elliott holt

My first novel YOU ARE ONE OF THEM was published by The Penguin Press in 2013. My writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Time, Virginia Quarterly Review, Guernica, the 2011 Pushcart Prize anthology, and elsewhere. I live in Paris.  You can learn more at elliottholt.com

[nymag]

Single women are taking up space in a world that was not designed for them. They make up a new republic, a new category of citizen. If the country is to flourish, we must make room for free women, and let go of the economic and social systems built around the presumption that no woman really counts unless she is married.

Rebecca Traister,  “Single Women Are Now the Most Potent Political Force in America,” New York Magazine (via nymag)

[nprfreshair]

Marriage is losing ground in America. According to the U.S. Census, the proportion of married adults dropped from 57 percent in 2000 to 52 percent in 2009. For the first time ever, single adult women outnumber married adult women in the U.S.

Rebecca Traister says the declining marriage rates among adult women are less about the institution of marriage and more about the choices available to women today.

Single By Choice: Why Fewer American Women Are Married Than Ever Before

[elliottholt]

I’m one of the single ladies in Rebecca Traister’s book. 

[elliottholt]

It frightened him to think what must have gone to the making of her eyes.

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (one of my favorite novels, always worth rereading)

[bc1012class2016]

Writers on Tumblr

Here are links to some well-known writers’ Tumblr blogs. You may use their Tumblr blogs as inspiration for your own profile for this class.

Roxane Gay

Elizabeth Spiers

Emma Straub

Elliott Holt

Rainbow Rowell

[amareamarique]

books i’ve read in 2015 -> 5. you are one of them by elliott holt

I have come to believe that forgiveness is the key to survival. It does no good to see everything as a struggle between opposing factions. Few things are that simple.

[elliottholt]

I love these illustrations! Thanks for reading the book.

[elliottholt]

Books I Read in 2015

Here’s my annual list of the books I read during the year, in the order I read them. 

1.  Loitering by Charles D’Ambrosio

2. Preparation for the Next Life by Atticus Lish

3. Find Me by Laura van den Berg

4. Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman

5. Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

6. The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum

7. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

8. Outline by Rachel Cusk

9. Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool by Jennifer Jacquet

10. The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters

11. All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

12. I Am Radar by Reif Larsen

13. The Same Sky by Amanda Eyre Ward

14. The Miracle Girl by Andrew Roe

15. A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

16. Oye What I’m Going to Tell You by Cecilia Rodriguez Milanes

17. The Home Front by Margaret Vandenburg

18. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

19. Family Life by Akhil Sharma

20. Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin (reread)

21. Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (reread)

22. Spinster by Kate Bolick

23. The Wallcreeper by Nell Zink

24. Mislaid by Nell Zink

25. H is the Hawk by Helen McDonald

26. Mating by Norman Rush (reread)

27. Home Truths by Mavis Gallant

28. The First Bad Man by Miranda July

29. The Sellout by Paul Beatty

30. Absurdistan by Gary Shteyngart

31. The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

32. The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

33. Strong Motion by Jonathan Franzen

34. The Bostonians by Henry James

35. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

36. The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (reread)

37. The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips

38. The UnAmericans by Molly Antopol

39. Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg

40. Purity by Jonathan Franzen

41. 1984 by George Orwell (reread)

42. All the Houses by Karen Olsson

43. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante

44. Delicious Foods by James Hannaham

45. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce

46. All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

47. Battleborn by Claire Vaye Watkins (reread)

48. Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

49. The Odd Woman in the City by Vivian Gornick

50. Speak by Louisa Hall

51. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill (reread)

52. The Mare by Mary Gaitskill

53. A Manuel for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin

54. Eileen by Otessa Moshfegh

55. Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill (reread)

56. Bad Behavior by Mary Gaitskill (reread)

57. Old Filth by Jane Gardam

58. The Man in the Wooden Hat by Jane Gardam

59. Last Friends by Jane Gardam

60. The Vegetarian by Han Kang

61. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

62. Ways of Disappearing by Idra Novey

63. The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard

64. The Lost Time Accidents by John Wray

[andrewdegraff]

Illustration for the Slate Book Review of “The Mare” by Mary Gaitskill with a great review by Elliott Holt. Had a boatload of fun doing these quickies for the book review working with @dankois . More of these to come!

[elliottholt]

A new short story of mine is in the fall issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.

[elliottholt]

Elena Ferrante’s New Book: Art Wins - The New Yorker

Ferrante’s Neapolitan series contains the most thoroughgoing feminist novels I have ever read.

If you haven’t read Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, start with the first one, “My Brilliant Friend,” and then read all four. 

[myacpl-deactivated20171212]

from Laura:

Quietly suspenseful and mysterious. I kept my Serbian dictionary nearby to see how the Russian words in this book compared.

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

By Way of a Preface | PEN American Center

Seeking faith with doubt, that’s definition enough for me. Or strike faith, if you must, and leave it at seeking with doubt. And longing. And not-knowing. And the occult directives of desire. And taking the next step West.

[thetinhouse-deactivated20180604]

Today, we bring you the previously unpublished story (!!!!!) “Covert Joy.”

Covert Joy

She was fat, short, freckled, and had reddish, excessively frizzy hair. She had a huge bust, while the rest of us were still flat-chested. As if that weren’t enough, she’d fill both pockets of her blouse, over her bust, with candy. But she had what any child devourer of stories would wish for: a father who owned a bookstore.

She took little advantage of it. And we still less: even for birthdays, instead of at least a cheap little book, she’d present us a postcard from her father’s shop. Even worse, it would be a view of Recife itself, where we lived, with the bridges we’d seen countless times. On the back she’d write in elaborately curlicued script words like “birthday” and “miss you.”

But what a talent she had for cruelty. She was pure vengeance, sucking noisily on her candy. How that girl must have hated us, we who were unforgivably pretty, slender, tall, with flowing hair. She performed her sadism on me with calm ferocity. In my eagerness to read, I didn’t even notice the humiliations to which she subjected me: I kept begging her to lend me the books she wasn’t reading.

Until the momentous day came for her to start performing a kind of Chinese torture on me. As if in passing, she informed me that she owned The Shenanigans of Little Miss Snub-Nose, by Monteiro Lobato.

Continue reading here…

[nymag]

‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen

By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme

More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.

Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.

In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).

Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.

The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?

But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?

This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.

Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”

There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.

This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”

Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■

Their stories, in their own words:

Rebecca Lynn Neal Barbara Bowman Beth Ferrier Helen Hayes Chelan Lasha Margie Shapiro Patricia Leary Steuer Marcella Tate Heidi Thomas Sunni Welles Jewel Allison Linda Brown Sarita Butterfield Helen Gumpel “Kacey" PJ Masten Joan Tarshis Kaya Thompson Sammie Mays Victoria Valentino Kathy McKee Lise-Lotte Lublin Linda Kirkpatrick Autumn Burns Louisa Moritz Lili Bernard Therese Serignese Janice Dickinson Linda Joy Traitz Janice Baker-Kinney Joyce Emmons Tamara Green Beverly Johnson Carla Ferrigno Cindra Ladd

[elliottholt]

Strong Motion

As part of our celebration of the 25th Anniversary of Discover Great New Writers, Elliott Holt looks back at an early selection: Jonathan Franzen's earthquake thriller-meets-love-story.

I revisited “Strong Motion,” Jonathan Franzen’s prescient second novel, which was published in 1992 (before he was famous).

[dumbledoresarmy-againstbigotry]

“My response to the “I am not a feminist” internet phenomenon…. First of all, it’s clear you don’t know what feminism is. But I’m not going to explain it to you. You can google it. To quote an old friend, “I’m not the feminist babysitter.” But here is what I think you should know. You’re insulting every woman who was forcibly restrained in a jail cell with a feeding tube down her throat for your right to vote, less than 100 years ago. You’re degrading every woman who has accessed a rape crisis center, which wouldn’t exist without the feminist movement. You’re undermining every woman who fought to make marital rape a crime (it was legal until 1993). You’re spitting on the legacy of every woman who fought for women to be allowed to own property (1848). For the abolition of slavery and the rise of the labor union. For the right to divorce. For women to be allowed to have access to birth control (Comstock laws). For middle and upper class women to be allowed to work outside the home (poor women have always worked outside the home). To make domestic violence a crime in the US (It is very much legal in many parts of the world). To make workplace sexual harassment a crime. In short, you know not what you speak of. You reap the rewards of these women’s sacrifices every day of your life. When you grin with your cutsey sign about how you’re not a feminist, you ignorantly spit on the sacred struggle of the past 200 years. You bite the hand that has fed you freedom, safety, and a voice. In short, kiss my ass, you ignorant little jerks.”

Libby Anne  (via

mikasaackreman

)

Yall know the “i’m not a feminist” “”phenomena”” has existed since feminism has been a thing right

(via adomenighini)

[n0thanx]

Signed copy of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House Second edition before publication, The Viking Press, 1959 Found on powells.com

[ruthfranklin]

Speaking of Joseph Mitchell! “Therese and Joe” are Mitchell and his wife.

[politicsprose]

Live at Politics & Prose

Meghan Daum, elliottholt and Sandra Beasley discuss the decision not to have kids in the collection, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed.

You can catch Live at Politics & Prose on iTunes, Soundcloud, and RSS. Rate. Review. Enjoy. :)