molting. I wasn’t going to be something to kick down the stairs. I couldn’t be.  

My brother once told me he got made fun of in fifth grade for saying his favorite snack was Wheat Thins. Then, he stopped eating Wheat Thins. This, I think, more than anything, explains why he kicked me down the stairs. He wanted me to stop liking my favorite snacks, in a matter of speaking, because they’re not everyone else’s favorite snacks. Because some jerk might make fun of me if he saw them in my lunchbox. 

Let me be crystal clear: I hate Wheat Thins. They are somehow both bland and too salty, and they cut the roof of my mouth. But you know what? I have never felt sorrier for my brother than when I learned he was too scared of another boy’s opinion to hold on to his own. I wish him Wheat Thins by the boxful. 

And me? I’ve decided to eat whatever crackers I want, with stinky French cheeses. I am going to love what I love, think how I think, be who I am. I am going to listen to the Rent soundtrack on repeat and wear my mother’s magenta sports coat and get a full-ride to college. I am going to be the weirdest, smartest, gayest James Davis there ever was—and there have been lots of us. And no matter how far anyone kicks me down, I will always get back up.

I have just finished reciting the poem by Anonymous when I see the head judge hold up one bent finger: 30 seconds till 10 minutes elapsed. I didn’t account for so much laughter. My speech takes on a new urgency. I see the 10-minute fist right at the end of the bug-zapper routine. As I utter the very last word of my speech, “yourself!”, I hear the head judge say “STOP,” the regulation signal that the grace period has elapsed. Any speaker who exceeds those 15 seconds cannot be the One.

After the applause dies down, I return to my desk and ask for my time, a standard nicety of forensics etiquette.

“10 minutes and 15 seconds,” the head judge says, matter-of-factly. Then: “Don’t worry. You won’t be zapped for that.”

The rum-pa-pa-pum speech came in second.

I hope everyone has experienced something like the sweet exhaustion of riding a schoolbus back from a speech tournament they’ve just won—taking off cheap dress shoes, blisters on heels, and lying across an acrid-smelling vinyl seat cover in the dark while the radio plays Top 40. Dehydrated, ripe with cortisol-rich B.O., I clutched a blue-and-silver first-place trophy the size of my forearm and read my ballots’ glowing comments by the light of passing street lamps. 

I went straight ones in Finals. That never happened, especially not to freshmen at Denver tournaments. The judges said I was a natural: Everything worked. 

“You’ve got it goin’ on!” one of them wrote. 

That night, Columbine High School became a site of transformative joy. It was where I learned I was good. It was where I fell in love with myself. Squinting in the lights onstage during the awards ceremony while each of the other five finalists’ names was read off before mine, I could catch the first few glimpses of a future in which I became my own person, loved by beautiful boys instead of ignored or tormented by them. A future in which my brother would become a friend, make amends for the ways he hurt me, and name his son after me. The brightness of this light washed out the tragedy such that I was slow to grieve what happened there, the senseless, brutal violation of children’s lives. I was so focused on saving my own. 

The post I Glimpsed My Future at a High School Speech Tournament appeared first on Electric Literature.

It may seem silly, but I prefer to read books that are much more explicitly transphobic and a few decades old. You’d be forgiven for not knowing how broadly blasé people were even 10 years ago about transness. In 2014, Rush Limbaugh, never a paragon of wokeness, actually apologized to a trans caller to his show for using the slur “tranny.” Famously, when Christine Jorgensen returned from abroad with her gender newly affirmed, it was treated more with intrigue than with anger. “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty,” the papers reported in 1952.

Don’t get me wrong: Even with all the attacks against trans people now, it is better to be trans in America in 2026 than at almost any other time or place. But I do get a real enjoyment from, say, reading Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge and seeing both how much and how little Vidal understands about trans women.

In this complicated space of retro transphobia, it’s hard to think of a book that has had a greater impact on the representation and public imagination of trans people than Thomas Harris’s 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs. Most of you have probably seen the movie; maybe you’re even trans and you really adore it—the canon of trans villains provokes diverse and complex responses from their transsexual audiences. I am not one of the trans people who has an easy time watching the film adaptation of Lambs, though I acknowledge that it is in most respects a perfect film. 

In case you don’t know, or have forgotten, Lambs is about a person the press call Buffalo Bill (“because he skins his humps,” girl detective Clarice Starling explains) who is killing women in order to make a suit out of their skin for himself. The novel was inspired by the press coverage of Ed Gein, a man who, in 1957, was found to have killed two women and robbed the graves of many more. Among the many handicrafts he made with these bodies were a “corset made from a female torso” and “masks made from the skin of female heads,” which, along with some leading questions by investigators, led to him being branded as gender-deviant. (This coverage also gave rise to Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.) The film version of Lambs is generally regarded as pretty transphobic, and even prompted director Jonathan Demme to make Philadelphia as an apology to the queer community. (Which was of course unnecessary; Demme was still at queer net-zero in my books for directing Stop Making Sense.)

Both film and book go out of their way to clarify that Buffalo Bill (who I will henceforth call by their government name, Jame Gumb) is not a transsexual. In the novel, Clarice tells Hannibal Lecter (a cannibal and more acceptable monster) there is “no correlation I ever saw between transsexualism and violence.”

“Billy’s not a real transsexual,” Lecter replies, “but he thinks he is” (emphasis mine). “He tries to be. He’s tried to be a lot of things, I expect.”

There is a long history of breaking trans people into categories that boil down to “real” and “fake.” Most famously, if you wanted to transition into a straight woman (“heterosexual transsexual” or HSTS) you were allowed to; if you wanted to become some kind of degenerate lesbian freak, you were an “autogynephile”—a man turned on by the idea of being a woman.

So how, in the imagination of Lambs and the late 1980s, are we to distinguish between these categories?

Lecter instructs Clarice to check the three extant gender clinics for people who have been rejected from transition. In particular, he suggests she look at a test called “House-Tree-Person,” in which a subject is asked to draw the titular trio. “Look for someone who didn’t draw the female figure first,” Lecter says. “Look for a house drawing without the rosy-future embellishments” like baby carriages and flowers and curtains. “You get two kinds of trees with real transsexuals: flowing, copious willows and castration themes . . . [but] Billy’s tree will be frightful.”

This is the sort of detail that is, understandably, missing from the Best Picture-winning film adaptation. But it’s what allows me to enjoy the book. Instead of distinguishing Jame as a fake, it exposes how absurd this entire taxonomic enterprise is.

Jame is “not a transsexual, he just thinks he is, and he’s puzzled and angry because [the gender clinic] won’t help him.” Early on, a doctor at Johns Hopkins says, “To even mention Buffalo Bill in the same breath with the problems we treat is ignorant and unfair and dangerous . . . it’s taken years . . . showing the public that transsexuals aren’t crazy, they aren’t perverts, they aren’t ‘queers,’ whatever that is . . . these are decent people with a real problem, a famously intransigent problem. They deserve help.” 

The book does not want to be sympathetic to Jame, but it is so interested in spending time with her that, in contrast to the (excellently acted, very upsetting) performance in the film by Ted Levine, I can’t help but see myself in Jame (or “Mr. Gumb,” as the narration insists on calling her). Jame has gotten electrolysis, started HRT. As she goes about her day, she notes that her “hands and feet [are] a little stubbly,” but she decides that “they would do.” She loves her dog Precious, coos frequently that “Mommy’s going to be so beautiful.” The first time I read Lambs, I had just adopted a cat; I was eight months on hormones—just past the edge of the most uncomfortably in-between period—and I remember thinking: This is exactly how I talk to my beloved pet. I, too, move between attempts at eradicating all hair from my torso and legs and thinking, eh, what’s a little stubble? The narration calls this an “earnest inept attempt . . . or hateful mocking” of womanhood, but to me, for better and worse, it just looks like womanhood.

What the book fails to ask or answer is what the difference is between being trans and merely thinking you are. What is the source of Jame’s apparent gender euphoria when she tries on her in-progress woman suit? Some post-Freudian obsession with her beauty queen mother, the book suggests, but we get no clearer answer than that. 

Like Jame, I have also been puzzled and angry that a gender clinic won’t help me (and they didn’t even ask me to draw a tree!). I know from experience that insisting all the more that no, really, I am really trans, and I can tell you a thousand truths and lies that confirm that fact if you will just give me some fucking estrogen doesn’t work when the system really wants you to stay where you are. I haven’t killed anyone over it, but it is easier to understand, in the context of Harris trying, again and again, to assuage any concerns you might have about the nature of Jame’s identity, why Jame might have.

It is far more pleasant to have an understandable trans villain than the ones Oyeyemi or Yuknavitch gave us. Their books have little interest in the psychologies of their trans characters or the arbitrary systems that aim to define what makes someone a “true transsexual.” How delightful, in contrast, to see the absurd system break down in Harris’s Lambs. Because despite occasional claims to the contrary, the only people who care these days about distinctions between “real” and “fake” transsexuals tend to be other transsexuals—crabs kicking and screaming to stay at the top of our particular barrel. J.K. Rowling and Pamela Paul and Graham Linehan do not care how you embellish your tree or decorate the female figures you draw. They would rather I and all my friends and perhaps you, too, reading this be immiserated if not outright dead. They look at the taxonomic absurdity and decide we are all monsters. Reading Lambs, you could conclude something similar: that trans women are freaks who would kill and skin a woman if that was the only way to be one; but you can as easily—and more accurately, I think—look at it and ask: What is the rational response to an irrational stricture? 

Taking after Lambs, this became one of the chief questions I asked while writing my own novel, All Us Saints—in which a closeted, abused trans girl sees, like Jame, no future for herself, and decides maybe it is better to kill and to die than to go on feeling the deep horror of living. She doesn’t die, and fails to kill her sister (taking out only her sister’s three best friends). 

Early in the writing process, I went back to the accounts of Ed Gein to see how those initial murders were described; as with Gein’s murders, my trans murderer can only be understood by the sensationalist true crime media complex as a freak of nature. In Harold Schechter’s account of Gein’s killings, he writes that Gein’s “transvestism” was a consequence of an Oedipal obsession with his mother, leaving Gein wishing he had been “a woman instead of a man,” wondering “whether it would be possible to change his sex.” But as scholar K.E. Sullivan points out in the seminal essay “Ed Gein and the figure of the transgendered serial killer,” there is little evidence of this beyond words that police put into Gein’s mouth, asking “Would you ever put on a pair of women’s panties over your body and then put some of these vaginas over your penis?” To which Gein responded, “That could be.” 

That could be. That’s more or less the basis for decades of transphobic slasher stories.

But having been, as Jame Gumb is, blocked from medical transition, and having lived, as Gein did, deep in repressive territory where if I hadn’t known a handful of trans people, I might not have understood I was one, the false story—the idea that Gein might have been someone like me—has always filled me with an indescribable melancholy. Every trans slasher movie—Lambs, Sleepaway Camp, Texas Chain Saw—has its trans defenders. I think this sort of melancholy is one of the reasons why. We see something of ourselves in these stories, even if they make us out to be monsters. To paraphrase Norman Bates, we all feel a little monstrous sometimes. It was this melancholy—this desire to look past the dominant narrative, not only of Gein’s gender identity but the killings themselves, and understand what it might be like to feel so confused and alone—that gave rise to my novel’s killer.

Unlike Harris’s depiction of Jame, I don’t try to quarrel about real or fake or identity at all; my trans killer doesn’t even know enough to call herself trans. But as with Jame, I wanted to take the abuses, the roadblocks, the violence that trans people face every day, and turn it back against the cisnormative nuclear family that is so often responsible for those horrors. I do not wring my hands, like the Johns Hopkins doctors of Lambs; instead I say, Okay. You’ve made us into monsters. Now what?

The post Revisiting “Silence of the Lambs” in the Age of Trans Backlash appeared first on Electric Literature.

I had forgotten the taste of bread. Of salmon and chicken. Of chocolate and figs. My tongue held the memory of these foods, of a cube of Kobe beef so tender that it felt a profanity to chew, of a spoonful of gelato, which seemed to carry a lesson of its own: how the initial shock of cold will give way to the warmth of sugar. For nearly half a year, I drank in large gulps water, tea, and cold brew. In the mornings, dry-mouthed and lightheaded, I would go to the bathroom, pee, and strip naked before stepping on the scale. I would try to ignore the sensation of feeling like a calf on display before its slaughter; I would ignore the paradox of both winning and losing, winning because the number on the scale had dipped since yesterday, losing because I sensed, in the way a runaway train barrels towards the precipice, that if this continued, as it must, absolutely must, I was probably going to die.

In one of those conversations, which if the contents were leaked would likely prove to be career-ending, I told someone that I believed that every woman, no matter how accomplished or intelligent or talented, desired to be called beautiful. In hindsight, I think I said this because, at the time, I equated beauty with simply existing. Wouldn’t it be nice, I suggested, to be congratulated for showing up: for sitting, then standing, then crossing the room and opening a window? Instead, one had to get degrees, to write and publish books, to hold one’s own on Derrida and Lacan and Marx, to listen to Bach and Shostakovich and be conversant about French New Wave. Not that I’m complaining, I said, complaining, and I quoted a favorite line from The Wings of the Dove, “…her easy injunction, tossed off that way as she turned her beautiful back, was like the crack of a great whip in the blue air…” Of course, James understood.

I’ve always wondered about the path by which we arrive at certain truths and how these truths are constructed. In 2016, I read an article about a four-year-old child, who told police officers that her name was “idiot.” This detail stayed with me longer than other features of the story, such as that the child was bruised and malnourished with marks on her wrists from where she had been zip-tied to a bed. I know about black eyes and bloody mouths, how the pain will not last but the sense of degradation will. I know that the body in such cases is merely a vessel, that it isn’t really the eye or the mouth or the tufts of hair like lambswool that is the true target but something else that takes more time to wear down until it won’t move, won’t even cry out. I thought about what it means for a child, particularly a girl, to believe her name is “idiot,” and to introduce herself as such to others in earnest. And because I am not above self-pity, I thought of myself, though I hadn’t endured the same horrors as this child, not even close. If police officers showed up, I would have used the words, “ugly” and “fat,” and uttered those words in two languages, because I had been called “ugly” and “fat” in more than just English. I didn’t know that these were “bad” words. I might even have said, “I’m ugly and fat,” with a good deal of pride. Often, the missives that are loosed from their strings in youth and adolescence don’t land until one has waded deep into the waters of adulthood. Children are hardier than we give them credit for; it’s possible I was stronger as a kid for the sole reason that I didn’t overthink what was happening to me. I rolled with the punches; I learned to raise a ruckus before others could, and if people spit poison at me, I learned to spit the same, or worse, back. Somewhere in my early thirties, I grew soft. I knew I wanted to be loved. I knew, too, I was ugly and fat. So, this was the truth I constructed for myself: Because I am ugly and fat, I am not loved.

Concerning my rapidly shrinking body, I made these observations. Sitting, I could not stand up again without experiencing momentary lightheadedness. Certain tasks, such as vacuuming, which required basic strength, became more difficult. To combat hunger, I would tuck a hot water bottle under my t-shirt, where the heat gave the illusion of making me feel sated. I was always hungry. As I pedaled away on my exercise bike, I watched videos of hot women give food reviews while taking huge bites of overstuffed burritos and slices of cheesecake. On more than one occasion, I escaped to the movie theatre, because the dark, the noise, and the large screen proved an effective distraction from the fact that I had consumed, in the span of 24 hours, a single hardboiled egg. I had only to glance at the mirror to be able to delineate the outline of my scalp, now visible because I’d lost so much hair, while what hair I had left turned soft and thin.

These observations were true, as was the fact that a sales associate at Neiman Marcus had embraced me when I told her why buying a pair of Helmut Lang shorts in size zero meant so much. In my presence, an elderly neighbor gushed to my mother, “Your daughter is beautiful,” and these words alone carried for the rest of the day the heft of a three-course meal. My new body was so mind-boggling to a member of the maintenance staff in my apartment complex that he spread the word to all his colleagues before beginning his own weight loss journey, telling me whenever he got the chance, “You inspired me.” What I had accomplished did seem, on some level, Herculean. At my heaviest, standing five feet two inches, I weighed 227 pounds; at my lightest, I weighed under 100. I marveled at small moments: how people seemed more willing to sit next to me on the bus and subway; the ease with which I could glide past cars parked far too close to each other in the parking lot; how the gazes of men appeared more inclined to linger; how department stores seemed, at last, to yield up their treasures; how one by one, like the slow unearthing of some ancient landmark beneath my skin, I could count my ribs. I emailed a friend, aware of how silly I sounded, and informed her that recently, I had set foot in Nordstrom and could choose, actually choose, what I wanted to wear, and that among these choices were dresses. I joked that I no longer looked like a beer barrel wearing a skirt.

It is strange now to consider the logic by which I linked the “preparation” of my body with my “preparation” for love. I am thin; ergo, I am ready to date. In my new body, I had plenty of time to think about food and love. To eat is one of the most primitive forms of self-care, just as to feed another is to show care. There must be a reason why during long-distance phone calls with relatives, we always, subconsciously or otherwise, circle back to the same questions: Have you eaten yet? Are you eating well? I wonder what it is about food that conveys affection and concern, why, for instance, certain foods—macaroni and cheese, chocolate chip cookies, cinnamon rolls—are well known for imparting comfort and a sense of security, the edible equivalent of a baby blanket or child’s favorite stuffed toy. For many, particular dishes conjure an almost totemic power, as a tangible and sensory-laden substitute for actual people. I cannot eat or even look at a spring roll, for instance, without also remembering a scene from my early childhood, that is, of my mother standing on our ramshackle back-porch, painted the color of rust, frying spring rolls on a portable gas burner. The frying of spring rolls always felt less cooking than ritual, less food prep than sacred offering. No spring roll has ever come close to burning the inside of my mouth, of bringing happy tears to my eyes, as I cried, “Hot! Hot!” while choking down the first simmering bite. The filling of my mother’s spring rolls was alive and bubbling, not the stale, lifeless creations sold en masse in cardboard boxes at the supermarket, or the lukewarm appetizers tossed halfheartedly into cheap plastic bags at one’s local takeout. If I needed any physical proof of food’s connection with love, I had only to look at my mother’s hands and wrists, which have known as mine have not how it feels to be burned with hot oil, with steam, with boiling water. Her skin is a constellation of scars, as tough as tanned leather.

I think about food and the relief that comes with knowing someone you care for is well-fed and sated, that there exists, at least in this moment, no possibility that they will go hungry, that they will starve. I think about how when there is nothing more to be said, food becomes so easily, even naturally, the default subject of conversation. When big, existential topics are exhausted, when there is no more to be discussed on love or Sartre, on Jean-Pierre Melville and Big Pharma, one can still talk for hours about bread. Just bread. Shokupan. Sourdough. Babka. Ciabatta, focaccia, schiacciata. Brioche, baguettes, and boule. There has always seemed to me a direct connection between loving someone and watching them eat. When I was young, my mother watched me eat, and as a child, growing up in Shanghai, her mother watched her eat. There is comfort to be had in fending off starvation and malnutrition, in providing sustenance, in the observation, the mere witnessing, of the simple pleasure food gives to one who is near and dear to you.

I know all this. Just as I know what it means to live in a fat body. At some indistinguishable point, the chubbiness of a well-fed child becomes a fat child, a fat girl, then a fat woman. At some indistinguishable point, one begins to notice that though food gives pleasure, it’s still thinness that’s prized, and if you believe that anything has changed, really changed, if you start to believe in all the rhetoric around body diversity, inclusivity, and the ugliness of fat-shaming, then I feel sorry for you. You have been fooled. Somewhere in life, these lessons are learned, and the brain develops its own logic and twisted reasoning. My brain told me that food was the enemy of love, that the only obstacle to love and being loved were the pounds of myself that needed to disappear. One has essentially to unlearn everything that is taught in childhood and in school: It’s the inside that counts; don’t judge a book by its cover; intelligence matters more than appearances. Don’t believe any of it, for they are lies.

But believe in the growing number of likes on dating apps. Believe in the potential matches who tell you how beautiful you are, how well you photograph, and how they would be honored to know you better, if you only gave them the chance. Believe in the friends who, wide-eyed and mouth agape, tell you how great you look, how you seem like a different person, how you are a different person.

Better believe that there is a price to be paid for everything. Better believe that love must be earned.

As much as I despise giving credit to an algorithm where matters of the heart are concerned, Hinge delivered. Sebastian, or “Seb,” as he called himself, was an early match. For nearly two weeks, our only means of communication was via text. We didn’t talk on the phone. Nor did we make any concrete plans to meet in-person. He didn’t share his surname, and I didn’t share mine. But we sent each other texts that ran the length of the mobile screen, texts in full sentences and whole paragraphs that discussed what I was working on, creative ideas, and opinions on film and art and music. When I pressed him on what he did for a living, he replied that we would have plenty of time to get to know each other and that he preferred for details of our lives to emerge organically in the natural flow of conversation. He told me when he wouldn’t have his phone on him because he was playing basketball, one of his great passions. He mused on saṃsāra and the cyclical life of cell phone batteries. He liked lox, Woody Allen, and Truman Capote and asked me if I didn’t think “vestibular” was a strange word. His texts read like miniature essays; his sentence structure rivaled William Trevor’s, and he used multisyllabic terms that implied at least some familiarity with Latin. I fell for him. I fell for him well before I knew his last name, before we spoke on the phone, before we even met.

During my weight loss journey, I had stayed away from restaurants. Entering the dating scene, however, threw me back into a world I’d left behind. It wasn’t a surprise that the first snag I hit with Sebastian was over where we would meet for our first date.

“Balthazar?” I suggested, trying to think of restaurants in his neighborhood. “I have good memories of that place.”

“A tourist trap,” he replied. “For our first meeting, I prefer somewhere casual where we can sit outdoors.”

“What do you mean by casual?” I said, feeling testy. “And how casual is casual?”

“Casual means easygoing,” he said. “Casual means not a big production. Balthazar would be a production.”

“Would it? You make a reservation, you go in, you sit down, you have dinner. Is that a production?”

“What about Fanelli Café?” he asked.

“What’s that?” I answered, furiously Googling. I scrolled the menu and made a face. Buffalo wings and chicken fingers? Are you serious?

“I’m not sure I’m a fan of pub food,” I said. “Or pubs, in general.”

This continued, until we circled back to my original suggestion. “I will go to Balthazar only because you want to go,” he said, giving in.

Online, I checked for reservations and came up with nothing. Calling the restaurant proved equally futile.

“They’re fully booked,” I informed him. “What do you want to do?”

By then, we had narrowed our choice of cuisine down to three possibilities: American, French, Japanese, or some cross-pollination hybrid of the above. We had excluded Italian because, as an Italian, he preferred not to eat at Italian restaurants. “I can make everything they can—and better,” was the explanation, which given his background as a restauranteur, seemed perfectly viable. I offered more possibilities, none of which passed muster. “We’ve officially landed in options territory,” he said.

“I don’t really care where we go,” I answered, losing patience. “But I’d prefer somewhere quiet with spacious seating, sufficient air to breathe, not congested. Clean restrooms. And, most important, I’d like to actually meet you.”

It seemed ironic, a trick of fate, that we ended up at an Italian restaurant, the space of which felt positively cavernous compared to other spots in Manhattan. The lighting was sufficiently dim to render most everyone in the space mildly attractive, and as the hour was still early for dinner, customers were few. “Spacious enough?” Sebastian asked, as soon as we settled into a large banquette.

“Spacious enough,” I said.

In going through life, it is hard to delineate ends and beginnings. All the times I’ve had toothache, which have been numerous, I thought the pain would never end. I would never know again what it would be like to live without the sensation of someone holding a blowtorch to my gums. On the occasions I had a fever, which was common when I was a child, it was the same, the whole world atilt; likewise, with grief over a dead dog; with bad colds and coughs; with hiccups; with writing a book. How does one chapter become thirty and counting? I still don’t quite know. When does a toothache or a cough give up the ghost, the world right itself again, a new dog appear on the scene? It always seems impossible, until it isn’t.

I mention this because I couldn’t, at the time, foresee how my struggle with anorexia would end. I did not want to return to my former self; I also did not want to die.

I couldn’t know that my healing would begin that evening of our first date, that if one chapter of my life ended with renouncing bread, a new one would commence with a bread basket, a plate of tagliolini and sea beans, and a lemon tart topped with toasted meringue. That it is commonplace, even mundane, for a relationship to start with an invitation to dinner suggests to me that there is latent within food the possibility of intimacy and romance, its very presence implying potential communion. In the restaurant, I studied the menu. I drank copious amounts of water because it was hot, the height of summer, and I was nervous about eating too much. Somewhere I had read that it was good to drink at least two glasses of water before a meal, that there is a delay in the signals the stomach sends to the brain. The brain is apparently slow in registering satiety, making it easy to overeat. Therefore, eat slowly. Therefore, I tell myself, eat smaller and smaller portions. Therefore, I tell myself, perhaps, better and safer for the body not to eat at all.

In the throes of my eating disorder, I often wondered what women are supposed to do with food. To be frank, there are still moments when I seriously ponder the question. What are women supposed to do with food? At the risk of stirring the reader’s ire, I promise I’m not being deliberately obtuse. Having no health insurance, I didn’t have access to a nutritionist or dietician; I had no concept of what it meant to eat well-rounded meals, to occasionally indulge but in moderation. My thinking was dangerously simple and reflected a lifelong tendency to take things to extremes. Dieting was deprivation. If for decades I’d enjoyed a surfeit, now I had to withhold, to punish myself, and to starve.

To this day, I don’t know how I came to order the dish of tagliolini and sea beans. Perhaps it was the cheapest item on the menu. Otherwise, it doesn’t make much sense. Pasta (a carb!) was strictly verboten. Likewise, I don’t know how a piece of bread from the bread basket ended up on my plate, the crust left to soak in a small puddle of olive oil garnished with pepper. I remember watching Sebastian, who casually remarked that he loved bread but preferred only to eat the crusts. I remember smiling when he said this, breaking off a very small piece of crust, and touching its toasted warmth to the tip of my tongue. I swallowed. Nothing happened. The roof didn’t cave in. The waiters didn’t trip over their feet and spill their platters or tumble headfirst into the banquettes. No one stopped to stare. But suddenly I remembered the taste of bread. I looked down at my plate as if a small miracle had enacted itself without my knowing. Sebastian took another piece of crust and dabbed it in olive oil, and I did the same.

The brain doesn’t register everything. Possibly, it doesn’t need to, and perhaps it’s better that it doesn’t. The body holds its own laws, its own yearning and awareness of the world. That evening of our first date, I ate slowly. I cut my sea beans into ridiculously small pieces and lined them up in neat rows, as if I were preparing to feed a fussy baby. I talked about my books, my work. I showed Sebastian the Henry James tattoo I got in Paris on my right forearm. “The best possible souvenir,” I said. “Beats a tattoo of a croissant, doesn’t it?”

We talked about French cinema and the bad acoustics of the restaurant. At one point, he looked over his shoulder at the chatty group of young women in the next banquette and said, “Someone turn the radio off,” and I laughed.

Somehow, I don’t know precisely how, the plate of tagliolini and sea beans disappeared. I tasted oil on my lips and forgot to wipe my mouth. I remarked to myself how good Sebastian looked in the ambient light, and with every such thought, another bit of pasta vanished from my plate. I stopped refilling my glass of water. It was the day before my birthday, so we ordered dessert.

“Una vela, sin cantar,” Sebastian said to the waiter, and some moments later, the lemon tart arrived with a single silver candle.

Under the table, we held hands, and I told him my wish was that I would have the chance to see him again. For the first time in months, I forgot about food. I forgot about food because I was full.

Falling in love isn’t a distraction. Rather, I think more and more that it is a guide. I see love as filling in those parts of the self that need care. Holes are patched over, rough edges whittled to smoothness, wounds aired and given the chance to heal. In Sebastian’s kitchen, I watched him squeeze a lemon between his hands over two plates of salad, and I wondered that such a sight could inspire so much awe and make my heart swell to the point of pain. “Do you know what you do with mint?” he asked over a dish of strawberry panna cotta before rubbing the sprig in his palms, inhaling, and offering the gap between his thumbs to my nose.

Reader, I gained weight. I fell in love in stages: a lemon, a mint leaf. I fell in love over butter-soft sashimi, over rainbow trout, clams, and yellowtail rolls, over margarita pizza and porcini mushrooms, over chocolate mousse, chocolate cake, and chocolate soufflé. The physical trail of my path to healing could be found in plates and bowls scraped clean, on paper and cotton napkins bearing lipstick stains, over bare and candlelit tables on which I left water rings, scattered breadcrumbs, and the stray piece of arugula. Is it possible in life and in love for food not to serve as some point of reference? Particular dishes conjure precise memories. Cod and matchstick vegetables remind me of New Year’s Eve, where a live bossa nova performance made up for the fact that my fish was over-salted. In a parking lot outside a Greek restaurant, the honey of baklava still on my tongue, I remember being pulled into the combined shade of an SUV and pickup truck and kissed. The music of Chaka Khan brings to mind a cup of sencha, sipped in a hotel bar not far from Carnegie Hall, where Sebastian and I had just watched a concert. The concert had been awful, reminding us both of the kind of grating, nostalgic entertainment performed on cruise ships and in senior homes with pastel wallpaper; the young woman singing “Through the Fire,” on the other hand, possessed a voice that could fill Stern Auditorium—and then some. Over a plate of linguine frutti di mare, he said for the first time, “I am in love with you,” and if I did not swoon, it was only because we were waiting for the tartufo. Manhattan, in especial, the Lower East Side, has become a landscape scattered with small monuments, significant only for how personal they are to me. Washington Square Arch can’t compare with any of the wooden benches outside of La Colombe in NoHo, where on a starlit evening, the autumn chill settling around us, we drank hot cocoa and talked of the past. Later, on the same bench, Sebastian would hold my hand, as he worked patiently to remove a splinter, his nail gently scraping at my skin.

If I fell in love in stages, then my healing also comprised individual moments and lessons internalized by my body. I learned that food wasn’t to be feared. To indulge was not to let myself down. I could control what I ate. I possessed the intelligence to determine what was good—and less good—for my health. I learned, too, that many things in life existed beyond the reach of mere nutrition labels, that you cannot hope to measure the value of a memory in grams of protein and fiber. If there is nutrition for the body, then there is almost certainly nutrition for the soul. This is wisdom that is acquired bite by bite, dish by dish; the kind of lesson one absorbs watching the remnants of a previous night’s charcuterie board turn into an omelet as if by magic. Jambon de Paris. Gruyère. A sprig of rosemary pilfered from a Japanese restaurant’s window box. Three organic eggs and a splash of olive oil. “It’s more a frittata,” Sebastian said, bending over the skillet and sprinkling in a pinch of sea salt. When the omelet arrived, I did a little dance of happiness. I broke my own rules around taking pictures of food (the remit of influencers) and snapped photos of the omelet from different angles. I kissed Sebastian on the cheek. If this is all life had to offer, I thought, just an omelet on a glass plate with two parsley leaves for garnish, then it would be enough. I could die happy.

Perhaps there is some degree of mimicry in love that manifests itself in habits and in convictions about food. I discovered I liked smoked salmon, Balocco’s Buongiorno biscuits, Manchego cheese, and split pea soup. I became highly opinionated about bagels: Plain was the way to go; a bagel with the dough scooped was always better than an unscooped bagel; a bagel was not a real bagel that did not also have a hole in it (not a squished hole, a proper hole); a plain bagel without lox hadn’t achieved its full destiny as a bagel. Neither of us could understand the copious amounts of cream cheese that seemed to accompany every bagel; certainly, neither of us would ever stand in line outside Apollo Bagels. No food in the world was worth waiting for, we agreed, if it took more than five minutes to place an order. I began to dip cookies in tea and coffee and to drink a mug of peppermint tea before bed. I bought a cheap French press, which until it broke, played as vital a role in my morning routine as the chalice during Mass. I think of a moment in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice when Mr. Darcy says, “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” and now I wonder if the food of love is, in fact, simply food.

In saying this, I do not mean to be reductive about how an eating disorder is managed, much less conquered. Often, far more complex issues are at work, and the journey to healing can be long, full of reversals, false starts, and regressions to harmful habits. What I had to face was that my broken relationship with food ultimately mirrored a broken relationship with myself. This isn’t about receiving permission from someone else to eat. Rather, it’s about the realization that to eat and to be loved are not mutually exclusive. If this should strike others as being self-evident, then consider yourself fortunate. It wasn’t long ago that I recorded on small slips of paper every item of food ingested; if I consumed 200 calories for breakfast, I would work off at least 400 calories at the gym. Once, having eaten out for a celebratory dinner, I proceeded from the restaurant to the elliptical and exercised for three straight hours, terrified of sodium levels and what my weight would be the following morning. Body-checking and laxative abuse became second nature. The most insidious aspect was my own self-awareness. I knew I was slowly killing myself, and still I jotted down every hardboiled egg, every banana and apple slice, every dozen blueberries and half-serving of nonfat Greek yogurt. My period stopped. My right knee, likely from over-exercise, started to appear misshapen, bending outwards and making me look partially bowlegged.

If I was aware of being caught in a destructive cycle, I also knew what I needed to heal: someone, who wasn’t myself, to encourage me to eat, to show, by gesture, by words, by simple kindness, that to feel sated was not to engage in an act of self-harm, far from it. In the end, I became the only person who didn’t want to celebrate my new body. Instead of receiving congratulatory remarks, I wished people who’d known me from before I lost weight would tell me I had always been beautiful. No one did. Instead, they were curious. “Did you use any GLP-1 drugs?” they asked. When I told them no, I had no insurance, and I couldn’t afford the medication out of pocket, they expressed amazement. “I can’t believe you lost that much weight on your own!” they enthused. It isn’t fair, but it would be naïve to ignore that, in any society, there doesn’t exist some correlation between aesthetics and attraction. The standards may vary; the desire for beauty, however that may appear to the individual person, does not.

Many friends and acquaintances have drawn a direct line between my weight loss journey and the love I now have in my life, a cause-and-effect story that I reject with some vehemence. They say that if I didn’t lose half my weight, I could forget about having a partner. Who would even look at you? In other words, my willingness to starve was also a sign to the universe that I was ready to love and be loved. I will never attribute to bullying, abuse, and harm the credit of enlightenment or happiness. But I will draw a connection between the act of sharing a whole branzino and the act of sex, between snacking on pane carasau with a sharp cheddar and kissing with tongues. In both instances, the mouth has achieved its telos. To taste my lover’s cum, I have found, brings the same warmth and satisfaction as the first bite of a cinnamon sugar donut.

It seems a natural progression to move from food to sex, for one form of hunger to replace another. The salt of the omelet still in my mouth, I returned to the bedroom and watched Sebastian take off his clothes. A soccer game was on. Neither of us bothered to turn it off. I lay on the bed and sucked him. Later, after we had finished, I took his hand and tasted the tips of his fingers. I thought of a time when we had gone to a bakery, and because my hands were full, Sebastian held the cookie he had bought to my cheek so that I could feel its warmth. The boy behind the counter had told him a new batch had just come out of the oven, wasn’t he lucky? “Cookie kiss,” I said. You could have offered me the Hope Diamond in exchange, and it wouldn’t have swayed me. As we left the bakery, I cupped the cookie as if it were the Holy Grail. I licked the mixture of dark chocolate batter and melted peanut butter chips from the wax paper bag and felt like a teenager about to write a bad poem.

Another discovery is this: The body wants to heal. If I had starved myself for love, then it was love that also saved me, that anchored me to the earth by giving me weight and heat and substance, and, therefore, strength. If men were at one time in my life both the enemy and the goal, it was, I confess, a man who steered me back to the path of nutrition, of consistent but not copious exercise, of the occasional indulgent sweet treat. For the dream of having a date, I had forgotten the taste of bread; it was on a date that I remembered it. I now know what Anna Karenina meant when she says to Count Vronsky, “I am like a hungry man who has been given food. He may be cold, and dressed in rags, and ashamed, but he is not unhappy. I unhappy?”

In an Italian restaurant, faced with a serving of tagliolini and sea beans, I had felt a rising panic. I recall inching the dish towards Sebastian, and when he didn’t respond, trying to fork as much of the pasta as I could on to his plate. He shook his head, refusing. “That’s all yours,” he said. Then, looking at me, he added gently, “Eat.”

I ate. I have been eating ever since.

The post My Brain Told Me Food Was the Enemy of Love appeared first on Electric Literature.