I Don’t Want To Write Beautiful Things
My earliest memories from childhood are of watching my mother work. Snapshots of life in different uniforms: Her behind the counter during the night shift at CVS, her wrangling neighborhood kids as she ran her own daycare, her working full days teaching reading at the elementary school and coming home to take online classes to put herself through a bachelor’s degree program.
She was a woman on a mission, machine-like, in her efforts to keep our heads above water. She did not take vacations. She did not get manicures. She worked because we were working people, the working poor, and that was what we did.
It wasn’t resignation that told me to expect that same level of tirelessness from my own adulthood, it was a dogged determination. It was simply thought, if never simply executed: If you want your people to survive, you will do everything in your power to provide for them, for yourself. There would be no fallback plan, no wealthy grandparents to call for help, no property to one day inherit, no passing go and collecting $200. If I failed, it would cost me everything.
So, I did what Good Daughters are supposed to do. I was going to achieve my way, our way out of poverty. I went to college and majored in journalism, which, if not a lucrative career, seemed at least a practical use of my skills. I applied for every scholarship, took the right internships, studied under the best people. I often did not love the work I was doing, but I understood that I was not a person who had the luxury of always loving their work.
It wasn’t the job of a career to make you happy all of the time, its duty was to get you paid. To give you healthcare benefits and keep a roof over your head and pay you adequately so should the day come when an emergency befell your parents or siblings, you’d have enough money to send home to them.
This is not to say that my mother didn’t encourage me to follow my dreams. She did. At every turn, it was her voice in my ear saying, “You can achieve anything you want to. It’s different for you. The whole world is at your fingertips.”
But the knowing and the knowing are two different things. What would make me happy, I decided, was being comfortable. One day I would make enough money to travel and go out to eat every night if I wanted to and buy my parents elaborate Christmas gifts. And no matter what I did professionally, if that were the case, I could rest easy at night.
To have what we needed would, of course, be sufficient. But to have what we wanted — the small, unnecessary luxuries of a life without lack? That would be enough.
In honor of Valentine’s Day, I set out to write an essay about love stories, a task at which I would consider myself something of an expert. And I have some notes about that if you’re interested in hearing them.
This is the truth: Writing about first love for a living is a magical gift. Being sixteen and confused and passionate is one of the most devastating and exciting things in the world. I remember it vividly.
Brushed hands across a lunch table. Secret, flirtatious texts on a phone your parents still pay for. The heart-skip between I like you and Do you like me back? I weave these sense memories between A plots and B plots, between guns on the mantle in the first act and guns going off in the third. I fashion queer teen love out of a combination of retroactive wish-fulfillment and mapmaking. I make work that I hope undoes the damage of a world which tells queer folks, queer people of color especially, that we aren’t worthy of love or tenderness or longevity.
Through a particular lens, my writing career is a love story of sorts in and of itself. It happened before I believed it would, was almost fairytale-like until it wasn’t. And at one point, it felt like it was over, felt like I should give up on it entirely, as I have often felt about love. I would be more specific about the details, but they are decidedly unromantic, and I’m trying to get at something here, so forgive me. What matters is that I pivoted, rediscovered myself, and came out the other side a Professional Writer.
A career like the one I’ve had so far is not the standard. I have been very lucky. There’s no denying that.
But I want you to understand this: There are days when I find it difficult to write tenderly. There are days when these fictions feel inadequate. There are days when I’m sure I won’t ever be able to get another character from a meet cute to a cinematic final chapter kiss. Not because of imposter syndrome or writers’ block. But because it is hard to be tender when I feel half full of exhaustion.
And it is near-impossible to gently usher my characters from chapter to chapter on days when I resent the very act of writing.
Because this, too, is the truth: For as much as I love my work, and as grateful as I am to be able to do it — this is still my job. I am now and will forever be a child of poverty, clinging to every dime I make like it’s my last. Every word I write, every manuscript I complete, and every proposal my agent sells is another stone in the fortress I am building to protect myself from slipping back into the type of life I wanted so badly to escape once upon a time. Writing, working, does and has always felt like life or death to me.
And that’s not a love story. It’s just a fact.
When I was a student, I would often call my mom during breaks between classes or running from one work-study gig to the next. When she wouldn’t answer, I would pout, as children often do, about not being able to reach her for guidance the moment a small crisis appeared — fully aware of the fact that she was busy during business hours but hoping, always, to catch her in her own in-between moments. When she’d call me back after she’d left work, her refrain was always the same: “I was working, Leah. Some of us have to work.”
It’s a running joke between us now. In my adulthood, the perceived urgency of my younger self is laughable. That I thought my mom — who still, years later, works more hours than any woman her age has any business working — could drop everything and come tend to me on a whim. The sheer absurdity of the belief that people like her — like me up until fairly recently — have the luxury of convenience in the ways we do our jobs.
When every day, every paycheck means the difference between lights or not, food or not, cell phone or not, there is no such thing as a “break.” I didn’t understand it then, but I understand it now. Now that there are sabbaticals, and extended deadlines when I’m spread too thin, and scenic mountainside retreats when I need to “unplug.”
Now that there is an option for rest, for refueling, and I still do not allow myself to take it, I understand it better than I ever have.
You need to be working, Leah. Some of us will always have to work.
When I talk to my friend, V, about this essay, and my vulnerability about sharing what is, in part, one of my greatest shames — how fragile I feel about the act and intensity of my writing — she points me in the direction of a newsletter that tapped a Phillip Roth quote, which has stuck with me since. He said that writing is a nightmare, but it isn’t necessarily hard.
Perhaps this work isn’t as hard as I’ve often purported it to be. I mean, it certainly, as Roth also said, isn’t coal mining. Barely more than a generation ago, my family was composed of sharecroppers, and even now, blue-collar factory employees and schoolteachers and custodial workers. Meanwhile, I sit at a desk with a thousand-dollar laptop and play pretend for a living. To complain about my work feels trivial at best, and, at worst, a slap in the face to the people who got me here.
But poverty, I’ve learned, especially that which we experience in childhood, is psychological. Being poor, therefore, isn’t something you outgrow. It shapes you. It seeps into your marrow. You can neither achieve nor logic your way out of trauma.
There is no threshold of success that, for me, is going to alleviate the gnawing sensation of This is not enough. Of: But what if it disappears? Of: Okay but what next? I am constantly waiting for the repo man to bring out the truck and haul away my life. When it comes to money, everything is fleeting. They don’t teach you this in the MFA, how the image of the starving artist is idealistic until you know what it’s really like to go hungry.
Money, or capitalism at large, I suppose, has created an unavoidable tension between myself and my work. As I write this, I am procrastinating drafting a novel that I have already been paid a great deal of money to write. In some ways, this essay saves me from the ordeal of having to look at my imagination straight on — this reckless beast of a thing which has willed joy out of thin air time and time again — and find it wanting. Find it inadequate. Find it depleted.
In other ways, this essay is just another in a string of works that take my gift and turn it to fuel for a future. I am aware that it is uncouth to talk about money in polite company, about how much it means to me and how much I would — and have — sacrificed in order to have it. I am both pleased with myself for what I’ve achieved and ashamed of not having done more, constantly oscillating between pride and fear and so much wanting.
I live comfortably. I have money saved for emergencies and spontaneous travel. I just bought a house. I’ve pulled myself up by my bootstraps. This is the American Dream.
And yet.
I’d planned to write about the craft of writing love stories, yet here I am. Forgive me.
It’s just, there is no way for me to address one of these things without the other. That is the truth, and I am in the business of writing honestly, especially about the things that hurt — heartbreak, disappointment, shame, poverty. My work — all those swoony kisses and witty banter-y conversations and idealistic first dates — is tied together with my desperation, with my deep desire to create the type of financial stability that a number of my contemporaries simply have, either due to nepotism or spousal support or just good old-fashioned luck.
I don’t know everything. The older I get, the more convinced I am, in fact, that I don’t know very much at all. But I believe this about love stories: Once you flip past the last page and close the book, your knowledge becomes incomplete. If the writer has done what they should, you will imagine a life for the characters past what you’ve been given access to, but you will never know for sure. The last page is merely a suggestion.
So fellow writers, please hear me when I say this: I want you to know that every book doesn’t have to be the book of your heart. Every essay doesn’t have to excavate the darkest depths of your most secret parts. It is okay to be motivated by money, and perhaps it’s okay, too, to be resentful of the fact that you are motivated by money. I want you to know that I’m exhausted too. That today I woke up and I didn’t want to write, that I crafted scenes I’m not yet proud of, but will revise and revise until I am. Because that is the work.
I want you to know that we are here and we are doing the best we can with what we have and it’s not always okay but it is a life. It is your life. It is my life.
In the tradition of love stories, this last paragraph is merely a suggestion. It is a stopping point for now, but if I’ve done my job, you will imagine a life past what I’ve given you access to. Mine, sure, but yours too. Perhaps in that imagining, we work less, we are secure in what we’ve achieved and have divorced ourselves from the idea that every word we write is the brick wall that stands between us and failure. Us and ruin. Us and and and and —
There is still love here, in the work.
I choose to imagine that we find it.
Count on Something Sweet
all illustrations for this series by A. Andrews
In the summer of 2004, my older brother, younger sister and I could count on each other and little else, it seemed. We’d been uprooted from our childhood home—losers on the side of a divorce that left little in its wake but ruin—and deposited in an apartment complex that catered to families like ours. Unmade, and cobbling together the remaking with too-soft flesh and paper-thin walls.
Our poverty no longer sat at the edge of my awareness, a dull hum calling only in the most quiet moments. It roared, untamable, lingered around every piece of secondhand furniture we owned. The horseflies that no amount of bleach and scrubbed surfaces could eradicate. The mice lured in by peanut butter and left screaming in the endless rotation of sticky traps behind the fridge. The hot pink ten-speed I got for my ninth birthday stolen from our patio on move-in day. All echoes of a life that dripped with what was now inescapable.
I had no answers for my little sister then. But my brother. In his teenage wisdom. His endless cool. His constantly-whirring brain. My brother knew all.
We would have followed him wherever he led that summer. And each day, he led us to K-Mart.
My mom left a few worn singles on the counter most mornings before work. My brother was to ensure we ate, to look out for us, to be good. It became an adventure of sorts, counting out the money, walking to the Super K-Mart behind our building that required we jump a shallow creek in order to reach it, picking the meal of the day.
We combed aisles, made a game of calculating sales tax in our heads. The practical options were ramen (cheap, quick, impossible to screw up) and generic Kraft mac and cheese (cheap, quick, shockingly easy to screw up). But that summer, we were only marginally interested in practical. Watched a practical home ripped from underneath us. Sat by as our practical family car was repossessed. Witnessed our practical mother try to hold herself and her children together with both hands as the world threatened to tear us apart.
No. We no longer needed practical. We wanted goodness, even if it was fleeting. We wanted saccharine, even if it left us yearning. We wanted Cosmic Brownies.
We wanted their artificial chocolate flavor staining our teeth, their almost chemical-tasting colored candies coating our tongues, their thick corn syrup crawling through our veins. We wanted their cheapness, their artificiality, the honesty of their emptiness. We wanted to devour to consume to gorge. We wanted to decide what would be our unmaking.
And we did. All summer, bound together by blood and forged under the sickly shine of K-Mart’s fluorescent lights, we did.
Years later, there would come a new house, new side of town, the ending of it all. No brother, no apologies, a family unmade once more.
But in the summer of 2004, my brother counted out the measly dollar bills left on the counter. He walked us over to K-Mart. And he made sure that, every day, we could count on something sweet.
This is the final installment of DINNER PARTY, a four-part weekly series of bite-sized essays edited by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya. Check out the first piece, Hot Cheetos: A Chorus by K-Ming Chang, the second course, Caesar Salad: Anamnesis by T Kira Māhealani Madden, and On Grandmothers and Malai Curry as Thick as My Missing by Sreshtha Sen. Illustrations for the series made by A. Andrews.
EXCLUSIVE Excerpt: Meet Toni, One of the Main Characters in Leah Johnson’s Latest Novel “Rise to the Sun”
You’re about to read a chapter an excerpt from Rise to the Sun, Leah Johnson’s sophomore novel, currently available for pre-order in advance of its release on July 6, 2021. Johnson’s award-winning debut novel, You Should See Me in a Crown, was released in paperback this week!
We also have an interview with Leah Johnson to discuss what it means to center the wholeness of Black queer girls in her work, which you can be reading right now! (Well… as soon as you finish this excerpt.)
Friday Morning
My summer is ending the way every summer of my life that I can remember has ended: setting up camp in the relentless sun of Farmland Music and Arts Festival’s seven-hundred-acre land next to a person that gets it, gets me. It’s perfect. It’s familiar. Until the person across from me speaks up, and I remember with startling clarity that nothing is the same as it has been in summers prior.
“Toniiiiiii,” Peter whines from his seat in the grass. “This would go so much faster if you would just let me help.”
Peter pulls off his worn Oakland A’s hat to shake out his black curls before readjusting it, brim to the back. He’s got his legs crossed just a few feet away from where I’m setting up camp, and I’m doing my best to ignore the big, brown, imploring puppy-dog eyes he keeps shooting my way. They’re almost irresistible, even for me.
I grunt instead of responding and pull the netting more securely over the top of the tent. Things are much quicker when I just do them myself. It’s no offense to him, it’s just a fact.
“Being an island isn’t in our nature as humans, T-Bone! Just look at John Tyler. They called him the ‘president without a party’ — never even stood a chance at a second term. You know why? He isolated himself.” He’s clearly been streaming one of those documentaries they used to show us in APUSH for fun again. When the only response I offer is a stare that says You’re earnestly comparing me to a dead white man in conversation again, Peter? he sputters, “Okay so maybe the aesthetics are a little different but the point stands!”
I wince at his volume and he adds, “Oops. Sorry, T. I get riled up about the pre-Reagan presidents.” He taps on his phone screen and brightens. “Hey! Someone just posted that they saw Bonnie Harrison at the taco cart. We have to go. Right? Definitely. I know how you feel about Sonny Blue.”
He’s right, Sonny Blue is my favorite queer-fronted folk-soul duo of all time, but I’m too focused on the task at hand to answer. He waits a beat before speaking again. Peter has done this since the day we met at this festival six years ago. He has no problem filling in all the spaces in a conversation that should, theoretically, be occupied by me. I try not to say more than absolutely necessary though. This, like my working best alone, is yet another brick to add to the impenetrable Toni Foster Fortress.
Peter is the only one who’s ever managed to work his way past my defenses. Six years ago, our campsites were right next to each other out here — him with his Uncle Rudy and me with my dad — and I couldn’t shake him the entire weekend. No matter how withdrawn or sullen I became, Peter just kept popping up, asking questions, insisting that I try his signature s’mores recipe over our shared bonfire. It was like he didn’t even notice how unsociable I was. I couldn’t seem to shake him. And eventually, somewhere between his forty-third fun fact about a dead president and his twelfth story about breaking a limb due to his ungainly awkwardness, I forgot that I wanted to.
He stands up and it’s like watching a clown unfolding as they climb out of those tiny cars — how did he ever manage to look so small? He throws his arms around my shoulders, even though it’s pushing 95 degrees under the midday sun and I’m in the middle of stomping a stake into the ground, so he just narrowly misses getting kneed in his ribs. He squeezes me hard like he’s afraid I’m going to try and escape, which goes to show how well he knows me.
“I love you anyway, my platonic life partner,” he whispers. And for a second, I’m tempted to return the line, out of instinct alone. When people say they love you, you tell them you love them back, my brain reminds me. But I don’t really do that sort of thing.
I pat his arm twice, suddenly and overwhelmingly eager to get out of this embrace and onto what we came here for. This isn’t a weekend for declarations of our BFF status, or time for Peter to employ his mom’s “lead with love” child-rearing techniques to therapize me. We’re not even here for the shows, though that’s a nice added bonus. We’re here so I can figure my life out. That’s it. I can breathe a little easier when Peter pulls away, and I almost feel guilty about it. But I don’t let myself. If I make room for anything other than drive, I think I might just lose it. I take a deep breath and finish stomping the stake into the ground instead. And just like that, the campsite resembles the way it looked last year and the year before that and every year since I was old enough to walk.
When I feel myself drifting toward what — who — it’s missing though, I shake my head as if I can physically clear it. I try to focus on the world moving around me. The crack of our neighbors opening two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, a feather-light laugh from a campsite across the way, the sound of the Farmland radio station playing through the speakers of my truck.
“And don’t forget to sign up for the Golden Apple competition!” The emcee’s voice is so boisterous and radio-artificial, it’s easy to cling to. “It’s a time-honored Farmland tradition, and we have reason to believe that this year is going to be extra special. Right, Carmen?”
A woman’s voice chimes in, raspy yet commercial. “Definitely, Jason. This year’s judges are the best lineup we’ve had in years. A life-changing opportunity for these competitors for sure. And we can’t forget the other exciting competition this weekend: #FoundAtFarmland…”
My attention begins to drift as the hosts keep talking. Farmland is famous for a lot of things — being one of the biggest music festivals in the country, essentially launching the careers of some of the biggest bands in the world — but the thing they hold in the highest esteem is the Golden Apple. A talent competition that gives amateur musicians a chance to play in front of a panel of headliners as judges, and whoever wins gets a chance to play on stage with one of the bands on the last day of the festival.
It’s one of the biggest draws the festival has to offer, and it’s a massive hit every year. This year, it’s being held for the chance to perform with Kittredge, one of the biggest alt-rock bands in the world and coincidentally, my dad’s former employers. He tour managed for them for most of my life, and before them a slew of other bands out of the Midwest, but never any that took off the way Kittredge did.
“You hear that, Toni?” Peter calls from inside the truck, where he’s attempting to charge his phone in my finicky lighter outlet. “They’re talking about your big break!”
He leans his entire upper body out the window and air guitars with no rhythm. I want to laugh, but the idea of a big break — of a moment on a stage that determines your entire life — is too close for comfort. I don’t want to be famous. I don’t want to be a star. I just want some answers.
I pull the hard case that now houses my favorite acoustic guitar — a beautiful mahogany Fender my parents gave me for my fifteenth birthday — out of the truck bed and lean it against the side of the truck. It’s adorned with stickers from all over the world, designations of all the places it’s gone. The limited untouched spots are reminders of where it has yet to go. Incredible big cities, dusty dive bars, and huge venues all decorate its exterior. It’s a tapestry, cohesive in its narrative: a patchwork life that took my dad farther away from me than I could ever wrap my head around.
But right in the center, shiny and fresh where the rest have dulled with time and wear, is the newest addition to the bunch. A crimson and cream welcome home, hoosier sticker from my freshman orientation at Indiana University last month. Mom must have snuck it on there when I wasn’t paying attention as I was packing last night. I’m almost surprised she didn’t slap her Maurer School of Law sticker on there too just so I don’t forget exactly where I’m supposed to be headed. The sight of it makes my stomach churn, just like every other reminder of where I’m supposed to be headed next week.
I know Peter doesn’t quite understand why this is so important to me or why I end the conversation every time he tries to talk to me about college, though I know he’d do his best if I tried to explain it. It’s just that Peter is all about big dreams and big loves. His dad is this huge mixed-media artist who sells his installations for like a billion dollars per piece, and his mom runs an Etsy shop hawking artisanal jewelry to other white women that’s designed to help them find their “soul source” — whatever that means.
Peter could tell them he wanted to major in Bowling Industry Technology and they’d be happy (he did briefly entertain this for a month in tenth grade after watching a documentary on the history of the bowling ball). The Menons are the kind of family that choose passion over logic every time. And it’s worked out for them. But it’s not like that for most of us.
I busy myself with arranging our air mattress inside the tent while Peter drums up conversation with our neighbors, a couple of girls in sorority tank tops and high ponytails with a UT Knoxville bumper sticker on their Jeep. As grateful as I am that he agreed to come with me this weekend, I breathe a little easier at the moment alone. I can feel myself slipping, despite my best efforts to swallow down all the anxiety that’s been bubbling up in me since the moment we got to Farmland. All the memories that refuse to stay locked away, all the promises my dad made to me that are now going to go unfulfilled.
The thing is, no one could have prepared for the way we lost my dad. But that didn’t change the gnawing emptiness that had taken up residence inside me over the past eight months.
I don’t know if I believe in a higher power or life after death or any of the stuff the minister said at my dad’s funeral. But countless summers spent at the greatest music festival in the world, on a former farm in Rattle Tail, Georgia, along with sixty thousand other music fans, watching sets from on top of his sunburnt shoulders taught me one inalienable truth: that somewhere in the light-years of space between the spiritual and the scientific, between the known and the ineffable, there’s live music.
There’s Jimi Hendrix playing a two-hour set at Woodstock that revolutionizes rock and roll forever. There’s Beyoncé becoming the first Black woman to ever headline Coachella and delivering a performance that redefines a culture. There’s Bob Dylan going electric at Newport Folk in ’65 and Queen reuniting at Live Aid twenty years later. Live music is a True Thing: It holds the keys to the universe, and all you have to do is pay attention.
If you ever have a question, my dad taught me that live music held the key. And I can’t help but believe that too. Because I’ve never been more in need of guidance than right now.
My mom has made it clear since I was a kid that what she wants for me is stability, consistency. That she wants something more for me than the type of life my dad led. I have to do something concrete, something real. Which means college. Not because she’d punish me or cut me off or kick me out or any of that if I didn’t go, but because it would break her heart to see me end up like my dad. Constantly running toward a dream that would never be realized.
I won’t do that to her. I can’t.
I want to trust my mom’s belief that starting at IU will give me the direction I’ve been searching for, but my gut is screaming at me that my purpose isn’t to sit in a classroom in Bloomington reading the Brontë sisters and trying to recover from a Kappa party the night before. When I think about college, my hands start to shake and I can barely breathe. But when I think about not going, I draw a complete blank.
My mom has no doubts that the reason why I’ve been flailing so spectacularly in the past few months was a result of my grief. But the bigger part, the even scarier part, is that I’m almost eighteen—almost a bona fide adult—and I have no idea what I want to do with my life. And I know now, with stark clarity, that none of us has time to waste when it comes to figuring it out. My dad was a prime example of that.
My dad always said when people get on stage they just know. It’s what happened to him. When he was eighteen, he picked up his guitar, and he played in front of an audience for the first time during an open mic at a coffee shop in Bloomington. And just like that, he was sure that being a part of putting good music out into the world was how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. Even if I wasn’t going to be in the music industry like him, he said, there was no lying on a stage.
Whatever you were running from, whatever you should be running toward, would reveal itself under all those lights.
This festival isn’t where he found his purpose, but it could be where I find mine. It has to be.
It’s too much to explain to Peter, to anyone, so I don’t.
“Toni!” As usual, I hear Peter before I see him.
I run a hand over my face and duck back out of the tent to meet him. When I look at him, he’s patting his stomach where his cropped Fleetwood Mac T-shirt leaves his skinny tanned torso exposed. He’s gotten really into bringing back crop tops for guys lately. According to him, The Fresh Prince did it! Fragile masculinity shouldn’t keep us from embracing the best of nineties fashion.
I can hear his stomach growl even from a few feet away. He wiggles his eyebrows at me. “Taco stand?”
I nod. I grab my phone, even though the signal is awful out here, and start in the direction of the Core — the center of the festival where everything from food to merch to the stages reside. We make it about five minutes before a flurry of movement out of the corner of my eye stops me. My first reaction is the quick uptick of fear at the sight of anything moving this fast and unpredictably, until I realize what I’m looking at.
There’s a girl tangled up in the lime green nylon of her tent. She’s wearing a hot pink dress that would probably be better suited for some artsy date night at the Indianapolis Museum of Art than a music festival, jumbo box braids up in a bun that’s so big I’m surprised it doesn’t throw off her entire center of gravity, and a huge pair of heart-shaped sunglasses that are clearly more form than function.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff at Farmland in my day, but rarely someone so woefully ill-equipped to set up camp.
“Actually,” I start, my voice rough from disuse, “Go on without me. I’m gonna…”
I jerk my head in the direction of the girl tangled up in the tent.
Peter smiles. “That’s the Farmland spirit! Say no more, friendo. I’ll grab you the best gluten-free option at the taco cart.”
“Wait! Can you sign me up for the Golden Apple while you’re there?” I tell him to put my first and middle name down instead of my first and last, just in case. I don’t want any chance of nepotism getting in the way of things.
We should have gotten in last night so that I could sign up earlier — they only have room for about fifty acts per day — but Peter was too tired to drive after his flight to Indianapolis to meet me, and we planned on taking off early this morning anyway. It didn’t help that we ended up getting a flat around Nashville and Peter practically broke a finger just jumping out of the car to try and help me change it.
He salutes as he practically skips away. While he leaves, I take a few steps toward the girl, who’s now so wrapped up in her tent that she looks a little bit like a mummy.
“Hey,” I call out. When she doesn’t respond, I realize it’s because my volume is too low. Sometimes I forget how to calibrate it when talking to anyone that’s not Peter or my mom — like my voice gets caught in my throat. “Hey!”
The girl’s eyes lock with mine for half a second, like she can’t figure out whether or not I’m talking to her. And she immediately face plants into the grass.
How Queer YA Novels Taught Me to Write My Own Happy Ending
I.
The Girl knows there are no happy endings for people like her.
For girls who sit in cars with other girls on a dimly-lit street in Harlem and wonder why they want so badly to whisper a barely-there Yes instead of I have to go home when asked: Do you want to spend the night? The apartment is free. In the breaths between that question and The Girl’s answer is possibility. The type of possibility The Girl has never so much as allowed herself to imagine. The moment is so still, so quiet, it renders itself almost dreamlike in quality — a scene stolen out of time.
The Girl — who idles in the bus lane while the rain pelts her car, watching the person she will grow to love dash across the street, hands acting as a poor substitute for an umbrella — is our main character. Her story is one that you won’t find in any novel, because she, of course, has yet to write it. But she will.
Here, though, she is resigned. She is afraid. The blueprint that has been laid before her for what that almost-yes would mean for her life, for her happiness, has been clear. People like her do not get happy endings. This fear looks like a man on her college campus shouting that God hates queers. This fear looks like her mother’s face when she tells The Girl at fifteen to return the book to the shelves because the jacket copy mentions a lesbian character in the text. The fear looks like the movie with the queer character whose body is left broken by shame and violence.
There is no happy ending for a girl like her. She’s watched this story play out before.
When her little sister tells her she’s reading a new book1, the first YA novel that has managed to capture her attention in months, The Girl buys it from the bookstore off Central Park Avenue immediately, without stopping to look at the synopsis. She’s searching, desperately, for lightness, for joy. What she doesn’t expect is to be lured in by the text so quickly, so seamlessly.
The novel centers two boys, falling in love via email. The setting is a suburb far from where she currently lives, and even further from where she’s from, but she finds herself templating her experience on top of this white, teenage boy. It’s a coming-out story, a closeted kid in a backward place, holding the biggest secret of his life to his chest with both hands. This, she understands. This, she feels acutely.
What she is less familiar with is what comes next. The family who embraces him. The friends who come at the end of the novel to defend him. The happily-ever-after.
Maybe, she finds herself thinking, there could be space for joy in this new life. Maybe, she dreams, as she finishes the last page and immediately starts the book over again, this is not so hopeless after all. Maybe, she journals, when the main character in the book — the young boy who was, at first glance, so different from herself — says: We are out and we are alive, and everyone in the universe is out here right now, a line can be a type of instruction. Her story can be a new roadmap. A fresh blueprint. A different ending. She doesn’t quite believe it yet — won’t for some time.
But.
Maybe.
II.
In this one, a girl gets sent away.
The Girl left her hometown two years ago, fresh out of college and fresh out of ideas for how to fashion a life for herself out of a vain hope of becoming a writer. She landed at a school where people didn’t assume anything, least of all sexuality — a place where it was simply expected that one would ask questions of themselves and the world around them. For the first time in her life, she had the space to explore what it could look like to be anyone, herself, at least, without the artifice of who she’d always been.
Now, fresh out of the grad school that changed her life and a newly-minted New York City transplant, The Girl writes. She signed a contract for her debut novel months ago, mumbled what the plot was about as she celebrated the deal on the back porch of her parents’ Midwestern home with her mom and sister. It’s about a girl who runs for prom queen who falls in love with her competition, she explained, sped past, teary-eyed with joy and a terror she was still too afraid to name.
It’s months later and she has yet to finish her first draft — stalled by exhaustion and the city and no money and fear masquerading as writers’ block. She thinks she must not be queer enough to write the book she’s expected to write. She’s an imposter, a fraud, waiting to be found out by an editor who will see in her prose that she’s not the writer she purported herself to be.
She prays again, in this season, like she never has before. Over her contract. On the train headed to Manhattan. With people from a friend’s progressive church she seldom attends. These are not like the prayers of her childhood, self-assured in her place in the world and the one that will come after. These prayers sound like apologies, like concessions, to a God and a home that she’s not sure have room for her anymore.
When the prayers produce no answers, she researches. She walks from work to the bookstore that has loomed large in her imagination since she was sixteen and hopelessly bright-eyed about moving to the city one day. She goes to the second floor, to those messy, colorful shelves marked Teen and Young Adult LGBTQ Fiction.
She pulls off a thick paperback2, one she’s heard about for years but never had reason enough to read, hoping that somewhere deep in the canon of queer YA is the answer she’s been looking for to a question she doesn’t have the language to ask. The book is adorned with the theatrical poster cover of the book’s recent indie film adaptation and she buys it without hesitation.
It’s widely hailed as a Sad Book, one of those novels where you must brace yourself for impact the moment you flip open the front cover. But she reads on. A teenage girl, a conversion camp, complicated webs of religion and desire and fear and emerging sexuality weave themselves throughout the pages. The Girl reads it in two days, and is moved by the prose — the sheer scope of the novel — but is rendered speechless by the friendship narrative once the main character reaches the conversion camp.
There is a pain in the main character’s exile from her home and what she’s expected to do and become in the camp, that is to be sure, but there is kinship as well. There, in a hyper-religious almost-prison in the rural heartland, she finds her people. She lives amongst the children of the discarded, the Island of Misfit Toys, the ones they want to “fix.” In the midst of great pain, trauma, she grows closer to the people who reveal her to herself — who finally give her something to cling to besides the rejection.
The Girl wonders: What does it mean when leaving the place where you were raised is something like coming home to yourself?
III.
The Girl’s fear has changed its face.
It no longer looks like the Evangelical man on her undergraduate campus or the rejected book in the library or the movie with the battered body. It now looks like the preacher in the pulpit on Father’s Day, telling the congregation what he’d do to another man in the event that they propositioned him. His glee in describing the way the blood would spill over his knuckles — the way that blood would be an act of God, of holy retribution. It looks like the nods of God’s people, the collective hum of their pleased agreement.
The preacher says queerness should be met with brutality, and that brutality is in and of itself an act of mercy. The preacher says that to go against the will of God is to incur His wrath on earth, and that wrath be justified. The preacher says to be soft, to be sweet, to be crooked is to condemn oneself to hell, forever and ever amen. The Girl sits in the congregation and has yet to free herself from the belief that the preacher might be correct. This, her relationship with God, is one of the remaining barriers she has yet to clear.
The fear looks like a secondhand YA paperback3 she picks up from a bookstore months later that sees her too well. She reads its dedication on the back patio of a cafe in Union Square: To those who believe in a loving God and those who struggle to love themselves. The pages are tear-stained before she even begins the story itself.
To believe what the book wants her to believe would be to finally release herself from the most potent vestiges of her fear — that the God she has spent her entire life reaching towards has already deemed her unclean, unsavable, unworthy. But the book says she is still deserving of love. The book says God molded her and shaped her in His image and to this end, God could not have been wrong. The book says she deserves to be held, to be cared for.
The book says she can stop holding onto the shame that she has carried with her for too many years of her adult life. The book says she is finally free.
Forever and ever, amen.
IV.
The Girl wrote the queer Black girl joy, happy-ending novel of her heart, but she couldn’t out-write her shame.
She recalls a scene from the book4 she carries with her these days like a Bible, well-worn and oft-referenced. There’s a moment in it, two boys under the stars, friends-but-perhaps-something-else, laying in the bed of a truck. It’s a turning point in the novel, this moment of clarity, of honesty. One boy says: I have to tell them, of his parents about his newfound queerness. He’s been holding on to this secret for too long, the reader intuits, and it’s time to let it go. Quickly, the other boy responds with a simple: Why?
Because I have to, the first boy answers. It is definitive, final — the last of the walls between himself and living the rest of his life honestly. He won’t waver. There is a life for him outside of these moments of openness he pilfers away with this almost-more-than-a-friend. It is a reckoning.
The night after The Girl’s book gets announced to the public, she’s at a tourist trap of a restaurant in Times Square, sitting across from her mother. Because I have to presses against the bounds of her chest; a levee, barely contained. When the truth rushes forth, unbidden, it’s over a plate of oversized barbeque chicken wings. She apologizes for being an embarrassment. For going against what she always believed was the will of God. For being the type of person her mother might not be able to love anymore. For not being able to change. And when she’s done, her mother watches her for a moment. Silent. Considering.
She says, There is nothing you could do that would make me ashamed to have you as a daughter. I love you. I’ve always loved you. I will always love you.
The Girl had held tight to the idea of love as transaction for so long, the boundlessness of this extension of grace stuns her silent. In this story, the mother was bigger than the cardboard cutout The Girl had made of her. In this story, there was character development past what The Girl could have imagined.
In this story, the happy ending wasn’t just wish-fulfillment, it was real.
1. Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda x Becky Albertalli
2. The Miseducation of Cameron Post x Emily Danforth
3. The God Box x Alex Sanchez
4. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe x Benjamin Alire Saenz
Leah Johnson’s best-selling debut YA novel You Should See Me In A Crown is available everywhere books are sold.