13 Sapphic Holiday Romances To Devour This Winter
There are few things I love more than a good romance. Or even a bad romance. One of those things? A good (or bad!) holiday romance. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a sucker for a cheesy Hallmark Christmas rom-com. Yes, they’re predictable, but that’s the charm of them! My biggest issue? Not enough sapphic holiday rom-coms.
And that’s where books come in! While TV networks are slow to catch on that sapphics want to see our love stories on-screen, books are willing to keep up with the demand. These stories make you want to curl up on the couch in a thick sweater with a mug of your favorite hot chocolate while sitting next to your twinkling Christmas tree.
Because what is the holiday season about if not a little romance? (I say this as a person who got engaged on Christmas!)
Make My Wish Come True by Rachael Lippincott & Alyson Derrick
Teen actress Arden James is more well-known for her party girl persona than her acting abilities. So when a picky director won’t give her a role because of her off-screen antics, Arden and her publicist make up a lie. They say that she’s from a small town (technically not a lie) and that she’s dating her childhood best friend Caroline (huge lie), which she can prove when she goes home for Christmas.
Caroline isn’t interested in anything having to do with Arden James. She’s been out of sight, out of mind for years. But when Arden shows up on her doorstep promising her an article in Cosmopolitan in exchange for pretending to be her girlfriend for 12 days, Caroline knows that it’s the journalistic opportunity she needs. What could possibly go wrong?
I’ll Be Gone for Christmas by Georgia K. Boone
If you wished that holiday classic The Holiday had a sapphic element, you’re in luck with this new holiday romance.
Bee Turner needs to get away from San Francisco. Everything is too much. So when her best friend suggests she list her sleek apartment on popular house swapping site Vacate, Bee jumps at the chance to escape. Meanwhile, Clover Mills has been having a year. Between losing her mother and ending things with her fiancé as a result, she needs to get out of her small Ohio town. When she hears about Vacate, her bags are packed faster than you can say cable car.
When she gets to San Francisco, Clover can’t seem to avoid Bee’s sister Beth, while Bee keeps finding herself in the presence of Clover’s ex, Knox. Maybe holiday magic is a real thing after all.
It’s important to mention that only one of these storylines is sapphic, featuring a late-in-life coming out story.
Make the Season Bright by Ashley Herring Blake
Ashley Herring Blake sapphic holiday romance? Say less, I’m already in.
Charlotte Donovan is living the dream as a violinist in New York City. Nevermind the fact that she was left at the altar five years ago and she never hears from her single mother. She’s ready for Christmastime in the city when her ensemble mate Sloane invites everyone to Colorado for the holiday.
The group aren’t the only ones in Colorado for Christmas — Sloane’s sister has brought home her friend Brighton, who just happens to be Charlotte’s ex. Now the two women have to pretend that they don’t know each other. Except that gets increasingly harder as their past comes back to them with a vengeance.
I’ll Get Back to You by Becca Grischow
There is something about a holiday romance that just begs for a fake dating storyline. Technically, this is a Thanksgiving story, but honestly, it’s all the holiday season in my mind!
All Murphy wants is to get out of her small Illinois town and start her life somewhere else. Instead, she’s stuck working in the same coffee shop she’s been working at since she was sixteen, and she doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to pass that pesky community college class that’s keeping her from graduating.
Murphy’s string of bad luck could potentially change thanks to former classmate Ellie Meyers. Ellie’s mom just happens to be the same professor whose class Murphy keeps failing. Ellie and Murphy realize that they are each other’s best bets for the next step in their goal lists, so they hatch a fake dating plan. Except the dating quickly feels not so fake…
This Christmas by Georgia Beers
No-kill animal shelter Junebug Farms decide to sponsor their town’s annual Christmas parade as a way to bring more attention to the shelter. And they will use the parade’s king and queen to create videos to ensure that all their pups are delivered to their forever homes on Santa’s sleigh.
What they don’t know is that the parade is going to have two queens this year. That is if longtime dog walking volunteer (and resident matchmaker) Mia Sorenson has her way. Mia rigs the voting so that her granddaughter Samantha and her friend Keegan get the gig. But will the two women overcome years of beating around the bush and the public embarrassment to make true love real?
Make You Mine This Christmas by Lizzie Huxley-Jones
Haf hasn’t had the best year, and all she wants to do is go to a Christmas party and have a good time. But her good time gets a little too festive: she gets drunk and kisses Christopher under the mistletoe while his ex-girlfriend just happens to be watching.
Suddenly, a drunken kiss turns into a fake relationship, with Haf joining Chrisopher’s family for the holiday season so he can save face. But word to the wise Haf, don’t fall in love with your fake boyfriend’s sister…
Most Wonderful by Georgia Clark
The Belvedere siblings’ lives are all falling apart when they show up to celebrate Christmas in the Catskills with their singer/actress mother Babs. Oldest daughter Liz has become a showrunner who can’t figure out season two of her hit show, and also can’t get a handle on her crush on the show’s star Violet. Her comedian middle sister Birdie is chasing skirts more than she’s chasing gigs, causing her to fear that she will be a flash in the pan. And then there’s their little brother Rafi, who proposed to his coworker girlfriend in front of the whole office and got turned down.
During their time in the mountains, each of the siblings learns a lot about themselves, their eccentric mother, and each other. And of course, there’s also a little holiday romantic sparkle.
The Christmas Swap by Talia Samuels
The last thing newly single businesswoman Margot wants is a holiday romance. But when sweet Ben needs a girlfriend to spend Christmas with him and his family, she can’t say no. She knows that nothing will happen — she’ll get a couple weeks away from London, Ben gets his family off his back. It’s a win-win situation.
There is something that Margot didn’t anticipate when making the deal: Ben’s sister Ellie. She has Margot majorly rethinking the whole holiday romance thing.
A Holly Jolly Christmas: A Second Chance Lesbian Romance by Emily Wright
Everything you need to know about this story is right there in the title. If there’s another trope I love for a holiday romance, it’s second chance.
Holly hasn’t been home in the two years since her brother died. Her family is still grieving, her ex won’t stop calling, and everything gets worse when she bumps into her first love, Vicky Castleton.
While Holly is trying to heal the broken parts of herself, her family and best friend keep pushing her to confront her past. And as she spends more time with Vicky, it’s clear that Holly has never gotten over her. Is Christmas the perfect time for her to risk it all for love?
It’s a Fabulous Life by Kelly Farmer
A sapphic It’s a Wonderful Life you say? Love it!
Bailey George is ready to bid adieu to Lanford Falls and finally leave her responsibilities behind for a vacation in New York City. But then the person taking over her leadership position for the town’s Winter Wonderfest gets sick, and obligation keeps Bailey from following through with her plans. While she’s pretty bummed about being stuck in Lanford Falls, things get a little better when her crush Marla agrees to help her out.
Unfortunately for Bailey, things just keep going wrong. Then one night, she finds herself under the town’s old bridge. When she wishes that she had never been born, a drag queen named Clara Angel shows her that Lanford Falls wouldn’t be better off without her. And holiday magic can make any dreams come true.
How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow
Shani didn’t mean to hit May with her mom’s Subaru. It was just another part of the curse of Winter Break, including the way Shani got dumped. But she’s going to push all that aside and focus on her month-long paleoichthyology internship. After all, that’s why she’s in D.C.
But when a dog walking gig serendipitously brings May back into Shani’s life, it’s easy to forget about fish fossils and heartbreak. Especially when they get snowed in together on Christmas Eve. Things were never supposed to turn out this way. Will Shani be able to accept that sometimes plans change?
Season of Love by Helena Greer
When artist Miriam Blum’s great aunt Cass dies and leaves her the family Christmas tree farm, she has to face parts of her past that she really doesn’t want to. All she wants to do is sit shiva (yes, there is something ironic about a Jewish woman running a Christmas tree farm), avoid her parents and get as far away from the farm as she can. But of course, life has other plans.
The business is about to go under, and to save it, Miriam must work together with Noelle, the farm’s grumpy manager. The chemistry between them is enough to burn the trees to the ground, but will that help them save the farm?
In the Event of Love by Courtney Kae
LA event planner Morgan’s life has blown up after a work-related scandal, and she’s forced to head home to Fern Falls for the holidays. But Fern Falls isn’t the idyllic holiday haven she wants it to be. Mainly because her former best friend turned crush Rachel is there. Rachel, who has now become a sexy lumberjane thanks to working at her family’s Christmas tree farm.
Soon, Morgan learns that Rachel’s tree farm is the only thing keeping Fern Falls from being sold to a seedy developer. So Morgan decides to put her party planning to good use and create the ultimate holiday experience. But just because she’s helping Rachel’s farm doesn’t mean they’re going to fall in love. Right?
Things I Read That I Love #334: Group Chats, Polycules, Data Free Disney, Iron Claws and Pretty Faces
HELLO and welcome to the 334th installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can know more about group chats! This “column” is less queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
You Have Such A Pretty Face, by Anastasia Selby for The Unpublishable, September 2023
“Whenever I gained weight, I compensated by focusing on my pretty face, spending thousands of dollars over the years on face creams, serums, toners, treatments, and products that were too expensive. I bought these instead of starting a retirement account, putting a down payment on a house, or buying a reliable car. I told myself I was living in poverty but I had VIB Rouge status at Sephora. Taking care of my skin was a backup plan. If I could keep up my pretty face, then maybe I would finally be worthy of love, even if I got fat again. Truthfully I never felt thin enough, small enough, or beautiful enough. Nothing was ever enough. It took me a long time to learn why.”
The Fall of the House of Von Erich, by Skip Hollandsworth for D Magazine, February 1988
I cannot stop thinking about The Iron Claw since I saw it (spoilers for the film, based on a true story, incoming!) and of course had to then read 500 things about it. This D Magazine story is crazy because at this point they’d only lost Jackie (the seven-year-old who was electrocuted in a puddle) and David (the one who died while wrestling in Japan) and already it was a tragic tale, because in addition to those deaths, Kevin had been injured in a match and Kerry in a motorcycle accident. You can also read about their imaginary cousin Lance in a December 2023 piece, The Ballad of Lance Von Erich.
Data Free Disney, by Janet Vertesi for Public Books, January 2023
Okay this is WILD!!! This woman has an “extreme approach to data privacy” and took her kids to Disneyland planning to shield them from every corporate attempt to harvest their data, like she painted their faces in a specific pattern to avoid facial recognition and got a burner phone to make the reservation and paid for everything in cash and basically eschewed the whole tech-enabled new Disneyland app system — which meant having to wait in more/longer lines for rides and food — anyhow, you’ll see!
The Birth of my Baby, The Death of My Marriage, by Leslie Jamison for The New Yorker, January 2024
“The idea that we both felt so many of the same painful things didn’t help me believe that the marriage was more possible to save. It became harder and harder to convince myself that our good months in the beginning mattered more than all the friction that followed. It seemed like the good place we were trying to get back to was just a small sliver of what we were.”
Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Internet, by Kyle Chayka for the New Yorker, January 2023
“When I made an account, I was surprised to find that MySpace tethered my shadow self to my physical person. I was no longer just a pseudonym and a cartoon avatar; the site asked for my actual name and a photo of my face; it told me to list my interests for everyone to see. Before, going online had felt like being a solo hiker, exploring unknown territories. Now I felt like I was putting out a billboard for myself on the highway.”
When I Met the Pope, by Patricia Lockwood for the London Review of Books, November 2023
“Before leaving that morning, we stuffed my bag with all sorts of objects, reasoning that if the pope blessed me, anything on my person would be blessed as well. It now has to go through the metal detector, a tense moment. I wonder what security will make of it – a jumble of legs, jaws, little girls, torsos and precious stones, all awaiting the gesture. How far does the principle of a blessing extend? Because there’s a tampon in there that going forward I will hesitate to use.”
The Perfect Webpage, by Mia Sato for The Verge, January 2024
Once more on my favorite topic: how catering to Google has made websites unreadable and terrible!!! It’s weird how they keep changing their algorithm to make results better — to ensure people are landing on websites written by actual people and not content farms — and every change makes leads to our site specifically faring worse, even though we are famously not a content farm! Google directed literally over a million more people every month onto this website in 2014 than they do now, ten years later. So anyhow great algorithm work for everyone over there
The Total Package, by Britt Young for The Baffler, January 2024
The hunt for a perfect silicone penis which is unlike the author’s hunt for a prosthetic arm that will not cost an arm and a leg after insurance.
How Group Chats Rule the World, by Sophie Haigney for The New York Times, January 2024
So much about this rang so incredibly true, especially their descriptions of the dynamics of who ends up in a group chat (and how these eternal chats often begin as one-offs for specific events) — and I was especially intrigued by how group chats have increased in popularity as communicating via social media platforms like facebook have receded. As this article describes, group chats are positive forces for so many reasons but I also wondered about the negative ones; about how group chats also contribute to the ways in which we feel constantly tethered to our mobile devices.
What Does a Polycule Actually Look Like?, by Allison P. Davis for New York Magazine, January 2024
Perhaps you are aware that New York Magazine did a big polyamory issue? Well! This piece digs into the relationships of a very specific polycule.
11 Queer Romance + YA Comfort Reads I Revisit on Bad Days
Reading has always been one of my favorite activities. As a kid, I would curl up just about anywhere and read. There used to be books stashed all over our house: between the mattress and the box spring, underneath the radiator. Even though there was no shortage of books at my disposal, I always returned to my favorites. To this day, I can’t tell you how many times I read Matilda or The Princess Diaries. Now that I’m older, my TBR is always a mile long, so I don’t reread books as often as I did as a kid, but when I find myself needing comfort from the atrocities of being an adult, these are the books I usually turn to.
Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi
I have read this book at least three times, if not more. Whenever I’m in a reading (or writing) slump, I return to this book. Safi masters both the art of tension and crafting a delicious slow burn romance. This is the book that taught me how utterly satisfying an enemies-to-lovers story can be. Sana is the epitome of the perfect cheerleader, and Rachel is the director with a chip on her shoulder. When they’re forced to work together, they realize that there’s always something else beneath the surface.
Once & Future by A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy
I am not a fantasy reader, but this fantasy was so wonderful and so unbelievably queer. It’s a futuristic retelling of King Arthur, but there’s one notable difference: Young Arthur is now a teenage girl named Ari. And the wise wizard Merlin is a bumbling teenage boy. Throw in a capitalist corporation running the government, queer knights of the roundtable, and sizzling tension between Ari and Guinevere, and I was hooked.
Once Upon a Princess by Claire Lydon and Harper Bliss
This was the first sapphic romance I ever read, and it has always maintained a special place in my heart. I love the “secret royal falls in love with a commoner” trope, probably because I spent years of my life hoping I would marry a royal. When princess Olivia decides to escape her royal life in London for the quiet in Cornwall, she isn’t expecting to meet Rosie, a struggling cafe owner. Can their love overcome the challenge of duty?
Her Royal Highness by Rachel Hawkins
I love an enemies-to-lovers romance, and this one is so much fun that it quickly became a favorite. Millie Quint is from Texas, and after her best friend (and ex-girlfriend?) Jude breaks her heart, she decides to take to the Scottish highlands to attend a boarding school that is going co-ed for the first time. She’s not expecting to be roommates with Flora, who is the literal princess of Scotland and a royal pain in the ass. Eventually, Millie finds herself in a situationship with Flora, but will it be different this time? Some things are worth fighting for.
Honor Girl by Maggie Thrash
In this graphic memoir, 15-year-old Maggie spends the summer as she always does, at Camp Bellflower for girls. But this summer is different. Not only does she find herself becoming an expert at the rifle range, but there’s an older female counselor named Erin who awakens something in Maggie that she’s not necessarily ready for.
Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
It feels like a cliché to include this book, because literally everyone loves it. There’s a movie adaptation that is so perfect. I will say, I read this book aloud to my fiancée when we first started dating, and it made her fall in love with me. Make of that what you will.
You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
This book is truly just a joy to read, and turned me into an instant Leah Johnson stan. It was the only book I read during lockdown — it took me months, but I did it. Liz Lighty needs $10,000 to pay for college, and instead of burdening her family with the responsibility, she decides to run for prom queen to win the scholarship that is exactly $10,000. The only thing is, she doesn’t expect to fall in love with her competition.
Fresh by Margot Wood
New Adult is a genre that is woefully underdeveloped, but this book perfectly straddles the line of Young Adult and New Adult. Elliot is a college freshman who thinks more about partying and hooking up than she does about her schoolwork. And hook up she does. Elliot is a pansexual queen, but her best relationship is the love/hate one she has with her RA Rose. (I told y’all, I love an enemies-to-lovers story!) This is an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma and has a cool use of footnotes due to Elliot’s ADHD.
Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake
Look, I would die for the ladies of Bright Falls okay? But the first book in the series definitely holds the tightest grip on my heart. It’s probably because of how much I related to Claire, the bisexual single mom who has kept a tight lock on her heart. But then brooding sexy Delilah Green shows up and throws her life into a tailspin.
Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli
I love the Creekwood kids, and after I read Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda, Leah was absolutely my favorite. Giving her her own book was a brilliant decision, and I devoured it pretty quickly. It’s senior year, and things between her super tight friend group are starting to change, which always happens senior year. Leah doesn’t know if things will ever be the same, especially after she realizes that her feelings for one of her best friends are starting to change.
She Gets the Girl by Rachael Lippincott and Alyson Derrick
This is a recent favorite that will absolutely be a book I return to because I loved it so much. Written by actual wives in a dual POV, Alex is a brash, chaotic flirt, and Molly is the exact opposite. When Alex agrees to help Molly land the girl of her dreams in an attempt to prove that she’s not selfish to her ex (which hopefully won’t be permanent), both girls get more than they bargained for.
What are the queer comfort reads you return to over and over?
An Exclusive Preview of “Critical Role: Mighty Nein Origins,” Featuring Our Resident Disaster Lesbian, Beauregard Lionett!
Critters, gather round! We have a special treat for you! The lovely folks at Dark Horse Comics wanted you, gentlereaders, to have an exclusive sneak peek at the next installment of the Mighty Nein Origins story, featuring none other than our resident disaster lesbian, Beauregard Lionett! Take a look back at Beau’s life before she was the badass monk (pop pop!) we know and love from Critical Role; see what she got up to before she joined the Mighty Nein, and get to the root of her daddy issues. Critical Role: Mighty Nein Origins — Beauregard Lionett is available for pre-order now.
New Memoir Explores Growing Up as a Twin and Coming Out in Midlife
Broader society tends to have a few visions of twins — who they are, how they are, and what their relationships are like to each other — that are more grounded in myth than in reality. Sometimes, people are just enamored and delighted by them. Other times, people find them freakish or uncanny. Rarely, if ever, do people not hold some kind of bias or belief about the inner lives and interpersonal connections of twins, even if they’ve never encountered any in real life. And the media doesn’t help much to clarify the realities of what it’s like to be a twin, either. Even some of my favorite pieces of media, like both the film and the TV show Dead Ringers, the play Twelfth Night, and the novel The God of Small Things for example, don’t necessarily elucidate those realities and usually engage in a little twin mythmaking of their own.
In professor Helena De Bres’s book, How To Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins, she uses experiences from her own life as an identical twin to help clarify some of these realities while also exposing and deconstructing some of our socially constructed biases and beliefs, dissecting the ways twins are portrayed in the media, exploring “the assumptions underlying our reactions to twins and show[ing] how they illuminate wider questions about what it means to be human.” She doesn’t dispel every belief or rewrite every wrongfully written character or attempt to take on each individual stereotype we hold about twins in our greater culture. Instead, she presents a philosophical inquiry into what twinship is to both the people who are twins and those of us looking in from the outside.
After all, as she points out in the book many times, our understandings, fears, and conceptions about how twins are and what they represent didn’t come out of nowhere. In most Western cultures, and especially in the U.S., we’re taught to believe our lives are ours and ours alone. Individualism rules every realm and every environment we’re part of, so it makes sense that twins are an enigma to many people, even if people don’t think about twinship very often. And we’re missing out on some important lessons about humanity as a whole on account of our inability to move beyond these preconceived notions. She explains,
Twins are a walking instance of the essence of freakdom […] Freaks disturb our familiar binary oppositions between male and female, Black and white, primitive and cultured, child and adult, animal and human, normal and abnormal, self and other. They destabilize our grip on the world and others and ignite a fear that we might lose hold of our own identities, to the point that we get submerged in, fused with, and incorporated into an alien other. […] But whether we consider freaks similar to or different from us, thinking about those who fall outside the norm has liberating potential for everyone.
The five essays that comprise How To Be Multiple, which De Bres says can be read together or apart, expertly take on various aspects of twinship that help get at some of these greater understandings of humanity as a whole. De Bres uses a combination of memoir, historical research, theoretical investigation, cultural criticism, and, of course, some examples from philosophy to focus on some of the most commonly misunderstood parts of twinship in order to bring us closer to that understanding. While De Bres’s experiences growing up with her sister Julia reveal how implicitly degrading our collective anxieties about twins can be in their own right, the inclusion of these elements is what makes De Bres’s work here powerful enough to have readers rethinking their notions of identity and how identity operates and fascinating enough to keep them paying attention to the arguments she (very successfully) makes.
Each of the five essays skillfully examines De Bres’s own feelings about her life as an identical twin while also examining the ways non-twins treat twinship. Her interrogation takes her to some of the aspects of twinship you might expect like being confused for her sister on a number of occasions or people assuming twins don’t have any independence, while also getting into areas readers might not expect. The two stand out essays of the collection, “How Many of You Are There?” and “Are You Two In Love?,” bring out some of the least discussed but most revelatory ideas about twinship that exist in our collective consciousness.
In “How Many of You Are There?,” De Bres discusses the phenomenon in which singletons (her word for people who aren’t twins) treat twins as a single, “metaphysical unit,” connected by not only genetics but also by some invisible, almost spiritual tether. The essay brings up some deeply held Western beliefs about personhood, about how we have a tendency to think of ourselves and other people as not just separate bodies but also separate minds. It’s part of what fuels our beliefs in this kind of rugged individualism where we’re each responsible for the outcome of our own lives and helps us feel like we have some semblance of control over what happens to us. But De Bres asks a few important questions in this essay that people should think about more deeply. In a part of the essay where she’s discussing conjoined twins, she points out how the families and friends of conjoined twins often think of them as two distinct people despite the fact that they share a body, and says, “If one body can contain two people, why couldn’t one person be spread across two bodies? Non-conjoined twins are the obvious candidates here. But once we twins have broken the body barrier, what’s stopping singletons from doing it, too? What makes you so sure that all of you is contained within that single envelope of skin?”
For De Bres and her sister, the fact of their separate personhood is, at some points, extremely clear, and, at others, entirely opaque. Of course, they’re separate people with different identities and personalities and oppositional qualities, but as De Bres points out, it doesn’t always feel that way for the two of them. Often, they find themselves having parallel thoughts or experiences even when they’re hundreds of miles apart. By illustrating these experiences, De Bres shows how recognizing the unique connections twins have to one another can help us to restructure and refocus our thoughts on the importance of individuality and our collective responsibilities to one another. Shouldn’t we strive to empathize so deeply with other people around us that we’re able to feel how interconnected our lives are to one another? Even if we don’t want to believe it, our lives are inextricably linked to the lives of everyone around us, twins or not. And that’s exactly where De Bres goes: “You can tell me that I’m fundamentally separate from [Julia], that we’re not metaphysically conjoined, that my personal boundaries are and should remain intact. You can tell yourself that, too, about you and everyone you love. As for me, I’ll believe my independent existence when, God forbid, I see it.”
“Are You Two In Love?” hits on some of the more controversial myths about twinship that exist in our culture. Funnily enough, De Bres brings up some of the examples of twins-related media that have greatly shifted my view of the world and our places in it (Dead Ringers, The God of Small Things, Twelfth Night), and uses them to expose and interrogate a different phenomenon that feels ever present in our societal consideration about twins. As De Bres argues in this essay, twin bonds are romanticized (in the romantic relationship sense and in the exoticization sense) and pathologized in many of the stories, from Greek and Roman mythology to our media now, that involve them. Twins can have a strong bond so long as it still fits our definition of what siblinghood should be and doesn’t detract from their responsibilities as individual beings. She explains, “…we’re encouraged to see young twinships much as we’re encouraged to see intense child and teen friendships: as practice for the real thing, which is a grown-up, romantic relationship between unrelated adults. When the time comes, the idea goes, twins will and should shove aside their sweet little bond, so that the serious business of marriage and parenthood can take center stage.”
She brings a variety of conceptions about twinships to illustrate the way people think of these connections throughout history, from how ancient philosophers discussed the idea of finding the perfect romantic match, to how artists of various mediums portray romantic love as a sort of twin connection, to how works from Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Mann show the ways twins both stabilize and destabilize each other at the same time. With these examples, she proves our culture is generally eager to produce evidence that the twin bond is a problematic one: It’s either sexual, too enmeshed, or doesn’t allow the twins the freedom to grow outside of the bond they have with one another.
She takes the argument even further when she explains the circumstances of her and her sister’s similar coming out stories. De Bres argues that queer people also suffer from these misconceptions. When discussing the disastrous relationships between the twins at the center of Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, she points out:
As a contemporary psychologist might diagnose the problem, both sets of twins have clearly failed to individuate. They’ve used each other as mother substitutes, “transitional objects” from which they’ve failed to transition. Deprived of the fresh air of outside company, their closed dyad has turned in on itself, intensified, stalled, and decayed. Queer people have often faced this same charge of arrested development. They’ve been assumed to be stuck in perpetual adolescence, by virtue of their pathological narcissism and lazy refusal to sustain straight social structures, including, until recently, the reproduction of the next generation.
De Bres and her sister’s midlife coming out forced her to confront some of her own deeply held biases about queerness and navigate them through her experiences of and beliefs about twinship, which not only helped her understand herself and her sister better but also helped her see how those kinds of beliefs are engendered within us in the first place. She explains there’s no doubt queer people face much more social stigma than twins do but, again, using the lens of society’s erroneous beliefs about twinship can help deconstruct our culture’s most fallacious thoughts about queerness and what it means to be a queer person.
The final part of the book, a short coda summing up some of De Bres’s arguments, reminds us that “In the West, many of us assume that we’re each physically and mentally discrete: tucked up in our bodies and minds solo, wrapped in a single continuum of skin. We’ve attached to that idea because we ground our autonomy in it, along with our dignity and value.” In How to Be Multiple, De Bres makes several compelling cases for not only why we should be determined to blow up that idea, but also how we can start. And even though the focus of the book is on twins of all kinds, she reiterates over and over again that we need not look further than our own relationships with the people we love and identify with the most. These relationships and our own various versions of enmeshment and closeness can help us redefine personhood as we know it — as a more dependent state of being that proudly admits the importance of intimacy in every area of our lives.
How to Be Multiple: The Philosophy of Twins by Helena De Bres is out now.
“We’re a Surviving Sort of Species”: Venita Blackburn on Grief and How We Live With It
feature image photo of Venita Blackburn by Virginia Barnes
Sometimes someone is like, here, read this novel about grief, and you’re like yeah, I know about grief novels, and you read it, and it’s devastating and heartwarming in all the ways a grief novel purports to be, and you walk away saying yes, it’s all very clear, that was most definitely a grief novel. Other times someone is like, here, read this novel about grief, and you’re like yeah, I know about grief novels, and then that novel is Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn. How to describe this genre-defying, mind-altering, utterly arresting story about complicated families and fierce love and the losses that accumulate over the course of a life? Saeed Jones said, “Your wig is going to fall off no matter what you do,” and that’s just the truth.
Dead in Long Beach, California follows graphic novelist Coral, who thinks she’s stopping by her younger brother’s apartment for a visit and instead finds herself dealing with the aftermath of his suicide. In the haze of grief that settles after his body is taken away, Coral, understandably, finds herself unable to cope — so she takes her brother’s phone and begins to assume his digital presence. I’m talking text his daughter, make plans with his maybe-girlfriend, make the man an Instagram kind of assume his digital presence. This novel is, of course, soul-crushing. It’s also, sometimes, quite funny. It’s the story of one woman’s mental breakdown, it’s a lesbian sci-fi saga, and it’s a tender exploration of how humans struggle to process unimaginable loss. It’s upsetting and absurd and, at times, you don’t know where it’s going to take you, but it always sets you down right where you need to be. It’s a grief novel, sure, but that’s not even the half of it.
Listen, I could go on and on about the rollercoaster that is Dead in Long Beach, California, but this is not a review, and I was lucky enough to sit down with Venita and talk all things debut novel — so I’ll let her tell you the rest herself.
Author’s Note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Daven McQueen: Starting out with a classic first question, what was your inspiration for this book? Where did you come up with the idea?
Venita Blackburn: Well, I had the idea for the interior parts of the book far earlier. The original title was “Lesbian Assassins at the End of the World.” That was sort of the big vision. I was kind of going to do this wild, epic kind of high fantasy sci-fi sort of thing with a small tether to modern existence and set in California in different time periods and all that kind of jazz. But I also tend to look into a lot of my older work and there’s always something that I’m not done with — concepts, characters that are still nagging me and rubbing against my psyche. I have to go back and sort of figure out what it is that’s still bugging me. There’s a few stories from my second collection, How to Wrestle a Girl, about dysfunctional maternal situations and femininity and sexuality, and I carried a little bit of that over into Dead in Long Beach. Then I started to deal with why I was trying to do this high fantasy sci-fi kind of world that is so far away from the things I know. I found it’s because of these profound senses of loss, this world of transformation and this feeling that we cannot go back to what we used to be and to the relationships we used to have.
I wrote most of the book during the pandemic, this huge moment in time — and we’re still in it. We’re still in this transformative state where we have to make a lot of big choices about who we’re going to be and what things we’re going to carry forward from our past into our future. If we’re going to try to cut a lot of them off, what will that mean? Who will we be after that? And there’s also the sense of denial about the nature of our history, about who we are as individuals — capable of terror, great terror, and also great love and compassion. And this idea that we haven’t quite navigated that sense of our own selves in a lot of ways. That’s when I started to go into the real heart of the story, the frame story, that’s set in the real world with a character who’s lost her brother and is unable to psychologically process that. That became what I knew was going to be the biggest story. I did a lot of trimming of the big fantasy in order to make room for what I would call a horror story.
It’s a little funny, but it is a tragedy. It is emotionally taxing to think about it, let alone to have to produce it over and over again on the page. I started to realize that I was distracting myself with the other story because it was fun and weird and sexy. That’s why the story wasn’t coming out.
DM: What you just said, describing the book as a horror — that’s something that really struck me as I was reading. It’s like, the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up, there’s this sense of claustrophobia. At the same time, like you said, you do have this sci-fi story interwoven throughout and this narrative voice that is non-traditional and extra-human. I’m wondering how you’ve come to think about the genre of this book, if there’s a way that you feel like you define it.
VB: The only kinds of genres I tend to think about is sort of, is it nonfiction? Is it poetry? Is it fiction? How close to reality are we going to get? Within the different breakdowns of fiction, I have no idea what this book is. Is it literary fiction? Is it fantasy? Is it sci-fi? It is this kind of strange anomaly in terms of genre. I would definitely call it a horror story, but that’s just because this is what I would classify as horror. I grew up watching traditional horror movies with my mom when I was a kid, very young, like five or six years old. She was just into it. She loved ghost stories and psychological trauma stories, and now those movies have a sense of comfort for me. Men behaving like monsters, dressed up in costumes, that’s almost cute to me versus, you know, what I think is truly terrifying. The truly terrifying things are the stuff that we can’t see. The stuff that’s going on internally, the breakdown of the mind, the loss of people that you love. The stuff that happens in real life, that’s horrifying.
DM: I’m also a big horror fan, and I’ve been watching them since I was really young, so a lot of the traditional scares feel sort of…
VB: Goofy?
DM: Yeah, goofy!
VB: They’re goofy. They’re silly! And I love that you mentioned claustrophobia as an element of horror and isolation. This particular character is dealing with that kind of internal claustrophobia. The world seems very big to her because of the life she’s living, tangential to fame in Southern California, which has that vast feeling. We don’t do a lot of high rises here, so the landscape is kind of low to the ground, too. You can sort of see the expanse of nature; things feel kind of open. But on the inside, she’s not connected to human beings in a way that she ever will be again. She’s gone through this complete separation and she’s unable to speak it. And that creates that other layer of claustrophobia where she is kind of bound in her own brain. No one else is in there with her except for the voice, which isn’t her own voice. That collective hive, that’s her only comfort.
DM: I do want to talk a little bit more about this hive voice. The first-person plural is so rarely used in fiction, and I’m curious about how you decided to use it.
VB: I love the first-person plural. I think it’s a beautiful voice with a sense of authority over the content. That’s sort of the trick that it brings. Every POV has its own little tricks. The first person is limited to just one person’s brain, comes out of their voice and their perceptions. You can’t go beyond it. You don’t have that sort of god-like aerial view of the world. The first-person plural allows you to get that, but also to have that god-like sense of everything else, because you always have more than one, the “we.” I think it’s just magical, the way that authority immediately happens. I call it the sort of natural sense of peer review built into the voice. It’s also a sense of community and a sense of belonging that’s built into the voice. And that’s exactly the thing that this character has lost, right? Her family is now broken, and her sense of self is broken too. She needs something that’s going to keep her tethered. In this moment, because she is so isolated, all she has is her own brain. This is the voice that she’s actually created for her own artistic purposes, and it’s the one she falls back on in order to navigate her way through this terrifying moment in her own life.
DM: It is really interesting the way that the voice does have this sort of collective feeling. There’s some level of warmth and community there, but we’re looking in on Coral who is so increasingly isolated and inside her own brain. I think that contrast really contributes to the sense of horror.
VB: Yeah, and I tried to create a sense of momentum as well, going forward, where it’s getting worse. You know, she’s got to make progressively worse choices. That’s just the rule. That’s the fiction part of things. Things’ve got to get worse and worse and worse and worse until they can’t anymore. But the voice has a sort of steady attitude about it all. Even if it’s terrible, that voice says, no, it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful and horrifying. Let us practice it. Let us, you know, revel in the marvel of this maliciousness. It’s this juxtaposition of all of the good and the bad and the things that make up humanity and make up who we become in these crisis moments, too. The beauty and the violence, the sadness and the celebration.
DM: Because of the voice, as much as the book is really focused on what’s going on inside Coral’s head and this experience of her life unraveling after her brother’s death, there is also this broader unpacking of what people are and why they make the choices they do. There is sort of this sense of doom around that, but at the same time the collective voice is, saying, “Everything’s going to be okay.” You saying you wrote this during the pandemic makes a lot of sense; I can see a lot of those feelings present there. I feel like it’s also really speaking to the present political moments that we’re in and the increasing sense of doom that a lot of people are feeling. But at the same time, the voice is engaging with some level of hope. I’m curious about how you think about that hope-doom balance in the book and how that connects to the world and humanity more broadly.
VB: I don’t believe in hope. But I’m also optimistic. I have that kind of ancient Greek philosophy about hope, that it arrests man’s despair. It makes you stuck. It’s when you’re in a crisis moment, and instead of doing anything, you’re just sort of hoping that things work. It’s also the thing you say to somebody when you’re not going to do absolutely anything to help them. You know, they tell you that they’re sick and you’re like, “Oh, I hope you get better.” I try to remove the word “hope” as much as possible from my lexicon because it has that feeling to me of inaction. I want to encourage people to, if you see something terrible in your life, in your community, that you make an effort to change it. You don’t want hope, you want action. You want reason. You want logic and purpose. You have to have all of those things, no matter what happens in the end.
That’s sort of my personal philosophy of things. And I guess it filters into that voice as well, because technically the end has already happened. People didn’t make it, according to the voice. It’s speaking beyond humanity, and it’s doing so in a way that’s sort of honoring their presence. It’s a child loving their grandparents and honoring their ancestors, even though really, the voice is not even human. They’re just sort of data. And I think that’s kind of connected too to where we are, where the last thing that we might leave is just a record of ourselves, just our data. We’re generating a lot of it all the time, to the point where it becomes so messy and chaotic that we don’t even know how to recognize ourselves amongst all of these little echoes that we’re leaving all over the digital spaces we inhabit. I’m kind of obsessed with that idea, but not that it’s going to destroy us. I don’t think our technology will be the end of us. If anything takes us out, it’s going to be us. But I don’t even think that will happen, you know — I think we will endure. We’re a surviving sort of species. We have thumbs! We keep creating new ways for us to prosper and to survive. But we keep forgetting a lot of things. We almost encourage ourselves to not think about our mistakes in our history. That’s the thing that can keep us from progressing and keep us arrested in our own despair and suffering. Because we don’t even know how we got there, because we forgot, because we didn’t teach it to our children. We didn’t make that record. Human beings are always this way. We always make a mess. We always clean it up. We’re violent to each other. We’re violent to our children, to ourselves. And then we are suddenly capable of such compassion and gifts of love without question. That’s the thing that’s hard to record. We forget that really easily as well, especially in our age of presentation, where if you’re if you’re not online protesting for something, then you don’t believe in it. It’s only real if we see it in these small squares of digital light. That’s not the true human self either. We have to keep reminding ourselves of all the different levels and states of existence that we’re constantly cycling through all the time in order to just be.
I don’t believe in hope. But I’m also optimistic. I have that kind of ancient Greek philosophy about hope, that it arrests man’s despair. It makes you stuck.
DM: I absolutely love that perspective. I think so much of what we’re fed is just this very black and white idea of like, either you have hope for the future and it’s just so misguided or we’re doomed, everyone’s going to die, climate apocalypse in the next, like, 15 years. That, I think, removes humanity from the equation in a way. This book has a sort of reverence for humanity and what we’re capable of that I feel like you don’t see that often. I really saw that kind of undergirding the whole story.
VB: I appreciate that you saw that. And that’s also kind of how I think. I’ve been called chronically unbothered or something along those lines. I don’t know where it comes from; I haven’t always been that way. I’ve gone through my cycles of being humbled by the world, being humbled by personal loss, and having to really build a lot of good habits around self-reflection and things like that. I have a lot of causes that really affect me mentally. Education is one, homelessness is another, violence against women is another. And then all of the other things across the globe that are all connected to those same things, connected to property, to extreme wealth gaps. That all really make me mad. It tends to disturb my unbotheredness because I can see how much suffering trickles down from all of those things. I think about that kind of perpetual nature of it, how we just have these bright moments of enlightenment on occasion, and then they break. You think you have a generation of peace, then you go a little further around the world and realize, oh, there’s an apocalypse happening just there. All that keeps cycling around itself. The only thing that we can really control is ourselves, you know, save who you can save. We have to remember to stop and go talk to each other in real life, in real time and make eye contact and move through the air with each other and walk this planet because that’s the real thing of life. You have that duty to care for yourself and care for your community. That will be the best thing we can never leave behind.
DM: Absolutely. And I think this book is kind of instructive, in a way. Or, well — the issues Coral is dealing with in the aftermath of this loss, the lack of connection and separating herself from the world, we’re seeing in her how things can go wrong and, in some ways, how not to act. As I was reading, there were moments where I was like, oh my god, stop doing that. But at the same time, I was like, I understand how this feels like the only thing that she can control. She’s trying to maintain a hold on anything possible. And…I don’t know if I have a question out of that.
VB: Well, that’s kind of what I was talking about with the juxtaposition of the good and the bad, because it starts off where Coral just needs a little bit more time, right? She’s mad at the world, she’s mad at men, she’s mad at all the things that have put her into this position where she has to clean up for people around her. But then she says, I’m going to make it stop. I want to make everything calm and peaceful and not let anybody suffer for a while. She almost gives people a gift of withholding the trauma of the loss. Then it turns into this act of cruelty where she’s actually setting them up for higher expectations. She’s sort of reaching into their futures and creating the impossible with these different relationships her brother has. And that’s part of the violence. Her anger starts to manifest in other ways. She becomes manipulative, she becomes toxic, she starts to go off into the world in progressively worse ways.
Yes, it is not an instruction manual. There is no instruction manual for grieving. When it hits you, it just hits you, and you’re just going to walk through the way it does. I say in the acknowledgments that this is just one shape of grief. It will take its own form for everyone. It’s an amorphous experience and there’s no right or wrong, truly. People just, you know, we do things that have consequences and all we can manage is what happens in the before and the after. And that’s the reality. There are no solutions offered here. In some of the earlier stages of the editorial process, my editor mentioned that we don’t get a note or anything from Coral’s brother. We don’t really talk about why the suicide happens. And I said, well, that’s not the book. That’s not the point here. This is not a book about how to get over it or prevent these things from happening. These things happen and sometimes we’re here right in the middle of the crack of devastation, the crack of grief, the crack of suffering, and this is what it can look like. That was the only promise I made, that we’re going to be right there. I’m not going to give you any reasons, I’m not going to give you any solutions, but here we are.
DM: And we definitely were right there the whole time. I know your two short story collections also dealt a lot with grief and families grieving. What draws you to write about grief?
VB: You know, there is this phrase — I wonder if it came out of a Disney cartoon or something — but it’s the saying that every story is a love story. It probably is not from a Disney cartoon. But I agree with that. I think every story is a love story, but also every story is a grief story. You know, it’s about loss. It’s about goodbyes and transformation and losing things of the self. I think every story is really invested in all of those things. There are these deep connections, this deep need and desire to feel like you belong and like someone cares about you without question. Every character is trying to find that somehow. But they’re also navigating this sense of deep loss of something. It can be very small, but it’s usually on that bead of grief somewhere. I think this story falls into both. It is both a love story and a grief story. The collective voice, the thing that is holding Coral in place, is profoundly in love with humanity, and that is essential because it’s also a reflection of this deep love Coral has for her family, for her brother, for all of the people that she has been losing. I think that’s just part of my view of people, so all of my stories are going to have that. It’s going to have loss. It’s going to have love. Otherwise I wouldn’t be writing about people, in my own mind.
But I also write about this weird period of adolescence, when you’re changing into yourself as a person, figuring out your own sexuality and how you’re going to present yourself to the world. I call it adolescence, but a lot of us go through adolescence for like, 30 years. Like, I used to wear really cute, like, body dresses. I had this Victoria’s secret type style; I was a super tall, weird, kind of, you know, gangly thing. Now I dress more like a dad on vacation. I got a grandpa chic sort of thing going. And I’ve never been more myself than I am now. And that’s just the surface level. That’s still part of giving up the thing and losing the thing you thought you had. That too is built into the love and the grief and the goodbyes and the hellos.
DM: I think that’s particularly true of queerness, this idea that when you come out you basically go through a second puberty. We kind of see that with Coral’s character, the ways she’s evolved through time. We see her discovering her sexuality, her first girlfriend and all these relationships, up to the dates she goes on after her brother’s death.
VB: Those are so weird. Oh my god.
DM: Yeah, I was like, oh my god. Leave the bowling alley!
We have to remember to stop and go talk to each other in real life, in real time and make eye contact and move through the air with each other and walk this planet because that’s the real thing of life. You have that duty to care for yourself and care for your community. That will be the best thing we can never leave behind.
VB: The one thing she does that I really love is that she did not order pizza for her coworkers. I was like, I support that. I support you leaving them in this state of hunger and just walking away. Of all the bad choices she made, I did like that one.
DM: I loved that moment. When she sticks her head back in and is like, it’s on the way. There is this uncomfortable delight in all of the ways that she’s making these choices and deceiving people. You’re like, oh, god, but you’re also kind of like, that’s kind of fun.
VB: I like that you saw it that way. I do have to say that when I wrote a lot of these parts, I was not in a good place. I was in the weeds, you know, kind of delirious, tapping into the rhythm of the sounds and the voice, the scenes, and the metaphors and all that kind of stuff, cycling through that sort of writer moment. Then months later, I would go back to read them and I would just crack up. I was like, oh my god, I am insane. It was not funny on the first write through. But once you experience it in a different state, it has this other effect. And I kind of like that. I like that it could be this dark place and this light place.
DM: A lot of your work is really focused on Southern California, and I know you grew up in Compton and in the LA area. I also grew up around LA, so there is a lot of familiarity to me in this book. I’m really curious about the way you portray Los Angeles — you capture a lot of the reality of it, but there’s also this sort of dreamlike quality where it doesn’t it doesn’t feel quite real. It’s like LA in a dream. How were you thinking about the sense of place as you were writing this?
VB: I’ve heard it described that way a lot, the sort of the dreamscape of LA. And I agree with that, because isn’t LA kind of like this dream? It means a lot of things to people, even from around the world. They have this idea of it. And I think that’s more LA than the real thing. The idea that this collective vision of this place is actually much better. People think of LA as a sort of nice, clean place, you know, hopes and dreams or whatever, celebrities and whatnot. But it’s actually really nasty. It’s super old and it can be dangerous, like any big city can be. I remember once I went to a conference in downtown LA, around the Staples Center. It’s got all the usual stuff, all the sort of semi-fancy, semi-pretentious chain restaurants packed with people. The food is just like, whatever, but you know, the sidewalks are clean and it’s bright and there’s palm trees or whatever, and a nice, beautiful breeze comes through so certain times you might even also smell the ocean a little bit. You all have these different kinds of sensory experiences going on and people look stylish, their clothes are bright and colorful. Then I turned a corner and a man was there bleeding out of the side of his body. He had just been stabbed. He had wandered off from close to Skid Row and was sort of yelling, you know, I got stabbed. No one did anything. I think a security guard popped out eventually and ushered him back to that area. And I remember standing there thinking, like, look at this. We think everything is okay, everything is working out. We’ve painted this picture, and then the reality wanders back over and no one does anything. I didn’t do anything. It’s all happening within a very few seconds.
That’s LA to me. It’s a mess. It’s this sort of construction of self, but there’s something gruesome underneath. There’s people just struggling. There’s tons of debt. There’s people trying to pick their dreams off the floor. But there’s still the idea of LA pulsing all the time around them. You’re just going to work and living your life, but it’s still right up against this extreme wealth and possibility for fame.
DM: Zooming out a little bit, there’s a lot going on in this book. The genre is kind of undefinable. There’s so much complexity in the narration and the character and her experiences. What is the process of writing a book like this? How do you keep it all straight in your head and have a sense of where it begins and where it ends?
VB: That is so hard, and this is why I’m just terrified of having to write another novel. I really appreciated those early times when I was writing stories and nobody cared if I was ever going to be a writer. It was sort of just me by myself doing this thing. I could make anything happen. With this book, because it’s so long, I hadn’t written a novel like this since I was a grad student. And even that one, I reduced it down to a few pages and published that. I’m like, ah, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen here. I can’t keep track of everything in my brain the way I’m used to, because in a flash fiction story, it’s two pages. I can look at the top anytime I want to, I can look at the bottom anytime I want to, I can keep track of all the objects that I’m manipulating.
This time, I’ve got so many little pieces all over the place. I felt sort of disoriented a lot of times. That was before I started to do a lot of the revision parts and the cutting and the reducing and sort of finding the things that I really wanted to keep versus the things that I was just sort of writing out of a desperate need to be elsewhere for whatever reason. I think there’s a novelist trick where you don’t think about the beginnings and the ends. All you think about is the task at hand on any given day. So if I’m writing about, you know, depression and ice cream or whatever it is, that’s it. My whole task for the day is to explore those two things for this character in this moment. And I don’t have to leave it. I don’t have to worry about trying to make it match up to anything. I have to trust my outline, trust that it’s going to be fine, and just devote the time to the language there on the page.
DM: Yeah, that’s such a mood. I know this book is just about to come out, but I’m curious what you’re looking to next. What are you writing towards, post this book?
VB: I am working on another novel, gosh darn it. But I’m also writing short stories simultaneously. People are asking me for some of the new stuff, but I’m holding on to them. Kind of seeing what I want to do with it. I’m starting to think more in terms of whole books now than I used to. Kind of the entire shape of a collection, entire shape of a novel before committing to the wholehearted writing of it. I am working on a novel that is going to be sort of historical horror, supernatural fiction. It’s an extension of a story I already wrote, a long, serialized story that came out in the Gagosian. It’s called Memoir of a Poltergeist. It’s about an ancient ghost that possesses this black lesbian in the Reconstruction period of the American South. And it too is a love story. It too is a grief story. But it’s got these different layers of the characters’ psychology. You’ve got the ghost, you’ve got the actual woman, you’ve got the community, there’s a kidnapping and a murder — it’s all crazy.
DM: It really feels like your work occupies its own cinematic universe of like, I don’t even know how it would be defined. But I’m excited for the next installment of it. Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you want to say about the book or your process or anything?
VB: I just want to always encourage people to be kind to each other, to have compassion, to choose compassion over violence whenever possible. And it’s going to be hard, and nobody listens to me, but still give it a shot. Do the good work, do the thing, take care of people. Don’t expect anything in return, not a single thing. And now you’re alive.
Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn is out now.
“Dead in Long Beach, California” and the Inevitability of Grief
Before we know anything else about the lives of the characters in Venita Blackburn’s debut novel, Dead in Long Beach, California, we know Jay has just committed suicide and Coral, his older sister, is left to deal with the mess. Quite literally, she walks into Jay’s apartment to find his dead body laying in his bed. At first, Coral is confused more than horrified. She just spoke to Jay before she headed over to his place, and he never mentioned the possibility of suicide once in their entire conversation or any time before that. Confusion evolves into annoyance, and then the annoyance takes Coral to places she never expected to go.
After Jay’s body is taken away by the EMTs and police leave his apartment, Coral notices Jay’s unlocked phone going off. It’s his daughter and Coral’s niece, Khadija, texting him to reschedule the dinner they had planned to have with Coral that evening. Unable to process or even fully think about the death of her younger brother, Coral — a talented and minorly beloved science fiction graphic novelist who has a penchant for lying to strangers and an attraction to people who deal in betrayal — dissociates from this reality. She latches onto another one, one where Jay isn’t dead to anyone but her. She replies to Khadija’s text messages as Jay, hoping impersonating him will spare her from the responsibility of his death, and finds an unexpected comfort in doing so: “Coral’s heart accelerated for a different reason. This was not grief or fury or the shaking of a fist at the sky for all the injustice of all time. This was at worst a kind of crime and at worst an infraction of decency.” She passively decides to keep doing it, not because she feels like she should but because it’s the only option that makes sense to her in that moment.
Using the first person plural of the same gang of artificial intelligence archivists who serve as the narrators for Coral’s popular novel, Wildfire, Blackburn takes us through the next seven days of Coral’s life as she drowns deeper and deeper into the world she’s building for herself and for all of the people who have a connection to Jay. As we move alongside her with the help of our AI guides, we also get a glimpse into some of Coral’s earliest memories growing up in Compton with her father and largely absent mother. We’re taken along as she realizes she’s a lesbian and keeps her identity a secret for as long as she can. We witness Khadija’s youth and her own struggles with her distant mother. We see Coral’s clandestine dates (both good and bad) and fleeting pieces of young “love.” And we’re given some of the moments that made Coral and Jay’s bond what it was to begin with.
The novel doesn’t follow chronological narrative aside from the fact that Blackburn assures us time is moving forward through the chapter titles. Throughout the new revelations and the unveiling of information, Blackburn incorporates a variety of other elements — text messages excerpts, pieces of Wildfire, newspaper headlines and stories, and a couple of pieces of Wildfire fanfiction — to help expose the truly fractured nature of Coral’s existence after Jay’s death. The most interesting of these are the various asides about the nature of humanity and our lives on this planet that come from that chorus of consciousness inside Coral’s mind. The chorus is there to tell us Coral’s story and guide us through her thought processes, of course, and it serves a much more intimate purpose, too.
Coral’s reaction to her brother’s suicide could easily be read as a way for her to deny the fact of his death, for her to avoid a complete descent into the pain and heartache of grief, but the voices provide a much more nuanced understanding of how Coral’s (and maybe, our) grief works: “When something is lost so suddenly, irrevocably, and spectacularly, there is no clear order of events to follow, especially when considering grief.” There is no doubt Coral is grieving because everything she does in response to Jay’s death is shaped by that sorrow, even if that isn’t immediately obvious.
The week keeps moving forward, and Coral’s behavior becomes more and more erratically calculated as she attempts to ensure no one knows what happened to Jay except her. She keeps responding to Khadija’s texts and creating excuses for why Jay is never home when Khadija wants or needs to drop by; she flirts with and tries to evade the attention of the woman Jay is dating; she engages with coworkers and convinces them Jay is in the hospital temporarily; she goes even further by creating a social media presence for Jay he never had when alive.
Meanwhile, the voices remind us of what’s happening in the depths of Coral’s consciousness, “When we remember murder, we know there will be loss. Someone somewhere probably loves that person, but we are more concerned with the ripples throughout the world that come from the new space. When the living are no longer living, a hole opens up where they used to be. People stare or look away. That hole exists for as long as someone remembers what was there before.”
Through the chorus, Blackburn brings us back to something inherently true about anyone experiencing this kind of loss: Our grief may seem singular, it may seem like it belongs solely to us, but that’s not exactly true. Grief is part of a larger system that connects us all to one another, and what we do with it, how we handle it, and what becomes of us after is not always fully in our control.
Coral’s unraveling feels so unusual, because it is. At first, it’s hard to even tell she’s detached herself completely from the way the world is supposed to work and from the responsibilities she has to the other people she loves outside of her relationship to Jay. There is an underlying paranoia that accompanies her every move, but she’s organized in the way she approaches imitating Jay, and she doesn’t let the paranoia guide her decisions. But as time moves forward, Coral’s ability to juggle the act of pretending to be Jay and her own torment diminishes little by little. And although her grief never spins her completely out of control, she’s brought back to the futileness of her battles against herself over and over again. The chorus tells us,
If Coral understood the world, there would be a time to say goodbye to those that are loved and a time to meet new loved ones. If Coral understood the world, she would’ve been born in mourning, knowing that what was cherished had already been buried, realizing that the road to the past had been erased. Because Coral did not understand the world, she believed in choices, personal autonomy in all cases. She believed she was strong, an American, Black, a woman, cunning, a minor god in the cosmic order of things and that she could have what she wanted if she willed it so. Coral secretly knew better than this but of course she believed it anyway.
It’s a masterful feat of storytelling for Blackburn to constantly make the reader feel as if Coral is coming full circle, only to remind us she can’t. When it comes to grief and emptiness we feel in regards to the loss of someone we love, we’re never fully done feeling that loss. Coral can’t bring Jay back and, technically, she doesn’t try to for herself. What she tries to do is prevent other people from feeling the way she does about Jay’s death, and in doing so, she does something we might be inclined to think of as unforgivable.
And yet, Blackburn reminds us at every turn that while Coral’s behavior might be unusual, it’s certainly not undeserving of our efforts to understand and empathize. Surely, we have all loved and lost or will love and lose in similar ways Coral does and, as Blackburn points out in the novel, we’re not free from reacting in ways that seem unthinkable. Part of what makes us human and sets us apart from everything else on this planet is the depth to which we can feel that love and those losses. Both can feel so insurmountable that whatever we believed we were capable of can elude us entirely, and the things we never expected to be capable of can become our main modes of moving through the world.
Her internal war with the chorus of consciousness comes to one final conversation before Coral tries to reconnect herself to our reality, to the reality where she has to let everyone into the secret of Jay’s death: “So you’re saying everything is just a cycle of creation and destruction? No, you’re saying that. We are saying that destruction is the purest form of existence, the grand finale to all other elements for the Species. So to love is to eventually give way to death? Yes, we say. And to control love we must control death? Yes, we say. To let love be in untamed ferocity is to be subject to suffering? Yes, we say.”
In the end, Coral has to fully accept the truth of what’s happened to Jay, which means she has to also stop pretending to be him, which means she also has to admit she’s been imitating him to the people who will miss him and who deserve to grieve him in their own ways, just as Coral has been doing for the last week.
We’re left with a profound and surprising demonstration of how there’s no way to fully outrun or outmaneuver or out-strategize the pain of loss. Even when we truly believe we can, the despair and disrepair of the loss will bring us to our knees and turn us in on ourselves. And although the idea that we don’t move beyond grief, we only learn to live with it is common, Blackburn’s debut novel provides a new vision of just how true this is, making that truth feel brand new again.
Dead in Long Beach, California by Venita Blackburn is out now.
“Brainwyrms” Is the Perfect Twisted Novel for Clive Barker Queers
From the very first page of Alison Rumfitt’s latest novel Brainwyrms, there’s an oppressive sense that something — who knows what exactly — is absurdly wrong. Its introduction is author Rumfitt winkingly declaring herself a cisgender woman in the first sentence (“you can make that decision for yourself”), joking she would never write about transness, or queerness (“whatever that might mean”). Just a few pages later, before we’ve even truly been introduced to the two characters wandering an unnatural and ethereal landscape, the reader bears witness to two people, who exist somewhere between loathing and loving each other, going through something miraculous: a trans woman giving birth.
What she is birthing, the reader has no clue, but what Rumfitt has birthed is another brilliant work of horror, one that is as much in conversation with her last novel, Tell Me I’m Worthless, as it is wholly unique. Both are overwhelmingly about the ways far-right rhetoric, from racism to transphobia, creeps into our minds through practically every facet of the lives we lead, but Brainwyrms fixates on the way we internalize and externalize that hatred through the lens of body horror.
Frankie, a trans woman whose life has been thrown into disarray after a transphobic woman bombed the gender clinic she worked at, is who the reader must latch onto for some semblance of normalcy. To many, she’s the kind of abrasive character that self-harms in myriad ways just to feel semi-functional, whether that’s her binge-drinking and shameless sexual habits — complete with a breeding kink despite the knowledge she (as a trans woman) cannot get pregnant — or the way she quite literally doom scrolls for her latest administrative job, endlessly being confronted with non-stop hatred on social media to be flagged and blocked.
She’s as relatable as she is potentially off-putting, prone to diving into questionable situations and bluntly voicing all her negative thoughts on the page, like when she refers to herself as a “fat clown” when she’s out at a party in a tight dress and questionable make-up. But it’s hard not to have some hope for Frankie when she meets Vanya. Their meet-cute, if you can call it as much, is nothing short of riveting: a bathroom hook-up that begins by indulging a mommy domme fetish and ends with a golden shower. From there, the relationship doesn’t just intensify, but slowly morphs into something unsettling, with the reader only being given hints as to what lies just beyond the idyllic, consensually kinky, fantasies of this coupling.
Bouncing between characters, perspectives, and writing styles is one of the ways Rumfitt expertly builds tension in Brainwyrms. One chapter may be told traditionally through third person (and these are largely dedicated to Frankie and some external character asides) while the next is a second person stream of consciousness mass of text as intimidating as it is engrossing. Second person is often how we experience Vanya’s point of view, a deceptively simple tactic that forces the reader into their place, being guided through their memories, their traumas, and their desires, to sometimes beautiful and often unsettling effect.
However distinct their prose and histories might be, Frankie and Vanya are complementary voices whose insecurities and histories intersect in fascinating and often surprising ways. What feels familiar at one moment may soon become something grotesque; feelings of disgust and pleasure are intertwined just as much as this couple’s bodies are. Beyond the core duo, Rumfitt includes a variety of interesting asides, be they social media posts incorporated into the text (from posts on parasite forums to tweets) or simply a complete shift to characters on the periphery of the narrative, whose triumphs and demises (mostly the latter) have far more impact than one might expect from a relative stranger.
To put it all simply, Brainwyrms loves to tear the reader in two, much like childbirth itself (or dysmorphia, am I right folks?) might tear someone’s mind and body apart. There’s an undeniable playfulness in the way Rumfitt presents sex, kink, and violence, but there’s also a seething rage underneath it all. Even its very title is representative of this balance, as much about how ideas are a virus that become reality as it is a casual joke about how whatever idiot on Twitter you disagree with has worms for brains.
That the novel literalizes these brainworms and creates monstrous transphobic cults around them (complete with reference to Eyes Wide Shut) is only one of the delights that lies within. Rumfitt seems to take absolute glee in the way she presents certain scenarios, whether that’s throwing her characters into uncomfortable sexual situations or creating a shameless stand-in for a certain children’s book author who shall not be named who is even more overtly monstrous than her existing counterpart. But that sense of humor is distinctly tied into the anger, and ultimately fear, that fuels Brainwyrms: it is a novel that speculates we aren’t quite so far from the dystopia it depicts, simply because everything, from our government to our sources of entertainment and distraction, is a tool being used against us.
There’s far more than just a hint of Clive Barker present in Alison Rumfitt’s writing here, and this isn’t limited to their shared ability to present eroticism and violence with as much sensuality as outright disgust. It isn’t even just that their protagonists have both been accused of being so unsavory as to make the reader question whether or not they’re worth rooting for. It’s in the way they both find inspiring ways to filter their queerness through humanity as much as through monstrosity. Characters indulge in the taboo, find comfort in the things that others find obscene, express their most volatile desires and shameful fears, and navigate the world they’ve been born into, like only characters created by someone with the experience of queerness, and of transness, can truly ever express.
In a world that is killing people like the author, and more than likely like the target audience of the novel, subtlety is an afterthought. Horror should be brash and should strike a raw nerve, especially when the commentary is about something as urgent as the ever-growing grasp of transphobia, and transphobic violence, over contemporary culture. Of Tell Me I’m Worthless, Alison noted she “never wanted to write a subtle ghost story” and Brainwyrms follows suit. It’s about the way all those horrid thoughts crawl into our mind and stay there with us and how fascist ideas are pushed by those with power, seducing the masses into believing the most vulnerable of us all are the real villains. There’s no reason to be subtle when any number of famous individuals are using social media, or comedy specials, or crime novels, to fearmonger.
This is exactly why Brainwyrms is as infuriating as it is deliciously twisted. For all the worms oozing out of orifices, the real terror lurks just around the corner, down the street, or on the very websites this will be posted on. And, well, that’s fucking horrifying.
Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt is out now.
Embracing the Dark Pleasures of Dystopian Literature: 10 Novels That Inspired Me To Write My Own
I often wonder why dystopian fiction is so compelling to so many of us, especially these days, when our real world looks more and more like a dystopia itself. What good is escape if what you’re escaping to is just a fun-house mirror? All of my favorite dystopian novels have this quality —that eerie too-close-to-home feeling that allows you to feel just unsettled enough to keep reading.
But why do we like to be unsettled? Life is pretty hard already. Maybe it’s because good fiction, with its low barrier to entry and captivating prose, allows us to understand the world around us without staring directly into the void; like looking sideways at the stars to fully see their light. Maybe fully acknowledging the real dystopia of capitalism and war and inequality is just too painful for our weak human brains, but through metaphor and lyricism, we can start to understand the forces at play off the page.
How else to explain the dark pleasure of not just reading dystopian literature but writing it? My own dystopian debut, Yours for the Taking, came out in December and is about a near-future New York City ravaged by climate change and a group of queer people who come together under the worst of circumstances. I didn’t write it to be realistic — if anything, I tried to make it a little ridiculous in order to inject some levity into its darker themes — so you can imagine my surprise when reader feedback started coming in about how close to real life it felt. I also knew that meant I had gotten something right.
Friends and readers keep asking me how I took care of myself while writing something so disturbing. I don’t really have a good answer for this. The writing was self-care. I worked on this book between 2019 and 2023, years not exactly known for… incredible progress. In many ways, letting myself slip into another, imaginary world — albeit a worse one — was how I made sense of it all. And when I got stuck, I turned to other dystopian books, looking at how both classic and contemporary works dealt with darker themes. Here are the ten that impacted me the most. While vastly different in subject matter, they all have echoes of our own world, as though the seeds for the future societies they describe have already been planted.
Black Wave, by Michelle Tea
This novel was the first time it occurred to me that you can take familiar-feeling queer drama and set it at the end of the world, instantly upping the stakes. Imagine! I’ll be a fan of Michelle Tea forever and this was just one of many books that made me feel in awe of her. In Black Wave, the world is ending in 1999, and the fictional character Michelle is living in a bookstore in San Francisco while trying to stay sober and also date Matt Dillon. It’s very funny, surreal, and incredibly original.
Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
If you haven’t read this or seen the movie, go into it blind. Unwrapping the mystery of what the fuck is going on in this book is half the fun of reading it; and by fun I mean the first time I read it, once it hit me what was actually happening, I felt like I was falling straight into a black hole of heartbreak! I won’t spoil it with a plot summary. I’ve returned to it many times to figure out how Ishiguro managed to pull off such a feat. Goes without saying this one is a masterpiece.
Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel
Multiple POVs span across decades in the aftermath of a global flu pandemic that wipes out most of the world’s population, though the heart of the book is a girl who is part of a traveling Shakespearean theater troupe and the dangers/joys they encounter on the road. Read it even if you think you want to avoid pandemic literature. Like most great sci fi it’s about something much larger; in this case, the way we’re all connected to each other by love and art and love of art. Also, as Riese and I discussed in our recent interview, the TV show based on the book is the best show ever made, full stop.
The Age of Miracles, by Karen Thompson Walker
A middle schooler navigates a drastically changing world when the earth suddenly starts spinning slower, making the days inexplicably longer. The “age” of miracles is both the time she’s living through and her literal age, in which she discovers first love, deals with the realities of her family, and tries to figure out who she is. It’s decidedly not YA despite focusing on young adults. This one’s a real gutpunch, and worth every second.
Parable of the Sower, by Octavia Butler
One of the first dystopian novels I ever read, this one follows a young girl who lives in a gated community in a world ravaged by climate change and war and capitalism. When outside forces can’t be held at bay anymore, she leaves, starting a new religion based on her own ideas, amassing more and more followers on the journey to safer grounds. It’s the blueprint for a lot of contemporary literature, and a classic for a reason. By the end of it you might just want to join her, too.
I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, by Mac Crane
Mac Crane’s debut novel is a master class in lyricism. In the future, in place of incarceration, a crime gets you an extra shadow, dooming you to live with the visible stigma of what you’ve done — though what counts as a crime and who gets to decide that is ethically murky. On the first page, our narrator’s wife dies in childbirth and the baby is given a shadow for her murder, setting the tone for a book filled with grief, love, found family, and an ever-present surveillance state. Told mostly as though the narrator is speaking to her late wife, and interspersed with experiments in form, it’s wildly imaginative and full of messy queer sex. I’ve taken to giving it as a gift.
The City We Became, by NK Jemisin
When each borough of New York City is personified and brought to life, and they must find each other in order to defeat the interdimensional forces threatening to turn NYC into something sinister and unlivable. The sign that this evil is coming? Gentrification, mostly. A great example of how a wild story can so accurately reflect our reality, I haven’t stopped thinking about this book since I read it a few years ago.
Children of Time, by Adrien Tchaikovsky
You might want to tell me that this is technically science fiction, but I’m not sure what is more dystopian than an unlivable earth and a scientist trying to inject monkeys on a terraformed planet with a virus to speed up their evolution (so that they can evolve to worship her, naturally) and accidentally creating a super-smart species of spider instead. Sorry! The spider planet is the scariest world I’ve encountered on the page, and therefore I’m including it on this list. The spider chapters alternate with the human ones, and by the first hundred pages of this epic I was sold: spiders do it better. When the humans and the spiders finally collide, well, I won’t give it away, you just have to read it.
Severance, by Ling Ma
When the world is hit with a pandemic that turns the sick into zombies, one woman’s employer offers severance to anyone who keeps coming to work until the end date, and so she does — until she’s the last woman in New York City, eventually joining a band of other survivors and setting out into the terrible remains of the plague-stricken world. It’s a creepy meditation on exploitation and capitalism, and was extra eerie once the real pandemic happened and some of us (ahem) just kept going to our little jobs and typing on our little computers while the world was on fire.
How High We Go In The Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu
Every time I recommend this book to people I also give them a heads up that it might ruin their life (but like, in a good way). It’s the story of an Earth forever changed by a virus unleashed by the melting permafrost, but becomes something much bigger than that. Each chapter feels like a separate story, taking us further and further into a pandemic-ravaged world, until you start to understand how it’s all connected — and that the very genre of the book might not be what you think it is. Ultimately it’s not just about how the characters and storylines are connected but how we all are, to each other and to things bigger than us. I really can’t count the number of times I cried reading it, and it cracked something open in my own creative process in terms of what you’re allowed to do with time and the scale of your story.
Consider This: Listening to an Audiobook While Doing a Jigsaw Puzzle
We all learned new things about ourselves and dove deeply into new hobbies during the pandemic, like making bread or getting really impressive shoulder muscles. For me, I discovered that my peak solo activity of all time is “listening to an audiobook while doing a jigsaw puzzle.” When life itself feels emotionally overwhelming or otherwise unstable, I turn to puzzles as, I suppose, some kind of problem I can solve with my hands, a way to put all the pieces of something together, if I can’t manage to do so with all the pieces of myself. But when you pair that experience with the experience of listening to a great book??? I have unlocked a new level of intellectual heaven, suitable year round under any emotional or physical or national circumstances. There is nothing I can recommend more highly than this specific activity.
Here are some ideas for jigsaw puzzles you could do while listening to a book!
Plain Bad Heroines, by emily m danforth
danforth’s Victorian sapphic horror-comedy-romance begins with cursed New England girl’s boarding school Brookhants and its rich, tortured history, linking it to a contemporary narrative in which lesbian it girl Harper Harper (who I had no choice but to envision as Kristen Stewart) is starring opposite a B-list actress and former child star in a film shooting on the Brookhants grounds. There’s a million other threads in there too, you’ll see. “Plain Bad Heroines is a book that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck, even as it surprises you with the occasional sweetness, and renews your appreciation for masterful story-telling,” wrote Lindsay in her review.
Either/Or, by Elif Batuman
Queer author Elif Batuman’s novel is set in the mid-nineties, following Selin, the young Harvard student we met in Batuman’s The Idiot, attempting to make ssense of the summer she spent working in the Hungarian countryside while pursuing her elusive crush, Ivan, while also seeking answers to bigger questions, about how to “live a life as interesting as a novel—a life worthy of becoming a novel—without becoming a crazy abandoned woman oneself?” Elif’s writing is a treasure, she’s just so smart and incisive I want to read everything she has ever said.
Last Night at the Telegraph Club, by Malinda Lo
Chinatown San Francisco Eastern Bakery Puzzle + Last Night at the Telegraph Club read by Emily Woo Zeller
Set in 1950s, queer legend Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club is the story of Lily Hu, a teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants exploring her sexuality and the lesbian scene of San Francisco during a time when Red Scare paranoia is turning Chinatown upside down and threatening her father’s citizenship. “As Lily becomes more comfortable in her own skin, Zeller’s narration becomes bolder and more confident,” writes LitHub. “Be forewarned, this audiobook will break your heart—and mend it.”
Mostly Dead Things, by Kristen Arnett
Jessa, a lesbian in her thirties tortured by her past and slogging hazily through her present, is keeping her father’s taxidermy shop afloat after his suicide while her Mom loses it in her own way and her brother Milo’s wife — who Jessa was also in love with — walks out on all of them. Then Lucinda, a mysterious gallery owner, comes to town to shake it all up. It’s a story about family and grief and loss and beasts and sweat and most of all, Florida. In her story about Mostly Dead Things, Molly wrote that the title “is a nod to the taxidermy, sure, but it’s also a perspective on the human heart and how it perseveres, even in the most hostile environments.”
The Seven Husband of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid
50 Must-Watch Movies + Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo narrated by alma cuervo, julia whelan and robin miles
The title and the the author’s heterosexuality had me certain for the many years it roamed bestseller lists that this could not possibly be a queer book, despite it showing up in that section of my Libby app. But indeed it is and wow did I love it. The story of reclusive aging Hollywood movie star Evelyn Hugo’s life — as it is relayed to Monique, a young writer in New York City who has no real grasp on why Evelyn’s chosen her as her biographer — is told through her seven public relationships, her marriages to a series of men. But those marriages are not the whole story of Evelyn’s romantic life IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN.
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
Cavallini Jellyfish Puzzle + Our Wives Under the Sea, narrated by Annabel Baldwin and Robyn Holdaway
This is the story of two wives. One went off on a deep-sea submarine mission and came back mixed up, and the other is grappling with the enormity of that gradual, painful wreckage. “Armfield has written a novel so chock-full of stunning sentences that that urge to scream needled its way into me throughout my first and second reads of the book,” writes Kayla.
Ace of Spades, by Faridah Àbíké-Íyímídé
Derrick Adams x Dreamyard 500 Piece Double-Sided Jigsaw Puzzle + Ace of Spades read by Jeanette Illidge and Tapiwa Mugweni
Ace of Spades is a “heart-racing horror mystery thriller” about Devon Richards and Chiamaka Adebayo, two of the only Black students at an extremely white elite private academy whose exceptional roads towards academic success feel suddenly threatened after their promotions to senior class prefect lead to both students becoming the target of anonymous text messages that reveal private information and secrets about Chiamaka and Devon to the entire student body. It’s a gripping story and I couldn’t put it down.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Gabrielle Zevin
read by jennifer kim and julian cihi
Jim Golden Video Game Puzzle + Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow narrated by Jennifer Kim & Julian Cihi
This is one of the best books I have ever read in my entire little life! Spanning thirty years, starting with precocious wildly bright kids collaborating at Harvard who eventually become very successful video game designers with a whole company in Venice Beach, this novel “examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love.”
Family Meal, by Bryan Washington
“What I love about reading Washington’s fiction is that I can always taste it,” writes Kayla of Family Meal. “The food, sure. But so much else, too. Summer nighttime air, sweat, spit. He writes bodies and queer sex and place so well… As with all of Washington’s work, violence and tenderness sit simultaneously in the pages. Gay ghosts, good food, queer sex — the novel checks so many boxes for me.”
“Alice Sadie Celine” Is a Delectable Queer Sex Novel With a Wicked Sense of Humor
Sure, plenty of people love a slow-burn, simmering story about queer desire and love. Some people, like me, like a queer sex novel that gets straight to the point. In the delicious and often uncomfortable Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright, fingering in an elevator happens on page 20, and almost instantly, I knew this was a book for a freak like me. There’s no slow-burn to find here; the narrative of this novel unfolds like a wildfire, every bit as destructive and fittingly set against an overly hot, climate change-baked California. Its three central characters impressively set ablaze the twisted triangle that binds them.
The sex itself is pretty straightforward, but the context and dynamics are a mess. Alice and Sadie are best friends. Sadie’s mother Celine is a Judith Butler-type feminist writer and thinker with a cultish fanbase and a lot of Ideas about sex and sexuality. Celine and Alice start fucking behind Sadie’s back.
Celine is a chaotic butch who loves Dr. Pepper, instant ramen, and has a mismatched collection of novelty mugs. I could picture her almost immediately. Her daughter Sadie is much more measured, almost performative in her straightness, like it’s somehow a rebellion against everything her mother is. She struggles to have sex due to mommy issues. Her best friend Alice, though, is her more outgoing and impulsive counterpart. Whereas Sadie attempts to script every aspect of her life (and in fact, schemed her way into best friendship with Alice), Alice improvises her way through life. Literally, probably, as she’s an aspiring actress. She also comes from massive wealth but works as a server as a restaurant, performing a sort of down-to-earthness.
Everyone, not just actress Alice, is putting on a performance in Alice Sadie Celine, and everyone is casting each other in the roles they see fit instead of seeing them as wholly complex people. To Sadie, Alice is her best friend; she doesn’t get to be anything else. Alice sees Sadie the same way. Celine sees her daughter as an extension of herself and not in a sweet way but rather in a god complex way. In every direction of this triangle, codependency seeps in like toxic sludge. In trying so hard to not be like her mother, Sadie paradoxically centers her mother in everything she does.
The novel is told in alternating perspectives between the three women, their serpentine names (so many S sounds!!!!) suddenly easy to mix up as you’re reading, a confusion that feels intentional as boundaries are eroded and the codependency shifts and morphs. When Celine attends a play Alice is in, she becomes immediately enraptured by her. But the festering obsession comes from an almost embarrassingly simple origin: Alice is wearing stonewashed jeans that remind her of her first lover.
Alice Sadie Celine indeed understands sex and desire to be powerful and yet also almost animalistic and uncomplicated when it comes to initial impulses. Celine is drawn to Alice because she’s feeling nostalgic and also like Sadie is slipping away from her. Obsessing over Alice is her way of possessing Sadie. Alice is drawn to what she perceives as Celine’s self-assuredness, a quality she herself lacks. All three women struggle to see beyond themselves, treating their relationships like games of chess.
What I love about the quick burning affair between Celine and Alice is that it’s sour from the start. Yes, they have marathon sex all night in various corners of Alice’s Airbnb, but they really do just seem to be going through the motions, using each other as they see fit. It’s what makes it laughably absurd that they then attempt to have a real relationship, at first behind Sadie’s back and then after revealing the truth. Celine and Alice never really like each other, only the idea of each other. What they both actually crave is Sadie’s approval, which Sadie is almost sadistically withholding of.
Sarah Blakley-Cartwright brings great humor to her renderings of this dysfunctional trio, penning one of my favorite fucked up mother-daughter dynamics I’ve read in a while. There’s a certain absurdity to everyday life, to sex and to familiar relationships, and this novel captures that well, often leaning into discomfort. It’s a wholly original affair novel and immensely skillful for an adult debut. An age gap novel that’s simultaneously convincing and critical of why its central affair happens, Alice Sadie Celine is sharp in its musings on the sometimes boring predictability of horny human impulses.
In its final section, the novel breaks its own form to introduce a new perspective, and while initially I found this coda overlong on first read, I enjoyed it more on a revisit, appreciating the sort of experimental way it functions, complicating our ideas of wrongness, hurt, and even narrative. It’s true that sometimes the things that feel like acute betrayals and dramas in the moment eventually begin to erode. It’s true that sometimes we hurt the people we’re close to for no good reason. This epilogue (it’s not labeled as such, but it functions as one) burrows into some of those contradictions and meta-reflections on how even if we’re presented with all three sides of a story, there’s still no way to know the complete truth of it all.
Alice Sadie Celine by Sarah Blakley-Cartwright is out now.
The U.S. Occupation of Hawaiʻi Haunts the Pages of This Extraordinary Short Fiction Collection
Megan Kamalei Kakimoto’s debut story collection Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare opens with a flash piece that acts as a gorgeous prose poem as well as a north star for the constellation of mythologies that follow in the subsequent stories, all centered on mixed Kānaka Maoli and Japanese women. “A Catalogue of Kānaka Superstitions, as Told by Your Mother” details, briefly, various inherited myths that then pop up in the rest of the stories. It’s not narrative hand-holding; it’s immersive, well crafted storytelling that almost has a horror bend to it. Here is what’s to come, the opening whispers, not one warning but a collection of them.
The whole collection is ordered and stitched together with great care, loosely following the cycles of a life, exploring everyday violences, desires, and hauntings along the way. After the prelude of superstitions, we open with a story that begins with a girl getting her period for the first time, ballooning into a years-spanning story full of blood, disordered eating, uncertainty. Sadie, our protagonist, has a violent pregnancy, a violent birth, Sadie disconnected from that which comes spilling out of her. (This titular story, which is also published online in Joyland, pushes my personal agenda for more period blood in literary fiction.)
We then end with a first person story about a widow who begins to see the fractured body parts of her dead wife Haunani in the anatomy of a corpse flower. From birth to death, quite literally, the collection blooms and swells, Kakimoto’s language and wavy, easily smudged lines between the real and the speculative haunting in such gentle strokes.
Nestled in the middle of these bookends are my three favorite stories: “Temporary Dwellers,” about a teen girl whose well meaning but sort of cringey mother welcomes in another teen girl from Kauaʻi where the U.S. Army and Navy have forcibly removed Native Hawaiians in order to test literal bombs; “Aiko, the Writer,” about a writer who ignores her dead grandmother’s warning to never write about a specific myth from her culture; and “Touch Me Like One of Your Island Girls: A Love Story,” about Mehana, a Japanese and Kānaka woman who starts doing on-camera sex work for the prolific white dude porn producer who specifically traffics in porn fetishizing Kānaka women from a racist gaze.
In “Temporary Dwellers,” the young protagonist develops an erotic obsession with her houseguest, and they begin a secret queer love affair. Intimacy and the throes of teen lust and love butt up against the unpredictability and obtrusion of a war the U.S. will not call a war, the violence of occupation displacing “the girl,” this houseguest, who is only ever referred to as the girl, perhaps a wall the narrator intentionally puts up to protect herself, perhaps a wall she never quite penetrates in the first place, never fully able to understand the pain the girl experiences when watching violence unfold on the news against her land and people. Take this scene, which so perfectly captures the push and pull of the story, that flicker of teen desire sitting inside violent context:
In the kitchen, we eat poached eggs and toast with lilikoi jelly and we watch reporters relay the most recent casualties of the bombings, now traveling north: a family of four in the Wailua Homesteads, an elderly couple that refused to evacuate their Anahola home. Toppled horse corpses litter the trail to a Kōloa stable, their bodies distended, swollen with trapped blood. Egg yolk trickles down the girl’s lip, and I have to sit on my hands to keep from swiping at it with my fingers.
The mother doesn’t understand the girl, either, has perhaps a good heart but also self-serving reasons for her “charity cases,” as her daughter regards them. The mother wants the girl to go to therapy; the girl wants to join the resistance coalition fighting for her land. Normal girlhood is impossible, the U.S. military has ensured that. It’s a story that contains many heartbreaks, and the unraveling of the relationship between the girls isn’t diminished or portrayed in contrast to the more serious Imperialist conflict of the story, but rather these things unfold together, in tandem, lives lived against the inescapable backdrop of occupation. Throughout the collection, characters confront colonial violence in myriad ways.
In “Aiko, the Writer,” those forces impact the character’s art and her relationship to it. It’s one of the best stories about the world of writing and publishing I’ve ever read, and it serves as a metafictional meditation for Every Drop. In fact, its central character Aiko is working on a manuscript with the working title A Catalogue of Kānaka Superstitions, a reproduction of the title from the opening of this collection. Her manuscript is haunted. Literally. The pages vibrate on their own accord, alive with the words of her late grandmother who sometimes visits her as a house gecko, warning her against writing of the Night Marchers. But Aiko has been pressured by the white publishing world to perform her own cultural identity, to give white readers more, more, more of herself, of the stories she has inherited in her bones.
This is something I think about a lot as a writer of marginalized identity: where that line is between wanting to celebrate and give visibility to your culture and wanting to protect it from an othering, voyeuristic gaze. Kakimoto threads the needle wonderfully throughout Every Drop, and “Aiko, the Writer” isn’t an explanation or a justification of any of the choices she makes but rather functions more complexly, perhaps even slyly critiquing the non-Hawaiian reader. It’s a sharp indictment of not just the publishing industry as a whole but also the limits of “representation,” of “Own Voices.”
“Touch Me Like One of Your Island Girls: A Love Story” similarly hums with an internal game of tug-of-war for its central character, Mehana, who is both repulsed and drawn to the tale’s villain, Landon Wilder, proprietor of adult entertainment company Get Wild Productions. Kakimoto writes: “She’d hated him for years and followed him around like a tracking hound, desperate to understand him, eager to slit his throat or suck him off.” Later, Mehana observes Landon shaers a similar gap between his two front teeth she possesses. She read somewhere about the fap “often reflected poor early behaviors such as extended pacifier use, thumb sucking, and the vaguely erotic ‘tongue thrusting.'”
Indeed, the story is unexpected and ambivalent in its portrayal of the erotic, both rightfully skeptical of Wilder and the wider world of pornographic tourism of Native bodies but still granting Mehana full, if complicated, agency, the ability to profit off the gaze impressed upon her. The relationship between Mehana and her friend Patti, another one of the Get Wild girls, injects the story with something both deep and wholly straightforward, an understanding kinship in an environment that seeks to cast them in cliched roles. There’s erotic possibility there, so much more potent than the performance they’re selling.
While those are the standouts to me, the other stories in the collection are similarly alive and haunted by possibility, full of characters in slippery relationships. The body horror and ghostly spirits throughout aren’t grisly. There’s a softness to them, much like those whispered warnings of the opening. It’s beautifully constructed from start to finish, and while the stories will get under your skin, it’s a welcome invasion.
Every Drop Is a Man’s Nightmare by Megan Kamalei Kakimoto is out now.
“Here Are All My Favorite Delusions, I Hope You Like Them”: Talking to Gabrielle Korn About Queer Dystopian Novel “Yours For The Taking”
Gabrielle Korn’s Yours for the Taking exists at an intersection extremely relevant to our collective interests. It’s a story about queer people and community and love but it’s also a sci-fi novel about a faux-feminist dystopia that asks all kinds of questions we’re always asking ourselves around here — questions about the limitations of an inverted paradigm of institutional power and about how or why to sort humans into boxes by gender and about why some straight women are so obsessed with us. These are all things I personally love to think about and talk about as frequently as possible so I drove to Gabrielle’s apartment, which required scaling several steep inclines on the east side of Los Angeles, to ask her about all of that and more. Believe it or not, this interview has been edited for length!
photo by Lindsey Byrnes
“I was trying to get back to the reasons I became a writer in the first place.”
Riese: I thought I’d start with the question everyone else has already asked and that you’ve already explained a million times — what inspired you to write this book?
Gabrielle: The truth is, I feel like we don’t ever really know where ideas come from.
Riese: Yes, I am always saying that.
Gabrielle: We’re constantly consuming things! However, it was a very specific moment in my life where I’d just left Nylon and gone back to Refinery29. My life didn’t feel like it belonged to me. I felt like I’d stepped into this fast moving river and got swept away and my dreams were not my dreams anymore. I was trying to get back to the reasons I became a writer in the first place and that was that I wanted to write fiction.
Riese: Had you wanted to write fiction before, but felt like you had to start with a book of essays?
Gabrielle: The book of essays [Everybody (Else) is Perfect] felt like a really natural continuation of what I was already doing. In that way, it didn’t feel as exciting as I thought it was going to feel. It just felt like, “Oh, yeah. More essays.” I was really glad that I got to do it and I felt really thankful, but it was like, “Who am I?”
When I graduated college, the panic to be financially independent was greater than the drive to just do my art at any cost, basically. Then I just didn’t do it.
Riese: Yes. College writing workshops are full of people writing fiction for the last time while incidentally learning the marketable skill of how to be editors.
Gabrielle: Right. So it was, “Okay, I’m going to try to write a novel.” It was the end of 2019, the start of 2020, the end of the Trump presidency. There was all of this nihilism in the air. People were talking about climate change in a real way for the first time that I’ve ever seen and I was stuck in women’s media. All of this coalesced and I’m really lucky that I have an agent who takes me seriously when I call her and say insane things like, “I want to write a science fiction novel.”
She was like, “Great. Do it.”
Then I went to Fashion Week, and I was in Milan and Paris in February 2020 when the pandemic started. I had the really strange experience of watching the absolute disconnect between the world I was in, which was fashion, and the world outside, which was on fire. Then I just started writing it.
“I’ve always loved feminist speculative fiction, but a lot of the classics hinge on a very reductive understanding of gender.”
Riese: Do you read a lot of sci-fi?
Gabrielle: I do.
Riese: Had you been reading sci-fi thinking, “I wish these people were gay?”
Gabrielle: Yes. Not only, “I wish these people were gay,” but, “I wish these people could think about gender as more than just men and women.”
Riese: Yes, absolutely.
Gabrielle: I’ve always loved feminist speculative fiction, but it really seems like a lot of the classics hinge on a very reductive understanding of gender.
Riese: What are your favorite dystopian books and films and stuff?
Gabrielle: Never Let Me Go, Station 11, The Age of Miracles, Parable of the Sower, Exit West, The Blind Assassin, The Power, Les Guérillères, and it’s not technically dystopian but I feel like I’ve been very influenced by the poetry book The Work Of A Common Woman which is quoted at the beginning of my book. I’ve always really loved Octavia Butler. I got into her when I was in middle school. I always return to those books.
I’ve always really liked hard sci-fi, too, which is my secret life. At one point, I’d read every Isaac Asimov book and I really loved The Children of Time book, which is about spider aliens. I really like when it’s about aliens, but not about aliens. In film and TV, as well. Contact, I think, is the best movie ever made.
Riese: Do you think that might possibly be partially because of Jodie Foster?
Gabrielle: Yes. But I also think that it’s just one of the most beautiful films. I can’t explain it. My partner Wallace was watching it recently because she had never seen it. I got her to agree, which felt important.
Riese: You watched Station Eleven on HBO right?
Gabrielle: That was the best TV I’ve ever seen.
Riese: Yes! Exactly! It’s the best TV show I’ve ever seen in my life. I’ve never seen anything better.
Gabrielle: Me too. I was really into the book. I read it a bunch of times. I thought what the series was the most incredible fucking piece of content I’ve ever seen. I cannot believe how beautiful they made it.
Riese: And it was nominated for nothing!
Gabrielle: I know. It’s like, “What’s the point of doing anything?”
Riese: I thought, “There’s no way this is getting zero Emmys. This is objectively the best thing I’ve ever seen?”
Gabrielle: And I’m not a crier. It takes so much to get a tear from me. The ending? I’m still crying about it.
Riese: Yeah sometimes I watch clips just to feel alive.
“Is this book too weird? Is it not enough of any one thing to be appealing to people?”
Riese: It’s really hard to find lesbian or queer genre books that also read like literary fiction, so I’m so glad you wrote one for me, thank you! Were you ever nervous that your first book wouldn’t feel like a lead-in to this one, which is so different?
Gabrielle: No. It’s different in format but thematically to me they feel in conversation with each other. I was more worried that publishers wouldn’t be interested in it because, to me, it feels like such a specific book, and it lives in so many different genres, which I think can make marketing hard. But you only need one “yes” when you’re pitching editors. There were some dark moments where I was like, “Is this book too weird? Is it not enough of any one thing to be appealing to people?” But we just had to find the person who understood the vision. I think not everybody gets it.
Riese: Have people had responses to it that surprised you?
Gabrielle: What I’ve suspected this whole time has come to fruition, which is people either really like it or they really hate it. I’m surprised either way. I’ve stopped looking at Goodreads because it was making me insane. Every other comment would be like, “This is the best book I’ve ever read..” And then the next comment would be, “This book is not worth the pages it’s printed on.” No one felt medium. I guess that’s true of most books.
Riese: The ones that hate it are always the ones that are like, “Thank you net galley—”
Gabrielle: Yeah, “Thank you net galley and St. Martin’s Press for this ARC!” So I’m just like, “Neither of these things can be true. It’s probably not the best book you’ve ever read..” But also, “It can’t be the worst book you’ve ever read.” So that’s been surprising, but also not, is what I’m saying. It is just such a specific book. People also seem to disagree on whether it’s plot-driven or character-driven, which is funny to me. Sometimes everyone’s reactions make me feel like every single person has read a different version of the book.
“Straight women really romanticize women.”
Riese: Often when I’m reading I feel like I’m not grasping the overall themes of a book, which is annoying to me because I like to think of myself as a smart person, and I’m like, “I don’t know what I’d ask the author of this book,” but when I was reading your book, I was like “Yes. This is hitting! I get it!”
Then I was like, well, I guess that makes sense. I related to your book of essays so much, too. Because we’ve had similar careers, we’ve been in leadership positions in “women’s media,” we’ve asked a lot of the same questions about the world and power and how ambitious visions are compromised by forces like capitalism and other people. So of course you’re writing about themes that I think speak to me personally. And one of those themes is that I think straight women really romanticize women. You know what I mean?
Gabrielle: Totally.
Riese: So I guess — you’ve said before that the book started with the story of Orchid and Ava in New York — but what made you get to the point where you decided you also wanted this to be about a feminist corporate dystopia?
Gabrielle: I know that I’ve said a lot that it started with Orchid and Ava, but it also started with Jacqueline, and Olympia and Shelby. It started with all of them. The plot, in my mind, was always Ava and Orchid break up because Ava gets accepted and Orchid doesn’t, and Jacqueline has not accepted any men, and the people who work for her either don’t know or are going along with it. It was only later that I was like, “I guess I’m saying something political.” I don’t know. I was brain dead and just banging on my computer and that’s what came out.
I feel like so much of the theme of straight women idealizing women just came from my dark times in women’s media. This idea that if you have a space that’s just women that it’s somehow superior — that just became so funny to me! The book is supposed to be funny, which I don’t know if everybody picks up on.
Riese: I think it’s funny! Even like the line about the only problem with the all-women idea is that it’s never been properly funded, I chuckled.
Gabrielle: Thank you. I was like, “If I can’t make myself laugh, what is the point of doing this?” But I just was so entertained by these women that I worked for, who just had so little self-awareness about the fact that they were branding themselves as something activist and they were making a fuckton of money and treating everybody like shit. I started writing this before the great “girl boss reckoning.” It was really interesting to be revising this manuscript while all of the stuff that I had seen play out was getting talked about.
Riese: Were you like, “This book is really going to hit now?”
Gabrielle: Yeah. I was like, “Someone better buy this fucking book.” I was also afraid that by the time it came out, people would be sick of these ideas because it became so in the news that I was like, “This is going to take three years to come out. I don’t know.”
“There’s no way to categorize people by gender that makes sense anymore.”
Riese: Have you ever been to The Wing?
Gabrielle: I was so amused by The Wing. The fact that it was like walking into a vagina and the lack of irony, the earnestness of it, I just thought was so funny. The membership fees, obviously, all of that went into the book.
Riese: I went to a book event there, and the crowd was going wild for these very basic concepts about female empowerment that are just part of your day-to-day discourse when you’re queer. By the end of it I thought wow, straight women are really easy to please! All these platitudes I thought everybody was being tongue-in-cheek about turned out to be earnest. Anyhow, I always felt like a weird outsider there.
Gabrielle: It also wasn’t just The Wing. I was thinking a lot about the activism of my early twenties and the conversations around planning The New York City Dyke March, which impacted this book, in terms of how exclusionary you automatically become when you try to categorize who can and cannot access something.
I don’t know if they still do this but back when I was involved there were people who showed up to protest, saying, “We’re protesting men at the Dyke March.” I was like, “This is for dykes. Why would there be men?” But they didn’t mean men. They meant trans women. They were a bunch of TERFs who refused to acknowledge that trans women are women. But trans women of course are welcome at the Dyke March. Anyone who identifies as a dyke is welcome.
Riese: Yep.
Gabrielle: I will never forget the cold horrible shock of realizing that that’s who they were talking about, and feeling there was this insidiousness, these TERFs, within an activist space trying to police who the space was for, and then seeing that conversation repeat in all these different ways in women’s media and having this gatekeeping around who the content covers and who it doesn’t cover and who’s On Brand and Not On Brand. Again and again, it was these cis women defining who should and shouldn’t have access to certain types of content. I decided I could either go insane or I could write a novel.
I think I did both.
Riese: Yes, the conversation that happens in the book around who counts as woman-adjacent “enough” to be in the women’s space is one that’s been happening in queer women’s communities for so long. It gets more and more impossible every year, because the lines between this gender and another get blurrier.
But Jacqueline’s idea, that having women in charge of everything will fix everything? On some level, sure — I think having women in charge can be better. But not always. We need more women in power not because they’ll always be better, but because it’s just more fair that way.
Gabrielle: Yes. Totally. I also think that what’s really complicated about theorizing about gender is that you can argue your own self out of existence. I think everything you just said is true, but also, I believe that women’s spaces are really important. I just think that having a space for queer women should not mean that other people are harmed. I think there’s this assumption that if something is for somebody, then it’s automatically against somebody else.
Riese: Yeah, it’s tricky. Sorting out the difference between trying to serve a specific community vs being exclusionary.
Gabrielle: I also think spaces where everybody is included are also important, and that it’s important to talk about queerness and gender and what it means to be a queer woman, ‘cause that category doesn’t go away just because we know that gender is fake.
Riese: Right, there’s no good way to do any of this, no way to categorize people by gender that makes sense anymore. You can say “okay, no cis men in this space,” but bring race and class into this conversation and it makes less sense. Because not all men are oppressors of all women. Are all men bad?
Gabrielle: Yeah. I feel like that is the question of the book, but I think that even when we say, “everybody but cis men,” the implication there is that trans men aren’t men.
Riese: Right! Exactly. Going back to, there’s no way to do this that makes sense for everybody. I think we can try to reflect what our communities look like on the ground — in reality, trans men and non-binary people and queer women, cis and trans, are often part of the same social community, that’s just the lived reality of it, and what we all want is to be able to share space with our friends! But once we have to officially write down “who is part of this and who isn’t” —
Gabrielle: There’s no way to do it that makes any sense! I think that straight women in particular really want to believe that it’s as easy as saying “men are the problem,” and it’s not. Because what we see is that often in positions of great power, women behave just like the men, if not worse, ‘cause they have something to prove. I saw that happen again and again and it feels like this cosmic joke.
Riese: Right! I do also think that when women in power — or anyone who’s not a straight white man really — mess up, they’re absolutely destroyed for it in a way straight white men aren’t. White men really can just be awful, torpedo a company, ruin thousands of lives, and then move on to the next project without much friction. They can fail up. Expectations are higher for women and trans people and people of color, especially when they’re trying to — or claiming to want to try to — perform a social good.
But the concept of “absolute power corrupts absolutely” has been on my mind a lot — with everything happening in the world right now. The idea that flipping who has the power will fix things, or that giving oppressed people power over their perceived oppressors will fix things — no, it’s still a power structure, just with different players in the roles, and often different ways of flexing that power. We published a piece a few years back where the author wrote, “I wish for a new societal order that does not revolve around relations of power and domination,” and I think about that a lot.
Gabrielle: It’s a classic sci-fi thing. I wanted to explore that very simple concept in a complex way where it’s queer and trans people.
Riese: Yes, I could think about this forever and ever.
“I know how this goes. I know how you can get chipped away at by someone who is a sociopath.”
Gabrielle: I also think another thing that happens is that traumatized people traumatize other people.
Riese: Exactly, hurt people hurt people. Do you think Jacqueline was ever traumatized?
Gabrielle: I think that Jacqueline felt very alienated in her own life and I think she was very disappointed by the men that she counted on, but I also think she mistook the alienation that she felt for oppression. I think that she desperately wanted to be marginalized.
Riese: Right.
Gabrielle: So that’s how Jacqueline operates. She wants to think that the things she’s been up against in her life are because she’s a woman and the reality is that she hasn’t really been up against anything. Everything she’s ever wanted has come true. She’s just been alone. I think people who are alone can be really dangerous because I think we need other people to grow.
Riese: Right, to keep us in check — we need people to supervise us and support us. The more power you have, the less the people around you feel comfortable being honest with you, which took me too long to realize myself.
Gabrielle: Totally, and she doesn’t have that. She doesn’t have anyone who trusts and respects her enough to give her feedback until Olympia starts doing that.
Riese: What were you thinking about when you were writing those types of conversations, ones where the people who are working for her were forced into compromise by a conversation?
Gabrielle: I was thinking a lot about my own work experiences and how easy it is to get tricked into doing something because you believe in the mission and want to change it from within, but forget that if you’re participating in the system, then you are participating in the system.
Also, I let myself have fun with it because she is a deeply unhinged person. It’s really fun to write a character that’s insane. So balancing out the rationality of the people she has around her with how unhinged she is and have them slowly give up more, and more, and more until they’re just doing exactly what she wants, that was a really fun thing to do. I don’t know. I felt the most confident, honestly, in writing those scenes because I was like, “I know how this goes. I know how you can get chipped away at by someone who is a sociopath.”
Riese: It’s also interesting in this because her job is her whole life. It’s not like there’s any escape. It’s not like at the end of the day Olympia can be like, “Now I’m going to my house.” Your house is part of the work.
Gabrielle: Totally. She’s really in it.
Riese: Right. Were you thinking about that at all in terms of what it was like for the employees in there?
Gabrielle: Yeah, totally. Again, if I had 1,000 pages to write the book, there would have been more employees who got to be characters. But I did, in a lot of ways, want her to not be a stand-in, but her experience, I wanted it to be implied that her co-workers were having parallel experiences and she’s the one who’s brave enough to actually take a stand at the end, but they’re all happily “trodding” along until they’re not.
“There was just so much else that I had to say that just couldn’t fit into my word count.”
Riese: What were your favorite parts to write?
Gabrielle: The romance and the relationships. That was just the most fun to write, even the romantic friendships and sister dynamics. I feel like I’m very relationship oriented and that was the most fun. It was also the hardest because you have to let your characters be their own people.
Riese: Yeah. What was the hardest stuff to write?
Gabrielle: I could not, and this is a spoiler, but I could not for the life of me write [redacted] and [redacted] saying goodbye to each other. I just felt like I had spent the whole book writing them towards each other and then they had to say goodbye and I kept not doing it and I kept having [redacted] just leave. I had to bring it to therapy and figure out why I couldn’t do it. I think it was because it felt like saying goodbye to the book, but also because I’m famously bad at goodbyes and breakups. It’s really hard for me to quit a job. I like to just bounce.
Riese: Yeah. You like to Irish goodbye on life.
Gabrielle: Yes. That’s my whole thing.
Riese: But you’re allegedly working on a sequel, right?
Gabrielle: Yeah, I am. It’s called The Shutouts.
Riese: Do you know what that’s going to focus on or who it’s going to focus on?
Gabrielle: Yeah. It’s both a prequel and a sequel. There are two timelines. One starts ten years before Yours for the Taking starts, and there’s a woman, we don’t know who she is until halfway through the book, but she’s driving across the country, trying to get back to her daughter. Then the other timeline picks up with Ava and Brooke leaving.
So there are a few new characters. It focuses a lot more on Shelby’s sister, Camilla, and Orchid, and Ava, and Brooke. It’s the outside world. It’s the story of the people who weren’t accepted inside. It’s different themes, too. It’s not about bad feminism. It’s about misogyny within left wing activist movements. My favorite thing! It’s coming out December 3, 2024.
Riese: Did you know when you were writing it, that you were going to do a sequel?
Gabrielle: At a certain point. There was just so much else that I had to say that just couldn’t fit into my word count. My editor and I started talking about what it would mean if this was a series and also, everybody hated the ending and said I couldn’t just end the book with a question mark.
So I was like, “Okay, the book continues.” But I kind of wanted to do something completely different. My editor was like, “No, I really just want the sequel.”
Riese: I was really happy when I found that out.
Gabrielle: Thank you.
Riese: As I was reading it and listening to it I was like, “this is going too fast!” Usually when I see “75% done” at the bottom of my screen I’m excited but I was like “No! I want more time with these people and this story, I want it to be longer.”
Gabrielle: Thank you. That’s really nice.
Riese: It would be like, “twenty years later…” and I’d be like, “Oh, my God! They’re going to die soon!”
Gabrielle: A lot of that is me not knowing how to write a novel, I think, and not knowing how to stay with something. By the sequel, I feel like I learned how to do it. It takes place over the course of a year. It’s a lot tighter, which I feel like is probably better. But for this, it had to be an epic.
Riese: When I’m really excited about a book, I like to buy it in every available format, which I did this year for you and also for Britney Jean Spears.
Gabrielle: Oh, my God. I’m so honored. Thank you.
Riese: I was like, “I just need to be consuming this constantly. I can’t stop.”
“Someone told me that in all sci-fi, you get one leap of faith. I was like, ‘Well, what if I got two?'”
Riese: Were there any themes that you had put into the book that you feel like people didn’t pick up on or that you thought would be noticed more that aren’t?
Gabrielle: If anything, it’s people pointing things out that I wasn’t aware of. People keep bringing up the symbolism of Orchid helping to build Inside and then not getting accepted into it. I’m like, “Oh, yeah. That is deep.”
Riese: How did you envision the spaceship and Inside? When I’m writing something, sometimes I have to look up a house on Zillow and assign it to the person I’m writing because I feel like I can’t see it in my own head.
Gabrielle: With Inside, I was at the airport. Specifically, Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. There’s this one section that has all of these tubes. It was like, “What if we lived in it,” and created that. Also, I was coming out of Fashion Week where you go into these spaces that are so heavily branded that the world kind of disappears and you step into Prada. Everything is so specific, so I think that really informed how I envisioned what it would be.
For the spaceship, I was mostly thinking of a cruise ship and just hoping that nobody would yell at me about science.
Riese: There was that one Goodreads reviewer who did yell at you about science.
Gabrielle: Yeah! It was really mean.
Riese: Did you think about that a lot? Because often I’m like, “I want to write sci-fi, but I hate science.” Did you feel like you had to research stuff to figure out how it would work or you felt like you could just create?
Gabrielle: I did a lot of climate change research, but when it came to the viability of Inside, I decided that my imagination could suffice. Someone told me that in all sci-fi, you get one leap of faith. I was like, “Well, what if I got two?” One being the space shuttles and two being Inside itself. My hope was that the hard sci-fi people wouldn’t read it and that the dystopian girlies would and that nobody would care that much. There was one science person who yelled at me and then one climate person who yelled at me in the Netgalley reviews. I was like, “Well, I can take two people yelling at me.”
Riese: That’s a very small number of people.
Gabrielle: Yeah.
Riese: That’d be a great day for me.
“I wanted the diversity of the world to feel organic and fact-of-life.”
Gabrielle: Yeah, totally. What feels more upsetting than people yelling at me about the science is people not connecting with the characters. Some people get them and appreciate them and understand their complexity, and other people just kind of don’t.
Riese: Do you think that some of that is based on identity?
Gabrielle: I think a lot of it is based on identity, but some people are just haters. I also just think people love to do bad faith readings and that’s really fun for them!
Riese: That is very true, especially on the internet.
Gabrielle: I appreciated Kayla’s review for so many reasons, but the main one being she understood the characters. I was like, “Thank God.”
Riese: Right, one thing she and I talked about was that the way you wrote outside of your own identity so well. You incorporated a more gender-diverse world in a way that felt very organic, not like you were trying to check off boxes or deliver a certain ideology. I didn’t feel hit over the head with it, it was just a fact of life. And people who don’t understand those things were also a fact of life.
Gabrielle: Thank you. That’s what I was trying to do. I really like how you put that. I definitely wanted the diversity of the world to feel organic and fact-of-life, and because of that I was explicit and straight-forward in the descriptions. I don’t love when books are vague about important character traits. Maybe it’s the journalist in me but like, just say who she is! Say she’s a masculine-of-center lesbian, and move along. Plus I feel like what I know about being queer is that we’re constantly talking about it. I feel like that’s true of any marginalized identity, you spend a lot of time talking to other people about your experiences. I wanted that to feel real. I didn’t want to ignore peoples’ lived experiences and the way that they would think and talk. Personally I talk about being a lesbian every day. I feel like that really works for some readers, and other readers who maybe don’t belong to any single marginalized category don’t get it.
Riese: Right, and we all have very complicated relationships to things that brought us good, but also were evil, and it feels for some reason like queer people are especially attuned to that conflict, we often have no choice but to live lives of compromise.
Gabrielle: Which is essentially what happens to Olympia, who in a lot of ways is saved from the climate apocalypse by Jacqueline but what she’s brought into is maybe just as bad. . She has to eventually realize that Jacqueline sees her as completely other. She wanted to think that the system would work for her, even while knowing that it wouldn’t, on some level.
Riese: Right. Which I feel like is usually the case — nothing is ever going to really work all the way. Everything is going to be a compromise. Part of what makes Jacqueline so comical, that she actually thinks there’s a way to make it so that everything will work — but moreso, that she uniquely knows what that way is. Which is only possible ‘cause she’s so narcissistic that she thinks what makes her happy is good for all of society. There’s no perfect way to do anything. Everything will always be compromised.
Gabrielle: Yeah. She’s the world’s dumbest smart person.
Riese: I think that those people are often the ones who amass that kind of power, aren’t they?
Gabrielle: Totally, yes. The people who have the most simplified ideas about the world are the people who get the most power. Because I also think that, how do you have a nuanced understanding of how power works and then aspire to more power?
Riese: Right. Exactly, yeah.
Gabrielle: You can’t.
Riese: We probably can relate on that. Literally, there’s nothing I would want less than more power.
Gabrielle: I never want to be in charge of anything again.
Riese: Never.
Gabrielle: I’m so much happier without a team of people relying on me for their emotional wellbeing. But if someone wants to offer me a job, we can talk about it!
Riese: Of course. Again, at the end of the day, people simply need to get paid.
“Here are the voices in my head, all my favorite delusions, I hope you like them!”
Riese: How has the experience been different of doing publicity, and having reviews, and having a tour compared to your first book, just because of pandemic, but also because of the difference in topic? How has that experience been different?
Gabrielle: It’s so different. I feel like, with my first book, the focus was really on me. So I did so many interviews. With this, it’s nice because it feels like the book is separate from me in a lot of ways and people don’t necessarily need me to talk about the book. But it also feels a lot more vulnerable.
With the memoir it was like, “Here’s some shit that happened. Let me make it interesting for you,” and with a novel it’s like, “Here are the voices in my head, all my favorite delusions, I hope you like them!” I just feel like I have a lot more riding on it and it’s a lot scarier. In person events are totally different from virtual events. I have also stopped sleeping, so that’s really fun.
Riese: Oh, that’s awful!
Gabrielle: Yeah. I think my brain has just decided that sleep is not in the cards until this is over.
But yeah! I think about this a lot because I like writing fiction more than I like doing anything else. Maybe this is naïve, but I just want to be a full-time author more than I’ve wanted to do anything. So! Commercial success, please. I don’t need to be a literary darling. I just want this to be a sustainable path. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how it happens and I still don’t know.
Riese: I don’t know why any specific book does well or not a lot of the time.
Gabrielle: Sometimes you read a book that nobody’s ever heard of and it’s the most wonderful thing you’ve read in your life and it has 50 Goodreads reviews and no press. It just feels like there’s a tiny room with a bunch of old white men who choose the big books.
Riese: Yes, and those old men love James Patterson. Did you ever imagine Jacqueline thinking, “I guess I should become a lesbian?”
Gabrielle: I imagined her wishing desperately that she could be, but she’s just so straight. I also don’t think she really likes women that much. She doesn’t like anyone unless she sees herself in them. She is obsessed with the idea of being a lesbian, though, which to me is very true-to-life with these sorts of people. The part of the book where she asks Olympia point-blank, “How do you identify,” that’s in there because that happened to me. Hilariously, with this person, she asked me several different times. We had this conversation and then a week later she came into the office and said the exact same thing and was like, “I just want to know how to talk about you. How do you identify?” And then a month later, she asked me again. Then finally, the last time, I was like, “I don’t fucking care. Say whatever you want. It doesn’t matter. I’m a fine mist evaporating into the air.”
Riese: “The more you’re asking this, the less and less I feel like I have a solid sense of self and therefore identity at all. “
Gabrielle: Literally that.
Riese: That was very real. People who are trying to be cool with the LGBTs ask the weirdest questions.
Gabrielle: Jacqueline thinks she’s trying. And she really idealizes lesbianism.
Riese: Right. Straight women are like, “I wish I could date women. It would be so much easier!”
Gabrielle: And you’re like, “I want to die all the time.”
Riese: Yeah, there’s a lot of things that are better! But it doesn’t eliminate —
Gabrielle: I think that women hurt each other in very creative ways. I don’t know. Lesbian divorce rates are through the roof.
Riese: That’s partially, I think, due to our propensity to get married.
Gabrielle: I agree with you. I think we’re not known for making great decisions when it comes to being in relationships with each other, but I don’t think that that knowledge has hit the straight community.
Riese: Yeah. No, definitely not.
Gabrielle: You know what? They shouldn’t know.
Riese: No, they shouldn’t know. They don’t need to know anything about us because everything that they do know, they do bad things with that information.
Gabrielle: I agree.
Riese: We should all be keeping it to ourselves.
Gabrielle: We should bring back gatekeeping. Just kidding, that’s the plot of my dystopian novel.
You should buy Gabrielle Korn’s dystopian novel, Yours for The Taking.
“Survival Takes a Wild Imagination” Shows How the Labor of Liberation Makes Us Better
How do we write and think about survival, about freedom, and about our revolutionary potential while living in a burning world? How can we begin to examine the interpersonal tragedies we’re forced to live through as parts of larger systems of atrocity that not only impact our lives but the lives of every living creature around us? How do we do that work despite (and in spite of) the fact that there are so many powerful people working against us to prevent us from doing it? Perhaps most importantly, how do we continue on with our humanity intact? How do we stay as whole as possible?
Through her newest collection of poetry, Survival Takes a Wild Imagination, multidisciplinary artist Fariha Róisín explores her experiences as a queer, Muslim, Bangladeshi woman trying to heal from a childhood of abuse and the pain of generational trauma while also providing responses to these questions and posing some new ones for us to consider as we try to move through our corners of the world.
The personal is political.
Because of the way people have bastardized that phrase, it feels almost silly to point out how closely linked our personal lives are with the world(s) outside of them, but it doesn’t make that reality any less true. The personal is political, whether we acknowledge that or not, whether we want it to be this way or not, no matter how hard we try to disconnect ourselves from what is happening and what has happened before we were even alive. Sometimes, it feels as if people are becoming more acutely aware of this, but then the modern world constructs new horrors or resurrects old ones to remind us that we still desperately need to have these conversations. We not only need to answer these crucial questions for ourselves so that we can find the strength to move forward but we also need to answer them to ensure our collective endurance and eventual liberation.
Most poetry collections at this length generally move through one or two themes but Róisín’s focuses on a variety of different aspects of her life, her identity, and her faith — her relationships with her unloving mother and her “hero” father, her relationship to her body, her relationship to desire, the importance of joy and pleasure, her belief in our ability to liberate ourselves from oppression, our connections to the natural world, among others. Although the collection is split into three sections (to hint at the ideas that connect all of the poems in that section), Róisín weaves all of the ideas, feelings, and memories she’s excavating and interrogating through one another to prove how no one experience is truly untouched by another.
In the first section, “The beginning, the body, the wound,” Róisín jumps right into the more intimate violences of her life, describes the difficulties and triumphs of healing from mental, emotional, and physical contusions thrust on her not by her own choices but by the inherited traumas of her mother and other family members, and pushes back against the systemic conditions that created those traumas. The poem “For Every Girl Who Has Had Her Throat Slit Open” directly addresses patriarchal constructions of violence and the ways men wield their power over women, each other, and the Earth. Róisín writes,
Here’s the thing, though you can pounce around in your violence all the mindlessness that becomes you. Fight wars & do whatever you need to do to tell yourself you have meaning. But nothing will salve ego without grace…
As the poem continues, she points out how men covet and use power as a way to mask the grief of their inevitable mortality and the parts of their lives that make them feel shame. But like most of the poems in the collection, she doesn’t just stop at pointing towards these truths; she also presents a resolution:
If they could only just take all the moments needed to weep & say thank you, thank you, for all of this… for a moment longer than a second…& mean it.
Two of the most impactful poems of this section, “This is for Everyone Who Had to Make a Family out of Themselves” and “Amar Sonar Bangla,” confront inextricably connected aspects of Róisín’s identity: that of a survivor of childhood domestic trauma and abuse and that of a child born to Muslim Bangledeshi immigrants whose families survived genocide. Named after the national anthem of Bangladesh, the latter poem, “Amar Sonar Bangla,” is almost a prayer about the burden and requirement of overcoming the historical and inherited trauma of her family, specifically of her mother. She writes:
You can’t ever forget, you can’t ever escape. Memory. I live it for you Every day, ammu abbu, dado, dadi, chacha, chachee. ancestors guide me out of this heat, let me heal your centuries’ worth of pain.
As she continues describing the ways her mother’s uncaring and hurtful nature helped make her strong enough to carry this burden, she hits on the radical possibility inherent in the struggle to liberate ourselves from the pains of the past:
I’m no longer mad that this was my karma, someone has to break this centuries-old grief. It’s a privilege to do it for you, it’s a privilege to do it for my people.
With this, she reminds us survival and liberation aren’t just about the destruction of the systems of oppression that threaten and dismantle our lives. We also have to eliminate those systems within ourselves.
The former poem, “This is for Everyone Who Had to Make a Family out of Themselves,” is about figuring out how to love and be loved despite years of living without the kind of love all young people deserve. It’s about trying to become a person who can give love and accept love freely, even among the ruinous nature of our society. Róisín writes:
I want a love that knows that to love a wild thing is to let it be free, & love me anyway. I want to be a person who chooses light, holy over seduction. God over money. Listen to me, I want to be a person who sings freedom & believes it.
Upon every rereading of this poem, that final line — “Listen to me, / I want to be a person / who sings freedom & believes / it.” — always feels so fitting as a summary of Róisín’s intentions with this entire collection.
The second section of the collection, “Liberation, pleasure, joy,” is the shortest section in both page count and in the length of the poems grouped there. While it may be a little jarring for some to go from reading poems about grief, trauma, and the general pain of being a person with multiple historically marginalized identities to reading poems about sex and the desire for human connection, these poems very much belong in the same collection. Actually, the fact that they exist together here elucidates how Róisín views all the different aspects of desire that the collection is addressing as springing from a similar place, from inside of us where all of our life experiences, beliefs about our positions in the world, and our relationality to others live and coalesce to create who we are.
All of the poems in this section will hit you in the gut one way or another, but the standout is really “A Pandemic Lamentation,” which sounds exactly like what it is: a kind of ode to the grief of the pandemic and a celebration of the lessons some of us (hopefully, many of us) learned from it. Through this poem, she examines the difficulty of isolation and of bearing witness to what feels like unending death. Then, she reminds us of this truth:
This tiny eternity made us
collapse capitalism into a blip.
Humans so greedy, they think
their lives that they lead for no one
will count for something,
when all that’s ever mattered
was how well you loved, & what you
left behind of it.
The third and final section of the collection, “Finding Earth, God,” is the most poignant and critical section of the collection, especially for the current moment we’re living in, especially for those of us bearing witness to genocide and finding ways to speak out against it. This is the section where she really gets into the logistics of survival — not just our individual survival through our personal tragedies but our survival as people who dare to imagine and believe in the possibility of a better world and who have committed ourselves to doing the work that will help get us there. What is especially surprising and moving about this section of the collection is how Róisín unites all the themes, ideas, griefs, and hopes she’s been investigating and dissecting throughout the other two sections together to bring her vision of moving forward to life.
It feels impossible to choose just a few poems from this section, as they are all equally stunning in their construction, delivering their messages in ways that are both extremely memorable and feel easily accessible to readers of any experience. But there are a few I will come back to over and over again.
The section starts with so much beauty and power with a 10 stanza prose poem where Róisín speaks directly to and about her younger self called “An Ode to Baby Fa.” She writes, “So I celebrate the small grand act of making something big out of a life that coulda turned’a tragedy. No one’s sympathy will ever be a salve for the permanent feeling of loss. Whose words will help overcome generations of trauma? You can do it, Fa, you can remember yourself?” Once again, she calls herself forward to show us the promise and possibility that lies in the labor of healing and of working to free ourselves of the binds of the past.
The section continues with poems that both continue the work she’s been doing in the rest of the collection and speak directly to us, as if she is trying to point out to us that while her experiences are her own, they are connected to the tapestry of human experience that she encounters through other people and through the work she does as a writer and an activist. In “Fear, I Give You Back,” she insists we must let go of the fear of the unknown in order to truly achieve the changes we want to see in our world:
Fear, a word by any other name, would sound as primordial & yet human evolution relies on its collapse. To fear or not fear? That is the question—whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer from it, the capitalistic design that arrows outrageous fortune, & to take & take, for a hypothetical scarcity, to steal, to pillage, to bear arms to seas, to lands, to fear the unknown, than to accept the devices of our own inhumanity.
In one of the shortest and most extraordinary poems of the collection, “What Is a Border?”, Róisín constructs a kind of declaration of independence for herself and for everyone with lineages and inherited violences that are similar to hers. To some degree, it also works as a declaration for anyone who is forced to live on the margins and doesn’t fit into the dominant, ruling class’s definition of how people should be. Here, she proclaims, “I am borderless / You see, / I am not small. / I am not made out of limitations. / I am free.” It’s so simple, and yet it is so gut wrenching and formidable in that simplicity.
The poem “How to Hone Your Intuition,” a short prose poem that uses allusions from the Tarot to urge us to remember the only way forward is to “Burn it all down & start again,” and the final poem in the collection, “An Incantation,” a two part poem that brings everything Róisín has been discussing in the collection to an incredibly compelling conclusion, are perfect end caps to a collection that challenges our ideas of what survival looks like and pushes us to recognize how our individual survival is intimately linked to the continued existence of the people around us, to the creatures we encounter, and to the Earth itself. In “An Incantation,” Róisín writes, “Survival is not for the weak, sometimes / you gotta kick so hard you break your leg — / see, survival is learning how to kick the door down / with a broken, rickety leg.”
This line feels like a perfect encapsulation of everything Róisín is trying to remind us of and teach us through this collection. Each section builds on the previous one to a tapestry of feeling that brings us through the diversity of experiences, possibilities, and hopes that are often a part of existing in a world as disastrous, demoralizing, and dehumanizing as ours. Through the exploration of her own specific tragedies and joys, Róisín is able to help us imagine a way out of the harmful processes and systems that make our lives feel impossible to live a lot of the time. As she points out in that line from “An Incantation,” our collective survival and liberation is dependent upon our ability to recognize and accept the toll the work of liberation will take on our bodies, our minds, and our spirits.
Róisín points out over and over again that getting ourselves out of the mess the people who came before us made was never going to be easy, but that doesn’t mean we don’t possess the ability to do it. And it doesn’t mean we should stop trying. In fact, as Róisín points out at the end of “An Incantation,” the labor of liberation can actually make each of us better, one by one: “I love myself for committing to this / healing, for embracing it, for allowing / it to cleanse me. For not resisting anymore.”
Survival Takes a Wild Imagination by Fariha Róisín is out now.
The Top 12 Queer Novels of 2023
It was another great year for LGBTQ books, as evidenced by the sprawling list of 65 standout titles across every genre published by Casey Stepaniuk earlier this month. Her list is a great display of the range and depth of the year’s top queer books. But I wanted to zoom in a bit and offer a personal list, one narrowed down from my own stack of queer books I worked my way through over the past year. I thought it would be fun to do a ranked list of the 12 queer novels that stood out to me this year. And by “fun,” I mean pleasurably agonizing. This was not an easy list to put together. There are several novels that almost made the cut and might even be just as worthy of a spot on the list but were nudged out for some abstract reason that would be difficult for me to perfectly explain. What I like about this final 12 is that they’re all very distinct novels from one another, even as some of them can easily be put into conversation with one another. Together, they form a thrilling tapestry of my year in queer reading.
Many of the novels on the list do not have standalone reviews on Autostraddle yet, as I regrettably fell behind on books coverage this summer. But one of my 2024 goals as the lead editor of the Literature vertical here is to retroactively correct that in the coming months. So while my blurbs below are brief, you’ll be hearing more about these novels very soon.
Here are the 12 best queer novels of 2023.
12. Homebodies by Tembe Denton-Hurst
A confident and capable debut, Black and queer media worker Mickey Hayward finds herself unceremoniously kicked out the door, prompting her to write a takedown of the entire industry, exposing the various levels of racism and sexism she experienced. Little happens as a result, and Mickey has to go backward to go forward, leaving the life she has built in New York with her partner Lex to move back to the Maryland suburbs and grapple with it all. Back in the hometown, lots of expectations and an ex await. As a media worker myself, I of course found much to love and wince at in the easy-to-flip pages of Homebodies. And the messy queer drama of it all delights.
11. Yours for the Taking by Gabrielle Korn
There’s nothing scarier to me these days than climate fiction — or, more accurately, climate horror — and in Yours for the Taking, Korn paints a bleak picture of the future. The earth becomes inhabitable, so projects known as Insides, essentially glassed-in cities sealed off from the endless storms and unlivable heat, emerge. But Insides aren’t driven by community care or radical revolution; they’re projects of capitalism and status quo. And when ultimate girlboss Jacqueline Millender takes control of one, her promise of a gender revolution that places women, and mothers in particular, at the top of society reeks of dangerous white feminism. Little pockets of hope and heat (the welcome kind) emerge throughout the narrative in the form of queer love stories. As I write in my review:
Yours for the Taking understands well that in the face of climate change, capitalism won’t save us. Matriarchy won’t save us. Jacqueline’s attempts to reimagine the world aren’t revolutionary. She manufactures community rather than fostering it. And yet, communities and platonic love and queer love still find a way to bloom despite the constraints of surveillance and suppression. Korn captures those bursts of resistance and hope, but Yours for the Taking is often most enthralling when needling into its characters’ most harmful choices.
10. Big Swiss by Jen Beagin
Beagin’s novel, according to my review, “veers from horny to humorous to macabre in zigs and zags.” It follows Greta, a 45-year-old transcriptionist for a sex therapist who becomes obsessed with one of the clients whose sessions she pens. She gives this mystery woman the nickname Big Swiss, but a chance run-in with the object of her obsession at the local dog park deepens the obsession, blurs boundaries. Big Swiss is a 29-year-old gynecologist who has never had an orgasm, and the two embark on an affair built on a massive lie, Greta concealing her true identity from the woman whose inner life she has access to. “The novel asks ongoing and open-ended questions about sex, trauma, violence, about violation, observation, obsession,” I write in my review. And if that sounds as up your alley as it was mine, this is definitely a novel for you to check out.
9. Your Driver Is Waiting by Priya Guns
A high-octane debut novel that burns brightly at the turn of every page, Your Driver Is Waiting veers through the racetrack of first-person narrator and rideshare driver Damani’s life as she navigates taking care of herself, her mother, and her community after the death of her father, who was killed quite literally by capitalism by my reading. Damani lives constantly on the edge: Her financial situation is perilous, she’s impulsive, and she throws herself into a fraught relationship with a white girl who doesn’t really get the contours of her life. I like what I wrote in my review about the idea of the novel as “satire”:
Some readers may be tempted to label Your Driver Is Waiting as satire. A ride share app called RideShare, blanket protests against things Damani can’t even keep track of, the fact that that fancy fundraiser turns out to be for a new brand of spring water called The Fight that promises to donate ten cents from each bottle to a breakfast plan for local city kids…it does all sound heightened and on-the-nose. But it doesn’t read as satire, just like Succession or White Lotus aren’t really satire. The characters and their behaviors on those shows about the ultra-wealthy are completely believable, just like the events, emotional stakes, motivations, and world-building details of Your Driver Is Waiting are closer to reality than to dystopia. In being so in your face and heavy-handed, the novel is actually quite effective in its scathing critique of capitalism and white supremacy and of some of the mainstream, toothless efforts to combat it.
8. Pomegranate by Helen Elaine Lee
Pomegranate opens just as its protagonist Ranita is about to get out of prison after a four-year sentence for opiate possession. She leaves behind haunting memories but also Maxine, a lover who loved her well and whose soft touch is present throughout the novel almost like a gentle haunting. Freedom in Pomegranate is complicated. Family is complicated. The novel portrays addiction and recovery with specificity, nuance, and empathy, and doesn’t present them as binary categories but rather both forces that operate nonlinearly and unpredictably in Ranita’s life. At the risk of sounding corny, the novel is indeed like a pomegranate itself: acidic and sweet in equal measure. Crack it open and marvel at all its interconnected seeds.
7. Brainwyrms by Alison Rumfitt
In Brainwyrms, transphobia is quite literally a parasitic infection that violently takes over its hosts’ minds. That on-the-nose metaphor shouldn’t work as well as it does, and yet in the masterful horror hands of Rumfitt, it does so swimmingly. It tells the intersecting stories of Frankie and Vanya, two trans people who meet at a play party. Shortly after, Frankie is peeing in Vanya’s mouth, and the two strike up an ongoing dom/sub dynamic that crashes them into each other’s fraying lives. Frankie is a trans woman and survivor of a TERF terrorist bombing at the gender clinic where she used to work, and Vanya is a younger nonbinary person with a parasite fetish who escaped their abusive family, including a mother infected with transphobic brainworms. It’s a nasty (complimentary), often experimental horror novel that’s often unsubtle (a character is definitely supposed to be the in-text version of J.K. Rowling) but also wonderfully complex. Its in-your-face quality is definitely an asset, a striking work of kink, violence, care, and the deep parasitic impacts of hate and fearmongering.
6. All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky
Oh how I love art about fucked-up sister dynamics, and All-Night Pharmacy is an instant classic of the canon. An unnamed protagonist (another thing I love!) is perpetually pulled into the wild drug and alcohol-fueled web of her chaotic older sister Debbie. The two frequent Salvation, an L.A. bar full of misfits who have no idea what it is they’re really looking for. When Debbie disappears, their co-dependent link is suddenly severed, and our narrator learns living without Debbie might free her. But forever used to defining herself in relation to another, she ends up in a relationship with Sasha, the strange woman who wanders into the hospital where she works claiming a psychic connection to her. I reveled in the sexy, scary edges to this book, and at every turn it’s obvious it was written by a poet, Madievsky’s sentences lithe and alive.
5. Mrs. S by K. Patrick
It’s honestly hard to believe this is a debut, so assured it is in story and in form. It reminds me of works of Woolf, but I’ve also taken to calling it “kinky butch The Price of Salt,” which of course is an over-simplification, and yet many of the themes of that influential work of lesbian literature are at play here. The title refers to the object of our narrator’s (also unnamed) erotic affection. Mrs. S, the headmaster’s wife at an elite all-girls boarding school where our butch, binder-wearing narrator has just arrived from Australia to work. She enters into a passionate affair with Mrs. S, full of secrets and strikingly queer, true-to-life sex. But even more than the steamy affair, I’m interested in the ways the novel explores platonic queer kinship through the narrator and another employee at the school. Mostly, I just want to sit inside the sweaty sentences of the novel over and over.
4. Organ Meats by K-Ming Chang
It is difficult to write an accurate summary of this tremendous new novel from Chang, but that hard-to-explain quality of the book is absolutely intentional and absolutely a plus. Organ Meats invites you into the feral, meaty tension and release of obsessive friendship between young girls, the horrors of girlhood, and the seduction and danger of myth. Rainie and Anita’s friendship has a possessive, violent quality to it, even as they genuinely seem to be the only people who really understand one another. Here’s some of what I wrote in my review:
Chang threads together a stunning tapestry of horror in the novel. Ecological horror looms over the setting: Anita and Rainie live in a place that hasn’t seen rain for pretty much their entire lives. Gothic girlhood and haunted family narratives add texture to this fable made up of so many micro fables. Body horror abounds. Anyone familiar with Chang’s work won’t be surprised to find bodily fluids and functions captured plainly on the page. Piss, shit, blood and spit are all part of this book’s simultaneously grotesque and wondrous alchemy. There are few boundaries separating dogs, trees, and humans here. Same with dreams/memories and beauty/ugliness. It’s a novel that loves to collapse categories and build metaphors you’ll want to tongue like a loose tooth, searching for meaning(s).
3. Blackouts by Justin Torres
Torres combines actual historical documents — primarily the 1941 study Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns — and historical figures to incisively analyze the very concept of queer storytelling. Archival work becomes expansive and complex in the novel, which follows an unnamed gay narrator into the desert to care for a dying queer elder connected to the lesbian behind Sex Variants whose involvement has mostly been erased from the work. Erasure is indeed a motif throughout, and Torres redacts pages from Sex Variants to poetic effect. Our narrator promises to continue the work of Juan, the dying man, but it’s never quite clear what this work is. Perhaps it’s just listening to his stories and sharing his own, as they do every night. Perhaps all the ways we tell and preserve stories as queer folks are interconnected. And maybe the ways we’re erased can tell us the truth about who we are. This is a novel I’ll return to often, not in search of concrete answers but rather to sit with the questions it asks.
2. Family Meal by Bryan Washington
What I love about reading Washington’s fiction is that I can always taste it. The food, sure. But so much else, too. Summer nighttime air, sweat, spit. He writes bodies and queer sex and place so well. In Family Meal, Cam is haunted by his dead lover Kai. He moves back to his hometown of Houston and reconnects with his former best friend TJ, starts working in TJ’s family’s bakery, in which Cam also grew up after the death of his parents. As with all of Washington’s work, violence and tenderness sit simultaneously in the pages. Gay ghosts, good food, queer sex — the novel checks so many boxes for me. I couldn’t decide if I wanted to devour it in one sitting or savor it slowly. I opted for the latter and didn’t regret it.
1. Biography of X by Catherine Lacey
While finessing the rest of the placements on this list was laborious, and many positions changed over time, the one thing I knew to be true from the onset of compiling this list was that Biography of X would be number one. Lacey collapses fiction and reality to craft a fictionalized biography of an eccentric, iconoclastic artist, penned posthumously by her younger wife CM as an attempt to revise the other autobiography written about her dead wife that CM finds wholly unsatisfying and incomplete. But as she tries to piece together the puzzlebox of her late wife’s inconsistent and almost fable-like existence, CM encounters the hard truths that perhaps you can never really know a person. Lacey weaves in real artists, writers, and thinkers into the work, and if it weren’t for the rewriting of U.S. history that occurs in the novel — the worldbuilding of which is so mesmerizing and rich — you might forget you’re not reading an actual biography. Stay tuned for a longer standalone review of this novel, which I feel compelled to write for similar reasons CM is compelled to write her autobiography of X. I find that most mainstream reviews of the novel gloss over its queerness, treating it as mere surface-level detail, when this is in truth a book that queers genre, archives, history, and much more, and it seems absurd to consider the motives and choices of the character X without contextualizing them in the ideas of queer survival and performance.
Again, obviously there are plenty of novels worth championing and discussing from this year that aren’t on the list above. Shout out your favorites in the comments, and let’s make this a conversation.
Short Fiction Collection “Girlfriends” Presents Expansive, Nonlinear View of Transition and Dysphoria
The first few years of being trans can’t help but feel a little like your teens, and I’m not even referring to the whole HRT-induced second puberty thing. The start of transition is just a uniquely awkward, unsure, and overwhelming time. People start looking at you differently, you reevaluate relationships with even your closest friends, you don’t really know what kinds of clothes you like anymore, and for some reason way too many people expect you to have your shit together. It’s easy to feel like there’s an essential part of yourself that you’re only just beginning to understand, but the rest of the world is refusing to slow down and give you the time you need to figure it all out.
It’s this feeling of disorientation and unease that I most associate with Emily Zhou’s debut short story collection, Girlfriends. Through seven narratives, Zhou assembles a collage of young, newly out trans women as they navigate hookups with barely-acquaintances at crowded parties, complicated roommate love affairs, co-dependent queer friendship, and the general what-the-fuck-are-we-doing nights that make up one’s early twenties. In “Performance,” Lara balances sex work, the unwanted attention of her friend’s long-term boyfriend, and a burgeoning romance with a friend of a friend. Kieran helps her father and his trans former co-worker turn an inherited home into a bicycle store in “Do-Over.” “Gap Year” follows a college-age narrator’s intense yearslong crush on Genevieve, a straight trans girl attending the same school.
The trans women in Girlfriends often find themselves stuck in the spiderweb of someone else’s drama or self-implosion. Even as they become tangled up in their own love affairs or drunken misadventures, Zhou’s protagonists stand witness to the busy world around them. Their point of view allows each story to float through scene to scene as both character and portal. Reading Girlfriends can feel like people-watching at a particularly eclectic party while your insightful, biting, and painfully self-conscious friend whispers judgment and gossip in your ear. Through her whispered or slurred commentary, we learn that everyone at this party, cis or trans, is just as confused as everyone else, especially those who want you to think otherwise.
No one is quite on stable ground in Girlfriends. Childhood best friends evolve into abusive adulthood situationships. Friends drop, pick up, and re-drop partners. Parents or queer elders are just as prone to upheaval and delusion as the young adults they want to guide. Across her collection, Zhou depicts a fluid and complex queer social scene through appropriately murky fiction. These stories are never content to conclude with resolutions that are steeped in personal clarity or epiphany but instead with moments of quiet, tender respite, closing with late night bottle rocket shows, nights of quiet insomnia, or conflicted bathroom escapes. It showcases Zhou’s confidence in her fiction that she so readily leaves her characters in that dramatic sweet spot between cohesion and unease that defines the best work of the genre.
What Zhou seems to suggest is that none of us ever “figure it out.” In fact, for some, there may be no need to at all. There’s a passage in “Do Over,” the collection’s closing story, that I find myself returning to again and again:
Dysphoria is a scary word, and for a long time I thought it was reserved for moments adjacent to desperation, madness, disintegration – I read once about a trans woman back in the day who cut her own junk off when she got denied surgery. Now I think maybe the thing with dysphoria is that it doesn’t begin or end anywhere in particular. I wonder about that woman – I could see myself doing something like that if I was less afraid of pain, if only to force this fine mist of vague unease to coalesce into something, like holding a magnet up to metal shavings. Does the magnet reveal the true nature of the metal, or just one of the properties it happens to have?
Our current language around dysphoria has always felt so trite and insufficient to me that I always appreciate whenever other trans writers attempt their own definitions, but Zhou’s prose offers more than simple explanation. While it might initially feel a bit too on the nose to say that everyone, regardless of gender, in Girlfriends is dysphoric, Zhou demands that reading. We are taught to think in terms of big catalysts that kick start even bigger changes. Too often, I hear cis friends ask me about my life “pre” and “post” transition, and I find myself explaining that it’s not nearly that simple. Transition, like puberty or aging in general, isn’t so much a single catalytic act, but a stumbling and awkward road filled with many smaller realizations, changes, and revisions. If dysphoria isn’t something with a beginning or end, then attempts to combat it are just as nonlinear and unending. And while not every character in Zhou’s fiction is reckoning with gender, all are dealing with their own feelings of displacement, distress, or unease. Each is waiting for a magnet to appear and sort their shaved metal selves into more easily understandable forms, but Zhou knows that isn’t going to happen. The story is in those moments of confusion and the quiet breaths we take in between.
Sapphic Yearning, Horror, and K-Pop Blend Perfectly in “Gorgeous Gruesome Faces”
If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s a book about pop stars. I’m not really a K-pop person, but as a person who loves pop stars, I find the whole world of K-pop fascinating from a behind-the-scenes aspect. If you throw in a dash of folklore and make it sapphic? That’s like gold. Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng checks those boxes — plus it has some seriously awesome horror elements.
Gorgeous Gruesome Faces is told from the perspective of Sunny, a teenage girl who was part of an American K-pop style group that formed on a K-drama. At her audition, Sunny recognizes Candie, a beautiful girl and performer, from her YouTube videos, which Sunny is obsessed with. Rounding out the group is Mina, who is also the catalyst for the action of the book. When we meet the girls, their group Sweet Cadence has broken up and their show has been canceled because of a scandal involving Sunny and Mina. Candie and Sunny go to check on Mina and find their friend in a bad place mentally and physically. To free herself of the pain she’s going through, Mina jumps off of a balcony to her death.
Mina’s death plunges Sunny into a deep depression — one so bad that Sunny asks her mother, an entertainment manager, if they can leave Los Angeles for Georgia, where she can escape the demons of her past. Or so she thinks. Even though she’s lost touch with Candie, Sunny is still obsessively watching her social media videos. So when she learns that not only is Candie in Georgia but that she’s going to be part of a new singing group, Sunny decides to audition for the group, even though she has given up pop stardom. With Candie back in her life, Sunny can finally confront what happened to Mina and make her peace with it. The story is told in two timelines: Then and Now, but they’re not used evenly. It’s more about what moment fits the story.
Sunny is desperately in love with Candie. It’s clear from the way she talks about the way she obsessively watches her videos before they end up being groupmates in Sweet Cadence. I totally get why Sunny is attracted to her: Candie is enigmatic, and you can’t help but be drawn to her. Even as a reader, I wanted Candie to notice me. Because of her love for Candie, Sunny will subject herself to the horrors of the maiden and everything that entails to save her. Sunny will endure horrors to make sure Candie survives. The trials and tribulations she is willing to go through are a testament to the intense love she has for Candie.
We know there is something between them based on how they act around each other, but for so long Candie is so focused on other things that you have to wonder if she still has feelings for Sunny. But they do get their opportunity to reunite, and it’s so so good.
I loved the way K-pop superstardom is used as a plot device in this story. We have all heard about how rigorous and borderline abusive these boot camp-style training sessions can be, and that plays right out on the page. We are with Sunny and the other girls as they practice and practice and drill themselves to be perfect. It never feels over the top or fake. Since I’m big on 90s pop stars, which is always what K-pop feels like, I found myself thinking that this is exactly what the audition process would feel like. Is it a little horrifying? Of course. But in the context of this story, it’s also wholly necessary.
The K-pop dreams are intricately tied to Asian folklore in the story. I love seeing Cheng finding ways to make a connection between these different cultural elements in a really fresh way. Candie is involved in a ritualistic cult that descends from an ancient maiden who was put up on a pedestal for her beauty and desirability. If that doesn’t feel like an analogy for modern day pop starlets, I don’t know what would. It may feel too easy, but I don’t think so. There are still too many people who haven’t been able to draw those parallels in real life to say that the analogy feels like low-hanging fruit or too on the nose.
Female pop singers are held to impossibly high beauty standards, and as a result, the women who make up their fanbase hold themselves up to impossible beauty standards. K-pop singers are branded and commodified even more than American pop singers are if you can believe it. Female K-pop stars are sold as the epitome of the performance of femininity, defined by the delicate features of the members, who are often posing in a line wearing typically feminine clothing. They sing in largely higher registers that are exclusive to their style of music. But it’s all performance, and you have to assume they’re incredibly different in reality.
The folklore of the maiden who has given all of herself to those she serves but now inhabits other’s bodies to take back what’s hers feels almost too perfect, but I honestly love it. Even though she’s not Korean, I immediately thought of Britney Spears and how she’s broken herself into pieces to serve people who only want to take things from her. Sunny, Candie, and the other girls trying out for the group are being infused with pieces of the maiden, who is hellbent on her own form of revenge. But in reality, she only wants to put the broken pieces of herself back together. The thing is, she has to destroy everything to do so.
I’ve never really been a horror girlie, but in recent months, I’ve found myself intrigued by YA books that have a horror element. The horror elements of Gorgeous Gruesome Faces aren’t there for shock value, and I think that’s why I enjoyed it so much. Cheng does a great job of blending Asian folklore and horror in ways that feel totally natural, but at the same time utterly unsettling. The first time we see the body horror is right at the beginning when Sunny and Candie go to Mina. The maiden is ravaging her body, distorting her face and making her almost unrecognizable to her friends. There are thriller elements to the story too, especially in the pacing and the balance between the Then and Now moments. By the end, I was gripping the book.
From what I can tell, there is supposed to be another book that follows this one, and I am very here for it, as the end of Gorgeous Gruesome Faces has the perfect open ending that lends to a sequel. If you’re looking for something that’s twisty, dark and beautiful, this is the book for you.
Gorgeous Gruesome Faces by Linda Cheng is out now.
LGBTQ Fiction Sales Are Up, but We Still Urgently Need Creative Ways To Fight Book Bans
feature image photo by Johner Images via Getty Images
NBC News recently published a feature about the rise of LGBTQ fiction sales and, as Dykette author Jenny Fran Davis puts it, the “renaissance of gay literature” we’re currently living in. And as the Autostraddle books editor, I’ve got THOUGHTS. I want to use the NBC News story as a starting point to deliver a sort of State of Queer Books overview to close out the year. So buckle in, and let’s deep dive into these NBC News figures and broaden their scope to see what they do and don’t show about the mainstreamification of queer lit.
According to the report, while the broader fiction market has slowed down, LGBTQ fiction specifically continues to grow and reached record sales this past year. According to data provided to NBC News by publishing industry sales tracker BookScan: “In the 12-month period ending in October 2023, LGBTQ fiction sales reached 4.4 million units, up 7% from the prior 12-month period and 200% from the 12-month period ending in October 2019.” Meanwhile, “the data showed that total fiction sales were down 3% in that latest year-over-year time period and up just 27% in the four-year span.”
Queer BookTokers, the LGBTQ BISAC code being added to a wide variety of fiction subgenres, and the fact that queer titles can be found on all the shelves in more and more bookstores instead of just being relegated to an “LGBTQ” shelf are all cited as part of this growth for queer lit. The piece briefly contextualizes that growth in the culture wars that have made queer and trans stories a lightning rod: “More than just migrating from the margins, queer fiction titles are thriving against a backdrop of record attempts to censor works by and about the LGBTQ community.”
But that’s all the piece really says about that, and even though I know not every news feature can contain all the complicated aspects of an issue, this positioning of a growth in sales as being a victory against LGBTQ censorship is a bit misleading, an incomplete picture of a literary landscape that should take into consideration not only the political contexts around it but also history.
More on that history point in a bit, but I want to start by talking about the unfortunate (and perhaps obvious, even if it’s not explicitly dealt with in the NBC News feature) reality that this rise in sales does not necessarily mean gay books are landing in the hands that need it most. One might be tempted to see the sales data and conclude it’s a direct response to book bans and other forms of censorship. And in some ways, yes, buying LGBTQ books if you have the means to do so is important to the overall cause. It supports queer and trans authors. It proves to publishers there’s high demand, so they’ll be less pressured to see taking on LGBTQ books as “risky.” But buying books cannot be the only means of fighting bans, and a queer lit renaissance should not be considered in a vacuum.
BookScan numbers are incomplete and do not include library data. As we know, book bans specifically target libraries and schools, places where queer and trans youth are, in theory, most easily able to access novels that touch on LGBTQ lives and experiences. Kids who might not have the means to purchase books themselves or might not feel safe to ask the adults in their lives to buy queer books for them can get those books in libraries. In practice, that’s becoming a lot more difficult — not only due to the rampant rise of book bans but also due to library cutbacks implemented by city governments that limit access.
Book bans, I will remind you, are not limited to the South. While they are certainly concentrated in places like Texas and Florida (where I live), there are public school districts banning books in places like New York, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, too. Book banning efforts were made in some California school districts, too, prompting Governor Gavin Newsom to sign into law a measure intended to curb these efforts. Schools that ban books on the basis of racial or LGBTQ content are subject to fines now. However, this version of anti-book ban legislation might not be far-reaching enough as it only applies to schools and not all libraries in the state. Less than a month after the state bill passed, the Huntington Beach city council approved a book banning ordinance. In Massachusetts, a cop literally entered a school to search for a book after a complaint.
Even if it’s just one district in a state or one city’s libraries, it does not serve us to downplay the nationwide consequences of censorship and book restrictions. Those aforementioned library cutbacks are also happening in supposedly progressive cities, such as in New York City where most libraries are now closed on Sundays, a slippery slope toward more cuts and loss of funding for libraries as my brilliant fianceé, who is a queer librarian, points out.
Maybe we’re living in a gay lit renaissance, but who exactly has an invitation to the renaissance?
It’s thrilling to see gay fiction sales on the rise. Hell, I’m literally about to marry a queer librarian who is also a queer novelist! But sales are just one small part of a tapestry of the state of queer literature. We must consider how a rise in sales and even the overall mainstreamification of LGBTQ literature doesn’t include everyone. And as we see in California, even legislative means of fighting book bans aren’t always a perfect solution.
One of the most exciting instances of fighting bans I’ve read about recently was in a CNN feature on The Queer Liberation Library, an entirely online nonprofit collection of hundreds of ebooks and audiobooks centering LGBTQ narratives that’s free to access. It launched in October and represents a creative way of circumventing book bans given social, political, and financial barriers to accessing queer literature. Existing entirely online, it welcomes people who might not be able to physically access spaces selling or lending queer books.
The nonprofit model allows the Queer Liberation Library to circumvent any potential attempts at state-level censorship as they do not receive government funding. But even more so than nonprofit efforts to fight book bans, I’m interested in how mutual aid-based approaches in recent years have emerged and grown. The Rolling Library, born from the mutual aid group Astoria Food Pantry, brings free books to New York City and surrounding areas and often specifically focuses on increasing access to LGBTQ+ books. The group has a queer book club (the excellent memoir Hijab Butch Blues is the current pick), sells Defend Your Local Library tanks, and often seeks donations of queer and trans books for children. We need more groups like The Rolling Library, especially in places where book bans are rampant. Because even the Queer Liberation Library can’t reach everyone as it requires internet access. The more community-driven efforts we have, the better.
I hope queer fiction sales continue to rise, and I hope to see an increase in programs and spaces like the Queer Liberation Library and The Rolling Library. I’m also strongly of the belief that this rise to mainstream prominence LGBTQ literature is experiencing should be coupled with a look back at the books that paved the way or were marginalized in a way they wouldn’t be now. Sarah Schulman spoke about this in an interview with Teen Vogue earlier this year:
If people looked back and said, “Wow, now we see that this work is great. Why don’t we go back to all the people who were doing this before, who we treated like garbage, and reevaluate them,” then they would be in trouble. Because the people who they did reward, all those now-irrelevant white men who dominated American literature for so many years, they would have to be repositioned. And then what does that say about gatekeepers?
So, they kind of pretend like none of that ever happened, and this thing just came up because the apparatus is so kind and inclusive. That is kind of a crisis of meaning, even though it hasn’t been articulated.
The NBC News story touches on the history of indie and small presses publishing queer and trans books only tangentially, such as when the co-owner of a bookstore that specializes in romance books notes that when they first opened in 2016, most of the LGBTQ titles they carried were from indie presses or self-published, and we’re now seeing a small but steady rise in traditionally published queer romance novels.
As far as literary fiction goes, I agree with Schulman that this moment when queer books are entering the mainstream cannot be viewed in a vacuum. Small and indie presses have been at the forefront of publishing queer and trans books traditional publishing houses wouldn’t go near, and that history is important. We’re starting to see some books by queer and trans authors get re-released, such as Random House deciding to republish Torrey Peters’ two novellas she previously published online. We should, as Schulman suggests, go back into the archives and revisit work that was pushed to the margins. And sadly, some of that work might be lost for good.
Drew Burnett Gregory writes in the introduction of her Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema on the reasons why her project cannot be truly exhaustive of all lesbian cinema because of access issues. “Some of the greatest works of LGBTQ+ film are not being watched, because people not within our community get to decide which films deserve attention.” This is applicable to the publishing industry as well. The traditional publishing houses determine which queer and trans books to push, and it means a lot of transgressive and radical work by queer and trans authors still gets pushed aside. And much like a lot of great lesbian films are lost or difficult to find, so many queer books published decades ago have gone out of print.
Small and indie presses are still publishing so much queer and trans work that would scare off traditional publishers. Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, which has become a lightning rod for the queerphobic fear-mongering behind book bans, was published by independent publisher Oni Press. It’s great that mainstream publishing is embracing LGBTQ fiction, but recognizing and supporting small press releases of both today and from years past is more urgent than ever in the face of book bans, which seek to stifle and roll back the progress we’ve seen in terms of more and more queer books being out in the world. I love seeing queer authors receive widespread coverage and mainstream attention, but we should not hinge the value of our art on approval from dominant cultural institutions. I hear stories all the time about queer authors at big publishing houses having to fight for their own work to be understood and championed.
We can’t talk about a rise in sales without also talking about decreased access. We can’t talk about queer books entering the mainstream without also talking about the marginalization of LGBTQ stories in the past and that’s still occurring even if more and more gay books are showing up on shelves and lists.
Things I Read That I Love #333: Erewhon, Melrose Place, The Bowel Unit, Blurred Lines and Crosswords
HELLO and welcome to the 333rd installment of Things I Read That I Love, wherein I share with you some of the longer-form journalism/essays I’ve read recently so that you can know more about the Bowel Unit! This “column” is less queer focused than the rest of the site because when something is queer focused, I put it on the rest of the site. Here is where the other things are.
The title of this feature is inspired by the title of Emily Gould’s tumblr, Things I Ate That I Love.
The Virus Inside Your TV, by Isaac Butler for Slate, December 2023
In the 1990s, a group of radical artists in California called the GALA Collective played an “audacious prank” on the world, smuggling “subversive leftist art” onto the set of megahit primetime soap opera Melrose Place, “experimenting with the relationship between art, artist, and spectator.” This is so wild!!! There are some pictures in the Slate article this article has a bunch more as well.
What is Erewhon?, by Kerry Howley for New York Magazine, November 2023
How a health-food store for hippies started by 1960s macrobiotic enthusiasts became the super-super expensive cult fave in Los Angeles where “small spaces are redefined as ‘curating an experience of collective energy’.” Beloved by celebrities and TikTok and rich people and people with very specific nutritional desires, this is about everything behind Erewhon and also about the evolution of the health food store industry.
My Impossible Mission to Find Tom Cruise, by Caity Weaver for The New York Times Magazine, July 2023
I for one had no clue Tom Cruise hadn’t given an interview to a journalist since 2012 and I hope if he ever does that he gives it to Caity Weaver:”What is missing from Cruise’s fervid documentation of ultrarisky, inconceivably expensive, meticulously planned real-life events are any details about the parts of his real life that do not involve, for example, filming stunts for “Mission: Impossible” movies. My own mission, then, was simple: I was to travel to the ends of the Earth to see if it was possible to locate the terrestrial Cruise, out of context — to catch a glimpse, to politely shout one question at him, or at least to ascertain one new piece of intelligence about his current existence — in order to reintegrate him into our shared reality.”
Selling the Seaside, by Ruby Tandoh for The Baffler, September 2023
Lord, Ruby Tandoh is just the most delightful writer every time all the time: “The way people talked to me about Margate was different, as though, despite being eighty miles from the capital, it was already spiritually theirs: very much like London, but smaller, cheaper, and with the reassuring finality of the sea. It was close enough to the city that they could still travel back for meetings. Someone they knew was there already. It would hardly be like leaving at all.”
Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?, by Natan Last for The New Yorker, December 2023
This is about like, the entire history of the crossword and its popularity in America, and how words from other languages or cultures have or haven’t made it into American puzzles and it’s really just fascinating!
A Restaurant Ruined My Life, by Robert Maxwell for the Toronto Star, October 2017
This was like a horror movie even though it’s nothing like a horror movie? And like, I say this as someone who also made similar decisions to tank their relationships and their financial health to make a specific dream come true in a field of business that rarely succeeds but wow!! I can’t even say I loved reading this? Just that I kept reading it, increasingly concerned for its author and his family.
Nobody Knows What’s Happening Online Anymore, by Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic, December 2023
“The very idea of popularity is up for debate: Is that trend really viral? Did everyone see that post, or is it just my little corner of the internet? More than before, it feels like we’re holding a fun-house mirror up to the internet and struggling to make sense of the distorted picture.”
The Mercy Workers, by Maurice Chammah for The Marshall Project, March 2023
A group of anti-capital-punishment activists are devoted to finding and recording and presenting the stories of defendants on death row, building a picture of the kind of life that leads someone to take someone else’s.
“Blurred Lines,” Harbinger of Doom, by Jayson Greene for Pitchfork, March 2023.
This was a journey into such a specific time I remember so vividly: “Together, Cyrus and Thicke stirred up the kind of shit-storm that neither could have accomplished on their own. For one shutter-clicked eternity, a white man’s predatory leering at all women met up with a white woman’s opportunistic leering at Black women, and they combined to make an infernal beast with two backs, a “We Can’t Stop”-able force meeting an immovable, Beetlejuice-suited object.”
Saving a Life, by Patricia Lockwood for The London Review of Books, February 2023
A week in the Bowel Unit: “The next day, thirty thousand feet over the Atlantic, eight hours into the flight from LA to London, it happened. ‘Something is very wrong inside me,’ Jason said on his way back from the bathroom, bending over my row with his face white and his arm held rigid over his lower abdomen. Secretly I thought it might be the world’s hardest fart; we had, in collaboration, eaten a whole head of cauliflower and an eight-ounce portion of toum before boarding the flight, out of what now seems a kind of shared death wish, a suicide pact in a place where there were only vegetables.”
“Yours for the Taking” Review: Matriarchy Won’t Save Us
In her debut novel Yours for the Taking, Gabrielle Korn takes an oft-deployed dystopian/sci-fi literary premise — a world without men — and shreds it to pieces, exposing the inherent biases and dangers in society’s structured around gender and exposing just how exclusionary and hierarchal spaces and communities designed “for women” and even “for women and nonbinary people” often skew.
In Yours for the Taking, this “world without men” is an experiment dreamt up by the fictional final boss of corporate girlbosses, a woman named Jacqueline Millender who transformed her family’s oil empire into a recycling empire and pens a manifesto on why women should strive not for equality but for power.
This message resonates with some of the young women introduced at the beginning of the sprawling epic who are part of Korn’s imagined generation that follows Gen Z. The novel is set across the years 2050-2078. It’s the beginning of the end of the world, a climate crisis collapsing society and becoming the sole focus on a new world order to the extent that other social issues are either ignored or have regressed. Men’s rights groups are back with a vengeance. Jacqueline is easy to peg as a corporate-feminism-backed girlboss for the reader but holds a certain allure to some of the characters who have grown frustrated with the current conditions of their world. There’s Shelby, a young trans woman from a lower middle class family who sees Jacqueline’s call for matriarchal power as inspirational but also just a means of surviving what has become an unlivable earth. There’s Ava, a college-educated and privileged young queer woman from a wealthy family undergoing personal crisis (her girlfriend is abruptly leaving her) against the backdrop of the global crisis. And there’s my personal favorite character Olympia, a Black masc lesbian and recent med school grad who thinks she might be able to change Jacqueline’s proposed system from within while simultaneously reinforcing a vision that goes against everything she believes in. The moral complexity of Olympia’s arc makes for some of the meatiest parts of the book.
A new global initiative has sprung up in the wake of the climate disaster: Insides. Manmade, city-sized communities sealed off from the outside world where people can apply to live. Jacqueline loves this capitalism-based solution to the crisis and takes on the role of director of the North American Inside. She also sees this as an opportunity to execute her grand vision, explaining to Olympia as she courts her to run the health division that it’s the patriarchal greed of men that has ruined the planet. But Jacqueline isn’t setting her sights on patriarchy so much as on men in general. After all, she has personally benefitted from patriarchy (not to mention capitalism) through the years. Her vision for Inside is drastic: She wants to only admit women and nonbinary people and, basically, anyone who doesn’t self-identify as a man. And she wants to explore the possibility of eliminating men altogether.
In Jacqueline’s mind, to reconstruct the society of outside on the Inside would merely be to reproduce its problems. But in still designating a societal structure based on gender, she’s still reproducing hierarchies and systems of exclusion…just rebranded. “The future is female” gets a lot more complicated when someone reminds you trans people exist. A matriarchy is no better than a patriarchy if it’s just gender-flipping power structures.
Korn explores these contradictions and the failures of a narrow view of gender and power deftly throughout the novel, which is propulsive in its plotting but also its character work. Most of the characters are, indeed, queer women and nonbinary people, but while there isn’t a focus on many male characters, the novel itself doesn’t fall into the same traps it’s calling attention to.
In her construction of Inside — a dystopia within a dystopia — Korn reveals that radical movements driven by power, stratification, and money rather than community and equity all ultimately look the same and pose the same threats regardless of what side of the political spectrum they fall on. Jacqueline would never consider herself right wing; quite the contrary. She has a trans assistant! She believes in feminism! She loves the environment for goodness sake! (These declarative statements should be read with a heavy dose of skepticism; Jacqueline’s neoliberalism is so transparently self-serving.) But her governance leads to people essentially being forced into pregnancy. In Jacqueline’s Inside, the people with the most privilege are pregnant people, and this pedestaling of pregnancy doesn’t look all that different from far right religious extremist movements such as the one depicted in The Handmaid’s Tale. If bearing and raising children is seen as the ultimate “job” Inside, then where does that leave people who can’t or choose not to have kids?
Jacqueline’s nefarious schemes go even deeper than the flawed premise of her reimagined society, but I’ll spare you the spoilers as part of the fun of reading Yours for the Taking is that it really does read like thrilling dystopian sci-fi while still being grounded with more interpersonal storytelling that keeps it from being all plot and no guts. There are multiple queer storylines that include heartbreak, romance, friendship, and sex. Mental health comes up often, too, Ava’s depression during pregnancy particularly affecting. It’s a well devised work of climate horror, and while it races through time, it also zooms into the intimate impacts of its characters’ choices, which are often flawed.
Yours for the Taking understands well that in the face of climate change, capitalism won’t save us. Matriarchy won’t save us. Jacqueline’s attempts to reimagine the world aren’t revolutionary. She manufactures community rather than fostering it. And yet, communities and platonic love and queer love still find a way to bloom despite the constraints of surveillance and suppression. Korn captures those bursts of resistance and hope, but Yours for the Taking is often most enthralling when needling into its characters’ most harmful choices.