There’s a Buzzfeed quiz that’s called “What 90s Bitch Are You?” I got Kathryn Merteuil from “Cruel Intentions” even though I feel like I’m sort of actually Cher Horowitz in real life. I set up my best friend from high school with another friend and the date didn’t implode on itself plus like, I say “like” like twelve times a sentence.
But, I don’t classify Cher or even Kathryn as bitches because I don’t feel that term is complimentary when used against women of a specific type, especially very young women and I really loathe this putting down of women as “bitches” and the “wrong” girl who isn’t supposed to be a certain way because it’s just the height of misogyny.
I do think I am Kathryn at my worst because I like my revenges and my dramatics and I like to win. I am not Annette and honestly, I’m simultaneously extremely jealous and disdainful of that type and never want to even be associated with it because it ideologically disgusts me. “Doll perfect women with angry black hair stomping in heels and demanding and demanding and demanding” was the phrase from “Nobody is Ever Missing” that I used as the ultimate about me because I can walk, skip and run in high heels and I think that’s a bad thing in our society when it’s not designated for the approval of other people.
I am not supposed to be this way because I show the cracks and I’m only doll perfect on the outside and not always sweet and kind and at the mercy of other people on the inside. Kathryn shows the cracks on the inside as well; she’s proto-Blair Waldorf and the disgusting part of this is that she isn’t allowed to win, or even come out even with Annette according to the narrative of the film.
Cher on the other hand, according to my mother is what “people are really like when they’re not being called on to perform.” It’s the 20th anniversary of “Clueless” and it’s highly appropriate because there has been a renaissance of movies for and by women. Cher is blonde and bubbly and sweet and “a virgin who can’t drive” but Cher isn’t Annette Hargrove by any means.
She just is, free from stereotypes of what young girls ought to be like, refusing to be polarized as the Madonna or the Whore because of what she might wear or say because she knows she’s good at heart and well meaning which is the most important thing when facing the Holy Gates. Or at least, that’s the moral code I’ve been following. She’s perfectly aware of what she’s good at and demands credit for it, unique even today but unheard of 20 years ago and she accepts praise because like, why wouldn’t she?
When Jane Austen wrote “Emma,” she described Emma as “going to be loathed by everyone apart from myself” but personally I couldn’t ever bring myself to hate Emma/Cher because she was as human as they come. To people who loathe her for being a spoiled know-it-all: have you met Fitzwilliam Darcy, or like, most other male heroes in history?
Kathryn is decidedly harder to stomach than Cher for the sharpness of her personality but is also punished by her narrative in a way that Cher isn’t and for the wrong reasons. She ends up being punished not for manipulating innocents, but for her cocaine addiction which is more tragic than reprehensible in such a young girl and even Sarah Michelle Gellar looked as young as her character in this film. (One thing the directors of both “Clueless” and “Cruel Intentions” did right was casting age appropriate actors which made their antics all the more realistic no matter how extreme they might have seemed.)
Perhaps the movie is making a statement against how women are always punished for the wrong thing, but what I got out of it is that Sebastian died a martyr and Annette is the better woman for remaining pure and good and not succumbing to drugs or sex except with the oh so holy Sebastian who was in actuality just as bad if not worse than Kathryn, and Kathryn is the slutty whore who deserved what she got.
I was thinking about the implications that my preferences are eternally towards very “white” media, like Clueless and Cruel Intentions, and my general consensus is that, similar to how women are expected to identify with men but men don’t automatically identify with women, there’s the ingrained expectation that people of color identify with white people while the opposite isn’t true. I’ve always been more into Gossip Girl than Bollywood (even though quite honestly, which plot lines are more unbelievable is a discussion worth having at a later date), because, to me, race is an unfair social construct in a million ways. Why can't I be an Indian Cher Horowitz? Because Indian girls shouldn’t be perky and resourceful and indignantly right?
I think it’s a matter of broadening our horizons of what people ought to be like and moving on from there, because the way to progressiveness is to start at a humanistic individual level, and encouraging acceptance in media is one of the first steps forward.
I read Rebecca Lindenberg first in her wide-armed debut, Love, an Index, a book of singular mourning and love spun out like thread.
The book is dedicated to her partner, Craig Arnold, who disappeared while hiking a Japanese volcano in 2009. One of my favorite poems, “Aubade,” reads:
I woke in a gold dress,
you, in jeans.
Morning filled
wine bottles in the kitchen.
Fine mica glitter
of fish scales and salt.
Outside, it was quiet.
You said, That went well,
don’t you think?
Sun behind you
I kissed the hold in the light
and said: Yes.
Her second collection, The Logan Notebooks, came out last year, and converses with Love, an Index in many ways—in its relationship with other texts (Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, most frequently, as well as contemporary poets), its humor, its concepts changed in repetition, its charming candor—and, as I’d hoped for, its attention to daily love.
Many of Lindenberg’s love poems remind me of a line from the poet Ilya Kaminsky; he writes, in Dancing in Odessa (which I reviewed here in 2012), “Lord, give us what you have already given.” Lindenberg’s poems hold the same quiet commotion of awareness, of both her luckiness and her sadness, of what she has lost and gained.
This complexity of thought—the ability to hold different ideas out in each hand, palm open—is, I think, what makes Lindenberg one of the most adept love-poets I know. She moves easily between profundity—“You’ll find someone else, Sara says. But all I want is to see the same landscape a thousand times and never repeat myself. To know the difference between white and white”—and the domestic, little divine—“The evening we spend trying—replaying the Internet video—to learn the steps to ‘Thriller.’ Barefoot on a linoleum floor under a naked bulb, between a deep exhausted laugh and a swig of purple wine from a box, I realize I don’t feel alone.”
The Logan Notebooks, like its predecessor, commits itself to the exploration of whole messy strata of emotion. In “Improvisation (Distortions),” a poem focused on love’s loss and gain, Lindenberg writes:
This one book claims the author
is dead. But I don’t want to be
dead, I want my naked foot to feel heat
in the dirt of this grass-bald yard.
I want to sit without fidgeting
in the wild silence of grief[.]
In smashing the idea of authorial distance, Lindenberg crouches down to us, holds out a hand, and does not shy from her experience. She is alive, wild, warm.
Lindenberg’s elevation of the daily to the sublime works particularly well in her new work, which largely records her life in a new place—the titular Logan, Utah, something westward, big sky and new land underfoot. Poems called “The West” and “The Real West” compare the wests of Lindenberg and her guy (this is how Lindenberg refers to him—“my guy”). Her west: “I’m thinking about these things in the car, rocketing across the same Nevada wasteland where, at thirteen, my father taught me to drive. It’s studded with brothels and un-blown-up bomb-testing sites. My guy says, Yeah, but. You didn’t grow up in the Real West.” And his: “A church without a cross on it. A church with a cross and a statue of Our Lady. Our Lady of the Desert Passage. Our Lady of the Wildfire. Our Lady of the Snakeoil Salesman. Our Lady, Pride of the Penitent. Our Lady of the Snows. Our Lady of the Unknown Variable. Our Lady of the Birdsong. Our Lady of the Beggar’s Ball. Our Lady of the Green Glass Sea.”
Lindenberg’s west is a place of radical rebirth coupled with daily lives, of burn-it-all-down head starts and the road stretching straight off to elsewhere:
Sometimes, driving down the West, you’ll come to a place along the road where everything is blackened, soft, and you can still see tattered remnants of flame. They do this periodically to clear out the duff, to keep conditions from becoming catastrophic, to make room for some new not-yet-thought-of thing.
There is a new element in Lindenberg’s work of collecting the visible quickly—a sense that time is running out. Lindenberg refers several times to blindness as a quick metaphor, but in “Things That Are Hard to Describe” (modeled, as many of her poems styled as lists and paragraphs in this book are, on a chapter of Shonagon’s Pillow Book), she describes her fear:
I wake in late winter dawn, open my eyes to find there’s something there. This has happened before, the black smudge and speckle of a hemorrhage in the vitreous. It blooms slowly across my view. Ink-leak into oil. How do I explain this so he’ll understand? Bats flap in my face when I try. I know what’s in store—the needle slides into the open eye, then the suddenly underwater look of everything when the drug goes in. I worry that someday a curtain of retina will tear itself down across the apron of my sight and leave me alone backstage. I could get all wrapped in the folds of that panic.
Lindenberg understands what cannot be spoken, though poetry may well be our best way of getting at it. In a poem named “Things That Lose by Being Written About,” Lindenberg’s notes toward the subject become, in fact, greater by their accumulation:
Pulling out a sweater that still smells of last winter’s perfume. The sound of a slow-moving river. Being a woman, which is fairly easy as long as no one’s around. . . .
A strange desire to touch embers in the fire pit. They wax orange when you blow on them, like recognizing something as true.
Lyric, which is a kind of defiant logic and moves like a crowd. The crack of ice melting in a glass of rye. The strident scent of conifer. Any idea of home.
The items themselves may be lost in the writing, or at least hard to touch, but the whole coheres; the poem stands stacked, more than itself. In contrast to those who find poetry inapplicable to their own lives, Lindenberg finds it a learned language (or one born in each of us) towards which we all move. “It’s not hard,” she writes. “Poetry is nobody’s / native language. Or the only one.” And later, in examining “Poetic Subjects”: “My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is the place arbored with locust trees. For me, it’s a language for which I haven’t quite found the language yet.”
Towards the book’s end, Lindenberg places a poem called “Insects,” an associative piece relating multiple scenes from her life. This final paragraph-stanza follows, summative of The Logan Notebooks and of Lindenberg’s collection of work as a whole:
In his library, he had framed glass cases holding many species, pinned to white paper in order of size. Beetles, spiders, butterflies and moths, scorpions and crickets and bees. Splayed, labeled. He called that “his collection.” I guess this is mine.
Interview with Kirsty Logan, author of THE GRACEKEEPERS
Fellow Female Gazer Kirsty Logan's debut novel, The Gracekeepers, is darkly dreamy and utterly absorbing. Reading it feels like swimming in a cool blue sea. It features a floating circus in a drowning world sprinkled with archipelagos, the last earth on Earth, and a hallowed grace-yard with totem birds marking periods of grief by slowly starving in their buoyant gilded cages. This novel is a gorgeous shard of sea glass washing onto a chilly northern beach. It's a bit like a richer, more compelling Waterworld.
The Gracekeepers primarily unfolds through the eyes of two heroines--North the fiery bear girl and Callanish the somber gracekeeper. Their stories kiss and diverge like waltzing lovers. A few other characters get their chance to shine in their own POV chapters, which I'm usually wary of but it ended up working beautifully. Everyone is struggling with their own bone-deep desires.
Logan gives us a wonderfully strange and sad post-apocalyptic world with humanity split into two factions--the earth-bound landlockers and the sea-bound damplings. Fear and prejudice fuel their interactions, and the damplings, like North, are clearly the disenfranchised ones. This book is built on binary conflicts. Can one form one's own identity, outside of a binary? Are there paths between binaries, and if so, how safe are they to trod?
1. Congratulations on your novel debut! Would you share the origin story of this lovely tale?
Thank you! I've spent so long living in this weird, dark dreamy world, and it's a treat to finally be able to bring other people in.
It began with a small, strange image. About a year after my dad died, I was out on a boat with my uncle. We'd both suffered a terrible loss – me of my dad, he of his brother – but we'd never spoken about it directly. I happened to see floating buoys with lights inside that looked like birdcages. So my mind began to wander: why would there be birdcages at sea? Grief was still very much on my mind, as well as my secular lack of a structured mourning, and a lack of a way to discuss it, and so I thought that perhaps the birdcages would be grave markers, and the lifespan of the birds inside would mark the mourning for the person who had died. The whole novel arose from that tiny, personal place.
2. Who was/is your first reader?
My partner, Annie. I read the entire novel to her, chapter by chapter, as I was writing it. Sometimes there would be a cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, and she'd then have to wait weeks until I'd finished the next one! She's now heard about three different versions of the book, as it changed with each edit. I like to think that there's this first-draft ghost-book that only exists in mine and Annie's imaginations, because we're the only ones who heard it.
3. I loved all the gender-play with the circus--the subversive clowns, the sensual glamours, the wild costumes and make-up, the androgynous performances. Am I right in believing all this gender-fucking reflects intentional themes of freedom and identity?
Very much so. It's about freedom, and about blurring boundaries, and about not having to just choose one thing or another. There are lots of different binary conflicts in the book: land/sea, male/female, gay/straight, security/freedom, wildness/domesticity. A lot of the conflict in the book is about the characters feeling they have to choose one and sacrifice the other.
By the end, I hope that the characters (and maybe the reader) have begun to feel that their world (and maybe our world) is not just a binary choice. If we want, we can choose one thing. But we can also flip between the two, or we can choose neither and follow a third path we have marked out ourselves.
I think partly that comes from my own life. I've had both girlfriends and boyfriends, and each time I had a new partner people would ask whether I was 'gay now' or 'straight now'. And the answer was yes and no. I'm a monogamous person by nature, so when I was with a man I wasn't interested in women – but I also wasn't interested in any other men, just the one I was with. So now I'm with Annie, and it's not that I'm a lesbian and not interested in men, it's that I'm not interested in anyone except her. But no matter who I was with, it didn't change my identity. The person you're sleeping with doesn't have to change you if you don't want it to.
I was born in England to Scottish parents, so I didn't properly belong there; and now I live in Scotland but have an English accent, so people don't perceive me as being properly 'from' here either. I'm from both places, and also neither entirely. I'm a cis female, and I like dresses and lipstick, and generally I'm happy to present as female. But that doesn't mean I want to always look typically female. I don't think the way I present myself changes who I am inside, because I don't want it to. We decide who we are, and the freedom to present ourselves however we like doesn't change that. I'm quite happy to hold all my contrasting identities simultaneously.
4. When I started reading, I assumed that North and Callanish were the only point-of-view characters, so I was surprised and honestly a little wary when I turned a page and met a chapter from the clown Cash's POV. I'd already grown attached to North and Callanish, and I believe it's a risky choice to use multiple POV characters, but now I can't imagine the novel without those secondary character chapters--especially Red Gold's and Avalon's. Did you always intend to tell the story from multiple POVs, or did that come about during the writing process?
This is very much a short story writer's novel! Short stories come more naturally to me, so this was a way for me to approach the massive undertaking of a novel while still keeping to my own natural rhythm.
Each chapter is its own little tale, and I wanted each character's point of view to subtly undermine the one that came before. So in one chapter we have the clowns observing the ringmaster's wife, and thinking how cruel and silly she is; and then we have the ringmaster observing his wife, and of course he's thinking that she's sweet and beautiful and sensitive. There is no single truth, not about the world and not about the people in the world. We are all complex. We all have multiple selves. Which self we present is different depending on our company, so it made sense to me that each character could be described from multiple viewpoints, and each of those would be true – even when they were contradictory.
5. So Avalon was the closest thing to a classic villain in The Gracekeepers--a pregnant Machiavellian beauty with a burning coal heart and desperation wafting from her like the smell of strong drink. I'm particularly fond of lady villains, flawed women, "ruined" girls, and the like, so of course I hate-loved Avalon. She reminded me a bit of Lady Macbeth, aka one of my favorite characters of all time. I was particularly enamored with the idea of a pregnant woman doing and saying the things she does; that clash of growth and destruction, and how it contradicts the popular image of pregnant women as life-giving beatific figures. I clearly don't have an actual question--I just want you to dish about Avalon a bit. Do you agree with my assessment of her?
Avalon was the most fun to write. She's the wicked stepmother from 'Snow White', she's the biblical Eve, she's Cruella de Vil. She's seductive and full of rage – and still, she's a loving wife and a nurturing mother-to-be. She loves her family, and everything she does, she does for her own good reasons. She can be all of these things, just as we can be myriad and contradictory things. Becoming a parent doesn't necessarily make you a good person. I very much want children, but I don't think it's an intrinsically noble act.
Most people I know are many different things. This book began with the loss of my dad, and he was a contradiction too. He was an alcoholic, self-destructive, couldn't hold down a job. But he was also a loving father who continued to support me financially and emotionally, even through his darkest times. Even as he couldn't properly look after himself, he helped other people by working for an addiction charity. He never settled to a career, but he was massively inspirational in my career. His funeral was packed with people I didn't even know he knew – people whose lives he'd touched, who had good memories of him. Recently his university girlfriend got in touch with me, and she had such strong and affectionate feelings for him even though she hadn't seen him for thirty years. He was a great man, but also a deeply flawed and troubled man – and at the same time, he was a regular guy, nothing special, someone you'd pass in the street and not even notice. Every single one of us is just a regular person, but is also vitally important.
6. I really enjoyed how you used the clowns; how they ended up being central to the plot. I was terrified of clowns as a child, and as I grew up that terror evolved into just being creeped out by them. What clowns are (ambiguous) and what we project onto them (fury, anarchy, sadness) is exactly what's so creepy about them. As you say: "Dough knew that clowns made perfect scapegoats, because what's scarier than a clown? They stand for money and hunger, sex and rage, loss and loneliness, displacement and death. They stand for everything, and they stand for nothing." Did you ever fear clowns as a child, and have you encountered any readers who are afraid of your clowns?
I hate clowns. Properly hate them. They're scary and sinister and I have never found them amusing, not even as a child. I'm creeped out by painted faces and masks and anything that hides people's faces in a grotesque way. But of course, that's why I'm so fascinated by them. One of the weirdest things about being a writer is that you're constantly exploring things that disturb you, because that's where your emotional truth hides.
When I researched the history of circuses – because there's loads of research in this book, though I don't think it really shows; I researched circuses and English folk traditions and naval superstitions and different types of boats and which crops grow in different climates and which landmasses would exist as islands if the world did flood – I found that clowns have always served as scapegoats. Their tradition goes back to court jesters and fools. The common people (the 99%, as we're now called) would be angry at what the kings and lords did, at their flaunting of wealth and charging of taxes. But it was too dangerous to criticise or mock those in power, or the platform to do so just didn't exist. So instead there were the jesters and clowns: figures of fun who made themselves look silly so we could all scorn them and feel superior to them. Also, the fools and jesters could talk about political situations in a way that no one else could, because they dressed it in a funny story. We don't just mock the clowns because they're silly – we mock them because they stand in place of those we really want to hate. It's the same with nursery rhymes and fairy tales: they seem like fun little stories, but many of them are a sneaky way to criticise those in power.
7. In our interview for The Rental Heart, we discussed your teen years and current life in Scotland and how it informs your literary aesthetic. Since The Gracekeepers is set in a fantasy post-apocalyptic world, how did your Scottish identity influence the atmosphere/settings, if it did at all?
Scotland is so inspirational to me. There's the folklore and fairytales, of course, and so many of those stories (selkies, kelpies, mermaids) are based on the sea. No matter where you go in Scotland, you're never more than 40 miles from the sea. I've written so much about Scottish folklore, but I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. Folklore is the well I keep returning to, and I don't see how it could ever run out.
So there's the sea part, and in Scotland we also have the tradition of the ceilidh, a social gathering with music and wild dancing. It's a very sociable country, and people are much friendlier here than any other place I've visited. Scottish folk – and those in Glasgow in particular – will always help a stranger, or chat to fill the silence, whether you want them to or not!
I love that raucous, sociable aspect: drinking and music and dancing until dawn. But I also love the other side of Scotland: days of silence and watching the tide breathe in and out. I try to bring that contrast, that non-conflicting contradiction, to all my writing. I'll never stop being inspired by this country.
8. Are you superstitious in any way?
I'd like to say no, but I did develop some little superstitions when writing this book. I wrote the first chapters on a series of writing retreats along the Scottish coast, and at one point I was in a little east coast fishing village called Cellardyke. While I was there I visited an antique shop and bought a brass compass. From then on, I always had to make sure the compass was pointing north before I could begin the day's writing. That was very much a book-specific superstition, as I haven't done that for any writing since.
9.If you could pick a classic fairy tale to retell (that you haven't already), what would it be?
'Kate Crackernuts', a Scottish fairytale about a girl who isn't pretty or demure, but who gets her happy ending by being clever and resourceful. It also features a fairy ball, which has a contradiction I love: it's beautiful and glamorous and happy, but it's also destructive and can ultimately kill you.
10. Now, please do share a little about your third book, the forthcoming story collection, if you don't mind. I can't wait to see it in print!
Thank you! I'm excited about it – I love writing short stories, and they're more fun to read at events than novel extracts because you get to share a fully-formed piece rather than just a sliver. Also, the collection is written in thirteen different voices, so that's more fun to perform as each story has such a different mood.
The book is a collection of linked stories called A Portable Shelter (due out in the UK in August). It's inspired by Scottish and Scandinavian folk tales, and it's all about loss, identity and the purpose of stories.
To be honest, I'm already getting excited about starting Book #4, which will be another novel. This September I'm off for a one-month writing retreat to a forest in the middle of Finland, where I'll start writing it. I've been planning three possible novels, and I don't know yet which one I'll actually write. But it's nice to have options!
I have a Cersei Lannister doll that lives on my desk and rightfully ought to be holding a glass of wine but unfortunately is not. For those of you who don’t know, Cersei Lannister is a female (villain) protagonist of HBO’s Game of Thrones, an adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s fantasy novel series, A Song of Ice and Fire.
I’ve been invested in fantasy literature for over a decade; my dad took me to see The Lord of the Rings when I was 9 and I’ve been reading the Harry Potter series since I was younger than that. I’ve read all 14 books of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time, I endured the awfulness that was the Sword of Truth saga, not to mention every obscure girl power fantasy series from Tamora Pierce’s Tortall books and Graceling by Kristen Cashore to all the godawful books starring a self insert Mary Sue protagonist with violet eyes and white hair.
Over the years, I’ve learned that it is not particularly fun to be a woman in fantasy circles and it is doubly not fun to be a woman of color, and I have the profound luck to be both. The strange thing about nerd culture as a whole is that for something that supposedly was created to abolish the hegemony of the society we live in, it does a pretty pathetic job of it.
That is, those who dominate nerd culture don’t want to abolish the complex social hierarchy--they simply want to establish a new social hierarchy with themselves on top, a marginally more nuanced version of the trite, tired racism and sexism we have to deal with in day-to-day life. (I’d recommend Laurie Penny’s impeccable article about this because she expresses so many of the issues I have personally faced in these environments.)
I read A Song of Ice and Fire in its entirety when I was 16 on an offhand comment from an ex-boyfriend that I was too much of a ditz to complete them, but I didn’t watch the show until the third season was released in 2013. Game of Thrones is an unprecedented success for HBO; it’s extraordinarily well acted and the audience encompasses all walks of life, from college students like myself to adults who watch with their own friends and family. What’s remarkable about Game of Thrones is how many women are genuinely interested and invested in the series, which rarely happens in fantasy themed media, which has long been a stronghold for the oh-so-repressed white male nerd.
There are many problems with Game of Thrones, those which exist in the source material and those that are singular to the adaptation but the fact remains, on a literal level, there are more female characters of different backgrounds and convictions than almost any other mainstream television show. The sad fact about our society is that it’s still revolutionary to regard women as people with complexities and nuances that are usually only granted to men.
I have many issues with GRRM’s writing because I think he resorts to traditional fantasy tropes far too often, which are rooted in misogyny. This includes but is not limited to: the tendency to fridge women to cater to “manpain;” the derision of and tendency to apologize for the conventionally feminine, not only in looks but in personality; and a heavy hand with racial issues. The show itself does a mismatched job with those issues. As a program, I give it much higher marks than as an adaptation, but at the same time, Game of Thrones falls prey, especially in its later seasons, to what I like to refer to as “HBO’s Deference to White Male Intellectual Jerking Off.”
In other words, the True Detective effect: prioritizing the narratives and stories of white men over any other group; refusing to grant anyone else the emotional range and resonance granted to white men. And more disturbingly, the program delights in using women’s pain and bodies as props, which is indicative of a more disturbing trend in our society.
Off the top of my head, issues with the show include Catelyn Stark’s silencing and portrayal as a secondary character in Robb Stark’s storyline while she is the point of view character in the novels, Cersei Lannister’s whitewashing (which I can somewhat excuse because of the amount of misogynistic hatred even her toned down show version receives), and her rape on her son’s alter by Jaime, her twin brother/lover (which I can’t excuse since the scene in the novel is defined by her explicit “yes”).
But the treatment of Ros and other sex workers in the show, this excess of female nudity and sexual violence, is indicative of a far more sinister misogyny in the show, where women are regarded as worthless unless they are easily sexualized by the male gaze or “relatable,” hence Arya and Brienne’s “not like other girls” portrayal that their book counterparts entirely lack.
Most recently, the completely unnecessary, non-canonical rape of Sansa Stark in Episode 6 of Season 5 has been universally condemned by countless others and for good reason. Sansa takes on the storyline of a minor character, Jeyne Poole, but my question and many others’ is: if the writers didn’t bother with the source material that includes Lady Stoneheart and Arianne Martell, storylines where women have power and agency, why were they so intent on including a storyline where an underage girl was brutally raped and traumatized?
And even more glaringly, recount the horrific event from Theon Greyjoy’s perspective? They couldn’t even portray the storyline in a way that made it about Sansa herself. Instead they made it about Theon’s dissociation from his identity and it’s revolting. When Theon was tortured and brutalized, it was all about his pain, his journey; his experience wasn't used to showcase someone else's struggle. It’s because, like on so many other shows and in real life, women’s pain is so normalized it’s not even worth talking about, except in regards to how it affects white men, and as a young woman, as a young woman of color, as a human being capable of empathy, it’s disgusting.
Despite the numerous issues I have with Game of Thrones, I’m going to continue watching the show because I’m invested in the characters. I’m not even hate watching like many former fans (though I don't begrudge them, or anyone who has decided to stop watching). I am going to continue to praise what the show does well, namely the acting and casting, and condemn it when it messes up like it so often does.
I will be an informed fan, taking into account my personal life experiences as well as other people’s to evaluate the show. I am not interested in people who insist on condemning those who watch it as “not proper fans.” The people who insist on praising the show to all heavens, ignoring the raging issues it has with violence against women in particular, bore me as well. “Historical accuracy” isn’t a valid argument and I’m not wrong for wanting something better.
Rachel Urquhart’s The Visionist is centered on unlikely strengthening, on the transmutation of circumstance into meaning in secular, social, and sacred worlds. In structure, the novel moves deftly between three people of the same place and time, and just as easily between first- and third-person points of view. Polly Kimball, whose life sets the fiction in motion, is a fifteen-year-old girl who has burned down the family farm and, in doing so, both killed her abusive father and saved her mother and brother (not to mention herself). Sister Charity is the same age, but her trauma took place long ago, and she has been raised in the Shaker colony called the City of Hope. The third voice does not join with the other two until later in the story: Simon Pryor is a private investigator who probes the mysterious circumstances of Polly’s abandoned life—the farm, the death, the land and to whom it must go.
According to its author, The Visionist took ten years to write; the time taken comes through in the book’s tightly woven research and in Urquhart’s careful rendering of each 19th-century voice. Its pleasure is in her pure skill—words that glisten through thickets and simple dresses, as connective and tactile as rough palms placed flat on planks. Just on the first page, as part of a prologue set sixty years after the novel’s action, Sister Charity says:
It is not uncommon, when one is young, to think that life is simple. In my case, I reasoned, it would require little besides discipline and effort. If I labored well, worshiped, confessed, and shunned all carnal desire, my soul would find sure and brilliant its path to Zion. . . But if we are to be sincere, then we know that we are not made for perfection. However we may try to fit the pattern, it pulls and bunches like a poorly sewn waistcoat and we exhaust ourselves with the fruitless smoothing of seams. I know something of this struggle, and now that I am old, I realize that my youthful presumptions about the way forward were based on a fundamental misunderstanding: I thought life was simple because I thought I was simple. On both counts, I was mistaken.
In its concentration on two distinct female voices, The Visionist primarily places itself as a novel of girlhood—the girl as agent, and the connections made between young girls cast as the most central to their lives. Polly, whose mother brought her and her brother to the City of Hope after they fled their burning farm, was grasping, helpless, before she made her radical action: “These were night thoughts, she knew, the kind that come when sleep will not, the questions no one can answer, least of all a young girl in the dark.” On her arrival, though, she is heralded as a Visionist at the first Sabbath Day Meeting. We first hear of the Vision from Sister Charity’s point of view:
It was then that I heard our labors to be accompanied by a strange noise, a moan so mournful and otherworldly that I felt sure a sudden wind had come up round the corners of the meetinghouse. As I ceased in the dance, I looked upon my fellow believers and found that they, too, had stopped to listen. . .
Surely no man or woman could give voice to such a pure translation of misery. We were in the presence of a warning spirit, one who had something of the gravest importance to tell us.
Then, I saw her.
Who could have imagined such a transformation? The new believer, standing apart from the rest, swaying with eyes closed and fists clenched, dancing—a slow, mournful shuffle—alone in a sun-soaked spot. . . I can only say that the sight stunned every believer in the room into stillness. But her song—its sounds spoke of suffering without ever sinking into words. In her wails and cries resided all the Earth’s pain and sadness, yet she appeared so radiant, like an angel warrior delivered into The City of Hope to help us fight against the doom she embodied.
Polly’s power, though, comes from her past, and is more centered in trauma than in belief. The visions, she realizes, are those she once used to spiritually escape her father’s abuse:
“I am not wholly certain, Elder Sister,” Polly answered. “I hardly remember it, though it was just hours ago. I think back and . . .”
Polly paused, her mind flooded by the memory . . .
“You think back and . . . ?” Elder Sister Agnes prompted.
Polly kept her face purposefully blank. How could she tell this woman that she had not seen anyone’s devil but her own? She had envisioned something nobody in this peaceful place could understand.
“I hear only noise, smell only smells, and heat . . . that’s all I feel until . . .” she continued.
“Yes,” said Elder Sister Agnes. “Until?”
“Until my angels come,” Polly answered. Then my soul is taken away from that which frightens me and I . . . escape.”
Polly’s devil comes to her, yes, the past which she must run from; however, in her are also the angels, and the power to escape. She, like Shiva, holds the destruction and creation of her own world.
Though Polly’s Vision is memorable and important to the majority of the believers in the City of Hope, it is most crucial in its ability to connect her to Sister Charity, who has been assigned as her roommate. After that first Meeting, Charity is hopeful and radiant: “No one had ever before gazed upon Polly with such unguarded devotion.” Polly finds that this kind of love is the ultimate miracle-action, more important still than visions or faiths of a so-called higher plane: “Polly realized that earlier, in the pale gray dawn, Sister Charity had performed no other miracle than to bathe her in love. Such a small thing, yet how it had changed the world.”
In fact, love seems to be the attendant faith of the novel despite its focus on a religious community; whereas spiritual faith depends on “tiny gestures . . . protected from the disturbances of a world [the believers] refused to acknowledge,” love is an arbiter of radical empathy and transformation despite these disturbances. We see this when Polly wishes to deserve Charity’s attention and faith: “Then she looked up and willed the angels to her aid. Please, she pleaded silently. Please deliver me from my past that I might deserve this one person.”
Belief, in fact, is cast as a sort of privilege; when Polly meets Elder Brother Caleb, she thinks: “He lives his beliefs . . . as enthusiastically as he lives his life. Had she ever lived hers with anything but survival in mind?” And it is more complex than simple devotion. Charity’s test of faith throughout the novel results in a doubt that creeps upon her based on the complexity and fallibility of what it is to be human. She mourns for the easy faith of her younger years:
Why can I not be the girl I was when I heard the music of my beliefs in the whirl of the spinning wheel, the boil of the distillery cauldrons, the crisp cutting of medicinal pills? My blessings and prayers I once counted in every stitch, for oh, did I sew my soul into the seams of our city! I was both dust and broom, sheep and yarn, grain and bread.
Yet we are not left alone for this failure of faith; where the divine fails, our feet on the ground and our connections to one another provide something newly sufficient. As Simon puts it toward the end of the novel, “one cannot sing the ballad of a single life.” These interconnected existences are in themselves a kind of grace.
Interview with Leesa Cross-Smith, author of EVERY KISS A WAR
Fellow Female Gazer Leesa Cross-Smith's award-winning debut Every Kiss a War is one of the sexiest books of all time--a collection of twenty-seven heart-throbbing, richly detailed stories concerning a series of evolving relationships and their inhabitants. These are highly textured, strong-voiced men and women who kiss and run and fuck and fight and mourn and pine and find themselves standing in a light snow with someone they don't love and drinking "ice clinky frontier whiskey" and wearing bracelets that make bright sounds and letting someone kiss them "because fireworks." When I think of these stories, I see starlit gravel roads; a girl standing in the southern heat, pretty brown legs ending in cowboy boots; a dimly lit kitchen swollen with country music; a woman's braid coming undone in the crepuscular light; and ROSCOE PIE, written twice and underlined.
1. One of the things I love most about your work is how sensually vivid it is. There are so many stellar passages I can't possibly start referencing them--I'd end up pulling at least twenty quotes. Do you write lines like this in bits and pieces, as inspiration strikes, stitching together so many colorful word-quilt patches, or do you sit down and write in long bursts until you get to the end?
Thank you so much for this sweetness Dawn! I appreciate it and you muchly. I write most of that kinda stuff in bits and pieces, yes. I will sometimes write a whole list of them in the notes on my phone and put them together later...however they end up coming together.
2. How important is symbolism to you?
I rarely do it on purpose. Sometimes it happens and I'm not even fully aware of it and that's my favorite!
3. Your collection is a blend of flash fiction and longer stories--you seem to flit back and forth effortlessly. Which comes more naturally: little fables or tall tales?
They both seem to come naturally, honestly. I like to go back and forth because some stories just feel longer than others and some...I only want them to be a little peek between fingers. A blink of a feeling.
4. So let's dish about genre a little bit. In my humble opinion, you definitely write love stories but you're not technically a romance writer. If I were a librarian I would shelve your book in the general adult/literary fiction section. Do you find any value in these kinds of distinctions? Speaking of which, I've always carried a hot stone of hate for the "African-American" section in libraries/bookstores for several reasons--chiefly because an author's race tells readers absolutely nothing about their book(s) and because it's often ghettoizing. Is that a "pet peeve" of yours too?
Romance is my favorite thing to write...complicated relationships. It's what I always come back to. And I always wanna be able to keep those ideas fresh and sexy and comfy and compelling and not-cliche. I think the distinctions can be super-helpful for people when they're looking for a certain feel or emotion as they're hunting for a book...but a good book is a good book and a good story is a good story, no matter what the label is.
I'm prettymuch anti-African-American section for the same reason you are. Once we start doing that...we have to do that for everyone/everything right? I'm African-American with some Great British and Scandinavian. I also love noodles and strawberries and Harry Styles. I could be shelved in a lot of different ways and so could everyone! It's weird to me. I mean I get it...in a way...but it's still weird.
5. Some of your stories have a male protagonist (Hem, The Wild Hunt, Wayfaring). I believe you write men quite well, whether they're protagonists or love interests or supporting characters. Do you find it difficult to step inside a man's mind and write from his perspective?
Thank youuuu! I love writing men/writing about men. I love the quote from Sylvia Plath's journals where she writes "My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy." Men interest me because humans interest me. It's not always about sex or seduction or lust. I just like trying different things and coming from different points of view.
When writing from a man's point of view I tend to make them a little more straightforward and a little less chatty. This is because most of the men in my life are that way. But when it all boils down I always give them the same emotions I give my women. Because people are people. And I write both the men and women in my stories as having lusty, sinful, grumpy...whatever thoughts because some feelings are universal.
6. I LOVE your Every Kiss A War playlist. Totally perfect mood music. Did you listen to these songs while you were writing or did you arrange the playlist later?
Thanks for listening! I don't really listen to music when I write, but I had some songs in mind that I wanted to put on the playlist. The Steve Nicks, the Neko Case...those were on the list in my head from the very beginning.
I'm deeply in love with your trilogy of stories (What the Fireworks Are For; Hold On, Hold On; Cheap Beer & Sparkles) starring Violet, a strong-willed but painfully confused runner with a husband, Dominic, and a crush, Roscoe Pie (I also have a crush on the perfectly-named Roscoe Pie, thanks to you!). I have a major soft spot for recurring characters, as you know, so I have a couple questions:
7. What first inspired you to write this trilogy?
!! Thank you Dawn! I do have a crush on Roscoe Pie, too. I love him madly. I wrote the first one "What The Fireworks Are For" just because I wanted to write about a wild girl. A woman who was gonna do whatever she wanted whenever she wanted. And when I got to the end of that story I realized that I wasn't finished yet. I couldn't stop thinking about her. I'd recently finished Fear of Flying by Erica Jong and I wanted to write about a woman who ran away from her husband for no real reason besides the fact that she just wanted to...a woman who was confident and surprising and rebellious and confused and a lot of other things too.
8. Did you know Violet's saga would be more than one story from the start?
I didn't! I was just gonna go with it and it turned into three stories then it turned into a full novel, which was nice and surprising.
9. Do you see more story series in your future?
There is another recurring character in my collection. His name is Sam. I have other stories about him and could probably write a whole novel about him too. I really love Sam. I think about him a lot and he's special to me. He's a precious man.
10. Speaking of which, I was tickled pink to read that you're working on a novel starring Violet. Can you tell us anything about it?
Aw, yay! I have it all finished and it's in my agent's hands now, which is still so surreal and amazing for me and always will be. It's a continuation of the trilogy of stories from my collection and it's about Violet and Roscoe and Violet's ex-husband Dominic and all that those complicated relationships entail. I could write a couple more books about Violet. I adore her, even the hard to love parts. She's so sexy and complicated and messy and wild and easy and hard to love. She feels real to me so I just keep writing her because bless her heart...I wanna kiss her mouth.
Let’s talk about the way you look. In that white, flowy dress, how you’re dancing and swaying barefoot by the shores of a muddy river.
Let’s talk about your crisp black dresses, bright honey blonde hair cut to fall justso, highlighting your cheekbones. Balancing that cigarette, tapping the ash free with your long fingers.
Let’s talk about your gigantic red curls, cat’s-eye glasses, and passion for gloves – and Balenciaga.
Let’s talk about your statement necklaces layered and layered and your hoop earrings to contrast with your endlessly long sleek braids.
Let’s talk about how you’re a witch, and you are really into looking good. And into looking. Taking an eyeful. Judging the quantities and qualities of what you see. Let’s talk about how you and your girls breeze about being the crème de la crème of New Orleans, looking your absolute best – but how sometimes, the perfection of your image can mask a lack of depth and certain coherence of personality traits – and plot lines.
The main arc in American Horror Story: Coven is the vainglorious pursuits of a group of witches looking for a new ‘supreme’ or top witch, a witch with the strongest powers who will lead them before their current supreme, Fiona Goode (Jessica Lange) succumbs to the cancer currently weakening her.
But the series starts in typical AHS fashion with a romp that suddenly turns bloody – SPOILERS ABOUND (though this occurs in the first few minutes):
Zoe Benson (Taissa Farmiga), an apparently normal teenager, discovers that she has a particularly gruesome special power when she attempts to have sex for the first time and graphically kills her boyfriend. It’s particularly p-in-v sex that causes the trouble: Zoe possesses a vagina that causes blood to burst out of noses and eyes. It turns out that she is the descendent of a witch from Salem, and is promptly shuffled off, out of the family home to live at Miss Robichaux's Academy in New Orleans, in order to learn how to control this and possibly other powers.
For witches have power they know or learn how to use, or it seems so for every other witch we meet. Choice, for the most part, plays into whether or not these powers will be used for good or evil, at full strength, or to clumsy, catastrophic effect. Even Zoe will eventually find a (admittedly pretty ethically grey) workaround after she falls for tender fratboy Kyle (Evan Peters).
At the school, run by Fiona’s meek and ‘disappointing’ daughter Cordelia Foxx (Sarah Paulson; specialty: niceness, plants – a bit like a frailer, more elegant version of the mother from Kiki’s Delivery Service), we find former Hollywood child star Madison Montgomery (Emma Roberts; specialty: faux fur, eyeliner, telekinesis, cruel one-liners),
Queenie (Gabourey Sidibe; specialty: human voodoo doll, putting up with racist shit),
and Nan (Jamie Brewer; specialty: clairvoyance, mind control, being chronically underestimated and wastefully killed).
Also at the school is live-in butler/creep Spalding (Denis O’Hare), who lacks a tongue.
Later he will be replaced by Kyle the tender fratboy, who was killed in a telepathically-induced bus crash, then brought back to life as a Frankenstein-esque construction, with limited vocabulary and possibly mental faculties, but all the love. His role (object of much exploitation) will be discussed later.
Significant figures outside the school include the immortal voodoo priestess Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett), who has lived in New Orleans since its beginnings (thanks to the old annual-innocent-soul-in-exchange-for-immortal-life deal with Papa Legba, a spirit that certain folk on the internet who seem to know more than I do on the subject say was misrepresented),
Madam Marie Delphine LaLaurie, and later, the head of Madam Marie Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), Myrtle Snow (Frances Conroy), leader of the witches’ council (specialty: truth spells, plummy voice, eccentric aunt fashion) and the too-sweet-for-this-world Misty Day (Lily Rabe; specialty: spectacular resurrection powers, love of Stevie Nicks).
While I love Misty Day and Myrtle Snow, there’s not too much I feel the need to say about them, so we’ll focus on the other two.
Laveau (specialty: everything? It seems she can do all the magic, also has excellent one-liners) runs a hair salon, which is both a successful business and a front for the spell casting she does. Marie Laveau is, like all the witches, magnificently stylish. She hates witches however because their white ancestors were given their powers as a gift from a slave woman called Tituba– the original witches in Salem were black. Only Queenie is descended from Tituba, and Laveau attempts to bring her over to her side by pointing this fact out.
Marie Laveau was a real woman from New Orleans and a practitioner of voodoo, as too was Salem resident Tituba – she was the first person in the town to be accused of practicing witchcraft. It’s apparently uncertain as to whether she was black, or a Native American, or Afro-Caribbean but either way she was a woman of colour who was enslaved. It’s not even certain that Tituba practiced voodoo, since there are no records, and all of the ‘witchcraft’ she confessed to conformed to European myths – although we can guess the reason why that might be, given her torturers were white European-origin settlers. Well, so the Wiki tells me.
Here, hold this grain of salt; it’s probably smaller than the one you need to hold in order to watch Coven.
What does it mean to take the story of women, even two relatively far back in time, and use these – clumsily, to put it kindly – to discuss racism in modern America? I don’t even know. There are parallels to be made between the misuse of Tituba’s gift and subsequent division between witches and voodoienne, the appropriation of African American art – say, Jazz music for one, given the location – but I don’t think the series sets up anything close to a coherent point on the matter.
Coven seems to rob liberally from history and slap the whole thing down on the table, cracking gum. The whole thing is really hard for me, a white woman in Scotland, to even attempt to wrap my head around. Another character in the show based directly on a real-life person is Marie Delphine LaLaurie. She was another real life resident of New Orleans in the 1800s, a wealthy white Creole socialite onto her third husband, who was discovered to be a torturer and serial killer after a fire revealed that her slaves had been chained up, beaten, mutilated and starved. Subsequently, tales of her abuses were made more lurid, though even at the time, the rescued slaves were held in a prison and made available for viewing to the public to help ‘convince them of the severity of the tortures’ or euphemisms to that effect.
Her house, which appears on the show (though I don’t think it’s the real LaLaurie house, which was for a time owned by Nicholas Cage, make of that what you will) is the site of her immortal internment under the ground, trapped by a spell of Marie Laveau’s as revenge for her crimes. For some reason the witches dig her up and have her at their place? Maybe because Fiona Goode likes to have bargaining chips in hand, or possibly because she’d like someone demonstrably even worse than herself around to make her seem less heinous.
My memory is fuzzy on this part. What I remember pretty clearly is the Minotaur, an inexplicably transformed version of Marie Laveau’s lover, all gleaming abs and mindless masculinity sent to attack the monstrous racist and then encountering Queenie, who is defending LaLaurie and then – I don’t even know, I reach the end of my understanding. And beyond that understanding, I recall Queenie is given LaLaurie as a slave and at the same time tries to rehabilitate her, and then in exasperation handing her over to Laveau, who has her head cut off. The head lives! The head is made to watch the box set of Roots, and cries about slavery. Mmm, hmm.
Coven is in my mind the most frustrating season of American Horror Story. I would be hard pressed to say what all of these characters get up to over the course of the series. I barely manage to touch on the above, and I pull my hand away, and it feels like I’ve stuck my fingers through some rotten fruit. The show has one great strength in the great visual touches – mostly in clothing, but also in the great, minimalist white-painted house which acts as an anchor for the action. I’ve discussed before how AHS is generally wound up tight and placed inside a singular location – the murder house, the asylum.
But too often in Coven the story strays outside of it, sometimes briefly, sometimes for longer, into other less convincing boxes. A penthouse building straight out of the eighties, a futuristic science lab, a frat house, a small home with a large, disturbing secret, the historical museum made of LaLaurie’s house and the streets around it, a hair dresser’s salon, a swamp hut, a necropolis, a boardroom, an old Jazz player’s apartment that feels straight out of a Tennessee Williams play, or at least, the acts that take place within it do, as seen through several smoked glasses of bourbon and a book about New Orleans Gothic stories. It’s a clunky bounty, and Coven doesn’t seem to know what to do with it all, instead letting characters pop up in whichever new place, visually moving on the action, but too often failing to keep the current linked up.
On the subject of visual interest, I’d like to touch on how the male body performs here. In contrast to the witches, all poise and style, the men in Coven appear fragmentary. There’s Kyle, with his body broken apart and reassembled poorly. Spalding with his tongueless mouth, the jazzman who trails between the spirit world and this, half ghost half man, the hunk next door pinned under his mother’s jealousy, and the Minotaur, another hybrid kept alive by his lover only to be used as a muscled weapon. You might raise Madam LaLaurie ending up as just a head – but this fragmentation is played for laughs.
And…reconciliation? (Nope!) Whereas the men are most often presented as either desiring object (who can be ignored or used by the witches as seen fit) or desired object – in the case of Kyle particularly. He is subject to the female gaze relentlessly. Even when dead, his divided body is the subject of comment:
Madison Montgomery: Zoe, look around this room. Okay, what do you see?
Zoe Benson: Tragedy.
Madison Montgomery: I see potential. Look, nice legs over here. A great set of guns. [chuckles] I wonder if he's a show-er or a grower.
Zoe Benson: What's your point, Madison?
Madison Montgomery: We take the best boy parts, we attach them to Kyle's head, and we build the perfect boyfriend.
Zoe Benson: Is this just a joke to you?
Madison Montgomery: No, it's a challenge. All we have to do is follow this recipe. Find me a saw.
Building the perfect boyfriend out of mutilated body parts. Reanimating them. Loving them, even when it’s not clear whether Kyle, mumbling and prone to rages, has returned to himself intact.
We see Kyle’s anguish as he recognises that a tattoo on his ankle was the one that used to be on his friend’s ankle. The built boy, no say in the matter, and little able to speak. I would love it if the show had made something of this premise, but it squanders ethical considerations on, what else, a cringy threesome between Kyle, Zoe and Madison – because two of the party are formerly deceased, Zoe’s killer vagina will be no impediment. The ethics of consent of the dead and possibly mentally incapacitated are firmly thrown on the railings.
While it was a hot and gorgeous mess, I found myself with a lot to say in the end. This being a Tumblr based site I have one recommendation for what could help the immortal memory of Coven– fan fiction. Fresh narratives crafted by those dedicated enough to pull out the threads and rework them, to take the potential this show had and bring it to a more satisfying fruition.
Art, little one-shots, some huge great novel that takes all the main characters and renames them and plants them in the White House or Middle Earth or even a coffee shop, for goodness sake. Pick a fixed stage and shine a great bright light on things. Maintain, supplement, complicate, extrapolate and philosophise all the wonky sex and endless machinations until there’s honey from this leonine corpse.
It is painful when the one we love stops mirroring our best self, who we want to be, or most importantly who we are most comfortable being. bell hooks says about love, “We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another...Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.” The One I Love at once supports and negates hooks’s assertion. Sophie, played by Elisabeth Moss, and Ethan, played by Mark Duplass, are at once more and less in love as their intimacy deepens and the film complicates itself, creating a Twilight Zone-like reality which makes for one of the more realistic yet bizarre portrayals of love and marriage I have ever seen.
Having somewhat recently gotten out of a decade long, on and off again relationship that seemed eerily similar to the one I knew to be portrayed in the film, I was more than ready for the catharsis I thought Charlie McDowell’s directorial debut might bring. The One I Love did not disappoint, nor did it fulfill my desire for a tidy, comforting ending, which I hoped would leave me feeling sanguine about the possibilities of romantic love and longing. If anything, this film left me with more questions, a strange verisimilitude creeping into the final moments of an otherwise implausible narrative.
The film begins with a flashback of how Sophie and Ethan met at a party and quickly found themselves sneaking into a neighbor’s backyard, breaking into their pool. “We were swimming and we were in love,” Ethan remembers fondly. Soon we see that Ethan, now several years older and married to Sophie who is sitting in the chair beside him, is recounting the moment they first fell in love to their therapist. He goes on to explain how he recently tried to recreate that moment with Sophie. We even see a flashback of his failed attempt at nostalgic romancing. “I felt like our happiness used to be so easy and there used to be so much of it and now I feel like happiness is something we have to recreate,” Sophie says. Soon after, the crux of Ethan and Sophie’s troubles, why we discover them in the therapist’s office to begin with, is revealed: he cheated, she found out, he wants to “move on,” and she can’t seem to. “Because you don’t get to decide that, Ethan. You don’t get to decide when we move on. I do.” Thus the power struggle that becomes the heart of the weird dream of this film commences.
Ethan and Sophie’s therapist recommends they go away for a long weekend to a place he’s successfully sent many other couples. The couple arrives in awe. The main house, guest house, and pool are beautiful. We begin to see what may have initially drawn these two together as they laugh over glasses of wine at dinner, get high together like teenagers, and tease each other playfully like new lovers often do. Still, there are hints of the underlying resentment Sophie seems unable to let go. She makes comments about Ethan’s glasses throughout the film, how she likes him better without them, and has he ever thought of not wearing them? It’s a seemingly innocuous comment that only the most emotionally inept would be unable to tell is meant, whether consciously or not, to wound Ethan’s ego, the same ego that so badly needed him to sleep with another woman in order to cope with the rough patch he and Sophie previously found themselves in. The specificity and power of this detail points to a larger strength of the film: that the characters consistently feel so damn real. Even Ethan and Sophie’s doppelgangers, who we soon meet, are trenchant though they mostly function as the bizarre twist of the narrative.
Sophie meets Ethan’s doppelganger the first night when she’s in the guest house alone. Markedly, a Matryoshka doll falls to the floor and when Sophie picks it up she turns to see Ethan Two who she believes to be her husband. The Matryoshka doll appears later in the film after Ethan and Sophie figure out that their doppelgangers do indeed exist when they are each alone in the guest house. Sophie takes apart the nesting doll while spending time with Ethan Two and in a poignant, albeit silly moment, she describes each doll from largest to smallest, the doll ostensibly representing the many selves competing for her attention, the selves trying to decide between staying with her husband or allowing herself to fall in love with his doppelganger, a sexier, more communicative, relaxed, and emotionally vulnerable version of the man Sophie used to feel so connected to.
Somewhat unfortunately for him, the funniest and saddest parts of this film are in response to Ethan’s extreme insecurity and jealousy of this other version of himself. It is understandable. We all have been envious of those who seem to more fully embrace the parts of themselves that we are most insecure about. How much more difficult would it be to compete with a slightly better version of yourself which, for whatever reason, you can’t seem to become? In addition, Ethan Two is not a man, insofar as the film reveals to us, who is deservedly ashamed of himself, his cowardice, and his insecurity as Ethan One most deservedly is. This dichotomy, the tension and empathy created between these struggling selves, is fascinating and like a nightmare come to life, taking cues from experimental films like Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon and Chris Marker’s La Jetée, but with a mumblecore influenced aesthetic.
The cinematography adds another layer, allowing lens flares to occur just often enough to accentuate the dreaminess of the film. The score is also simplistic and pulsative, effective in creating a feeling of unease, suspense, and vengeful gaiety as Sophie breaks the rules of the game, falls deeper and deeper for Ethan Two while Ethan One’s jealousy consumes him, causing him to further betray her and make things a lot more difficult for her terrifyingly domestic, two-faced doppelganger, who is extremely unhappy that Ethan Two is slipping from her grasp.
Ultimately, this film is a scorned lover’s revenge fantasy played out to the extreme. In all ways, the women win in the end, duping their betrayers and getting what’s theirs. Sophie takes her power back by leaving her adulterer husband for a version of himself that she describes as like a memory of him, a self she once loved deeply, a self with whom she did not need to recreate happiness, but rather just was happy. Sophie’s dilemma could be summed up as Emily Dickinson so pithily bemoaned: “Heart, we will forget him! / You and I to-night! / You may forget the warmth he gave, / I will forget the light. / When you have done, pray tell me, / That I my thoughts may dim; / Haste! lest while you’re lagging, / I may remember him!” Sophie not only gets to leave and betray the Ethan that betrayed her, but she also gets to preserve and relive the memory of the man she once fell in love with through her relationship with Ethan Two. At least that’s what’s strongly implied in the final scene, and how I read the many vagaries leading to it.
Although the denouement of The One I Love doesn't quite provide an answer to the central thesis of the film, it does give us some sort of resolution by asking the question again. How much can we ever really know the one we love? Is it possible to know more than the character any of us create for ourselves, particularly in the throes of romantic love or the often terrifying intimacy of marriage? I'm no closer to an answer to these questions. Truthfully, this film left me devastated and frustrated by its unwillingness to soothe with romantic comedy-esque notions of dumbfound love and commitment. The One I Love is outlandish, funny, astute in its particulars, and honest about the intricacies of attraction, admiration, resentment, and often the dishonesty with self and others that comes with what we call loving. In the end, more than anything, it is truthful about how amazingly complicated loving someone is, or at the very least, can be.
"Motive is never easy. Sometimes it occurs to one only later."
When I was twenty-four, I met a girl called Suse. I liked her. I really, really liked her. She had stretched earlobes and smelled of men's aftershave and made me mix CDs. She studied medieval history and wore both her dead parents' wedding rings.
But I'd just come out of a four-year relationship with a man, a merchant navy sailor who was 6'4" and tattooed and from the Scottish Highlands and not at all the sort of man people who know me would think I would go out with. After we broke up I was confused and trying to figure out who I was. I didn't know if I wanted to be in a relationship with a man, or a woman, or both, or neither.
I felt lost, cut loose from the moorings of a steady relationship, desperate to feel grounded – and at the same time frantic-thrilled to be seeing new people, eyes bright, constantly drunk on excitement. I was, if I'm honest, temporarily insane. I spent half my time with Suse telling her I didn't want a relationship, and half the time treating her like my long-term boyfriend. It was weird. I was weird. She broke it off.
Then I met a girl called Suz. I wondered if god or fate or the universe was mocking me. She had bright red hair and wore lip-gloss and studied abnormal psychology. I liked that she was called Suz because I was still hung up on Suse, but it turned out I didn't like anything else about her. I broke it off.
After that I met a girl on a gay dating website. We chatted online and liked one another, so we arranged to meet. Oh wait, I thought – what's your name? Susie, she said. Then I knew for sure that god and fate and the universe were all mocking me. Apparently I was going to meet every lesbian called every variation on the name Susan in all of Glasgow. But then Susie and I stayed together for four years. I came to think of the Suse and Suz as pseudo-Susies, stepping stones leading me to the 'real' Susie.
Such a pleasing story! Beginning, middle, end. But I know it wasn't like that, not really. It was life, and it was messy, and it's only now, six years on, that I can look back and see the shape of it.
"By their nature words are imprecise and layered with meaning – the signs of things, not the things themselves. It’s difficult to say who’s in charge."
'Milagro' is one of the simplest, most intimate, and most beautiful episodes in all nine seasons of the X-Files. On re-watching it to write this essay, I alternated between absorption and cringing. Absorption because it's such a visual treat, from the tender close-ups of Scully's beauty to the softly-lit church to the final pulsing heart. Cringing because holy shit it represents the aesthetic and life goals I never realised I had: the solitary writer living in a room with just a chair, table and typewriter; the heartbeats, the catholic paraphernalia, the overwrought prose (Grief squeezed at her eggshell heart like it might break into a thousand pieces) – these are things I've done, things I've written. I basically watched this episode at the age of 20 and forgot about it, then my subconscious spent the next decade obsessing over it.
But it's only now that I see that. That use of symbolism as story – I've built my whole career on doing that. Last year my first book was published, a collection of twenty short stories. All the interviews I did mentioned how surreal, how fantastical, how outlandish the stories were. But I didn't think they were fantastical. I thought they were logical. I had my heart broken and thought, rather melodramatically, as you do when you've been dumped, "This hurts so much that I wish I could take out my heart and get a new one" – and so I wrote a story about hearts that could be rented and returned. When my merchant-navy boyfriend was away I got very lonely, and would develop these pseudo-relationships with other people, as sort of filler until my boyfriend got back – and that became a story about a lonely woman who makes a man out of paper. My dad was an alcoholic, and we never seemed to speak about it, and when we did speak about it the words never came out right – that was a story about a man who eats words. After his death the world seemed so dark and cold to me – that became a story about a grieving woman who eats light bulbs. It's weird, and it makes perfect sense, but only from a distance, looking back. The weirdness and messiness of my emotions only formed into logical narratives when I could observe them, coldly and cleanly, from afar.
As anyone who does anything creative knows, it rarely makes sense at the time. It's a process of stumbling in the dark, knocking flints together to make sparks, until finally the flame catches and the whole is visible. So too with life.
"A story can have only one true ending."
Whatever choices we make, when we look back it will be easy to trace the path of it. How obvious it seems now – but it was never obvious at the time.
We're all living a story right now, but we don't know what it is. When it comes to life, we're all long-sighted: we need distance to see clearly.
Before I started writing this essay, I asked myself what exactly it is I love about Asylum, the second season of AHS. The plot is like a bag of thorn cuttings; it just confounds me the more I dig through. There’s the mental institution, Briarcliff (hence the thorn metaphor). Here it is at the opening of the season as a ruin haunted by a murderous psychopath. Here it is in 1964, bustling with nuns and the sick, and, as is swiftly revealed, seamy with the twisted motivations of those who run it. I’m on board, I follow.
SPOILERS ABOUND.
The characters of Asylum are played with a heartfelt screwiness and occasional poised venom. There’s Kit Walker (Evan Peters once again), the sweet-hearted garage assistant with the secret wife, Alma (Britne Oldford). It’s a mixed-race marriage, and there are lots of enemies out there, but this being Asylum, it’s not the racist pack who keep hounding Kit that bring about the strange turns of events.
Alma is inexplicably abducted by aliens, and a dead woman with a faceless resemblance shows up. Her murder echoes a number of others in the area, so it’s Kit, who earnestly pleads the alien abduction case, who is taken in to the asylum awaiting psychological evaluation. He is a celebrity patient, drawing reporter Lana (Sarah Paulson).
When Lana comes against resistance to her wish to interview Kit from the redoubtable Sister Jude (Jessica Lange), she decides to sneak inside the asylum to find out the full scoop. This however, lands her on a permanent visit – Sister Jude is able to use Lana’s sexual orientation to trap her.
Being a lesbian in 1964 is seen as an affliction, a mental condition that only confinement and occasional whippings can cure. Good thing Lana’s wily and tough as nails, because she’s about to be witness – and victim – to some truly grotesque happenings, many of them directed at her by the hospital’s visiting evaluating psychiatrist, Dr Oliver Thredson (Zachary Quinto, expertly creepy here).
The (almost) closed set, as with Murder House, in which human drama however oozy will play out within these set parameters, is so effortlessly appealing. And, like Murder House, it retains, unfortunately, rape as plot advancement, but it also lacks the weaknesses of the first season, in that there is no tedious side-plot of infidelity – in fact, there’s no time at all to be bored.
Asylum does not proceed with even Murder House’s whip-crack pacing of one strange, spooky, nonsensical thing after another. It’s instead everything at once. Rubbing shoulders: a secret Nazi doctor (Dr Arden, played by James Cromwell), Sister Jude as a nun with a violent past,
the innocent Sister Mary Eunice (Lily Rabe) possessed by the devil, corrupt church officials, a serial killer lurking the corridors, mutants, aliens – and then there’s the experimentation, corporeal punishment, unwanted leg removal, an unexpected song and dance number, alien pregnancies, desperate sex, resurrection, copious bread baking.
Shouldn’t I be appalled that it attempts so much?
But it’s a bottled chaos: beautiful, torrential, a bit leaky at the edges (in keeping with the AHS family, it doesn’t always handle the issues with much degree of subtlety) but crucially, contained. Limited, as TV always is, by the confines of the medium: after 50 minutes, the episode will end. After so many episodes, the season will end. So unlike the real world, with its sickening sprawling complex horrors. Here’s where fiction in all its forms saves me just a little.
As I write this, the great wave of grotesque is to be found in the American Senate Intelligence Committee report into the torture used by the CIA against suspected (and sometimes, not at all suspected) terrorists in the wake of 9/11. The report, still partially censored, is a catalogue of human rights violations: inflictions of rape, homicide, near-drownings, hypothermia. In one instance, a man with mental disabilities was tortured and kept confined by the CIA for the sole reason that his suffering provided leverage over his family.
And now, on the tenth of December, it’s International Human Rights Day, and I feel like throwing up. Mostly, as a citizen of a country that colluded with the rendition of prisoners, a country that is currently trying to expel a man with Down’s syndrome just because, what’s humanity, right? Every week a new death, a new revelation, a new ‘villain’ in the form of an immigrant, a child with a toy, a man trying to walk home. Every week a politician talking of ‘patriots’ and those with ‘tough jobs’ to do.
It feels like the situation is hopeless. My entire adult life has taken place under the shadow of wars and torture inflicted by the institutions of countries I either live in or have heart-deep ties to. But God, what do you do? Sign petitions, sometimes march. Keep writing to recover a little bit of humanity. Keep reading for the same. Listen to the wronged. Listen to writers who might have been, or might still be, silenced.
And sometimes you have to take time to realise your smallness.
And sometimes you need to retreat. Just for a while.
We look to be consumed by all sorts of things. By substances, by ideas, by God, by other people far more charismatic than ourselves, by blankets of art that compound the pains of the world and seek to transcend them. Or trashy TV that makes puppets of the horrors and then makes them dance for the viewers. Within that bottled chaos, a tiny Nazi tortures a tiny mental patient. It’s horrendous. But look, they’re both made of plastic. Tip up the snow shaker, watch the glitter fall around them. Now there’s a man who has lost his wife to an alien, and everyone thinks he’s been murdering a whole load of people.
Now here’s the man who has done this to him, showing off his human skin mask and explaining to the captive Lana how she will be the mother he never had.
Now Sister Jude has become lost, trapped in her own asylum and doped up to the nines, suffering a kind of purgatory for all the sins that she committed. Here’s the Nazi doctor, moved to real tears by the death of the devil-possessed Sister Mary Eunice, burning himself to death on her crematorium pyre. Their plights can move me, I can be challenged by the brief moral complexities emerging out of the rush, but I know what I’m seeing is just this much, and no more.
The Russian critic Mikhail Baktin explains this concept as (translated into English) the ‘carnivalesque’. He talks of this as a literary concept, but it’s evident in many films – particularly horror. Carnival as a concept is an ancient one in which the most sacred rituals, the most accepted and comforting behaviours are tipped on their heads for the duration of the carnival. Everything is excess, everything a bit bawdy and shocking. Think of Mardi Gras, think of the medieval Feast of Fools.
American Horror Story as a series takes the tropes – the family, the figures of religious life, the school – and dismantles the order, throwing confetti and consistency out the window. (It is only in the current season that the show has perhaps stumped itself. How can you have a carnivalesque of the carnival? It might be why it seems the least interesting production so far.)
There’s one episode of Asylum I think of now and then. It’s the final episode of the season, “Madness Ends.” It’s the one where the snowshaker rights itself again. Lana Winters has become a venerable journalist having written a tawdry and not entirely loyal memoir of her experiences at the hands of Dr Thredson and eventually having worked to shut down Briarcliff (much declined even from its satanically-run years). She gives a lot of exposition in an interview at her elegant New York home, where she lives with her partner of many years.
When the cameras have left she wins the trust of the son she abandoned (the product of a rape by the serial killer, and a serial killer himself) who has popped up to kill her - only for Lana to shoot him dead.
Loose ends rather grimly tied up. Kit rescued Sister Jude and brought her into his family for the remainder of her days. Much later, the aliens take a terminally-ill Kit up to alien heaven with them. There are flashbacks to the beginning of the show, where the carnivalesque of the characters’ lives began. It’s not an episode that should work. Too much heavy-handed telling, dripping with melodrama. But watching it play out, I was getting teary. Somehow I cared about the fates of characters. In attempting to tie everything together (however violently, however sadly) this last episode brings the kind of closure we cannot get in life, only in film and in stories. An overview as if from the vantage point of standing on a cloud watching over the parade of years, watching each trajectory come to a close.
And all was well, as much as it could be; though there was regret and pain, there was also redemption, sudden cheesiness, and an end to suffering. A kind of peace that though fictional, unreal, seems hard-won. The little flakes of fake snow, finally settling.
American Horror Story is a gaudy, gory, hugely flawed mishmash of an anthology series, with each season set in a closed-system locale. It has been from the beginning intent on raiding the larder of pop culture horror and filling these particular closed systems – house, asylum, witchy school, and now freak show – to bursting with scenes that are by turns (and sometimes at the same time) cheesy, repellent, spooky and moving. A mostly-brilliant cast then elevates the lot to something transcendent. It is like nothing else, and like everything else – and it will not let go of your throat (which then, you can imagine, makes a kind of rubber-duck noise as it is squeezed). The show has won and been nominated for a tonne of awards, as well as attracting valid criticism over its treatment of mental illness, rape and abortion.
You love what you love, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be clear-eyed and critical of it. So! For this essay, I’d like to focus on perhaps the least coherent of the seasons – the first, Murder House. I’d like to pick it apart like a gooey candied bug and we can have a look and see what there is there at which to marvel and wince. Watch out for spoilers, although this show is so wild, so salted in disruption and weirdness I don’t know if it is possible to spoil it.
To summarise the plot of Murder House might be difficult and off-putting for those who have not yet see it. Quick setup – a family troubled by infidelity and grief after a stillbirth move across the US to live in a large, suspiciously cheap house in LA. The place is just darling, with all original features – and a cast of dead folk keen to torment the living and add more to their brood. The list of bogles (throwing a Scots word for ghosts at you) is long and unwieldy: the tow-headed sweet monster teen Tate (Evan Peters), who appears at first in need of counselling – from Ben (Dylan McDermott), the psychiatrist father slash adulterous pityparty slash terminally oblivious naysayer – and becomes quickly besotted with the psychiatrist’s daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga); Chad and Patrick (Zachary Quinto and Teddy Sears), the bickery couple who owned the house previously and were killed by a mysterious entirely-black-rubber-covered figure who lurks around variously ominously creaking as a rubber bodysuit tends to do, murdering and sexually assaulting various inhabitants as and when the plot needs advancing; Moira, the housekeeper who ‘comes with the house,’ and who appears young and sultry to heterosexual men but as an older woman to the other women on the grounds; women see things as they actually are while men see what they desire to see (old Moira played by Frances Conroy, young Moira by Alexandra Breckenridge).
Nora (Lily Rabe) a mournful, self-pitying figure who killed her husband and herself in the 1920s after her baby was murdered by the vengeful boyfriend of a woman Nora’s husband had given an abortion to AND after said mutilated and murdered baby of Nora’s was reassembled by the abortionist husband into a kind of indescribable abomination – the ghost of which is somewhere in the cellar along with that of the husband. Oh, and I almost forgot, LA’s famous murder victim the Black Dahlia (Mena Suvari) is in the house too, because why not.
This is not a comprehensive list, and yet more ghosts are added as the season goes on.
The living members of the household are, as mentioned, the world’s worst psychiatrist Ben, warm and down-to-earth Vivien (Connie Britton), and stroppy teen Violet. Into the house poke other former residents – the slick, sinister housewife Constance (Jessica Lange) and her daughter Addie (Jamie Brewer), with the latter’s main purpose at first seeming to be simply uttering ‘you’re going to die here’ to various folk throughout the eras of the house who then, yes, die.
Oh and then there’s the horribly burnt Larry (Denis O’Hare), recently released from prison for (sloppily) setting fire to his family in the Murder House. He decides to harangue Ben, often while Ben is out jogging, in some of the show’s funniest, most Lynchian moments.
I suppose most of the plot comes from this shoving, cajoling press of lost souls. It’s better to think instead of plot, of a subway car full of strangers that has broken down on a long dark stretch of track. Frayed tempers are responsible for a lot of the goings on. As to why the house is so full of dread and menace, that is pleasantly left unexplained. It has just accumulated passengers along the way and none of them, if they die within the grounds of the house, are allowed to leave, except for one day of the year – Samhain, Hallowe’en.
In a desperate attempt to draw this essay into some kind of focus (discussing AHS is like wrestling an exploding, blood-and-streamer party popper), I’d like to look at my favourite part of Murder House, the Hallowe’en episodes. In respect for Hallowe’en as the most significant time of the year for dead folk (who generally live beyond time, as is to be expected), AHS grants two whole episodes to covering the thinnest day’s events. Some of what happens ties in to the narrative arc, so I will streamline a little –
Part one introduces Chad and Patrick, the couple who were murdered in the house prior to our family moving in. In 2010, they were living in stressful conditions. Financially stretched, the two fought over money as well as Patrick’s suspected infidelity and Chad’s actual callousness. After an intense argument, they go their separate ways for a time, only for the infamous rubber man to appear and off them both inside the house. In the present day, Vivien and Ben are trying to sell their nightmare of a house, and have called upon the service of ‘fluffers’ to redecorate the house in an appealing neutral style. Chad and Patrick show up and are mistaken for the home decorators. If there is one thing this show tells us, it’s how easily a ghost can be mistaken for a living human being. There is, visually and corporeally, no difference at all, when a ghost is given reason to manifest. Patrick Swayze lied to us! Or perhaps it’s only a quality of Murder House? Tactile ghosts who obsess over girls and arrange apples and gossip. Or, like Moira, freed for the night, going off to visit ailing parents. Moira watches her mother in her hospital bed held on to this world by life support. She mourns her mother’s wrinkled hands, which used to be so fine. Then, she pulls the plug. A kindness, she thinks. Mother’s spirit goes off across the veil, while daughter remains, bound to the house and to a life of finding things to do with this oddly physical afterlife, which for her is the comforting ritual of cleaning and keeping house.
Is it better to be beyond the human world (whether in heaven or as nothing) or to be a ghost that can feel all the things a living person can feel, but is trapped into cycles of behaviour for longer than the human lifespan? Moira copes in her small, often conflicting ways. Besides cleaning, she falls into testing the men she abhors by taking on her sultry form for weaknesses she knows are there. So she can confirm, over and over, that the abusive sexuality of the man who brought about her murder – she was shot dead by an angry Constance after she was ‘caught’ being raped by the master of the house – is a common, abiding trait. It’s not clear whether she has much say in her repeated seductions, whether fate – the Moirai, in Ancient Greek – push her to it, or whether to be a ghost is to define oneself by habits just as impulsive as those of the living. She will crawl into the laps of married men, she will bite off penises, she will hide bodies and at the same time, she will sympathise with Vivien of the no-good cheating husband, she will cook her food in her time of need. Morality of the Murder House dead works on a strange logic, and it is one of the things I love it for. It leaves room for complexity in Frances Conroy’s excellent, weary performance. And if it’s by intent or clumsy characterisation I simply cannot tell and do not care.
Tate, the forever-teen, is another complex character who is at his most interesting – and whether he knows it or not, most revealing – on Hallowe’en. In part two, he and Violet skip out of the house on their first date to an after-dark beach. I greatly approve of night beaches in horror, though this setting is as far as I can tell rare. But beaches at night are cold and dark and liminal. An edge-zone where anything could happen. When a group of other teenagers in some awfully convincing Hallowe’en costumes show up on the beach and start harassing Tate, it feels as if we have fallen into an eighties horror of ghostly Lost Boys. Their bodies are broken and oozing blood, while those of the house have always been for the most part whole and visibly unscathed.
Again I wonder about the choices that can be made by the AHS dead. To wear their deaths like a costume for maximum impact. To wear a youthful mask, as Moira does, to her own ends. To wear an all-black fetish outfit that dehumanises and heightens fear and confusion in the beholders. Ghosts as actors working to a script that they perhaps have only had a partial hand in writing, if any at all.
While Tate – and Violet – can escape for a while, Hallowe’en allows the aggrieved group to follow them back to the Murder House for a confrontation. Turns out that Tate may be rather further beyond therapy than previously thought. The teenagers were murdered in a school shooting that Tate, a resident of the house, carried out. But the boy just can’t remember doing it. Are they mistaken? Is he lying? In denial? He runs off, getting the murdered group to follow him and leave Violet alone. So that she won’t hear what they have to say, for better or worse. But Tate has always been the Edward Cullen of the house. We will not find out for much later his depths, but those of us not caught up in his devotions can sense that they are there, a yawning gulf of awfulness.
I’m ignoring subplots in these episodes. The dreariness of Ben’s infidelities do not appeal to me, and the misadventures of Addie hurt too much to analyse. I am drawn instead to the spectres with the most nuanced roles. Too often in ghost stories, the spirits are a blank malevolence rattling the doors, pinching skin and throwing objects around. In Murder House, a ghost can have hurt feelings, can be banished momentarily at least by simply telling him or her loudly to go away. That’s the central soothing of the story – ghosts can be reasoned with. The dead will interact with you in meaningful, if not at all safe ways.
It turns grotesque when these bodily ghosts can murder – can rape. I don’t see why this needed to be in the season. Rape is used as a way of providing drama and schlocky turns that could have been achieved in other, less traumatic ways. But AHS thrives on pushing buttons, not questioning whether in a show so already full of bodily dis-ease these buttons need to be jammed. The identity of the rubber man, which we find out later, is one that upends the whole sense of character integrity for me. But then, the difficulty with horror is in where it chooses to fall or walk along the line between queasy horror of the real (rape, murder, abuse, home invasion, unwanted loss of pregnancies, poor mental health, family-destroying secrets) and the mutated, transmuted horrors of the supernatural. AHS chooses both type of horror, all at once, now, now, now. A weakness that is disguised by profusion, the shudder of a train stuck on a sparking track. And it all adds up to a kind of hypnosis performed by the glare off a lurid carapace. For all its problems, I do love this dancing, outrageous, venomous beastie of a show.
Chloe Caldwell’s novella Women (published October 1 by Short Flight/Long Drive Books) is a book about love between women—in relationships, in friendships, in families, and otherwise. The book centers on a romantic relationship between the unnamed narrator and Finn, but it is more than that: throughout, women move in and out of one another’s orbits, love and hate one another, and explicate what loving can be. On the first page, the narrator confesses, “Sometimes I wonder what it is I could tell you about her for my job here to be done. I am looking for a shortcut—something I could say that would effortlessly untangle the ball of yarn I am trying to untangle here on these pages.” Chloe Caldwell does not take that shortcut, and Women is not untangled: it is a knot that does not simplify, but rather deepens what women are.
Emma Aylor: Women operates on that continuum of fiction-to-non that has characterized many recent and notable works—Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being come to mind. It’s also a novella that recognizes its own existence; just in the first few pages, for example, the speaker acknowledges both her audience and the book’s upcoming publication. How did you classify Women during the writing process? Did it change form as you sank further into it, or has it always been intended as a novella?
Chloe Caldwell: Last fall I went to Jamaica with Elizabeth Ellen and three other female writers for a vacation. We were all to bring something we were working on, with plans to do a more laid-back version of “workshopping” each other’s pieces. So I brought “Women,” which was not “Women” at the time, of course. It was like three pages of raw anecdotes. I remember being in my bedroom at the villa we were staying in, sitting on my bed. She was sitting in her bedroom across from mine—both of us had our doors closed and we were reading one another’s work. She was texting me how much she liked it. Sounds cheesy but she believed in it and saw something in it from day one. She “got” it.
I kept working on it and sometime in January or February she gave it another read and decided she wanted to publish it. She’d wanted to publish something “like it” and was interested in publishing a novella. My piece fit that bill because it was too long to be an essay and too short to be a novel, thus, a novella.
But I’d never written a novella before, so I kind of learned as I went. I read lots of novellas and novella length novels while working on it: I read Bonsai by Alexandra Zambra, Loverboy by Victoria Redel, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Walks with Men by Ann Beattie, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, and The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, and a few more. These books truly informed my writing of Women. It was really fun and entertaining. Also, funny you mention Ruth Ozeki. Her book, Tale for the Time Being is a favorite of one of my best friends and my mom.
Bonsai is one of my favorites! Women actually reminded me of it—especially the part that says “When Julio fell in love with Emilia all the pleasure and suffering previous to the pleasure and suffering that Emilia brought him turned into simple imitations of true pleasure and suffering.” And I can absolutely see The Lover as an influence on Women.
I noticed a few references to women’s writing as I was reading—the most prominent being Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” but also Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Nelson and Rebecca Solnit and so many other of my favorite women writers. There’s the one part, too, where the narrator describes a document she keeps full of other women’s sentences, unattributed, that she and Finn [the love interest] have sent back and forth. The simplest common thread I notice between these women’s works is a sort of legitimization of love-writing—that we can make something that is sometimes dismissed as trivial into a meditation that expands into others’ lives. This is all a roundabout way of asking this: How did you approach writing about something so interior and private and often difficult to express?
Is love-writing often dismissed as trivial? I don’t agree. I know this is a thing that people think and say, but give me a book that isn’t rooted from love? It always goes back to love. Just look at the response to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a book totally rooted in love.
I see what you’re saying—that my book focuses on it and never strays away from it, there’s no other plot. But I read a lot of books like that, such as the ones I quoted in Women, but also many more. I surround myself with this sort of writing, and the people that think love-writing is trivial, well, I don’t want to know those people.
I knew I wanted to write something that dealt mostly with the aftermath of a break up. Not concrete aftermath, like moving things out of an apartment or who gets the kids on weekends, but the emotional aftermath. How you can look the same on the outside but be utterly changed on the inside and how lost that leaves you.
I was interested in how grief changes you, and I wanted this to be a book about living in the space of grief. The kind that comes from a broken heart though, not a death. But a broken heart is a type of a death. I read lots of books about this. I talk to friends about this. I was obsessed with how people “cope.” Like the part in the book where a friend says you deal with heartache by “comedy and roller skating.” Another friend told me she chewed lots of gum, couldn’t stop. Lots of people jump into online dating. Others drown themselves in books and movies. So, I wanted to explore those kinds of things—things you do that are motivated by grief and confusion.
I approached it as I would approach anything I write. Just sitting down and trying. I often write from the force of emotion. I’m into feelings. Like, as a hobby, ha! I talk about them. I like therapy. So it’s natural for me to write about them as well, you know?
Elizabeth Ellen was a great editor—lots of times I wanted to skip over stuff and she would make me slow down and explain. It is difficult to express these sort of feelings, you are right. So I kept writing about it until I had expressed it to the best of my ability. One of Elizabeth’s biggest notes would be like, “Add two or three more sentences here about this same thing.”
I’m absolutely on your side about that, and I love your point that people say it but it doesn’t necessarily ring true. I think that’s more accurate than what I said.
It seems like the grief process you explore in the book is one that is both caused and healed by other women. The narrator is devastated by a woman, talks to women, grieves with women, drinks with women, sleeps with women, loves and is loved by women. The narrator finds both great comfort and some fear in how well she can see herself in other women—how emotions and ideas are mirrored. Can you talk a little bit about, well, women? Obviously they’re important to the narrative and to its arc of emotions, but I’d like to hear a bit about how you thought about it.
I love this question! You’re spoiling me, because you are really getting my book on the level. Thank you.
This is exactly how I wanted the scenario to come across. I wanted to show how sometimes it’s the unexpected people in your life that, well, I don’t want to say “save you” because that’s too dramatic for what I mean, but who come into your life, and they are not the person you expect to get you out of a rut, but over time, or looking back, you see that they have/did/are. They change you, is more accurate I suppose. For example, in Women, that’s what The Female Woody Allen character does. The narrator meets her in a class, and then TFWA emails her, “Hey do you want to go stay in my cabin in the woods?” At this time the narrator is needy from her lover, but her lover cannot provide what she need, even though she THINKS her lover is. So she gets it elsewhere, without even realizing that. And towards the end TFWA is like, “Dude get out of here, you’re miserable.” If she had not said that, how much longer would the narrator have stayed in that city grieving and losing her life?
Same with the online dating. The narrator never finds love with it, but she maybe gets the attention she needs. Or she gets an activity partner. A new perspective. I also think the narrator was using women as her singular resource and the response to that was a multitude of people.
It’s through this that I think the narrator learns you cannot get everything you need from one person—she places a lot of need on the Finn whom she is seeing romantically, forgetting that even though Finn’s a woman, she still can’t provide relief for all of her emotional needs.
You know how at some points of your life—you stop and look around, and you’re like, Woah. My life is not what it was before. My life has become something different entirely. That’s what I wanted to convey about the narrator. She is suddenly surrounded by women in ways she was not before. She was getting what she needed through them.
In my real life, I am swimming in women. Just the other day, after a back and forth with the event planner at Housing Works, she wrote me, “You know so many rad ladies!” because we were planning my book release and I had a gaggle of awesome women who offered/wanted to read with me.
So, I’ll take this opportunity to say, I am SO lucky to have such a posse of women around me. In the past few years, mostly through writing, being a woman who publishes stuff about feelings and hardships online, it has become that way. I could rattle 10 women off the top of my head who I met through writing, who have become an important part of my life. They all support the crap out of me, and I them. It has been so delightful to become real life friends with the women whose writing I admire.
AND we introduce one another to even MORE women. It’s unending!
Have you read this essay “A Particular Kind of Self-care: To A Year of Female Friendships” by Jenna Wortham? My friend Molly Oswaks told me about it. It correlates to what I am saying right now.
Anyway, I am in constant communication with women. We talk about writing, death, hair loss, acne, sex, you name it, all day. We blab on the phone. Binge-email. Text. Meet for lunch, drinks. Go to movies. Go on hikes. Museums. Have sleepovers.
Women and women friends have always been a big part of my life, but as I got/get into my later twenties, I found/am finding a new importance in it/them. They are probably the best thing in my life right now. They are so good to me; they nourish me, and through them is how I learn.
Oh, I loved that essay! I just love The Hairpin in general for writing about female friendships and moms and the kinds of relationships Women also covers—woman-to-woman and made important by that.
I think there’s also something in female relationships that allows a quality I noticed in the narrator of Women and her life—that she finds meaning in opposites, in hybrids, in general multiplicity and more-ness. Like the way she writes about both never wanting to leave her mother’s company and about, a few days later, flying off nevertheless; or the way Finn offers to let her wear one of a few objects of clothing, and she says, “I choose the flannel because I’ve already worn the sweatshirt and the jacket and I like to wear as many different pieces of clothing of other people as I can.” I can see this in The Female Woody Allen character, but I’m wondering if there were any particular characters or plottings you used to emphasize this hybridity and wealth of experience.
I definitely consciously played up the mother character. I read this novel called Loverboy by Victoria Redel while writing Women and it really affected me. It’s about a mother completely consumed by her young son. Obsessiveness to the point that it hurts both their lives. Keeping the child at home instead of letting him go to school, etc. It’s such a twisted and dark book and definitely encouraged me to take the darkness in my book to the next level. Just like, make it really fucked up and painful.
It also gave me the idea to play up the enmeshment between the mother and daughter—so much so that the daughter compares all of her female friends to her mom, looks for her mother in other females since her mother is not around.
I wanted to explore the idea of reaching, yearning. When the narrator needs attention from Finn but can’t get it, she throws herself into online dating other women.
I guess the more females I kept adding to the book, the more I saw how they naturally complemented (or didn’t complement) one another.
I like to think both Finn and the narrator represent dark and light, but they switch back and forth playing who is what at each time. They attempt to balance each other’s obsessiveness—when one is more obsessive, the other backs off and vice versa.
I loved the idea of all the women in the book representing different things: kindness, humor, sex, love, friendship… but overall they each represent one thing, which is love, regardless if it’s romantic or not. It’s about how love can come in eclectic, unexpected ways, some unrecognizable as love, but love all the same.
So what’s next for you, post-Women? Are you working on anything in particular at the moment?
I don’t do much writing when I’m doing publicity stuff. I can’t multi-task that way and I’m out of town for the month of October on book tour with Elizabeth Ellen, Mira Gonzalez, and Chelsea Martin. So I’m focusing on Women stuff for now, and doing readings and socializing. Feels like coming out of hibernation after this past year of writing.
But I’m getting another essay collection together, slowly, and would like to write a young adult novel, and a memoir. I’m just gonna keep going! I do have some vague ideas in the works for books but am apprehensive about talking about them on the internet just yet. How’s that for a cliffhanger.
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: & Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty
Like many, I discovered Caitlin Doughty’s work in death acceptance and funeral industry reform through her video series “Ask a Mortician.” From there I found her organization, the Order of the Good Death, and got a little obsessive.
Like many thoughtful kids, I grew up a little morbid—wanted to be a medical examiner; took too-close pictures of dead seals that washed up on beaches in Canada where my family took vacations; was over-interested in the bog bodies of northwestern Europe—and Caitlin Doughty is exactly what I wish I had had then. In her video “It Gets Better, Morbid Kids!,” she says, “People who make you feel bad about being interested in death are doing it because they are terrified of death, and they’re living half their lives closed off to the fact that death actually enhances our lives, and makes it more beautiful.” The message is directed at death-curious kids who are like I was (and, let’s be real, still am), but it applies to everyone, which is one reason I’m overexcited that Doughty has written a book.
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory covers some of the same territory as Doughty’s videos, but the written format allows her to spread out—to tell more stories from her own life, for example, and to delve more deeply into death customs both ancient and current. Doughty’s work is intensely researched, with a bibliography included, and her extensive knowledge of the death practices of other cultures is one of our first entrances into what could be if the West accepted death for what it is. One of my personal favorites (and Doughty’s as well) is Tibetan sky burial, in which the body is laid out to be eaten by vultures, becoming useful in death by nourishing living things. As she explains in a video that covers the topic, “It’s one of my favorite death customs because I think it’s just beautiful. The idea of your body being taken apart and flown into the air in a million different directions is really, really powerful.” Elsewhere, Doughty describes the way the Romans of the first century used milk to wash the bones remaining among the ashes on the funeral pyre; the contemporary Japanese custom of placing the bone fragments that remain post-cremation into urns, from feet to head; the ritual of Brazil’s isolated Wari’ people, who once practiced mortuary cannibalism as a compassionate act for the person who had died; the way the Javanese wash the dead by “holding the corpse on their laps, positioned so the living are soaked in the water as well.”
These customs stand in stark contrast to Western ones. Doughty traces the transition from medieval Europeans’ relative comfort with death to the West’s current culture of death-denial. Embalming, Doughty explains, began to become popular during the Civil War, when the logistics of retrieving a soldier’s body from the battlefield were complicated by their sheer distance from their families. “The situation,” she goes on, “brought out the entrepreneurial impulses of men, who, if a family could pay, would perform a new preservative procedure called embalming—right there on the battlefield. . . . Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.” The tradition stuck, and brought about what Doughty describes as “an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other North American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.” Furthermore, the early twentieth century “brought on what is known as the ‘medicalization’ of death,” by which the majority of Americans no longer passed away in their homes, but in hospitals or nursing homes.
The problem with these customs is not the customs themselves; rather, it is in their motivations—or lack thereof. Doughty writes,
Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance . . . The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.
Part of this breakdown between practice and belief comes from the secularization of Western culture; Doughty points out that the “fastest-growing religion in America is ‘no religion’—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States.” It is our responsibility to create new rituals that actually mean something, that are tender and meaningful and help those who have been left in life by the people they love.
This movement, of course, would require that we accept death in the first place. “Death should be known,” Doughty writes. “Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” After all, 2.5 million people—a group Doughty calls “the necro demographic”—die each year: “We’d probably pay more attention,” she points out, “if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together.” Doughty’s own experiences in acknowledging and working with death were to her “an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.”
“When you know that death is coming for you,” she writes elsewhere in the book, “the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love.” It is, in short, our built-in motivation: something we are born with that makes our birth all the more meaningful.
It is, in fact, simply human. “Some 95,000 years ago,” Doughty writes early in the book,
a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. . . . We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.
And here is the crux of anthropology, the central question which divides it from primatology even as specialists cannot pinpoint the exact moment of difference: When, exactly, did humans become human? Doughty has a possible answer here. What is unique about us as humans may not be creativity, or intelligence, or tool-making, or civilization: it may be that death, that thing that happens to any animal or plant or protozoa, is something we know is coming.
Yet what is unique to all of us is also what is the same between each of us. During her first job in the death industry, Doughty remembers one day of contrasts and sameness:
One afternoon, Chris and I left the crematory in his white van and drove into Berkeley to pick up Therese Vaughn. Therese died in her own bed at age 102. Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity. . . .
Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.
The quotes above are from an advance reading copy and may include some minor discrepancies.
California, Edan Lepucki's debut novel, is a stunning tragedy set in a post-apocalyptic near future. There are no zombies, no aliens, no genetically mutated humans. The only monsters are us.
A young married couple, Cal and Frida, flees a decaying L.A. for the woods of California, in a desperate attempt to stay alive together. The United States is a desolate, crumbling shadow of its former self, due to increased natural disasters, rapidly dwindling resources, and a steadily swelling gap between the rich and poor. The world as we know it is releasing its final death rattles. The realism of this outcome is beyond unsettling. The novel sustains this uncanny, skin-crawling feeling until its final devastating moment. It lingered with me for several hours after. This is a testament to Lepucki’s masterful way with words; the writing is gorgeously, deceivingly plain.
The beginning of California finds Cal and Frida in almost-total isolation—their only outside contact is August, a reticent man who travels with his mule and cart to various isolated homesteads in the area, trading precious supplies. He urges them to stay put, to not ask questions. In these early moments we watch Cal and Frida eke out a life together while they mourn the world they’ve lost and use sex to pass the time. Their robust love glows in the dim, stark cabin that holds what little they still own.
This fragile existence is demolished when Frida gets pregnant. They don’t trust their ability to keep a child alive in this new world (especially after an early and pivotal tragedy that I won’t address because no spoilers), so when Frida accidentally discovers a nearby settlement, they strike out for it, despite previous warnings to avoid the area. Frida is determined to increase the safety of her unborn child, but Cal is more reluctant, being wary of the unknown. The paranoid community they find carries dark secrets and mysterious rules, and when they meet the leader, Cal and Frida’s cabin-life is set on fire. They know they can’t turn back now.
In this new society, called The Land, knowing what to do and who to trust becomes far more complicated than they anticipated. The best and worst aspects of humanity are dragged out in the open, forcing them (and us) to confront the depths of our treachery and vanity and the heights of our resilience and honor.
The evolution (or devolution) of Cal and Frida’s relationship is both compelling and frustrating. Their bond is affected by the mere presence of other people, with all those other human sounds and smells and personalities and fears. They have different roles to play and different distractions colonize their attention. Also, from the beginning Cal and Frida kept secrets from each other, but they get progressively worse after moving to The Land. Adversarial feelings flower between them. The love we saw in them earlier begins to transform, turning into something barbed and slightly poisonous.
Violence and death hang like a mist over the book, as Cal and Frida try, in their separate ways, to unravel the mysteries of The Land. As the story progresses to its climax, they form tenuous relationships with a few memorable residents, like Sailor, Anika, and Peter; and we gradually learn those dark secrets. Many of them are little individual cataclysms, hurtling Cal and Frida closer to the fork in their road.
[Spoiler Alert] I can’t resist addressing the chilling, somewhat open ending that seems to have divided readers. Personally, I thought it was brilliant. Even though it would have been entertaining to read how The Plan turned out, it’s unnecessary. It probably would’ve weakened the ending if Lepucki kept going to show us how it all turned out for Micah and Pines and The Land. If California was about the Group and the Communities and The Land, Cal and Frida wouldn’t be the main characters.
Pines possess a more familiar horror than The Land, which made the ending more unnerving for me. Cal and Frida are trapped in this profoundly elitist, sexist, and heteronormative shadow of a structure that is partially responsible for the apocalyptic landscape in the first place. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, after all.
The husband goes to work and the wife keeps house and they eat their beef wellington protein in their little boxes on the hillside and they pretend the wild, rotting “out there” isn’t there, just outside of their reinforced gates and security patrols. Her job was to not ask any questions. She and the child, they would stay here. Frida and Cal turning into Julie and Gray after surviving in the wilderness and living on The Land is so perfectly tragic that I’m getting queasy just thinking about it. [End Spoilers]
I am far from an expert on post-apocalyptic novels, but I believe this is a thoughtful and unique entry into the genre, peopled with flawed, distinctive characters, refreshing wit, and a provocative plot. Lepucki uses the dystopian setting to explore human fallibility, and how far we will go to preserve what love and safety we have in our lives. It definitely deserves the hype.
Interview with Kirsty Logan, author of THE RENTAL HEART
Kirsty Logan's fantastical fiction has thrilled me for nearly four years now, and I've been lucky enough to work with her here and elsewhere online, but my favorite experience (so far) has been reading her debut story collection, The Rental Heart and Other Fairytales. These twenty surreal and sumptuous stories defy tidy labels. Fairy tales, magical realism, steampunk, literary fiction. It's all there.
Logan's work is humming with dreamy, erotic energy. Every detail, even the mundane, is scandalously compelling. Her characters are far from meek damsels and hollow princes--they are adventurers; positively lusty with their desire to discover what fate has in store for them. Witches, coin-operated boys, Eros-soaked lovers, an imprisoned empress, a girl with antlers, a boy with a tiger's tail. Many of them are at liminal stages in their lives, in the twilight of adolescence or facing a major personal upheaval. Some of them live within traditional fairy tale retellings, and some of them live in their own contemporary fables, but every one of them is stuffed with lust and loss. They all seek love or a worthy substitution, and from Logan's dark, wild worlds, they will haunt you.
1) First of all, when and how did you find out that Salt wanted to publish The Rental Heart?
It was an unexpected tweet. I have my phone set to flash up Twitter messages and Facebook comments but not new emails, and as I was getting ready to go out with my girlfriend Annie one afternoon I noticed a Twitter message flash up: CONGRATULATIONS. I had no idea what I was being congratulated on (though it's always nice to be congratulated, no matter what it's for). So I checked my email, and there was a lovely message from Salt saying I had won the Scott Prize and they were going to publish my book. Annie and I jumped around the room for a bit going WOOHOOOOO, and then we went out for a coffee. It was a good day, though really it was just the first step in a long process. I know in films there's always The Moment where they get The Phone Call and then Everything Changes. But that made me realise that in life it doesn't go that way. Book publishing is generally a slow and staggered process, and there's not one big explodey moment where you're showered with glitter and praise.
But as often happens in life, what I thought I knew turned out to be wrong, because for my next book I did get The Phone Call and The Moment! I was in a cafe and my agent called – the cafe was noisy and she was in a car with her baby in the back, so it was all rather loud and I knew I'd misheard her when she said 'We've got an offer, are you sitting down?' It was only two days since she'd sent out the manuscript so I knew I'd misheard, as it takes months for editors to even glance at your manuscript. But no, it was true, and the offer was so fast and so amazing that I was glad that I'd been sitting down because if not I'd have fallen over. Now I try and live by a Dutch proverb: "Don't worry. It will happen differently anyway". Publishing, like life, often surprises you.
2) Underskirts might be my favorite story in the collection (if I could choose just one). I've loved it since I first read it in PANK a couple years ago. It's incredibly lush and the ending is quite haunting. What originally inspired you to write it?
It all started when I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and saw a painting, ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger by Kees van Dongen, and my brain said DING DING DING in the manner of a winning slot machine. Well, okay, it wasn’t that dramatic. It was more like ‘she looks interesting, I would enjoy writing a story about her.'
When I got home, I flipped through my writing notebook and found a note I’d written to myself months ago – lady lifts servants’ skirts. I have no idea what I meant, but I thought it fit nicely with the painting. A story can’t be about one character – what the lady needed was a love interest. I searched through online archives of paintings and found this one of a farmer-girl gazing dreamily into the distance. Aha!, I thought, this is the sort of girl who would run away on adventures.
So I wrote a story about a lady who lifts her servants’ skirts, and about the sorts of girl who ran away on adventures. One weird thing was that my first thought on seeing ‘Portrait of Guus Preitinger’ was "hey, she reminds me of PJ Harvey." And when I went down to Bridport, a little seaside town in England, to collect a prize that 'Underskirts' won – who was there at the ceremony but… PJ Harvey.
3) Which story was the most difficult to write and why?
They were all easy, and they were all ridiculously hard. Ideas are simple and plentiful – I have more story ideas right now than I could write for the next ten years, and every day another one appears. I don't struggle to create worlds or situations, or to put sentences together. But there is one thing that I find near-impossible, and struggle with on every story I write: the 80% mark. I don't know what it is, but something happens when I'm about 80% through a story when I just… stall. I'm frustrated, I'm bored, I know how to finish the story but I just can't do it. I have to really push myself through. It helps to talk it out with other people, to take a break, or sometimes to just put my arse in the chair and my hands on the keyboard and just write the bloody thing. It never gets easier.
If I had to choose one, though, it's 'Bibliophagy.' For years I'd avoided writing about my dad's alcoholism, for so many reasons: because I loved him, because I didn't want to hurt him, because I didn't want people to think that he was an alcoholic and nothing more, and because it hurt me too. I find that the best way to approach difficult truths is not head-on, but sideways, through the medium of myth. I couldn't write about an alcoholic, but I could write about a man addicted to eating words, even though he knew that his addiction was tearing apart his already fractured family. That was tough to write, though I'm glad I did it. Honesty hurts, but writing falsely safe stories is no good for the writer or the reader.
4) The Rental Heart glides from one setting to the next, spanning the past few hundred years and two continents. I love your ability to slip into unfamiliar times and places and make them so sensually real. When you begin a story, is there a time period and/or setting that comes most naturally to you?
I always have a sense of the 'world' of the story before I begin it. My process for coming up with a story basically consists of daydreaming. I get on a bus or train, put in my headphones, and listen to music while watching the scenery pass by the window. I need movement – a walk is okay, but a trip on public transport is best. By the time I get to where I'm going, the story has always taken shape in my mind.
I like that you've used the phrase 'sensually,' as that's how it works for me at first: purely in the senses. When I've figured out the story's world I don't necessarily know what will happen, who it will happen to, or exactly where – but I do know the tone and feel of the story, certain sights and smells and sounds, perhaps the temperature of the air or the texture of the ground.
So much of our sensual experience is based in place, and that's what comes together for me when I'm starting to write a story. Not in the sense of a specific place like Rome or Skye or Minnesota, but in a more general sense: by the sea, in an isolated place, at the edge of a city. First I get the feel for the setting, and then I'll decide on the specific place. Often my stories are set in unreal and unspecified places: the woods, the island, the city. The places usually have a Scottish or Northern European feel, though, even if it's not specified, because those settings are most familiar to me.
Even when I write stories that aren't set in the present, they're rarely historical in the strict sense – I'm sure a historian would shred them to pieces! I often write in 'fairy tale time': a vague past, a once-upon-a-time that might not be historically real but is real in a timeless sociological and emotional way.
5) Speaking of settings, how important is your upbringing and current life in Scotland to your literary aesthetic?
Scotland is so inspirational to me. Although I'm Scottish by family, I was actually born in a small town in the English Midlands, and it was dull dull dull. Both my parents are from Scotland, and my family moved back to Glasgow when I was 13. If I'd stayed in that English town I certainly wouldn't be the same writer I am today.
So much of Scottish culture is water-based. Glasgow isn't by the sea, but it's got a strong history of shipbuilding – the US still buys old ships that were built on the Clyde river by Glasgow's shipbuilders, because they're so good. I love Scottish mythology and folktales, and many of those stories (selkies, kelpies, mermaids) are based on the sea. If you look on a map, Scotland is a very craggy country with lots of coastline, and many small islands off its north and west coasts, so there's a lot of connection to the sea. To give you a sense of it, England has 1,988 miles of coastline – but Scotland has 10,246 miles.
My dad was also a big influence on me, and I've always associated him with water and the sea. He was born on the small Scottish island of Bute. When I was a child he had a small sailboat called First Symphony on Lake Windermere in England, and used to take me out sailing. After he died, my mother and brother and I scattered his ashes on the beach at Culzean Castle, which looks out on Bute. Now every time I'm by the sea, I feel that I'm with my dad.
I'm currently working on my third book, a collection of linked stories called A Portable Shelter. It's inspired by Scottish and Scandinavian folk tales. Part of the research for the book is to travel around the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and I did the first part of that recently when my girlfriend Annie and I went up to the Applecross peninsula with our lurcher puppy Rosie. The landscape there is glorious, whether it's endless blue skies or torrential rain (and we got a bit of both!). I ate local squat lobster, went out on a fishing boat, explored lochs, and climbed seaweed-slippery rocks. I even stripped to my knickers and waded into a loch to retrieve Rosie's ball when I threw it in deep water. And it was a particularly memorable trip because Annie and I got engaged. So many of my memories are linked to Scottish landscapes.
Photo by Luis del Rio.
6) What are your favorite fairy tale retellings?
I'm madly in love with Emma Donoghue's Kissing the Witch. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on retold fairytales, and to my mind Donoghue's was the only book that actually subverted fairytales at their base level, rather than just changing a few details or flipping characters around. It's sadly out of print now, but if you can find a copy then grab it. Reading it is an education.
7) If you could turn one of the book's stories into a short film, which one would you choose and why?
I would love to see 'Una and Coll Are Not Friends' as a film. There just aren't enough films about teenage girls with antlers.
8) If you could be a faery, a witch, or a mermaid, which one would you choose?
A mermaid. I'm so obsessed with the sea, I might as well live in it. Also, it would make travel so much easier: no need for the faff of airports, when you can just swim.
9) Have you ever experienced any kind of negative criticism due to the occasional queer content of your work?
Never. It's all been positive. Quite a few of the reviews have mentioned the way the stories normalise queer relationships, with all sexual and gender identities presented without comment as just part of the story. I'm so glad that people are picking up on that, though I confess it's not something I did on purpose. I just write the world the way I see it. I've always seen different sexualities as equal, and certainly not the most important part of someone's identity. We can be queer while also having plenty of other facets to our identities.
10) You recently announced that your debut novel, The Gracekeepers, will be published in the UK, US, and Canada in 2015. Congratulations! Is there anything you can share with us about it?
My elevator pitch is that The Gracekeepers is about a circus boat in a flooded world. If it's a slightly longer elevator ride then I'd say it's about two women, North and Callanish. North and her bear live on a circus boat, floating between the scattered archipelagos that are all that remains of the land. To survive, the circus must perform for the few fortunate islanders in return for food and supplies. In the middle of the ocean, Callanish tends the watery graves along the equator, as penance for a long-ago mistake. A storm brings a change in both their lives that they may not have been expecting, but could bring them the peace and happiness they have yearned for. The novel has themes of non-traditional family, love, belonging, autonomy, home, and hunger (both physical and emotional). At its heart, it's the story of two women trying to make a real home in a difficult world. It was an absolute joy to write, and I can't wait to share it with the world.
“Lydia is dead. But they don't know this yet.” This is the first line of Everything I Never Told You, Celeste Ng’s debut novel. It’s May 1977 in small-town Ohio and James, a Chinese-American professor, and Marilyn, a white housewife, are going about their married morning. Blue-eyed, dark-haired Lydia Lee is the middle child and their favorite. Her younger sister Hannah is the first to comment on Lydia’s absence, and it descends into horror from there. Lydia’s body is found soon after; apparently she drowned in the lake near their house. The Lees’ lives detonate, of course, but this story is far from your typical “lost child” tale. How each person in Lydia’s life absorbs the reality of her death is only a fraction of the narrative, which is why I fell in love with it. Everything I Never Told You is subtly exquisite.
I was drawn to this novel for many reasons. First of all, it’s set in Ohio, where I’ve always lived. I’m also fascinated by familial drama and the cultural atmosphere of the 1970s and the author’s name is lovely: Celeste Ng, pronounced ing. It’s aesthetically and phonetically pleasing. And chiefly, it explores the lives of an interracial couple and their children—being an African-American with very fair skin, I grew up being identified and treated like a multiracial person, even though I’m not (I have white ancestry but it’s too far back to matter). Those feelings of isolation and social anxiety and mild body dysmorphia forever in my marrow. The various racially-charged interpersonal dramas. So what are you? What are you? No one looking like me, not anywhere I looked, not ever. When the local newspaper writes about Lydia after her death, they mention how alone she was, how she didn’t have any friends, and the editorialist always mentions directly before or after that she was the only Asian girl at the school, that she stood out in the halls. No one looked like her, not there, where she looked.
While Ng unveils the complex inner life of our dead 16-year-old heroine, she deftly weaves in the equally multifaceted inner lives of her family, sliding back and forth in time and place. The ways that James, Marilyn, Nath, and Hannah loved Lydia illuminates each of their fatal flaws. If this were a Shakespearean tragedy they would all be dead by the end, except Hannah, who would bear witness, being the shadow—the keen observer in their quiet world of love and betrayal. Ng shifts focus expertly, without any indication that we are changing perspective, except for the tender white space between scenes.
We learn how very different difference means to James and Marilyn, and how that shapes their parenting styles, for better and for worse. James grew up as the perpetual outsider, being Chinese in a sea of white classmates, being working poor among a sea of middle-class and wealthy peers. This all contributes to his marrying Marilyn. “This was the first reason he came to love her: because she had blended in so perfectly, because she had seemed so completely and utterly at home.”
For Marilyn, difference is salvation. She grew up desperate to distinguish herself from her fiercely traditional home-ec teacher mother, which illuminates her own initial feelings for James, who came into her life as a young history professor. “How skinny he was, she thought, how wide his shoulders were, like a swimmer’s, his skin the color of tea, of fall leaves toasted by the sun. She had never seen anyone like him.” She was on her way to becoming a doctor before she fell in love with James and became another pretty housewife, despite her best efforts to avoid such a life. Years later, when she discovers that she’s pregnant with their youngest, Hannah, and James comes to her, “[e]verything she had dreamed for herself faded away, like fine mist on a breeze. She could not remember now why she thought it had all been possible.”
These defeats and desires linger in their bones, shaping how they raise their children. They do love them; they’re positively drowning in it (no pun intended), but they betray them anyway. Perhaps some form of betrayal is inevitable for everyone.
The atmosphere of this novel reminds me of one of my all-time favorite novels and film adaptations, The Virgin Suicides. Thick and soft, silent, poisonous. The pulpy suffocation of the parents. Lydia’s apparent and assumed virginal suicide. The way no one truly knew her, like no one truly knew the Lisbon sisters. Everything I Never Told You is the perfect title—it’s plump with every characters’ wretched, deafening secrets. Everyone is an iceberg—the vastness of them hidden below their self-revealed surfaces.
In the midst of all this, there’s Jack, Nath’s envy and enemy, and the only real friend Lydia had. I won’t ruin the heart-rending twist in Jack’s story, but I will say that he is there to the end, and he is more than he appears, to Nath and Lydia alike, and I could see the twist coming, but it was executed so flawlessly that I was still deliciously devastated.
Some may say the ending is rushed, but I believe it was building methodically to such a conclusion all along. It wasn’t a happy ending—it wasn’t necessarily thrilling, but there is a release, a deep exhalation, a sort of coalescing. So much of it is still vivid in my mind now, days after reading it; that tortured glare of Jack’s with his golden-tipped eyelashes, Hannah curled and absorbent under the kitchen table, the Lees crossing the last name off a tidy list of teen girl false friends, the tragic scent of lemons, Marilyn’s mother’s cookbook, “the curve of Louisa’s back and the pale silk of her thighs and the dark sweep of her hair,” Nath and the astronauts, Lydia’s silver heart on a chain, the smell of the lake .This is a terrifically nuanced, haunting novel that is practically begging for its own film adaptation. Someone brilliant, please make my wish your command.
Last year, Christian Wiman stepped down from his post as editor of Poetry and took a position teaching at Yale Divinity School’s Institute of Sacred Music. As a professor, his courses bead along the thin perforation between language and belief. In a recent interview with Commonweal, Wiman spoke of that intersection:
My point is this: Poets are still guardians of the truths of faith, but poetry has less and less to do with the institutions that presume to name that faith. This makes some religious leaders think they do not need poetry, when in fact they need it now more than ever, because within poetry is the same anarchic energy and disabling insight that causes people to seek religion at all. It is the aboriginal energy of existence itself that is missing from most religious services these days. Art has this energy in abundance.
This pairing of art and faith can easily guide an interpretation of Wiman’s 2013 book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. So, too, can many other seeming dichotomies that melt into synonyms: human and divine loves; death and possibility; knowable paradox and unknowable truth.
In the book’s preface, Wiman mentions the cancer that initially brought him to faith (and to Christianity in particular). It may be more accurate, actually, to say that his illness sharpened a faith that was already present:
When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being?
He did not want to “experience grace,” as he puts it in the book’s nominal chapter-essay; instead, he wants to “integrate” that grace, to experience “the poetry and the prose of knowing.”
Wiman’s book is not exactly chronological, but one of the first nodes of being he tackles is love: that is, the interplay between the human and the divine, and what it meant to his spiritual self to fall in love with his feet on this ground. It “was human love,” he writes,
that reawakened divine love. Put another way, it was pure contingency that caught fire in our lives . . . I can’t speak for other people. I only know that I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening.
The openness and space in that love allows the inherent paradox of religious inquisition; in this particular example, Wiman writes, “There is a constant interplay between divine and human love. Human love has an end, which is God, who makes it endless.” Towards the end of the book, he revisits this interweaving:
It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.
This is the messy belief I myself crave, the god in us, or the us in god.
There is also, of course, the god in death. In an early chapter, Wiman expands on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ last words: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.” These words, Wiman writes, show that Hopkins had “that capacity of dying into the life that one has loved rather than falling irrevocably away from it.” He expands on this “form of survival”:
I mean something deeper and more durable. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication—even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death.
Later on, he links this to a snip of his own poetry on his grandmother, whose death in west Texas he had recounted earlier in the book:
And suddenly I am seeing my grandmother again, recalling that habit of mind too attentive to be called passive, too intuitive to be called thought. I am thinking (thinking!) of a presence so in love with life, so in tune with time, that death seemed only to drive her further in:
She who in her last days loved too well to lose
A single weed to namelessness, in creosote,
Blue grama, goatsbeard that is not thriving, is,
Amid the cattails brittle whisper whispers
O Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.
In the face of death’s prospect, Wiman places the twinned art and faith. Neither of these is a means to some end, but, rather, each provides analogue to the other, a call-and-response that is ultimately more satisfying than one provided by the traditional pairing of theology and belief:
The purpose of theology—the purpose of any thinking about God—is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning—by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings—more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.
Another paradox, then: in its difficulty and irreducibility, poetry eases a passage. It reduces while not strictly reducing, names what Wiman admits sometimes has “no names.” Indeed, he has no qualms about the fact that art can provide no “true” answers. Truth itself, as a concept, is flawed, he means—an insufficiency under whose terms we must work. (Those terms are compared to those of language, another insufficient thing we must call sufficient in the absence of anything better.) Wiman’s examination of what it means to be Christian, as he identifies, echoes the terms of arguments over fact against fiction in writing that toes such boundaries:
No, to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ, though I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this: Did a man named Jesus really rise from the dead three days after being crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago? The arguments are compelling on both sides, but the whole process of putting faith on trial, the incessant need for an intellectual result, feels false to me. It seems like a failure of vision to even ask the question, much less to get all tangled up in it.
It is possible, in other words, not to answer—and not just possible, perhaps, but necessary to the integrity of the experience.
Wiman does not mean for his book to prescribe others’ experiences. He does not preach. He admits that
I can’t be the man who stands on his belief as on some stark outcrop of rock from which the land is larger, the horizon farther, every path and peril clearly seen.
His book is remarkable in that way: it is highly personal, an answer to one self, that can also encompass all.
A simplified synopsis of the book can come down to a single punctuation mark, and perhaps the most telling way in which Wiman shows the shift in his faith. At the book’s beginning, he copies from a poem draft he says had “fail[ed]” and been sitting for several years:
My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:
Ending just like that, the colon and then the breath. He closes My Bright Abyss with this revision of the verse:
My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this.
—with nothing changed but the addition of that full and grateful stop.
