Earlier this week, People Magazine revealed the cover for my third novel, Satellite, which is coming out from Viking on March 30. You can pre-order the book here. If you’re in any way associated with books, you probably already know how much pre-orders matter. They can make or break the success of a book–all pre-orders count for the first week of sales. I’d be very grateful if you pre-order. You can also mark the novel as want-to-read on Goodreads, which is also extremely helpful, or reserve it at your local library.

I’m really thrilled with how the cover turned out. It was designed by Colin Webber, featuring a painting by Michele Poirier Mozzone. The painting is part of Mozzone’s Fractured Light series, which meticulously captures the effect of water and light on the body. There’s a sense of grounded surrealism in these paintings, the sort of surrealism that arises out of prolonged attention to the world. These painting highlight the many ellipses and distortions of seeing, the rich expressions of color that can be easy to miss. What I love about this painting, in particular, is how the swimmer’s face blends into abstraction. Satellite is a novel of misshapen identity–identity distorted by responsibility and desire and habit and fear. It’s also a novel about swimming. The book is structured around a swim the main character’s husband plans to take, his first since he was paralyzed. There are also pool parties, drunken swim competitions, and late night sex in the water. This cover speaks to what obsesses me about pools: they’re class markers, sites of everyday erotic mystery, expressions of joy, and potential threats.

There were four other options, as well, and I’ll include a few at the end, if you’re curious to see which ones didn’t make it.

Author vs Writer

I’ve seen a few people on here talking about the distinction between being a writer and being an author. The thinking goes that being a writer is the work of sitting alone at a desk, whereas the work of being an author is public-facing, the carnival-barking required to get your book into the hands of your readers. The divide inherently privileges the writer. The writer is the true artist who writes because they cannot not write, but they are, unfortunately, victims of the market and publishing. A real writer hates being an author, but every few years they are dragged out of their caves and asked to perform for their readers, the sacrifice they make in order to be granted more time at their desk being a writer.

I don’t disagree. It’s true that being an author is humiliating, especially with all the effort that now goes into promoting a book on video. I’m not the biggest fan of my face, and I’m already dreading seeing it in the occasional clip. Even in the world of writing, the art form most often completed with sweatpants and frazzled hair, so much depends on the author’s beauty (Zefyr Lisowki wrote an excellent piece about this). I remember attending a lecture years ago where I learned that Nathaniel Hawthorne’s success was due, in part, to the inclusion of his photo on the back of a book jacket–writer turned author thanks to an excellent face card.

I understand the impulse to privilege the work of the writer over the author. Without the writing, there is no author. Worse, we’ve all fallen for books that could’ve used less author and a lot more writer. I’ve been curious about this balance for some time. As the Hawthorne example makes clear, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Walt Whitman, for instance, was one of literature’s most prominent authors, and an instigator for the toxic blurb culture that’s currently giving me un petite menty b. But Whitman was also an excellent writer–him being an author didn’t take away from this fact. The two seemed to exist in conjunction.

The writer and the author are not opposed forces. And only a few decades ago, a writer used to be able to make a good living as an author, touring sparingly, letting reviews do the work of promoting the book. The issue is not that a writer must become an author but that a writer must work as an author for free, with no guarantee–or even slight likelihood–that the effort of authoring might translate to more writering. The work of authoring is all that goes into a book outside of a book, the work that allows a writer to survive and pay rent. Teaching. Touring. Writing for magazines. Applying for grants. These are all the work of the author. And as those opportunities disappear, the divide between writer and author widens. Not only in what each job entails but in how many people fall into each category.

There will always be more writers than there are authors. And many writers write with no intention of becoming a professional author. But for those who do, like myself, we frequently find ourselves in the unenviable position of cosplaying as authors, faking it until we make it, clawing toward the aspirational stability of benefits and a salary. There are simply fewer opportunities for writers to support themselves as authors. The reasons for this are all predictable. Publishing professionals are overworked and have pushed most of the publicity work onto the authors themselves. Universities are cutting back on the humanities. Fewer institutions are supporting the arts.

Last year, I was a Shearing Fellow at the Black Mountain Institute in Las Vegas. Shortly before I arrived, one of the fellowship’s primary donors pulled their funding. No specific reasons were given. The foundation wanted to support other causes, or some bullshit like that. I assume it had something to do with AI. I predicted as much after the NEA fell apart. The evisceration of the NEA did not spur wealthy donors to support smaller arts organizations. In reality, without a centerpiece arts organization, wealthy donors saw no cultural cache in supporting the arts–this is all speculation, I don’t spend much time with the wealthy. All to say, I wasn’t surprised that the Shearing Fellowship donor pulled their funding. But I was saddened that this all but ended the fellowship, a program so excellent and invigorating I still can’t really believe it existed: I spent 9 months writing, with my rent covered, receiving a stipend and benefits, and my only requirement was to write and host a few readings. For 9 months, I got to be a writer, supported by the effort of authorship.

But now I’m an author again. Promoting, hyping, sharing, and begging (plz pre-order Satellite) with the hopes of continuing my work as a writer. And of course I feel all the complicated things a writer must feel at this moment. Like how do I talk about this book born out of silent, ambiguous feelings? How do I share my love for these characters with people who’ve never met them? And what the fuck should I do with my hair in photos?

I appreciate everyone who’s been reading along so far, and for those of you curious about Satellite. I really do like this novel a lot, and I’m very excited to talk about it–and about pools, and 90s erotic thrillers, and satellite TV–over the next 8 months.

Three Covers That Never Were

I’m not sure if I’m allowed to share these, so I’m posting it behind the paywall.

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On July 16th, I’ll be teaching a craft class called Stealing, Borrowing, and Letting Go. We’ll be exploring strategies and best practices for drawing from real people. From the practical details--when to change names, features--to the impact of real life on craft--when does the true narrative get in the way of the better story? We’ll also talk about how to determine your own personal ethics on the subject. In the end, we all need to decide what feels right to us.

I’ve taught this class once before and it was a great success. It’s perfect for writers who are curious about how best to navigate the tricky task of writing about real people and events. Don’t hesitate to reach out if you have questions!

As far as my real life, it’s been a whirlwind the last couple months. My final weeks in Vegas were marred by some personal tumult, the effect of living so far away from my life eventually wearing down my relationships. Long-distance dating, it turns out, is hard. I spent my last month in Vegas doing as much Vegas as I could, detached from NYC, visiting bars I wouldn’t return to, soaking up time with friends I’d made in the city. Maxing out my Trufusion membership before my life as a Vegas group fitness girlie ended: still missing my Rise and Rave Rides.

I also wrote a lot into a new book, though I don’t yet know what it will become. Completing a novel is a taxing, psychologically-scarring endeavor. But the easiest thing in the world is to write the first 100 pages –before that point, you’re just playing around, and you don’t have to decide if you’re truly writing a book. I’m at that point now: deciding. But what I wrote really excited me, and since returning to Brooklyn, I’ve been trying to find my way back into that excitement.

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Except that I haven’t been writing. I’ve been doing a lot of Ethical Procrastination. Willie and I came up with this term to describe the many worthwhile tasks a writer can do to avoid writing. Many are things that a person must simply do to live in the world. They become ethical procrastination when you choose to do them in lieu of writing. Think ethical in the basketball sense, in which a player doesn’t go hunting for fouls. It’s procrastination done for the right reasons. Some examples include:

• Packing

• Grocery Shopping

• Researching a book

• Google mapping to a bar you’re going to later (I do this a lot)

• Hosting a party

• Falling in love

• Telling someone about the book you haven’t yet written

• Sending emails

• Paying bills

• Day job

• Vacuuming

• Pitching essays

• Breaking up

• Working out

• Redecorating

• Buying new clothes

• Selling old clothes

• Imagining elaborate and unlikely moral quandaries that will make completing your novel a crime

As for unethical procrastination, we must all decide for ourselves what that means.

Some Books I’ve Loved the last couple months

Tanya Bush - Will This Make You Happy

I admire Tanya’s ability to glide between internal doubts and the actions we take to try to relieve them. This memoir deftly captures the unique experience of learning to commit: to oneself, to relationships, to the pleasure that makes life worth living.

Malcolm Lowry - Under the Volcano

A classic of disorientation and self-annihilation. A frustrating, uncomfortable, and brilliant novel, untidy in all the best ways. The Consul’s self-destructive descent into drunkenness and loneliness, written as an aspirational epic, is mesmerizing, maddening novel.

Ahmed Naji - Rotten Evidence

Rotten Evidence chronicle’s Naji’s ten-month prison sentence in Egypt for publishing fiction that “violated public decency.” Naji has such an excellent eye, and he captures the unique, harrowing world of the prison with a brilliant mix of irony, doubt, frustration, and care. But what I loved most about this book is how passionately Naji writes about reading. It’s a book about books, and the vital role they play in making life worth living.

Lucy Ives - Three Six Five

As much an art object as it is a craft book. I like to pluck out a prompt in the morning–Imagine a time traveler who regrets time traveling; write a sentence that becomes an image–and let it shape my thinking throughout the day. It’s a book that makes the world more visible. Here’s a great review of the book.

Italo Calvino - Six Memos for the New Millenium

Technically, only 5 memos–Calvino never finished the 6th. The were written as a series of lectures on Calvino’s most cherished literary qualities–lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. These are potent, inspired reminders of why we return to the page, as writers, but largely as readers.

Samantha Josephs - Carrying (Out Oct 6)

Josephs’s debut novel follows a married stealth trans woman named Martha who mysteriously becomes pregnant. Carrying is a biting, Stepford-wifey body horror about the lengths we go to protect our relationships: the secrets we keep, the friends we lean on, the sacrifices we make. A funny, paranoid page-turner. I’m excited for it to be in the world.

Elizabeth McCracken - A Long Game

A perfect craft book as far as I’m concerned. In lieu of close reads, McCracken shares vignettes of wisdom she’s learned over the years. This book is full of insights, epiphanies, and contradictions–just like the act of writing itself.

Megan O’Grady - How It Feels to Be Alive

Not much to say other than that I loved being inside O’Grady’s mind. The best kind of essay collection: one that feels like a walk with a brilliant, considerate friend.

Ana Paula Maia - On Earth as It Is Beneath

Imagine the World’s Most Dangerous Game reimagined at a Brazilian prison. A taut, captivating novel about the harsh angles of human depravity. Gruesome and frank. My first read by Maia, and I’m excited to check out more.

Some Movies I’ve Loved the last couple months

Maddie’s Secret

Rose of Nevada

Desert Hearts

Misericordia

Backrooms (discounting all the parts about trauma)

Current and Future Reads

Nicholas Russell - Observer (I’ll be moderating Nicholas’s book launch in October at Book Culture)

Krista Diamond - Close Relations with Strangers (come to Krista’s NYC Launch at Books are Magic!)

Emeline Atwood - A Real Animal

Allie Rowbottom - Lovers XXX

Stephanie Krzywonos - The Blue Hours

John Dos Passos - USA Trilogy

Writing Conferences, Salons, and Launches

Congratulations, OG

Omega

A few days after I returned to Brooklyn from Vegas, and emptied my suitcases, I packed a new one to travel upstate, where I taught at the Orion Environmental Writers’ Conference. It was held at a new age wellness retreat in Rhinebeck called The Omega Institute. An employee drove me to my cabin in a golf cart. On the way, she assured me I’d leave Omega calmer and more relaxed than when I arrived. Many guests reported feeling this way to her. She showed me the wellness center, and the stairs to the sanctuary, and a large white horse sculpture–isolated in a field–which is on loan. When she asked me about my writing, I felt self-conscious, because she assumed I was an environmental writer, and instead of answering her I pointed at Tajja and Tara, who were walking toward their cabins, and asked if we should give them a ride.

The Orion faculty was brilliant. I got to hang with Tajja and Erica and work alongside writers I’d long admired from afar. The students made everything easy. I sat back while they took over discussion of assigned readings and the work of their peers, occasionally interrupting to deliver lectures on World and Voice and my Infidelity Theory of Nuance in Fiction (a new one). I splurged on a massage. I meditated in the sanctuary. I hunted my ankles for ticks after hikes. I went hard on the vegetarian meals in the cafeteria (Omega only served meat on Tuesdays and Thursdays, the same days they served dessert). As a connoisseur of the slop bowl, I relished the opportunity to create my own slops at every meal: a precarious bed of spring mix topped with scoops of under seasoned tofus and tempehs and beans. Add in 6 - 8 everything crackers, and you’ve created a perfect meal. I drank draft kombucha on the deck of a cafe in the afternoons, reading Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millenium, as a man paced below me telling someone on the phone about all the emotions that had been recently freed from his neck. I taught in the Ram Dass library and spent the time after class plucking books off the shelves, flipping through texts about apparitions and near-death experiences and the modern art of face-reading (the right side of the face reveals your public persona, whereas the left side reveals your true nature). I read from the opening chapter of Satellite, and got to hear Tajja and Erica read from their new books, the writing so deft and inspired I felt proud to call them my friends. It was a profoundly inspiring week–I cherished the late-night discussions and karaoke with the faculty over contraband bourbon and wine–but not very relaxing, as my tour guide had promised.

Scanner

Back in Brooklyn, Sarah hosted a scanner salon with Phil at their apartment. Everyone brought an object or two they wished to scan, and we took turns saving them onto their computer, adding cellophane and handkerchiefs, or waving our hands over the object, to distort and texture the final image. I brought a photo I took of a steel beam across from my apartment. I’ve been thinking a lot about beams lately, after learning my great grandfather fell to his death off a beam. In the scan I created, I let my hand hover behind the photo, as if reaching for an object that had slipped from my grasp. My favorite scans were a face with a hand waved in front of it, making the skin look swimmy and tugged, and a series of scans of everyone’s glasses. Sarah and Phil are planning to make a zine of the images.

After dinner, we squeezed onto the porch, where a few of us read from work and shared projects. Arya Burke read two excellent poems from a collection coming out later this month. Damian Thomas talked about two projects: Unplatform and The Summer of Ludd, the latter of which was a series of phone-free public events in Brooklyn. I read from the opening chapter of Satellite. Another person talked about the home server she’d built for herself and her friends, and a tenant organizer in Kansas City read from a letter written by one of the tenants, a moving, courageous speech defending their rights–all of our rights–to a dignified standard of living.

After the presentations, I hung on the balcony talking to other writers and filmmakers, so engaged I forgot to go in for dessert.

Kismet

Kismet launched its first print magazine last Monday, hosting a reading in the garden next to St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery. I’ve admired Samuel Rutter since his work with Astra–gone too soon–and have loved the work he’s done with Kismet.

It was the first really hot day of the week, and I wore a breezy tan tunic—the kind of thing a 70s cult leader might wear—and, regrettably, tights. By the time I arrived at the church the tunic was darkened with sweat. A bird shit on me when I entered the courtyard, though I wouldn’t realize this for some time. Me and another person walked around the church looking for an entrance, thinking the party was inside, but we walked at such different paces there was no room to exchange names, and I felt too self-conscious to share my name, hoping the image of me in this dampened, bird-splattered tunic might fade from everyone’s memory.

I showed up early, to the VIP pre-party, and promptly started talking to Mina, an agent friend at Janklow. The venue was fittingly Edenic. Thin dirt paths between flowers and bushes of wild ramps. Fresh flatbread hung from a tree. I got a drink–a grapefruit Campari gin cocktail. Simon Critchley came over to say to hello to our group. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Infinitely Demanding changed my life, and his books on humor and tragedy were vital to my thinking when I was in grad school. He introduced himself, and I gave him my name, and rather than politely share how much his work mattered to me, I asked if he knew any party tricks–he didn’t. I showed him that trick where it appears you’re pulling your index finger apart. His uncle used to do that, he told me.

I talked to a few friends about Vegas and felt myself wishing I had more to say. I’ve been having trouble talking about Vegas, even with friends. Not just because of the final month tumult, but because my experience doesn’t seem to align with what I assume people want from my time in the city. What do they want from my experience? I don’t know. The truth, likely. No one seems disappointed by the stories I tell. But travel places an expectation on the traveler to see and do all that must be seen and done, and I’ve never been the type of person to see or to do very much when I travel. And Vegas, perhaps more than any other city, seems like such an alien destination, a site of transience inhospitable to prolonged habitation, ripe for the most captivating of stories. But what I loved about Vegas was its hospitable nature, how easy I found it to live there, and whenever I’m asked how it was, I have trouble explaining that what I loved was the walk to my local coffee shop on temperate winter mornings, or shooting the shit with Nicholas behind the book store when I walked downstairs to pick up my mail. What I loved was how living there slowly weathered my thinking into a new shape, in ways I don’t yet understand.

I told Jen and Jeremy about the bird shit, and they told me it looked like a pattern on the dress. This put me at ease. Kendall and I shared a cigarette. She raved about Emeline Atwood’s debut, A Real Animal, and sent over a copy this week. Adam arrived. Then Sam arrived. We stood on the far side of the flatbread tree, opposite the flatbread, discussing which forthcoming books are not-so-secretly about established authors behaving badly.

The readings began.

First with an entrancing hymnal from Kyle Kidd. Their voice is a canyon–mesmerizing, expansive. Wayne Koestenbaum read from My Lover, The Rabbi as I watched bees duck into the flowers beside him. Megan Nolan closed the readings with a brief excerpt from an essay on the love we feel for the people we love, as compared to the ire we feel for our work, and the repeated shock of spending our lives with the latter when the former is always so close. Kidd ended the performances with an a cappella hymn.

By then, the booze was all drunk. I chatted with Zefyr and Bobuq then fled home, and after getting off the train, I bought a small box of tortilla chips from a Mexican food truck close to my stop, my favorite chips in the city.

Dyke March

It was my first time waiting at WSP for the march to arrive—normally, I march, but I hurt my leg the night before and wanted to go easy. I’d been having a tough week, had been very hard on my body and myself, and it all fell away seeing the marchers cascade into the park. What a profound feeling, to look into their faces, to see their joy and perseverance and pleasure and love, to shower them with the affection and admiration we all deserve.

It’s been a few months since I last sent something out. I’ve been editing my new novel, which is now titled Satellite. (I love the new title, and feel like it speaks to both the literal satellites in the novel and the way characters revolve around each other.) The second round of edits are set to come in this week. I sent the book to my mom, too, for notes on satellite dishes–fewer channels than I thought!–and to double check the specifics of my grandfather’s accident. So far, my editor seems to really like this draft, but we’ve both been thinking through where the book can still be a bit better.

I was texting with August the other day about the impact of a good edit, how it can reveal avenues in the novel the editor doesn’t touch. A few weeks ago, I had a call with my editor, and I told her I wanted to cut a few scenes–these were not scenes she originally wanted to cut, and she was surprised I wanted them gone. She liked them! But the changes she suggested elsewhere in the novel had, in my opinion, rendered those scenes superfluous. And after reading this revision, she seemed to agree.

Anyone who’s written a book knows the impact of every insignificant edit.You change a character’s hair color, and now it doesn’t make any sense for them to fall in love with a bartender at the end of the book. I’m reminded of a class I took in grad school, with Mat Johnson, when he compared writing a novel to sailing: you might have a destination in mind, but you’re always adjusting to the wind. My editor’s comments were the wind, and my work was largely navigation. A good edit doesn’t tell you where specifically to go, or even how exactly to get there. It reveals the book to you from an angle you couldn’t previously discern–and if you’re tapped into the book, you can begin to really see it, not how the editor sees it but how only you can. You need to get to this place, I’m convinced, before you can really begin to work on a book.

Speaking of novels, I’ll be teaching my Novel Openings Workshop on April 14 from 6-9 pm est. It’s one of my favorite classes to teach, and perhaps my most practical. I’ll be offering some tools that will help you see the opening pages of your novel anew, to begin to see your book like a reader or an editor might. Literary Agent Ayla Zuraw-Friedland took the course last year, and she said it gave her great insights into why so many manuscript submissions in her inbox don’t seem to work. We’ll be talking about the balance of information in the opening pages of a novel, looking at books by Sarah Thankam Mathews, Raven Leilani, James Baldwin, and others. Would love to see you!

I also reviewed Jordy Rosenberg’s excellent new novel, Night Night Fawn, for The Atlantic. And on Monday, I published a new piece in The Cut about why crushes make us so damn annoying to friends–and how to guard against ruining friendships when you’re down bad. I also have a new essay for Feeld coming out soon–it’s about getting new partners sick.

Not much to report on in Vegas. I bought a monthly membership to a group fitness spot called TruFusion. It’s more than I can afford, so I try to go every day to get my price per class number down. I’ve been doing a lot of burpees alongside cirque gymnasts in cement rooms heated unthinkingly into the high 90s. The instructors love to play club remixes of the saddest songs you’ve ever heard. If you’re aching for a dubstep remix of “Fast Car” or “My Heart Will Go On” while swinging a kettlebell, this is your place. But seriously–I love working out here.

A few weeks ago, Jean was in town, and she taught me to play blackjack–I technically knew how to play, but Jean is much more of an expert, and I liked seeing her swiftly leave tables whenever the vibe started to shift. There was such confidence in her movements. Leaving didn’t mean leaving the casino–it simply meant finding a new table, seeing if anything stuck. I left $155 richer. Which means my Vegas gambling debts now amount to -$5. We also went to a Chippendale’s show. And the women in the audience hooted and yearned. Jean and I tried, but we’re both a little too detached to publicly hoot. We did touch a man’s pecs, though, and at the end, we received group shout outs: Jean for her engagement, me for getting divorced (who cares if it was six years ago).

Sarah Schulman read from her new book last Friday. She closed the reading with a comment on how citizens should be confronting this administration, and the many horrors it–and others–have wrought. “All we have is our integrity,” she said. “We know what will happen if we do nothing. And we cannot do nothing.” All we have is our integrity. Even with the ceasefire deal with Iran launched–a deal that still allows Israel to continue bombarding Lebanon, including one of the most devastating attacks yesterday–we need to protect, and be generous with, our integrity.

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Favorite Books of 2026 So Far

I’d also like to shout out a few of my favorite books over the last couple months. I’m going to start putting book lists together here, like I used to for Vulture. I still have the itch to spread the good word. So, here are five favorites from Q1 2026–some of them published decades ago.

T Kira Madden - Whidbey

This is my favorite book to recommend to bartenders in Vegas. It’s a thriller, of sorts, about the intersecting lives of three women shaped by the actions of one young man. Two of those women were assaulted by him when they were girls, the third is his mother. When the man is killed–outside the isolated community where he lives alongside others convicted of sex crimes–the three women must each reckon with the unique impact of his harm. But the plot isn’t the reason why I fell so deeply into this book. Madden is an excellent sentence writer, this novel is teeming with images and sharp insights, with prose that moves in unwieldy, unpredictable directions. It’s also such a testament to what a novel can do: confront the many fractured angles of feeling that exist inside of a traumatic event. I don’t know how she pulled this off.

Michelle Tea - Valencia

On the back cover of this reissue of Tea’s classic, Torrey Peters claims it’s “One of the few life-changing books.” I both wish I’d read this book years ago, and am so happy I only discovered it recently, so that I can feel close to the rush of reading it for the very first time. What a perfect cartwheel of a book, a novel full of momentum and youthful wisdom. I so admire novels that move, that seem as spontaneous as a night out–and this has all that, alongside some astounding insights into mid-20s loves, and all the envies and lusts and sadness that accompany love. Please read this novel so we can talk about it together.

Javier Marias - A Heart So White

Another older novel. And one that I’ve already read, years ago, but something about Marias’s classic story of early marriage and doubt spoke to me from the shelf. I’m so glad I reread it. This is the book that does everything The Drama believes that it’s doing. The story follows a young man recently married, as he reflects on his father’s past marriages–a widower, he marries his wife’s sister before the events of the novel opens–and his uncertain future with his wife. An excellent, slow burn of intrigue that patiently meanders toward its shocking conclusion. Marias’s novels are full of tunnelling perception, deepening sentences that try to get to the end of every emotion, only to discover there’s even more when you get to the end. I feel so

Hugh Ryan - My Bad

May 26, 2026

I met Hugh a couple years ago at the Provincetown Book Festival, where I heard him read from The Women’s House of Detention: A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison. I know him mostly as a historian, and I was excited to read My Bad, Ryan’s memoir of queer life in the 90s. I loved being inside this book, and inside Ryan’s early exploration through queerness. He has an eye for historical details, which feel especially relevant in this book, where Ryan deftly draws connections between larger social forces and his personal journey. I normally hate the word journey, but that is what’s happening here. What makes this memoir really stand out is Ryan’s honest assessment of himself. I’m reminded of Melissa Febos, who also lovingly takes a scalpel to her past actions–both Ryan and her write with the rare courage of honesty, highlighting both their accomplishments and the small but significant shames that make up a life. Ryan doesn’t veer away from those moments, and by doing so, he has written a book that feels so smart and embracing. I can’t wait for this to be in the world.

Patrick Cottrell - Afternoon Hours of a Hermit

April 26, 2026

Patrick’s first novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, is one of my favorite contemporary novels. Afternoon Hours of a Hermit is a sequel, of sorts. But calling it that fails to capture what is so strange and compelling about this book. The narrator, Dan Moran, returns home after publishing his first novel–Sorry to Disrupt the Peace–and receives a mysterious envelope containing a photo of his deceased brother. The book roughly takes the shape of a mystery novel, as Dan attempts to uncover who sent the envelope and what it means. But I was most drawn to it as a horror novel about the everyday terror of being around people who refuse to accept who you are. Dan has transitioned since his last time at home, and his family, while occasionally well-meaning, largely makes no attempt to support him. I was struck by scenes where Dan, attempting to uncover clues about the envelope, eavesdrops on family and friends who misgender and deadname him. I think of it as a trans horror where the horror is so mundane but omnipresent it can’t even really be named. It’s just there–impeding Dan’s every attempt to solve the mystery at the center of the book.

What I’m reading and loving right now:

Tanya Bush - Will This Make You Happy

William Faulkner - Absalom, Absalom

Vera Blossom - How to Fuck Like a Girl

Aimee Groth - The Kingdom of Happiness

All Culture is Fast Casual Now

A few days ago, while texting with Sarah, I said it’s becoming harder and harder to read a piece of criticism without imagining a propeller hat on the author. At the time, we were talking about the attention directed to American Canto, which was originally silly and pulpy but had since devolved into a sad, vindictive spectacle. I dubbed it Schoolyard Criticism. Everyone was stepping up to loft an insult at Nuzzi.

The publication of American Canto seemed like an eclipse-level event, the type of publishing cycle that mid-list authors like myself can only hope to weather and survive. I get why a magazine would cover the book—they’re all hunting for views. But I could not understand why an author who was not assigned to write about Canto would willingly write about it, even to eviscerate the book and its author. I’m not immune to any of this. I’m writing about her in a piece about how we shouldn’t write about her!

But all coverage of Canto was time taken away from superior books. And the coverage risked turning the memoir into a commercial success, the kind of book readers pick up with rubbernecking intrigue. I have, thankfully, been proven wrong–American Canto flopped both critically and commercially, perhaps because of its negative coverage.

The issue goes beyond Nuzzi. You can see it in countless year end-of-year lists where the same books and movies and songs reappear like churned worms from a mother bird’s beak, or in celebrity reading lists, where we all pretend that Obama actually hunted down the books on his list. Even worse: we don’t pretend! We call bullshit on the lists but still want to be on them—at least I do.

And this shapes what I consume. I’ll read a book getting excellent coverage and discover that it’s overwritten and dull—yet I still read to the end. The TV show everyone loves has no idea it’s TV. That brave new essay about marriage or dating or fucking performative men? It could’ve lived an excellent life in the group chat. A thinker I used to admire just published a book claiming Taylor Swift, one of the richest artists working today, is a victim of patriarchal disparagement akin to Sylvia Plath. This is the true art of cruelty: expecting readers to accept fast-packaged ideas as genuine thinking.

I don’t subscribe to the theory that everyone is twelve. This puts too much blame on consumers. And most people are smarter than we give them credit for. People can understand Shakespeare; they will flock to strange, unparalleled work if given the chance. But rarely are they given a chance.

The problem is not that we are all twelve but that culture is becoming fast casual. We are living through the Chipotleification of the American Mind. The movie is just good enough to fall asleep to on a plane; it stars actors scooped out of room temperature tubs. The novel is filling but flavorless, dressed in a long squeeze of ambiguous lyricism, its ideas and characters tossed together glumly in a large metal bowl. Every viral essay reminds you of an essay you read at another magazine. Each new thing is a little bit different from everything else but bad in the same way, a new expression of elevated slop with no intention of making you feel or think anything new. I can’t imagine any review of American Canto might say anything especially different from the last, yet each review appears like a chain in a strip mall, the Chipotle beside the CAVA beside the Just Salad beside the Panda Express.

But culture is trending toward fast-casual for the same reasons restaurants already have. We’re busy. Because we’re busy, we’re lazy. I love a Panera salad on the days I go into the office, just like I love watching Netflix when I’m too tipsy to think. But if you live off fast-casual books and criticism and movies and music, soon it will be all we have—and all that we know how to consume.

Fast Casual culture is my top grift of 2025. But there are others. So, I put together a guide to 10 other grifts of 2025. I also recruited some decidedly ungrifty writers to share theirs1. Thanks for reading!

2025 Grift Guide

Pluribus

Come on. We can’t be serious, right? I was game to love this show, but I’ve been bored to exhaustion every time I watch. The pacing is arduous. Every episode features 10 minutes of people completing chores. This is a perfect show for when you need to catch up on your texts.

Hating an Author’s Book Tour Persona

I’m absolutely guilty of this. I’ll see a writer expressing deep, theatrical vulnerability in front of a camera and conclude the author is faking it to sell books. Duh! That person is selling a book. And I would, undoubtedly, act the same way if given a chance. But it’s not me in front of an audience, and I’m jealous. It’s time to stop hating authors for how they promote their books and get back to hating them for the right reasons: their personality and the quality of their prose.

Dating is So Bad Right Now

It’s true, dating sucks, and the apps are a huge problem. The aforementioned Sarah wrote an excellent piece about this crisis last year for Harper’s Bazaar. Some people are catfishing, others are cheating, the algorithms are locking the hottest people behind paywalls, and everyone’s ghosting or getting ghosted. But I say this as someone raised by a single mother who dated a lot when I was a child: be grateful that you got ghosted. Every generation gets the fuckboi it deserves. And I assure you, our ghosting fuckbois are better than the alternative. You might marry a pathological liar.

My Car

I bought it for like 9 grand thinking the price was okay but the thing keeps breaking and needing new parts and every few days I’m forced to fill it with gas. And then there’s insurance. And registration. All those added costs should be included, in brackets, next to the price of the car. Driving, however, is awesome–especially passing people on small country roads.

Smash burgers

Anytime someone hypes a restaurant by telling me they have really good smash burgers, I know they have been compromised. Smash burgers are not good. They are not cheap. They are expensive for what they are: frail, diminutive patties shaped like paws. It’s phlegm cooked to a crisp slathered in a chunky, unredeemable sauce. Smash burgers are an invasive species.

Literary Parties

I love a party. And I understand why so many organizations have turned to galas, in part, to fundraise after the collapse of the NEA and other sources of financial support. But if everyone is throwing a party then no one is throwing a party. And too often, literary parties fall into the Fast Casual trap, each one aspiring to the same safe, chic styles. When will New Directions put on a house party? Why isn’t The Yale Review throwing a kegger in a field?

Authenticator Apps

Who even thinks of these numbers?’

Acquiescence

From TV studios to universities, this was the year institutions took turns acquiescing to fascists. This doesn’t work! It shows the regime that you will, in the future, do whatever they want. I’ve never put much trust in these institutions—they only ever follow trends—but the haste with which broadcasting companies, colleges, and companies enabled their own censorship and demise was one of the most depressing trends of the year.

Washing Your Face

I went 36 years without a regular face-washing routine. That changed this year. And my skin has only gotten drier, and baggier, and I’ve lost 5 minutes every morning and night making myself look a little bit worse.

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Grifts from Friends!

Time shrinkflation

Google Maps underreports traffic, the flat payout breaks down to a sorry hourly rate, the New York Times claims it takes 5 minutes to prep salmon. I’m generally amenable to the psychedelic moiré of shifting spacetime, but this year it felt like my time was being repackaged and sold back to me in a bum deal.

Aiden Arata is the best-selling author of You Have a New Memory.

Hating exclamation marks in essays, texts, emails, etc

To me, this is the ultimate identifier that a person leads a fabulously dull existence. Only the most Grinch of a person would feel like exclamation marks are “too much.” People who roll their eyes at them make me feel insane. Life sucks so fucking bad, let me just feel something, okay? Even if it’s too much shitty punctuation! I would like to add 15 more onto every sentence I’m sending you right now, so here we go, exclamation mark!!!!!!!!

-Kristen Arnett is the author of the lesbian fuckboi clown novel Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One.

To-Do lists

Stop being judged by to-do list hustle culture and open your one wild and precious life to the possibilities of “to-done” instead. To-do lists are for unquenchable strivers! To-done lists are for realists! I chant smugly as I add to the list throughout the day. Just think, if a meteor was coming toward your window, wouldn’t you rather glance at your desk and die knowing you had triumphantly “Responded to four overdue voice memos” rather than that you still needed to “Call the furnace guy”? Same! To-do lists are the equivalent of helicopter parenting your inner child. Resist the idea that you are defined by what could happen rather than what, you know, is in the bag.

-Erica Berry is the author of Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.

One Battle After Another

It is Not Good!

-KB Brookins is the author of Pretty.

Piaule

A “landscape hotel,” by which I mean shipping containers plopped on a barren stretch of the Catskills. My husband and I had the privilege of shelling out 500 bucks a night to “immerse ourselves in nature” after we got hitched. Complete with a surly little spa sans cold plunge and persnickety desserts like “deconstructed tiramisu,” which I was forced to reconstruct.

-Tanya Bush is a writer and a baker in Brooklyn. Her narrative cookbook, Will This Make You Happy, comes out in March and is available for preorder.

Prestige TV/Film

A major studio plonks a big star (or 10) down into the driver’s seat of a plotless, meandering hour long slog filled with 13 minute intro aerial shots and we’re supposed salivate at the thought! Or we’re supposed to tune in for 1.5 hour episodes about some 30-year-old teenagers in the ‘80s?! And why is TV host Jennifer Aniston negotiating international peace treaties?? Sitcom supremacy in 2026. And turn on the lights!

-Ashtyn Butuso is EIC of Flagrant Magazine and writer of OffBall’s daily newsletter.

BoJack Horseman

They should have cut out the middleman and had Will Arnett do a Brene Brown audiobook.

The Spaghet

To make this coy, thoroughly vile take on everyone’s favorite summer spritz, you pour off an inch from a bottle of Miller High Life and dump in a glug of Aperol. Congratulations, you have made a boilermaker for people who read The Cut. We’ve spent the last decade in the crimson grip of Big Italian Bitters, and while I enjoy a Negroni (or better yet, a Boulevardier) as much as the next person, you don’t need to ruin a perfectly good bottle of beer.

“Fade into You2” by Mazzy Star

This is Starbucks music.

-Willie Fitzgerald is a writer and editor living in Brooklyn.

Dubai Chocolate

With no disrespect to pistachio, tahini, and kadayif as culturally significant ingredients on their own, the barrage of marketing for “viral Dubai Chocolate” feels vaguely sinister. I mean, yes I tried it and it’s pretty tasty. I’m only human. But virality as a selling point does not even hint at quality, simply ubiquity. This year, some of the biggest cultural phenomena from Labubu to online sports betting to The Life of a Showgirl felt essential because of omnipresence rather than any specific benchmark for quality. It’s not that none of these things are good (although I would argue that at least one of them, in its current incarnation, is actively bad), it’s just that we aren’t even supposed to think about whether they’re worthwhile; they’re simply inescapable. Monoculture by brute force. You’ve probably seen the tweet about this, but I can’t find it to include here. I don’t mind consensus, but if something’s going to be thrown in my face one million times a day, I’d love for the pitch to imply that people are at least enjoying that thing.

-Josh Gondelman a writer and comedian and his new special is “Positive Reinforcement”

Hobbies

This was the year I decided to set aside my judgment for the culture of “hobbies” and try some out. Last December, I told my friends that I had decided to enter my “wholesome era” and was thus giving up on dating/sex (this was obviously a lie and a cry for help, but my friends, being very kind people, indulged my derangement). I bought a sewing machine. I signed up for tennis lessons. I took up mending and embroidery. I enrolled in an acting class. None of these endeavors lasted very long. Maybe that’s the nature of hobbies? You have to keep trying out new ones? I don’t know. I can’t keep doing it. Does anyone want my sewing machine?

-Jean Chen Ho is the author of Fiona and Jane.

Cosmopolitans

I’ve made too many fucking cosmopolitans at the bar this year, Carrie Bradshaw be damned. It’s NOT a good cocktail, but then again, Gen Z doesn’t know how to drink, so they probably can’t tell it’s not good.

-Jamie Hood is the author of Trauma Plot: A Life.

Dry Martinis

I made a resolution at the beginning of 2025 to be the woman I imagined as a young girl I might one day become: a martini woman. She’s got the palate of an octogenarian and the complexion of a 20-something. Her wit is like a knife and her nonchalance is hypnotic. She’s sexy, but made infinitely more so by her cocktail order: a martini, dry with a twist (read in the sultry voice of Eartha Kitt, please). Look, I love the sex appeal of the martini as much as the next person, but I refuse to drink a cocktail for (solely) aesthetic purposes. If you, like me, cannot sip a martini without wincing, here’s your permission to free yourself from the societal pressure to drink something that doesn’t taste good in the name of optics. Order that cocktail that’s maybe pink and maybe a little sweet and probably tastes so much better than a dry martini. There’s sex appeal in that, too.

-Leah Rae Hulgin is a writer who lives in New York.

Newsletters

Dry January

Gift Guides

Invoicing

Celebrity Book Clubs

-Maris Kreizman is the author of I Want to Burn This Place Down.

Kareem Rahma posting other people’s tweets on Substack Notes

Let me first say that I genuinely think Kareem is a really creative, smart, and funny dude. His shows lean into new technology and media containers without being corny or contrived. The only reason I’m hating like this is because I genuinely like his shit.

OK, with that throat-clearing out of the way — Kareem: you need to stop posting other people’s tweets/ memes on Substack Notes to engagement-farm. It’s totally insane. You are famous!!! You have the biggest short-form video show possibly in the world. You do not need to be the Fuck Jerry of Substack Notes.

Pluribus, Alien Earth and all other “What if The Robots are actually humans” media

Alien Earth had some of the more imaginative and scary monsters I’ve ever come across on TV. The alien eyeball that eats peoples brains through their eye socket?? Incredible. And yet most of the show was spent focusing on what is possibly the least interesting techno-moralist question of our time: Can Robots become people? No!! They cannot. There is an interesting technological question around “can we build a robot that functions like a human”, but I feel like I’m taking crazy pills when i’m asked to spend one second giving a fuck if that robot feels weird about being a robot. Same thing with Pluribus. Don’t care at all. Don’t get me started about Bladerunner 2049 either.

The CWSC (Central Williamsburg Slop Corridor) on N4th between Bedford and Driggs

What’s going on here? On this block alone, there is a Dig Inn, a Bond Sushi (the slop bowl of sushi), a Glaze Teriyaki, a Sweetgreen, a Just Salads, and a CAVA. There are functionally no other fast casual slop bowls in all of central Williamsburg. I’m not mad that they exist, I’m just totally confused as to why they are all on that block. It reminds me of how in Starcraft the Zerg can only build on land that has been covered in their purple zerg slime– so building clusters of zergling buildings helps them grow their empire.

-Harry Krinsky is the host of Nothing But Respect and a media consultant living in Brooklyn.

Hot takes on AI slop.

The only thing worse than the unfortunate, now, daily occurrence of encountering AI slop, is hearing people bitching and moaning about it.

-Heather McCalden is the author of The Observable Universe.

Bookmarks

I’m tired of the prissy attitude towards folding down book pages to hold your spot. First of all, it’s cute. It’s like a little map of how you read it last time if it’s a book you reread a lot. Second of all, I have accumulated one hundred thousand bookmarks over my one hundred thousand years on earth, and I have to put a stop to just politely accepting them whenever I buy a book at a store.

-Haley Mlotek is the author of No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce.

Laufey

Can you write jazz without the blues? If your answer is yes, then you probably like Laufey, a ubiquitous musician born from TikTok. She’s the zoomer version of Michael Bublé — the representation of a quietly retrograde worldview disguised under the veneer of diversity and the worst outfits you’ve ever seen. The music itself is made to be maximally inoffensive and algorithm friendly. In a previous generation, we used to call this “easy listening” but really it’s just music for people who don’t really like music. At least the Swifties have some conviction. Laufey fans have her Everlane collab.

-Kevin Nguyen is the author of Mỹ Documents.

Passports

After a year of people in America being deported to countries other than the ones that issued their passports, and of U.S. passport holders being detained by ICE, it’s hard to argue that passports aren’t overrated, at least in the American context (though I have no love of the global mobility regime they oversee and conduct elsewhere). Also overrated: Every heist movie released after Heat, with the exception of Set it Off.

-Elias Rodriques is author of All the Water I’ve Seen is Running.

SPHERE

This summer, I wrote about the Las Vegas Sphere (named simply SPHERE even though no one, except the depraved goons in the C-suite who care about these things, calls it that) where a bastardized, AI slop-ified version of The Wizard of Oz has been playing for the last six months. But Sphere Las Vegas encapsulates every 21st-century tech grift one can think of, from ubiquitous facial recognition surveillance software to dynamic ticket pricing to those stupid little drones you increasingly see in various “immersive” experiences and outdoor live shows. Sphere Las Vegas is a chamber of technological vapidity and greed. Also the seats are crammed close enough together such that the booming sound coming from massive speakers wasn’t enough to drown out the generous stream of farts escaping from the guy next to me. There’s a reason only washed legacy acts have agreed to stage residencies there. And there’s a reason why they’re building an identical location in the human rights capital of the world, Abu Dhabi!

-Nicholas Russell is the author of Observer.

Actual gift guides and the debased phenomenon of unforced auto-influencerfication. Products are not a personality

Straight men describing themselves as dominant on dating apps or in any circumstance, really (Citation)

Lazy/smug atheism

Gen Z slander. They’re no worse than any other generation and so far, they are funnier

America

Movies

-Charlotte Shane is the author of An Honest Woman, and co-host of the Bookforum podcast Reading Writers.

Text messaging

The worst invention of all time unless it’s my group chat — IG DMs, phone calls, and emails are wonderful and the only way to fly, as each draws out the right concentrations of looseness/involvement for their format. I like my friends too much to worry about the timing and level of response I’m able to offer by engaging by way of an endlessly buzzing phone, a phone that’s never satisfied even when I acquiesce: The more texts you answer, the more there are.

-Arancini Spangle is an editor and sequined Italian rice ball.

Miu Miu Miutine

My workplace got sent literally THOUSANDS of samples before the launch of this perfume, each one was individually wrapped in plastic... maybe smelling this off a passerby would have been alluring and elegant, but this garish gourmand infestation obliterated my ability to smell for about a month, was a micro-catastrophe for the environment (store and otherwise). My antidote to this is Egyptian Musk Oil...it’s $20 and every time I wear it, pretty girls stick their nose in my neck and tell me I smell AMAZING :)

People hating on the Frankenstein adaptation because it took license with the plot and was a little sappy.... key word adaptation!

Birthday gifts with no cards :(

-Swati Sudarsan is a writer from Michigan, now based in Brooklyn. Also, she is a libra.

Sunglass etiquette

Just let me fucking wear them when it’s cloudy out without a little quip, it’s fine.

Great restaurants

This is more of a complaint about lines, but nothing--nothing--on this earth is worth waiting more than 20 minutes for. Whenever I see people waiting in line for a restaurant, I think of little ducklings lost out in the cold. Just go grab a sandwich.

The term “baby moon”

I’d not heard of this until recently, but the phrase is both senseless and unsettling.

Salmon

Haven’t we all had enough?

Hating small talk

This trait doesn’t make you roguish and charming, it makes you unaware of the fact that small talk is just a portal to interesting conversation. More provocative ice-breaker-type questions too often feel tryhard.

-August Thompson is the author of Anyone’s Ghost.

Muses

The idea of someone’s artistic oeuvre being derived from or inspired by one source, often a person, is, well, uninspiring and anti-worker. The most conspicuous examples exist in film: Scorsese and DiCaprio, Scorsese and DeNiro, Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullman, Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, the Coen Brothers and Frances McDormand, and Chloe Zhao and white people. This year, the director-muse canon added another entry with Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’s fourth consecutive film with Emma Stone as the lead (plus one short). I haven’t seen his last two movies, but I thought Stone’s Oscar win for Poor Things was undeserved. Her nomination was correct, but it was the year of Sandra Hüller’s powerhouse performance in Anatomy of a Fall (and Annette Benning’s in Nyad), which should have prevailed over a collection of beautifully edited shock-acting scenes. Nevertheless, my beef today isn’t with #OscarsSoWrong but with filmmakers who cannot work outside of what they know. They’re touting artistic collaboration and familiarity while simply upholding a system of spoils and laziness. Imagine if your team manager selected Bob to be the tech lead for all future projects because he knows Bob well and because Bob catalyzes him creatively? And it’s true; your manager and Bob might very well knock it out of the park each time. But you, too, want to be a tech lead. You, too, want “exceeds expectations” in your year-end evaluation. Well, every time Almodovar casts Penelope Cruz, somewhere in Galicia or Andalucia there’s an aspiring talent living on a handful of euros from community theater and street juggling tips. Whenever gay directors cast Josh O’Connor or Paul Mescal for all the gay roles that Ben Whishaw hasn’t already scooped up, I wonder about the panoply of young queer actors who can’t get a foothold in the industry. Don’t get me wrong, Emma Stone is brilliant and will have no problem finding work until Hollywood ages her out—let’s see if Lanthimos still loves her when she’s 40. Lanthimos is a superb director, who could easily broaden the pool of talent (and workforce) by giving other actors opportunities. (Yorgos, meet Alfre Woodard.) The hundreds or thousands of wannabes pounding pavement for paychecks must find an already thin array of opportunities even more diminished and disheartening when our most prolific and lauded filmmakers choose to work with the same actors film after film. Wes Andersen is also guilty of this, but at least he employs Earth’s entire population in each of his movies. The answer isn’t for Scorsese to never hire the same person twice, but how about giving Sharon Stone (not Emma) another crack? And DiCaprio doesn’t need to retire, but does he need to be everyone’s muse? Not only Marty’s, but Quentin’s too. And soon, he’ll be Paul Thomas Anderson’s go-to lead, which begs the question, Why hasn’t PTA cast his wife, Maya Rudolph, in one of his masterpieces? Get that queen an Oscar!

-Alejandro Varela writes books. His most recent is Middle Spoon. His most popular is The Town of Babylon. His most underrated is The People Who Report More Stress.

Anonymous Grifts!

Generative AI

Using generative AI for anything creative is a total grift. I don’t even want you to send me an AI generated image as a joke anymore. I don’t want to read an interesting dialogue you had with Chat GPT. I have zero respect for any artist that uses it in any capacity. It is so obviously corporate poison. Grow a spine.

This thing where people are constantly complaining that “we should all party more” and then convening straight up panels about “the death of partying” or throwing what you think are parties but are just brand events to ameliorate this imagined problem from exactly 6:30 to 8:30 pm on a Monday

I don’t think you guys know what you mean when you talk about partying. Partying is doing drugs and getting drunk with people you love, people you hate, and weirdos whom you cannot link and build with in one conversation. The people who are doing that kind of partying just aren’t talking about it and they are certainly not inviting you.

Dubai Chocolate

I mean disrespect to the just, morally honorable city of Dubai when I say this luxury chocolate is the sweetest scam of the year. Overhyped and overpriced, this treat is not for the people. It contains literal gold, which adds no flavor, just another justification to charge more. I don’t even think the ingredients are bad together. It’s the melty flaky principle of it. Dubai Chocolate wasn’t only shoved into the mainstream by influencers, it created a new subcategory of influencers who only do these specific reviews. My review? This stinks.

Dogs

You can have a dog or a life, not both.

Karaoke

Caviar (it’s essentially salt).

Hamnet (the film).

Parties between the hours of 6 and 9pm with no food.

Email

Marty Supreme

Striving

Virtue signaling your departure from Spotify

Galley brags

N/A Aperitifs

Tomorrow, Thursday November 13, I’ll be teaching my novel openings seminar. The class is on Zoom and runs from 6 - 8 pm ET.

If you’re struggling with the first chapter of your novel, wondering how to make the opening more engaging and clear, this class for you! It’s one of my favorite seminars to teach. We read the opening pages from a few excellent novels–Giovanni’s Room, Luster, The Virgin Suicides, among others–to look at how the authors keep readers engaged. In the early pages of a novel, writers tend to convey information through three primary modes: factual, emotional, and narrative. We’ll talk about how those details inform each other, build out the stakes, deepen character, and so much more. You can sign up here.

Against The Insecure Sentence:

Over the last few years, I’ve been haunted by something I call The Insecure Sentence. The Insecure Sentence is endemic to the early draft. We have all written them. I write them quite often in drafts, and many get as far as final revisions before I’m able to pluck them out. The structure of The Insecure Sentence goes something like this.

Jerry was late to his job at the deli–well, technically, it was a gas station that sold hoagies.

Isabella had always wanted to be a dancer–though in reality, her mother was the one who pushed her to dance.

Eleanor wore her burgundy jacket to the date; actually, the jacket was more of a maroon.

I could go on. I don’t want to include actual examples for two reasons. One: I brought very few books with me to Vegas and can’t find examples in the books I brought. Two: I don’t think most writers are at fault; it’s more of an editorial issue. That said–writers can pay closer attention when they revise their work to cut out insecure sentences.

The Insecure Sentence arises out of indecision. The writer wants it both ways–who doesn’t. They want the impact of the initial claim (Jerry works at a deli) and its complicating detail (the deli is actually a gas station).

Rarely does the second detail genuinely complicate anything for the reader. Instead, it wastes the reader’s time. Best case scenario, it sets up an expectation solely to undermine it. Worst case–which I find more common–it’s a sign the writer doesn’t know which detail to choose. This is especially true in sentences like my final example, where the writer just needs to make up their mind: is the jacket burgundy or maroon?

Most often, I see insecure sentences when I’m working with novel clients and with students on their drafts. It makes sense to see these sentences there; the writer is still working out which direction to go in. Increasingly, though, I’ve found these sentences all over published novels, from writers I genuinely admire, and I feel like I’m losing my fucking mind. The Insecure Sentence is SO easy to fix.

Jerry was late to his job at the gas station.

Isabella’s mother pushed her to be a dancer from a young age.

Eleanor wore her maroon coat to the date.

The rare occasions when this sentence structure works well, or when it’s required, is when the author wants to convey a unique detail about the character. This structure can help reveal when a character is hiding something.

Jerry was late to his job at the gas station, though he preferred to tell people he worked at a deli. It sounded fancier. And didn’t he make a few sandwiches every shift?

Isabella had always assumed dancing was her passion, but recently it had become clear her mother had forced her to dance as a child.

These aren’t the best sentences, I know, but both offer windows into their characters’ psyches. They give us access to the larger scope of their lives. The earlier versions might suggest these details, but in my mind, they leave too much for interpretation.

Writers: Stop doing this! Make up your minds!

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Recent Movies Ranked:

1. Die My Love

Excellent performances—Lawrence is superb, Pattinson’s always one of my faves—and gorgeous to look at. Could’ve watched the breeze blow through the grass all day. But weighed down by repetitive escalations and fakedeep surrealism. I was desperate to like this movie more than I did. I suspect I need to give it another shot.

2. Bugonia

I’m very much a Lanthimos stan. But my sense is he no longer understands what is interesting about his work. He’s a stylist; the pleasure of his films is how people speak to each other, with the cadence of formality and the content of cruelty. His despair is not very interesting, especially without the stylistic flair of the dialogue. This movie, unfortunately, leans into the latter.

3. Peter Hujar’s Day

I wanted My Dinner With Andre and I got an art house version of a Taylor Swift full access documentary. Feels like a passion project, the movie a director makes after making a hit. At its worst, it’s self-congratulatory tedium; at its best, it’s overhearing a stranger talk about lunch. Patrick Nathan had more cogent thoughts about the film. Don’t watch if you’re sleepy.

Gladwell is undoubtedly more skilled at signing books than I am. He has a lot more practice. But I’m very competetive, and I love being an underdog. So I wrote to Gladwell’s speaking agency and challenged him to a book-signing competition. I proposed that we sell tickets to the event to raise funds for organizations of our choosing. In the email, I offered to support orgs helping protect trans people under the second Trump administration and invited Gladwell to pick a charity of his own.

Gladwell–who recently stated that he, one of the most prominent journalists working today, was “cowed” into supporting trans-inclusive sports–has not yet responded. Perhaps, despite his decades of practice, he finds this competition unfair.

Dick Cheney died today. It’s also election day in NYC. Go Zohran!

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Leah visited Vegas a few weeks ago, the week before I sold my new book. The first night we bopped through my haunts in downtown Vegas.

At Esther’s, Tucker hooked us up with small pours of a tequila they just put on the menu, and we ended the meal with free sips of amaro. At Liquid Diet, we talked the bartender in letting us split a horseradish shot, the drink they’re known for, which comes with a chaser of clear tomato juice. I normally hate horseradish but the shot lived up to the hype, a bit like taking a shot of a knife, but the tomato juice was perfect follow up, uncomplicated and pure. At Dustland, I knew none of the bartenders, but I ran into Cornelius, who works at Nocturno, between trips to the photo booth, where Leah and I gathered an album’s worth of pictures.

The following night we tested The Strip. I went once, about a decade ago during grad school, and only remember drinking some kind of yard marg at Senor Frog’s. This time Leah and I tried something classier. In the cab ride down, the driver gave us advice for navigating the casinos without ever stepping outside–it was raining, one of the few days of rain I’ve seen since I got here. As we got out of the car, the driver asked Leah if she was wearing a skirt, in an attempt, he claimed, to warn her about revealing herself as she stepped onto the sidewalk.

We had dinner reservations at Casa Playa in the Wynn but stopped off for a drink at Juliet, a cocktail bar in the Venetian. The cocktails at Juliet are, ostensibly, good, but I ordered a martini and the bartender made it shaken without asking, and what he poured me was a glass of ice crystals and gin. In a little cage at the front of the bar a woman sang covers of pop songs, while a bassist with a goatee and wide-brimmed hat obligingly strummed at her back.

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Casa Playa was excellent.

But The Strip left me sadder than I expected. It isn’t seedy or debased, not like the Jersey Shore of my youth, but there is something so generic the people who walked the casinos and the sidewalks. Outside, all the young people were trying to be hot in all the same ways, wearing the same styles of dresses, the men all dressed in uninspired expensive jeans. The Strip that I saw that night lacked novelty and creativity. And walking past group after group of friends, all of whom could have been interchanged for another, weighed me down with despair.

Leah and I trekked from the Wynn to the Cosmopolitan to try out The Chandelier, a three-story bar featuring diamondy encrusted chains that hang down from the ceiling, so a person can feel as if they’re drinking inside of a light fixture. The drinks were fine. The problem with most drinks in Vegas is that they’re so full of stuff, loaded with juices and tinctures and vodkas and sugar and sugar and sugar, so I ordered another martini–stirred this time–and Leah ordered a wine, and the drinks were okay. Leah and I made the mistake of sitting on the ground floor, where there is no view. A man close to us was getting a massage in his chair. It went on for a very long time. And when it finished, he paid the masseuse for another round. We left before he did.

The night after I learned about the book deal I took myself out for a solo drink. At Nocturno, I met a married couple, Ashley and Jacob, who started talking to me when I looked up from the book I was reading. People tend to talk to me at bars. I think it has something to do with reading alone. I don’t doubt that I appear a little bit helpless sitting at a bar by myself, trying to read in the dim. Though part of it, too, is that I don’t need anyone when I’m reading. The most attractive thing a person can do is not need anyone. This happened to me often, when I visited London last year–just about every time I read alone at a bar someone would start talking to me, or invite me to join their group.

I don’t mind. People are often more interesting than books. Ashley and Jacob were engaging and fun–and very in love. Jacob described himself as an appreciator of the arts, told me he grew up in a house full of local artists’ paintings; his father, I think, was a lawyer. Ashley was a musician. If I remember right, she’d just completed a brief tour of some kind. They were both on their second marriages. I asked each of them what they had loved about the first person they married.

Ashley and her mom were training to get their yoga licenses. Ashley and her mom were both workout fanatics. Ashley’s mom, Ashley told me, was once in a Bowflex infomercial, the one that played for an hour in the middle of the night. Jacob broke his collarbone using a Bowflex machine. I showed them my collarbone scar, and I let them touch the place on the scar where you can feel the screw head under my skin.

“Do you want to be friends?” Jacob asked.

I did.

Jacob was meeting some people at the speakeasy behind the ice cream shop across the street. Did I want to come?

I did.

To get into the speakeasy, you need to go into the ice cream shop. The cashiers in the shop were dressed in cashier outfits, yellow t-shirts or polos, maybe visors, but a hostess stood in front of a walk-in freezer door, clutching an iPad to her chest. Jacob told her we wanted a table for six. She demurred, she tapped around on the iPad, and eventually said she could seat us but we had to be out in an hour. Next time, she insisted, we should make a reservation.

The speakeasy was a rich forest green, loaded with cushioned green seats. I ordered a martini. Jacob told me he’d pay. He worked for a spirits company, so all of this was a write off for him, so long as we order his liquors.

Jacob’s friends arrived. One of them was a colleague. With her were two friends from college, or high school, I can’t remember. I told them my name and that I’m a writer and a few minutes later one of the friends of the colleague showed me People Collide on his phone, asking if I was that Isle. I am, I told him. He started reading it, right in the bar, and after a few pages he asked if I lived in Bulgaria. He did some work over there, a few years ago, and we shared stories about loving the country. At the end of the table, Jacob’s colleague was drinking a spiked punch out of a SPAM canister. She passed it around. We took sips.

Three sisters arrived. The eldest worked with Jacob. The three sisters ate together at a table in the corner as we finished our drinks. The sisters joined us at the next bar, where I stayed for about half a drink before walking home.

But a few days before that, I moderated a StraightioLab live show downtown. I’ve been a fan of the podcast for years. I wrote about it for Vulture, and appeared on the show in 2023, where I talked about the straightness of Lunch. The hosts, George Civeris and Sam Taggart, are two of my favorite comedians working today. They invited Nori Reed as a guest.

The show was held in a small theater in the arts district, essentially a black box. The lighting was off. Instead of aiming at the hosts, the light hovered brightly over the audience, illuminating the crowd, so that George and Sam could see everyone’s facial expressions as they cracked jokes. They played it off well—as well as they could. The venue was also short one microphone, and when Nori came out, they dropped the mics altogether. The show evolved hybrid of performance-and-conversation .

Nori’s straight topic was the nicknames that straight men like to use–dude, buddy, boss, etc. Nori had recently been dude-ed by a dentist, a little blip of transphobia from a man with his hands in her mouth. The audience weighed in with other words: hoss, champ, big guy. Nori proposed using the nickname killer for men, since they’re more likely to kill her. Sam was shocked that men actually called women kid.

The topic shifted to Vegas celebrities. Sam and George projected photos of celebrities, for a segment with Nori, where they asked her if these people had made it—”Is she there yet?”—but the audience intervened to speak about every celebrity, telling stories about Elvis and Celine Dion and Carrot Top. They named the restaurant where Carrot Top frequently ate.

I interviewed Sam, George, and Nori to close out the night. It was, after all, a university sponsored event, and many of the audience members were writing students or professors, so my questions revolved around the craft of joke-writing. I asked them how a comedian might stay relevant as they gain fame and attention. Nori talked about writing her first jokes after getting a big TV job, when she suddenly had way more money than she ever had in her career. She embraced the strange new reality. I referred to myself as trans rich, she said, and delivered a joke about wanting to go out to Nobu with friends who couldn’t pay rent. The goal, she said, is to invite the anxiety in, to discover what’s funny about what has changed, rather than pretending nothing has changed–a lesson for any artist as they grow throughout their career.

The Saturday after I sold the novel, I held an impromptu celebration with friends at Dustland. It was the day of the Las Vegas Book Fest. The panel I spoke on went well. As I mentioned in an earlier diary, a person I did not want to think about was also there that day–I successfully avoided her at the book fest, though I did, somehow, see her inside a taco shop later that day.

At Dustland, we all crammed into a booth. And I felt bad that I hadn’t gotten there early enough to snag a table, and felt worse because the outside–the main attraction at Dustland–was closed for a show. I’m terrible at letting myself be celebrated. I love the idea of it–I’m the one, after all, who proposed the night out. But I kept deflecting whenever anyone asked about the book, and as I repeated the story, the story grew shorter and shorter.

Lille showed up right as we were leaving but she joined a few of us at Silver Stamp, because I was told I needed to see the halloween decorations. It was crowded. But Tajja scored a table in the back. Severed heads hung from the ceiling. A clown spun above a cauldron. Behind the bar, a creature shook awake screaming every few minutes; a leaf creature jumped out of a bush, screaming as well. Against the back wall, there was a man inside a glass room, sitting in an electric chair, sizzling for passersby.

At our table, I ate chips off Tajja’s plate. Friends brought up the book fest, including the person I did not want to think about,

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Here’s a brief synopsis:

Set in rural New Jersey in the summer of 1995, during the heyday of satellite television, The Channel is a speculative love story centered on commitment, care, and regret. It opens with a dinner between a young married couple, Paul and Johanna, in which he asks for divorce. She refuses. Two years later, she is Paul’s sole caretaker. He was paralyzed while installing a satellite dish at work. Johanna’s life consists of repetitive tasks: dressing her husband, preparing meals, cleaning the house, gossiping with her best friend. Repetition prevents her from questioning her desire to stay in the marriage. What level of care does she owe the man who wanted to leave her? Who could she have been if she agreed to a divorce?

Johanna finds her answer flipping through TV stations. She discovers a show playing her life had she split up with Paul. The other Johanna lives in a studio apartment in Manhattan, working as an assistant on a late-night television show. She is also openly queer. Johanna is transfixed by her alternate self. As she obsessively watches the channel, her marriage and friendships disintegrate.

The novel takes inspiration from The Picture of Dorian Gray and classic novels of domestic ennui, like Madame Bovary, Revolutionary Road, and Mrs. Dalloway. But the emotional seed of the book is the story of my grandparents’ marriage. I grew up living next door to them, spending my evenings at their house while my mother worked. As a child, I loved to lounge with my grandfather in his adjustable bed, watching cartoons and baseball games beamed from across the country. Years later, I learned the complicated history of my grandparents’ marriage. Shortly before the work accident that would paralyze him, he asked my grandmother for a divorce. Like Johanna, she refused. She had grown up in poverty in the rural midwest; she was unwilling to lose the middle-class life she’d married into. After the accident, she spent the last twenty years of her life taking care of my grandfather. This book is my attempt to honor that care and give her the life she couldn’t pursue when she was alive.

I really love this book and I loved writing it. I was talking with my friend Nicholas the other day about writing, and how we both hate the old adage “I hate to write but I love having written.” No. I love to write. It’s how I think and feel through the world—it’s one of the rare places where I can slow down, get away from everything hectic and awful about the world today. Novels are sites of spontaneity and play and discovery. Another adage I hate, especially when it’s delivered by established writers to aspiring writers: If you can do anything other than write, do that. Haha. Hoho. No thanks. Yes, it’s nearly impossible to make a career writing books, but this advice not only has a gentle whiff of ladder pulling, it neglects the genuine pleasure of writing, treats it like any old job, one that simply pays less than answering emails for Raytheon.

Anyway—I loved writing this novel. The early pages felt like the captivating rush of a crush, when you wake up every morning excited to learn something new about the object of your desire. This kind of obsession is rare. And I know to not take it for granted. More than anything, what I’ve learned about novel writing three books deep, is that I can only write the books that invite me inside. I bailed on a couple novels between People Collide and The Channel because the books didn’t catch. I wasn’t in love. In other words, I couldn’t find a way into those worlds. Three books in, it’s become easier to sense when I’m not in love with a book. Perhaps it’s a little like dating—I know, now, what I want from a book, what kind of book will work best for me, the kind of book that might love me back.

ON SUBMISSION

It was not a sure thing, though. A few weeks ago, Marya (my agent) and I agreed to turn down an offer from my previous publisher and go on submission. I really loved my editor there—I worked with him on my first two novels—but I was curious about other houses.

I hadn’t been on submission since The Atmospherians, 5 years ago. That submission process was comparatively easy because I was going through a divorce, and submission felt like a mild nuisance compared to the breakup. In the lead up to submission this time, my agent made no attempt to hide what might happen. Everyone might love it. Everyone might hate it. It was a risk, going wide. But it was a risk both of us wanted to take.

There were passes and there were enthusiastic responses. Marya showed me the enthusiastic responses; I wasn’t ready to look at the passes. But from the beginning, Lindsey at Viking seemed to just get the novel.

Ten days after we went on submission, I flew to New York with Leah—she’d been in Vegas to visit, an amazing trip I’ll soon write about here—because I needed to get some car documents signed. But the timing worked out, and I was able to meet with Lindsey at the Viking offices.

In 2020, I was living at home in New Jersey, unable to meet with any editors in person. I took calls over the phone while taking notes at a bedside table in my childhood bedroom. The experience with Viking was entirely different. Marya and I met with Lindsey in a conference room, alongside a full crew from the Viking team. They praised the book, they told me how they would position it, glasses were complimented—but most importantly, we discussed how Lindsey and the rest of the team imagined the book through edits. I am not the type of writer who thinks their writing is perfect. I love to be edited. I can’t really think of an instance where an editor made my work worse. More than I admired their vision for the book on the market, I admired their commitment to making it better.

After the meeting, Lindsey and I went out for coffee at a half-underground bar in midtown that I’ve been to on many occasions—it’s my go-to fuck I’m stuck in midtown location—though I can never remember its name. We talked life and books but quickly got into edits. “I think this book is good,” I told her, “but I want an editor who can help make it great.” She told me about receiving a very polished book on submission, loving the novel as-is, then proceeding to leave roughly 2,000 edits on the manuscript. Right into my veins, I thought.

The decision was easy. Phone calls were made. Emails occurred. And Thursday afternoon, Marya told me we had an offer from Viking. I’ve been totally blown away by the commitment and enthusiasm, and I, like the freak that I am, can’t wait to dive into edits over the next coming weeks.

NEW CLASS

Speaking of edits and novels: I’ll soon be teaching my Novel Openings course. This time, through The Shipman Agency. The class is on Thursday, November 13 from 6:00 - 8:00 pm EST. This is one of my favorite classes to teach. I hope you can make it! It costs $75 to attend and scholarship applications are due by November 3.

COMING SOON

Next week, I’ll have a new Vegas Diary, with stories about an ice cream speakeasy (they make you enter through the walk-in), Leah’s trip to Vegas, halting conversations by telling the truth about someone, and a new friend whose mom was in a Bowflex infomercial.

ciao ciao,

isle

At a bar called Velveteen Rabbit, where all the cocktails have too many ingredients, the bartender and a man are discussing his most recent breakup. The bartender consoles him. The man won’t have it. “It’s for the best,” he says. “She had a terrible habit of marrying my clients.”

I was wary of coming to Vegas. In the weeks leading up to the fellowship deadline, I tried to talk myself out of applying, even though I’d completed all the materials. The day before I submitted, I told a friend I wasn’t going to apply. She convince me to apply anyway, I’d already done all the work. At every step of the process, I considered removing my name. I have coyly dubbed this The Power of Negative Thinking–don’t let the universe know what you want! But in all honesty, I was scared to move here.

A person I don’t like to think about is connected to this city. In the days before I applied for the fellowship, I agonized over whether I’d run into this person. My understanding of Vegas was shaped by this person, and I couldn’t imagine living in a city defined by the stories they told me about it. But when I was offered the fellowship, I accepted, for both practical and emotional reasons. The practical reason is obvious: It’s rare for artists to receive this kind of no-strings support, and I am very grateful that I accepted this gig; I’ve been loving Vegas so far. Emotionally, I wanted to build my own relationship to Vegas, detached from the person I don’t want to think about.

The first few weeks are a success. However, over the last week, this person has come up quite a bit. This person is known for couching their selfishness in the language of moral complexity, a mess-maker who views their messes and harms through a fatalistic sense of self-abnegation, like a forest fire blaming its match. This person bought me a bike. It’s likely I’ll have to see them in passing at an upcoming festival.

I go to Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Las Vegas launch for her new story collection, Where Are You Really From. I know Elaine from New York. Years ago, she read for my reading series Debuts & Redos when her first novel was published. One afternoon, we shared chicken salad sandwiches in McCarren Park that she originally told me she had prepared but later confessed she purchased at Trader Joe’s. I have a grudge against Trader Joe’s–a grudge absent a reason, a grudge that has only intensified over the years because it’s irrational–so it’s a sign of my admiration for Elaine that I was willing to overlook her duplicity and maintain our friendship.

Elaine is in conversations with Tajja Isen, who recently published an excellent essay about the publishing industry’s “gambling problem.” The reading is held at The Writer’s Block, the bookstore beneath my apartment, very convenient for me, and I roll down 5 minutes before it begins. Elaine and Tajja are brilliant together, funny and charismatic, confidently resigned about the state of publishing now.

When the reading ends I walk us over to Jive Turkey–even though no one in Vegas walks–a bar ten minutes from the bookstore, where I’ve been going every week or so to solo read at the bar. Over drinks, we celebrate and gossip. At a certain point, a friend of Elaine’s asks the question many writers and friends of writers are asking these days: What is a writer’s responsibility in the midst of political turmoil? This friend isn’t a writer, and he asks the question with an almost pleading urgency, genuinely interested in how the artists at the table–Elaine, Tajja, KB, and me–might respond to this moment. Alexander Chee wrote a smart piece about this a few weeks ago. I recommend checking it out. I especially liked this passage, which accurately captures the humility required to put work into the world.

“To the extent that I have any influence on what happens in this life it is because I am writer. Because I wrote essays, stories, novels, poems, journalism, reviews. Did it fix the world? Not yet. Who knows? That isn’t in my job description that I know of but I get it, I get it. But maybe it helped someone fix themselves and that is part of the work and if we all do it then great, the work is getting done.”

This passage follows a longer paragraph, where Chee outlines the many ways he’s staying active: donating, calling politicians, signing petitions, etc. Chee’s essay is more nuanced and astute than anything I say that night or will say here. The truth is, I’ve begun to bristle at the question, as it seems to annoint art with superheroic powers and, at times, risks a sort of ahistoricism that fails to account for the artists who created during the atrocities that preceded our own.

I don’t fault the person for asking. I ask myself the same question, every once in a while. However, as someone who has committed myself to–forgive me–the life of the artist, I find myself most drawn to Chee’s “Who knows?” My response, this evening, is the response I’ve been giving for years: “An artist should do what Samuel Beckett did during World War II: Join the French resistance.”

This isn’t to say that books don’t matter–they do. I wouldn’t write them if I didn’t think they mattered. However, relying on art to do the work of politics, at a time when fewer and fewer people are engaging with art, seems like a naive and potentially fruitless endeavour–especially if the goal is to combat authoritarianism. A lot of the art that seems most politically engaged is that which anticipates and reflects. I’m thinking of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, or George Orwell’s 1984, or Margarett Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. I quote Atwood frequently, when asked about the role of art in times of crisis. Years ago, she gave a Q & A at my MFA program. Someone asked what led her to write so directly about politics. Her answer was something to the effect of, “Well, I was thinking politically, and that shaped what I wrote.”

I don’t think an artist can decide to be political or decide to resist in their writing, the way you might decide whether you want your coffee black or with milk. If an artist is engaged with the world, and its politics, then those ideas will seep into their work. And if they’re not thinking politically, or about the world, then they likely won’t create anything that responds to the moment–not, that is, with any insight or care.

So, what should a writer do? Confront the crisis as a person. And, as Chee notes, use whatever power you might gain through art to further amplify your political action.

My new novel is on submission. So I’m distracting myself with playoff baseball. Go Mariners!

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More than a decade ago–also during my MFA–I went to trivia. I was invited by other writers in the program. This was 2014, before every bar hosted a trivia night, and I left that evening confident I would never return to trivia ever again. I am not made for trivia. My knowledge isn’t in facts–it’s in emotional conundrums and witty retorts. If there were an emotional intelligence trivia, where teams had to decide on the best way to get over a breakup, I’d be there every week. But trivia demands both a fact-based intelligence and the sort of collective attention to a singular goal that prevents conversation. The one time I went, the few stabs I made to gossip were silenced as the team was brainstorming answers.

I don’t know what makes me go to Trivia in Vegas. Likely I’m lonely. It’s a Monday, and my night is expansive and empty. Lille invited me a few weeks ago with a promise of seeing a man named Ian answer every question for the team, as the rest of us hang around buying him drinks like acolytes sating a god. I avoided it for two weeks. But last Monday, Lille tells me the theme of the night was philosophy, and I’m eager to test what I’d retained from my own scattershot readings.

Trivia is hosted at a bar called Rebar on Main. Rebar is famous–famous to me at least–for its three dollar mystery beers. They keep a sign out front. The sign doesn’t explain what makes a mystery beer, as it shouldn’t. For my first drink, I order a nonmystery beer and find Lille and the team in the back. Our name, I learn, is [a picture of a butt].

It’s outside season in Vegas. The nights are perfectly cool, hovering in the 60s and 70s, and every outdoor table is packed with teams. Somewhere nearby a man was playing a flute between questions. Later, the same man will clutch a dildo. I introduced myself but the table decides it’ll be too overwhelming to dump all their names on me at once. “You can learn them as they come up,” Lille said

Viv, a tattoo artist, tells me about her ongoing series where she tattoos similar images for multiple clients, then takes a video of the images, to make it seem as if the tattoos are animated. Her next project is a series of slot machines and, as of last Monday, she still needs a few more bodies to finish the series.

Lille and I talk about reading and teaching. Over the speakers, songs from the 90s play, beginning in 1999. Each successive song is from the previous year. It’s our job to name the artists. I don’t name any artists. But Ian appears to know all of them. When a Smashing Pumpkins song plays, Ian brings up his favorite Simpsons joke–“Homer Simpson, smiling politely”–and I share mine–”I shouldn’t have stopped for that haircut”–and we share a spark of imminent friendship. Ian is a sports photographer, into horror movies, and the next night he’s gonna see Deep Red at the theater in my apartment complex, I should come. (I want to but don’t end up going.)

I answer no questions during the next round, which is a history fact sheet. But during the philosophy round I show out. I don’t know the first question–Who is the father of modern liberalism?–and remain silent as the group confirms the answer. But I nail the next 8, occasionally correcting incorrect guesses, though I stumble over a question about Aristotle: What is the name of the school he founded? My answer: The peripatetics. The answer: Lyceum. Though I will be awake the following morning, at 5, googling Aristotle school of thought, at which point I’ll learn that I was right, sort of, and that the host should have clarified whether he was looking for physical school or school of thought. This kind of relentless competitiveness, in the face of meaningless facts, is another reason why I don’t play trivia.

I order a mystery beer but keep it in the bag, rather than unveiling the can, as most people do. I’m pretty sure it’s a weisse of some kind. I order a second and keep the second in its bag. It’s either the same beer or I can’t tell the difference between different beers. I talk to a couple about to get married. I talk to Ian about the Aces game he’ll be photographing the following day. I talk to Lille and then I leave, as I haven’t answered a question in nearly half an hour, and I want to go out on a high.

Outside, the air is perfect, the sky is empty, and I’m reminded of a dark ominous cloud I saw in the sky a few weeks ago, with Nicholas, as we were leaving Silver Stamp. Tonight the ominous cloud is nowhere to be seen.

The comedian Natalie Rotter-Laitman has a joke about bangs I bring up too often. It’s something like, Bangs never really exist in the present. They are either a memory of the time you had bangs or the decision to get bangs in the future. The same can be said of Las Vegas.

The night before my birthday Leah and I walk around the Fremont Experience, a sort of starter strip bankrolled by the former Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh. The Fremont Experience was built, in part, to revitalize Downtown Vegas. Though I still haven’t made it to the strip, Fremont feels less like how I imagine the strip and more like Times Square with a zipline, or like the Jersey Shore of my youth, crowded with drunk, shuffling quartets of buddies and families posing for photos with dancing labubus, a site of weathered glitziness and ten-dollar T-shirts proclaiming one’s acumen for eating pussy.

Performers line the thoroughfare, contained to circles painted on the ground, and venture out only to summon passersby into their photo-opp plots. They have the appearance of holograms in a Star Wars movie. One man in his forties giggles past a woman cracking a whip, telling a friend he wants nothing to do with her, then he circles around and giggles past her again, as uncomfortable with his desires as a middle schooler teasing their crush. Two shirtless hunks loft up a woman holding an American flag as her mom takes a photo. Drinks are either four dollars or forty. A family of five poses in the center of the thoroughfare, smiling for a stranger holding the father’s phone, and all I can think about is how the kids in the picture will later look back on this moment: Will this photo hang on their fridge throughout their youth, will they bring their own children back here in 30-odd years to reclaim whatever they feel on this night?

I, too, see myself remembering this night in the future–my first night in Vegas–that future memory holding onto this moment with more force than the moment itself. Vegas is one of those places that is exactly what people say–cities like New York and Paris. Because it aligns so closely to what you expect, it’s hard to live outside those expectations. It’s like living inside a commercial for both your memories and your plans.

***

The night of my birthday Leah and I go out for drinks at a bar called Nocturno. It’s a cocktail spot in my neighborhood. We arrive right when it opens, at five, and receive a long rundown from the bartender about their menu. It’s an exhaustive and enthusiastic list, with over a hundred drinks, we are told many times, a list that constellates dozens of variations around a dozen or so standard cocktails. It will soon become my favorite bar in the city.

I go back a few nights later, after Leah returned to New York, and do my damnedest to read an arc of Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs over a drink. Little electronic candles rest intermittently on the bar, and I tilt the book in such a way to illuminate the pages, but the candles provide too little light, and eventually I give up.

As I’m leaving, a woman seated next to the exit compliments my earrings, and I compliment hers. They’re disco balls, she tells me, in honor of the large disco ball she used to carry with her at all times.

“In your hands?” I ask.

“Now I carry a smaller one,” she says. “I’m no longer a size queen. My back couldn’t take it.”

I admire a person aware of their limits.

***

Ever since reading Garth Greenwell’s excellent essay on Sabbath’s Theater in The Yale Review, I’ve been trying to track down a copy of the novel. I refused to buy a new one. With older books, I prefer to stumble on them in used bookstores. Buying an older book should feel a little bit fated. It doesn’t happen in Brooklyn. But when I check into my apartment in Vegas, a copy is resting on the bookshelf in the kitchen.

Over my first week, I can’t get enough of the novel. The prose is crisp and swallowing, the dialogue taut and enraged. In an early, perfect scene the protagonist, Sabbath, masturbates on his dead lover’s grave and runs when he hears someone approaching. The person who approaches? Another lover, who masturbates on her grave. It’s a grotesque portrait of grief and possessive desire so unlike anything I’ve ever read. I text last year’s fellow, Alejandro Heredia, to ask if I’m reading his copy–I am.

Two weeks later I give up on the novel during a scene in which Sabbath gripes to a student he’s fucking that her attraction to his mind is making him feel “mentally harassed.” I already have a low tolerance for teacher-student relationships in fiction, and no tolerance for jokes that, however representative they might be of the character, are of such dogshit quality they chip away at my respect for the author. I confess to Alejandro that I’m giving up on the book. He confesses that he did the same. We quit within 20 pages of each other.

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***

I cannot account for my days. I’m still running on east coast time. I wake up most mornings around five and rumble around in bed on my phone, fighting for pillow space with Monty, before finally going downstairs.

These last two weeks I’ve been revising my novel based on my agent’s feedback. This is my favorite window of revision, when everything is about the book. I can stay in it for 8 or 9 hours a day, pausing occasionally to make coffee or work out in my living room. I eat the same thing every day. A smoothie for breakfast, a salad for lunch. I wash a whole head of lettuce and keep it in the salad spinner all week, packing handfuls into a massive bowl alongside cucumbers and snap peas and grilled strips of fake chicken. At this stage of writing, I crave repetition, and I’m lucky the fellowship allows me to live the same way every day.

***

I meet up with Lille, a visual artist and designer, for a drink before the opening of Brian Martinez’s Cosmic Chicano show at the Nuwu Art Gallery. Lille and I originally met in Florida, at our friends’ Kristen and Kayla’s wedding, and I’ve been looking forward to hanging in Vegas.

She takes me to a bar called Dustland that’s outfitted like a den in Joshua Tree and we talk about the art scene in Vegas, its small, enthusiastic cohort of artists who all show up for each other. Outside, I walk in the wrong direction, tractor-beamed by a blue Almodóvar tote bag I adore. Lille asks what I’m doing. I point at the tote. She knows the person holding to the tote. Lille introduces me to her friend and her friend’s friend. The friend of the friend is on her way to a show she’s performing. As we’re walking away, Lille tells me this is what it’s like living in Vegas, that everyone you know is always around, it has a very small town mentality.

Lille knows everyone at the opening, and though she apologizes for saying hello to so many people, I love it, a perfect introduction to the new city. I meet a guy on her trivia team, who informs me that he and Lille only go to give moral and libational support to a guy who knows every answer. Another artist, who grew up in Vegas, the child of a musician who routinely opened for Joan Rivers at casinos, tells me about growing up between hotels and green rooms before being interrupted by his kid. Me, Lille, and a painter named Sara make plans to see a movie in the future.

Afterward, Lille drops me off at Esther’s Kitchen, on Main. I’d walked past the restaurant a few times already, but it always seemed a little too packed to venture inside, too full of people celebrating vacation. But a few nights earlier, at Nocturno, I talked to a guy who works at Esther’s. He told me to come in sometime, and tonight is as sometime as ever.

There’s a 45 minute wait so I hang out at the cocktail lounge on the second floor, a little crow’s nest of a bar created for waiting. I read Johanna Hedva’s On Hell over a martini called The Aeroplane Over the Sea–an excellent dry gin martini.

I ask F, the woman twisting in her seat beside me, whether her chair might spin all the way around. She never tried. Fittingly, F is a hairdresser–and her hair was perfectly up, chop sticks peace fingering out of the bun–accustomed, perhaps, to chairs that spin 360 degrees. F and I talk about hairdressing and writing and love and life in Las Vegas–she’s been here a good chunk of her life, though she’s eager to leave. Her table is ready, and so is mine. We are seated next to each other at the bar.

F’s friend C is just getting back into town, as well, and he plans to join us on his way back from the airport. F and C have known each other since high school and have the long-running rapport of deep-knowing, a friendship that evolved through many seasons of life. C can’t get a spot at the bar, though, and has to find dinner nearby.

F and I share a big hunk of sourdough bread–Esther’s is known for their sourdough–and each order wide bowls of pasta. I get something gnocchi-looking in red sauce. F’s gets something delicious with crab; her noodles are green. I envy her meal–I’m a sucker for colorful food.

Eventually, C’s bar seat is ready, though he’s already eaten, and F and I have asked for our checks. T, the guy I met at Nocturno a few nights before, comes over to say hi. He’s the beverage director. He created the cocktail list upstairs and down–including the Neutral Milk Hotel martini, a reference he’s pleased that I know. He gives us us shots of amaro to welcome me to Las Vegas.

Me, F, and C walked down the street to Cornish Pasty, a British hot pocket joint. In the back parking lot, I meet Cave. Cave is taking photos of people wearing a pair of silver glasses. They look like late 90s Oakleys with clear lenses. I don’t know where Cave found the glasses, or why they’re important, only that he’s collecting photos. He asks me to take a photo and when I hesitate he shows me his camera roll, where hundreds of people are posing in his glasses. F takes a photo solo. Then me, F, and C all take one together.

We go inside for a drink. Though the front of Cornish–as F and C called it–is a restaurant, the back is a boothy pool hall, with a DJ in the corner and a photo booth that rarely stays empty. Vegas is a photo-booth city. Bars, casinos, movie theaters–they all have photo booths. When I tell Leah this, later, she makes a plan to take a picture in every single booth in Las Vegas.

C is too exhausted to drink. He’s only in Vegas for one night, before flying to Portland the following day for a friend’s birthday. He just finished an 8 week shift as a server on a riverboat cruise and is off for the next couple weeks. Most of the guests who go on this cruise are elderly people, he tells me. For many of them it’s their final cruise.

“Sometimes people die on the cruise,” he tells me. “Either from old age, or they just fall down.”

“What do you do with the bodies?” I ask.

“There are plenty of places to stop on the river,” he tells me. “It’s not like the ocean.”

“Of course,” I say. “It’s not like the ocean.”

Soon we’re all too tired and drunk and F has work in the morning and C has to get on a plane. Goodbye. Goodbye. I stop at Nocturno for a nightcap. The host gets me a seat at the bar. I try reading and must look so pitiful, with my electronic candle whispering light, that a bartender tries to adjust it, to prevent it from flickering, and though it makes no difference I continue reading out of stubbornness and gratitude.

I feel a tap on my shoulder. Beside me is T with his friends. I don’t have much left in me but I talk to a friend of T’s about novels, the book she wants to write, and then it’s too late for me, apparent the only way too late is ever apparent, with the suddenness of a tsunami. I wake up safely in bed the following morning.

I understand, of course, that writing a novel also takes a great deal of effort and revision and sitting. No one lets a novelist ever forget about all the sitting. These are all decidedly non-metaphysical acts. They require endurance and spreadsheets and Microsoft Word. But as a year becomes two becomes three, returning to the chair can take on a mystical quality. At its best, the act of writing is a form of communion. Most novelists know the sensation of the book or the characters taking over, when writing becomes a process of discovery.

I’ve been thinking about the metaphysics of writing because I had my tarot read Wednesday night—and by my tarot, I mean that my novel had its tarot read. My tarot reader is a woman named Angela, who goes by Mysdix. My friend Forsyth originally bought me a reading with Angela as a birthday gift last summer–Forsyth sees her every three months. The first time, I went in skeptical. Writing is the closest thing I have to a spiritual practice–I don’t pray, I don’t recharge my crystals, I rarely water my plants, I only learned my astrological signs to fit in at parties in Brooklyn. I delayed my reading for three months, but when I finally went, I was mesmerized. She recommended I record the session, and over the following weeks, I listened to it while washing dishes, while going for walks, on flights, trying to squeeze every last insight out of the session. I anticipated this latest reading, and dreaded it, too—how could it ever live up?

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After a week of frantic packing, me, Leah, and Monty leave the city on Wednesday night in the midst of a storm saturating the highways. Monty meowls in his carrier. The roads are thick and perilous; my tire pressure light keeps chiming on. The rain dries into stern slate clouds and we stop at roadside ice cream stand called Cliffs. I drop in every time I go home for a few scoops of Smurf. It’s vanilla ice cream dyed blue with chunks of chocolate and marshmallows. It’s a flavor for children. I’ve been ordering it since I was a child and just never stopped. Cliff’s has been around for 50 plus years, is known for lines that stretch to the edge of the highway on hot summer nights. But today it’s only me and Leah and a few teenagers and I order Smurf and Leah gets fluffernutter and in the car the check engine light flashes on when I press the ignition.

It’s a half hour drive to my childhood home. Jodi and Susan are sitting with my mom in the kitchen. They’re over to help bake cupcakes for Eleanor’s first birthday party the following night. Eleanor is a tiny white dog who pants in Jodi’s lap. After they leave, Leah and my mom and I all chat a little–it’s their first time meeting–and when my mom goes to sleep, Leah and I watch the first half of Ocean’s Eleven before conking out.

Thursday 8/21

We stop for breakfast at the Doghouse, a cash only deli close to my old high school. There’s a path through the woods from the school to the deli, past the fight rock, and just about every afternoon the Doghouse would crowd with teenagers ordering muffins and bagels before rushing to practice. This morning, I order egg, cheddar, and tomato on an everything bagel and Leah gets an egg-white wrap.

We’re trying to make it to Cincinnati to stay with Leah’s family. On the drive, I talk on the phone with my agent about my new book, which she just finished reading. Afterward, Leah and I swap out so she can take a call. We’re in rural Pennsylvania, climbing an incline that has no intention of leveling out, when the car starts trembling. I pull onto the shoulder. The engine lets out a smoke scent but doesn’t smoke. I give it a minute, check with Leah, we agree to try again.

The car enthusiastically shakes, even more dramatically this time, and I swerve into a gravel lot right before the entrance to a tunnel. A turnpike worker pulls over to check on us. Calls are made. A tow truck arrives. Monty remains in the car.

The driver, Jansen, has been towing for more than a decade. A hundred miles or hundred thousand–any car can break down. He recently towed a 2021 Tundra, a beautiful truck, home to a man’s house and then to the mechanic the following day. I tell Jansen that Leah and I are headed to Vegas. “Just because you buy a car to drive to Vegas doesn’t mean it’ll get you there,” he tells me.

On the ride, I call mechanics. Jansen recommends a spot but warns me they’ll likely be busy. I call. They’re too busy, but they recommend Hornick’s, who can see me first thing in the morning. Jansen tows us to a hotel in Somerset County. After he unloads the car, he crouches in front of the tires and tells me there’s no way they’ll make it to Vegas.

That night, Leah and I eat at Ruby Tuesday. She’s never been. The restaurant was a staple of my youth. When my eating disorder was at its worst, a friend and I would head there after school for the salad bar, piling croutons over greens, dressing it with whispers of balsamic.

Ruby Tuesday is half-empty and smells like fried fish, wherever you sit. It’s Tiki Thursday, and Mai Tais are six dollars, but I order a gin martini and Leah orders a large white wine. We both get the salad bar and split a burger I will later regret.

It’s easy to think Covid killed salad bar and buffet culture at large, but salad bar culture never should have existed, it has always attracted the coughiest, most curious-fingered among us, people who pick up and put back, people who struggle with tongs but continue undaunted, people who cannot tip dressing without drenching the bottle. No disease is deadly enough to turn a salad bar person against the salad bar. It’s like riding a motorcycle without a helmet. You don’t do it in spite of the risk–you do it because of the risk.

I love constructing a salad bar salad. I start with a wide foundation of mixed greens before adding a perilous row of sliced veggies, then a few novelty veggies—beets or corn or roasted broccoli—and finally a dollop of slaw before spiralling vinaigrette from the edge of the plate to the center. I never put meat on a salad bar salad; this is how I’ve survived for so long (plus, I liked to believe my teenage years inoculated me against whatever viruses breed between the bell peppers and cottage cheese).

The allure of a six dollar Mai Tai wins out, and I order a large–for one extra dollar–and it arrives in a pint glass, all orange and pineapple juice, sweeter than sherbet. It’s my first Mai Tai. And my last.

Back at the hotel, Leah and I swim in the outdoor pool. We’re the only ones here so we practice handstands and make out in the water until we start shivering. We fall asleep right away.

Friday 8/22

Hornick’s is a massive brown barn converted into a three-car garage tucked in the back corner of somebody’s yard. Trucks line a gravel driveway curved into a question mark. Next to the garage is a log cabin that appears to be under construction, the deck cluttered with ladders and sawhorses. I park in front of the garage. There’s a small niche built into the barn where you hand over your keys to the cashier. I hand over my keys, tell him I’ll wait to hear what’s wrong. He tells me to take a folding chair outside instead of sitting around in the corner. I sit on the chair in the gravel working on novel edits for a client. Half hour later, Dwayne has an answer. There’s an o-ring missing at the end of the dipstick, I think. I’m too naive about cars to comprehend what he tells me. Something about air, something about seals–this explains the shaking when I accelerate.

Dwayne feels the same way as Jansen does about the tires. He recommends a used tire shop across the street–if they don’t have them, Dumbauld’s should. Dwayne is an angel. I buy a Hornick’s T-shirt to commemorate the occasion.

The tire man across the street thinks he has tires my size but needs to check in the trailer. He checks once, then a second time, then asks a child in an Elmer Fudd Orange is the New Black T-shirt to check with him, because the kid’s eyes are better than his. No luck. I buy a new set at Dumbauld’s then pick up Leah and Monty and return to the road. Next stop: Cincinnati!

Leah drives me around the University of Cincinatti to show off her old haunts–the falafel spot, the coffee shop, a record store–before we head to her mom’s. Leah’s older sister and mom live together in their childhood home. The house is built into a hill and looks down only a lake shared with a few other houses.

Leah’s mom is a smart, excited woman who gives me a long hug when we meet. Inside, her sister tells me secrets about their father, who left more than a decade ago. Leah’s nephews are away for the weekend so we mill about without responsibilities, until Leah and I go to the market to buy cocktail supplies. On the way in, I impulsively play a crane game and win Leah a shiny stuffed frog on my first attempt. She names him Claude.

Back at her mom’s, I make martinis–perfects for me and Leah, a dirty for her mom, and a gin & tonic for her sister–and we share takeout while leaning over the counter. Leah’s mom wants to celebrate my birthday with paper lanterns but it’s too bright out, still, and we have plans to meet a friend of Leah’s downtown.

We pick up A outside a restaurant where she’s finishing dinner with her family then circle a nearby block three or four times before parking close to where we picked up A. At the bar, we sit on a small wooden patio, in the corner, A and I in chairs while Leah sits on a table. A just moved back to Cincinnati in the last year and tells us a bit about dating frustrations. Leah and I are engrossed, eager with empathy and advice. A is charismatic and charming; everything she says seems important and charged. Before we leave, A and Leah pose at the front door to Leah’s old apartment building.

Saturday 8/23

It’s an uneventful drive to Kansas. We stop in a town called Salina, unload Monty in the room then head to a sports bar called The Library. Inside, football is blasting. Everyone seated is facing a screen. I’m charmed by the bar. I’ve always had a soft spot for small town sports bars–though Salina’s the type of town I would’ve considered big growing up in rural Jersey.

Leah and I order wings and onion rings and I ask the serve about a side dish called Jimmy Beans. They’re made by a man in town named Jimmy. He drops them off at the bar in the mornings, and they slow cook the beans all day. We have no choice but to order. They’re a far superior variation on the canned baked beans Leah and I both ate as kids–sweet and lightly salty, thick fists of bacon bobbing next to the beans.

Back at the hotel I put on House Hunters, which is one of those shows you can only watch in a hotel or at the dentist. For years, I’ve been putting together a ranking of the best TV to watch in hotels. It should be illegal to stream anything in a hotel. The whole point of a hotel TV is to accept whatever the Cable Gods have provided. Hotel TV teaches humility. It is an antidote to grindset and striving.

Unofficial Ranking of Types of Shows to Watch on Hotel TV

1. Home Makeover shows

   • House Hunters, Fixer Upper, Flip or Flop (is this one real?)

2. Live sports (obscure)

   • Professional darts, table tennis, axe throwing, bowling

3. Reality shows about haggling

   • Storage Wars, Shark Tank, Pawn Stars

4. Action Movies

   • Transformers, Kong, The Day After Tomorrow

5. Live Sports (popular)

   • Football, basketball, baseball

6. Rom-Com/Drama Movies

   • Runaway Bride, Jerry Maguire, Trainwreck

7. Sitcom

   • The Office, Seinfeld, Friends

8. Morning News

   • Preferably local

Sunday 8/24

In Colorado, we stop for Panera. It’s our second time stopping at Panera on the trip. To me, it’s the perfect road trip lunch. I know I sound like an absolute simp for the bread bowl company. But I rediscovered Panera last fall while canvassing in Pennsylvania and have been aching to get back. There are a few in the city, but city Panera isn’t the same. Panera was created for the suburbs. The store needs to be too empty and large to meet its potential–city Panera’s lack the expansive that a Panera requires to be its best self. I order a salad from the kiosk because it allows me to add 5 extra toppings for free. Leah isn’t aware of this trick and regrets the salad she orders, practically naked compared to mine.

In Colorado, a storm swallows the highway in the mountains, and I drive with the concentrating silence of a sociopath, strangling the steering wheel with both hands–normally, I keep one hand in Leah’s lap when I drive–the wipers sliding manically over the windshield. I spend this stretch of the drive grateful that Jansen and Dwayne insisted I needed new tires. The storm lets up at the edge of the state and we stop at a rest stop under the highway, next to the river, which has been agitated by rain.

In Utah, the entire globe stretches before us. The rocks are the pale red of birch beer spilled on a dress. Scrubs of sage bush hunch along the highway like tufts of gray hair over a balding man’s ears. The mesas are ironed flat. As we drive deeper into Utah, the rocks darken into an ashy gray wrinkled like elephant skin.

We stop for the night in Green River, home to the world’s largest slice of watermelon. We visit before walking to the Tamarisk Inn across the street, where we get a booth overlooking the shore of the river. Our server is too young to take our drink order. “I need to get my adult server,” he tells us, then returns to put in the food.

After dinner, we sit behind the hotel listening in on a rave in a shack at the edge of the parking lot.

Monday 8/25

Vegas arrives earlier than I expect. I’ve only been to the city once, for a weekend in grad school twelve years ago, but both times the city surprised me, leaping out as if it had been hiding behind a rock. At city limits, I put on The Killers–Hot Fuss was the first CD I ever ordered online, and I remember so vividly the thrill of tearing open the package, the jewely blue cover inside.

Charlotte, the assistant director of BMI, meets us outside the apartment to hand over the keys. The apartment sits above an indie book store and an art house theater. Inside, I free Monty, who runs under the bed. Leah and I unload the car, then unload the boxes, then sit around doing nothing before venturing out.

We walk to a wine bar a block from the apartment called Velvet Vine. It’s empty inside. The overhead lighting is mean and obtrusive. Fake flowers rest on shelves hammered into the walls. Against one wall is a carpet of vines, a pink neon sign shouting out from the green.

We sit at the bar and talk to the bartender, M, a woman in her twenties who’s been living in Vegas for 3 years. She came here with her ex-husband, who was stationed in Vegas, but they went “Splitsville” once M realized there’s more to life than the boy down the street. She can be anything here, she tells us. She doesn’t need to be a house wife or a mom or whatever people expect of her. Leah is very happy for M. M is very happy for us, and for me, and for all I’ll discover in Vegas.

She pours us glasses of Prosecco with candy rims and toothpicked gummy bears resting over the mouth of the glass. The gummy bears are from Thailand, she tells us–not those cheap Haribo bears.

After drinks Leah and I see Honey, Don’t at a Regal in a casino. It’s a luxury theater, where the seats recline flat. The servers forget to bring us our drinks. The film is uninspired and confused; at times, it seems mad at itself for existing.

Back at the apartment, we crack open a vibrator sent to me by a PR firm–I’m not yet allowed to say what it is–and at midnight-oh-one, Leah wishes me Happy Birthday.

I’m 37. I’m now living in Vegas.

Life is fairly hectic right now. In a few days, I’ll be leaving my apartment in Brooklyn, where I’ve lived the last five years, to serve as a Shearing Fellow in Las Vegas. It’s not permanent–only a nine-month appointment. I’ll be back. But over the weekend, I had a small going away hang at Franklin Park. Leah ordered a beautiful cake from Losers–cigarette added later–and I gave a speech I cannot remember. A perfect night.

Earlier this week I bought a car–a Nissan Rogue, name tbd–at a small family-run dealership at the end of my block. During the test drive, Mo (one of the employees) and I talked about how much he loves living in Brooklyn, his favorite dessert spots in the East Village, and his lifelong love for cars. A few hours later, once we’d completed the paperwork, I asked Omar (Mo’s brother) if I could keep the car on the lot until the day before I left for Las Vegas. I’m not ready to deal with the hassle of street-parking. “Of course,” he said. “You’re my neighbor.”

I don’t doubt I’ll find similar connections in Vegas, but I’m definitely not ready to leave the everyday moments of community in Brooklyn: the neighbor who waved at me through my window when a cop threatened to ticket my rental, the book store that saved a sticker for me when I missed Independent Bookstore Day, the small local gym with queer lift nights on the weekends. I’ll miss my partner, and my friends, and Metrograph, and my biking routes–too many things to list here. Perhaps this is why I haven’t started packing: I really don’t want to leave.

On Thursday, August 28th, I’ll be teaching an online seminar called Against Complicity: Radical Honesty in Literary Fiction and Nonfiction. The course centers on the work of Deborah Eisenberg–one of the finest writers on the subject of American complicity. We’ll talk about Eisenberg’s story “Holy Week,” plus strategies I’ve seen in writers like John Keene, Melissa Febos, Helen DeWitt, and David Wojnarowicz. I’d love to see you there. Scholarship applications close on August 20th.

The past week also marked another big milestone: I turned in my new novel draft to my agent. The novel, titled I’m So Happy You’re Here, opens with a husband asking his wife for a divorce–she refuses. Shortly after this dinner, the husband is paralyzed during a work accident, and his wife becomes his primary caretaker. Two years later, while channel surfing, the wife discovers a TV show playing her life had she agreed to a divorce. It’s a surrealist reimagining of my grandparents’ marriage. The book is funny! And weird! And intimate! And this week, I decided to write a little about my revision process.

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Last night I saw Zach Cregger’s new film, Weapons. I loved it. It’s such a skillfully constructed movie, shifting between POVs, bringing characters’ to their highest moments of tension before veering away–plus a few good jump scares and a thrilling final sequence. But there are two things in particular that I really admired, which seem unique to his vision: the horror of personal flaws and the commitment to kid logic.

Cregger is excellent at creating dread separate from monsters or serial killers or supernatural forces. In Barbarian, he achieves this through a slimy actor named AJ (Justin Long), who must gradually confront the reality that he is, in fact, a sexual predator who will be blacklisted from Hollywood–and rightfully so. He is not a sympathetic character, but his dread interests me because it is distinctly human in a movie that revolves around a distinctly inhuman monster. Similarly, inWeapons, some of the most terrifying moments arise when characters must face the consequences of their actions. I’ll be vague, so as not to spoil anything, but Cregger understands that most of us will never face off against witches or demons or monsters; instead, we’re terrified of people being upset with us, or of destroying relationships on a whim. For Cregger, Confucius’s phrase “Wherever you go, there you are” is not an insight on mindfulness, but a terrifying reality: we cannot escape ourselves.

As for kid logic, one section of the film follows a nine-year-old boy named Alex. Centering a kid’s POV is not so uncommon in film or in books. As I often tell my students, literature is the foremost home for precocious children. But I tend to bristle when I encounter a precocious child in books. Writing through the POV of a precocious child allows the writer to insert adult logic into the voice of a child. To me, there is something unique about kid logic. It is a distinct view of the world, potentially limited by lack of experience, but not inferior to adult logic. I see it in books like Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye or NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names. Alex is not a precocious child. He’s just a nine-year-old boy put in a perilous situation. Cregger does not respect Alex any less because he isn’t precocious; rather, he respects the boy’s vision because he respects the character. This kind of admiration and empathy is rare, and it’s part of what makes Cregger’s vision of the world so engrossing.

All to say–Weapons is scary and funny and fun. I’m very excited to see what he does next, and how he might evolve away from a few of his current tricks. Can he pull off a film that remains in one POV? Time will tell.

Freakier Friday is also out this week. It would be an understatement to say I’ve been on a body swap kick the last couple years. My most recent novel, People Collide, was about a husband and wife who swap bodies. During the research process, I watched countless body swap movies, and I’m sure I’ll catch the sequel if I can find time while preparing to move.

To mark the release of Freakier Friday, I’m sharing a lecture about the role of empathy in the body swap trope. It’s called “What’s So Great About Empathy Anyway?” I delivered the lecture at the Tin House Summer Workshop in July. I originally published the piece as an essay for Broadcast in early 2024, and it’s since gone through two heavy revisions, once for a keynote address at the San Francisco Writers’ Conference and now for the Tin House Summer Workshop. Beyond the practical reasons for returning to the piece–I like the essay–I’ve found that my ideas continue evolving. This new version, for instance, has more to say about reductive expressions of empathy: “In fiction, empathy without ethics is empty, just as in politics, empathy without action is strictly rhetorical.”

As I noted before delivering the lecture, publication is only a time stamp. I like this version more than the last few versions, and I can see a future where this version, my latest, seems like a lost relic from another lifetime ago.

Thanks for reading,

Isle

What’s So Great About Empathy Anyway?

In early 2023, I received a wave of notifications on Instagram alerting me to new followers. Normally, there would be nothing strange about this occurring—it happens sometimes, after publishing essays or sharing good news—except many of my new followers were writer friends who already followed me, people I’d seen at a party the previous night or over lunch only days earlier. The new accounts all appeared to have been made for the same reason: their original accounts had been hacked, they insisted. In the bios of the new accounts were pleas to unfollow the original accounts. Those accounts, the new accounts claimed, were imposters.

The new accounts were obvious scams. It was unclear what, exactly, prompted this surge in identity theft. Most of the writers had published one or two books and were in the early stages of building careers. A few months later, Pulitzer Prize Winner Andrew Sean Greer alerted his followers to an imposter Andrew Sean Greer Facebook profile and asked that everyone report the other account as fake—and a few weeks ago, Kaveh Akbar posted a similar request on his Instagram page. Identity theft on social media requires a person to not only report their imposter but also enlist friends in their cause; social media platforms tend to be wary of removing fake accounts without a critical mass of complaints. It’s not their job to decide who is real. This uniquely frustrating modern experience offers a technological parallel to a narrative that long predates the rise of social media: the myth of the doppelganger.

Over the last few years, Doppelganging has been having a moment. Jon Fosse was awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in literature shortly after his Septology books were published in English. The books center around a painter and his double–and though it was Fosse’s entire decades-spanning oeuvre that earned him the Nobel, the timing suggests the author tapped into something critical to our current moment. Everyone’s favorite workplace sci-fi, Severance, brought its own culty corporate intrigue to the subject, turning its most desperate employees into memory-wiped grunts the second they entered the basement. Naomi Klein’s 2023 book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World, is perhaps the most comprehensive recent exploration of the phenomenon. In it, Klein uses her personal experience being mistaken for Naomi Wolf–the former liberal darling whose star fell precipitously once critics started fact-checking her claims–as an entrance point to the cultural impact of doppelgangers more broadly. The book skates brilliantly across political commentary to literary history to personal reckoning–some of Klein’s best writing explores how she evaded the Zionist expectations prevalent in her community growing up. For Klein, doppelgangers help explain a range of confounding political crises of self-defeating radicalism. Why have so many seemingly-progressive wellness influencers found homes in the anti-vax movement? How was a celebrated feminist like Wolf drawn toward right-wing blowhards and conspiracy theorists? And what does the United States gain from supporting Israel’s genocide in Palestine?

As a side note, Klein’s second book, The Shock Doctrine, seems especially prescient today, in its analysis of the tactics right wing leaders use when they obtain power–the same strategies we are now seeing enacted by the Trump administration as it decimates the U.S. government and rolls back human rights for marginalized Americans and further enables ICE abductions of immigrants. Klein’s study of dopplegangers is an even more granular and exhaustive look at the political and personal divides that, exacerbated by greedy charlatans and bad actors, now seem beyond repair in this country.

Though I admired Klein’s book, I, for one, have spent the last few years obsessing over a different well-trodden trope: the body swap. Whereas doppelganger narratives serve as a way to confront the messy and repressed parts of ourselves, as Klein notes, the body swap is, ostensibly, about the desire to understand someone else. We all know how the story goes: you and a person you envy touch the same haunted skull during a lightning storm, causing you two to swap bodies; after a few days spent learning to empathize with the other person, the two of you palm a new skull together, this time during a solar flare, and return to your original bodies, grateful for what you have and who you are. The arc is predictable. Lessons are learned. Envy and misunderstanding give way to empathy and compassion through embodied experience.

I am a nonbinary person and a fiction writer. While gender transition has helped me see the many ways that a body can change, writing fiction has given me an intimate understanding of empathy and envy. Though I don’t think empathy is the most important factor in making good fiction–personally, I’m most inspired by the texture of sentences–good fiction writers must, at some point, imagine themselves into the lives and minds of their characters. We want our readers to feel what our characters feel. This might not necessarily require us to feel it as well–though it helps–but writers generally benefit from making those experiences recognizable for readers.

My feelings of envy typically arrive after a book is published, in those small-souled moments when I wish my work was as widely read as some of my peers. Regrettably, when I saw Andrew Sean Greer being impersonated, I felt a flash of self-doubt. Would I ever have a career worthy of both a Pulitzer prize and an imposter? What about me wasn’t good enough to be scammed? At that moment, I was willing to suffer the frustrations of identity theft in exchange for the accolades of a celebrated writing career. Envy brought me to a place where I was pursuing empathy–albeit, for my own artistic gain.

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The desire to be someone else can sometimes feel as old as desire itself. As a culture, we’re obsessed with both the fantasy and the threat of swapped lives. In Being John Malkovich, for instance, countless disaffected shlubs line up to pay $200 for fifteen minutes riding along in the brain of an actor who, the movie reminds us, isn’t even that famous. As often as we dream about swapping up we also fear stumbling down. “There go I but for the grace of God,” we mutter, upon seeing a version of ourselves with whom we hope to never change places. The body swap plot is often used to make the point that such conceptions of better or worse are themselves moot, despite the fact that we are obsessed by the urge to compare, to wonder, to worry. The swap reminds us that wherever you go there you are. Becoming Malkovich does not free puppeteer Craig Schwartz from his anger and reckless ambition. He is not satisfied as a celebrity. He still believes he deserves greater praise and attention for his work. Celebrity seems only to intensified his resentment.

It’s difficult to not obsess over comparison. Our language is cluttered with clichés about walking in another person’s shoes and grass being greener. Mark Twain wrote about this nearly a hundred and fifty years ago, in The Prince & The Pauper. In movies, the narrative reappears across films like Switch, 13 Going on 30, Trading Places, and, the most recognizable of the genre, Freaky Friday. And we’re only weeks away from the release of its sequel, Freakier Friday. Even a film like Everything Everywhere All At Once uses its multiverse plot to explore how its protagonist Evelyn wields the skills of her alternate selves to strengthen the life she is already living. This is not a body swap movie in the traditional sense. But it lands in a similar place. Upon seeing how she has drawn a wedge between her and her daughter, Evelyn applies what she learns in the multiverse–that she has actively pushed her daughter away–to change how she acts in real life and embrace her daughter’s queerness. In the end, a lesson is learned. Evelyn empathizes with a person she once refused to fully accept.

I understand fairly well the desire to live a different life. I spent my first 30 years wanting to be someone else. As a child, I would imagine myself as my stepsisters, sometimes going so far as wearing their dresses and painting my nails with their polish. Later on, I shaped my personality to align with a best friend’s. I lived with him for a few weeks one summer, desperate to insert myself into his family, and I even stole one of his brother’s soccer jerseys–which included their last name on the back–and wore it to school. I spent every Thanksgiving dinner with him and his grandparents, even though my mother’s and father’s families both hosted meals. Later in high school, I wondered how it would feel to be a different friend, a woman this time, less envious of her family than of how she moved through the world. When I developed an eating disorder, I modeled mine after hers, trying to twin myself with her, in a manner that seems so aspirationally feminine in hindsight, though at the time I undoubtedly would have explained away our connection as a shared love for Cold Stone and Elliott Smith. Over the years, as I came to terms with my gender identity, this feeling returned among strangers and friends. I would picture myself as women and gender nonconforming people I passed on the street, wishing I could inhabit their bodies. I would pay close attention to a friend’s eyeliner and later steal the look for myself, or if a friend looked amazing in a shirt dress and tights I would buy a similar outfit that week, creating my aesthetic out of large and small imitations. Eventually, the imitation evolved into self-expression, a kind of thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of crafting my personal style.

Ideally, I would claim these feelings were driven by empathy, by a generosity of spirit so grand I cannot help but move through the world eager to know what others are going through and what it might be like to live their lives. Forgive the glibness. I do genuinely believe in the power of empathy–I write novels, remember, the art form most often asked to invoke this feeling in readers–but I also believe it’s important to recognize the limitations of empathy and to put some pressure on the idea that it is always a universal good. What I felt in those moments, for stepsisters and friends, was not empathy but a kind of self-interested pursuit. I tried to understand their lives because, not yet confident enough to pursue the life I wanted for myself, I wanted to live as they did, these people who seemed to exist so effortlessly in their bodies. I wanted to incorporate what I admired about their lives–their charisma and style, often their gender–into my own. I longed to be these people in order to make sense of myself. I longed for the excitement of the body swap yet desired nothing of its promised lessons regarding compassion. As a teenager, I didn’t have the language for what I was doing. But through imitation, I was aspiring to self-expression and self-understanding. I knew only how to imitate myself into being.

This kind of imitation is not unfamiliar to artists. Think of the great masters who developed their genius as painters by serving as apprentices for their mentors. Or the musicians covering the songs of their idols before writing their own. In college, I once spent an afternoon in the library typing out the entirety of Joan Didion’s essay “Slouching Toward Bethlehem.” I did this not only because I wanted to learn how to write sentences as economic and ruthless as hers, but because Didion had done the same with Hemingway’s stories, and I wanted to insert myself into their literary family tree. Harold Bloom offers some of the best evidence of this practice in The Anxiety of Influence. Young artists imitate in order to eventually create something unique. Imitation is the gateway to innovation.

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Imitation and empathy, though, are separated by a perceived transgression. Imitation is often considered a grasping act. Rarely does anyone call it the sincerest form of flattery because they actually feel flattered. At its worst, imitation—and its problematic sibling, appropriation—can illuminate unequal power dynamics or tend toward violation, especially in many of the doppelganger narratives that appear in Klein’s book. According to her, though the double can “stand in for our highest aspiration,” it more often “represents the most repressed, depraved, and rejected parts of ourselves we cannot bear to see.” The double is a violation. It wants what belongs to the original. In defeating the double, one kills off a part of oneself but also protects oneself–albeit at a high cost. The doppelganger narrative teaches self-protection; the body swap, however, teaches empathy.

Empathy might seem, on its surface, like a universal good. We’ve all seen the headlines: some variation of how reading 20 novels a year will teach you how to be a good person. As the novelist and critic Jeremy Gordon wrote in The Atlantic, “The concept of reading as an empathy machine is appealingly idealistic.” Google your favorite fiction writer and the word empathy and you’re bound to find an interview in which they’re praising its importance in fiction. How many people in here see empathy as integral to their practice as artists? I don’t blame you. As I’ve said a few times, I believe in its power as well. What can go wrong by imagining how it feels to be someone else? Empathy is the bridge to understanding. And when we step out of line, when we assume, incorrectly, how it feels to be other people, empathy serves as a necessary corrective.

In body swap movies, empathy is a lesson characters are required to learn. The lesson is the point. In Switch, a womanizer killed by his lovers is given another chance at life by God. However, he must return to Earth as a woman, in order to understand how he’s mistreated the women in his life, and convince a woman to sincerely love him if he wants to get into heaven. The body swap, in this instance, is punishment. The same holds true, to a lesser extent, in Freaky Friday. Fighting between mother and daughter puts the new family unit at risk. But thanks to an intervention at a Chinese Food restaurant, each one is forced to see how the other one lives. Here, empathy is a kind of checkpoint through which these characters pass in order to return home. It is a feeling just as powerful as the spell that caused them to swap.

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While these movies champion the value of empathy, they also seem suspicious of its application in everyday life. They imply that the only way to understand another person is to undergo the impossible: to physically inhabit their skin. Furthermore, this transformation is only possible through supernatural means, like earthquake-inducing fortune cookies or animatronic psychics or a small hidden passageway between the 7th and 8th floor of an office building. Empathy is obtainable only when the right cosmic forces align. But the movies are right: empathy is impossible. And its power comes not from how gratifying it is to empathize with another person but from the ongoing pursuit of this feeling. We aspire to empathy, to care for loved ones and strangers alike, even though we remain hemmed in by the limits of our own histories and perceptions.

Eight months into the pandemic and feeling starved for connection, I began writing my own body swap narrative, a novel titled People Collide. The book follows Eli and Elizabeth, husband and wife who wake up in each other’s bodies. I wrote the book, in part, seeking connections that had begun to deteriorate in the pandemic–I wanted to write something embodied during a time when it seemed dangerous to hug the people closest to me. I began the writing process intending to explore how two people intimately connected might grow even closer through this transition. Over the course of writing, however, as I considered my feelings about these characters and my views on intimacy, I found I was much more suspicious of empathy than I originally believed.

For Eli, becoming Elizabeth does not bridge the divide that had been growing in their marriage but instead exposes the many ways he may never understand her. There are limits to what embodiment can teach him. Over the course of the book, Eli does not learn to be Elizabeth but merely deepens his self-knowledge under these new conditions–this is made most apparent through conversations he has with her parents, where he is forced to hear what they honestly think about him. As for Elizabeth, she thrives in her husband’s body, not because the transition lets her understand him better but because she already knows herself. Her desires, she believes, align with her new body more than they did with her old one.

Both characters are rather naive. And the body swap further insulates them from confronting their respective naivetes. Eli adopts a caretaker’s stance toward Elizabeth’s body while conveniently ignoring the many ways he prioritizes his own pleasure–whether he’s pursuing lovers or drinking too much–over the safety of his wife’s body. For her part, Elizabeth leans a little too eagerly into the notion that every part of her life will be easier now that she is perceived as a man. Both characters appeal to the language of empathy. In one scene, Elizabeth assures Eli the transformation has taught her to love him fully because she is now shitting as him. However, this experience does not actually alter how they see one another, the way empathy, in body swaps narratives, is supposed to. Rather, close corporeal intimacy exposes what they can never know about one another. Late in the book, Elizabeth advises Eli how to be her, but he asks her to stop. Nothing she says will teach him to be her; he cannot ever be her. The best they can do is exist in an aspirational state.

I wasn’t the only person thinking imaginatively about what it would be like to inhabit another’s experience during this time. In late 2020, right as I was beginning my book, neuroscientist Pawel Tacikowski published findings from a study that tried to capture the body swapping sensation. Tacikowski’s team gave 33 pairs of best friends VR headsets to replicate the experience of existing in each other’s bodies. The study sought to reimagine conceptions of selfhood and embodiment, in part to better understand diseases like depression, which can reshape a person’s identity. Participants showed a decline in episodic memories while viewing life through their friends’ point of view, suggesting that by virtually living as someone else, they lost track of themselves. The self, according to the experiment, is not a fixed and coherent entity separate from one’s body, but an expression entwined with our current physical state.

While body swap movies suggest a fixed self can be transferred into another body, the study shows that the self is always shaped by our surroundings, which includes whatever body we find ourselves in. This, too, complicates standard notions of empathy.

How can I ever know what another person is feeling if that person exists in a state of quiet flux, their selfhood an ongoing reaction to their surroundings? This suggests something Heisenbergian about empathy. The closer we get to someone, the more our getting closer influences what there is to know about them, creating and unveiling layers that didn’t previously exist. What does this mean for us as writers? When we try to understand our characters, trying to empathize with them, we will never capture the rigid essence of the person, we can only learn how they act in particular moments. Our decisions as writers shape their decisions as characters. Character must emerge out of the combination of selfhood and context. As I often tell my students when we talk about character: I don’t know people by the details of their lives, by their jobs or that old writing cliche to make a list of what’s in their pocket; I learn about my characters the same way I learn about friends, by seeing how they interact with bartenders, by hearing about how they flirt, by running into them on the street and discovering what’s on their mind. I learn about them from how they move through the world. Selfhood dictates actions and actions alter selfhood, each one influencing the other–and what a writer or reader empathizes with is that dynamic expression of action and self.

I find this notion exciting. It requires humility to accept that empathy, in its platonic conception of fully understanding another person’s experience, might very well be impossible. I wonder why we ever thought we could entirely feel what another is feeling? Perhaps because we truly do want to know other people–especially the people we love–and it is terrifying to accept that, no matter how close we are to a person, we will never feel what they’re feeling. And no matter how much we learn about a character, as both readers and writers, we will never fully understand what they’re feeling.

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For many readers of fiction, empathy has become a vital component for marking the quality of a text. Books are judged for how well an author imagines themselves into the lives of their characters, and, as a result, how well the readers can then empathize with those characters—at times, this devolves into measures of likeability. The author’s empathy is transposed to the reader, and the reader leaves the text with a new skill: empathy. This is what the internet think pieces aim to convince us: that reading fiction will make a person more empathetic—in other words, “better.” I am temperamentally wary, and I’m suspicious of any ideas that reduce something as profound as the reading of fiction to a kind of calisthenics for the soul. It should go without saying. But many of the most terrible people to have ever existed were consummate readers of fiction. Reading fiction alone is not enough to impart moral clarity.

So what is a writer to do? Especially if you, like me, believe in the power of empathy. A book can bring you closer to people and characters you might not otherwise know. How many in here have been deeply moved by a novel? How many people have felt less alone when reading? My impulse isn’t to strike empathy completely but to complicate our assumption about the role it might play in our work. As Paul Bloom argues in his book Against Empathy, the claim that fiction teaches readers empathy implies that empathy, itself, is morally good, rather than an action that one might take in order to understand another person. Empathy is amoral. It only becomes moral—or immoral—inside the world the author creates.

While a novel like Denne Michele Norris’s When The Harvest Comes might help non-Black readers empathize with the experiences of Black queer people in America, what is to prevent a novel written by a white supremacist, about white supremacists, from encouraging young white people to join their cause? Case in point, The Turner Diaries. Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby did an excellent introducing many cis readers to the everyday experiences of trans people; that same year, E.J. Levy published The Cape Doctor, a historical novel that attempted to turn the story of Dr. James Barry, a 19^th century physician commonly considered a trans man, into the story of a woman who lived as a man because she wished to become a physician during a time when women were not allowed to work as doctors—an idea that runs quite close to TERF talking points about trans women in bathrooms. In this instance, Levy’s impulse to empathize with her version of Barry forestalls the reader’s ability to empathize with Barry as a trans man. The empathetic impulse is immoral—at least, if your morals demand safety for trans people, as mine does.

Bloom argues throughout his book that empathy alone is not enough. And the insistence that fiction is a surefire way to build empathy fails to account for the ways that empathy—simply feeling what another person is feeling—can be misused if it fails to adhere to an ethical framework. A story that empathizes with Donald Trump’s childhood will likely fail to account for the harm he’s inflicting on immigrants, trans people, women, and any number of others suffering under his presidency. Too often the effort of seeing into the soft hearts of cruel and vindictive people is deemed an essential component of fiction rather than a deliberate and potentially short-sighted decision. Furthermore, championing empathy assumes that a reader will leave a book having internalized the lessons an author wishes for them to learn. If only Ted Cruz read a novel centered on an Iranian family! If only your republican uncle read Toni Morrison! We are living in an era where officials in the American government are currently siding with nazis. This gives me little faith in those same people and their voters to appropriately empathize when reading a novel.

This is not to say that, as fiction writers, we should not aspire to empathy. Admittedly, I don’t have a very good answer to the question you’re probably asking: What should we do instead? In Against Empathy, Bloom argues for compassion, which allows us to act righteously without needing to feel what another is feeling. In practical terms: We should not have to empathize with over 10,000 murdered Palestinian children to see that Israel must be held accountable for committing a genocide. We should not have to empathize with a trans person to know that it’s cruel for the U.S. government to strip them of medical care. And when we rely on empathy to prove our points, we risk taking an elaborate detour en route to what should already be obvious. The problem is not the eventual destination. The problem is that we cede too much political and ethical ground in getting there.

How, then, might fiction balance its commitment to empathy with a deeper understanding of the world that gave rise to the characters that readers ought to empathize with? This is not a call for trite revisionist histories of bad people, where it turns out the villain was bullied, thus making his malice acceptable. Rather, it is a call for literature that, even in the pursuit of empathy, never loses track of moral or political clarity, literature that might explore depravity without ever condoning it, that values courage without pretending it always wins out in the end. This literature might be difficult to read and even harder to write. But it’s invaluable insofar as it accurately portrays reality without ever condescending to readers. I see it in books like Madeleine Thien’s The Book of Records, where the empathetic impulse is used to explore figures like Spinoza, Du Fu, and Arendt in an effort to spotlight how people think and live through historical atrocity—narratives that are intertwined with a young girl’s attempt to care for her ailing, imperfect father. In Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin deftly captures his narrator, David’s, humanity, while rigorously skewering his narcissism and careless misogyny. In Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, I feel so deeply for the novel’s ne’er-do-well protagonist, Maria, as she takes advantage of her last remaining friend and steals her girlfriend’s car and tries to crack a young man’s egg against his will. In these last two instances, I can empathize with the characters, but the authors make it clear that a reader should not want to be them. And I leave these texts feeling no better as a person for having seen shades of myself in those characters. The empathy in these novels is tempered by their authors’ moral clarity.

The goal of writing and life, for me, is to chip away at my own self-delusions, to pursue understanding while accepting I may never fully understand anything. Empathy requires vulnerability and humility. When we want to be someone else, we are saying we want to be closer to them. However, we can never entirely bridge the divide between people. The cynicism of the body swap narrative, which turns becoming someone else into a punishment, ironically captures what is most beautiful about wanting to become someone else: we cannot. Yes, it is true that fiction can bring us closer to feeling what another person is feeling, but if we treat empathy, that asymptotic arc toward understanding, as the primary function of fiction, then we have not gone far enough. In fiction, empathy without ethics is empty, just as in politics, empathy without action is strictly rhetorical.

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As writers, I hope we can remain humble and vigilant when we talk about empathy in our work. I hope we hold two commitments at once. It is vital that we work to authentically represent characters on the page, especially those with different life experiences from our own (for practical tips on this subject, I recommend reading Alexander Chee’s essay “How to Unlearn Everything”). And it is just as vital that we, as artists who care about creating beauty and who long to see the moral arc of the universe continue—or maybe begin?—bending toward justice, must use what we know about empathy and humanity to not only shape the moral and political clarity of our books, but to make the world safer and just. This requires compassion, which requires action, which, at times, require putting the book down, leaving the draft half-written that day, and using our skills as artists to create a world where the people we love, the people who need us, might be able to thrive.

Here’s the thing about teaching. If you’re good at it—even if you’re mediocre—standing in front of a classroom is bound to make you seem hotter than you actually are. The way your hair is always a mess? Endearing. The confused face you make when you’re thinking? Pedro Pascalian levels of charming. I’ve had crushes on teachers over the course of my academic life, and, fortunately, out of all those crushes, only one teacher took advantage of the power they held. The problem: I dated that teacher. This makes me a compromised expert.

However, many of the most astute and rigorous conversations about teachers seducing their students fail to acknowledge what I think of as the loser component. I am not here to wade into nuances about consent and power in the classroom–for that, I recommend Amia Srinivasan’s essay “On Not Sleeping with your students”–but to speak in the bluntest possible terms: fucking your students makes you a loser.

The closest any contemporary work has come to broaching this issue is Eva Victor’s excellent new film, Sorry, Baby. The film follows Agnes, a grad student in New England, who is assaulted by her mentor, Preston Decker, a novelist failing to write a new book. In a scene before the assault, Agnes and Decker discuss her mentor’s unfinished second novel. He insists that it’s bad; she teases him about his performative self-doubt. The bad books, she tells him, are necessary for deciding which books are good. Then, she gives him an impassioned compliment about the impact of his first book on her life and her work.

In that instant, Decker is not a divorced man fighting with his ex-wife about taking care of their child. He isn’t an underwhelming novelist wasting his handsomest years struggling to meet his talent. He catches a glimpse of the person he wishes he was, younger and full of promise, through Agnes’s admiration. What he fails to notice is that she sees him that way, in part, because she wants those things for herself.

Did I want to be with them or be them? This question has become somewhat rote when talking about desire, but it’s vital for understanding the complicated attraction students sometimes feel for their teachers. It is why Srinivasan concludes that teachers should refrain from sleeping with their students, even if it is consensual. “When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key,” she writes. “Allowing himself to be–or worse, making himself–the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.” The teacher has something the student wants–success, career, books, power, control over their grades–and that wanting might invite a spark of desire. But the teacher’s job is to educate–to stomp out the spark–and divert attention from themselves to the class. Anything less is not only an abnegation of responsibilities, it’s pitiful.

I should probably add: I do think that, in some situations, teachers and students can engage in consensual sexual relationships, but only after their pedagogical dynamic ends and if the student consents to fucking a loser.

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A few years ago, during the early wave of #MeToo, a writer I admire asked whether he could no longer congratulate students with hugs, a gesture he’d long taken for granted. It was one of those lazy rhetorical questions tenured professors tended to ask at that time. And the answer was often fairly predictable: You shouldn’t be hugging your students.

The predictable answer, though right, always seemed to miss something important. This writer, who had built a career on the recognition and articulation of nuance–for what is writing if not the attempt to convey the most intimate and fleeting of feelings–was eager to cede all of that expertise to a talking point. If you’re a writer, your job is to observe and to feel. Who better than a writer to recognize, through body language and spoken language and vibes, whether someone wants you to hug them? A writer, especially, should be able to sense that however carnal a student’s gaze, that the student is not attracted to the teacher as a sexual being but to the ideas, the feelings, the knowledge that the teacher can convey and inspire.

Decker fails as a person, a teacher, and an artist. He fails as a person because he assaults Agnes. He fails as a teacher by compromising a sacred agreement with his students. Agnes admires him, but she does not want to fuck him. The movie makes this clear. Decker sends her a text calling her thesis extraordinary, and Agnes’s roommate, Lydie, notices her friend’s giddiness and tells her she ought to sleep with Decker. Agnes isn’t interested. What she wants is to be extraordinary. She wants a novelist she admires to admire her work.

Decker’s expertise as a writer should have made this obvious to him. He either does not see it, or sees and chooses to ignore it, because he wants to take advantage of her admiration. Whatever the case, he fails to apply his work as an artist to his life. Failing as a person makes him a rapist. Failing as an artist makes him a hack. Failing as a teacher, though–that makes him a loser.

I met the teacher I dated at a writing workshop. The teacher wasn’t supposed to teach that year. Another instructor dropped out, and she was invited as a last minute replacement. “Afterthought,” I remember her saying.

She must have felt so insecure at the conference, alongside the first choice instructors. But in my eyes, she was an artist I deeply respected. It must have felt so affirming for her to be seen for who she wanted to be. My guess is she felt bad about herself, and pursuing students–I wasn’t the first–gave her a sense of confidence and self-worth that art-making could not–not, at least, without a great deal of effort. In short: she felt like a loser. Seduction was a kind of fast food self-worth. The responsibility of a teacher, though, is to redirect their student’s admiration toward an outcome that will help their student learn and build their career, not to fish hook them into a romance.

Does Preston Decker know he’s a loser? He knows he’s a criminal, the movie implies. He skips town to evade the consequences of his actions. But it’s worth pausing to do what Sorry, Baby does not: separate the criminal from the cringe. Even if Decker made an advance on Agnes and accepted her opening no as a no, he would still be a loser. Even if he politely asked Agnes on a date, and she enthusiastically agreed, that would still make him a loser. In those hypothetical instances, he takes advantage of the trust Agnes has put in him.

In one of the film’s most poignant moments, during a jury selection process, Agnes raises then quickly lowers her hand when asked whether she’s been the victim of a crime. In a conversation with the prosecutor, she admits she can’t tell whether what happened was a crime. She doesn’t want to expose Decker or go to the police, because doing so would not change his behaviors. It would make him “a person who did that” in jail. She would rather he be a person who doesn’t do that.

Like Agnes, I don’t have any interest in exposing this person. What I want is much simpler. For teachers to consider the harm they may cause in pursuing a student, even if the relationship is consensual. Decker’s actions are an extreme but possible outcome. More likely, you might crater your students’ confidence in their work. You might push them out of the field. You might make it harder for them to trust authority figures who genuinely want the best for them and their work. You might do a lot of things that neither you or your student or I can predict. Only one thing is certain. You will, without a doubt, become an absolute loser.

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On a deceptively hot day in September, I met Daniel Loedel in the backyard of Blue Marble ice cream in Prospect Heights. I spent the 40 minute walk from my apartment listening to an interview between Loedel and Phil Klay about Hades, Argentina, Loedel’s debut novel. It’s strange to meet someone for the first time after researching their work. The idea you build of the person is forced to confront the actual person, and in the best case scenario, the line between the real and the imagined is thin.

The gap between truth and what we imagine as true is major part of Loedel’s debut. Hades, Argentina follows Tomás, a man driven by guilt, shame, and desire to return to Argentina a decade after leaving the country. Tomás fled to save his own life, following the 1976 military coup; though, ten years later, he is a broken man. His former love—unrequited—has died over that span, and, back in Argentina, he must confront his complicity with a military regime that tortured countless innocent people.

Hades, Argentina is my favorite kind of novel: it fearlessly explores the tense contradictions of being alive. The good are capable of awful things, the awful are capable of startling kindness. And often, the truth about ourselves is more difficult than we wish to admit. Loedel and I talked about these very contradictions, the divide between what we tell ourselves and what is true, the eerie feeling of seeing the plot of your novel play out in real life, and the ongoing effort of building a writing career.

Can you talk a little bit about the process of coming out with a book mid-pandemic? What was it like to release into this world, especially as an editor and a writer? I imagine your expectations were probably very different from someone only just entering the publishing world.

Yeah, it was strange to have no access to what I knew of as the buzz machine, where you run into someone, and hand them a galley—in my case, usually a book that I was publishing as editor—and talk about it. All of that went onto social media, where I do not feel very comfortable or equipped to do it well. So I felt out of my element. But at the same time, it was also nice to be removed from a lot of the inevitable envious feelings of “Why aren't they talking about my book?” or whatever. To have it all be far away was actually nice. But there were weird hiccups, like my book didn't really have proper galleys, and things that were odd, but my publishers were really great about always reassuring me. What was the second part of your question?

Because of your background, were you expecting something that maybe you weren't able to get?  

I think the strangest part about publishing it when I did is it was less, in some ways, about publishing it during the pandemic than about the fact that my book came out six days after the coup—the storming of the Capitol. And my book has a lot about a coup in it and is about the outcomes of that. So that was the most surreal part, to watch that unfold while I'm talking about the outcomes of oppression. In terms of being an editor, I don't know, you'd be surprised, it felt probably the same as it does for any first time author, which is to say, full of anxiety, some excitement, a good amount of excitement, but also a good amount of anxiety. And I knew the ropes in some ways no better than anybody else. 

I want to circle back to what you were saying about coming out with a book six days after the Capitol storming. I think of it as literary mysticism when really all it is is like having paid attention and that all of these things are cyclical. So I guess how did it feel to release something that seemed so unintentionally topical. A non writer would be like, oh, clearly they were aiming for this as if you had written the book over those six days to get it out right away. 

What's funny is there was a tiny, tiny element of that in the sense that I started the book roughly in the aftermath of Trump getting elected. I remember when Trump was elected, I spoke to my dad about it, and he referenced the election when [Juan] Perón was elected in the 40s. He said, basically, that election didn't lead to the dirty war stuff, but it was the one that opened the door. That was a fair election, but then [Perón] was ousted, and the cycle began with that door opening. He felt that with Trump's election, the same door had been opened. And that wasn't the direct reason I started writing Hades, by any means. But the timing was not that coincidental. It made sense that I worked on the book for four years and it comes out right at the time when what started with that election ends up at its natural conclusion. Which is not to say that, you know, the book or the process was prophetic at all. But it made sense that it happened. 

So much of this book is really grounded in stasis. Tomás is going back and living through memories that aren't really there, trying to find a new way forward through memory. How did the world that you are inhabiting find a way to inflect the book that you're working on? Were there ways emotionally or thematically you felt that living in the US at a time so obsessed with memory—the Trump project is one of insidious nostalgia—shaped your thinking about this book? 

As for the stasis to do with memory, it was less a product of the political landscape of America and more the personal landscape of my family. My father lost his daughter, who obviously is the inspiration for the character of Isabel and for this whole book. He never healed. That loss was just too deep. While his life moved on and I was born and a lot of other things happened, he was in a kind of stasis in terms of that pain. I think, in Argentina, there's a lot of that kind of stasis because of the nature of the deaths, and also of the dictatorship. There are no memorials held, or there were very few for a long time, because people were disappeared. The military regime wasn't held accountable. A lot of people didn't get to mourn, heal, move on. And I felt that on mostly unconscious levels with my father and my family in general. And I think that that's where that comes from more than sort of the American political landscape. 

Probably a more interesting way to think about your relationship between editing and writing is: What is the goal? What do you think art can do to provide catharsis? Or do you think you have this trickle down ability to write about the things that it sounds like your father couldn't talk about or couldn't fully engage with? What is the goal of writing about this thing that seems to not have a language? 

It's interesting. On the one hand, I would say my book did nothing to close those wounds. But my father--who historically never spoke about those wounds, basically at all--he was a professional translator, translating documents for the UN for most of his life, and he took it upon himself to translate Hades into Spanish, which is obviously a way of putting the story into his own language. Obviously, the book didn't heal him, but it did allow for him to process things in some way that hadn't been processed. And maybe that's truer in some ways even more with the rest of my family. In writing the book, I called up cousins and friends of Isabel, and asked them questions about her. I asked them to engage with this life that they hadn't engaged with in a really long time. There was also the practical ramification that, while searching for her story, I was also engaged in a literal search for her remains. My father and I did blood tests to identify her remains. And we finally interred them in 2019, 40 years after she was disappeared. I don't know to what extent the book itself healed anything, or to what extent the process of trying to talk about these things was healing. But I do think there was, at the very least a lot of confrontation with what happened that needed to take place and hadn't.

And that seems to be a huge theme of the book. I was listening to your interview with Phil Klay and you talked about denial. It's almost as if they are two levels of denial. There's the denial that's happening in the book and the confrontation with that, and it's also happening in the outside as well, in your own life, or in your dad's life. These things are being engaged with when maybe they weren't previously.

I guess what I don't know, to this day--nine months out from publication--is, does confronting this stuff, these wounds, does confronting the past heal you in the present? What does it offer you in the present? In Hades, that question also goes unanswered. It is a journey into Tomás's past. And he comes out on the other side, and he does not know what he gained, except, perhaps, clarity on what happened. And we generally think that kind of clarity and self knowledge are beneficial things that allow us to progress into our futures. And I generally think that as well. I mean, obviously, this is the reason we are all in therapy. We have accepted the assumption that confronting our traumas helps us move past them. And I think that's true. But it's hard to have tangible evidence of that.

I think about that especially with Tomás in relationship to his wife and how she's pushing him to understand these things, but it doesn't seem like it's necessarily the right idea.

And if you ask my father, I think he would to this day say it doesn't do anything. But if you ask other members of the family, they would say that it offers a kind of catharsis. So maybe it depends on the person? Or maybe it means more to my dad than he would admit to me.

Classic dad move.

I have the pure instinct that silence is bad, emotional silence, political silence, all forms of silence is bad. And writing is obviously a way of breaking through that whether it's on a personal or political level. But where that faith comes from that breaking silence is urgent and important--I sort of don't know, it's sort of like a faith in God.

I think that it's interesting you’re also saying that there's a reason why all of us are in therapy now. Because it also seems so contemporary, this faith that we can't possibly be in silence. I'm totally extrapolating, but I'm thinking about the need for noise. I personally am terrified of silence, always washing dishes with a podcast on or something like that. But how is that engagement with the past its own form of needing to be entertained, to pick that old wound?

And going back to stasis, it's a way of  breaking that, of making yourself feel like you are moving forward. It's not always clear that you are moving forward by unveiling something in your past. I hope you are.

I'm going down too deep of a wormhole here. But I'm also thinking about something like recovered memory. Which have mostly been proven false, right, that's not really how like the brain works. So how do we engage with a memory that might not exist but is in fact a creation of a narrative that didn't actually exist. Which in some ways debilitates, but also creates a narrative, which is something that Tomás needs. It might not help him to have this narrative and might not help him to know what happens. But at least he knows what happens.

Going back to your original question of what does writing do in terms of healing: we all need stories about ourselves with which we can anchor our sense of ourselves. I think a story often provides a destination point. It provides an ending and provides this logic to why your life ended up where it did. If you look at your past and can create a story from it that makes sense and you can embrace it, it makes it easier to embrace where you ended up. I keep being really ambivalent, but what's complicated is they can also be lies, too, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. 

No, I love that ambivalence. And that's something that isn't exactly clear in what is happening with Tomás in the book. I was interested how you had said [in your Phil Klay interview] you originally wanted this book to be realist. There were so many times that I was like, Oh, I'm in scene. And then suddenly, I would be like, Oh, something is happening that could not be happening. I don't want to call it a trick, but that sense of destabilization is a really great reminder of the ambiguity of what is being learned or what is being retrieved when remembering. Is it truth or is it a story? 

I like that. Are you recovering truth or story.

I'll bring that question to my therapist: What have we been doing?! With that in mind, I wonder how that shapes your editing process, this hatred of silence? I talked to Rakesh Satyal a couple weeks ago and we talked about his practice of editing, what he's looking for, what he's trying to do. Do you feel like you have an editorial ethos that you're looking for? Are you looking to crack silence when you're deciding to buy a book?

I like books that wrestle with something, and that also feel comfortable straddling that kind of ambivalence we were just talking about. I find a lot of books today to be--I don't want to necessarily say preachy--but the moral complexity feels a little diminished, straight on, here are the bad guys, here's the right path. And I personally am not called to those books as often. I mean, I can be if the language is just so extraordinary that I don't care. But I generally love work that is trying to ask a question, not necessarily provide an answer. And the question can be about virtually anything. It can be something political, familial. But I want to see the characters, and by extension the writer, figuring it out on the page as opposed to feeling myself being pushed toward a certain conclusion. I do also like books that have what I call for lack of a better term stakes, which I don't really know how to define except that the questions that are being asked do have some significance, particularly societally.

It's like a “so what?” factor.

Yes. The “so what?” factor, exactly.

But moral complexity is so huge in this book, right? We are for hanging out with torturers for a lot of this book. Can you talk about the process of avoiding the really simple good person bad person dichotomy when you are writing about people who objectively we can say were doing a lot of really bad things? It would be easy to say these are evil people. Kaitlyn Greenidge had this line about her first book that I think about all the time, "I would have to love this monster into existence," when writing about this old racist white woman. It was horrifying to her but that's the only way that she could make the book work. So can you talk about that process?

When I first conceived of the novel, I didn't have torturers in it. It was a story of Tomás, Isabel, and the Colonel. The barrier I kept hitting was that the character of Isabel was too morally pure. She was this idealist, brave champion of the oppressed. And I was trying to do honor to my half sister, by purifying. And the reality of both my actual half sister and people in general is that no one is like that. And they are uninteresting if they are. They [characters like that] don't force the average person who is not a saint to wrestle with the questions of what do I do when confronted with a difficult moral choice. So the first step of increasing the moral complexity in this novel was realizing that the character of Isabel had to be really morally complex. She had to demand a lot of Tomás and the people around her a commitment that bordered on the immoral. A commitment to the cause of justice that bordered on injustice. So that was step one. That opened the door to the narrative completely. And I still resisted for a long time writing about anything explicitly to do with torture and torture centers. But I was researching the period and I found myself falling into the trap that I think most people fall into, which was that I was scared to look at this stuff. I didn't want to deal with it head on. Most people in Argentina at the time didn't want to deal with it head on. Most people in the world don't want to look at these horrors head on. They prefer a book about the legacy of the horrors. They would prefer a book with very clear heroes and villains. But once I started looking at this stuff head on, I decided I have to include it because to not do so is to engage in the exact kind of denial and silence that I really don't want to engage in. I read a lot of first hand accounts of being in these sorts of centers and the truth was the people who did these acts were people. And by virtue of being people, they had personalities and backgrounds, often had families. I would have had to actually simplify them into pure monsters. I mean, some of the characters in the book are almost basically pure monsters. But some people in reality and in the book had shades of kindness and even just brief, brief, tiny moments of goodness, that didn't seem to accord with any of the rest of what they did. And I found it both fascinating and true. I couldn't look away from that truth that I saw. It wasn't even necessarily that I have to write a morally ambiguous book, it was just that life is morally ambiguous. 

But I'll admit to this principle I have which is that, if you believe there are good people and there are bad people, I think you're assuming that you belong to the good people, almost always. And that does not allow you to see yourself clearly, when perhaps you are actually being complicit with a bad action. Good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things, particularly when the systems around us are bad. Good people in bad systems or situations often inevitably have to comply in some way or other. There's just a kind of denial if people don't want to admit that, and that denial is dangerous, because we all have to wrestle with what we ourselves do, in the good and bad actions we do. If we just assume we're good people, we're not actually asking ourselves whether our actions are good or bad. 

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it sets you up with a sanctimonious way of living, right, which assumes a level of infallibility. That creates a worldview in which no matter what you're doing, it's perceived as good, because the possibility that you could be bad--even if you're doing bad things--if you define yourself in a certain way, then it becomes  incompatible. It creates cognitive dissonance and you ignore the fact that you've done a bad thing, or you reshape it into a good thing.

This goes back to what I was looking for as an editor, which is, the question of choice is, to me, one of the great questions of literature, period. And choice means often good or even just the average person choosing between two sets of action, neither of which is necessarily clearly right or wrong. Because that's how I think it works most often. I don't feel there's great appetite for that way of thinking.

I absolutely feel that which is really interesting because I think of America as obsessed with this idea of the anti hero. I wonder how that version of the anti hero is not actually an anti hero, but Americans believe their moral code is so good that it supersedes our moral code and we don't see them as a complicated person. We see them as being extrajudicial. It's not so much the antihero, it's the vigilante, you know. I mean, I watched like, two seasons of the show years ago, so I don't know what I'm talking about, but a show like Dexter is the example coming to mind. I've also been watching The Sopranos for the first time throughout quarantine. And that is such a difficult show to watch right now because Tony's mostly not good. But you're stuck with this person. And it also does not seem as if you can contort yourself into thinking that he's a good person. But there's really no way around it.

I don't know if this necessarily belongs in the interview, but I do think Tony is an interesting reference point in the sense that if you asked him his chief virtue, presumably he would say, his love of his family.

Loyalty, right? 

And I've been watching rewatching Succession and Logan Roy, same thing. Whether he believes it or not, he takes care of his family. And I think so many people in the world look at themselves and say, I'm good, because I am good to my family, and that is what is most important. And what was really interesting thing about these torture center workers is a lot of them are family men. They had a wife and kids. In one case, an actual torturer brought his young daughter to the torture center to introduce the child to prisoners. And obviously, that is really warped. It probably helped him sleep at night to think that he was somehow taking care of his daughter.

There's that one line from the book that is burned in my memory--I forget which character it is--but Tomás says something like he didn't assault a female prisoner and was it because of conscience or because he had a family at home? You would want to believe it's the conscience, but also you see that he's still torturing people, right? So how far does this conscience go? 

Exactly.

Reading this book I was thinking so much of Bolaño. I felt a real sense of similarity, of confrontation on the level of language, on the level of theme, on a level of thinking with what is damned. Rather than avoiding it. Who were you reading to get in this headspace to be able to do it? 

Well, I confess to not actually being the like the biggest Bolaño guy.

I haven't read him in years, in fact.

Well, I know I am supposed to be, and I have read Bolaño. Some things you read, especially by legends, they echo around inside you, even if you're not conscious of them. And Bolaño is born of similar traditions. I mean, Latin American literature and sensibilities. When you're aware of things like political corruption and how that informs people's lives, the echoes are inevitably there. But in terms of the the authors I had closest to mind when considering Hades, one book that was really important was Pedro Páramo by Jaun Rulfo. Because of the confrontation with memory and it's also a literal journey into a ghost town. This is gonna be a list that has no unifying theme, which will tell you how I view influence working. I'd love to say, "I'm born of the South American literary tradition." At this point with globalization, it's impossible to figure out what traditions writers come from. The Remains of the Day was hugely important to me because of the way that is also a confrontation with the past and denial. On a totally different end of the spectrum, Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward. That's a story that also uses a ghost and confronts a communal trauma and memory and history. And then in some ways less conscious for me in a kind of minutiae of the craft kind of thing, but the general goals of these books. Exit West, in that it tells a story of a journey that is supernatural, but is very grounded in reality and recognizable situations. Similarly, Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, which took a real fact of history and made a metaphor literal. And the concept of Hades was born sort of out of thinking about that. Particularly, this idea of the disappeared-- where did the disappeared go? The initial like eureka moment, when I was struggling a lot with the book, trying to write it as a realist novel. And then suddenly, on a walk, I had this eureka moment of wondering: What if there's an underworld where the disappeared go? The book became more complicated than that. But Underground Railroad was a book that definitely contributed to that line of thinking. 

Have you continued to write since your book came out? And what has it been like to continue to move on to the next book after the first? What keeps you going? 

Yeah, I have been working on something. The quality of which is also wrestling with ambiguity. One thing that's been really different is Hades had this personal backdrop that grounded the project for me. It gave me a kind of faith that I had to write it, that this was the right book for me to write. It was important to me to do it. However hard it was to figure out at different points for different reasons, I had to. My personal connection provided a true north as a compass, and I'm now working on a novel that is set in Argentina and is historical and plays with a lot of the same themes and stylistic choices that Hades does, but does not have that sort of obvious personal anchor. And therefore, at moments when the book is difficult for me, which is inevitable, I don't have as much faith that this is the right book, that I have to persevere and keep going with it like I did with Hades.

Was Hades your first book?

I had written one other that I put in a drawer. As we all do. But Hades was pretty much my first. It was the first one where I really felt I was onto something and had a different kind of belief in it. Although there were times I obviously knew it wasn't working. But the question of abandoning it wasn't really an option. Whereas I'm finding that temptation feels more real this time, to let go of a book that is challenging. On the other hand, I'm also like, Well, I've written and published a book. I can work my way through this. But it's harder, and it goes back to the “so what?” question. When you have this personal anchor, it's very easy to answer that “so what?” question. You think, There's a reason I alone can write this book--which is also a question I believe a lot of writers should ask. Why should I be the one to write this book? And when you veer away from the personal--as I believe many authors should and have to do later in their careers--it's harder to answer that question. Sometimes it's easier, but often, I think it's harder. It's been a struggle, but it's going.

Even in “normal times,” the writing community is an ethereal collection of shy, lonely people gossiping together online between major conferences and writing retreats. Every few months, writers left their houses dressed in their least-stained clothing to crowd into bookstores drinking wine from plastic cups as a novelist read aloud from their most scandalous chapter or a poet serenaded the moon. I lived for these readings and conferences and retreats. As fun as it was to gossip online, to share secrets in the DMs, to boost the work of writers I loved, one of the great joys of being a writer, for me, was hanging out with writers in person to brief escape the isolation of the blank page. It was vital to see that I wasn’t alone. Writers were—though awards season might have us believe otherwise—all in this together.

The last 18 months have all but rendered those those in-person meetings impossible. Sure, there were readings online, online panels, Zoom hangouts and phone calls. But we all know it wasn’t the same. The writers we met online remained online. We existed as two-dimensional faces inside the limits of profile pictures. Over the last few months, though, I have been fortunate to meet some of the authors I only knew over the phone or on Twitter. One such author: Rakesh Satyal.

In January 2020, when we were all so very naive, Rakesh acquired my debut novel The Atmospherians. I had dreams of someday meeting him over lunch or drinks—the way an author might in a Netflix series—but the pandemic got in the way. And after a few passing encounters in Brooklyn, Rakesh and I were finally able to hang out in person on a sunny August afternoon over ice cream at Davey’s Greenpoint location.

Rakesh Satyal is far more than an editor. He is the author of two novels—No One Can Pronounce My Name and Blue Boy—and one of the most astute and funny voices on Twitter. He is a brilliant thinker with nearly twenty years in the publishing world, a writer and editor who is committed to making book publishing more inclusive, inventive, and literary. It was a pleasure to finally hang out with Rakesh in person to talk about writing, editing, and breaking the mold of traditional publishing trends.

How did you get into editing versus writing? What made you want to do both?

I took creative writing courses when I was an undergrad at Princeton, which is a very good writing program. It's generally thought that if they ever had a grad program, it would probably be one of the best ones in the country. But the school is focused primarily on undergrad education. I really think a grad program would be extraordinary, given the faculty. I talk often about the fact that because artists are minimized in society, in general, and writers, maybe more so than a lot of artists, I was one of those people who wrote all the time growing up, but I never thought about myself as a writer. And I never thought about making a legitimate career out of writing. And that's compounded by the Indian experience where I was also not exactly encouraged to, at least for a long period of time, to pursue it as a career. 

So I took creative writing classes, and lo and behold, my sophomore spring, I had a course with a professor who pulled me aside after class one day and said, "Have you thought about becoming an editor because you give very pointed feedback during the workshop?" And I had never even considered this was a job. I knew editors existed. But like many people, I thought an editor was a copyeditor. It was sort of a pencil behind the year correcting grammar. And so I ended up applying for an internship before my senior year of college. It turned out that a friend of mine from school, his sister had started working in publishing, and she worked within Random House. She passed my resume along to HR and then I ended up interviewing with this well known editor. And he actually left after hiring me but then I ended up working for the editor-in-chief. He's a really legendary editor.

That was how it was decided for me. If there was a way to find a professional outlet for what I liked to do, creatively and academically, then I should have done that. So I did that internship. And then I was such a naive young college kid, because when I had my exit interview, from the internship, my boss was like, “Have you thought about what you're going to do after graduation?” Of course, like an idiot I tell him I might go to grad school. I didn't take the bait—he was basically telling me to work for him. Thankfully, shortly before I graduated, his assistant was leaving. And I reached out, he's like, Yeah, come, he wanted me to start working before I graduated. I was like, Well I do need to graduate college. So then, again, like many people, I didn't understand that it was a profession, I didn't know that you could actually make a career out of it. But I do love reading people's work. And at that point, I loved reading people's work and giving feedback. So that was one of the reasons why I ended up getting into editing.

That's fascinating. You talked a little bit about coming to a place where you could accept that you could do this as a career. And that was related to the Indian experience, as you said. We're in the midst of like—publishing, at least, is in the midst of reckoning with its own whiteness and its relationships to power and I guess, if you feel comfortable talking about it, what do you think your role is in moving publishing forward, especially as an editor, and also as a writer?

Editors, to be clear, are the ones who get projects in and champion them. I have tried to have my list reflect those values I want to put out into the world. And so I see that as a very important job. And that has informed a lot of my work. I look back on a lot of the books I've acquired and it's no surprise that a lot of them are by marginalized authors. So there are a lot of, you know, queer authors and authors of color. And it is a very conscious decision to do that. And I think things are changing to a certain extent, but the question is really going to become who lives it as opposed to people who do it because it is a trend or it's perceived as being a paradigm shift.

I don't want to make too causal a relationship but change will require people who truly are those things and believe in those things. Because the truth is, it's a very homogenous industry in a lot of ways. I do wonder sometimes if you need people with that lived experience, you need that to be really tied into how they want to see a better world and the changes they want to see happen. And since I've lived those things, it makes it a bit more urgent, in terms of why I represent a lot of the authors I do.

That seems like such a difficult thing to bring up, especially for the people who might be in those positions right now, who are, as you say, passionate and interested, right, but what is that gap of understanding, which can be a huge difference in what sort of passion they bring, what sort of unconscious biases—not even biases—but inability to fully engage with something. This is something I talked a little bit about with Jeanne Thornton. She talked about how trans authors might move more and more into big presses. She speculated that it might take more trans editors moving up the ranks rather than just there being an interest in their work. Is it just a paradigm shift that is driven by the bottom line? Which is one thing. Or is it actually driven by the desire of the people who are there and a real essential impulse to see different writers in the world?

It's a very difficult question. That's absolutely correct, but it's difficult because there's also the difference of who has institutional power. And so the problem is that there's the question of having representation within the ranks. But then who gives value to that representation? Who are the decision makers and what are the power structures within the buildings actually giving voice to [diversity]? I'm very lucky to be in a role right now where I work for a publisher who has had a long-standing commitment to diversity way beyond the catchphrase or trendy nature of that term. She's invested not only in having people who represent certain communities but making sure they have a framework to succeed and a framework to make those voices heard. 

I was really interested in the relationship between your editing and the things you're trying to create on your list, the people you're trying to publish. How does that shape how you think about your own writing? Or are they separate?

Yeah, you know, they're separate because you should keep your professional and personal creative worlds separate. It's very important. But [my professional life] does inform what I do. I mean, especially the last book that I wrote, it engages, especially in the last half, very directly with this question about publishing and about writing about identity. And I can always tell when I run into a publishing colleague who has not read my work, when they ask me these questions, as if they don't know that I've talked about this.

So it does find a way in. One of the things that frustrates me is that if I sit down and write something I'm absolutely bringing to bear what I know about the world of writing and publishing. And that does find its way into my work. And so one of the things I have to think about is if I'm making a conscious decision to write about something, from a specific perspective that may seem limited or quiet, somebody reading it, if they know that about me, should understand why I've made a conscious decision to do that, and then ask themselves why I've done that. That is true of writers from any marginalized background.

If you're a trans writer, and you're trying to transgress certain conventions of form or structure or voice, and it strikes somebody as odd or too out there, or unconventional or obtuse -- what people need to start doing is ask themselves why it feels that way and what value that might add to the existing literature. I think you know this, but I worked for a few years in the world of branding. And one of the things that really emerged for me during that experience was being creative in that world means you really have to learn the landscape of something. So you have to learn what exists in the marketplace. What have people done in this space, what ad campaigns have been there, how people engage consumers in a different way.

And what you start to understand is what trends really mean in that context. The idea that somebody creates something that really engages with people because it goes completely far out. And it is so odd in a way, but then you start to see other people take that and run with it. This is a very random example, but Skittles is an example I mention. Their ad campaigns were very, very strange. Like if you look at them within the past 10 years or so what they did, especially in appealing to younger generations, some of those early ads on MTV and VH1, you know, those were odd ads, and they still are, but totally different from what you see. Then you start to see brands starting to adopt that a little bit, piece by piece.

I'm thinking of like Old Spice or something which seems to have been influenced deeply, like the same sort of absurdity between the two of them, right?

Yeah, exactly. Think about that in music too, like a good example, to use an example from current events: Look at Britney. People forget how unique, how different she was in that landscape. And she came out with the idea of having a pop princess in this way, and having somebody who was playing with ideas of sexuality and all these things in a different way. And so then you saw Jessica Simpson, and you saw Christina Aguilera, and you saw all these people who came afterwards, and then you start to identify [people] breaking the mold a little bit in pop culture, then people follow suit to open a certain conversation. So writing is similar where—if something comes along, and it's a bit different, and it seems off the beaten path, there's stock in that, you have to put value in what people are trying to say. And just because it doesn't match what came before, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. And you have to understand why it's happening and why it connects with people. And this seems like a very basic idea, because it is. But I think that's what I try to do: take the existing rules and subvert them a little bit.

So in the last book that I wrote, I was looking at these tropes of immigrant literature and what people thought about South Asian literature in particular, just tried to subvert them a little bit. And I think that's what you try to do creatively. And people's first instinct when they need something like that is to have their hackles raised. And especially when you try to go for subtlety, and you try to go for something that's about the human experience in a subtler way. The dismissiveness often comes because the stakes aren't raised in narrative and one of the things I personally and professionally try to put stock in is that stakes are raised for people who come from marginalized communities. And just because it doesn't read as immediately tense in the way that it does when you're dealing with people who aren't that way, it doesn't mean that it doesn't have value. And in fact, maybe it has more. And so interiority and subtlety I find really compelling. And I think people have to be a bit more open to what that means.

That makes me think stakes are cultural, right? Like, the stakes of a white family having a bad Fourth of July or something like that might be very different from the stakes of a microaggression, which a white reader might think, Oh, how is it the same thing as the blue frosting coming out purple instead of blue, right? And a white reader can say, Oh, my God, that's a terrible thing if this color is off, and then look at like a microaggression and wonder what's the big deal because they don’t understand. How we understand different forms of stakes, I think is really, really difficult to convey.

A go-to response as an editor is that I just didn't feel invested in this, or I just didn't connect with it as deeply as I would have liked. Now, that's a very valid point a lot of the time, because there is writing that doesn't necessarily connect with you. But I do try to perform a gut check before I reject something, for example, as to what is driving that. Is it really lack of narrative flair? Lack of aptitude? Is it lack of execution? What is leading that? And if I go back to it and it's my discomfort because it seems different, then there's merit in questioning that a little bit. And I understand that volume of work makes editors do that; we have to be very quick about things because of the volume [of submissions]. But sometimes we use that as a crutch. And that's where the problems begin.

From the other side, what are some of the things when you are reading that you're seeing maybe, I don't mean this to be like a listicle. But what are some of the mistakes that you're seeing from authors who ended up submitting to you. I want to ask about this both in pre publication when they're on submission, and also post-publication, since you've been editing for how long?

Yeah, I've been working in publishing for almost 20 years. Yeah. But what are the errors?

Yeah, what are the things you see younger writers doing either in the submission process or even after they have had a book accepted for publication, and maybe in that pre pub spot or even post publication?

That's a difficult question to answer, because at that stage, yeah, a lot of it is the publisher's responsibility.

Let me try to rethink that. What do you feel when debut authors, when they're submitting to you, when you're seeing their work: Does it feel like their books are ready when they're coming to you? How do you think authors can put themselves in the best position to be prepared to submit to you?

Sometimes I'll read something and there are some very basic things in terms of mechanics, or just things I think a writer should know how to do about perspective or structure, and they just haven't thought about it enough to push it to a more polished version. If I read it and I can't tell if the author knows, that's the problem. That's what an editorial conversation is for, that's why when you’re intrigued by something, that's why you set up an author call. Because it's sort of a fact-finding mission. Does this author know what needs to be improved? If I bring up something that I want to discuss as an editorial point, and they're open to it, and they get what I'm trying to say, and I feel like they can accomplish it, then I feel I can work with them and take it somewhere. But if they're not capable—first of all, if they're not open to feedback, not open to hearing, that's a problem. But I don't read anything assuming it's perfect. There's an internal process that needs to happen. But sometimes you do get something and you're just like, This is not ready. I don't think you showed this to another person whose opinion you trust. This is especially true of nonfiction when I see it, which is that I don't know if the author and the agent had enough of a dialogue before it got to the stage where I'm seeing it to understand what the project is really shaping up to be. Is the material representative of what the project is supposed to be?

You said that you're always expecting there to be editorial work, you're never receiving something to give your stamp of approval and get it published. So what are your expectations when you begin working with an author? Do you think there were times when you're ready to do an entire re-envisioning of a book or do you prefer to be one who takes it from like 80 to 100?

I think it depends on the book, but sometimes you'll read a book and you'll be like, Okay, there's a whole third of this novel that needs to change significantly. In which case, you can offer that feedback and say, Once you've managed to do this, then I would love to see it again. Because that shows you how the author works, what their work ethic is like. Then there are logistical concerns. If you get a manuscript in and it needs a lot of editorial work, one of the reasons why editors will pass on it sometimes is because they need to know what the pipeline of the project looks like. Because there's certain questions about timing and publication and payment and all these things that come in.

If you can't see the end of where the book is going to be, what the timing is going to be, how long the author needs to work on it, where it's going to go in the schedule, that can be difficult because you are on a publishing schedule and you're trying to figure out where things are going in the season. If you don't know if a book is going to go through several rounds of editing, that's a problem, because you need to understand where you're putting it in the schedule and how you're talking about it in-house. If I read something and I'm like, This needs a lot of work and I need the author to do this work so it can get to a certain point, I want to A) See if they can do it, to put the work in and do it, and B) I don't want to sign it up and have those things not be decided because it’s actually bad for the book in the long run if you don't understand how it's going to come together.

I think that puts the author in a really tough spot. I've talked to friends who have been in that position: they thought the book was gonna come out in one year, and then it comes out two years later. And then they're just wondering what to do. And they're really in that sort of middle zone.

So you’ve written two books so far. How do you stay inspired and committed between books? What is keeping you going to book number three to book number four?

I was just giving a talk to a group of writers. You really have to think about what your voice as a writer is. People have that conversation a lot when you're writing a debut book. They're like, What is your voice? What are you trying to say? But that actually becomes more important the more books you write. What is the worldview you're trying to put out? And what are things that you care about and themes you want to be exploring? How are you approaching them in a new way? Because if you've written books that address those themes, then is it the same themes that you want to be working on and are there truisms of your work that you need to carry from book to book and how are you going to keep those fresh?

Or, there are moments—obviously the past few years, politically—that have a bearing on what people think their work should be doing. What do you want to be accomplishing? For whom do you want to be advocating? All these questions are very serious and worth thinking about.

The thing that keeps you going is—I still love the process of writing, I still love the process of creating something. I often say that if you ever have writer's block [the solution is] to write a sentence that entertains you. That's where you keep things fresh. Can you write a sentence that surprises yourself? So I think that's one thing that keeps me going. Because it is about the work, you know, regardless of financial considerations and publication. So I think that's really key to what keeps you writing and what keeps you exploring. You have to look at what's going on in the world around you and want to be in conversation with it. How is your work going to do that? And how is it going to address the things that really matter to you?

In my work, I want to explore things like identity and representation and the political act of being yourself when people tell you you can't be yourself.  Those are things that will be threaded throughout the work. And then comedy in a way. I've tried to write things that try to—not be flippant about things—but that find levity and gravity at the same time and figure out what the role of that is. That's the thing that's been the biggest challenge probably for a lot of writers in the past few years: How do you toe that line? Because everything is so cataclysmic. How do you find humor in them? And yet there is humor in everything somehow, you have to figure out how you're going to address that.

Yeah, I was talking to Jeanne [Thornton] about that as well, too. We were talking about how in a lot of queer narratives where the events are so dark, but like, we lived through it, and there is a way to find humor in that. Jeanne also brought up the work of Brandon Taylor, how there can be really sly humor in his work. Things can be really bad sometimes but it’s because the characters pushed it into this bad space and there's levity in this drive to see things collapse. 

As a final question: What is your advice to people who want to become an editor? You talked about your own process for it—and based on what we also talked about with the reckoning in publishing, things probably seem a little different than they were when you were first getting into it. So what would your advice be to people who want to get into publishing?

It is a difficult job. You are taking on the big considerations of professional life right now: the intersection of art and commerce. What is a more fraught discussion? That is what we do. It is challenging. There's an analogy to be drawn between the way that you challenge convention in your writing and the way that you challenge convention in publishing. To challenge convention in writing you need to learn the "rules" that exist within the genre and exist within the literature—and that's how you subvert it. Because you need to know what the parameters are. You have to understand what is succeeding in that space. What has connected with people? And then how do you find other things that add to that conversation and subvert expectations?

The exciting thing is, especially with the health of independent publishing the past few years, we have seen books succeed in ways that are very inspiring. The perfect example is In the Dream House and Carmen [Maria Machado]'s first book, which are both very experimental and really transgressive and sold very very well. Her voice is so fresh and her vision is so clear and that made those books so successful. Brandon [Taylor] is a good example too. He achieved a way of opening a window onto an experience that is very interior. The plot of it is emotional. Emotion is the plot of that book. Editors can often be dismissive of that or publishing can be dismissive of that because it feels "quiet." But a lot of people were able to connect because that isn't quiet. That's very loud. If we're living in this anxious world, what is more narratively compelling than the tension you feel inside?

On a Thursday afternoon in mid-August, Gabriella Burnham and I met at Ollie’s, a small ice cream shop in Bushwick where neither of us had been before. Like every day in August, the weather was damningly humid. The fire hydrants were jetting into the streets and every dog’s tongue was glummed on the ground. I’d never been happier to have pores. 

I raced out of the subway and walked how I normally did when I was late--and I am often late--my strides stretching every inch of my legs, veering mindfully between strangers. One of the strangers I passed, I would soon learn, was Gabriella, whom I swerved around a block away from Ollie’s. I settled on a bench in front of the store. She waved to me from across the street and patiently crossed. 

I’ve always admired patience--I’m a rushed person, a habit I can’t seem to break--both in people and in literature. Burnham’s debut novel, It is Wood, It is Stone, is a tense and haunting portrait of a woman living in Brazil with her new husband, an acclaimed academic. It is a story of desire and self-sabotage and resilience. More than anything, though, it is patient--in how it unveils its characters’ unspoken desires, their defining betrayals, their hypocritical attachments, the risks they’re willing to take to build meaningful lives for themselves. Burnham writes masterfully about infatuation and doubt, and how the latter, in a relationship, might spur the former to bloom. 

Burnham and I have a fair share in common. We share an agent, we share the honor of releasing debut novels during the pandemic, and we share a love of mint ice cream, which we both ordered—though she added a cup to her order, a safety precaution I hubristically spurned. Over the course of an hour, we talked about her experience writing outside of the traditional publishing world, working in immigration law, and the role of the writer in making the world a better place. 

Alex McElroy: How did you start working on this book? How did you get into writing? Marya [Spence, our shared literary agent] told me a little bit about it. So I wanted to hear from your end, what was your story? What led you into the writing world?

Gabriella Burnham: Well, like most writers, from a very young age, I gravitated towards writing as a way of expressing myself. When I was really young, I must have been like six years old, I asked my mom for a typewriter. I barely knew how to write, but I would try to create stories on the typewriter, banging away. But I never actually thought that I would be an author. It seemed like a profession that was really far away from what I could achieve. I didn't know any authors growing up, I didn't know anyone who wrote professionally. My mom was a chef who worked in kitchens. So it was incredible when I got a job as a reporter at my local newspaper in the summers during college. That was my first experience working as a writer. And then I graduated from college in 2009, at the height of the financial crisis.

AM: Great time to graduate.

GB: Yeah, it was tough. I didn’t want to move back home to Nantucket, where I grew up, so my first job out of college was working as a hostess at this decrepit seafood restaurant on the Berlin Turnpike in Connecticut.

But I kept writing on the side and then eventually I got a job working at an immigration law firm. Again, I was writing on the side all the time. But not publishing anything, just writing for myself. I moved to New York in 2012 and started an MFA program in 2013, still with a full time career working at a law firm.  I didn't actually quit my job until about six months before my book came out, because I still didn't believe I could write full-time. And that was both a financial thing and also, I kept asking myself, what does it actually mean to be a writer? How would I fill my days, what does that even look like? And I'm still figuring that out. I'm figuring out the money, and I'm figuring out what my days look like.

AM: That's really fascinating thinking about models. I have a couple questions about that. You said you've got your MFA on the side. What was your writing community like? Were you working on the book on your own? Are you someone who shows no one until it's ready? I feel like I'm the exact opposite. Like, I'm always talking to other writers, other friends who I trust about my ideas, thinking through things with them. What was it like to you to for you to be outside what we think of as the writing community as you were working on this book?

GB: I met other writers at my MFA program, and that's probably one of the greatest things that getting an MFA gave me. The program I went to, The Writer’s Foundry, was very new when I joined -- I was part of the first class to ever graduate from there. I found out about it because Justin Torres was teaching there at the time, and I loved We the Animals. I applied on a whim--which was not a super official process, I think I sent them a writing sample. But they contacted me and told me that classes started the following week if I wanted to join for the fall semester. I was in a cubicle in Midtown Manhattan, wondering, should I do this? It was such a risk, but it felt like the right move for me-- to dedicate more time to writing in a serious way. So I emailed my boss, and I was like, I'm going to have to start leaving at 6pm three days a week. Is that okay? And so for two years, I was working full time and then going to school at night, and it was the greatest thing I ever did. I mean, I was also in my mid 20s. It was a lot easier to not sleep as much.

AM: There're so many more hours in your 20s.

GB: And I was still going out every weekend and also exercising in the mornings somehow. 

But it was a really nascent MFA program. So it wasn't the type of program that was going to get me connected into the professional writing world. It was much more about honing my craft and figuring out my voice as a writer, and then also meeting other writers. Some of my friends—especially one of my closest friends—I met at this MFA program. We were a ragtag group of people at different stages of writing--a lot of very politically engaged people. One student was seventy years old, and he was doing it because he loves to write and had been a mechanic his whole life. That was my writing community and still is my community in a lot of ways, even though I'm meeting more published writers now.

AM: That touches on the question of models, which hearing you talk about it, it seems so similar to something I was struck with in your book, the narrator talking about having a life in relationship with [her husband] Dennis? He has a life where he knows everything he wants to do, whereas she is trying to get to the next thing, doesn't really know what her next step is. I love that as a metaphor for people who aren't reared in the academic world? Can you talk a little bit about—I'm not trying to accuse you of auto-fiction. But I want to talk about what it has been like for you to learn to write without clear models? And how have you created a vision for yourself of what it means to be a writer? What does it look like, for you, without those models, and how do you think you've benefited? Maybe because you haven't had models?

GB: I've been a reader my whole life. So in some ways, my idea of modeling what writing is, or what a writer is, was through writers and books I admire. What kind of book do I want mine to be, in the footsteps of writers whom I love? When I look at writers like Anne Carson, or Maggie Nelson, or Clarice Lispector, or Gabriel García Márquez, writers who, when I read them, I was like, This has completely broken open and disintegrated any idea of what I think a book should be. I wanted to try to do that with It Is Wood, It Is Stone--play with form and language in new ways--which is a really tall order. I think that if I had the specter of the publishing industry over my shoulder, I wouldn't have had that ambition.

As I was writing [my novel], I truly did not intend to publish it. I was not thinking about that at all. I was just trying to push myself and how I use language. I was experimenting. And so I think in that sense, it was, you know, it was a benefit that I wasn't in the publishing space while I was writing this book, so that I could be freer to try new things. I think the hard part is now that I have published it, I'm learning that I'm in the business of writing. It's not just my passion project on the side. It's how I'm earning money now. And also there's a very wide audience that's reading my book and I'm having to navigate the different voices that come to the book. It's something that I have to learn. It's a part of the business now.

AM: [Editor's Note: very cute dog trotted past]. You were in immigration law. What has it been like moving from something that was public in a different sense, working in the legal field, whereas you were not public. And now to move into a space that seems almost inverted, where you're becoming very public. How have you continued to find balance in your life?

GB: I was just talking to a friend the other day about how, being a writer—and I don't know if you feel this way—being an author is such a strange profession, because it's full of contradictions. On the one hand, people think that if you’re an author, you're this mythical figure. Suddenly you become an icon. Writing and publishing a novel seems like one of the most impossible things to do. And it is-- it’s an incredibly difficult thing to achieve.  But on the other hand, it's also perceived as being frivolous. Like, writing a book is this insignificant way to spend your time. And so it's both of these things, in the eyes of society. It’s a monumental accomplishment: Who is going to write the next great novel? And yet, It's also something that a lot of people think they can do without much practice or experience. Or without having something to say about the world. So there are these constant contradictions of what it means to be an author. It both has this kind of iconic status, but at the same time it often isn't taken seriously as a craft.

And moving from a profession where—not to say that immigration law is this noble profession, because, I mean, working within law is very complicated, morally speaking. But I think that there was a part of me where I could tell myself, You know, I have this nine-to-five job and I'm helping people immigrate to the United States and I'm learning about this part of our country that is highly relevant, politically speaking. So to move from that to spending my days writing can be really difficult. But at the same time, on a personal level, it's what makes me happiest, and I also believe that the act of writing-- of spending your time imagining, and daydreaming, and creating--is a political act in a hyper-capitalist society. I can say that honestly as someone who was squeezed for every minute of my time, working at a law firm. So when I remember that, I am so much happier doing this than anything that I was doing before. That brings me back to my writing. And I'm starting to realize that my contribution to the world actually is writing. It's not clocking in at a law firm day in and day out, you know, drafting immigration petitions.

AM: I have a couple thoughts about that.

GB: I want to hear them.

AM: Something I've been thinking when I'm in my most cynical is, The role of the artist in society is to volunteer with their local mutual aid organization. There's a lot of conversation around the role of the author. And I think you've been in the activism sphere, and you are now in the literary world. How has being around an activist world shaped your understanding of the power of literature?

This goes back to what you were saying about authors as both deities and regular people. Because if we didn't think they were deities, we wouldn't pursue this career. And then we obtain this career and realize, Oh, I'm still me. I'm not the person I thought Márquez was. He was just him. And he's not the person Borges was. That's a lot of questions mixed together. But what do you think of the relationship between like activism and art production? And how have you delineated these two worlds for yourself? Or where do you see them intersecting?

GB: It's a really good question. It's one I think about every day. I should first say that, if my sister heard me say that I was an activist—and she's like a true tenant organizer who organized in the South Bronx and in the Southside of Chicago—she would be like, "Okay, Gabi, sit down." I always thought of myself as a little bit on the periphery of people who are doing these great things and I am lucky enough to associate myself with them. But I always considered myself a writer no matter what.

A lot of people really want to be involved right now in political work that many very skilled people have been doing as jobs and careers for their whole lives-- like my sister, for instance. We're in this moment where everyone is asking themselves this question: “How am I going to contribute to society in a more meaningful and important way?” And I think, unfortunately, the answer is personal. I think there are a lot of well-meaning people who are now like, “I’m an activist” or “I’m an organizer” because they’ve been doing volunteer work for a few months and getting more involved in mutual aid groups. Which in some ways is so great. We’re being radicalized out of complacency. But just like it takes dedication and skill to write a novel, it also takes dedication and skill to organize communities. The way that we're all going to individually contribute to something greater has to do with our personal skills and commitment. My personal contribution is writing. My skill set is not in organizing. I don’t have a lot of experience doing that work and there are a lot of people who do and are very skilled at it. And I think when I can, if those who have built a life as activists and organizers need more hands, I'll do whatever they tell me to do. But writing is why I'm on this earth. I can't force something else to be true. I’ve devoted my life to being a great writer, even when it wasn’t how I made money. And I’m going to make sure that my writing has the same ethos and mission as those who have committed their lives to organizing and movement-driven work.

AM: I should pull back. My point is not that every writer must work at a mutual aid. I really resonate with you saying that the artist is not an activist; in most instances, they are not. And that was the point behind my thinking. I'm curious about finding your contribution without feeling this desire to name what it is? Like, how can I just like, do the thing. Writing is what I do and what I contribute, as you said, it makes me happy, and I love it. And I both think it is the most powerful thing in the world and the most useless. Both of those things are profound to me. I don't know if writing a book can change the world, which I think is a conversation that gets brought up all the time. But on some deep level, I've committed my life to this thing. So I probably do believe writing can change things.

GB: I think writers have a duty to write something that reflects our material conditions and our sociological and psychological conditions. I deeply believe that and I'm frankly not interested in writing that doesn't do that. The books I gravitate towards are ones that reflect back the most important questions in our world. And that might not be directly useful on a day-to-day basis like organizing work, but we need books to ask questions about humanity. Why humans make the decisions that we do. You brought up the ‘use’ of books. It's an interesting question, because I think a Marxist application is becoming more and more relevant, and Marxists contemplate the use value of things, and where that ‘usefulness’ fits in the material conditions of our world. And so the question is, where do books fall in all that? Gramsci might argue that books are a tool against cultural hegemony. But really, the point is, books are going to outlast all of us. Both of our books are going to be here far longer than we are. So the question is: What do our books say about this moment in time? 

That is really important. I think it's a bit unfair that art in general is not taken seriously in this hyper-productive world. And I think it is deliberate. It's deliberate. The literature that really turned me on to writing—not first, but definitely in my early 20s—was Russian literature. What really turned me on to it is that I could see that they were laundering information under the currents of the page, because they were so heavily censored, and they were being told to write propaganda for the oligarchy. So they were giving us messages underneath the text that were accurate reflections of humanity. And I think it's so important. The direct action work makes a difference on the day to day, and books tell people 100 years from now what was actually happening.

AM: I really love that and I think that that gives a really broad perspective on what it means to capture truth. The most important part of that for me is that it's an artist's job to continue to look at something, to continue to observe and figure out what is happening, to try to capture and represent it in some way. And whether that's working through the maze of censorship or through parable, through allegory, through satire or anything like that or when you're directly able to say it.

Less theoretically, can you talk a little bit about the process of releasing your novel? It was published during the pandemic. What has that process been like for you? How has it been to find your readers that way?

GB: Well, on some level, it was kind of nice, because I was so anxious about my book coming out. It was the first big thing I've ever published, and I had no idea what to expect. So having it come out during the pandemic, when I was fully cocooned, not leaving my apartment, it was strange, because it felt like this thing that happened outside of me. But I could control how I was feeling in my apartment. Doing virtual events, same thing, like I shut the computer, had a martini, was on my couch afterwards. I could relax.

But I went to a friend's reading recently, Sanaë Lemoine, who wrote The Margot Affair. She had a reading at Fort Greene Park. After her reading, this young woman approached her clutching her book, and was like, “I came all the way from Manhattan because I love your book so much and I wanted to see you read.” And she asked Sanaë to sign it. And I was like, Oh my god, this is what we've been missing. Those serendipitous moments that happen after readings or doing in-person events where you can have a physical connection with someone. I can't wait to have that with the next book. Writing is such a solitary process. Being able to finally connect with people is a true joy.

You seem to really thrive in the virtual space—I don't want to make assumptions—but you know how to work social media in a certain way. And I am not a person like that. I have moments where I get it. And then there are other moments where I'm like, I don't get this, it's horrible. I want to delete all of this from my phone.

AM: I always feel horrible. So that's just my advice. But yeah it's hard to stay in the digital space, right? I talked to a friend the other day about this. He's a friend I met online. And he was like, “You seem a lot like yourself in person as you do online.” I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. There isn't a major divide between who I am online or off. Maybe I'm just a weirdo in person.

GB: I need to practice more because I feel like I'll post something and it doesn't sound like me. And it's not intentional that it doesn't sound like me. I haven't figured out how to kind of be myself in that space. And then I get really insecure when I see someone who's so good at it. And I'm like, How did you figure out how to emanate this personality in this space? I haven't figured it out yet.

AM: That's what the second book is for: figuring out online personas. Can you talk a little bit about your process for the second book? Maybe talk about the revision process that you're using now? And how is it different from working on your first book?

GB: I don't know if you felt this way writing your first book, but--I don't mean to say I was just throwing pasta at a wall to see what sticks. But I had to figure out while writing what the structure was going to be and what I wanted my characters to do and say and then eventually who they were going to be. It was a lot of trial and error. I was learning how to write a novel while writing a novel in a lot of ways. It was a lot longer of a process. I was also, like I said, working full time and in school and a lot busier. I didn't have time to even think about my process. I would write waiting for doctor's appointments and wherever I could. And so now I have a lot more time to structure my writing process. With this book, I wrote a complete first draft, and I did not edit at all while I was writing it. Do you do this?

AM: I freehand my first drafts. So pretty much the same way.

GB: So I freehand also—but do you write the whole thing in one go freehand?

AM: For the first draft I did. I wrote the whole thing freehand. And then I typed up what became the second draft and felt like I had a bird's eye view because I could tell what to cut. I would start to type something and be like, I don't want to read this again. And I would cut it. That was like a really good lesson: if it's boring to me right now, no one's gonna want to read this.

GB: I write freehand, but I don't do it all in one go. I'll write a chapter or section freehand, and then put it in the computer. And then that becomes part of the editing process. Technically, in doing that process, I did read some of it. But I was like, I'm not going back and editing while I'm still drafting. In an MFA program, you're submitting chapters and getting feedback all the time, so you want to edit while you go. For this new book, I wrote a first draft all the way through. And then I went to a writing residency and read the whole thing. I've been making notes on note cards as I go through, and then when I finish, I have a whole stack of cards that I can prioritize. I sort the cards out between the huge edits I need to make, and the little, don't worry too much about these things, kind of edits. And it made the process faster but also way more fun. I don't feel like I need to spend a lot of time doing something I don't want to do at that moment, just because it’s the next edit I’ve come across. Like when you get snagged on something and decide to spend a week working and working on it, and then down the line you eventually cut it. That is the worst.

But it's been really great. Overall, my first book, the vibe is really tense, the whole thing is in a pressure cooker. And it's hyper psychological. It's about really intense relationships. And this book, maybe because I have more space, it feels much more open. And it is more open physically—it's set on an island. There's a lot of being on the beach in physically open spaces. How you write a book, the process of how you write it, the book ends up subsuming that into a feeling. The first book I was writing under such time constraints, and I feel that in the book. It's been a really joyful process this time.

AM: I think that's absolutely right. Somehow the soul of whatever you're doing will make itself into the book. My last semester of grad school, I took a novel writing workshop and we read everyone's full novels.

GB: Did you get an MFA?

AM: I got an MFA and a PhD in creative writing. So I stayed away from the real world for as long as I could.

But in that class, what was interesting is that at some point, it seemed like everyone's psychology would transfer onto the page, whatever they were obsessing over, because it can't escape the book. You're working on this thing every day for X number of years, where you are in your life will inform it and is going to shape it. And that doesn't get discussed enough when we're talking about craft—beyond questions of mood and tone. What is the feel of the book? Which is also the thing the writer knows but no one else ever will. And that's the ghost of the earlier book or the sort of palimpsest of the book is always there, you're going to see the initial foundation of this that was shaping how you were thinking and how you were able to get into that space. But it's only there for you. And that's the fun and I feel that in my book, there are things in there are just for me or just that I feel. Just as there were things I didn't realize that I was working through that other people now see.

GB: It's really fascinating. Like, you can't escape that. Whatever mood you're in or the place you are in your life is going to find its way in. Which is kind of beautiful. Your DNA becomes part of the book.

AM: What's keeping you working on this next book, besides needing to keep the lights on? What's keeping you invested after the first book?

GB: garI feel like I need to grab this moment. Because, like I said, I never thought I was going to be a working writer. Even when I sold the book, and I knew I had a book coming out, I couldn’t comprehend it. I was going to acupuncture once a week, I was seeing a therapist, then I started seeing a career coach. I was having a complete emotional, spiritual, psychological breakdown over whether I should leave my nine-to-five job to pursue writing full-time. And it wasn't just about money. In some ways, I worry less about money now than I did when I had a very steady paycheck coming in. There's something about a biweekly paycheck that is very addictive, and forces you to think about money everytime that check hits your bank account. So when that paycheck cycle is removed, that psychology, the Pavlovian response around when the money comes, kind of goes away.

I feel like I'm so fortunate to have this much time to write and I love writing. It's the thing that makes me happiest. And it's what makes me a full human being. When I'm not writing, I am a shell of a person. And everyone around me knows it. That's what keeps me going. And this next book is one I'm so excited about. I'm actually excited to go through the process of publishing it this time, because I just can't wait for my editor to read it. Sometimes I'll text her and say, “It's so good! I can't wait for you to read it!” And that's so not me. But I feel very excited about it.

That's where I am right now. Like, I'm still really figuring that out. I'm at the beginning of my new career. And I'm taking it one day at a time. I told myself for a long time that diamonds were made under pressure, that I needed to work full time and do a million other things and then squeeze writing in or else I'm not going to have the drive and real world experience to be able to create. And I’ve found that's so not true. It's a complete myth. And every lawyer that told me that was the case was completely fucking wrong.

A few weeks ago, Jeanne Thornton and I met on what appears, in hindsight, like a mild Brooklyn summer day at the Ample Hills in Prospect Heights. It was a Saturday afternoon. Vanderbilt Ave was cordoned off to allow for median picnics. Jeanne and I met out front, and after a short wait in line, we each ordered waffle cones, briefly discussing the risks of choosing a cone—I see no risks in choosing a cone; I always choose cone when I can. I ordered something cinnamon-heavy with chunks of baklava in it; Jeanne added a sour cherry topping to hers, the weird texture of which, she recently told me, still remains in her soul.

We settled on a bench beside the line waiting to enter. Over the next hour, families and couples and friends would snake into the building. One unlucky child, for reasons that remain unknown to us both, would be carried away by his father before they entered the store. Half a block away, a band performed a show in front of a dive bar, punctuating our words with crashing symbols and riffs.  

It seems fitting that our conversation would feature a rock band in the background. Jeanne’s second novel, Summer Fun, is delivered by Gala, a trans woman living in small town New Mexico writing to B----, the former lead of the band The Get Happies, a 60s California pop band reminiscent of The Beach Boys. Summer Fun is a novel of blurred identities and discovered selves. Gala not only writes to B----, she imagines herself into the consciousness of her idol, drawing parallels between their lives as the book’s epistolary form takes on a new shape. Summer Fun is my favorite type of novel: the kind that reinvents itself over the course of its pages.

I was also thrilled to talk to Jeanne for more personal reasons. I moved to Brooklyn last summer hoping to find a community of trans writers. Talking to Jeanne wasn’t merely a literary masterclass on form and craft and commitment—though it was very much that—it was also a crash course on the trans literary scene in New York, a world I know so little about. Jeanne is a smart, funny, and fearless writer, qualities that all come through in our conversation. Even better than talking to her was listening back on our recording, reminding myself of her generosity and brilliance. I hope you’ll enjoy our talk as much as I did.

Alex McElroy: How are you feeling a couple weeks out [from publication]?

Jeanne Thornton: I compare it to moving. I used to move every year or two—I don’t know why. There’s this process you go through in moving like, Oh my god do I really want to do this? There’s all this fear about it, but at a certain point you just put all your shit into boxes. I’m just moving stuff and I’m gonna think about it again when it’s over. For the last couple weeks I’ve been in the “I have to put everything in boxes phase,” and now I’m in the “I’m gonna think about it again when it’s over” phase and trying to just enjoy it.

AM: At a certain point there’s nothing you can do to change things. The lease has been signed.

JT: I had a really good moment. I managed to record the audiobook. My first book, the company we sold rights to hired a cis woman to read it in kind of like a teen girl voice. She did a good job, but it’s hard for me to think about that being out there. And [reading the audiobook of Summer Fun] was like, something I wanted to do for a while. To extend this moving metaphor, I feel like in recording it, I had to pick up and carry every word in the book via my lungs over a threshold. I think before that, I had this idea that “Oh my god there’s all these terrible things I’ve said in this book all these awful implications. I can’t possibly be responsible for any of this.” But now it’s like, no, that was fine. There’s stuff I’d do differently now, but that was okay.

AM: Returning to the book, all the fear of seems [excessive].

JT: I’ve been working on this book for a long time, so it got really built up.

AM: I read the interview with you in The Rumpus in 2012.

JT: Oh shit.

AM: So you were working on this book then, weren’t you?

JT: Yes, I was.

AM: What has it been like to release this book after working on it so long? I don’t want to say “What took you so long?” Because a book takes as long as it takes. But were there difficult starts and stops? Did you just want to get it right? Outside impositions?

JT: I finished the book in 2015. The actual writing of it didn’t take the whole time. I started it in 2009, 26 years old, and it’s now coming out and I’m 38, right? Some of it was just like, I’d finished a very long draft of it in 2015 and gave it to my agent. She started trying to sell it at that point but it just was not right. The first draft was double the length.

“I picked out my outfit for the dance when I was 26 and I have to wear it to the dance when I’m 38. All I can do is wear it and give as few fucks as possible.”

AM: And it’s still a pretty long book.

JT: It had to get shorter by a lot of degrees. Usually I would revise by radically cutting and compressing. There’s still a few things I cut—a couple things that are going to nag me forever that are not in there, but I just needed to be done with this. It was a very frustrating process. We went out on submission in 2015 and finally sold it in 2019. Some of that has to do with this weird quality I feel like this book has. It’s in the reviews that have come out already. There are people who really really really like this book and people who just don’t, who have antipathy toward it. I don’t know what causes that. But that’s just how it’s gonna be.

AM: Do you think that was true of your earlier books?

JT: No. I don’t think so, anyway. Both of them were out from smaller places, so maybe I just didn’t know about it. Sometimes I don’t like this book. It’s a complicated thing where I started writing it before transitioning. I knew that I was going to, and writing the book was part of the way of putting myself on a path where I had to. But also some really poor decisions about it were made before I had any practical experience of being an out trans person in a way that is baked into the book at a really deep level.

The way I thought of it is, I picked out my outfit for the dance when I was 26 and I have to wear it to the dance when I’m 38. All I can do is wear it and give as few fucks as possible. An attempt to do honor both to the original but to also recontextualize it to whatever extent that’s possible. The thing I tell my writing students is, “If you’re gonna write a novel about something, it should be something you’re willing to look at for a really long time.”

AM: I’m teaching a novel writing class now and I’ve told them, “Get ready.”

JT: Totally. You’re gonna have to see it until the point where you don’t like it anymore, and you’re like, Why did I do this? [Eventually], enough time has passed where it’s not even a matter of skill, it’s a matter of, I’ve chosen to live with this novel, and I will change as I live with it until I get to a state of acceptance of it.

Things I find harder to accept now: there’s an oppositionalness to the main character that strikes me as some of the oldest writing in the book that was consciously left in. It had a very different energy. Before coming out—do you know this weird thing from Thus Spake Zarathustra, the three metamorphoses of the spirit? It’s one of my go-to things.

AM: I don’t.

JT: So there’s an image Nietzsche has called the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit: The Camel, The Lion, and the Child. The camel is like, Whatever it takes to do this thing, I’m going to do all of it. The lion is like, No actually fuck this I’m not gonna do this, I’m not gonna do that. I’m gonna define my own terms. And the child is like, at a certain point, you get over needing to do that and just kind of exist. I think I got to the point of existence with regards to trans stuff after doing the primary part of the writing by writing subsequent things. This book cannot really partake of that spirit, except insofar as I am indulging my younger self with grace as much as I can—you know what I mean?

AM: That’s so interesting. How do you give space to that zone of pure speculation?

JT: Say more about that zone of speculation.

AM: Before you have that experience, but you’re living with what you think that experience will be and you write into that. It could be incorrect, but that experience is really interesting to me. That space where you’re living only in desire.

JT: Exactly. It’s like a fantasy.

AM: A fantasy of either freedom or fear. It’s really interesting that you’re leaving those feelings in the book. It’s not the same thing as revision. Experience isn’t revision. It’s not like you were reading and thought, Oh this is actually what it’s like, so I need to change it. Because that experience is  something that was real.

JT: Honoring the idea of incomplete knowledge is what you’re saying.

AM: That’s a much better way of putting it.

JT: I don’t know if this is something specific with transness, also, and like the way we inhabit it experientially. I didn’t actually start on hormones until a lot of this book was written. There’s only a couple passages in this book about hormones that I added after the fact. But the fundamentalness of those changes [from going on hormones]—those changes are fundamental and really really really strongly resist language but nonetheless are undeniable. Do you know Casey Plett?

AM: I’ve read her work.

(the author, Jeanne Thornton)

JT: We were talking about this at one point and talking about this philosophy experiment called Mary’s Room. Do you know about Mary’s Room?”

AM: No.

JT: It’s one of those weird philosophy thought experiments. Mary is a researcher who is a theorist of color. She’s a specialist of red. She lives in a completely black and white world. Checkerboard. The lamp is black, the table is white, the walls are black, the floor is white. But she is a theorist of red. So she could tell you so many things about red. She could quote every poem that’s ever referenced red, she could tell you the harmonic frequency of red. Every fact about red that is communicable, she could give to you. One day the door of Mary’s room opens and there’s a red wall outside and she’s seeing red for the first time in her entire life. Does she have new knowledge or not? Because she knows every fact but she hasn’t had the experience.

There are various arguments either way, but that’s the closest analogy I can think of for taking estrogen for the first time. I don’t know how to explain anything that’s immediately different, but everything is different. And I think there’s something about taking the risk of stepping out and being trans in the first place, the experience of relationships as trans, all these different things, that feel like there’s a story you can tell about them, there are facts you can tell about them, but there’s a real intense perspective shift that’s happening in each of these points down to the level of the body and how you relate to it. I feel like I went through all of that in different stages of writing this book, but not in any coordinated way that’s going to lead to like, a good design for a book. Not chronologically. It’s sort of useless for a reader except that there’s a Whitman sampler of different trans states of time that you don’t have a map to.

AM: I imagine even if there were a chronological map it also would not get it right. Even for me—I’m not on hormones, but everything has been so fits and starts. And I’ll always feel like I’m behind language. The experience thing hits so deep. It’s something that was inexplicable to partners, when it became clear to me and it was a fundamental shift that was so freeing but hard to even begin to explain to other people.

JT: And it sucks because we picked the job where you sort of have to.

AM: Exactly.

JT: If we were fishers, we could just [exist]. I could just tell you how to catch a red snapper.

“And that’s how I feel about transness. If someone were inclined to make a map, I’m not sure there would be value in having a map.”

AM: Do you think painters would be able to get at it better? Or music?

JT: I don’t even know.

AM: When I came out to my best friend, the first thing he did was send me an Octo Octa album.

JT: I’ve heard that name but I haven’t listened.

AM: It’s like house music. And I vibed with that immediately. And I wonder if there are other arts outside of language that are able to capture it. We’re just stuck with stupid words.

JT: I think it’s like. Do you know the comic Love and Rockets?

AM: No.

JT: It’s by Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez. It was big in like the early 80s. Contemporaries of Dan Clowes. There’s a series called Locas about these women Maggie and Hopey who have this lifelong lesbian friendship slash romance. There’s one moment where they’re at a coffee shop and trying to talk about punk to somebody who’s not getting it. And they’re saying, “Punk is in everything we do. It’s in the way you stir your coffee in the morning.” And the person’s like, “What, with a switchblade?” And that’s how I feel about transness. If someone were inclined to make a map, I’m not sure there would be value in having a map, the exhaustive Mary-like account of the color red.

Casey Plett did it really well in her book Little Fish. There’s this moment where she’s hooked up with some guy and she’s staying at his place in the morning and Wendy looks in the mirror and says something like, “In the mirror I saw myself how I looked as a little kid.” That feels so trans in ways I don’t know how—I don’t know why that feels so trans.

AM: A friend a few months was telling me that a lot of trans women she knew, before they transitioned, when they were teenagers, they were really big into Fight Club and it made perfect sense.

JT: Totally.

AM: It’s men destroying everything about themselves in the most male way possible. [Masculinity] is taken to its most violent extreme to realize, Oh, it’s really awful. Can we just destroy it?

JT: This is something I really vibe with in your work. As soon as I got to the list of men, I was like, Oh shit this is fucking trans.

AM: What’s interesting to me is that I didn’t know. I mean I knew, obviously, but I wasn’t writing towards it in the way Torrey Peters or you’re writing about it. I was cis and married and was very much like shaken to my core about the ways I was presenting and my assumed identity and much of the book was a subconscious grappling with something I no longer wanted to grapple with.

I want to return to this question of experience. I don’t want to give too much away for our panel [Editor’s note: Jeanne and I will be on a panel together for the Brooklyn Book Fest], but how do you think the experience [of transness] is going to be conveyed for a larger audience? Do you think that it can be?

JT: Are you asking how the portrayal is going to change as the Big Fives take a long position on transness?

AM: The way you’re describing this languageless experience. How will that be expressed through the Big Fivization of trans writers? Is this an experience more suited for small presses? As Peters said, she was writing for other trans people. What happens when this experience is presented for a larger market and audience.

JT: There’s two ways to look at it. There’s a question of what the larger presses want to buy, which is more a function of who’s editing. There’s a writer I know who had two pretty successful YA books come out before she transitioned. And then she went on submission trying to sell her trans woman novel and suddenly found her a lot of doors that would have been opened to her were closed. Not by any conscious We don’t want your kind kind of thing. She was getting the same rejection letters that I was getting for years, which were kind of like, I really love this you’re a really great writer, there’s just something about this I don’t connect with. Which is an experience I think is really common. It made me not feel isolated. She would send me these letters and they were pretty much verbatim. And so I felt validated. 

I think that is changing. Torrey’s success with Detransition, Baby changes the whole calculus. This is something I want to talk about in our panel: To what extent? It’s not going to be like a tipping point, in 2014, or it if it is it will be like a tipping point like in 2014.

I’m the daughter of two white lawyers and I have doors that are open to me as the result of that. That needs to be unpacked and said. A thing that I miss about small press trans world—it’s not different in there. But the community is small enough where the erasures were more evident. I have no answers or solutions. But as the hand of Penguin Random House is reaching down to us all, we have to be yelling at the hand about where it’s going and what it’s doing. You have to continue being dissatisfied about what it’s doing.

“There’s a world in which Jonathan Franzen is saying, By the way everyone, I’m trans. And what would that mean for trans literature? Who the fuck knows?”

AM: And that dissatisfaction seems louder or more effective now.  I hope it’s more effective. S&S will cancel a deal with someone but who knows if they’ll continue in a year or whether cancelling that deal will anger the higher ups and prevent them from publishing books [from marginalized writers].

JT: It’s not even a question of “What voices are being missed?” Earlier I was hanging out with Anton Solomonik, who for years did this open mic called Genre Reassignment with the writer Juno Tempest. It started during the high Topside Press period in 2016. There were narratives that came through that couldn’t be assimilated by large places, but are still vital.

I actually did not know who you were before I saw The Atmospherians coming out. A bunch of people I knew were like, Oh my god all of our books are coming out in 2021. Casey Plett’s got a new book coming out. Megan Milks has like four books coming out. And then, who’s this new person? And your book is fucking phenomenal [editor’s note: it’s alright], and I hadn’t heard of it at all. That turned up to 11 is what I want the future of trans publishing to be. Where there are other currents of experience, other currents of transness coming in. And I think what’s really exciting with transness is that—I want to use the word sleeper cell. There’s a world in which Jonathan Franzen is saying, By the way everyone, I’m trans. And what would that mean for trans literature? Who the fuck knows?

AM: This is our first scoop: Jonathan Franzen is trans.

JT: You heard it here first. Purity no more. The Corrections, indeed.

AM: [laughs] People coming out of nowhere—is that what you’re saying?

JT: The lived experience of transness can be really complicated. We’ve talked about different ephemeral things. Suppose Franzen were to come out, what would that mean to recontextualize so many years of your life, so many years of your writing life? I don’t think I wrote any books where I didn’t know—other than unpublished juvenilia. I definitely wrote books where I wasn’t out and didn’t plan to be, and that changes things radically.

There is this tradition in queer literature which is really valuable: writing things that are forbidden. Finding these names for experiences that are legally unpublishable at certain points. Things about the body. Obscene words and sexual practices, depravities, that inculcated this deep sense of suspicion and resistance to any sort of rule about what could be said and what can’t. I definitely remember trans women saying to me as recently as a few years ago, I wouldn’t want to be published by a major press. It’s more important to build this power, build this sphere.

Do you know Jamie Berrout? She did this book, Otros valles, about being a very isolated trans woman on the Texas-Mexico border dealing with things like border politics, immigration policy, deep isolation, and paranoia. She’s the writer of a series of very intense manifestos about the destruction of the academy and all publishing. She’s also created a very radical mutual aid publishing concept. Her ideas are not wrong, and her fiction is brilliant. Any major press would be elated to have it. But she doesn’t want to do that. What she’s doing is not wrong. I want more people to know about her work and give her money for it. But that level of resistance is absolutely something I don’t want to see leave trans writing.

I [also] don’t want to exist in a state of bunker peril about the corruptibility of what we’re doing. I’ve been on a small press, I’ve done the hustle. And it’s nice not to do that. I try to teach my students: Don’t wait for publishing to spread your work. Don’t wait for the brass ring. Find ways to circulate your work. Multiply by 100 for trans writing. There’s so much that’s going to be valuable. The stuff that’s the most valuable is going to be the hardest to assimilate. It’s going to happen generationally as editors come up through the ranks, or come out.

AM: What has been different about this experience versus coming out on small presses?

JT: I had this experience early on at the first publicity meeting where they told me the book was a big hit at Winter Institute. I didn’t even realize they were taking it to Winter Institute. This is a feeling I didn’t have with my first book, which got a lot of reviews. At any level of publishing you’re giving up control, things are happening, people are taking a journey through this world of yours without you being involved. And that can be weird and alienating. It’s like if I were to go to a church and light a candle for a saint and then hear the saint say, Don’t worry, we’ve got you as far as Winter Institute goes. There’s a feeling of comfort with that.

It not being my first rodeo is a good feeling. My first book came out nine years ago, and I remember flipping out a lot about it, and I’m just not this time. I’m glad it’s finally out there. I don’t know if you felt this when you finished this book where you had this prophetic urge where you have said something with this book and need to tell everyone about it. I feel like that went away for me some years ago when I was trying to sell it and it was replaced by fears of what it means to publish this book. And then we had the synthesis, where both of those feelings are in there to some degree.

There’s something so weird about the attenuated process of trying to sell it that’s so far from the kind of way it’s connected to the main line of my life. I feel like the executor of the will for myself from 2015. Not quite that far back. I definitely feel more distant to it but I’m proud of it. I’m glad it’s out there. But it doesn’t feel like I’m proud of a thing that feels like myself. It’s that I’m proud of my plucky daughter. She’s doing great.

AM: What do you want for your plucky daughter?

JT: For her to find readers who are into her weird vibe. People who’ve read it have talked to me about it in ways that are exactly as I would have hoped. I feel like it is very important to provide some kind of feeling of reassurance, some kind of feeling of not aloneness in the world. You don’t want people to come away from it with this sense of: The end; no moral.

It’s a pretty brutal book. It’s really unambiguous about some of the self-loathing aspects of transness, some fairly brutal family dynamic stuff, some fairly brutal self-harm stuff. There’s a scene where this woman has just had a very intense family confrontation and she’s looking at herself—and she has a history of self-harming—and she’s trying to decompress from this thing where all the pain has had to go inside to avoid harming someone outside. And her brother is watching her and talking to her. The thing is ratcheting up. Her brother has to intervene. And there’s a moment where they’re decompressing after she’s literally beaten herself up in a bathroom, and then a moment of, What do we talk about now? How do we get back to normal, having gone through this fucked up thing?

It’s weird to say, but there’s this funny part of it. Like, Oh my gosh I’ve gone and spoiled the party! How does the dinner get back on track? I’ve been very grateful every time I’ve seen something with that vibe. I’ve seen people read it who get a sense of like, Okay, I’ve been on that bathroom floor too. Thank you for showing me a way to find the fun in that.

AM: I feel like the difference between people is that some take themselves seriously and some just don’t. And I very much don’t. Even in those moments of extreme self-loathing I see the comedy of it, of how melodramatic it is. It’s funny because you’re both denouncing yourself while also centering yourself. You’re like, I am nothing, but also the center of the universe.

“You learn most not from trying to capture the obvious sublimity, but from these weird little moments where something breaks through.”

JT: You remember the moment in Real Life at the dinner party after Wallace has fucked everything up, and now he’s really enjoying the food. There are so many moments like that in the book and that’s the one that really stands out.

AM: It’s not even taking pleasure in the destruction. There’s something there—I don’t want to say beautiful. But it’s a unique experience so outside our mundane experience.

JT: It’s hard to assimilate all the contours of it. And it’s difficult to speak of experiences. If you take a trip to a mysterious land, do you come back and talk about how the mountains were exquisite and the desert sublime and the light on the ocean perfect. Or are you just, Oh man we had the weirdest meal at this one restaurant? That’s what rises out of that experience. You learn most not from trying to capture the obvious sublimity, but from these weird little moments where something breaks through.

AM: You go there for the sublime and the sublime has a World’s Most Photographed Barn vibe to it. But who knew that one of the chips you were gonna eat would be shaped like Gerald Ford?

JT: With most dark experiences, you don’t consciously go there usually. Transness is one of those dark experiences that we do consciously steer toward. There’s something about the unquestionable desire that’s like, I guess I’m gonna do this fucked up thing. It could be the worst thing in the world but I’m gonna go there. Maybe that’s something sui generis about transness—the fun opt-in trauma.

AM: I used to joke when a friend asked how did I know, I would say that I saw all those The Future is Female signs and I figured I better get on board.

JT: You wanted to get in before the rush. Seemed like where the action is. You’ve read Nevada, right?

AM: [embarrassed] I haven’t read Nevada.

JT: There’s this moment where the main character talks about the experience of being called Ma’am after being out for ten years and having this weird moment of vertigo. She hears someone say “Are you next in line, ma’am?” and she’s like, Yeah I guess I transitioned once. It’s that feeling where you’re never not aware of it, but that feeling of, Oh, that’s weird never really goes away.

Another thing about trauma stories. Have you ever hung out with former military people?

AM: Not that much. Just some family.

JT: When I first moved back to Texas, I went to this coffee shop and ended up hanging out with a lot of people who had done tours in Afghanistan or Iraq. And every once in a while you would ask what it was like or they would start telling stories. And the stories also had the same zany quality to them, but they’re describing horrible things.

AM: I feel like that’s the only way to survive through it. You need to find a way to make it not as awful as it truly is.

JT: But you’re also creating waypoints for people who have traveled the same territory. You have this flash of what it was like to go through this dark season, and you send up a signal flare and you see a rock formation that looks like a mushroom, and you put that in a narrative. And someone else is like, Oh I too have seen that mushroom rock formation, but didn’t know that I needed to see it.