What makes the novel so compelling is its understanding of art history not as ornament, but as a narrative engine. While writing my own novel, Mona’s Eyes, I had the chance to experience how powerfully works of art can move a story forward. Lemle uses that force in a darker key. She goes behind the museum glass, into the machinery of provenance, money, desire, and crime. We are drawn to beauty; but we are also drawn, perhaps more secretly, to the mud around it.

In that sense, Artifacts is a form of archaeology by other means. It excavates memory as much as ruins, illusions as much as evidence. In the conversation that follows, Natalie Lemle and I spoke about ancient things and ordinary possessions, Italy and myth, the art world’s shadows, unstable memory, and the strange energy that certain objects continue to exert over the living.

Thomas Schlesser: Let’s begin with the title itself: Artifacts. An artifact is an object, of course, but an object that has survived—something charged with evidence, memory, perhaps even secrecy. Your novel is full of these presences: antiquities, artworks, fragments of the past, but also more intimate traces of a life. As an art historian, I am always struck by the way certain objects seem to remember more than we do. What is your own relationship to them—ancient or ordinary, precious or personal?

Natalie Lemle: My relationship to ancient objects is very different from my relationship to everyday possessions. When it comes to antiquity, or really anything that comes from the past—it doesn’t even have to be ancient, but let’s say something at least 100 years old, something made before my lifetime—I’m much more intrigued, much more fascinated. That is what gets me thinking, what gets me into my storytelling mind.

With everyday possessions, I have a more complicated relationship. To be honest, I don’t like being attached to physical things. I don’t like the feeling of being beholden to them. I want to be the kind of person who could always pack up, leave her life, and not feel sad or sentimental.

I may have one or two pieces of jewelry that feel sentimental because of the memories associated with them, but I can’t point to a single possession that feels important to me in that way. I see how easily possessions can become an extension of the ego, and I bristle against that. I am fascinated by ancient objects, but suspicious of what belongs too closely to my own life: The older something is, the more it liberates my imagination; the closer it is to me, the more it feels like a trap.

TS: What I find striking is the paradox: In life, you resist the hold material things can have over us; in the novel, you give them enormous power. Did Lena need to believe in them more than you do?

NL: Yes, that’s true. It doesn’t bother me if readers see that the book is written in the first person and think Lena is a stand-in for me. But there are many differences between me and my narrator.

I needed Lena to be more fully fixated than I am on the promise of something tangible, something you can hold and see. At least initially, she believes that if she can see something with her own eyes, she can understand it. What she learns is that seeing is not the same as knowing.

TS: In my generation, Indiana Jones was a terribly efficient machine for turning children into imaginary archaeologists. A lot of us wanted, at least for five minutes, to dig up mysteries in a hat. But archaeology, in your novel, is obviously not just adventure. What do you think draws us so deeply to it?

NL: I think the most obvious answer is that we want to dig in order to understand. We want to understand how people lived before us, what they did with the things they possessed or shared—maybe because those things give us clues about our own daily life, or help us understand something about the through-line between human beings.

My personal belief, and what I tried to do with Lena and the other archaeologists in the book, is to show that they are interested in archaeology because they really want to understand themselves. For Lena, excavation becomes a dangerous form of introspection: She thinks she is digging into the past, but she is really digging toward herself.

What she comes to realize is that something from the outside can maybe lead you to an inner corridor in your own mind—but then you have to actually be willing to open all those doors. The excavation is only step one. What happens afterward has to happen inside you.

That is also why archaeology becomes frightening for her: It asks her to follow a feeling before she is ready to do so. She is still in her head, still cerebral. She thinks archaeology is about physical evidence. But by the end of the book, she comes to understand that archaeology may be more spiritual than she thought, and more based on instinct: on being willing to follow those instincts instead of grasping for the tangible.

TS: The novel is built on two timelines, and Lena is not only confronting a mystery; she is also meeting a younger version of herself and facing the gap between two periods of her life. Why was that structure important to you?

NL: Originally, there were two reasons I decided to use a dual timeline.

The first is that the laws and attitudes around cultural heritage and restitution changed so drastically between 2004 and 2022, when the present-day story takes place. How did we go from 2004, when museums were still taking things into their collections so freely, and all kinds of sketchy pieces were being sold on the open market, to 2022, when curators won’t touch an antiquity—even the most beautiful one in the world—without rock-solid provenance? They won’t touch it with a 10-foot pole. That is a huge difference.

The second reason is that I wanted Lena’s present-day narrative to be somewhat unstable. Not because I needed her to be fully unreliable, but because I wanted her to filter her memories through what she is learning in the present day about the case. The two timelines let me think about provenance in two ways: what can be proven about an artifact, and what can never be fully proven about memory.

She remembers things based on what she is learning now. And of course she cannot remember verbatim what was said. The dialogues are more or less invented, right? The mind doesn’t remember in that way. She remembers some things—she definitely remembers the important things—but she is also selling us a narrative about the past.

I personally enjoy fiction that does that. You suspend your disbelief, you go along with what the narrator says, and at the same time, as a reader, you keep asking yourself: Is this what really happened?

TS: I’m happy you mention unstable memory, because I know you also love Elena Ferrante. And Italy, in Artifacts, is such a powerful landscape: luminous, sensual, full of secrets. Why was it the perfect place for part of this story?

NL: Ferrante does narrative instability so well. Troubling Love is a great example: The main character is looking for her mother and remembering pieces of her childhood. Then, as she gets more clues about what happened to her mother, she starts remembering her childhood differently. And The Lost Daughter does that really well too.

As for Italy, I am half Italian—Sicilian on my father’s side—but I didn’t go there until I was 18. I didn’t grow up going to Italy. My Italian side is totally American. I think I’m fourth-generation Italian, so it’s not as if I had a direct connection to the country.

But I was lucky enough to go to a high school where I learned Italian, and I did an exchange at the end of high school with another high school in Bologna. I remember being there for the first time and feeling this very strong connection to the country. At first, I thought it might be related to my knowledge of the language, or my interest in it. I was also studying Latin in high school, and I knew I wanted to study art history, ancient art, the ancient world. So initially I thought: I am interested in all these things, and now I get to be in the country where so much of this came from.

But then I started to feel that it was deeper. I felt a sense of homecoming. And yet I’m Sicilian, and I was in Bologna, so it wasn’t literal. Italy was both inherited and imaginary for me: I felt a homecoming there, but it was a home I had invented as much as received.

Later I did an archaeological dig in Tuscany as an undergraduate, and then I spent a college year abroad in Bologna. I even fantasized about staying, but that year also made me realize how American I really was.

So when I was drafting Artifacts, I was returning, with some distance, to the sense of magic I felt when I first went to Italy. For me, Italy is a place full of stories to which I feel an emotional connection. It makes me feel transported. And maybe this is a naive thing to say, but when I’m writing fiction, part of the pleasure I get is the feeling of being outside myself, outside my normal day-to-day life. I love feeling as if I am in Italy when I write.

TS: I’m struck by how hungry readers are for the dark side of the art world—the money, ambition, vanity, and opportunism behind the beauty. But your novel does not simply expose that world from the outside; it understands why people are drawn to it, and why they stay. What makes that darkness so fertile for fiction?

NL: Like anybody else, I can be critical of the art world. It’s fun to complain about how sketchy it can get! But ultimately, it is also a place where I feel very at home—so I don’t know what that says about me.

I think I am very comfortable with gray areas in general. I am interested in systems and how things work, and the art world is a very complex system that relies on relationships: institutions, personal relationships, discretion. These are compelling and interesting forces, and very fertile ground for fiction.

What fascinated me in my 20s, as I was building my career in the art world, was that I could walk into a museum and look at beautiful paintings, or go into a gallery, or see that a Basquiat had just sold at Sotheby’s for many millions of dollars. I could see all of that, appreciate it, move toward it, without really knowing how it worked.

I think there are many of us who work in the art world who do not actually understand its hidden scaffoldings. Many things that happen sound stranger than fiction but are painfully true.

The art world is where idealism and opportunism meet in front of the same beautiful work. People enter the field because they love beauty, and then find themselves inside a system built on money, secrecy, and power. You have bad actors and idealists constantly in conversation with each other. And what brings them together? A work of art that they may both love, but for completely different reasons.

TS: There are several allusions to myths and legends in your novel. In myths, there is very often a key object at the center: a treasure, a relic, something that must be found. Did you always know Artifacts would have both this mythic dimension and a darker, almost noir dimension?

NL: My first introduction to myth was probably in school, and then through art history. But it was in college that I read Apuleius’ The Golden Ass, and inside that novel is the myth of Cupid and Psyche. Psyche stayed with me because it joins love, rebirth, transformation, and the soul—which are also the hidden materials of Artifacts.

As for the darker dimension, I love writing plot. I knew something had to happen that would be the engine of the novel. I wanted Lena to be trying to figure something out. I knew I wanted some kind of mystery element, though I did not know at first how dark it would become.

I rewrote the book so many times. Every time I rewrote it, something new and important revealed itself to me. So I am a first-time novelist in the sense that this is my first published novel. But behind the scenes, Artifacts is the tip of the iceberg. Underneath it are so many revisions, so many thoughts.

TS: The book is full of enchantment, but also of the end of illusions. I felt something close to that, in another way, while writing Mona’s Eyes: the discovery that art can illuminate life, but does not magically repair it. Would you say that Artifacts is also about that kind of loss of illusion?

NL: Yes. I think there are many ways the book looks at the end of illusion: Lena’s relationship to archaeology, to history, to love, all of those things. But the one that is most personally resonant for me is the relationship she has with her parents. She is circling this unresolved—I don’t want to say trauma, because I feel that cheapens it—but this unresolved, complicated relationship with her parents, which extends to her sister in the present.

The real trigger is not only the case, but her sister’s pregnancy, which forces Lena to think about family, inheritance, childhood, and the stories siblings tell differently about the same past.

By the end of the novel, she realizes that love does not have to follow a set of rules. She and her sister can have different paths and still love each other.

And one personal thing—true both for me and for Lena—is the illusion that we can control outcomes. We can choose our actions, but not the life those actions create. The events we set in motion may look as if we can control them, but we cannot. There are too many unknown forces. I believe that the idea of controlling outcomes is an illusion the mind creates. That is my woo-woo side.

TS: One last, slightly tricky question. Do you think every artifact hides a story, or do we need to invent stories in order to love what remains?

NL: I think it is both. But I would not use the word story. I would use the word energy, or feeling. Something more abstract than narrative.

I don’t think you can ever separate your own bias, your own history, from something you are beholding, or even reading. I am not only talking about an antiquity or a painting on a wall. I am talking about the bias we bring to reading fiction. Even reading your novel Mona’s Eyes, I bring my own museum memories to it.

That is just to say that you cannot separate yourself from the work of art. But that is one of the pleasures of art. Art helps us understand ourselves because we see our story, and we feel it reflected back to us.

I feel this especially with ancient things. I am not an archaeologist, I am not a registrar, I am not a museum curator. I do not regularly have occasion to hold an antiquity or a sculpture. But I can feel the energy of a thing when I get close to it. I can feel what draws me to it.

And I do think that, under the surface, there is a lot in Artifacts about magic. Cyrille talks about Druid rites, about various superstitions. And of course there is the dichroic glass cup, which for a long time could seem almost magical, because scientists did not yet have the technology to view the nanoparticles of metal mixed into the glass—the thing that gives it its dichroic quality.

I think so much of what is pleasurable and important about art is that je ne sais quoi, that intangible magic you cannot put into words. It is just a feeling you have.

If ancient things did not give off some kind of energy, I don’t think we would fight over them, preserve them, or build museums around them. They matter because they make us feel that the world has remembered something we have forgotten. We simply understand, as humans, that they are important, and that they have power.

The post The Secret Lives of Objects appeared first on Electric Literature.

Bottom Feeders explores Hebert’s love for a state that’s produced an opioid crisis and for those who struggled with that addiction. These two loves collapse into one another, becoming interchangeable objects of desire and destruction, the speaker too immersed in the damage to see a way out. Distance offers relief, a chance to catch her breath after living so long underwater, but it doesn’t extinguish the pull.

Like Hebert, I grew up in Florida and left for many of the reasons she depicts. While distance felt necessary at the time, Florida is a seductress, and after so many years I find myself questioning why I left—even the humidity I once found so oppressive rewritten in my memory as a familiar comfort. This longing is palpable in Hebert as well, both in her collection and in our conversation. In our interview, I asked Hebert how she writes about disaster without falling back into its magic. Like she states in the collection, “Everything we do / is self-preservation / or self-destruction,” but how can you tell which is which? It’s a question I asked as much for the readers’ benefit as for my own.

Although states apart, I could feel our shared insatiability for the place we both left behind. Potted ferns decorated both our backgrounds as we talked over Zoom, her words pressed like fingers on a bruise: Painful, yes, but also a relief to be reminded that part of you is still there.

Sam Risak: Florida is often made into spectacle: the news stories, the memes, the mythology. Do you feel the state warrants this portrayal? Did you find yourself consciously writing toward it or against it?

Arielle Hebert: I am hyper-aware of the ways that Florida is portrayed in the media, especially since I’ve left the state and hear outsiders’ perspectives. When I say, “I’m from Florida,” it’s received with a certain look, or a recognition of what they see portrayed in the media, whether that’s Florida Man stories or, these days, about the political climate. But when I was writing the book, I tried to be aware of those preconceived notions about Florida and to write honestly toward my own experience. I tried to do a little bit of both leaning into and away from what folks might think they know about Florida.

SR: Taking the preconceived notions and complicating them?

AH: Complicating them, interrogating them, and also trying to portray what I loved about Florida—the flora and the fauna, the landscapes, the ocean, the swamps, all of it. It’s such a beautiful place where complicated things happen.

SR: In Bottom Feeders, the opioid crisis functions as a structural backdrop to the personal narrative. Why was it important to put the state’s conditions in conversation with the speaker’s intimate life?

AH: I didn’t want it just to be about a breakup or a relationship. The time that the book is written about is my later years of high school and then the few years after graduation. So certainly adolescence and being a young adult. And during that time, there was so much happening that I really wanted that intertwined-ness to be present in the book. It wasn’t just early love and early hurt or heartbreak. It was also exploring my sexuality and finding a group of friends to do that with that I felt safe and accepted by. 

It was also the height of the opioid epidemic, and that was certainly ever-present in all our lives whether it was in that friend group or outside of it. It touched everyone I knew, whether personally or [by] a few degrees of separation.

And then, going back to Florida as a place, erosion is ever-present. I lived on the coast—the west coast of Florida in Sarasota—and the beaches have been eroding since I moved there in 2000. So all these issues were swirling around each other, and I don’t know if I could have written about only the personal or only the external factors. It seemed like they were all predicated on one another.

SR: In “Hurricane Blues” you write: “We treaded grief like water, / missed hurricanes in the off season, / when chaos ebbed enough / for us to see clearly, all the damage.” It seemed like a parallel that runs throughout the collection: that both the speaker and the citizens of Florida are inclined to dwell in disaster rather than take on the arduous work of reckoning. Do you have a sense of what produces that collective avoidance? Did your thinking about it change while writing the collection?

AH: My perception definitely changed as I started to write the collection. There is this sort of—I don’t know if addiction is the right word, but keeping in the themes of the book—this addiction to chaos, where things are happening very quickly, and one piece of chaos or disaster can befall [you], and you don’t have time to process before the next thing is happening, whether that’s hurricanes, overdoses, prom, funerals—all of it overlapped. And going back to that intertwined-ness of chaos, I would say that as I was writing it, my perception did change, but it was also confirmed in a way.

I keep daily planners and weekly calendars, and I have since middle school. And it was illuminating and also affirming to look back at those old calendars from high school and from the couple of years that followed to see how frequently these life-changing events were happening, and in such quick succession. So in part, I think that chaos does prevent some of the processing and the reconciliation that needs to happen. And I don’t know about the collective, but for me, it certainly was a space that was hard to heal when you’re inside of it. It’s hard to reckon with one disaster as another one is befalling you. It’s like keeping your head above water during a high tide. You’re treading water and doing everything you can to just make it to the next day or the next week or the next year.

SR: And in turn, the chaos becomes the familiar.

AH: Definitely, definitely. The chaos becomes the stasis of being. 

SR: It can be difficult to write about addiction without romanticizing it. How did you navigate that balance, both for the readers’ sake and your own? Were there poems in this collection that crossed a line you had to pull back from?

AH: Early in my writing career, I did fall victim to that, but I’m very lucky to have wonderful mentors. When I first started writing these poems during my MFA, I remember one particular workshop with Eduardo C. Corral where we were going over a poem in which I had likened an image of track marks to wisteria vines. And one of the most valuable pieces of feedback I got about that poem from Eduardo was that I was using beauty for something I shouldn’t. I was afraid to dwell in the ugliness for a long time, and my defense mechanism was to use these beautiful images to lift the reader out of that, or to essentially romanticize it.

I don’t think any poems that made it into the book do that. I hope not. What I did end up doing was incorporating beauty and levity and love into the book, but where those things fit—[like in] the relationship between the speaker and her girlfriend before the addiction, or the relationship between the speaker and her friend group. There were moments of real joy and beauty in there, but they didn’t belong in the poems that dwelled in addiction.

SR: The speaker implicates herself throughout the collection, perhaps most directly in “The Architect” as she says: “Even if it wasn’t my intention, / I helped build this house.” How do you write culpability without letting it tip into self-blame?

AH: Writing those poems helped me blame myself a little less. Early on in these experiences, I did feel incredibly guilty and responsible. I was constantly grappling with the question, “What else could I have done?” And writing the poems where I do express some culpability helped me pull back enough to say, “We were in the trenches together, and we weren’t each other’s keeper. We did the best with the tools we had at the time.” And in a way, expressing that culpability helped me forgive myself a little bit and forgive her, forgive Florida, forgive our friend group. We weren’t always the best to each other, and that’s something that made our friendships very complicated but also very beautiful. We were certainly flawed, and yet we had this sort of unshakable bond. We were fiercely protective of each other, and sometimes that fierceness turned into fierce betrayals.

I don’t want to say I’m completely guilt-free now. I do still grapple with those feelings, but it was also important for me to include some of my own experiences with opioids or experimenting with drugs and alcohol because we were all in it together. I wasn’t a victim. I wasn’t a bystander or an innocent witness. I was right there alongside the rest of them. And I think, for better or for worse, admitting some of those things to myself and in the book also demonstrates that I’m not demonizing the speaker’s girlfriend. I’m not vilifying addiction or addicts or anyone in recovery. There is only a thin line between what happened and what could have happened. It could have been any of us. And I say that in the collection too. It feels like I got lucky.

SR: Do you find that writing gives you some intellectual distance that helped you get to that place of forgiveness?

AH: It’s a phase of my writing, a lens that I use during revision or drafting. And sometimes thinking of myself as “the speaker” is like the Scooby-Doo villain’s mask that you take off, and it’s the same person underneath. But even that tiny layer of distance provides enough outside perspective that I can look at things a little bit differently, even if it’s just one hue or shade different. 

SR: Distance from Florida appears in the collection as necessary, and yet it does not ultimately offer a total solution. Instead, recovery is portrayed as an unglamorous, unending process. How do you write honestly about recovery without diminishing its urgency?

AH: Like anything worthwhile in life, recovery can be difficult, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And seeing friends and loved ones go through recovery and advocate for themselves motivated me to portray how difficult it is. How unending it is. It really is a cycle.

There’s a metaphor in psychology that likens grief to a ball in a box. And when grief or trauma first happens, the ball inside the box is really large, and it bumps against the walls frequently and with force. Over time, the ball in the box gets smaller, but each time it hits a wall, it’s still just as powerful, just as visceral, as when it first happens.

And I think that’s also an apt description for recovery and addiction. It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been cycling through or which number of the cycle you’re on. It’s just as easy to ping back to day one of a recovery or a relapse. But knowing you don’t have to do it alone—that there are people who believe in you—makes it worth it. Their care and love, and the care and love you feel for yourself, is worth it. 

SR: Would you be willing to share what your relationship with Florida looks like now?

AH: Still complicated. I miss Florida every day. I have mermaids in almost every room of my house. I’ve got some shark teeth on my desk. This summer, I’ll have lived in North Carolina for just as long as I lived in Florida—so 13 years—but I don’t know if I’ll ever think of Florida as anything but home. My folks still live in Sarasota. I’ve got lots of friends there. It’s a place that I love to visit. I’m not sure I’ll ever live there again, although those are some famous last words.

Though, I do want to add, Florida was recently rated the least safe state in the US for LGBTQ folks. I know tons of queer people who still live in Florida, and it’s so hard to hold that in my mind. There is this awful legislation and political climate in Florida, but also so many people fighting the good fight. A lot of times, I wish I was one of them.

SR: Your final poem is titled “athazagoraphobia,” meaning the fear of being forgotten. In it, you write: “I start to wonder / if I’ve ever really seen a wolf.” When you write for a living, it’s easy to become aware of how memory is constructed, even manufactured. Do you find yourself struggling to trust your own memories? If so, how do you deal with it? How do you know that wolf was really there?

AH: I don’t trust my memory because it’s not very strong, but that’s why I have all my calendars and weekly planners. I keep my dentist appointments and doctors appointments and my meetings and my work obligations in those pages, but I also keep written logs of hanging out with friends and going to the beach and—if we’re thinking back to the years depicted in the book—when prom was, when my coach’s funeral was, when our intervention for my girlfriend happened.

I’m drawn to writing and archiving because I know that memory can change over time. Like you said, we can fabricate what a memory becomes for us, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book so badly, or felt compelled to write these poems. I don’t trust my memory, and I wanted to stay true to the way things were and how they happened and who we were during those times. I wanted to honor us and tell our stories. And the story’s not over. Memory goes on just like the story does. Being a poet and a writer and an archivist is another failsafe in having a shoddy memory. I want to look back someday and know that I kept a record, that I stayed true to those girls we once were.

The post Coming of Age in Florida’s Turbulent Waters appeared first on Electric Literature.

What I love about Belc’s newest book is the way he’s able to hold space for his own trans identity, while still taking his kids, his conservative mother, and even the trad-wife movement he watches on TV seriously. He finds the ways in which his life as a trans man cooking meals for his wife Anna and their four kids overlaps with the stay-at-home wives and mothers we often assume are in opposition to queer politics. He writes with a lot of generosity, and reading his work makes me feel like he’s opening up the conversation, rather than shutting it down. 

I’ve known Belc since he was a rugby-playing 19-year-old, just starting college and trying his hand at fiction. It was fun to call him up and ask about all that went into his insightful and luminous new book. Over the phone, a medium he said he hadn’t used this way in a while, we discussed having kids, food culture, and writing a memoir that spans both the frivolous and the dark. 

Emily Robbins: All of the chapter titles in this book are women’s names. Can you talk a bit about where this idea came from?

Krys Malcolm Belc: Titling is primarily, for me, a way to subvert expectations about what something is going to be. In terms of gender and the titles of these chapters, when I was writing them as essays, I was thinking a lot about the types of models I had growing up, of what I could turn into, and none of them were men, because that was not the reality of my childhood. So, I think I was interested in looking at these nine women, who have widely varying relationships to the way they present femininity, masculinity, or something that doesn’t neatly fit into those.

A lot of the book is about the decision to divest from all the options I had to become a woman, and still to be very compelled by looking at women and thinking about them as models of a type of person I can be. I am trying to replicate the dishes they’re making, the way they act in the kitchen, the way they’re presenting themselves in the world. I guess I’m caught up on the fact that transitioning didn’t change the way my orientation toward possibility was created as a child.

ER: You quote Stephen Vider: “While the home is not innately freeing, people of various identities and backgrounds have found emancipatory potential within the constraints.” A lot of your book is about homemaking, and when you do and don’t feel comfortable as a homemaker.

KMB: A lot of what I see online about domestic labor, and the way it breaks down in mostly straight households, is very binary. Either you’re someone who loves it and wants to be at home being a trad wife, or you’re someone who doesn’t want to do it at all. I don’t think that captures what anyone is actually like.

Most of the people I know have to do domestic labor. Some of it they like and some of it they don’t. People I know who love to cook don’t necessarily love to do it every single day, or love doing it when their kids are going through a picky phase, or when they’re not feeling well, and too bad because your kids still need to eat. There’s a lot of complicated angst around it that is not captured by what I imagined as a kid watching my parents do or not do domestic labor, or by what I’m seeing now in parenting content online.

ER: It is always clear that you love your family. At the same time, you are not afraid to express ambivalence about your relationship with your family, even though your kids are old enough now to read this memoir. Does writing afford you the space to be ambivalent?

KMB: It does, but I think there are many nonfiction writers who find space in their writing to air thoughts that they don’t generally air. That is not me. I think my kids understand that they’re not the center of my universe. I’m not always happy to be with them. Not in a mean way. I want them to have a full range of emotions without feeling like they owe me happiness or devotion because I perform love or labor for them.

We have a lot of fun together. I love having a big family, and a lot of the time I spend with my kids is wonderful. I keep liking parenting more as they age. Hanging out with my teenagers is the best thing ever. But if they say, Do you want to play this game?, I am happy to say, No, I don’t like that game. I’m not doing that. Or, I don’t really feel like watching TV with you tonight. I would rather watch TV with your mom, so you need to go somewhere else. 

If my kids read this book, I think they would say, This is an extremely accurate portrayal of how Krys feels about parenting. They don’t understand the degree to which I’ve had mental-health struggles. I tell them I’m tired or having a bad day, but I wouldn’t say, I’m severely depressed. That is my boundary. But something like, Sometimes Krys wishes we would all go take a walk and be gone for an hour. They are well aware that is how I feel, and that’s a kind of humorous thing that our family shares that I don’t think my kids have any negative feelings about.

ER: Have people in your family read it so far?

KMB: Not yet. I was a lot more nervous about that with my first book than with this one. There’s some aspect of writing a first book where you’re trying to figure out how to enact your sensibilities on paper. In memoir writing, for me, part of that was, Who is the me I’m going to put in a book? My first book put a very morose version of me on paper, someone very ruminative about microaggressions he’s experiencing and these negative vibes toward childhood.

I really went in for [the idea that] the speaker of the memoir is not the writer; it is a character you create. That was a shield that helped me write that [first] book. With this book, I was like, What if I could just really actually try to transmit my actual personality in a book? I’m not engaging in the artifice that was so central to my first book. With the second book, I want to be recognizable to people I love.

ER: This book goes from light to very dark.

KMB: Yeah, when I was working on early drafts, the dark stuff started pretty early. The book had a lot less plot. I didn’t know that my life could arrange itself in a plot. I didn’t have that perspective when I started writing the book, so I was writing about the emotional landscape primarily, and not necessarily putting it in a reader-friendly order.

I realized perhaps in this type of book, you want to know the person you’re getting into the deep water with a little better. I don’t think it is primarily a book about being depressed. It is a book about someone who is getting depressed as part of what happens to them in the events of the book, which last a number of years. So, I decided to order the material so that [the depression] came closer to the middle, even some of it closer to the end.

I could have started with, I’m infertile, I’m depressed, I had a traumatic birth experience. Instead, I was sort of like, I want someone to be fully in it before getting that information, and I want them also to be able to come out of it, and that’s not because I’m “completely healed” or everything’s great, but it is a real experience. Luckily for me, my postpartum depression was contained within one year. So, I think it is an honest representation of what typically happens with postpartum depression, but I didn’t want to descend too quickly.

ER: One scene that struck me is when Anna puts aspirin on the counter and says something like, when you are having thoughts of self-harm, promise me that you will only use this to grind into paste, and not on yourself. 

KMB: That scene is something I wrote really early on. It had an interesting voice and intensity, and it was about how you have to make dinner no matter what’s happening, even if you’re struggling. That was one of the early sparks of this book. I was like, I’m making this celebratory dinner while I’m having this really intense interaction and it’s spinning off and making me think [about] all of these other things and communicating with your partner in the midst of that, and trying to keep that conversation out of the larger family sphere. That’s all quite complex and relies on a level of faith that takes a long time to develop. But I would like to think that we have.

ER: You write about going off testosterone to have a child, going through postpartum depression, and Anna encouraging you to get back on it.

KMB: I think Anna was sort of pressuring me to go back on T at five months postpartum, partially because she was like, I know you’ll like the way you look better. It was an outside-in solution. More than, You’ll feel emotionally steady or it will make you stop crying, it was, It will make you more muscly, working out will be more fun, your facial hair will become thicker. You’ll like the way you look, and I can’t offer much, but I can offer insight that you like looking nice and perhaps that will help.

I love a little treat, I operate in my life on the little treat economy. So it is like, it’s a little treat, more hair on my chest. And it did start to help me emotionally. But I started back on T at five months and didn’t feel totally out of that depressive period until my daughter was closer to a year old. It was a slow, slow upswing. But I did feel better once I looked a little better, so she was right in that regard.

ER: There is another vignette where Anna is reading the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale on her phone. She asks if you’ve considered self-harm, you say yes, and she marks no because that is the right answer for the form. Your book interrogates forms and institutional forms. How do you think about forms?

KMB: We both now see forms like the postnatal depression scale, or any of the forms I filled out when I got neuropsychological testing, as something you fill out partly in a way that helps you get what you think you need out of the interaction. I was diagnosed with ADHD, anxiety, and depression, things I had known for a very long time were part of who I was. Nothing changed because I got a diagnosis, except that I wanted stimulant medication for my ADHD and was able to get it.

Similarly, my first book deals a lot with legal forms we had to do for an adoption. We got what we wanted out of the interaction. I think there is also a tie to trans medicine: You say what you need to say in order to get the medication you feel you need. That doesn’t involve exaggerating. It involves knowing how the story is supposed to be presented.

That particular question on the postnatal depression scale, [Anna] was like, Do you think the kid’s pediatrician is going to help you get something you want out of disclosing that you’re having thoughts of harming yourself? If it’s really bad, you do need to seek help. But in this setting, it is just going to bring additional scrutiny. Not in a harsh way, just, you have to pick who you disclose things to, which is part of the reason why talking about being depressed is probably the scariest part of this book for me. I think she was not dismissing the symptom, but rather being like, We disclose things to people who will support us. This is perhaps not the setting where you’ll get the support you’re looking for.

ER: So much of this book is about presentation: How TV chefs are presenting, and how you present to the world. Yet you almost never mention beauty. Are beauty and attractiveness important aspects of presentation to you? Have your feelings around that changed over time?

KMB: I don’t think I ever thought about those things. The biggest motivator for transitioning was to look unremarkable. It’s interesting the way people talk about queerness in the public sphere because a lot of it is about presentation and choices that we make in presentation, and I think growing up, I had this sense that it didn’t actually matter what I wore or what I did. I was marked. Something about my affect, or the way I looked in clothes, or the way I carried my body, made me stand out and drew attention to me. I did experiment with ways to make that go away. I think I would call it more conforming versus trying to be beautiful, and it didn’t work. It didn’t really matter if I always wore sports clothes or if I wore dresses and skirts. I know how to dress. I think I have a decent sense of style, but I didn’t find an outfit that would work for me, which is why I’m so interested in Ina Garten. She literally wears a uniform on television, and it is not a chef’s coat. It is just an outfit she can buy at the store.

When I transitioned, I was like nobody. I didn’t necessarily stand out anymore, which is wild because I’m very small for a guy. But being a small white guy is very unremarkable. People don’t look at me anymore. I don’t feel scrutiny. And I used to feel like my appearance was quite scrutinized. 

A lot of these women [TV chefs] are conventionally attractive white women. If I used words like beautiful or pretty, it would just be repetitive. I was more interested in how to describe people without being a guy who likes women talking about how pretty all these women on TV are. What other kinds of looking can I do, other than that narrowly constrained way of looking?

When I was researching someone like Nigella Lawson, I was struck by how objectified she is by men and by the creepy male gaze people engage in when looking at her. That is not part of this book to me. It’s not that I don’t think about whether people are attractive. It’s just not what is interesting to me. I was interested in how they dress, and what that tells me in combination with the type of space they are in. The way the background interacted with what they wore was more interesting to me than whether they have a nice face, because they all do.

The post A Trans Dad Interrogates the Gendered Experience of Domestic Life appeared first on Electric Literature.

I had the pleasure of meeting with Greer over Zoom for Electric Lit’s 23 Questions. He claimed that his workspace was messy and covered in clementine peels, but I failed to see any evidence of this disorderliness; I was just delighted to speak with him. 

— Amulya Tadimety
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Andrew Sean Greer: It’s the calm before the calm.

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

ASG: I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

3. Write alone or in community?

ASG: Alone. I love the idea of “in community,” but no way.

4. If you were a novel what novel would you be?

ASG: Any Wooster and Jeeves novel by P. G. Wodehouse.

5. Describe your ideal writing day.

ASG: Wake up, go swimming with my best friend in the San Francisco Bay. Sit in a cafe with him and write. See, I’m not alone, strangely. Go home and have lunch, take a nap, and then write again for the rest of the day.

6. Typing or longhand?

ASG: Typing [laughs]. Good lord!

7. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

ASG: Kill your darlings.

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

ASG: Stop while the iron is hot. So in the middle of a great paragraph, if you’re near the end of your day, stop right there because then the next day is so easy.

9. Realism or surrealism?

ASG: Surrealism. Who wouldn’t choose surrealism?

10. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

ASG: The Hours is my favorite film adaptation. I just couldn’t believe they pulled it off. Least favorite is A Wrinkle in Time.

11. What’s your favorite comfort snack?

ASG: Apparently it’s clementines. I have a lot of peels next to me.

12. Edit as you go or shitty first draft?

ASG: A combination. I edit as I go and it always turns out to be a shitty first draft.

13. How did you meet your agent?

ASG: She read my first novel and contacted me because I was without an agent. I saw a couple agents, and I asked her, “If I call you, will you answer the call? Or will you say you’re gonna call back later?” She said, “Of course I’ll answer.”

14. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

ASG: Write anything. Anything at all. Even take a walk and write down things you see on the street. It doesn’t have to be about the novel . . . It will turn out to be about the novel. Block means that you need to go somewhere else, and you discover where you go by just rewriting, even.

15. What’s your relationship to being edited?

ASG: I love it and hate it. I need to be coddled and praised and flattered and manipulated into doing what I know is necessary.

16. Book club or writing group?

ASG: Book club . . . I’m in a poetry book club that’s been meeting every Saturday for six years. That’s pretty wonderful. It’s an easy book club because poems are short and we do the same poem for like five weeks.

17. The writer who made you want to write:

ASG: Well, I wanted to write when I was really young, so I will say Richard Adams, Watership Down.

18. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

ASG: Oh, I know what the end is going to be when I start writing the book. So I can’t wait. It’s such a wonderful downhill moment when you’re like, I know exactly what I’m gonna do.

19. Writing with music or in silence?

ASG: Silence. Sometimes if I’m in a cafe, I put on Philip Glass.

20. Describe your writing space.

ASG: A little messy. Incredibly messy. There’s a pile of books to my left that are the books I think can help me write the book I’m working on, and a couch that I can nap on.

21. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

ASG: I keep a copy of Proust. I have one on my computer and . . . because I live between Italy and the United States, I have copies in both houses because you can’t carry that stuff around. But if I need it, I have it there.

22. What’s the last indie bookstore you went to?

ASG: Booksmith, yesterday . . . I bought Ayelet Waldman’s novel A Perfect Hand.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

ASG: Fashion. Everyone needs something; they know baseball statistics, or the intricacies of politics, or something outside of the writing world. I like to look at secondhand clothes.

The post Andrew Sean Greer Refuses to Kill His Darlings appeared first on Electric Literature.

I had weird middle of the night reveries about what I might grow up to be. Becoming a nun seemed attractive, perhaps a challenge as I wasn’t Catholic. Maybe a kind of whirling dervish/Siddhartha-type nun, instead?

I wanted a purpose: a reason why I was here. I wanted to be worthy of something. Sacrifice the self for a greater cause. Or perhaps, I wanted to fit in a world that didn’t seem to have room for my oddling ways.

Paige Lewis’s exhilarating debut novel Canon is a modern epic about individual agency within the context of grim, nearly apocalyptic times; the lies and violence that “higher powers” exert upon us; and the truths we can only determine for ourselves. And along the way, it’s also a rollicking good tale, with Lewis’s intelligence, wonder, heart, and charming humor on full display. The momentum of the book is built through swift, sharply drawn chapters—with titles such as “Small Blips of Joy Keep Weary Prophets Going”—along with a kaleidoscopic narrative and Lewis’s joyful polyvocality. Ultimately, amid the madness—perhaps because of it—it’s especially about the enduring power and beauty of love.

I realize now that perhaps what I wanted most when I was an awkward child was to transform, to evolve into something, anything, greater. Amid all the chaos within the multitudinous realms and characters of Canon, the core of Lewis’s uncategorizable novel is about this “becoming”—creation through destruction, which is both our fate and our reward. In Lewis’s world, we are our own divine intervention.

Mandana Chaffa: The word canon has a complex etymology, initially referring to decrees of the church, and in modern times also as a reflection of an academically approved—traditional—literary “standard” of excellence. This Canon offers a definitive upending of such doctrines, and a rigorous interrogation of prevailing sanctioning bodies. What were you contemplating when you titled the book, and when did you end up with the title?

Paige Lewis: Mandana! I’m so grateful for the time you’ve given to my book and for this fantastic question. I wish I could just copy and paste what you’ve said about my title upending religious and literary doctrines. But the truth isn’t very thrilling—the title came very late in the writing process. I hate coming up with titles and would have never landed on Canon on my own. As I was getting closer to finishing the manuscript, I brought up my titling frustration with Kaveh [Akbar, Lewis’ spouse]. So, we made a long list of title ideas pulled from different sections of the manuscript, and I chose Canon from that list. 

Trying to choose from a long list reminded me of when the poet Marianne Moore was asked by Ford Motors to come up with a name for a new car model. She came up with so many incredible names (Utopian Turtletop, Mongoose Civique, Thunderblender, The Intelligent Whale). All were rejected. 

Part of me wanted to use The Intelligent Whale for my book title, but I think Canon is more fitting. And I do love a one worded title. 

MC: Canon also questions binaries in favor of rich multiplicities. One of the most damaging of the former might be societal edicts of good and evil that reduce the complexities of humanity to two-dimensional moralities. They are nearly worthless in offering a blueprint to remaining humane in a darkening world, and this book is deeply invested in an individual’s agency, in the decisions one can make, in the responsibilities we have to ourselves and each other.

PL: I’m sure philosophers have said it far better than this, but to me, the good vs. evil dichotomy is bullshit. It’s something that those in power use to control the narrative while committing appalling acts. A pervasive example: Israel uses this binary to shape the narrative of their ongoing genocide against Palestinians as a fight against evil. Amichai Eliyahu said, “Thank God, we are wiping out this evil.” Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel is “[G]oing to abolish this evil in order to further all humanity.” 

And yet we have seen Israel murder over 50,000 children in Palestine since October 2023.

We have seen Israel “manufacture a consent to kill” by claiming that journalists murdered by the IDF had ties to Hamas.

Binaries like good/evil often flatten our understanding of the world. And this flattening makes humans easier to deceive. Does anyone ever think they might be on the side of evil? 

Mandana, I know you didn’t ask a question here, I’m just angry all the time and this seemed like as good a place as any to remind people that they should be angry, too. 

MC: There’s a strong element of ecoprose throughout Canon which speaks to our current environmental disasters as well as to a host of ancient mythologies in which nature is a kind of deity. I appreciate that you don’t shy away from the complexities of nature—its beauty, power, and sustenance, and also its brutality (though not purposefully cruel).

PL: When I was young, I could watch any nature documentary. Now, it’s hard for me to watch anything if I suspect nature is about to be itself. I find myself both rooting for the lion and the gazelle and am sad no matter the outcome. So, it means a lot to hear that you think I did right by nature in this book. 

MC: Might we talk about structure and form? Canon is both lyric and epic, and many chapters of the book—some quite spare in prose, others fuller—resemble the motion and space of poetry collections. Which makes me also want to talk about genre with you: So much of the contemporary literary landscape smudges such boundaries. Did you always anticipate the structure you ended up with?  How many iterations of form did you have in mind?

PL: I started this book as a one-page poem about a character from the Bible. I was inspired by Anne Carson’s “Book of Isaiah, Part I” and thought it would be fun to try it with the character Yael from the Book of Judges. Once I “finished” the poem, I showed it to Kaveh (who is always my first reader), and he said it was good but not finished. So I moved from that to writing an epic poem (the first few sections of which appeared in Poetry magazine in 2018). After I showed a “finished” copy of the epic to my agent, Jacqueline Ko, she helped me realize that I was writing a novel. So, then I spent a few years expanding the sections into chapters and adding new characters and adventures. But the poems never really left the book. They are more noticeable in some sections because of the use of empty space and lineation, but some of the most textually dense sections are also poems (especially the sections that include dreams). 

Genre has always been a frustration, and I’ve decided the best thing, for me, is to step away from trying to categorize Canon as anything beyond it being a thing I made.

MC: In the past, we’ve talked a bit about speculative fiction—might you touch on your pedagogy around that genre, as well as how it plays into this particular work? What are your favorite examples of worldbuilding, and how did they impact what you wanted to create in Canon? How did this world shift as you moved through different drafts of the novel?

PL: I love to read and teach science fiction and was heavily influenced by the world building in books by writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Pamela Zoline. I was also really drawn to S.F. that didn’t take itself too seriously and allowed for humor and absurdity. I’m thinking particularly of Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (published in 1970), which is one of my favorite short stories to teach. It’s usually pretty pohl-arizing—half the class loves the humor, and half thinks it’s too much. 

In the story, Pohl’s narrator tells the reader about a love story between a boy and a girl in a future society in which gender is fluid and relationship norms (and most societal norms really) have drastically changed. The woman in the story, Dora, is born with XY chromosomes, but genetically altered in the womb because: “If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.”

So, I’m sure it would have been easy for Pohl, especially in the ‘70s, to get his laughs by mocking this future society’s gender norms, but instead he often breaks the fourth wall to make fun of the reader’s own conservative views: “Go ahead, and grumble. Dora doesn’t care. If she thinks of you at all, her 30 times-great-great-grandfather, she thinks you’re a pretty primordial sort of brute. You are.” 

So, perhaps more than worldbuilding, S.F. has really influenced my understanding of a narrator’s relationship with the reader. 

MC: Related to this last question: What were your initial expectations for Yara and multiple narratives adjacent to them, and how did that shift as their story evolved? What came first: your narrative intentions or the characters? 

PL: It started with Yara on their journey. And then I felt there needed to be a second journey, so Adrena was born! And then Adrena needed something to convince Harpo to let her join him and his army, so Arielle and her kidnapping came into being. I feel like many characters and actions came into existence as the narrative started to take shape. I wrote the story the same way I write poetry, without knowledge of where it would go. But Yara was always there. 

MC: There’s also an expansive exploration of the shades of loneliness, isolation, and alienation in Canon, that feels particularly resonant right now, especially in our hyperconnected world, which distances more than it engages. Not to mention that these mindsets increase the risk of being taken in by sects, discipleships, cults, and the like. Even popular culture fandoms feel like closed loops. Though Yara’s story upends that narrative, as they ultimately free themselves. I appreciated that arc—they didn’t completely understand what they were drawn into, and what the cost of it was, but still had the agency to determine the next part of their life. 

Delving into that a bit further: There’s the larger monomyth, the subject of many an epic: the overall idea of the Hero’s Quest whereby the protagonist sets off on a fraught, challenging mission and journey of self-discovery, only to discover the answer was in choosing personal identity over the demands of larger, often flawed societal machines. What are the epics that have spoken to you as a reader and writer? 

PL: Sometimes I can only speak for myself. I grew up in a house with a lot of people in it, but because of my OCD and how it manifested, I was always given my own room. No one in my family was allowed in my room, and if I left my room, I would have to shower before I could touch anything in my room again. So, I spent a lot of time alone in my room because it saved me time and energy (and it saved water). Understandably, my behaviors affected the rest of my family. So, when I would come out to interact, my siblings would, from a place of hurt, make comments about how I wasn’t really a part of the family. And so, I would go back to hiding in my room. I didn’t feel lonely, but I was in some ways in a perpetual state of alienation. I’m also sure this has something to do with why I’m so drawn to epic poetry. So many epic heroes are lonely on their journey. Even when surrounded by soldiers, or sidekicks, or friends, the hero sort of functions at a remove from others. The hero has a mission, and they also have hope that the mission will eventually end, that they will be able to go back home to their family and/or their everyday lives. Some epics that influenced my own exploration of isolation, loneliness, and/or familial estrangement are: The Tale of Kiều by Nguyễn Du, Does Your House Have Lions? by Sonia Sanchez, Aniara by Harry Martinson, The Odyssey by Homer (translated by Emily Wilson), “The Anniad” by Gwendolyn Brooks, The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley 

MC: You used to wake up very early and get in a couple of hours of poetry writing before teaching your students, which both wowed and intimidated me. Do I remember this right, and do you still do that? How has your writing and process changed over the years, especially given your full professional and personal life? What’s the smallest unit of a writing life that people might be able to perform on a daily basis, that accumulates into a practice?

PL: Yes! Even when I taught eight a.m. classes, I would wake up a few hours early to get some writing in. I have found this to be a bit more difficult now that I have four needy animals who make writing at home nearly impossible, and because most coffee shops open at seven a.m. (at the earliest) in Iowa City. I don’t think people need to write daily, though I do think it has been very good for my routine-driven brain. What can feel less daunting is for a writer to carry a small notebook around with them (or to treat their notes app like a notebook) and jot down a few things every day while running errands or meeting friends. This is a great way to get descriptions of different locations or weird quotes from a stranger who’s talking too loud at a restaurant. Then, when you have time to sit down to write a poem or a scene, you have so much material saved up to pull from!

The post A Debut Novel About Individual Agency in Apocalyptic Times appeared first on Electric Literature.

Although our books differ in genre and scope, they shimmer with striking similarities. Montesanti’s Drag Thing is a memoir by a millennial writer raised in Michigan and Alaska; G’Sell’s Lipstick is cultural criticism written by an author about a decade older. But a quick glance at the covers reveal the books’ obvious connection: makeup, glam, and the undeniable pleasure of self-adornment. 

An ode to alternative drag culture, although not without forays into the mainstream, Drag Thing explores Montesanti’s mental health crisis and how it becomes entangled with her onstage persona. Starting out as a drag king, she soon becomes a “drag thing”—a performer who defies gendered classification. Set against a backdrop of increasing danger for queer and trans people, Drag Thing is both high camp and a rallying cry for building queer community as a form of resistance. 

Rather than a traditional history of the object, Lipstick is a roving exploration of gender, sexuality, power, and performance—from MAC to Glossier, from Marilyn Monroe to Chappell Roan. Crucially, the book includes the voices of women (cis and trans) and nonbinary folks interviewed by the author in 2024. The final chapter, “A Femme-Friendlier Future?”, honors the ways in which changing attitudes toward lipstick reflect larger generational shifts.

Both books aim for multi-faceted—and glittery—forms of truth-telling. We conversed online to discuss our books, the power of radical reinvention, and the magic that comes with it. 

Eileen G’Sell: You describe the art of drag as an intoxicating blend of “grandiosity . . . exaggerated personas too large to be contained by any conventional human body . . . and sometimes offensive self-confidence and self-admiration.” As you experimented with being a “drag king” versus a “drag thing,” how did your approach to painting the face evolve?

Gabe Montesanti: I am surprised how suddenly my evolution from “king” to “thing” happened. When I started performing as a king, I was painting my face with three layers of concealer, followed by bronzer to accentuate my temples and widen my nose, and I always topped it off with an eyeliner mustache. At that point, before I discovered “thingness,” I was aiming for some version of a working-class, heterosexual version of Fender Bender. All it took was one trip to Mimi’s Beauty Supply and I was an uncategorizable “drag thing.” There were several big changes to my wardrobe, and some small changes to my face like fake eyelashes, but the most significant change was the lipstick. 

EG: Really? That’s fascinating. Lipstick really can be identity-reconfiguring. It just changes the way your face looks more than anything else.

GM: I put black lipstick on my lips and a pink matte lipstick mustache that perfectly matched my 14 dollar wig. Maybe if I had read your book around this time, Eileen, I would have had some clue why lipstick was a portal for me into the complicated territory of “thingness.” It wrenched me into another version of a performative self: one that craved whimsy and reinvention and despised classification. 

EG: For both of our books, the ability to visually reinvent yourself is key—which can be a real challenge when it comes to doing justice to it in writing. What motivated you to include your own illustrations? 

GM: Drag Thing is a book about self-invention, self-creation, and art. I had two partial versions of the manuscript. One was a traditional, full-text version, and one had a watercolor on every page and a small amount of text. Arsenal Pulp Press bought the book, and together, we designed a hybrid version that worked better than both versions I had previously: 41 watercolors placed only where they really counted.

EG: In your hand-drawn images, many of the figures present two faces or silhouettes. Given that your book candidly explores your experience with bi-polar disorder, was that double-face motif intended as a gesture to what you were going through?

GM: I never thought that I was drawing people with two faces to represent the poles of my disorder. I was just drawing, which evolved into this somewhat cubist style soon after I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But I still sometimes flip through the notebooks from group therapy sessions when I was crawling out of my skin with mania. The therapist gave me colored pencils, hoping I could chill out, or at least not distract the other people who were talking. I drew anything that came into my buzzing mind, but the double faces were a constant motif. Only about a year later during COVID lockdown when I was doing a virtual art group with some roller derby friends did I realize that my faces might be trying to tell me something.

EG: I love how openly your book, both in prose and in image, questions not only gender essentialism, but the idea that sexual orientation itself is fixed. You write of a drag king who took joy in complicating “queer girl desire” through performative maleness onstage. In the process of writing, did you find yourself encountering any new forms of desire—for the queer subjects you write about or for yourself?

GM: The first king I witnessed was in Houston, at age 19, when I had recently come out and was learning more about drag history. That king was sexy, and I couldn’t take my eyes off of him. But like Madonna for you, he also opened up an entire new realm of possibilities for who I was becoming. I guess you could say I desire myself when I don’t doubt myself. That’s a big theme in the book: selfhood. Since Drag Thing opens at an emotional low, I naturally encountered a lot of queer people in the drag scene who fully embodied what I thought of as a full and complete self, or who knew exactly who they were when they stepped into their persona. Those were the people I desired: to be with or to become, especially in the beginning.

EG: Like your book, if more subtly, Lipstick traces an attraction to self-adornment and performance to a working-class, Catholic, Midwestern background—where, in my case at least, bright lipstick felt rebellious rather than capitulatory to patriarchy. Your book engages more directly with family trauma, and how drag helped you reinvent yourself in light of estrangement. Did you feel closer to your family in writing about them so closely? Or was it more a way of carving out a space for yourself outside their conservative, homophobic parameters?

GM: I was once in a poetry class with francine j. harris, and we were talking about how the only way to write about a hole is by describing the dirt left around the hole. How else can one possibly write about nothingness? I guess I felt the same way as I was trying to write about my family. All I had was nearly 10-year-old information to try to describe the grief of an absence. I’m not sure if that made me feel closer to them or further away. What I do know is that I had no idea that so many forms of grief would surface in this book when I started it. Now that I’ve written two books that required full immersion, I have realized that’s just part of the gig. I can’t go in thinking I know where I’ll end up or what the themes will be. I just have to live it . . . and take a lot of notes.

EG: In a way, memoir might prove its own sort of drag. What are the challenges in representing yourself in such a pivotal and creative—but also torturous—time of your life? How does the art of writing about queer identity, joy, and pain compare to performing in front of a live audience?

GM: I definitely believe memoir is a sort of drag. In workshops, I was taught not to refer to myself or the writer as “I” or “you,” but as “the narrator” or, even more fittingly, “the persona”—a way of acknowledging that the persona depicted on the page is just a description of the you who has a body. One of the most challenging parts of representing myself during the time depicted in Drag Thing is that it is incredibly vulnerable, but so is drag. It takes nerve to be a writer, knowing that anything could happen once those stage lights flicker on and the curtains open. 

Some of my favorite moments in Lipstick were where you touched on how a painted lip crossed into drag or gender deviance, commenting, “Bowie’s and Poison’s heterosexuality [was] intact; Boy George’s and RuPaul’s homosexuality inferable.” Many drag artists would agree that putting on makeup can be a form of art, not conformity to fashion or method of self-improvement. What are the most significant examples of this distinction between art and fashion or self-improvement that you’ve witnessed?

EG: Part of why I wanted to write about lipstick specifically is that it has long been such a conspicuous signifier of femininity—so much so that even when cis, straight men might dally with nail polish or eyeliner these days, it’s unusual for them to paint their lips. But at the same time, as is the case with drag especially, challenging the typical hyper-femininity affiliated with bright lip color can be a source of play. 

In my second chapter, “Painted Ladies and Painted Men,” I build off philosopher Becca Rothfeld’s argument that, as she put it in her essay collection All Things Are Too Small, “the aesthetic resides in excess and aimlessness, in wants that spill far beyond the narrow bounds of need.” To address your question about art versus “self-improvement,” when a person—usually a woman—feels the need to paint her lips to perk up her femininity, then at best it can be a creative take on a practical goal, not art. Lipstick is art when the goal and effect is to be excessive—even disruptive—for its own sake. That’s why lipstick often feels the most “artful” outside the context of cishetero femininity. 

GM: I totally see that excess and disruptiveness in drag. Have you ever seen yourself, as a cis woman, as a kind of drag artist?

EG: I have never performed in drag onstage, but I’ve long embraced unexpected, excessively bright lipstick shades as a way of denaturalizing my own femininity. The older I get, the more it feels aberrant. It’s my own everyday micro-drag, I suppose. I have no interest in appearing “naturally” beautiful in a feminine way; artifice is it for me. And as I write in the book, looking fake feels more honest.

GM: I love that. As a person who has rejected lipstick at various points of her life and also embraced it, I resonated with the paragraph in which you asserted your love of lipstick while also asking the question, “Was I, like millions of other women, unwittingly participating in my own subjugation by painting my pucker a piquant pink?” You immediately answer that question. Of course not. But then came this line: “I’m inclined to see vanity as neither vice nor virtue . . . But just because something isn’t inherently good or bad doesn’t mean it can’t lead to good and bad outcomes for different people.” Why did you choose lipstick out of all the cosmetics that are perhaps neither vice nor virtue? 

EG: Quite simply, because lipstick transforms the face the most overtly and the most efficiently. It’s also the beauty tool conflated the most with femininity, which is why phrases like “lipstick lesbian” or “lipstick feminist” even exist and conjure up a sense of inherent contradiction—even though, as I argue in the book, they needn’t!

GM: Lipstick was the key ingredient in transforming my aesthetic from “king” to “thing”—unlocking that discovery was really important for both of us. You mention the pressure to adopt a more subdued style, but say, “I’d rather be a gadfly in a glittery dress (and a matching lip) than conform to what feels bland and predictable.” I totally agree. You say in the acknowledgments that almost 100 people contributed to a lipstick questionnaire and made themselves available for conversation and follow-up questions. How did that process of collecting data change your own lipstick habits? I’m thinking of your interview with Smitha, a Gen Z woman who witnessed slut-shaming and stigmatization of girls who wore bright lipstick in middle school. 

EG: A woman from an older generation than Smitha might have felt judgmental or protective of a young teen wearing lipstick. Collecting so many stories from women and nonbinary people across generations threw into relief what I already suspected: Attitudes toward self-objectification and self-adornment are predicated largely on when and how you grew up. If anything, writing the book made me feel more empathetic—both to women older than me who experienced more overt forms of sexism and the strict beauty standards that usually came with them, and younger women who don’t necessarily see beauty culture as fraught or sexist at all. 

Writing the book also made me feel more queer in a lot of ways. My fascination with lipstick, fashion, color, excess—none of it really felt attached to attracting a male partner at any point in my life. If anything, my flamboyance has been a turn-off with straight men! Self-adornment has always felt risky, erotic, and daring in ways that I think are linked to my own attraction to both the hyper-femme and hyper-masc. I grew up fishing with my uncles and wrapped the worms around my fingers as rings. Who does that?

GM: Mad respect for finding the bling anywhere you could! You were way more imaginative than me with the worms. I loved seeing photographs of you as a girl—in addition to the images of pop culture icons, suffragettes, and historical advertisements. What was the selection process like for the visuals? And, out of all the questionnaire answers you received, how did you pick the handwritten ones published in the book? 

EG: Securing image rights was mighty difficult, but imperative for representing key lipstick icons like Grace Jones and kd lang, the first openly lesbian brand ambassador for a lipstick. With both the images and handwritten testimonies, I chose those that conveyed a narrative and identity that was entirely not mine. I’m a pasty white, femme-presenting xennial. There is no reason to include images of other women in this category—or close to it—if my goal is to reflect the fabulous spectrum of lipsticked faces over the last half century. As far as the handwritten stories, they are separated into generations, to reflect a salient lipstick memory for one particular woman (some cis, some trans, some gender-fluid). Handwriting is another means of visually reflecting both generational and gendered expectations and norms—which is why I wanted to include it. It’s also very personal, even vulnerable, as arguably every woman’s relationship to self adornment is at some point.

The post Memoir Is a Form of Drag appeared first on Electric Literature.

So, beaming with excitement at the opportunity to sit down on Zoom ahead of Land’s publication, I was curious about what illuminates the life of an author whose stories make countless others, including the senior citizens I see almost daily, inspired to share their own. I discovered the urgency O’Farrell has carried—a refusal to sleep, a compulsion to craft a world different from the one she’d been taught—since she was in her early twenties. A need to make something true of her own runs through everything O’Farrell does, coursing through her words, her pages, and even the granolas in her breakfast.

— Shandela Contreras
Editorial Intern

1. Describe your publication week in a six-word story.

Maggie O’Farrell: It is very hectic, but fun. 

2. What book should everyone read growing up?

MO: The Color Purple by Alice Walker 

3. How do you start from scratch?

MO: Don’t worry about the beginning. Beginnings are really hard and it’s really hard to know what you’re doing when you start, so I would say just plunge in anywhere because you can always make bad writing better, but a blank page is always just a blank page.

4. Map your novel point A to B, or pivot as you go?

MO: I map it out as I go. I don’t necessarily have a strict plan. I tend to start out and just kind of explore what’s there and then I draw maps and flow charts and plans while I’m in the middle of it.

5. Three presses you’ll read anything from?

MO: Oh, wow. Well, I don’t tend to choose books by publisher. Sometimes I will read authors that I know and trust and love, and sometimes I’ll just go by a really interesting blurb or if my eye is caught by a cover that beckons to me. I don’t limit myself to publishers. I’m more interested in themes and people.

6. Hardcover, paperback, or e-reader?

MO: I don’t really use e-readers. I don’t really have to. I can see that if I was on a long commute like I used to be in my 30s then I probably would, but I always go for paperback 

• I love a paperback book, not too heavy. It’s perfect to carry around.

• MO: Yes, but hardbacks feel so sumptuous don’t they? You can treat yourself to a lovely hardback sometimes 

7. Describe your ideal writing day.

MO: I tend to ring-fence my mornings for just writing and thinking, so I don’t answer any emails, I don’t pick up my phone, I go down to my studio, which is at the bottom of our garden, and it doesn’t have any connectivity. And sometimes it happens, I end up writing something, and sometimes there are those days when nothing is really coming, but you can just daydream and read and think about what might come next.

8. What’s a piece of writing advice you never want to hear again?

MO: Write what you know. I think you should write what you don’t know. For me, the best start is writing something you don’t understand, something that baffles and confounds you.

9. What’s a piece of writing advice you think everyone needs to hear?

MO: Just to keep going. Keep going—that’s the main thing. And remember that writing is in some part inspiration but a lot of it is just graft.

10. Favorite and least favorite film adaptation of a book:

MO: Oh, that seems really mean. I think there was a brilliant adaptation of Edward St. Oban’s Patrick Melrose novel called Patrick Melrose. I can’t remember which channel it was on, but it was written by David Nicholls. I thought that was brilliant, and was really, really close to the book. I have to say, there have been some really quite painful Jane Austen adaptations, some of which I cannot watch because I love Jane Austen. Some of the adaptations set my teeth on edge.

11. What’s your favorite comfort snack?

MO: Dark chocolate, preferably with orange or lime in it. It’s very good if you feel like you’re flagging slightly, when you’re writing, and you just don’t quite have the time to make a meal. You can have a few squares and it keeps you going for a little bit longer.

12. How did you meet your agent?

MO: Well, actually, my agent and I almost met at university. We were at the same university on the same course, same year, and we never met. We met a bit later in an office, which is quite boring, but I love my agent. She’s one of my favorite people in the whole world and when I went to the Oscars I took her with me. 

13. Best advice for pushing through writer’s block?

MO: You have to know that those times when your confidence falls are part of the process. When you have a surge of optimism, that’s when you get words down on paper and then you have a crash in confidence, but the crash in confidence is when you look at it with a critical eye, so that’s to do with editing and finding the right path. Don’t think of it as writer’s block, think of it as a necessary part of a process. 

14. What’s your relationship to being edited?

MO: I really welcome being edited. I have had the same editor, amazingly, the whole time. I’ve never written a book without her and I really rely on her feedback and her eagle eye and her intuition. Sometimes she says things to me which I don’t entirely want to do, but I look at my work and I think: Well okay if I want to keep this bit then I have to make sure it works. I have to do the work, I have to do the buttressing, and I’ve got to redesign the architecture of the book if I want to keep it. But sometimes she says something and I think, oh, my God, she’s so right. I have to rush home and get rid of that page! What was I thinking?

15. Write every day or write when inspired?

MO: I don’t tend to write every day, just because I have a very busy domestic life. And I think you can’t always wait till you’re inspired, because then it might not happen. 

Daydreaming is a very important and very underrated part of writing. Your work isn’t always writing on the page. Sometimes it’s just thinking and the book will fix itself in your head sometimes.

16. The writer who made you want to write?

MO: I’ve always wanted to write, but I think when I read Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, that was when I really thought I wanted to do this. I read it in Hong Kong. I was living in Hong Kong for a while when I was about 21, 22. I remember reading it, and I closed the book and I tried to go to sleep and I couldn’t go to sleep. So I got up, and I remember writing something. Getting up in the middle of the night and writing something thinking, I really want to do this.

17. How do you know when you’ve reached the end?

MO: I find it really hard to know when I reach the end and I usually rely on either my husband or my editor to basically wrestle the manuscript out of my hand and say, “Okay, that’s enough.” It’s really hard because you can just go on and on, you know, finessing it and fiddling with your adjectives and crossing things out. There is a point at which I think you do need to ask someone and they have to say, yes, it’s finished.

• Is your husband one of your first readers?

• MO: He is, he always reads, I mean, not my first draft, because no one reads that, but I’d say he probably reads my earliest draft that I’m happy to show someone. And then he also reads my penultimate draft.

18. Writing with music or in silence?

MO: The actual writing itself I have to write in silence, but I usually have a playlist for every novel which kind of gets me in the mental space for the book. When I’m opening my laptop and laying out my notebooks, getting my pens (I write with old fountain pens). I fill my fountain pens and while I’m doing that I’ll have my playlist on and then when I start to write I turn it off. I find that it kind of helps me. Music is very useful for making the bridge between your quotidian life and your writing life.

19. Describe your writing space.

MO: I’m really lucky that in the last five years, we have built a studio in the garden, which is glass, it was an old greenhouse which fell down. So it’s glass and it’s like sitting inside the rib cage of a sea monster. It’s lovely. 

20. How do you keep your favorite writers close to you?

MO: Re-reading is something that’s really important to me, there are certain books that I re-read every year, five years, 10 years, and you always see something really different in them. Sometimes you need to let your well refill. So if you’re feeling that you can’t write any more, if you are having one of those moments where you hit a brick wall, just go back to something that really sustains you. And even if it’s nothing to do with the book you’re writing or the piece you’re writing, it will somehow refill you.

21. What does evolving as a writer mean to you?

MO: I think that with every book it’s really good to set yourself a new task or a new hurdle to clear. With every book you write, there’s a learning curve, you learn so much and then with your next book you want to put it into practice and try something new.

22. Book club or writing group? 

MO: You know, I’ve never been in a book club. No one has ever invited me. And I don’t do writing groups so much now, but I found them incredibly useful and supportive when I was starting out. I think it’s a great thing to have, especially when you’re starting. They can give you lots of encouragement and feedback when you haven’t necessarily got a professional editor yet. Also, writing groups can get you into a kind of regular habit of writing which is really good, so maybe every month or every week you have to produce something. That’s a really good discipline.

23. Outside of literature, what are you obsessed with?

MO: I love cooking. I love cooking a lot. I love cooking lots of soups and bread. I make my own sourdough. My own cereal. And I love growing things. I grow lots of herbs and lots of flowers, and my children—I’m very obsessed with my children, and my cats. And I go swimming. 

• You make your own cereals!?

• MO: I make my own granola cereal!

The post Writer’s Block Is Part of Maggie O’Farrell’s Process  appeared first on Electric Literature.

In No God but Us, the voyager, Delbar, is an American by birth but also the child of Afghan refugees, making his belonging in the US more contested than his literary predecessors. And he journeys eastward not to escape America but to run away from the fallout of being outed to his DC-area diaspora. He lands in a different kind of European city, Istanbul, just as the city’s regressive forces are turning against dissident communities. There, he meets Mansur, an Afghan refugee who has fled Tehran, a character who Sayed gives his own first-person narration, further subverting the Americans Abroad frame. The narratives of these two queer, displaced Afghan men intertwine, as does their desire for each other. Delbar’s narration is a story of love and self-becoming. Mansur’s is a story of the search for security and a path out of statelessness. Through their interweaving, the American Abroad novel is reimagined as a story in which characters displaced by imperial war confront the limits of a seemingly shared identity and contend with their differing relationships to love, desire, and relative privilege or devastation within the diaspora. No God but Us is a necessary and powerful intervention in American literary history––a novel that challenges tradition with new narrative form to show how the US’s imperial wars are carried within us wherever we go, shaping our loves and imaginations on the most intimate and psychic levels. 

Sayed is a Steinbeck Fellow, Lambda Literary scholar, and award-winning MFA graduate of the University of Miami. We spoke over Zoom in April, less than half a year before the 25th anniversary of the US’s invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. 

Leila C. Nadir: Let’s start with how your novel participates in but ultimately disrupts the literary tradition of Americans abroad, and also conventions of immigrant literature. Delbar and Mansur are neither contending with their lack of belonging in the US nor questioning their place in their ancestral homeland. So why Turkey? Why this third space for their stories? 

Bobuq Sayed: I guess there was a sense of fatigue with this way that a lot of immigrant literature has been stalled by rudimentary questions of belonging. “Woe is me, I feel left out.” Boohoo, you know? We do the complexity of our experience a disservice when we fetishize trauma and permit narratives that overly self-victimize. We fail to account for the vastness of our power and, in many cases, our complicity in empire.

I didn’t want to write a domestic story about a gay child of immigrants questioning his belonging. This third space you’re mentioning, Turkey, was a sort of undressing of the strictures of identity and language, because Turkey is neither origin nor destination. In Turkey you have this cosmopolitan community of refugees and asylum seekers who make huge sacrifices to reach Istanbul since the borders from West Asia and North Africa up until Europe are more porous. They’re sometimes waiting years for their new homes and permanent stability to materialize.

I wanted the third space to present other identity formations and relationship types. When we rid ourselves of this language of who am I and where do I belong, when we begin from the premise that none of us belong here, what other indexes of power emerge? What are the subterranean tensions and motivations that are hidden until that undressing takes place?

LCN: Delbar imagines the identity he shares with Mansur grants him some great vault of access to Mansur’s life experience. Over the course of the book, we see the evolution of that hubristic assumption. In Turkey, Delbar’s American-ness becomes painfully obvious, and it becomes a barrier to genuinely understanding Mansur.

BS: Totally. The first chapter begins with Delbar presenting himself as an educated authority on the Middle East and on representations of the SWANA diaspora. And maybe in the American context he is, or he has some discernment, he gets away with the woe-is-me thing.

Unlike Mansur, who reaches Istanbul via smugglers, on foot, and in the hulls of passenger buses, Delbar is accessing the city via frequent flyer points, airplanes, and his expat aunt. We see the flattening effect of language and identity. These two people are, in fact, worlds apart. What do love and family look like in this context? Where are the fault lines of power?

At the social support dinner for queer and trans refugees and asylum seekers in Turkey, Delbar displays an acute understanding of his lack of authority, right? No one has to tell him that his Afghanness is not the same as Mansur’s. Delbar’s supposed cultural authority is also a chronic delusion about the integrity of his point of view, which the reader comes to learn.

This book would’ve been much easier to write as an exclusively single-subjectivity, diaspora story, but then it wouldn’t be taking any swings. There would be no risk involved.

LCN: Did this inform how you structured the book? The novel alternates between Delbar and Mansur’s first-person narration, yet their timelines are not synchronous. Delbar’s begins with meeting Mansur shortly after his arrival in Turkey while Mansur’s is longer, and begins earlier, showing his struggle to get on his feet while awaiting review of his case in Turkey. The stories don’t link up until the last third of the novel.

BS: I wanted to trap the reader in identification with Delbar, who’s this edgy, urban, queer snarky, counter-cultural beatnik figure that you want to go to bat for. And with those single subjectivity, autofiction storylines, you do. You start with the Gary Indiana and you end with the Gary Indiana. Wherein, he’s not necessarily good, he’s not necessarily likable the whole time, he’s certainly not making fantastic decisions, but beginning to end he remains your guy.

I was interested in what happens if he starts as your guy and then, by the end, it’s not that this guy sucks necessarily, but that in the grand context of history, and interspersed with this other point of view, we get to see the ugliness of the American subjectivity, how much it excuses, and how much it gets away with. Who are the casualties of that subjectivity? Who is obfuscated?

This also relates to the writer abroad thing, all these American and British authors across history who’ve written these authoritative accounts of the cultures they transplant into.

LCN: I feel that––how Delbar’s narrative implicates the reader. They’ve become emotionally invested in his self-becoming, in his search for self-expression and identity partly through his pursuit of drag performance. We get a lot of Delbar’s romantic pursuit of Mansur, the play by play, while Mansur’s narration is focused on seeking material security and negotiating with power to find some kind of base line of freedom.

BS: Delbar is having this profound, heated, romantic love story. And it is a love story from Delbar’s perspective. But from Mansur’s perspective, that love story looks very different. A central tension here is between love and security in a queer contemporary migrant context.

Like, arranged marriage is frowned upon, certainly among queer people. This idea that you could match people because they’re from a good family or they have a good job. We’re fed this idea that “all you need is love.” But, for someone like Mansur, pursuing a relationship for love destroyed his whole life in Iran. He never had the luxury of choosing love. What is the class context, and what are the historical conditions, of who gets to choose a partner based on the whimsy of the human heart?

Delbar isn’t yet burnt by the sharp edges of love; he has the privileges of native fluency in English, American citizenship, and ultimately a family that will not abandon him. His family is complicated but there is no abandonment. His mother crosses the ocean to reiterate that refusal. And it’s not that Mansur’s family abandoned him, but the book is concerned with how nationality, class, and visa status inform things like love and family estrangement that we don’t often associate with border violence.

LCN: While writing about two queer Afghan men, how did you carry the legacy of the ways Afghan genders have been represented across history? Noble and fierce warriors of the British and Reagan periods, terrorists in the Bush era, cowards in the Biden era. And Afghan women always in need of saving. What kind of responsibility, burden, or freedom did you feel in writing against this legacy?

BS: I was definitely really careful about perpetuating stereotypes of Afghan women, refugees, and queer people as docile or in need of saving. I wanted to show how matriarchy looks in the American context and also in the Afghan-Iranian context, where Mansur’s mother has to secure her daughter’s future when there is a fear of deportation. In the end, everyone is making the best decisions they can based on their material circumstances and their worldview.

When Mansur’s little sister starts to veil, our tendency is to associate that with backwardness. She snaps back that it’s my body, don’t I have a right to choose? And indeed, isn’t it more misogynist to assume that Afghan women and girls have no free will? For eight years, Laura Bush made Afghan women her First Lady project. Eight of the first 26 years of the 21st century, American political consciousness revolved around the plight of Afghan women. Today, they are worse off than ever before.

These conversations we’re finally having now about where our tax dollars are going, what murderous wars they’re funding and to what end, are great questions. Susan Sontag was widely rebuked for making this same argument in 2001, even among liberal commentators. SNL threw Rage Against the Machine out onto the street for performing “Bulls on Parade.”

There has always been tremendous opposition to criticizing the American military and it still remains sort of taboo. But like, where did the $2 trillion spent on the war in Afghanistan go? Because, you know, in Afghanistan, it’s hard to find receipts for where that money was spent. A lot of it was used to line the pockets of defense contractors and weapons manufacturers in the DMV.

LCN: Mansur and Delbar navigate shifting operations of power across empire, state authoritarianism, anti-queerness, anti-transness, anti-immigration, and also the ways Islam is weaponized as a tool to control people on the state level or justify war. Trying to read this barometer of where queer immigrants fleeing imperial violence might be safe is a constant negotiation. As Mansur says, “Every promise of safety had come at a price.” I’m amazed at how this novel holds all these shifting borders, which are even more relentless in 2026.

BS: Part of Orientalism’s suffusion into our representations of the Middle East is that we have an enormous and compelling set of stereotypes for the Muslim world. I embarked on this novel to articulate something different. We’re writers, cultural workers, narrative shapers. That’s our role. We push back on dominant, hegemonic, harmful narratives. Novelists have the profound opportunity to showcase an alternative way the world might be, or already is today.

I felt it was important to register my dissent at the narratives we’ve inherited, both named and unnamed, at the explicit level of women taking charge of their lives, the passports and privileges that certain characters have and others don’t, but also at the level of what they’re afraid to say, the very subtle moments of protest and refusal.

The aid organization that several characters work for, Peacemeals, is led by this German guy, Leif, and it’s funded to build bridges by breaking bread, or whatever the slogan is. The reader is cringing a little bit at the out-of-touch nature of this organization, but they’re only doing that because of how we’re being told the story, and who’s telling it. In another accounting, Leif could easily be portrayed as a savior here, helping to evacuate queer and trans people from the Middle East. And in fact, that’s the person who has told this story across history. It’s Leif. I really wanted to shut him up because he’s also the mouthpiece of empire. He’s the one we’re primed to accept as the spokesman of this community.

The number of books written by white people about Afghanistan is astounding, and the sheer magnitude shows us that it’s not just an individual problem. We’re really dealing with a system of dehumanization here that indicts publishing, the aid sector, and the global image economy.

LCN: It’s like that time The New York Times assigned the review of Jamil Jan Kochai’s short story collection to a white military vet.

BS: Oh god, yeah. The review was tiny and the reviewer spent a good portion honing in on some minor irrelevant detail of how the book had inaccurately specified the rank of the airman who’d be flying a certain kind of warplane. These fuckers really have some nerve to reprimand Afghan writers for not expertly skilling themselves in the language of our own annihilation.

LCN: Let’s dwell with that a moment––how Afghan writers establish our authenticity for those audiences only if we submit to the West’s militarized representation of our culture and history. You blow right past that racism with this novel. I’d love to hear about literary inspirations you turned to in constructing Delbar and Mansur’s stories, which are counter-narratives to each other but also to that Orientalist militarized frame.

BS: A Burning by Megha Majumdar was a major inspiration in demanding that I bifurcate this narrative; the structural restraint of just Delbar’s perspective made it impossible to showcase his character. There are some things that could only be done via another character looking in and seeing this guy’s delusions, you know? Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways was another inspiration.

There’s this common conceit of a main character obsessing over another person in their life who represents some shortcoming or perceived insecurity. I’m ugly, look at how beautiful she is. I’m unpopular, and I’m fixated on the cheerleader everyone loves. It’s a whole thing. By letting the subject of that obsession write back against the grain, we turn that conceit on its head. Suddenly, whole new tensions emerge. It’s part of why Delbar gets a three month timeline and Mansur’s is more like six years. I really wanted to complicate this idea of who receives more nuance, because the predominant tendency in books is for us to never get Mansur’s point of view at all.

LCN: Let’s close with your title. No God But Us reworks the shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith. There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his Messenger. Neither Delbar nor Mansur are vehemently religious, yet they share that background. How does the title capture Delbar and Mansur’s relationships to Islam, gender, and sexuality? 

BS: The idea was to suffuse this centerpiece of Islamic prayer with Attar’s Conference of Birds, which is central to Sufism. The Simorgh is this Sufi folktale of a huge trove of birds who go in search of the famed God of the birds. On their journey, they encounter various obstacles and endure mass casualties and, by the end, there are only 30 birds left. 

They come across a reflective surface and the 30 birds who remain realize that they are the Simorgh they went in search of. Si-morgh translates to “30 birds” in Farsi. I interpolate that Sufi text to champion our people as divine.

In the Bible, Jesus loved the poor and a sex worker washed his feet. A foundational tenet of Islam is the anti-capitalist repudiation of collecting interest on loans. Even today, the Pope condemns conquest and deportations. Organized religion used to rail against the elite.

Part of the racialization of Islam is that you can never fully disavow it because the state, police, border guards, and case workers see you and read your name and see your thick facial hair and act accordingly. How you identify doesn’t materially inform how you’re treated. They look at you and they see a Muslim. So, despite these conservative and queerphobic religious authorities who would like to deny our claim to Islam, whether they like it or not, Islam belongs to us too.

When those 30 birds see their reflection, among them are queer and trans people, sex workers, drug users, immigrants, divorcees, feminists, criminals. That’s what the title gestures to.

The post A Novel That Reinvents the Modern American Abroad Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

Meanwhile, Steven’s 2025 collection Outliving Michael is both memoir and memorial, and is written towards Steven’s close friend Michael Church, who died of AIDS in 2000. Now, of course, I’ve come to realize that people pushed me towards Steven because he is generous and warm, as well as talented and prolific.

So we emailed. I asked for advice and, more daringly, a very last-minute blurb. The conversation kept rolling and we dreamed up an interview to formally bring our words together. But I never expected to meet Steven in person, at least not any time soon. He was on the West Coast, where I essentially never venture, and I was in New York City. So you can imagine our mutual surprise and delight when we spotted each other at the Publishing Triangle Awards this month. Since 1989, the Publishing Triangle has championed and connected queer writers and publishers.

Afterward—and once again back on our prospective coast lines—Steven and I discussed how the AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s has shaped our work and lives, generational memory and the beauty of the dance floor.

Sara Youngblood Gregory: I was so moved by Outliving Michael and there are so many moments of emotional and thematic overlap between our two works. Tell me how Outliving Michael came about.

Steven Reigns: The poems in Outliving Michael, like most of my work, came out of my trying to make sense of things. I realized I had lived longer than Michael, something I, for some reason, hadn’t thought possible. The poems were my reminiscing on his friendship and its lasting impact on my life. This book feels like a personal companion to my previous collection A Quilt for David. I spent over a decade researching and writing about a dentist who was accused of transmitting HIV to his patients. I didn’t know David and so, for the next book, I focused on and honored a best friend, Michael. 

I actually have a similar question for you because I thought of it when I first had your book in my hands. DEAD BOYS IN SPACE is more than a meditation, the GRID series of poems is a perfect example. I imagine some of your poem’s creations were quite intense. 

SYG: Oh, I’m glad the GRID poems stuck out to you. Those are a series of three poems in the collection, and they all follow the same format—literally a four by five grid on the page—and each column works to define or capture or snapshot the feeling of a specific word. Words like “bird,” or “mother,” or “apology.” You can read the poem straight down, or straight across, or I guess even go tic-tac-toe style.

Originally these three poems were pretty pastiche. I was playing around with the form of one of Franny Choi’s poems—I think it’s from Soft Science. I wrote some poems in this grid format, but they weren’t fully formed. Then a few years later, I was at the point where my heart was set on writing a manuscript fully dedicated to thinking about the AIDS crisis. I was reading a lot of different books about AIDS and I learned an early name for the virus: Gay-Related Immune Deficiency. GRID. There it was again. It was like lightning struck. It felt eerie, almost. Here I was writing in these small boxes and columns—in this confined form on the page—and all along that same containment was already and very explicitly built into the history and language of AIDS and homosexuality. 

Now, as I ask you questions, I am thinking of your poem about working on a different interview for a different magazine. Michael had advice for you: Respond as if your soulmate will read it. Were you writing directly to Michael with your poems? Was he your soulmate? 

SR: Not at all. In every reading, I stress I never had sex with Michael. We were friends. I’m not offended by the suggestion but what gets lost is the concept of nonsexual connection and friendship. Gay men, particularly in straight people’s imaginations, are wildly sexualized. It’s also an important point to stress because we don’t have as much art about friendship. I was probably 22 when Michael gave me that advice. At the time, I was overly romantic and believed in soulmates, in some cosmic connection with one other person. 

SYG: Yeah that’s so true—the sexualization. I didn’t even think about it, though of course as a lesbian that sexualization certainly, and unfortunately, informs my own interactions with straight people and heterosexuality. 

SR: Exactly! I think this imaginative sexualizing by straight people is why there’s so much discomfort with queers around children. Drag queens reading to children is scrutinized for that exact reason. The data far from suggests that queers are the issue. If facts were prioritized over fantasy, gun violence in schools would be the biggest conversation point, not drag queens with books. 

SYG: It does feel particularly sharp that it’s drag queen with books that are under such fire. Plus all the queer book bans. They hate when school kids know us, and read about our lives and relationships on our own terms, which is what Outliving Michael does so well . . . It felt really clear to me when reading how grounded and how deep-running your friendship was, and also that it was firmly platonic, firmly a friendship. I do think sometimes about friends I’ve had and how strongly they’ve impacted me and how fated it’s felt. I can get a little bit woo-woo though. [Laughs]

SR: I’m not opposed to woo-woo. I have a poem in the book about me during an insufferable New Age phase and how Michael teased me about my seriousness. Did you have a reader or certain audience in mind? 

SYG: Not at all. In my day-to-day as a freelance writer and journalist, I’m constantly thinking about the reader. What do they need to know? Do they have enough context? What’s the takeaway? But when I write creatively, the exact opposite is true—I don’t want to write for anyone, or with anyone in mind. I actually have to banish the people in my mind and the possibility that the work might one day be read by others. Otherwise, I feel distracted or self-conscious. Like someone is reading over my shoulder. 

SR: Keeping one’s vision the primary focus in writing creates singular work. Writing with a committee in your head creates too much caution and fear of experimentation in disclosure or structure. What I want to do is create the best work I can. I’m asking readers for their time and attention. I’m not going to create fluff or phone anything in. I want to honor the time they’re giving the work. 

SYG: In DEAD BOYS IN SPACE and Outliving Michael, nightlife, dancing, parties, sex and desire are strong throughlines. You mention a few times the feeling that the party would never end, the fear that the party was already ending, knowing and not knowing that AIDS “was already in the room.” Tell me about what it felt like to be young and gay during the AIDS crisis. 

SR: I didn’t know gayness without the threat of death or sex without the threat of seroconversion. I was so young and gay and sexually active that I didn’t know any other way. I did know, even back then, how loaded and charged every moment was for me and my friends. It was only in 2010 when reading Alice Walker’s poetry book Hard Times Require Furious Dancing, that I reflected on all that time we spent on dancefloors and in beds. It was our release and shared expression of joy. 

The times I’m referencing were before you were born and yet it has its own draw to you because you have a beautiful poem “The center of the universe is a small-town gay bar” where dancing and finding rhythm are part of it. 

SYG: It is interesting. The durability of dance, the dance floor, how strongly so many people associate queerness with nightlife and music. There’s also a ton of dancing and music in Pamela Sneed’s Funeral Diva and Natalie Adler’s novel Waiting on a Friend.

In my poem, the speaker’s desire is focused on a single person—a butch lesbian to her femme—but that desire also goes in every other direction too, tossed around and toward all the other queer people around her. Not a sexual desire, but this broader erotic gesture towards these different generations of gay men, trans people, lesbians, homosexuals . . . For me, the dance floor is a place of reunification and memory and remembering. It is a chance to look around and wonder who should still be here, but isn’t, and who might still be here moving and sweating and laughing, just out of sight.

SR: Community is how we’ve survived. For many of us, the gay bar is the first place we encounter queer community and witness unabashed queer joy. The sacredness of queer clubs is hard to describe. It’s why there’s a mourning of clubs that close and another reason why the Pulse Massacre hit so deeply. 

SYG: I was born in the late 90s so my coming of age as a lesbian was really in the late 2010s and early 2020s . . . You remember and have to live with those memories of the AIDS crisis, which I imagine is a blessing and a great grief. I don’t remember and have to live without those memories, which is a blessing and a great loss. 

I want to ask you about memory—specifically generational memory. When I was writing DEAD BOYS IN SPACE a lot of my grief and frustration stemmed from my complete lack of memory. The inability to recall, to know, to learn and feel connected to the history of my people and the history of my family. What’s been lost and found between the generations “after” and “during” the AIDS crisis?

SR: I had a fake ID at age 16 and was befriending and having sex with men older than me. I had such an early exposure to it. I don’t see myself as active or engaged in the height of the crisis. Queer women played a big role during the AIDS crisis. This is sometimes under-represented by the media, the connections between LGBT people. 

SYG: I think about this, too. Sometimes, I felt a little strange or self-conscious being a lesbian writing about AIDS when there’s such a strong association with gay men. But all women—trans, queer, cis, heterosexual—are bound up in the history and active, ongoing reality of HIV/AIDS . . . The main narrative I’ve heard, or been exposed to, is that lesbians were caregivers. For example, the San Diego Blood Sisters who organized blood drives to support people with AIDS. And that’s an incredibly powerful and important history to uplift. That solidarity. But when the story starts and ends there, it falls flat. There’s this mother-izing that happens.

Then and now there are active, reciprocal relationships with gay men full of solidarity and love and strife. Keiko Lane’s memoir Blood Loss is an example, so is Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s novel Terry Dactyl. . . I’ve been reading the anthology Sister and Brother all about gay men and gay women and their relationships. It was published in the 90s and I read an essay from Jewelle Gomez there. She mentions speaking at the Gay Pride rally in Central Park when the New York section of the AIDS quilt was dedicated and writes: “I think it is fitting that a womanly art—quilting— has come to embody a memorial instigated largely by gay men. When we try to discern what ‘gay’ culture is, it is often found in the combination of things that highlight an irony or a difficult truth.” There it is. The connection, the layers, how interwoven—quite literally—we are with one another.

SR: I love these books you’re mentioning. Sister and Brother has this incredible story “The Night Danny Was Raped” by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. It is a perfect literary example of storytelling, insight, compassion, and coming of age. I feel for Lucy because I mention that 1994 story to her every time I see her at conferences. That anthology is the only place it’s been published and that’s reason enough to get it. 

What was fueling your pursuit in this collection?

SYG: A main pursuit of my collection was imagining and creating a world in which gay men did not die of AIDS, and instead were able to live in new worlds. I used sci-fi and speculation and space travel to do that. I didn’t fully realize what I was getting at until Bryan Borland, the editor of Assaracus: A Journal of Gay and Queer Poetry, put it to me simply: I wanted to re-arrange the universe around this generational absence. Around queer loss and joy and sex and anger. 

So I was incredibly moved when I read the following from Outliving Michael:

Michael had feet in both worlds, yet now

he’s not in any world except my memories

and this writing—that is neither 

Holleran not Sheindlin—but the compulsion

to write about him, honor him, memorialize him

is the only way I can give back an ounce 

of what he gave to me.

Writing with a committee in your head creates too much caution and fear of experimentation.

– Steven Reigns

SR: Thank you. Grief causes such a strong nostalgia. We want the world we had with them to last forever. In some ways, I’ve captured Michael and our friendship. These ways I find satisfaction in, and I’m pleased more people get to know Michael because of my book. In other ways, no one can fully capture a person or relationship. There will always be a gap, some slippage. Since Michael’s impact was so great, attached to my appreciation for him is also a sense of debt. What I’m noticing in the excerpt you pulled of my poem, is the form. 

I’m curious about the topography of your poems and the format. “BLOODSHIFT,” the GRID poems, and “If You Ask Me Why I Read Science Fiction” come to mind. This collection is experimental in many ways. 

SYG: I love to play with format and form. I’m one of those people that never imagines their work will be read out loud, ever. [Laughs] That’s how I often end up with dramatic and strange poems like “BLOODSHIFT,” which uses long lines across the page and between words to force a feeling of submersion and depth and of going deeper and deeper underwater. Then with “If you ask me why I read science fiction” the idea was something windy and loose on the page, your eyes sort of move all over the page as you read, back and forth like a swing.

GRID was, as I mentioned, about containment. Later on in the collection, I sort of put this image on its head and draw parallels between cages, grids, and the look and beauty of quilt squares. Which also brings us back to the AIDS quilt.

SR: While you’re talking about that, can you say something about the structure of the book itself? It’s divided into four sections. How did you arrive at this format?

SYG: Structuring and ordering the poems was the hardest part of the manuscript. My editor, KMA from YesYes Books, and I went back and forth a lot. So there was a lot of re-ordering. But what always felt clear to me was the middle section—also called DEAD BOYS IN SPACE—as the creative and speculative center. That section is one long play that can be performed with a few people. It’s one of the only times I actively thought about the work being real aloud. It’s also where the sci-fi is most present, and the world building is the most concrete and specific. 

I always meant for world building to be taken very seriously, at face value. It’s not metaphor. To me, the speaker really does live in a very real universe where her brother didn’t die of AIDS, but escaped the Earth, escaped forced displacement to the moon colony, and very much outwitted the United States government. Her grief is no less real because her brother isn’t dead. It isn’t even more complex. It’s just a different grief for a different, slightly more righteous world.

The post These Poets Are Writing Queer Afterlives appeared first on Electric Literature.

After being diagnosed with six autoimmune diseases, Boissoneault began mapping her body’s systems onto weather patterns—thyroid onto temperature regulation, heart onto storms, uterus to floods, guts to landslides, and joints to wildfire. In Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene, Boissoneault argues that chronic illness and climate chaos connect: Regulatory systems that once self-corrected are breaking down and warnings are dismissed. Those most affected are told we’re overreacting.

Since 2025, the Trump administration has terminated and frozen thousands of climate science and medical research grants, while gutting the Environmental Protection Agency. Meanwhile, chronic diseases are rising worldwide. People are getting sicker while the infrastructure meant to cure them is collapsing. Boissoneault’s book lands in that collision.

Boissoneault’s book gave me a way to talk about my own experience with illness. I was diagnosed with lymphoma at 29 and spent months convincing doctors that something was wrong before they found tumors the size of baseballs crushing my heart and lungs. I’m in remission now, but I still wake up checking what hurts, or wondering if today is the day something will appear on a scan. Body Weather gave me a way to talk about that: My body is weather I cannot predict. We spoke over Zoom in late March, a few weeks before her book’s release. She was smiling inside her home near Chicago on an unseasonably warm, sunny day—the type of stable weather, she told me, that her body responds to best.

Leslie Nguyen-Okwu: You’ve published in The New Yorker, Smithsonian, JSTOR Daily, and more—a lot of science and history journalism. When did you decide to turn inward and write about your own body instead of reporting on other people’s stories? I spent years as a foreign correspondent covering displacement and statelessness, and that pivot from external reporting to internal experience feels like crossing a different kind of border.

Lorraine Boissoneault: Yes, absolutely. I love that way of putting it. It is crossing a different border, and I was very resistant to crossing that border. When I started envisioning writing about health, I was interested in the question of autoimmune diseases and why women are so much more likely than men to develop them.

At a certain point, it started feeling very disingenuous not to disclose that I have, depending on how you’re counting, five or six autoimmune diseases, [and] that I have a personal stake in the issue. Even after I made that realization, it still took a little longer to feel comfortable sharing my experiences and writing about them.

I started with shorter things, essays like the one for The New Yorker, and I did a couple for Catapult to get a sense of, do I feel okay emotionally putting this information out in public? Because there’s a lot of stigma still around talking about illness, especially chronic illness. I wanted to see what the reaction would be. The reactions were overwhelmingly positive, and I felt pretty good about it.

The other thing was, at the point when I started writing this book, I had been living with chronic illnesses for a decade. So it was not something new to me anymore. It’s not that all of my feelings were perfectly cemented, but I wasn’t so fresh to it that writing about the experiences would be retraumatizing. Whenever you’re crossing from being an outside observer to being the observer of your own experience, feeling in a place where you’re emotionally ready to do that—to me, that’s almost the first thing that needs to happen before you can start.

LNO: You’ve structured the book roughly around the stages of grief—denial, fear, anger, grief, and radical love—and mapped body systems onto weather patterns. When did you first recognize this connection between your body’s dysregulation and our climate systems breaking down? And what made you organize the book around the stages of grief?

LB: When I started thinking about what was happening at the same time around me in the world, that’s where the weather aspect came up. I was having these heart issues at the same time as I happened to be living through a lot of intense storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and that’s an interesting coincidence. That was the first piece of putting the body and weather systems together. And from there, it was like, oh, that might be a useful organizing principle for writing about this.

As for the stages of grief, I realized that there was an emotional aspect to each of the sections in how I was thinking about my body and climate change and the weather. I hadn’t meant for it to be the stages of grief initially, but there was something about denial in the first part, and in my experience with first getting diagnosed with thyroid disease—it was real, and I also almost couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t absorb it. I’ve heard from other people with chronic illnesses and disabilities that that’s a common experience. You don’t know how to process it at first.

That immediately reminded me of the ways people talk about climate denialism and even how we go about our daily lives a little bit in denial of it, because for most of us, it’s hard to grapple with, to know what to do. And from there, it was easy to pull out the other emotions like anger and grief. I think it also helped with forward momentum, so it doesn’t feel like disparate essays but like an emotional journey.

LNO: Let’s talk about “body weather.” The phrase itself captures something that clinical language can’t. What does that term mean to you? How is it different from how doctors talk about chronic illness? When I was diagnosed with lymphoma at 29, my oncologist used words like “aggressive” and “dysregulated,” terms that sounded more like storm warnings than medical explanations.

LB: I love that reframing of medical language as weather warnings, that’s awesome. Body weather was a way to capture both the hugeness of what I was experiencing and what I felt like the world has been experiencing with climate change and the individual nature of it.

One of the most challenging parts of being human is that we’re alone in our bodily experiences. We can try to use language to convey what’s happening, and with medical technology, we have so many ways to see inside the body. But it’s like with the [1-to-10] pain scale: Everyone I know who has used it says it sucks. It doesn’t communicate very well what our physical experiences are like.

For me, body weather is finding nonmedical language to express what it’s like to be alive in this moment. And I don’t think it’s limited to chronic illness or disability. I think everyone has their own body weather. It’s a matter of paying attention to it. We live in a culture where we’re so often meant to be distanced from our bodily experience, separated from it, whether that’s because we have to push through work or childcare or illness because we don’t have good health insurance, or other different things. I want body weather to be a way to reintegrate with the way we experience the world outside of us, and the way we experience our bodies and our inner worlds.

LNO: You spent years being told your symptoms were psychosomatic while your body was genuinely breaking down. The book connects this medical gaslighting to climate denialism. When did you first see that parallel?

LB: What it came down to for me is recognizing power systems, because medical gaslighting is a lot about maintaining power for those who are at the top of the systems. This is not to say that all doctors are bad or nefarious or unwilling to see their patients, but a lot are. A lot do not take seriously the fact that patients are knowledge holders of their own bodies and experience.

I think it’s similar to climate denial. The science has been there for a long, long time that this was happening, and there were powerful forces in the oil and gas industry trying to sow doubt about that, because they have the power to do that. They have the money and the lobbying groups to go to the government in a way that individual citizens don’t. They want to keep that power. They want people to be in doubt, so that the large majority of the population that is not oil and gas executives won’t use our concerted energy to push back against this and demand change. And so far, it has worked.

I think a lot about how, in both the energy and environment sectors and the medical sector, systems of power are upholding structures that are damaging to the people underneath but beneficial to the people who are on top.

LNO: The final section includes essays on “Colonial Control” and “Our Disabled Ecologies.” You’re connecting chronic illness to larger systems of extraction and control. How did you make that connection feel concrete when you’re writing from lived experience rather than theory?

LB: One of the hardest parts of writing this book, apart from the emotional side of it, was recognizing that I have colonizer ancestry: French Canadian, German, a few other things. I am part of the story of the environment being ravaged for resources, and of other people being subjected to horrible displacement, to murder, to slavery. It was hard to figure out how to situate myself as experiencing the harms of the medical system and [also] wanting to highlight all of the ways that people who aren’t me, people who look different than me, have very different life stories than me, are harmed even more. The system is bad for pretty much everyone except the people who are at the very, very top. But it’s worse for a lot of people than it is for me, and that’s important. It’s not necessarily that I think those are my stories to tell, but I don’t want to ignore or downplay them either.

That’s the part of the book I’m honestly most nervous about. I don’t know how people will react. Some people might get angry. Some people might feel I’ve done it wrong. And I have to be okay with that. The writing process is a continuous process of changing and growth.

LNO: How do you make meaning from something that’s ongoing, that doesn’t have an endpoint or resolution? I’m writing a memoir about cancer, and I keep running into this problem—the experience won’t stay in the past tense.

LB: I love this writerly question, because I think it is something that anyone writing a memoir about ongoing issues, especially sickness, has to grapple with. I wish I had a better answer. When I wrote the first part of the book about my thyroid disease, there was nothing about me having hyperthyroidism—where your thyroid is overactive—because it hadn’t happened yet. Never in a million years did I think I could develop Hashimoto’s and Graves’ disease. I still don’t understand it. When it did happen, it was like, oh, I guess I have more to add to the story. It fit well with the Death Valley material I had been writing about already. It’s not that I wanted to have another thing go wrong, but for the sake of storytelling, it worked well. 

But I also didn’t include anything about developing a vocal cord disorder because I didn’t know what to say about it. It was so fresh and raw when it happened. The disorder is called spasmodic dysphonia, and it’s rare. People generally haven’t heard of it. I didn’t know how to talk about it. I felt a little embarrassed.

In writing, because it’s a static thing—once a book is in the world, you have to decide where the narrative stops for your readers. That’s a personal decision. And making meaning out of your experiences, that’s also personal. I know a lot of people who completely reject any sort of meaning in their experience of chronic illness, because it’s suffering and it sucks. That’s totally fair. It is suffering and it sucks. 

For me, it felt very psychologically healing, if not physically healing, to find a way for it to mean something. I still don’t exactly know what it means, but I think it gave me a different lens through which to view the world and the environment, and I’m grateful for that. I still wouldn’t choose to get sick. But I am grateful for that.

LNO: It’s empowering, I think, to tell your narrative in the way you want to tell it, especially if you haven’t been able to do that for whatever systemic reasons—the medical system, the racism of this country, or the immigration system. With that, your book doesn’t offer false comfort. It also ends with radical love rather than despair. And it publishes on Earth Day. That timing was intentional. What does it mean to you?

LB: I love Earth Day, so it’s an honor and exciting that my little book gets to be paired with this bigger connection to our planet. But to what you were saying—the moment that we’re in, where these crises are accelerating—it’s hard not to feel depressed sometimes, because we’re seeing such a wanton desire for destruction and harm, both in the U.S. and abroad.

Any time war is waged, that is ecological damage. That is always ecological damage as well as human damage. I think of the black acid rain falling in Iran because of the bombs on oil refineries. That’s terrible for the people. That’s terrible for the ecosystem. It’s almost always both things.

What gives me hope, and why I want the book to end with radical love and not doom and gloom, is that there are so many people resisting these destructive forces. I’m in Chicago, and there were ICE agents here last fall, and people were joining brigades and showing up for their neighbors. Community members standing up and saying, we don’t want this. That gives me so much hope.

It’s easy to be despairing of the human race, but I think most people are doing their best on any given day and are deeply in opposition to the things that are happening, even if they don’t fully understand a lot of the connections between climate change and human health. I think we have to make the choice to turn away from despair, because that means giving in and becoming complacent with the terrible things that are happening.

LNO: What do you want readers who are living with chronic illness to take away from this book? What about readers who aren’t yet sick, but might be?

LB: For readers living with chronic illness or disability, I want them to feel less alone, because there were moments when I felt so alone in it. I want them to understand the frameworks of ableism that can make us feel terrible about our bodies, about what we can and can’t do. And to not be afraid of considering themselves disabled or thinking that they might never get better, because for a long time that tormented me—the idea that if I did all the things right, I wouldn’t be sick anymore.

Once I started developing a disability community, it was so much easier to accept that I have chronic illnesses. They’re not going away. I’m doing the best I can, but I don’t have to solve them. I don’t have to fix them. My life is just as valuable and worthy as anyone’s regardless of what I do in my day.

For people who aren’t sick yet, my number one message is that disability and illness will happen to everyone if you live long enough. That is as inevitable as death. Pretending otherwise is willful delusion. It’s not that you have to be thinking about it every minute of every day, but upholding ableist values and beliefs about what a good life is, what a good body is—I want people to start rethinking that, because you don’t know what’s gonna happen to you tomorrow, a week from now, three years from now. Nobody knows.

If we as a society are more willing to view all bodies, all people, all life experiences as equally valuable, dignified, worthy—I think we would save ourselves, individually, a lot of pain and suffering when bodily change comes for us.

My life is harder than it was before I got sick, and some days are definitely worse. But I have a good life. I try to emphasize this to everyone. I have a good life. I’m lucky in a lot of ways. I have health insurance and a partner who’s very loving and supportive and stable income, and all of those things make a huge difference in the experience of illness and disability. But getting sick, having a new disability, does not mean your life is over. It means learning a new way of living.

The post Tracing the Connection Between Chronic Illness and Climate Change appeared first on Electric Literature.