Rainbow Reading: Book Recommendations From Hot People Just Hit Different

A+ Read a Fucking Book Club Q&A with Sarah Thankam Mathews

feature photo by Dondre Stuetley

Hello book wyrms, book dragons and all manner of book serpents! Welcome to September and the SECOND iteration of A+ Read a Fucking Book Club. Are you thrilled? I’m thrilled!

This time, we’re reading All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, a book our Managing Editor Kayla called “so good I dreaded finishing it.” So, I’m hopeful that knowing we’ll have a Q&A with the author will help comfort us as we turn the final pages.

The details:

How do I read All This Could Be Different?

You can buy it from Bookshop to support Autostraddle and indie bookstores, or plan to get a copy from your local library! It’s also available as an audiobook on libro.fm, which also supports indie bookstores.

How do I get on the pop-up Discord?

First, you’ll need to make sure you’re an A+ member! A+ members support everything Autostraddle does, and they get all kinds of bonus content as thanks — now including access to the A+ Read a Fucking Book Club!

This post will re-appear on the day of the event, behind the A+ paywall, with the link and join widget, about fifteen minutes before it starts at 4:45pm PST, so that A+ members can join.

When is this again?

It’s taking place on Monday, September 26, so you have several weeks to dig into the book! It’s happening from 5pm PST to 6:30pm PST. Times in some other zones are as follows:

• 8 – 9:30pm, Eastern Standard Time
• 1am – 2:30am, London, UK
• 2am – 3:30am, Berlin, Germany
• 8am – 9:30am, Tuesday, September 27, Hong Kong
• 9am – 10:30am, Tuesday, September 27, Australian Central Time

What if I can’t make it? The time doesn’t work for me :(

I’m sorry (especially if this is in the middle of the night where you are)! This is always so hard. We have to host most events within times that are reasonable for the team working them and the author participating. However, I will publish the transcript the following week behind the A+ paywall, so you will still be able to catch up on the chat!

P.S. If you’re in Europe (truly being hit the hardest by the time zone situation here) or anywhere else where this is straight up in the middle of the night for you, and you have a question you’d love to see asked, you can email me at nico[at]autostraddle.com with the subject line BOOK CLUB QUESTION and I’ll collect them all and ask them on your behalf, and then the transcript will be available the following week for you to check out! I know it’s not a perfect solution, but when it comes to events with live humans who go to sleep at night within their respective time zones, it’s the best we can do right now.

What will the event be like?

It will be a text-based Q&A within Discord. I (Nico) will be there to moderate / help with flow. Basically, read the book (or as much as you can), bring your questions for the author, and ask those questions in the chat! Sarah will be there to talk with everyone and can you tell I’m excited? I’m excited!

Accessibility

We want Autostraddle events to be as accessible as possible and we opted to go with a text-based chatting format via Discord in large part because it was one of the most accessible ways to hold this virtual event, not just in terms of audio/visual accessibility, but also because we know it can be hard to ask a question out loud or know when to jump into a conversation. We hope this helps things go as smoothly as is possible for a virtual event. That said, if there are accommodations that would make it easier for you to attend this event, please reach out to me at nico[at]autostraddle.com to let me know. Also, here’s a link to a guide on using Discord with a screen reader. 

Queer Graphic Novel “Coven” Will Fill the Buffy-Shaped Hole in Your Heart

Do you like witches, gays, and found family? Do you never tire of magical fictional teens and their supernatural angst? Is there a Buffy– or Baby-Sitter’s Club– or Motherland: Fort Salem-shaped hole in your heart? In other words, are you literally me and everyone I love? Well, I have some good news for you: Writer Jennifer Dugan (Melt With You, Some Girls Do, and Hot Dog Girl) and artist Kit Seaton (Wonder Woman: Warbringer) are releasing a graphic novel into the wild just in time for spooky season. It’s called Coven, and it’s everything you love about enchanted youths — but gayer and more racially diverse. Plus: queer love and an adorable cat. It is, as they say in the hit film Twilight, a home run.

It goes like this: Emsy’s mom was Head Witch in her family’s coven in upstate New York, but when Emsy was young, she stepped down from her role and moved the family across the country to California. Unlike her witchy peers, Emsy didn’t grow up learning about and honing her craft. She grew up at the beach, falling in love with other lesbians and snagging herself a girlfriend. She’s enjoying a perfectly normal high school life, thank you very much, until word arrives that members of her family’s coven are being murdered. Emsy is whisked back across the country and tossed into a messy, otherworldly situation she resents with her entire hormonal heart. She doesn’t want anything to do with the other coven kids, but when it turns out the witch hunter is after her family, it’s up to her to actually learn how to use her magic to solve the grisly mysteries unfolding in her hometown and keep her family safe.

Awesome, right? If this was a movie trailer, you’d be tweeting it with a sobbing emoji right now.

Basically all the teens in Emsy’s coven are queer in one way or another, and while she hates their guts on sight, at first — she’d rather be SURFING, okay? — she ends up needing them and then loving them too. The magic system and world-building in Coven are really fun and engaging, especially for a graphic novel on the shorter side. And, of course, Emsy turns out to be more powerful than her wildest imagination. It’s not just Emsy with the misgivings. It turns out her fellow magical teens don’t exactly trust her, and some even blame her and her family for the murder spree that’s unfolding around them. None of the queer witches are closeted or fretting about their queerness in any way. They have to keep their magic hidden, but their sexuality is as chill as the non-surfable waters of the great northeast.

My only real quibble with this book is it’s too short! I wish it was twice as long, or a trilogy! The characters are all so interesting; and this weird little town is like Upside Down Stars Hollow (a very exciting place to be, in my opinion); and I think the payoff of Emsy becoming a super powerful, coven-saving witch would be even more triumphant if the build up was a little bit more fleshed out.

This is my first time engaging with Kit Seaton’s art, and it is so expressive and moody I can’t wait to go back and read everything she’s worked on. It’s also my first experience with writer Kit Seaton, and she’s won me over too. She employs my favorite recapping technique: saying the absurd thing that’s happening right out loud. At one point, one of Emsy’s new friends chides her for spending so much time surfing. “It’s not a very useful skill to have when you’re being stalked by a Death Witch, in the middle of a Witch War, four hours from sea!”

Honestly, that line of dialogue alone is a better selling point for this novel than any review ever will be.

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Coven by Jennifer Dugan and Kit Seaton is out now.

103 Queer and Feminist Books Coming Your Way Fall 2022

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September

Real Bad Things by Kelly J. Ford (September 1)

Space Trash Vol 1 by Jenn Woodall (September 6)

Aces Wild by Amanda DeWitt (September 6)

Our Shadows Have Claws edited by Yamile Saied Méndez and Amparo Ortiz (September 6)

Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life by Alice Wong (September 6)

The Holiday Trap by Roan Parrish (September 6)

The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas (September 6)

Doughnuts and Doom by Balazs Lorinczi (September 6)

Refusing Compulsory Sexuality by Sherronda J. Brown (September 13)

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton (September 13)

Junie by Chelene Knight (September 13)

I’m the Girl by Courtney Summers (September 13)

Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender by Kit Heyam (September 13)

Panics by Barbara Molinard, Translated by Emma Ramadan (September 13)

Nona the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir (September 13)

A Sentimental Education by Hannah McGregor (September 20)

The Black Period by Hafizah Augustus Geter (September 20)

Rust in the Root by Justina Ireland (September 20)

The Unbalancing by R.B. Lemberg (September 20)

The Lost Century by Larissa Lai (September 20)

Other Ever Afters by Melanie Gillman (September 20)

Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, Translated by Holly James (September 27)

Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution by Kacen Callender (September 27)

Leech by Hiron Ennes (September 27)

How to Succeed in Witchcraft by Aislinn Brophy (September 27)

find her. keep her. by Renaada Williams (September 27)

Forest Hills Bootleg Society by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux (September 27)

October

Heartstrings: Melissa Etheridge and Her Guitars by Melissa Etheridge, Kelly Fitzpatrick, Frank Mariffinno, et al (October 3)

The Last Hope in Hopetown by Maria Tureaud (October 4)

Màgòdiz by Gabe Calderón (October 4)

The Family Outing by Jessi Hempel (October 4)

Queer Little Nightmares edited by David Ly and Daniel Zomparelli (October 4)

A Minor Chorus by Billy-Ray Belcourt (October 4)

Cry Perfume by Sadie Dupuis (October 4)

The Future is Disabled by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (October 4)

The Restless Dark by Erica Waters (October 4)

Anne of Greenville by Mariko Tamaki (October 4)

A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo (October 4)

Movements and Moments edited by Sonja Eismann, Maya Schöningh, and Ingo Schöningh (October 4)

Where the Lost Ones Go by Akemi Dawn Bowman (October 11)

Mistakes Were Made by Meryl Wilsner (October 11)

Season of Love by Helena Greer (October 11)

Power: The Rise of Black Women in America by Charity C. Elder (October 11)

Jade is a Twisted Green by Tanya Turton (October 11)

It Came from the Closet: Queer Reflections on Horror edited by Joe Vallese (October 4)

Will Do Magic for Small Change by Andrea Hairston (October 13)

Helen House by Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya (October 18)

When We Were Sisters by Fatimah Asghar (October 18)

When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (October 18)

Lavender House by Lev A.C. Rosen (October 18)

Hazel Hill Is Gonna Win This One by Maggie Horne (October 18)

Whorephobia: Strippers on Art, Work, and Life edited by Lizzie Borden (October 18)

Nothing Sung and Nothing Spoken by Nita Tyndall (October 18)

Life in Every Breath: Ester Blenda by Fatima Bremmer, Translated by Gloria Nneoma Onwuneme (October 18)

Pretend It’s My Body by Luke Dani Blue (October 18)

Dream Rooms by River Halen (October 18)

README.txt by Chelsea Manning (October 18)

Unsettling: Surviving Extinction Together by Elizabeth Weinberg (October 18)

Into the Riverlands by Nghi Vo (October 25)

Heretic by Jeanna Kadlec (October 25)

The Scratch Daughters by Hannah Abigail Clarke (October 25)

Anne: An Adaptation of Anne of Green Gables by Kathleen Gros (October 25)

The Call-Out by Cat Fitzpatrick (October 25)

Faltas: Letters to Everyone in My Hometown Who Isn’t My Rapist by Cecilia Gentili (October)

November

The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (November 1)

When Franny Stands Up by Eden Robins (November 1)

Learned by Carellin Brooks (November 1)

A Restless Truth by Freya Marske (November 1)

The Frenemy Zone by Yolanda Wallace (November 1)

Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun (November 1)

The World We Make by N.K. Jemisin (November 1)

How to Excavate a Heart by Jake Maia Arlow (November 1)

Rethinking Gender by Louie Läuger (November 1)

Small Game by Blair Braverman (November 1)

The Forever Factor by Melissa Brayden (November 1)

Even Though I Knew the End by C.L. Polk (November 8)

Holding Space: Life and Love Through a Queer Lens by Ryan Pfluger (November 8)

A Short History of Queer Women by Kirsty Loehr (November 8)

The Long Covid Survival Guide edited by Fiona Lowenstein (November 8)

The Age of Goodbyes by Li Zi Shu, Translated by YZ Chin (November 8)

Cyclettes by Tree Abraham (November 10)

The Polyamory Workbook by Sara Youngblood Gregory (November 15)

Reader, I Murdered Him by Betsy Cornwell (November 15)

The Secret of Matterdale Hall by Marianne Ratcliffe (November 15)

Securing Ava by Anne Shade (November 15)

Mabel and Everything After by Hannah Safren (November 17)

Astrid Parker Doesn’t Fail by Ashley Herring Blake (November 22)

Schuss by E.J. Noyes (November 22)

At Midnight edited by Dahlia Adler (November 22)

Never Ever Getting Back Together by Sophie Gonzales (November 29)

The Two Doctors Górski by Isaac Fellman (November 29)

We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds (November 29)

I Thought You Loved Me by MariNaomi (November)

December

Last Chance Chicago by Diana Digangi (December 6)

The Ivory Tomb by Melissa Caruso (December 6)

This Cursed Crown by Alexandra Overy (December 6)

Camp Lost and Found by Georgia Beers (December 13)

A Million to One by Adiba Jaigirdar (December 13)

A Spark in the Air by Dena Blake (December 13)

Picture-Perfect Christmas by Charlotte Greene (December 13)

Winter’s Moons by Lise MacTague (December 15)

I Dare You to Love Me by Lori G. Matthews (December 20)

After Happily Ever After Once Again edited by Astrid Ohletz (December)

“Middlesex” Has a Complicated Legacy — 20 Years Ago, It Changed My Life

I: “I feel another birth coming on.”

In fall 2002, I was 14 years old, and I felt like the world couldn’t possibly get any worse.

I had just started my freshman year at a Catholic high school that was beyond my family’s economic means, George W. Bush was president, the racist and hate-fueled aftermath of 9/11 was tearing communities apart, another American war in Southwest Asia was on the horizon, Aaliyah had been dead for a whole year, my mom’s alcoholism was getting more severe, I wasn’t straight, and something I can now identify as gender dysphoria was changing the way I viewed myself and how I interacted with the world around me. I wanted so badly to be the kind of kid who was obsessed with the Spider-Man movie that came out that summer or Kelly Clarkson’s now legendary run on American Idol, but everything was so distracting that not even the glitz of big summer blockbusters and reality competition shows helped me escape.

Being a child in the 90s was strange because it felt like everything in the U.S. was constantly moving forward even when it technically wasn’t. When the new millennium came around, it felt as if that forward momentum halted entirely. By the time high school began, some of the most common political conversations revolved around the questions of same-sex marriage, whether Islam was “compatible” with “American values,” and how much state surveillance is too much state surveillance. Although neither my school nor my family were quite as conservative as they seemed to me then, I felt trapped in a box of traditionalist thinking that I couldn’t define or speak about properly. I didn’t know how to explain myself to others, and I didn’t understand how and why people around me kept pretending everything in our society was business as usual even though I could see through their behavior that nothing was right about what was going on.

In the few years between elementary school and high school, my life at home became turbulent. Communication between me and my parents and extended family wasn’t as open or intimate as it should have been. I didn’t think anyone was really listening to me when I talked, and I couldn’t get straight answers to anything that was unrelated to the very basic details of my daily life. School, for me, had long been a place where adults listened, even if it was only to correct me, so I always looked for as many possible ways as I could to be heard there. I loved reading and writing, and I loved to be a part of teams and groups. I thrived in situations where I could do all of these things at once.

When I originally chose Journalism as my elective class that summer before high school started, I believed it would teach me to turn my endless curiosity and concern into investigative skills that could help me both uncover the answers to the questions I had and discuss my findings in a way that would make people want to listen. The teacher of the class at the time was a middle-aged man who wasn’t married, didn’t have any children, and had a certain flair about his movements and the way he talked that all my friends and I identified as gay. There was absolutely no hard evidence that he was, but he felt like family to us, so we treated him that way and thought of his word as gospel. Desperate to learn all I could and be taken seriously as a “person with opinions,” I poured myself into that class from the moment it began. I respected the teacher more than I ever had any other teacher in my life, so I also wanted to prove to him that my personal growth was worth his extra time and attention. As winter break crept up on us that semester, he was the first person I went to for book recommendations. In the fall, he’d recommended James Baldwin’s work, which I was immediately transfixed by, so I trusted him to know what was most important for me to read.

“I just read this incredible novel called Middlesex,” he said. “It’s kind of dense and has some surprising subject matter, but I think you’re up for the challenge of both.”

I took the bus to the library that day to get the book.

II: “Like Tiresias, I was first one thing and then another.”

This is technically an essay about Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex on the 20th anniversary of its release.

It feels surreal to imagine the birth of a book that is so wholly focused on being born/”born” and dying/”dying” and being “born” again. And that, 20 years later, I’m still interrogating my relationship with this text. But before we go any further, I feel like I should give some plot context.

Middlesex begins with the narrator, Cal Stephanides, explaining the unusual circumstances of his conception, but the story of the novel really begins about 18 pages in with Cal’s grandmother, Desdemona, a Greek sericulturist living in a small village named Bithynios on the Aegean Sea in 1922. At the start of the novel, Desdemona is grieving the death of her parents in the Greco-Turkish War a few years earlier, and her whole life is about to change. First, she’ll realize she’s in love with her brother, Lefty, and then together, they’ll be forced to leave Bithynios for their cousin Lina’s house in Detroit, Michigan because of The Great Fire of Smyrna. On their way, Lefty and Desdemona deceive the people traveling with them into believing they are simply lovers looking forward to starting their new life together in the U.S. Once they’re in the States, Desdemona and Lefty struggle to find their footing in a society that was still outwardly hostile to white ethnic minorities, and Desdemona loses sleep over the possibility of their secret coming out. Desdemona and Lefty don’t exactly assimilate, but they do begin to set roots in Detroit. Lefty opens a bar called The Zebra Room while Desdemona finds a job as a silk worker. Along the way, they have a son, Milton, and around the same time, their cousin Lina gives birth to a daughter named Tessie. Milton and Tessie fall in love and have two children, Cal’s older brother and a few years later, Tessie gives birth to Calliope, named so because at the time of his birth, the doctor believed Cal was a girl.

From there, the novel’s scope narrows, focusing its attention on Cal’s childhood and adolescence and how he views the events happening around him. We know at the beginning of the novel that Cal is born intersex, but he doesn’t know until he’s 14-years-old. Before that pivotal moment, we see various changes in Cal’s life and his family members’ lives through his eyes. During the summer of 1967, Cal is a firsthand witness to the Detroit Riots as he watches The Zebra Room burn down despite Milton’s best efforts to defend it. With the insurance money from the fire, Milton decides to move the family out to a strangely built house on Middlesex Boulevard in the suburbs of Detroit. Cal’s life in the suburbs is punctuated by the things most young people’s lives are punctuated by: crushes on his neighbor; being bullied by the pretty, rich girls at school; questioning the changes in his body; experimenting sexually with other teenagers; and falling in love with the first beautiful young woman he gets close to. After an accident lands Cal in the hospital and the doctors reveal to him and his parents that he is intersex, Milton and Tessie take Cal to see a doctor who specializes in “sexual disorders” like Cal’s. The doctor — modeled after real-life bad guy Dr. John Money — determines Cal has 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency and recommends he undergo surgery to ensure his genitals appear “more female.” In response to this plan, Cal cuts his hair and adopts a more outwardly masculine appearance, then runs away to San Francisco and works at a sex club until family trouble brings him back, fully himself, to that same strange house on Middlesex Boulevard.

Although grown-up Cal interjects commentary about his current life throughout the course of the novel (including a little romance that serves as a backdrop for his self-explanation and examination in the text), it really covers 80 years of Cal’s family history and the history of the U.S., from 1922 to 2002. The novel’s scale is long, and it includes references to many major events in American history throughout that time. There is so much contained within these pages that it would probably take several essays to get through the breadth of the plot entirely. Through Cal’s narration, we see much more than what was mentioned above. We see refugees coming to the U.S. through Ellis Island, World War II, the Civil Rights Movement, white flight, the Vietnam War, the hippie movement, the Cold War, the Watergate Scandal.

On a very basic level, the novel is about transitions, about things being one way and then another. Lefty and Desdemona go from siblings to lovers, from refugees to settled (albeit not very comfortably) in a new country, from parents to grandparents, young to old. Milton goes from the child of marginalized immigrants to a successful entrepreneur. Cal’s brother becomes a hippie then a communist then a burn out. Tessie is, at first, the mother of a daughter and a son then becomes the mother of two sons. And of course, Cal experiences a couple different “transitions” of his own. Even beyond that, we also see the culture of the U.S. shifting and transitioning alongside the Stephanides family and we see how those changes impact them. Desdemona is defiant against assimilation while Milton is willing to give up anything to be treated as the white American man he is.

It’s sweeping and expansive in scope, and every time I reread it or think about it, really, it’s still shocking to me that it was published. Even more shocking is that it ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize the following year. It’s true that before Middlesex, Eugenides was already a critically lauded writer, but on its bare face, the novel is long and dense and weird. It makes use of many of the tropes of both Greek comedy and tragedy, references tons of figures and events in Greek mythology, and both plays with and employs the structure of epic poetry. I mean, Cal even calls out to the Muses at one point. It’s a Bildungsroman, it’s a family saga, it’s a modernist masterpiece, and it showcases just about every narrative point-of-view available. The language is so lush, and to this day, has some of the most sublime metaphors I’ve ever read in my life. When Cal is narrating his grandparents’ journey to the U.S. and compares his revelations to the discovery of silk in 27th century BC China, he says, “I feel a little like that Chinese princess […] Like her I unravel my story, and the longer the thread, the less there is left to tell. Retrace the filament and you go back to the cocoon’s beginning in a tiny knot, a first tentative loop.” And the playfulness of the writing and sense of humor used throughout seem unusual for the story Eugenides is telling.

In the winter of 2002, I couldn’t get enough of it.

III: “My spoon was right.”

It’s not that I knew exactly what Cal was going through, but the familiarities were enough to make me feel understood.

The night I picked up the book from the library, I sat up in my room until 4 a.m. I’ve never been the fastest reader, but I finished it over the course of the next two days. Once I was finished with it, I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.

Somewhere over the course of the text, I felt something inside me cracking and breaking. I began to feel less restrained by and less beholden to the values swirling around me at the time. I had known I was queer since I was 11 and saw Sigourney Weaver strip down to her underwear in Alien. By the time that winter of my freshman year came around, I was already a couple months into an ill-advised, on-again/off-again relationship with a young woman five years older than I was who lived a few blocks away from my house. At 14, the question of “Am I?” or “Am I not?” was never what kept me up at night. What I worried about was what I was supposed to do with it all. I worried about how to tell my family, how to talk to other adults about it, and what it would be like to grow up into a queer adult. I had questions about my body — about the way I felt in my body, and about the way I felt when other people felt my body — but I couldn’t properly articulate them to myself or anyone else.

When I read Middlesex, I felt that tinge of recognition I think a lot of queer and trans people look for when they realize something is different about themselves. Someone, somewhere understood me. But Cal’s experiences with/within his body weren’t the only things that seemed to funhouse mirror my life.

As I read the book, I was growing up in a momentous time in American history in the same way Cal did in the text as a child. The year before, 9/11 happened. When I look back, I know all it did was expose what was true about American culture before it happened. But living through it felt different. It felt like everything was changing. And to be fair, a lot did change in terms of the way the state uses surveillance. But I wasn’t exactly thinking about that in 2002. I was thinking about the way people treated my brown neighbors and friends, the nasty things I’d hear adults say about immigrants, and the way everyone seemed to be on edge all the time. It didn’t feel good to be a kid, because it always felt as if adults around me were trying to get me to think like them in the same way Cal’s father Milton is constantly trying to get Cal and his brother to value whiteness like he does.

Similar to Cal’s grandparents escaping Bithynios in the 1920s, my southern Italian great-great and great-grandparents on both sides of my family came to the U.S. in the 1930s to escape the oppression and devastation by the National Fascist Party in Italy that they foresaw worsening in the 1930s. Arriving in the U.S. by boat — or in one of my great-grandfather’s cases, through an elaborate ruse he set up to get here by pretending he was going to compete in a bicycle race in Canada — with barely anything to their names, my ancestors entered an American society that was reluctant to accept them as American and as fully human. They felt the pressure to assimilate, going so far as making sure their language wasn’t passed down to their kids and grandkids out of fear it would signal they weren’t grateful to be in the U.S. I didn’t grow up feeling the diaspora vibes as strongly as Cal did, but there were definitely moments of my life that were made both more interesting and more difficult by the fact that I was different in this way from the kids around me, especially when it came to other white kids. Like older Cal in the book, it would take me until I was a bit older to see the way my family’s insistence on assimilation and their acceptance of the white supremacist values of the U.S. damaged our relationships with our heritage, with marginalized people around us, and with each other. Cal’s experiences have stayed in the back of my mind at every new discovery and understanding of their lives.

And of course, there was our queerness and the queerness of our relationships to our bodies. Cal recognizes early in the novel that he’s attracted to girls, and his first kiss happens with his neighbor, Clementine. Eugenides’s description of Cal’s feelings in this part of the novel felt so dead-on to the way I felt when I also kissed a girl neighbor friend on the lips for the very first time, like “a kind of swish.” Then, as Cal gets older and his body begins changing the way puberty makes all of our bodies change, Cal starts feeling less connected to it, less like it’s his after all. He feels clunky and awkward in his own skin, unsure of where he belongs and why he feels the way he feels. Nothing looks right about his body to him, and he fears other people can see that there is, in fact, something wrong with it. As a fat 14-year-old who didn’t meet the criteria for our society’s standards of beauty, it was so easy for me to relate to this, but the relation came from somewhere even deeper than that. As young kids, neither of us had the power or the language to define what kind of bodies we had or how we wanted people to perceive them. Midway through the novel, as Cal is discussing his early adolescence, he says, “Unlike the rest of me, which seemed bent on doing whatever it wanted, my hair remained under my control” and then explains, “…there were virtues to my hair. It covered tinsel teeth. It covered satyrical nose. It hid blemishes and, best of all, it hid me.” The shared sense of something being off in a way that no one else seemed to be experiencing helped me feel less alone.

IV:  “I’m quickly approaching the moment of discovery…”

Here is where I tell you there are some problems with Middlesex.

For some, the most glaring issue is that Jeffrey Eugenides is a straight, cis man. But you probably knew that already. When I’ve taught this book in my high school English classes, my students see Eugenides’s last name and Cal’s last name and ask me if this is about Eugenides’s life. It’s not, though I imagine many of the immigration-related and Michigan-related parts of the text come straight from similar experiences. But at the end of the day, it’s fiction.

At 14, I wasn’t thinking much about who was writing what books and when. I didn’t know anything about the book publishing industry, how it worked, who got published and who didn’t. I was lucky that in my high school and in my life at home, there was an abundance of diversity in the media I consumed. I read and watched stories about all kinds of people, and I didn’t give a lot of thought to who was producing those stories. I just wanted to experience them. Authors, to me, were just a small part of the equation.

Five years after reading the book for the first time, I learned in my second semester in college who Jeffrey Eugenides is. I don’t mean I didn’t realize he was the author. I mean, I didn’t know who he was until I was considering using Middlesex for a paper in one of my seminar classes. I searched for some information about Eugenides, and there he was, in about a dozen or so different interviews and reviews, talking about how the book was born, the decade it took to write it, and the story that inspired him to write Cal’s. To be completely honest, even though I felt disappointed that Eugenides is not a member of the intersex or queer or trans communities, I couldn’t handle juggling that knowledge with the emotional connection I had been actively fostering through reread after reread for so many years. The novel became one in a small pantheon of other texts that, in no hyperbolic way, kept me alive through some of the hardest moments in my life.

When I got to my upper level literature courses during my second year of college, I was being introduced to so many new ideas, writers, and theorists that I didn’t have time for rereads. I didn’t visit the pantheon again until I started graduate school. Reading Middlesex again after all of that time and radicalization and emotional development felt like a different experience all together. Emotionally, I was right there in it with Cal like I always had been, but intellectually, I could see where and why people — especially queer people, trans people, and intersex people — don’t always have the most positive connections with the text.

Eugenides himself admitted in many interviews after the book came out that the idea for Cal’s story came to him after he read a book called Herculine Barbin, a short memoir by a French intersex woman who lived and died in the mid-1800s. The memoir follows the life of Alexina/Camille/Abel who — after falling in love with another woman, getting caught in the affair, and being found out as intersex — was sentenced by the courts to live her life as a man. She committed suicide at 30-years-old because of the forced isolation and poverty that came with the punishment of pretending she was someone she wasn’t. In one interview published in The New York Times in 2003, Eugenides calls Barbin’s work “very melodramatic” and “evasive about the anatomical details,” so he decided to “write the story that [he] wasn’t getting from the memoir.” Every time I think of this, it makes me feel like I’m complicit in the theater of some cis man’s morbid curiosity.

Then, there is the matter of the incest. Eugenides connects Cal’s intersex diagnosis to the nature of his family’s relationships. His grandparents are brother and sister, and his parents are second cousins, and through Cal’s narration, Eugenides treats the gene carrying 5α-Reductase 2 deficiency as if it’s its own character with its own thoughts, feelings, and intentions of coming for Cal in response to the “transgressions” of his family. Early in the novel, Desdemona refuses to consummate her relationship with Lefty because she keeps having nightmares of babies born with physical deformities, and later, Desdemona confirms to Cal that she had always heard stories in the small village where her and Lefty are from about people who were born girls and then turned into boys. Because the connection is so explicit, it’s easy to see how some might interpret or see this as further stigmatization of an already highly stigmatized group of people in our society. Children who are born intersex are often subject to surgeries they can’t and don’t consent to and grow up to be intersex adults who have to deal with the reality of that. Intersex people experience discrimination and hardships that many people don’t have to deal with and don’t understand.

Researching people’s reactions to Middlesex online yields criticisms that are all over the place. A lot of intersex people, trans people, and queer people hate the novel. A lot of intersex people, trans people, and queer people say it accurately reflected the thoughts, feelings, and experiences they had when they were younger. Some people say it’s too long or too odd or overly descriptive. Others think it’s the most well-written and meticulous account of growing up in the U.S. in the 20th century they’ve ever read. In the “critical reception” section on the Wikipedia page for the novel, a number of positive reviews in medical journals from doctors who specialize in care for people born intersex are quoted and cited. There is a post on Book Riot written by an intersex writer from as recent as 2020 that applauds the work Eugenides did in the text.

I’m not going to say people should excuse the problems I’ve pointed out here or ignore them — because they shouldn’t. I don’t. Even now, I don’t know how to fully reconcile the value I know resides in reading this novel and the dilemma of its existence.

V: “Biology gives you a brain. Life turns it into a mind.”

The fact that Middlesex was published and remains important in the American canon is not, in any way, a liberatory act that will help intersex people and trans people gain the peace and freedom they deserve, but it helped me free myself and my imagination of so many of the limitations I learned without even realizing. That’s what keeps me coming back to Middlesex. And it’s the reason why I adopted it as one of the seven anchor texts I use in my classroom.

In my Advanced Placement English Language & Composition course, we study Middlesex at the very end of the year because, by that time, we’ve covered books and materials that address some of the things mentioned in the novel in some way: xenophobia, white supremacy, systemic racism, the problems of capitalism, and immigration to the U.S. Before we begin reading Middlesex and during our discussions on it, we also read, watch, and listen to essays, articles, videos, and podcast episodes written or produced by and about intersex people and trans people.

We have conversations about gender and sex and the myriad ways we can categorize and define both. During our study of the novel itself, I talk to them about how I felt the first time I read it and about how much it taught me. I remind them about the power of fiction, about how much we can gain from just letting ourselves live in someone else’s world for a while. That first time I finished reading through the novel entirely, I didn’t think of Cal as a stand-in for every intersex person I’d ever know. I didn’t assume that every person born intersex was born that way because their grandparents were brother and sister and their parents were cousins. And I didn’t think that every person in Cal’s situation could or would get the same (fairly) happy ending that he did. So, my students and I talk about the limits of fiction, also, and the purpose of reading fiction in the first place.

At the end of our study, we talk about Eugenides. We talk about whether or not it was acceptable for him to write Middlesex and for the publishers to publish it and about some of the problems addressed in this essay. But because 17-year-olds are some of the most insightful people you’ll ever meet, these conversations usually aren’t very long. We spend a lot of time discussing this quote: “But in the end it wasn’t up to me. The big things never are. Birth, I mean, and death. And love. And what love bequeaths to us before we’re born.” And how inextricably tied to the past, to the histories of our families, and to the world that existed before us we all are. We discuss what that means for the trajectory of our lives and why understanding those connections is so important in our examinations of the world around us.

Often, my students — the majority of whom are white, cis, and heterosexual — are surprised by how much they find in the text to relate to, how much they can see themselves mirrored in the experiences of the characters. Some of them also experience that same cracking and breaking I did. They come to me in between their classes or at break or at lunch to tell me their minds are blown, and they don’t want the novel to end. I hope that after they’re long gone from high school, they’ll use some of the lessons they learned from it and from my class to help free people who aren’t in the same positions they are.

VI: “We’re all made up of many parts, other halves. Not just me.”

I’m not intersex. I was assigned female at birth, but I’m not a woman. I’m not a man, either. I describe myself and my sexuality as queer because that is the closest and quickest explanation currently available to me of who I am, what I believe, and what kinds of sex I like to have.

I don’t think Cal’s experiences are reflective of the experiences of everyone in the LGBTQIA+ community, but some of them are so close to mine, it’s sometimes difficult to even fully discuss it with people close to me when we’re talking about Middlesex. Like Cal, I never felt like I had full agency over my body and how people interacted with it. The world around me made me feel like my body was too big, too unruly, and out of place everywhere, so I never really knew what to do with it. Then, as I got older, it wasn’t just my body that felt out of control but also my desires. In middle school, all my friends dreamed of growing up and getting married to someone who looked like Nick from The Backstreet Boys. They would talk about kissing and having sex with boys from our school, while I was replaying the scene from Titanic where Rose takes off her robe over and over again in my head. I didn’t want to do any of it. I wanted to make out with one of the girls in the grade above me, and I wanted her to show me my body wasn’t as unmanageable as everyone made me believe it was. It felt like torture every day that I couldn’t — and that I couldn’t even talk about it.

I carried all of that straight into high school and into that relationship with the girl who lived not too far away from me. My first sexual relationship ever. Since she was older, she had much more experience, and she wielded that experience over me as if I’d never figure out queer sex on my own. She instructed me, “Think of yourself as the man” and so I did even though that didn’t exactly feel like the right way to explain how it was supposed to go. Then, whenever she would touch me back, I felt overwhelmed, not just because it felt good but also, surprisingly, because it scared the shit out of me to entrust someone with the soft places of my body. Trying to navigate this at 14 with the limited language I had due to my age and what the world was like back then felt lonesome and grim. Reading about Cal’s experiences in his 14-year-old and 42-year-old bodies helped open an escape route out of despair for me. It didn’t give me the language I needed to fully express myself, but it helped me envision other possibilities of who I could be and how I could be.

When I read Middlesex now, I still feel like I’m reading about myself, about how the past is part of us no matter what, and about a possibly freer future for people like me, like Cal, like so many others. Cal isn’t just an intersex person who was raised female and then later chooses to embrace his maleness. He still feels Calliope within him, and he honors that part of himself by paying attention to it. There is narration in the text to support the arguments that Cal thinks of his genes as a punishment and as a biological accident and as a blessing. He doesn’t hate himself or his parents or the doctor who delivered him for not noticing he wasn’t exactly the daughter they all thought he was. There is so much nuance in the way Cal’s story is presented and progresses.

In the end, when Desdemona finally confesses to Cal that Lefty was her brother and she thinks she is the one responsible for Cal’s condition, Cal isn’t angry or sad. He responds simply: “I like my life. I’m going to have a good life.” Despite it all.

Most days, I like my life, too. And I know I’m going to have a good one. I already am.

Get in Your Back-to-School Feelings With These 10 Queer YA Books

Back-to-school time is my favorite time of the year now that I’m an adult. Summer is over, my kiddo is out of the house during the day, life returns to a routine. But sometimes I miss the time in my life when “back to school” meant shopping at the mall for a new first-day-of-school outfit, loading up on blank notebooks and pens, and seeing my friends for the first time in months.

Books that feature high-school-aged characters bring me right back to those times. There is something to be said about going back to that time when you know it’s long behind you. School is such an important part of your life when you’re a teen, and capturing those moments in a story, or having much of the story revolve around the day to day of being in high school, just hit a little different. At least they do for me. If you miss it a little or just need a reminder of what that feels like, this is the list for you.

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Fresh by Margot Wood

The first year of college is a real ride, am I right? Elliot McHugh thinks her first year at Emerson College is going to be a breeze. Little does she know she’s going to be the living embodiment of the phrase “fuck around and find out.” She thinks freshman year is going to be full of sex and shenanigans (which it is) but then she forgets one important part…SCHOOL. It’s one thing to not have declared a major yet, but it’s a whole different thing to half-ass your way through classes and expect to pass. Elliot definitely learns this the hard way, as so many of us do.

This book is also one of the queerest YA/NA books I think I’ve ever read. Elliot is hella queer. She sleeps with a bevy of co-eds throughout the book, and she also has a ton a queer friends. Despite really taking advantage of the amount of new people to sleep with, she keeps having the most deliciously intense sexual tension with her RA, Rose. Rose is constantly exasperated by Elliot’s shenanigans, and Elliot hates that Rose is somehow always around and spoiling her fun. (PS: the book is a loose retelling of Emma, so Rose’s last name is Knightley after the Mr. Knightley character in the book.)

Fresh is such a fun romp of a book. Because Elliot has ADHD, there are footnotes in the book so you can follow along with her thoughts as they kind of ping ping around in her brain. Also, you’re never going to look at chicken tenders the same way ever again.

As a content warning, there’s a sexual assault midway through the book.

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Home Field Advantage by Dahlia Adler

I am not a sports queer by any stretch of the imagination. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love a sports story — especially a football story. So when I heard about this book, I was intrigued, and it’s by one of my favorite YA authors.

Amber has one goal: to become captain of the cheerleading squad her senior year. And she’s well on her way to making that happen. That is, until Jack shows up. The new team quarterback, Jack, isn’t what anyone is expecting — she’s a girl. Amber is the most surprised — not because Jack’s a girl, but because she can’t stay away from her. But if Amber gets too close to Jack, she stands to lose a lot; most importantly, her chance as captain of the cheerleading squad. But sometimes you gotta do it.

This book really does perfectly encapsulate those first few months of a new school year as an upperclassman. I didn’t go to regular high school, but I really wish I had just to experience Homecoming from a distance.

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Tell Me How You Really Feel by Aminah Mae Safi

There is nothing I love more than a good enemies-to-lovers story, and I think it’s because of this book. Rachel and Sana could not be more different: Rachel is a feminist filmmaker and Sana is gasp a cheerleader. And after an incident sophomore year, they’ve been sworn mortal enemies…but are they really?

With Rachel dangerously close to not completing her senior project film (which she has to finish to go to film school), the only way she’s going to get it done is if they work together. Sana is the only person who can star in it and show Rachel all the things she’s missing. Not only is Sana the picture perfect leading lady, but she’s the only one who will dare challenge Rachel’s creative vision. Maybe they’re not actually mortal enemies; maybe it’s just fear. For Rachel, it’s the fear of trusting someone, but for Sana, falling for Rachel brings out the fear of people knowing who she really is. Especially because she’s not as sure as she once was about it.

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The Love Curse of Melody McIntyre by Robin Talley

I didn’t know how badly I needed this queer theatre nerd book until I read it. If you’re a theatre kid (like I was), you know all about showmances. There’s something about spending a lot of long hours with people that can make you fall in love with them. But sometimes, they can really get in the way of the production, and that has dire consequences for everyone involved.

Melody McIntyre is no stranger to a school production showmance. She’s had one for just about every play she’s been a stage manager for, often with utterly disastrous consequences for not only her but the production itself. So when her friends make her swear she will keep their spring musical strictly professional, she takes the challenge. They’re doing Les Miserables, her favorite show and the one she’s been dreaming of stage managing since she was a kid. And things are going well…until she finds herself spending a lot of time with Odile Rose, one of the show’s stars.

Now Melody’s stuck. Because the one thing she wants to do is the one thing she literally can’t. But curses are meant to be broken, aren’t they?

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Her Royal Highness by Rachel Hawkins

A royal with a bad streak, girls who kiss, and boarding school in the Scottish Highlands? Say less.

Millie ends up in a far too common situation for a teenage queer; she’s ended up in a romantic entanglement with her best friend, who then acts like it wasn’t serious between them and starts kissing someone else. Some people would just sit at a different lunch table, but not Millie. She applies to (and gets into) an exclusive prep school in Scotland. Culture shock is a thing to deal with, but she has no idea that her roommate Flora is going to be an actual freaking princess. And she’s a total brat.

After getting over Flora’s attitude and a reality check, the girls realize the other isn’t so bad. Before Millie can believe it, they’re kissing behind giant rocks in the idyllic Scottish countryside (more of this please!) and sneaking off during Flora’s royal engagements to make out (again, more of this!). But Millie doesn’t think she can do this whole kissing-in-secret thing again. Will they figure out how to navigate the world together?

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We Used to Be Friends by Amy Spaulding

It’s hard to capture an entire school year in one book, which is why most authors won’t do it. But Amy Spaulding does it in the most clever way possible — a dual POV story told in dual timelines. (Think like the musical The Last Five Years but teenage girls.) James (a girl with a “boy’s” name) is telling the story of the ending of her relationship with her best friend Kat from the end of senior year to the beginning, while Kat tells the story from the beginning to the end.

James is suffering mightily because her parents — who she thinks are the definition of the perfect relationship — are getting divorced. So of course, she’s going through a total crisis of faith when it comes to love. But at the same time, Kat, who has been dating the same shitty guy for most of high school, meets someone new and falls in love. That someone just happens to be a new girl who intrigues Kat after a meet cute with a lasagna (that was the first thing I heard about the book, and I was SOLD).

While the dissolution of the friendship is the crux of the book, Kat’s budding relationship with Quinn is a huge part of her storyline, including their fight to both be crowned prom queen. Senior year is so emotionally fraught without the addition of a new love interest and the struggle of losing your best friend in the process.

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The Prom by Saundra Mitchell

This book is a novelization of the Broadway musical of the same name, which is cool because it goes to places the play can’t because of time constraints. Mitchell worked with the creative team from the musical to make sure the story doesn’t stray too far from the original, and as someone who has seen the musical and read the book, I think it does a good job.

Emma wants to take her girlfriend Alyssa to the senior prom. But they live in Indiana, and the PTA who hosts the prom has decided to cancel it under the pretense of maintaining the town’s family values. Oh, and Alyssa’s mom is the head of the PTA and totally unaware of the baby gay in her house. Obviously things get complicated. Alyssa was going to use the prom to come out to her mom. After a group of clueless and desperate Broadway actors show up to champion Emma’s cause to elevate their own fame, Emma learns an important lesson: You have to take your story into your own hands.

The promposals in this make me really glad that wasn’t a thing when I was in high school. Isn’t prom stressful enough without having to throw a person a parade to ask them to go with you?

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Forward March by Skye Quinlan

Most of the time in pop culture, band kids are the butt of the joke or just side characters. This book is bringing a band kid front and center. Even though Harper is called “Band Geek,” she’s more than that. For starters, she’s trying to figure out her sexuality, complicated by the fact that her dad is a Republican.

Someone decides to troll Harper by creating a dating profile for her without her knowledge — a big no-no. If her mom — the school dean — found out, it would be big trouble for several reasons, including the fact that Harper still isn’t sure that she’s into girls. But then the leader of the drumline, Margot, swipes right. And now Harper has a lot to figure out. And did I mention that her REPUBLICAN dad is running for president? Her being into girls could really slow his momentum on the campaign trail. But sometimes you just have to be who you are, even if it costs your dad the White House.

Forward March also features an asexual lesbian main character, which is something we don’t see nearly enough.

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Some Girls Do by Jennifer Dugan

School is such an important part of this story for multiple reasons. First, Morgan is kicked out of her Catholic school where she’s a track star because being out and proud goes against their code of conduct. Senior year is almost over, but she has to transfer to a new school where her running career is in danger, which could mess up going to college for her.

For Ruby, college is something that feels too out of reach. She lives with her mom in a trailer and works in exchange for pageant lessons. Her mother’s pageant career ended when she got pregnant, and so even though she’d rather be working on her classic car, she spackles on the makeup and rhinestones to keep her mom happy. But then she learns that pageants can help her pay for community college and get out from her mom’s thumb.

The two girls meet by chance when Ruby almost runs Morgan over with her car. But then they just keep crossing paths and realize they don’t mind it. Morgan finds her queer community for the first time, while Ruby keeps her sexuality stuffed away like a pair of socks to fill the cups on her pageant dress. How will they overcome the hurdle (couldn’t help it) together?

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Cool for the Summer by Dahlia Adler

I told you all how much I love this author, so let this be a testament to that. When I first heard this book described, it was sold to me as a queer version of Grease. Listen, that’s all I needed to know. This book was one of my most anticipated reads of 2021. One of the things it does best is paint a picture of the beginning of the school year. Even though you’re in school, your mind still drifts to summer. So imagine how Lara feels when her summer fling Jasmine shows up at school, throwing a wrench in the budding relationship with BMOC Chase that Lara has been dreaming about since freshman year.

The struggle of having your summer crush (the one you never saw coming and never thought you’d see again) show up on your first day of school is deliciously played here. Sun-kissed hair among the lockers, the tans fading even though the memories won’t. But also, there’s this weird reality of having that person in what you thought was your space. Trying to pay attention in English class is hard when you’re remembering the feeling of your fling’s hands on your body, and Lara’s in for a wild ride.

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Bonus Middle Grade Option:

Drew Leclair Gets A Clue by Katryn Bury

This middle grade story is an explicitly queer, modern day Harriet the Spy. True crime fan Drew has to use her sleuthing skills (and her dearth of internet resources including her online sleuthing group) to figure out who has been cyberbullying her classmates. On top of that, she is deep in the throes of early adolescence. Her mom left and she’s trying to wrap her head around that. Oh, and she thinks that she may be attracted to girls, which would explain a lot about who she tends to like.

This book smacks you right back to middle school in a visceral kind of way. But it’s sweet and has a whole lot of heart. Plus, who doesn’t love a baby queer?

Slow Takes: “Stone Fruit” and Choosing Given Family

I learned about the concept of chosen family from a heterosexual uncle I don’t talk to anymore.

We had a brief period of closeness when I was about ten. Once a week, he started taking me to play tennis. I wasn’t very good, and it wasn’t my favorite sport — in part because I wasn’t very good — but it was nice to spend a day with my uncle who was more intellectual and more interested in art than anyone else in my family.

One day, driving home from the court, he told me I should never feel obligated toward family. He told me that family, like any other person we encounter in life, was optional. If I didn’t want to spend time with, talk to, or care about someone, I should feel no guilt about that.

I’d never heard this sentiment expressed before. And I’d never considered whether or not I wanted to visit with family. My parents would say, “We’re seeing grandma on Sunday.” And then I would see my grandma that Sunday. Something felt wrong about what my uncle had said. And then, as the years passed, as our tennis lessons stopped, as our family gatherings lessened, I wondered if what he’d really been providing was a warning.

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Lee Lai’s debut graphic novel Stone Fruit is dedicated to her sister.

It’s a melancholy work about family, childhood, play, depression, and the limits that exist between people. But this dedication to her sister soothes the melancholy. This dedication at the beginning provides the book a happy ending.

Stone Fruit is not a memoir. It’s the story of Ray and Bron, two trans people in a relationship who find their greatest peace when playing monster with Ray’s niece Nessie. Ray has a complicated relationship with her sister and Nessie’s mom, Amanda. She has a complicated relationship with Bron. Bron has a complicated relationship with herself. And Bron has a complicated relationship with her parents and her own sister, 16-year-old Grace.

Ray and Bron felt judged by their families for their queerness, their transness, their relationship, and so they cut ties. Ray rescued Bron from her parents’ house, and they started to build a life together, a new family, just the two of them. But the bubble of familial distance popped when Amanda’s husband left her. Ray re-entered her sister’s life, and the playdates with Nessie began.

When Ray and Bron play with Nessie, Lai draws all three in their imaginations. They look like monsters, a cross between a cat and a frog, moving with the pulsing fluidity of water rushing down a hill. These are the rare moments we see the characters with mouths turned up into something like a smile.

Ray and Bron turn into these happy monsters once when having sex. Otherwise, the book follows them and their families through grounded moments of slice-of-life frustration. Lai often includes panels with no dialogue. Moments of quiet. Objects. Landscapes without bodies. It’s like if Chantal Akerman wrote a graphic novel.

Eventually, Bron’s depression becomes too much for her. Her desire to be near Nessie isn’t enough to feel the pain of Ray’s failed attempts to connect. And so Bron leaves.

But where can Bron go when she leaves her new chosen family? Where can Ray go when her new chosen family leaves her? The answer for both of them is a return. They return to the family they were given.

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I didn’t come out to any of my extended family. My parents wanted to be the ones to tell their siblings, and I was tired enough to let them. My priority at the time was maintaining my relationships with my parents and my sister. But, in retrospect, I wish I’d told everyone else myself. I’m not sure my parents realized how challenging it is to explain something you yourself are still struggling to understand.

When my dad told my uncle, my uncle said something to the effect of: I’m a therapist and I’ve worked with trans clients. Drew is not trans.

To my dad’s credit, he continued listening to me and not his brother. Two years later, when my dad sent him one of my first pieces for Autostraddle, my uncle responded: Sounds like Drew is continuing to have deep, rich, challenging experiences on his life’s journey.

Like most trans people, the response from my family varied. Some acted like nothing had changed. Others stayed away from me and kept me away from their children. But others went out of their way to make sure I didn’t just feel accepted — I felt supported. One aunt — who I know has less money to spare than some of my other relatives — gave me a gift certificate to a service that sent monthly clothes options. It was such a thoughtful, generous gift to receive at a time when I was figuring out my new style and needed a whole new wardrobe.

At the time, my mom and dad and sister often told me I needed to have more patience with people as they adjusted to my new lifestyle. They were referring to each other, themselves, their siblings, my cousins. But I felt I’d been expressing endless patience. The gulf between us was so large that both of our tryings just weren’t enough.

And so I turned to my new family. The girlfriend I transitioned alongside who’d been automatically supportive, my childhood best friend who lived with us, the queer community I was slowly starting to build. This is where I found comfort. This is where I found safety.

Years later, my mom told me that while she’d heard stories of parents disowning their trans kids, her worry had always been the opposite. During those early months, she felt me pulling away. She wondered if I’d ever return.

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In the first two chapters of Stone Fruit, Amanda is introduced as a challenge. She interrupts Ray and Bron’s play time with Nessie, she’s neurotic about Nessie being dirty, she’s critical of Bron staying in the car, and she’s critical of Bron being there at all. She seems to fit easily into the role of “homophobic sister.”

But after Ray and Bron break up, we begin to see a fuller picture of Amanda. Her understanding of queerness may be limited, she might continue to call her sister Rachel instead of Ray, but mostly she’s just a well-meaning, exhausted single mom.

When Ray, deep in a depression, tries to take some weeks off caring for Nessie, Amanda snaps. “What you’re asking for is to shirk your responsibility so you can fall apart,” she says rather harshly.

She goes on to say that when her husband left her, she felt like giving up. And yet, she still cared for Nessie every day. Her harshness continues. You may disagree with her tone or even the substance of her argument — being a mom and an aunt don’t hold the same commitment as far as I’m concerned. But it’s not about agreement. It’s about understanding. In this moment, Amanda gains understanding — from Ray, from the reader.

“You said you wanted to be family again,” she concludes. “This is it. So I’ll see you next Saturday. You don’t have to be fun, magical Auntie Ray. You just need to show up.”

Meanwhile, Bron is struggling to find her own familial reconciliation. She knows that her attempt to cut ties with her family failed. She knows her depression is both clinical and causal — and her family could hold the answers to both.

“There is always a place for you in the family home,” her dad says to her. But when she tries to apologize for and discuss their last fight he says, “We don’t have to talk about those things.” When she tries to talk about her life, he says, “You don’t have to tell me everything, you know.”

Her mom is also unwilling to open up. She refuses help in her garden, and when Bron tries to broach the topic of her mom’s own mental health struggles, her mom denies that their family has a history of mental illness. “What, and I’m just the only fucked up one in a long line of God’s joyful children?!” Bron snaps. “Don’t be dramatic,” her mom replies.

But as hard as it was to leave her parents, it’s the distance with Bron’s sister Grace that really hurts. She can feel Grace’s resentment that she missed so many formative years. She can feel Grace’s desire to have a weird older sibling who she can lean on and look up to. But Grace is being raised in the same environment that Bron was raised in. And Grace doesn’t get Bron either.

Bron tries to express to Grace that their family’s community treats her like an outsider. Grace insists that they’re happy she’s back. Both things can be true.

Bron tries to express the same thing to her parents. Her mom insists that with time, she might become more accepted. This might also be true. More, yes. But not fully.

The truth is Bron’s family and hometown community don’t want to get rid of Bron. Grace, especially, wants Bron to stay forever. But there are just limits. There are limits to how much any of them can change.

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When I was in high school, The Glass Menagerie was my favorite play. As a closeted trans woman, I could relate to its portrayal of queerness — like Tennessee Williams, society also forced me to express myself through a straight character.

This classic memory play follows Tom Wingfield as he looks back to the 30s when he lived with his overbearing mother and shy, disabled sister. He felt trapped, forced to work at a factory for a small salary, his only excitement at nightly trips to the movies. At the end of the play, he leaves, just like Tennessee Williams left, for a life of excitement, a life of art-making, a life of queerness. He was finally free — from everything but his memory.

Like Tom and Tennessee, I left home too. My parents told me I could only go to school out of state if I got a scholarship, so I worked as hard as I possibly could in high school to do just that. I turned 18, graduated, and went to New York to start a new life.

Transitioning at 23 was a challenge for my family and I, but this first period of escape was even more difficult. I hadn’t yet discovered why I found my childhood home so oppressive, why I felt so out of place with the people who raised me. I’d return for holidays and fight more with my family than I ever had as a kid. And yet, when they dropped me off at the airport, I’d always cry.

Coming out didn’t fix these conflicts, but it did clarify them. My entire childhood and adolescence got a rewrite. The subtext became the text. I began to understand suburbia as a shrine to heterosexuality. My family as the keepers of that shrine. I had no intention of ever moving back to California but slowly my trips home became less emotional. More than anything, they became more honest.

I got a job that would take me to LA for three months, and being close to the place I used to call home filled me with hope instead of dread. Okay, maybe a little dread, but I wanted the job. And then that job led to another. And then I broke up with my girlfriend back in New York. I broke up with the person who had become my family.

Like Ray and Bron, this breakup forced me to return to the given family I’d years earlier decided not to choose. I needed the things that family provides. I had my friends, but they were all back in New York — and I shared so many with my ex. But an hour away, I had my mom, my dad, and my sister.

It was during this time I found the relationships I have with them now. We began having more difficult conversations. We rediscovered our love. We bumped up against our limits.

During one conversation, my mom told me she understood I was making a new family with the queer people in my life. She’d always be there for me, but she understood there were limits to our relationship.

This was the closest I’d ever felt to her.

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Ray continues to grow closer with Amanda. They share memories, they share stories, they share emotional scars from their mom, they share cigarettes. They don’t lose their limits — they just accept them. And they learn from one another. Ray learns to have more responsibility, Amanda learns how to be more playful.

Bron reaches her limit too. She has to move out. Grace is furious at her. She feels like Bron is abandoning her all over again. Bron insists this isn’t true. She needs space but they’ll still be in touch. They’ll have a relationship again. She just can’t live at home. There are limits.

Ray and Bron also find limits with each other. Bron returns to the city and apologizes for leaving so suddenly. But they’re not getting back together. Bron asks if she can still be in Nessie’s life, and Ray says yes. In time. For now, she needs space. Bron understands.

Ray and Bron are not separated by queerness. But they are separated by their past. They’re separated by cultural differences and the impact that has on how their families express emotions, the different ways they’ve been taught to express emotions. Every relationship has limits. That doesn’t mean they’re not important.

Sometimes given family needs to get cut off. Sometimes given family cuts you off. Sometimes it’s not possible to reconcile, sometimes bigotry is thicker than blood. But there are so many relationships that can exist in between total understanding and total dismissal. My family will never understand certain things about me. I’ll never understand certain things about them. But I’m glad we’ve worked to understand what we can. I’m glad we’ll keep working. Probably for the rest of our lives.

My uncle wasn’t wrong when he told me we don’t have to have relationships with people just because they’re family. He and I have just made different choices. Neither of us is wrong in our priorities. But I’m glad I’ve made the choices I’ve made — my relationships and my boundaries.

The title of Stone Fruit comes from a flashback to the first fight between Ray and Bron. Bron is excited for Ray to try her first nectarine. But Ray doesn’t know nectarines have pits, and she chips her tooth. Ray is upset that Bron didn’t warn her. Bron thought it was common knowledge. Neither is wrong. It’s just another limit.

But what a joy to share our favorite fruit with the people we love. What a joy to open up each other’s worlds to new experiences, new pleasures. Sometimes we’ll chip a tooth. Sometimes we’ll feel distant. We’ll feel sad. But to me, it’s worth it. Feel the guilt, feel the pain, feel the limit. And then try again. Take another bite. Careful, this time. Careful.

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Slow Takes is a series of “belated” reviews by Drew Gregory of queer art released last year that Autostraddle didn’t cover.

Juniper Fitzgerald’s Queer Memoir-in-Fragments Examines Her Identities as a Sex Worker and Mother

Memory works strangely for me. I have difficulty seeing things linearly and, oftentimes, my timelines get mashed up and hard to parse through. The three therapists I’ve seen over the last decade told me over and over again that this is common for people who have experienced trauma, especially when that trauma is linked to family and identity. So this experience isn’t unusual, yet a lot of our conversations about memory and telling our stories are so focused on telling those stories in a way that “makes sense” both chronologically and emotionally. When we read the stories of others, we expect a seamless and clear narrative account of their lives even though we mostly couldn’t do that with our own.

In Juniper Fitzgerald’s debut memoir-in-fragments, Enjoy Me Among My Ruins, she bypasses the expectation to tell her story in a neatly contained narrative. The book is composed of ten major sections, each just a few pages long. The sections are interspersed with pieces of her teenage journals — all addressed to her diary, named after The X-Files‘ Gillian Anderson — and loving accounts of some of the most important women in Fitzgerald’s life. Although the book is only 100 pages, Fitzgerald creates an intimate and lyrical archive of the contents of her memory that, on the outset, seem somewhat disconnected but work together to form a holistic view of Fitzgerald’s experiences as a scorned child, a sexual assault survivor, a radical sex worker, a devoted mother, and a “monster.”

Through the various lenses of her life experience, Fitzgerald explores the ways women are treated, disregarded, and vilified because of the choices they make, the people they become, and the way they express themselves. To do this, she takes us through her adolescence growing up in Nebraska, her time spent in the Midwest and Las Vegas, her work on porn sets and in graduate school, her relationships with men who harmed her, and her deep, deep respect for the responsibility of motherhood.

As the memoir progresses, it becomes more and more obvious that the thread connecting her examination and understanding of these pieces of her life is the intersection of her identity as both a sex worker and a mother. Because of this frame, the book also becomes a work of auto-theory, expanding the reader’s perceptions of both of these statuses. In a particularly powerful section of the text, Fitzgerald describes a situation where a break she took to breastfeed her child on the porn set she was working on led to a discussion among the rest of the sex workers and crew present about their lives as mothers and sex workers. From that conversation, she concludes:

When the wife-and-mother class is also the whore class, patriarchal domination is so threatened, so ultimately blanched and blinded by its own precarious ideology, that it digs its claws in deeper, threatening not only the safer of sex workers but of our children as well. […] And so those of us who occupy these two classes simultaneously, those of us who must mourn the stigma and violence against sex workers on a daily basis, will continue to push back with images of lilies, of the fleur-de-lis, reclaimed and reimagined as both Madonna and whore.

In a later section, she discusses her work as a phone sex operator and braids it with a striking reading and interpretation of Madeline Miller’s Circe. It might sometimes feel as if the view of sex work and the people who do it have shifted dramatically, but Fitzgerald’s work here is a reminder that this is far from the case. People pass moral judgment on the work she does — either by thinking it evil or by assuming she is being taken advantage of — and do so more harshly because she is also a mother. However, for Fitzgerald, this is something she can do easily to supplement the meager income she makes in academia: “I do not mistake the incorporation of feminism into my sex work for liberation. This is merely one underpaid, shitty job in a long line of underpaid shitty jobs. But ‘shitty job’ is not the same as ‘sexual exploitation’.” Where the character of Circe was forced to turn the men who tortured and abused her into pigs so that their power could be stripped from them entitrely, Fitzgerald does what she has to do to survive in face of a world that is rooting against her.

While there are many significant and powerful moments in the text, the most impactful moments come in the eighth section of the text. Here, Fitzgerald talks the most straightforwardly about her tumultuous relationship with her family, her queerness, and the family she is building outside of her family of origin. She says early on in this part that “Queerness means surviving and escaping the spaces we were not meant to survive or escape” and then goes on to discuss her family’s treatment of her gay uncle, Victor; the trauma she’s inherited as both a child of people who have experienced trauma and a receiver of the abusive behaviors that trauma often breeds; the kind of friend-family she’s built for herself and for her child; and about the importance of radical narratives about queer life. She quotes theorist and writer Laura Westengard’s work about how Gothic texts often present queer sex as “monstrous, abnormal, and pathological” and takes it further:

But it is also precisely at this intersection of monstrosity, abnormality, and pathologicality where queer liberation lives: not poster children for homonormative narratives about fucking consumption and property ownership and child-rearing. But instead, monsters with peeling flesh and scandalous bodies, helping one another navigate fields of hemlock under a harvest moon.

Even though Fitzgerald is investigating and guiding the reader through some of the most pertinent and difficult conversations about our society at this time, it never feels as though the issues she presents the readers with are too hard to carry. The text showcases Fitzgerald’s resilience through it all and gives us a visceral analysis of what it’s like to exist within the context of marginalization and persecution. She models not only a will to survive but also a will to create better conditions for the people around her and for the ones who come after her.

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Enjoy Me Among My Ruins by Juniper Fitzgerald is out now.

In “Diary of a Misfit,” Casey Parks Creates Records of Lives Left Out of History

Queer life is often predictably, devastatingly lonely. And in response to the loneliness, we search and we reach — sometimes consciously, sometimes subconsciously — for some assurance that we’ll end up all right or, at the very least, alive. Before the rise of the internet and social media, the only way to get that assurance was to look around you and try to find people who might reflect the feelings you have inside. We construct our own visions of them, rewrite their life stories, and find ways to connect even when connection is hard. For some of us, these moments of identification can change the trajectory of our lives and help us survive. For me, those people and those moments were easier to find than most. Growing up where I did, there wasn’t a short supply of gay and lesbian people. They weren’t always open, but by the time I got to high school it wasn’t difficult to see that there were people like me around — even if I couldn’t verify that that was true.

For Casey Parks, though, that wasn’t exactly the case. In her hometown of West Monroe, Louisiana, Parks didn’t have many figures in her life to look up to for recognition and assurance, but she couldn’t deny to herself the fact of her queerness. Her new nonfiction book Diary of a Misfit starts in 2002 when Parks is just 18-years-old. After her first semesters in college, she decided to come out, and her mother shunned her for being gay while her church’s pastor prayed to God to kill her so she could be saved. In response to her mother’s reaction, Parks’s grandmother stepped in to say, “Life is a buffet. Some people eat hot dogs, and some people eat fish. She likes women, and you need to get the fuck over it.” Sometime after her mother’s breakdown, Parks’s grandmother reveals to her that when she was growing up in Delhi, Louisiana, she knew someone named Roy, “a woman who lived as a man.” Stunned, Parks pushes her grandmother for details about this mysterious person. From this short conversation over her grandmother’s wobbly table, Parks commits to learning everything she can about Roy.

By 2009, Parks had completed her undergraduate program and was living in Portland and working as a journalist when she decided to truly dedicate time to learning about Roy. The beginning of her journey takes her straight to Delhi, the small city her grandmother’s sharecropper family moved to after it was no longer viable to stay on the cotton plantations they worked for many years. It’s there where, when Parks’s grandmother was a child, Roy would play songs on his guitar and sing for the neighborhood children who would gather around to listen to him. The way Parks’s grandmother tells it, Roy was well-liked by everyone in the town who encountered him. For a living, he mowed lawns and picked cotton, and he mostly kept to himself except for the nightly concerts on his porch. She seems, in some ways, to insinuate to Parks that some people knew about Roy and some people didn’t, and the ones who did know never really discussed it. As Parks’s grandmother got older, she didn’t keep in touch with Roy, but she was always curious about what might have happened to him.

Over the course of 10 years, Parks — along with two filmmaker friends named Aaron and Aubree — travel back and forth from Portland to Delhi on their own dime to interview people and record their stories about Roy. As Parks talks to more and more members of the Delhi community who knew Roy, the picture of Roy’s life she begins to get is slightly different from the one her grandmother painted. Roy was well-liked, yes, but it turns out that no one knew what to make of him or how to talk about him. They misgender him and switch back and forth between pronouns as they talk about him, and when some of the townspeople talk about him, they make him seem more like an outcast, a “misfit” they tolerated rather than a beloved and respected member of the community. Of course, this is not true for every person Parks interviewed, but it does help Parks see that her grandmother’s compassion and understanding toward Roy wasn’t shared by everyone in Delhi.

Early in the process, Parks gets news that Roy left a set of journals titled “Life of a Misfit” with his neighbors, Mark and Cheryl. It takes years for them to finally acquiesce to Parks’s requests for them because they claim that Roy asked them not to share the journals with anyone. When Parks finally does get to read them, the confessions and thoughts scribbled in them open up a whole new chapter in Parks’s inquiry. Parks learns about how lonely and isolated Roy felt in Delhi and how much he longed for something better. He puts himself down, calls himself stupid. It’s obvious he believes he’s not worthy of much time or attention or love or respect. In the journals, Parks comes across a poem Roy wrote called “The Town Misfit” that said “When my life on earth is over, and it’s time for me to die / No one here will miss me. There will be no one to cry. / If I make it up to heaven, will I then find a friend? / Or will I be a misfit, with no place to fit in?” Even though she asserts that Roy was wrong for assuming no one missed him (since people clearly did), Parks learns that his journals confirm what she already suspected about Roy’s life.

As Parks attempts to figure out the mysteries of Roy’s life, her life keeps moving forward at full momentum. She continues working as a journalist, she gets married, and then leaves it all to move across the country to New York City for graduate school. The one constant in her life is the puzzle she was trying to piece together about Roy’s life. The more time Parks spent learning about Roy’s life, the clearer it became to her that she was doing this for reasons beyond Roy himself. She took on the investigation as a way to try to understand herself and connect more intimately with her family:

I did feel connected to Roy. It wasn’t just that he felt like some kind of queer ancestor. His life felt to me like a cautionary tale. […] I kept digging into Roy’s life hoping some stray fact might reveal something to me. I wasn’t sure what I hoped might be revealed, but I knew I didn’t want to die feeling as if I’d never fit anywhere.

That investigation is what launches Parks into not only contending with the facts of Roy’s life, but also her own family history, her relationship with her mother and grandmother, the history of where her family is from, the realities of small town life for queer and trans people, and her struggle to reconcile her feelings about all of it. She writes, “If I could solve his mysteries, I thought, I would decipher my own. I would know where I belonged. But I understand now, most of what haunted me before might haunt me forever.” At the end of her journey, Parks understood that even though this reconciliation and the search for the connection she felt she was missing couldn’t be solved by simply reconstructing the narrative of Roy’s life in Delhi, it gave her an opportunity to free herself of all that was holding her back from establishing those connections on her own.

Although Parks’s writing is elegant and descriptive, what is most compelling about Diary of a Misfit is how brilliantly organized it is. All at once, we get a biography, a memoir, a family history, and the active history of a place that most people are unfamiliar with. The book acts as a kind of living archive of the lives of people who history tends to forget. Not just Roy’s life as a gender nonconforming person, but also the lives of poor people in South and of the women who keep communities together, who remember, who try to make sure people don’t forget what went on and how it went on. Parks writes, “Neither Jewel [Roy’s adoptive mother] nor my mother had lived what historians would have called a remarkable life. Few people in Delhi had. But their lives were important, to me, if to no one else. […] I decided I owed it to all my people to write them back into existence.”

In the same vein as books like Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House, Diary of a Misfit acts as a testament to the lives of people who are often written out of history. And in 2022, when trans people have to wake up to the news of more horrifying anti-trans laws and mandates every day, I honestly could not think of a better time or moment for a book as extraordinary and powerful as this one to be out in the world. As these laws get proposed and passed and the war on trans people in the media continues, the agenda that transphobic politicians and talking heads are pushing is that being trans or gender nonconforming is some kind of new phenomenon when the truth is that trans and gender nonconforming people have been here all along, purposely left out of the record over and over again.

During an email exchange shared by Parks in the book, she hypothesizes to one of her graduate school professors that perhaps, in our own ways, we’re all considered “misfits” somewhere — whether we acknowledge that fact or not. Parks felt that way most of her life, so did her grandmother and her mother, many of the people she spoke with in Delhi, some of the people she encountered in Portland and New York and places in between, and, especially, Roy. But only because they’ve been left out, too. Parks proves this through her work in this book, and most importantly, she creates yet another record for us to visit and consult when we need to find that recognition and assurance we might be missing or might need to prove that we have always been here. And that’s literally just the half of it.

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Diary of a Misfit by Casey Parks is out now.

Queer Naija Lit: “We Are Flowers” Documents the Beauty and Resilience of Nigeria’s Queer Community

Feature image by the_burtons via Getty Images

We Are Flowers, a Queer Nigerian anthology, is defiant and audacious. It has no choice but to be. The collection was published in the online literary magazine Brittle Paper in the years following the passing of Nigeria’s SSMPA. The editors took on the group name 14, both as a reference to the 14-year prison sentence imposed by the SSMPA on queer and trans folks and an attempt to preserve anonymity. We Are Flowers is in an active dance with the realities it’s seeking to argue against.

The anthology is an argument, even as it is artistic expression, because Nigeria forbids such expression from its citizens. The writers and editors of We Are Flowers grapple with telling a potentially illegal story, and therefore are made to justify the telling of their stories.

Perhaps this forced justification is part of why the anthology includes a well thought out introductory section, where editors and writers map out their intentions and hopes for their collection. As Unomah Azuah writes in said introduction: “The task of the anthology moves beyond enlightenment and entertainment. It delves into the topography of advocacy and activism.” Ikhide Ikheola follows up with, “marvel at the gift and resilience of beautiful people who refuse to be ugly in an ugly world.”

The SSMPA and similar ordinances subjugating queer Nigerians do so by distorting public perceptions and intentionally galvanizing the unrest of the populace from things that need to be addressed — like income inequality, Nigeria’s failing universities, and the ongoing pillaging by neo-colonial empires — and redirecting this unrest into useful tools for the state to keep its populace in check by blaming the struggles of the public on the existence of queer Nigerians.

The blame heaped on queer Nigerians (a descendant of the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy favored by oppressors everywhere) is a logical leap made possible by ensuring that “queer Nigerians” become the kind of people (in public conscious) that could somehow be responsible for the issues facing Nigeria. In short, queer Nigerians are grappling with the external violence of the state — and an internal crisis of identity.

Identity formation is a vital part of the development of a person. Yet, how do you engage with the complications of identity formation when so much of your expression is criminalized and therefore suppressed?

Who are you when you don’t get to be you?

“We are flowers” is the answer the anthology provides.

Each artist engages with identity through different forms (poetry, essays, and visual media) and different standpoints. The pieces that make up the collection are from a varied source of Nigerians living within the country, as well as queer (and not queer) people aligning themselves with the cause from outside of Nigeria (an unexpected offering the editors incorporated into the anthology). The variation in narrative bolsters the depth of the anthology’s engagement with identity.

It’s easy to pigeonhole queer identity into the expression of ‘queer’ desire, but no one ever taught my body to divide its desires into ‘queer’ and ‘not.’ Meaning, it is the same desire that guides me to play video games and read books that also guides me to make friends and fall in love. Before there’s a “me” that loves, that “me” must first have room to exist. The stifling of my queer desire is simply the subjugation of my desire in general.

It wasn’t until I moved out of Nigeria that I discovered I was not, in fact, a quiet child with little interest in making friends. While our stories are different, I resonate with the protagonist of the short story,  “Friends In A Ship” who bemoans that, “A friendship based on a misconception is a fraudulent acquisition. Like fake jewelry, it will fail every examination and test of time.” I understood, innately, that there was a difference between me and the people around me, one so dangerous I couldn’t allow myself to label it. Unfortunately, me not labeling myself didn’t stop others from helping themselves to what was not theirs.

I learned names for “people like me” before I learned of “me.” I was certain I was not a sin, and yet that was the only word given for me. Rather than be a sin, I chose not to be at all. It’s a kind of living death, feeding the functions of the body but not the spirit. It’s even worse when this ‘choice’ happens subconsciously, because your mind is too scared — and too young — to make those choices intentionally.

Which brings me back to my earlier question: Who are you when you don’t get to be you?

I have a few favorite engagements with this question.

First, Osinachi’s visual piece “Ada-Obi.” Images have the ability to give form to unlabeled or even unexpressed experiences while still remaining free from the constriction of language and definition. “Ada-Obi” is a multifaceted piece, reflective of its name. Adaobi is, in igbo, the way to refer to the first daughter of a family. There are numerous expressions of the name “Ada” (first daughter), but what’s interesting is the way Osinachi chose to write the title, Ada-Obi.

The separation between the phrases calls into the picture the (again, numerous) meanings attached to “Obi.” Obi can be the heart organ, it can be a family compound, it can be the title of a ruler, and, in present day igboland, it is a common “boy” name. It is this last definition of Obi that I most enjoy applying to Osinachi’s piece. With a simple hyphen, Osinachi separated and recontextualized a name I’ve been called by often (as the first daughter of my father).

What once left me feeling gendered incorrectly has become an affirmation of my gender and the multiplicities inherent in igbo culture. Visually, the piece engages with traditionally gendered depictions of igbo people, not so much as to present any one gender in a person, but the way they’re all connected. Part of how Osinachi does this is by utilizing elements of Uli (in igboland, an art style associated with women) but not quite making an Uli drawing. It’s a reminder that everything in my culture is an attempt at representing what already is.

What came first, the person or the identity? In Igbo culture, the spirit comes first.

Another favorite is Romeo Oriogun’s poem “You Think You Are Fucked,” which I like both for the title, and the first lines, “wait until you write a poem/ about your father asking what it means/ to be bisexual” because it drew a chuckle at the reminder of a similar horror I faced, and also gratitude that I could now laugh where I once only felt despair. Another favorite poem, also by Oriogun, “How To Survive The Fire,” has the lines: “the first rule of survival is to Run” and “I tell you this to understand my silence,/ to understand why I crawled into my voice,/ I do not want to die.” I always appreciate art from people haunted by the same things that construct my fear.

In stories, Rapum Kambili’s “Gay Wars: Battle of the Bitches (or, The Tops and Bottoms of Being Out in Nigeria)” remains one of my favorite shorts every time I read it. Even if I didn’t deeply enjoy how it’s written as well as what is written, Kambili’s use of “bitch” alone would secure this piece as a personal favorite. In Kambili’s words, “Bitch: A man who rolls his eyes, dangles his wrists, or simply says, ‘I am.’” Beyond that, the Rapum in the story survives with a balance of wit, humor, and aggression that I’ve never been able to figure out but admire.

Additionally, Rapum’s experience is a bit similar to the experiences I had in Nigeria, when I would return as an older teen with a better understanding of my own desires (that is, knowing they exist in the first place). While in America, I labeled the sense of isolation I had grown up with as reflective of the rarity or impossibility of my own existence. It didn’t take long after returning home with a sense of self for me to realize I was terribly wrong, and there were queer people everywhere in Nigeria. Rather than the isolation I expected to continue, I was faced with learning how to safely (for us) navigate the now visible (to me) queer world I was simultaneously told didn’t exist. Rapum, as an ‘out’ gay man in Nigeria, is entrenched in balancing cultivating a life between visibility and invisibility. His observations of the harm done to a community forced to live in this way are layered intricately through the piece connecting his personal and larger communal experience.

As with Osinachi, Kambili and many of the artists in the collection work to define themselves. We are obliged to name ourselves, especially when the world aches to give us false names.  The result of this work is a beautiful offering of life, a collection dedicated explicitly to “the victims of the February 2014 Gishiri (Abuja) homophobic attacks. And for all those who have suffered homophobic violence.”

A rose by any other name would still smell as sweet, and we are flowers.

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Queer Naija Lit is a monthly series that analyzes, contextualizes, and celebrates queer Nigerian literature.

Rather Than a Coming Out Story, “Body Grammar” Is About Queer Characters Coming Into Themselves

The following review of Body Grammar by Jules Ohman contains one major plot spoiler of the book.

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I’m on the record as being a big fan of the homoerotic haircut scene in cinema. In Body Grammar — a novel by Jules Ohman that published in June — we get a literary version of the staple. About 40 pages in, the novel’s anxious protagonist Lou asks her best friend Ivy to cut her hair. Ivy obliges. When she stops, Lou asks her to go shorter.

When Ivy was done, all that was left was the top, curly and wild. It hadn’t taken that long for her to look like a completely different person: her face thinner and more intense, her jawline a sharp hook, her eyebrows less worried and more concentrated. It wasn’t that she looked all-the-way-boy, exactly, but she didn’t look like a girl. She looked visible.

Since she was 14, Lou has been approached by modeling scouts. In malls, on sidewalks, outside while she’s working her summer job for a lawn service, the women come up to Lou and press their business cards into her hand, make it clear they see something about her physicality that they think could, well, make them money. Lou sheepishly turns down these offers but also saves the cards, hiding them from Ivy.

Lou likes Ivy, that much is certain. It’s seen right away in how Lou shoots Ivy on her camera. Ivy also likes Lou. When Ivy and Lou take a roadtrip to see Ivy’s band Fortunato perform, Ivy surprises Lou with a song she has written about her. “It’s bigger than we both knew / Please come on come on / Lou Lou Lou.”

I mean, does it get much more obvious than that?

And yet, Lou doesn’t really take the hint. Or, at least, she’s too frazzled by the events immediately preceding Ivy’s very public declaration of love. Moments before, Lou has a fumbling, alcohol-fueled hookup with her friend Catherine, a troubled trackstar and sibling to Morgan, a university student with fashion design ambitions. The novel brims with missed connections and misunderstandings, its characters just slightly out of rhythm with each other so as to accidentally sow subtle emotional chaos.

If there’s somewhere Lou truly belongs in the fashion industry, it’s probably behind the camera. But life has other plans.

In a tragic accident early on in the book, Morgan dies. This has an immediate impact on the story. Lou drifts away from Ivy and feels bereft and confused, having lost someone who she didn’t really know but also whose death she was there to witness. She isn’t sure what to do with all these confusing grief-feelings and the trauma of the tragedy, so she grasps at ways to change things. This starts with the aforementioned haircut. But then she makes a wilder choice. She decides to defer her college acceptance and throw herself into the dizzying whirlwind of the high-fashion modeling world. The novel sprawls out from here, Lou encountering new friends, lovers, friend-lovers as she moves her entire life from Portland to New York but also constantly returning to the people in her before-life, like Ivy and Catherine. Through all of this, the novel’s early death echoes, a reminder of the fragility of bodies, of the uncertainty of life.

Body Grammar does its best work in its quiet contemplations of grief and heartbreak but also in the ways it weaves gender and queerness into its narrative. Here are several queer characters with several different queer narratives. All of the characters feel distinct in their understandings of their genders, sexualities, and relationship structures. Some characters are poly, some monogamous, some unsure. There’s queer yearning, but there are also established queer relationships, breakups, divorces, it’s-complicated situationships. Some characters are more out than others, but never once does it feel like there’s a coming out story in Body Grammar. These are more like stories of young people coming into themselves. There’s confusion as to what they really want, what they desire. But there’s also a freeness to the way they consider these parts to themselves, even set against the rigidly gendered backdrop of the fashion industry.

“This was a whole new body grammar,” Lou observes when watching Harrison, her first model friend pose shortly after she decides to give modeling a shot. The novel constantly expands and illuminates its many body grammars, Lou’s feelings on her gender presentation more nuanced and between-lines than language often makes room for.

She’d never minded being mistaken for a boy, but she’d never wanted to be a boy either. She liked her androgyny and liked other androgynous women. But she liked it even better now, in this heightened form. The designers and stylists liked it too.

This tension courses throughout Body Grammar, too — the fact that Lou’s authentic presentation is also something desirable to others, to the people shaping her for their own uses. It can be all the more difficult to figure out who you really are when you’re being told how to be. There’s an edge of avoidance and maybe even of self-destruction to Lou’s decision to model, but her other post-tragedy transformation — asking Ivy to cut off her hair — feels like a rare moment of Lou knowing exactly what she wants and how she wants to be seen. “She looked visible.” Soon, she’ll be over-visible, modeling perhaps one of the most extreme examples of having zero control over how one’s perceived.

Other characters struggle with contradictions and outside pressures, not knowing what’s being said in their own voice and what’s coming from the outside. Like Catherine, who isn’t totally sure how to identify. Catherine has a drunken blow up at Morgan’s memorial, and Lou later asks about it:

“What did you mean at the memorial,” Lou said, “that Morgan thought you were selfish?”

Catherine didn’t answer right away, but when she did, her voice was heavy and stiff. “I came out to her in eighth grade. I told her, you know, not only do I like girls, but maybe I’m not even a girl myself, I don’t know. And she told me not to tell my parents.”

Later on in the book, Catherine tells Lou she’s fine with she/her pronouns for now, likes the way her gender presentation confuses people but also admits she could just be scared of announcing a change. Body Grammar doesn’t pressure Catherine to commit to a clearly defined identity. I can’t stop thinking about how perfect the title is, how this novel presents such an expansive and ever-shifting and varied grammar for bodies, for identities.

The book features messy makeouts and messy hookups and messy relationships throughout — all of them queer as fuck. Body Grammar is most compelling when it’s in these between-boundaries, hard-to-define spaces like Lou’s feelings on androgyny. Lou and Ivy’s will-they/won’t-they arc hinges on that tingling tension of two people just constantly getting in their own ways. Lou eventually begins a new relationship with fellow model Thayer. The sex writing gives just enough, not withholding but not surrendering everything over to the reader, a balance that works well for a novel so steeped in youthful exploration and uncertainty:

It felt heady and strange to be kissing someone she didn’t know well but was extremely attracted to. Her body hummed as Thayer took off her shirt and peeled down her jeans, then lay there, looking up at Lou. Lou asked what she wanted, and Thayer told her. Lou didn’t know what to do, but she knew how to follow directions. She could put her mouth there and there and there, and she could move her tongue like that and that, and she could do everything that was asked of her, especially if she was asked like that, and it turned out she could it all well, like really well. Thayer smelled and tasted delicious and Lou was so hungry, and as soon as it was over, she wanted to do it again.

The prose often has the diaristic feel of the above passage, the novel told in a close-third person from Lou’s wandering perspective. Ohman writes on bodies exquisitely, and the modeling world is fleshed out with great worldbuilding details (Ohman was a model in high school). Where the modeling industry is harsh, all sharp angles and hard edges, Ohman’s prose is soft and sweet, a juxtaposition that works well.

The novel is stronger on a character level — both in terms of its interiority and its bodied language — than on a plot one. The ending reads as too pat, Lou and Ivy’s conclusion too neat when really the two are perhaps most interesting when they’re kind of fucking things up with each other. Again, the novel’s best when it lets things be messy and uncertain. Catherine and Lou’s friendship is one of the most complex relationships in the book, difficult to define, sometimes fraught, but full of tender care. Its their platonic love story that actually has a more compelling arc than Lou and Ivy’s.

There’s also an interesting ambivalence to the way the modeling world functions in the story. It is, more often than not, a looming villain. The models have to change everything about themselves to fit conventional beauty standards, leaving their homes and families and ultimately controlled by their agencies. They’re told what to eat, but the agencies also have financial control over them, Lou realizing at one point that she has to book gigs in order to pay back her agency money she owes for rent and travel. But at the same time, it’s more complicated than just a villainous presence. There’s something to be said of the fact that even within its strict confines, Lou finds herself in her new life in New York. Even though Portland is her home, it becomes a haunted place after Morgan’s death, and modeling offers a way out. Also, by leaving, she’s able to fix her relationship to Portland, to the people she left behind. And through modeling, she also makes meaningful connections with others, and even the relationships that end aren’t failures but cumulative experiences for Lou to further figure out what she wants and who she is. Again, that contrast between the rough reality of working in fashion and the prose the story is told in is effective. Ohman avoids romanticizing fashion but also doesn’t make this into a modeling dystopia or a lampooning of the industry.

Modeling doesn’t have to be something Lou does for a long time for it to have had a profound and mixed impact on her life. So much of Body Grammar is about trying new things, even if they don’t work out. Lou fears uncertainty, but she also hurls herself at it. Reading Body Grammar reminds me of all the times I’ve done a dramatic hair change of my own, of that first look in the mirror, a transformation into who I see myself as. The novel reminds us it’s okay to change the grammar we use for ourselves and who we are.

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Body Grammar by Jules Ohman is out now.

In Verse: Poetry Collections for a Big Life Change

Feature image photo by mikroman6 via Getty Images

If you’ve been reading my work recently or following me on social media, you know I’m about to embark on a big life change: a move. I have never lived anywhere that wasn’t in Pennsylvania. This state is my home, but I’m ready to move on from it.

This move has come with a host of emotions: I’m excited, I’m anxious, and I’m scared. Scared that things won’t go as planned, anxious that I might not like my new city, and excited to start a new life for myself. I’m in flux, but being very mindful about how a big change could easily untether me. I’m working at staying grounded, and a part of that is turning toward poetry.

These books aren’t specifically about big life changes themselves, but they do ask big questions about grief, humanity, and more. They ground me not because these poets have answers to said questions, but because they dare to ask them.

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Soft Science by Franny Choi

I have only ever wanted to bite
down hard on whatever was offered
to my hothouse mouth.

I was first introduced to Choi’s work when she co-hosted the VS podcast with Danez Smith. I hadn’t read any of her chapbooks, but when Soft Science came out, it was next to impossible to get my hands on it. It was always sold out wherever I looked for it. When I finally did get it, I was struck by the world within the book, the world Choi questions and interrogates.

One of the big questions asked in this book is about what separates the human from the machine, in this modern world, where do we draw that line? It makes me think about how we work, the current state of the “content machine,” and how we make everything in our lives fodder for online consumption. Or we are forced to.

These poems are rife with Turing tests and examinations of what makes us human. One of the things that the book offers as an answer is itself. I walk away from it with a thought that humans were given the gift of making art. A machine can formulate art as well, but it doesn’t have the understanding of what it is doing the way we do.

There is also the question of what the poem can do, especially within the poem “You’re So Paranoid.” Many people will offer the poet’s job is to witness the atrocities of the world and make art despite, but this poem makes me think: is witness enough? In the poem, the police offers give up their humanity to move with machine precision and brutality. They are ostensibly humans but humans acting at the will of an oppressive state, robbing them of what makes us recognizable to each other.

The speaker in the poem muses:

The cop speaks and I call a plum into his mouth it doesn’t shut him up.

Poetry, as beautiful and stirring as it is, has its limits. I chose this book of poems because everything changes, but how we respond to that change can make us more ourselves, more human.

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Ghost of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

If you are unafraid, beware. 

This book deals heavily with the death of the author’s brother by suicide, so I want to tell you this before you go into it. Grief can feel insurmountable. Maybe it is insurmountable. The death of a brother is vastly different from moving across states, so why did I choose this book?

I chose it because of my fear and my grief. Quite frankly, I don’t know what to do with either. I’m in therapy, I’ve acquired all the tools I need to make this move successful, so why am I still grieving?

In the above-referenced poem, “Grief Logic,” the speaker tries to work out just that, the logic of grief. It is a stunning poem, a heartbreaking one. I think of it often and reading it again for this has come with that same swell of emotion. I have five brothers, two of which I still speak to. To lose one of them would wreck me. In this poem, the speaker states

If this doesn’t end the world, the world will end after it.

and I can’t help but think how poignant and true that is of grief. The times in my life where I have lost someone or some version of myself, it felt like I would never survive it. These poems survive though, they endure the grief of the author, they carry that grief along with her. Poetry, even when you aren’t the one that has written it, can carry your grief.

Grief is the most human emotion. A big change can come with that grief, and it is important to know this and let it come. To not fight it even if you are scared or worried. It cannot be rushed or hurried along, so it is best to let it take its course.

In “An Empty House Is a Debt,” the speaker writes something I will leave you with:

A human terrifies.
A human is someone who becomes terrified, and having become terrified,
craves an end to her feat.
This craving carves a cave.

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I Was A Bell by M. Soledad Caballero

How long since my body
carried joy? 

I have to confess that Caballero was one of my college professors, which is in part why I love this book. I also love it because it deals with a similar change. Caballero writes of coming to the US, her journey out of a country changed by a coup, and even her present-day cancer diagnosis.

What I learned from this book is the enduring spirit of the heart. The heart that can be wracked by grief and fear of the unknown, can still recover, can still beat. In the poem “Pacific Dreams,” Caballero writes of missing the Pacific Ocean, a place where her body was once suspended in the cool water, the smell of seafoam in the air.

The opening line is quoted above, and I ask myself the same question often. A part of why I am moving is because I am moving toward joy, which I have rarely ever experienced in my life. The body is so fragile, robbing it of joy can have lasting effects. I’m trying to prevent that from happening.

Reading as the speaker talks of becoming accustomed to the strange land of the United States, I feel empathy for the small girl in those poems. I’m moving as an adult and I’m terrified, it must have been so hard to lose a home for a girl so small.

The poems that deal with cancer and the havoc it wreaks on the body are so complex and divine.

too much life. That is
what the doctor says. Many routes of muscles, blood
to dance with, invade. So many ways to make mountains
of death.

These lines appear in “What You Are Doing Is Living,” a poem that confronts the terror of death and tests and the body. It’s a beautiful collection that makes me want to confront change instead of shying away from it.

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Hull by Xan Phillips

have you ever heard
of intimate space
compounding with want

This collection is daring, it burns in your hands as you read it. The titular poem contains the lines:

It is for the
dead’s inability to do so
that I rattle the coins in my
chest. In every exhale there
is audacity

These poems have audacity, and that is something I want to mirror in my own life. To have the audacity to want change, to strive for it. I like to think of it as my ancestral duty. These poems guide me toward that thinking.

Many of them chronicle the realities of violence enacted on Black people throughout history, from slavery to modern-day lynchings. These poems take on the voices of the deceased or are in conversation with them. It’s a challenging read because of its history, and its emotionality.

In “I Never Used To Write About Birds,” the speaker says

this is the closes I’ll get to grabbing
our unjust god by the pearls
strung across his throat so I can ask
why he sat back in luster
all these millennia
watching my people die

and all I can think of is the audacity it takes to write those lines. Phillips is a strong poet, and an obviously audacious one. I hope you find this in their work too.

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Winter Recipes from the Collective by Louise Glück

I try to comfort you
but words are not the answer; 

Anytime anyone dares to ask me who my favorite poet is, I mention Glück. Her work is not only beautiful, it is honest, the purest form of truth, for me.

Winter Recipes from the Collective is her most recent book, and while reading it, I was struck by it’s quietude. I know that doesn’t sound like it makes sense when talking about poetry, but the book is really a study in patience, in observation, in looking.

In “Autumn” the speaker writes

The part of life
devoted to contemplation
was at odds with the part
committed to action.

To change is to be committed to action, no matter how scary it is. I spent many years contemplating this move and feeling stuck in this city, but now I’ve put in the action necessary to make it a reality.

I list Glück as a favorite poet because her voice is so clear and wanting. It is begging to get at the meat of what is in its sights. Whether that thing is relationships or the natural world, she approaches it along with you. You the reader and the speaker hand-in-hand, getting to know what is being discovered together.

What impressed me about this collection is that Glück is such a celebrated poet that there is no one left for her to impress. She’s writing with a new eye, in my opinion. Writing with that honesty I love so much. I consider her collected poems to be my favorite book, and it shows: The collection is well worn with brown edges and a softness that comes from opening a book again and again.

There is so much beauty in discovery, and I find that in this collection. I have complete confidence that you will, too.

Rainbow Reading: Even the Crows Are Queer in This Upcoming Speculative Novella

Keah Brown on Her New Picture Book and the Importance of Disability Representation for Children

It’s back-to-school season. For most adults, that doesn’t mean much, but for kids and their parents, there is a certain excitement and trepidation about the start of a new school year. Remember all of the preparation you put into the first day of school as a kid? Having the right backpack, the right lunchbox, and the right outfit set you up for success.

Keah Brown, author of the memoir The Pretty One is back with her first foray into writing picture books for children. In Sam’s Super Seats, she tells the story of a young Black girl who goes back-to-school shopping with her mom and best friends. Sam has cerebral palsy, so sometimes she has to take a break from all that walking. At home, she has super seats — her favorite and most comfortable places to sit. There’s Misty, her pink couch at home, and Laney, the backseat of her mom’s car. During her time at the mall, she meets a seat who isn’t quite super, but it gets the job done.

Rest is important for Sam because of her cerebral palsy, but seeing her take a break is an important lesson for all of us, not just kids. It’s easy to push yourself to keep going, even when your body is giving you signals to slow down. Not knowing when to rest is an unfortunate side effect of our capitalistic society. Sam’s disability forces her to slow down, and while some kids would be upset, her friends happily sit next to her and take a rest, too. They understand how important it is for their bestie to rest, and even if they don’t say it, they’re likely happy to rest too. And sitting on the bench, adorably named Maya, allows them to do the best mall activity with ease: people watching.

Sam’s Super Seats is a sweet story that has disability rep wherein the disability is just one part of the story. Sam is a little girl who loves her parents, her best friends, and clothes. She lives in a bright, colorful world where she takes dance classes, plays dress up, and knows how to accessorize. If you’re looking for a new picture book to get for the kids in your life, look no further.

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Sa’iyda: This story is just so sweet, and it has so much heart, and I really love that. And I’d like to know a little bit more about where the idea came from.

Keah Brown: Absolutely. So I actually wrote The Pretty One, which if people don’t know is my memoir of essays. I got asked by my editor, Sydnee Monday, if I was ever interested in writing for children. Because Sydnee loved my essay in that book on chairs, and why I give my chairs names and personalities and back stories. And I was like, “Absolutely, I’m a Virgo. So I have a 10-year plan.” Always.

We love to see it. We love a Virgo.

I always have a 10-year plan. So basically it came about because Sydnee had read The Pretty One and really liked what I had to say about the importance of rest. And then Sam came to me very quickly. I was like, “What about this little girl named Sam? And she has super seats.” Because I liked the idea of bringing in the element of what I actually do in my real life, which is give my chairs names and personalities. One of the things that I loved the most about going to school was getting back to school supplies, and I love the school supplies.

Oh my gosh. Same.

We love a school supply. And going to the mall to get clothes. And I was like, “Kids don’t go to the mall anymore. She’s going to.” And so basically what I did was, “Okay, it’s going to be at a mall. And she’s going to go shopping with her friends and her mom.” And then I started to build the story out. What are the seats that she’s comfortable in at home? Like her living room couch, and her mom’s car back seat. And what comfort do those bring? The couch in her living room is named after Misty Copeland. I just liked the idea of giving her a hero to name one of the chairs after. There’s another chair that makes jokes that always make her laugh.

And then, the idea of there being a super seat in training, a chair that’s not all the way there yet. Because we live in a world where not everything is comfortable. To me, there was something about making sure that she could talk through the discomfort like, “Hey, I know this is not comfortable for me. And I know exactly what I need, but thank you for providing me with the comfort that you can.” I just really like the idea of teaching kids it’s okay to be comfortable, and it’s okay to take a break. And so, that’s how it came about — just me being obsessed with the conversation around rest, and the idea of productivity, and how even I fall into that cycle of needing to be productive even if constantly moving, so that I hold “value.” And it really came about because I was excited to talk about rest for children, to talk about how even rest can be an adventure.

How did you come up with the names for the seats? I’d love to know if that’s something that you do in real life, I’d love to know how you do that in real life as well.

Oh, I’m so glad you asked. One, yes, it is a thing that I do in real life. My living room chair in my mom’s home is named Vivian. It looks like a Vivian to me. It’s a big brown couch. My office chair, it’s a big, black office chair that’s very comfortable. I’ve named it Owen. Owen feels like a really strong name. Sometimes he wears flannel. He’s like a security guard vibe. So I do name every chair that I’m in long term.

With these chairs though, I wanted them to be full and light and exciting, because she is a kid. If she spent a lot of time in her living room chair at home with her friends, I wanted it to be somebody that could bring her comfort. And I don’t know why, but the first person I thought of was Misty Copeland. This little girl, Sam, she loves to do pirouettes, and she loves her dance classes, and she would love Misty Copeland. She would freak out if she met her. And the chair was pink and very cute. And I was like Misty Copeland, immediately. Her mom’s back seat — which is named Laney — I named it after my cousin because she’s very funny.

You have cerebral palsy. And how important for you was it that your main character would share your disability?

Oh, it was imperative. I think I couldn’t have written this without it being that way, because I was really writing the book that I would have loved to write at her age. I just wanted somebody to share my disability, because I think it would have helped me get to a place where I accepted myself much faster than I did. I’m thinking, what other little Black girl is waiting for a book like this? What other little Black girl with this sort of visible disability? There aren’t that many of them.

I know that disability advocacy is something that’s really important to you, but what I loved is that Sam’s disability isn’t the whole story.

I was very conscious that I didn’t want it to sound like an after school special. Sam is who you want your kids to be friends with, and also she has a disability. Because I think oftentimes when we tell stories about disabilities, it becomes all they are. They don’t have thoughts or feelings or ideas outside of their disability. And in every ounce of the work that I do, I try my best to make sure whatever character I’m creating, or whatever thing I’m doing, is not just about disabilities. I know that my life is more than that. I do have cerebral palsy. It’s a big part of my life, but it is not the only thing about me. Somebody said this to me a couple of years ago, and it’s the idea like, “My disability is the lens through which I see the world, but not the subject.” That’s why it’s so important for me to have, in the book, her best friends laugh with her, and play with her, and try on jewelry, and help her when she needs it. It was really important for me to make Sam a fully realized child. And not have to be designated to just being a disability and nothing else.

So let’s chat about disability rep in children’s books.

I mean, listen, I think that writing books is very hard. But I’m very tired of seeing books in general — but especially I’ve seen quite a few children’s books — where it’s like the parent of, or the caretaker of a disabled person, right? I was so desperate to tell my own story, not have it be told to me. I think Sam’s Super Seats is a great stepping stone in the direction of giving disabled authors the chance to tell the stories they want to tell. So it’s not a “from the outside looking in” thing. It’s like, “No, this is literally my life. And these are characters that I created, and characters that I want to see.

And I think oftentimes, children’s books speak to children almost like they infantilize them where it’s like, “Oh no, they couldn’t possibly understand disability. And they couldn’t possibly understand race or gender or a lack of gender.” You know, I think there’s always conventions about what kids can handle and what they can’t. And for me, I wanted to make sure that Sam was very fun, very bright, very bold. But also could teach a child, who might not know something, something along the way. I wanted it to be like a spoonful of education. I just wanted people to have fun while they’re reading it. And then also be able to learn without it being so ham-fisted.

Oftentimes children’s books about disability, or any sort of marginalization, can be ham-fisted because people are like, “We just want kids to obviously treat everybody equally.” I think sometimes when you go in with that mind frame of like, “this has to be super-educational,” You lose the joy, you lose the fun, you don’t think about fun. You don’t think about character or the way something is illustrated — working with my illustrator was the same practice. Because I wanted her to be very bright and bold and fun. I want people to be able to look at her and smile.

People feel like they need to teach kids, whereas if they just read a book about a character with a marginalization, that light bulb goes on in a very different kind of way. Sometimes it feels like do people know kids at all?

Right. I feel like what we have to learn to do is give kids more credit. To allow kids to be like, “Oh, okay. This thing I don’t understand, please tell me about it.” That’s why they’re asking you. They’re not asking you to tell them something that dismisses their thoughts and ideas. They’re asking you to tell them things that they can know for the future. I don’t understand where that disconnect often comes from. Do you know the children that you are with every day, or the children that you know — do you actually know them? Do you think that it’s fair to be like, “Oh no, they can’t learn about disability. They’re too young. It’s too much.” No, you have to give them a chance. You have to give kids the chance to show you what’s too much for them. It’s just frustrating. I’m really glad to have this conversation, because I feel like people don’t think about the way that they baby children.

You said that you love backto-school time, because you like buying office supplies and getting ready. So what is your favorite office supply to buy during back to school time, and also what was your favorite part of back to school as a kid?

So back then, my favorite was a notebook, or a binder of some sort. I was obsessed with the three ring binders. I just liked the idea of putting my little loose leaf paper in the binder — it was so exciting. And I love the notebook. I loved handwriting things. So notebook and folders where I could put the things that I had handwritten.

Now as an adult, I love to buy planners. I was buying them, but I didn’t really actually start using them until 2017. They were just collecting dust. I’d be really into it for a month or two, and then I would just stop. But since I got busy, they actually helped. So I have so many at this point. I saw a bigger desk planner that I used just at home, and then I have a wall planner, and then I have one that I take with me on the go. But sometimes I switch that one out for just a regular notebook. There’s something so satisfying about planning ahead for the things that I have. It’s very much a Virgo thing. Writing it down, and like, “Okay, this is what I have to do this week or this month, or these are the big things.” And I do little encouraging notes in the corner, like, “You got this girl.”

Lastly, you set the bulk of Sam’s Super Seats in a mall. Why? What do you love about malls?

One, I love a mall. Like, I love a store. I love shopping. I love malls because there’s so many stores, and there’s so many cheap clothes. And as a kid, my favorite thing to do was go to Borders bookstore. I miss Borders. So we would go back-to-school shopping with my mom, me and my sister. We would get clothes, whatever. And there would be like a couple more stores I want to look in. I would be like, “Mom, can I go in the Borders while you and Leah go into these other two stores?” She’d be like, “Fine, but you can only get one book.” Or “You can only get two books.” And so, I combine both things that I love so much at the mall. That’s why I was like, let me set this children’s book in a mall.

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Sam’s Super Seats by Keah Brown is out now.

“All This Could Be Different” Review: A Novel So Good I Dreaded Finishing It

“As the summer began, I moved to Milwaukee, a rusted city where I had nobody, parents two oceans away, I lay on the sun-warmed floor of my paid-for apartment and decided I would be a slut.”

So begins the wonderfully immersive and concentrated All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews, a novel so good I was torn by the incompatible desires to never set it down and never finish it.

Sneha, 22-years-old and fresh out of college, lands a well paying corporate job that buries her in Gantt charts and spreadsheets. The fact of having a job sets her apart from her college friends, ground down by the recession. She brings one of those college buds along, Thom, her white boy bro. Together, they work as consultants for Peter, a boss who dictates what Sneha should wear, how she should be, dangling before her the carrot of possibly, maybe, one day sponsoring her green card.

Eager to make good on her slut goals, Sneha spends cold Milwaukee nights meeting girls at bars or scrolling through the apps and firing off missives ranging from lazy (“sup”) to cringe (“my doctor told me I need some Vitamin U”) to earnest (“hey! always great to see another queer brown lady here. how are you?”). She lives alone in an apartment paid for by Peter, a bizarre perk of her job as a “change management consultant,” a job title that often elicits clarifying questions as to what the fuck that even means .

Sneha is very good at her job. In every other part of her life, she is very bad at managing change.

She has intimacy issues that touch every part of her life, every fluttering attempt to connect with others stymied by her clamshell-closed heart. She was abused by a close family relative in her childhood. Her parents immigrated with her to India in her youth, but scandal swarmed, leading to her father’s deportation. Both her parents returned to India, leaving Sneha alone in a country still very new to her and with no real way to process this abandonment.

It’d be easy to say Sneha belongs to two worlds at once, her lives twinned but separate. But I find it even blurrier than that. She isn’t of two worlds but of the space between worlds. Early in the book, she reads an article on her phone about how “in certain cultures, there are no separate words for the color green and the color blue, and if you showed someone a grass-hued paint swatch next to one the color of summer sky, they would say these were the same. Different shades of one thing.” This resurfaces from time to time in the book. Greenblue, bluegreen, not hyphenates but one conjoined, complete, sundry thing.

Sneha longs for India just as she feels out of place while there. In Milwaukee, she hurls herself at building an adult life, feeling like three toddlers in a suit. She clings to familial expectations even as they’re at odds with who she is at her core. She hates her name, a discomfort I’m so familiar with that it’s difficult for me even to write her name so often on the page since I know it’s what she wouldn’t want. This is the experience of reading All This Could Be Different; the characters’ hopes, dreams, and desires are so fully rendered on the page that it’s difficult not to absorb them.

The novel is told in first person from Sneha’s perspective and broken into four sections titled I, They, She, We. Despite the first person point of view, the book is communal — collectivist even — in its approach to storytelling. Sneha accumulates a community of friends, her relationship with Thom deepening but also growing more complicated in that way college friendships often do when removed from the bubble of a campus. She reconnects with her ex-boyfriend and dear friend, Amit, with whom she shares a relationship that really does transcend boundaries between family, friendship, romance. She meets Antigone “Tig” Clay, and the two become loving best friends who also challenge each other often. And with Marina, a white girl dancer who Sneha immediately places on a pedestal, she has at first a long circuitous dyke opera of a maddening crush and repeated chance run-ins where nothing really happens . Eventually, they have an on-and-off romance that’s as enthralling when it’s going well as it is when it’s extremely not.

A masterclass in character development, All This Could Be Different provides a textured view of friendship. It looks at not just how we show up for and tend to the people we care about but also how we fail them. These characters fuck up constantly, make patterns of bad behavior. Sneha repeatedly withholds emotional truth from her friends, refuses to open that clamshell, sees herself and her feelings as a burden. And that fear of burdening indeed incidentally, well, burdens, makes her friends have to guess at what’s going on, puts up impenetrable walls. This tendency toward silence and secrets peaks when she accidentally falls into a lie that her parents are dead. But even this choice — to essentially kill her parents — is written with such nuance and care so that it seems not at all like a plot device but a deeply human impulse. In text messages to Amit, Sneha writes about why it felt easier to pretend her parents were dead than to acknowledge their role in her life:

wp get their to own their lives. they get to feel like their lives belong only to them.

for about a month i got to feel that way. not like all my choices are mortgaged to the people who have made my life possible

After this exchange, blue and green reemerge, Sneha using vague memories of her Intro to Physics course to try to break apart the particles and waves of her life. “Sometimes green and blue collapse. Indistinct. Smudge into sameness.”

Consistently threaded into the narrative fabric of the novel are the sociopolitical contexts of the time and the cultural underpinnings of its characters. Class plays an enormous role in the book. When Sneha chooses to “kill” her parents mentally, it is a fantasized rebirth as something she is not and cannot be. It is not so much that she is wishing her parents were actually dead, of course, but rather that things…could be different (*Beanie Feldstein in Lady Bird voice* IT’S THE TITULAR ROLE), that her life could not be so compressed by the fact of her father’s imprisonment and deportation nor by the expectations from her parents that she should marry a man and live the life they envision for her.

The characters in All This Could Be Different self-sabotage and self-harm, but these chaaotic choices are often symptoms of the state-sanctioned violences that grip their lives: racism, unaffordable healthcare, xenophobia, homophobia, strictly enforced gender binaries, patriarchy, and more. They’re bound by the precarity of life. In the storms of their circumstances, they must reach for each other for some semblance of purchase. Some are affected by addiction or proximity to it (the writing about addiction throughout the novel is honest and empathetic). They all bring their baggage to the table, and when the characters fight in this book, it’s as meaningful and deep-seated as when they connect. Their problems are sometimes at odds with each other; they struggle to see things through each others’ eyes. But they try. And when they fail, they keep trying.

To Thom, Sneha’s paid-for apartment might seem like a great privilege, but it comes at a great cost, too: Her property manager who lives in the same building is a nosy, uptight racist who uses every dogwhistle in the book to signal her disdain for Sneha. When Thom pontificates on his Marxist kill-the-ruling-class ideology, Sneha goads him into admitting his parents are doctors. When Marina laughs at the Indian woman who approaches Sneha to inquire about marriage arrangement, an ache blooms in Sneha as she realizes she can’t explain to this white girl how, yes, she’s happy to be in this country where she can freely hold her hand but also, no, she does not wish to laugh at or mock her people.

For every character, things will be good for a bit, and then one bad thing leads, quickly, to another, problems compounding each other until they become ruinous. An infected tooth. A lost job. A family member in need of help. These things can upend a life. Sneha goes from having enough money to live comfortably while sending some overseas to her parents and picking up the tab for her less financially stable friends to watching her bank account dwindle dangerously close to zero, running calculations on how many days she can live on Wendy’s chicken sandwiches and secretly shopping at a food bank. This trajectory seems to happen quickly and slowly all at once. The temporality of capitalism, indeed, dizzies.

I think I’ve suggested this throughout, but it’s worth stating baldly: All This Could Be Different is queer as fuck. And not only in its dating storylines or queer sex scenes but also in its rendering of friendship as every bit as propulsive, impactful, radiant, and heartbreaking as romantic relationships. As every bit as messy as family, too. It is perhaps the greatest depiction of what chosen family really means without ever explicitly using those words. When Sneha says “I love you” for the first time, it is not to a lover but to a friend.

But also, let’s talk about those queer sex scenes. All This Could Be Different is smart, layered, and often very serious, but it is also very horny (and none of those things contradict each other but rather work together). It is so boring to believe art cannot be both erotic and political. All This Could Be Different deftly functions on both levels, in tandem. There’s a sex scene involving a car’s gear stick that I don’t even want to describe too much so as not to spoil its wonders, so strange and hot and real. The kind of queer sex I crave from literature, exploratory and revelatory.

Those intimacy issues Sneha has? Of course they work their way into the bedroom, where her tendency toward silence persists. One time when Sneha and Marina are fucking, Sneha internally remarks on feeling like she knows all the right things to do with Marina, her body moving as if by instinct. But at the same time, another thought that undercuts this: She thinks about wanting sex that is rougher, that is kinkier than what they’re currently doing. We’re let into the rough contours of Sneha’s desire, but she doesn’t let herself or Marina fully into it. Immediately following these fantasized thoughts, Sneha narrates:

But that was too much. I knew that. And I was holding her like a lover, holding her in my arms carefully while my hands worked her. It would be too much.

Instead of asking for the things she wants, instead of consensually exploring desires she deems too much , unattainable, Sneha stays silent, performs. She judges herself, slick with shame. Later, when the gear stick moment comes into play, we finally get to see Sneha let her desires out a bit more, and that makes the sex scene all the hotter.

Mathew’s prose is remarkable throughout, short, bright bursts of fragments between languid, snaking sentences that surprise. Never before have I read a sentence about masturbation more lovely than this: “I began to knead and whisk myself, summoning the froth of lust.” It’s immediately followed by the to-the-point: “When I came I cried out loud.” This skillful alternating between lush imagery and straightforward, plain language makes All This Could Be Different pulsate. I was immediately captivated by its rhythms.

Even the mundane is rendered rousing, such as this description of Sneha simply tracking the furniture she ordered online: “I checked the tracking numbers of the furniture items I’d bought. The pieces—dressers and tufted sleeper sofas and leaner mirrors—were lodged in the belly of the country, moving slowly, implacably, toward me.”

I’m a sucker for food writing in fiction, and there are great food and drink descriptions throughout: “We ordered bulbous glasses of jammy-then-butter red wine, fried tomatoes, a salad topped with perfect little dominoes of beefsteak, a risotto full of corn and leeks—new to me, green and oniony.”

The movement of memory in the book also has a distinct and memorable rhythm, such as this bang of a flashback when Sneha accidentally cuts her finger opening a can of chickpeas (RELATABLE):

The sting of it against my little gash, a time machine. Arnica on my cuts, my mother holding me aloft by a single thin brown arm while I wailed. Light coming in through dusty curtains over the bed that my grandparents would, years later, lie in and never leave. Dettol in the small hospital in Kerala. I had gone to have my wisdom teeth taken out mid-university; it made no sense, my mother said, to pay American highway robber prices. I thought of how in childhood I would fold into my mother after tantrums and punishments, how she would envelop me. Stiff bright fabric, soft ropy arms.

What a packed paragraph, every detail meaningful. Complicated memories blooming like little bruises. And it’s immediately followed by a tight, one-sentence paragraph that does just as much:

My mother’s smell. Fennel seeds. Sandal soap.

Whether she’s writing about Gantt charts or economic turmoil or oysters or blue and green or sex or hunger, Mathews’ sentences seduce and swathe. Here is a sprawling novel that’s still intimate at every turn, compacting so much into its shape, like a fistful of sand. And it is a testament to the strength of the character writing that I genuinely feel like I could read about them for much longer, that I didn’t want the story to ever end. But so much of this book is also about eschewing endings, about imagining the future and also recognizing the way other people ripple-effect our lives. So even its ending doesn’t feel like a conclusion so much as an embrace and a gentle nudge forward.

These characters help and hurt each other in turns. Their interpersonal conflicts are inseparable from the more overarching systemic ones that impact them in varied ways. But most of all, these friendships and relationships just feel blisteringly real in their highs and lows. During a rift with Thom, Sneha laments there aren’t movies she can sink herself into that contend with friendship breakups; romantic breakups take up more space in heartbreak narratives. I think now if a friend were to come to me experiencing difficulty with another friend, I might press this novel into their hands.

Yes, here are some messy as fuck people, but they’re also trying their best in an inhospitable, cruel world. The novel is quietly anti-carceral, believing in second, third, fiftieth chances. Its title also becomes a rallying cry, the core of Tig’s beliefs that they can and should try to build a better life, one in which burdens can be shared and not dealt with in painful isolation. When the characters begin to hope, begin to work toward something new, something different, it feels like a transcendent act of bravery. And none of it is sugar-coated or idealized. This is hard work, building community and coalitions. People will fuck up, and they do, over and over in All This Could Be Different. But the novel dares to suggest that even within our interpersonal conflicts with each other, there are chances for connection and for growth. We just have to allow ourselves to take them.

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All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews is out now.

Author Lydia Conklin on Being Queer in the 90s and Writing Characters in Transitional Moments

Feature image of Lydia Conklin by Emily Ray Reese

The authentic queer self, as Lydia Conklin reveals in their debut collection Rainbow Rainbow, is not a divided self but many conflicting ones. We are eager, ridiculous, tragic, blundering, wicked, hopeless, selfish, adventurous, loving, doting, brave. The stories gathered here define queerness as freedom at the cost of approval, connection, even love. We learn about breaking rules, especially when those rules were never written with us in mind.

People gather unwittingly in groups and en masse beneath Conklin’s sharp eye, in settings so deftly curated they occasionally feel like sets — a pioneer pageant, a raucous street fair full of drunk college kids, the 90s, a convention where trans Youtubers debate “crucial Gen Z issues such as pansexuality, passing privilege, cisnormativity, he/him lesbians, PGPs, chasers, and demiromanticism.” Exchanges of dialogue cut sharply while relaying vulnerability. (“Of course I care. You’re my best friend.”/ “You’re not my best friend.” / Heidi frowned. “Well, who is?” / “My pussy.”)

Yet it is Conklin’s commitment to the depth and emotional scope of the queer experience that give life to the work. A lesbian decides to have a child with her girlfriend for the wrong reasons. A woman accidentally kills her quasi-girlfriend’s dog. An aunt devotes themselves to their trans nibling but mourns how she was born too late to have received the injections that would have meant “my body would have never bloomed into these curves, (141). Given the choice between being a matriarch and an ox in a simulation of the Oregon Trail (“what she wanted to be was a boy”), a young person chooses ox. Sometimes it’s strangers who know us best, as we see in “Pink Knives” when a nonbinary speaker soon to get top surgery begins an open-relationship affair during quarantine. With this comes one of the collection’s most striking passages and revelations: “And since you’ve used my right pronoun, which my girlfriend can’t always quite get, which I can’t always quite get, which confuses and upsets my friends, to what extent they think about me or it at all, which my family won’t know until they read this story, whatever final form it takes, I assume what you are doing is right.”

Conklin allows our readerly gaze to fall on the outlier, the lonely misfit who would choose singularity over false belonging. No choice is easy, certainly there are regrets, yet everyone makes their way. “She was a true pioneer,” Conklin writes, “one ocean behind her and another—one she’d never seen and might never reach—ahead.”

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Annie: There is an impulse in media and pop culture to reduce queerness to a single or flat expression, an effort to universalize and contain. You buck against this in Rainbow Rainbow and get at sublimated vulnerabilities, desires, and darkness. How does this collection conceive of queerness as freedom?

Lydia: There is obviously hardship in being queer, whether during the Trump administration, right now when rights are under siege, or back in the 90s when I was growing up. But there’s also a kind of freedom in not having the expectation of “normalcy” and being able to find out for yourself who you are. I always had this feeling that I wasn’t normal and that things that were being said didn’t apply to me. That feeling had a lot of sadness and scariness around it but also, yes, a certain freedom that I could just be the weird one, whoever I was.

It’s also interesting, what you say about flattening of the narrative, because I was definitely trying to write against this Hollywood idea of queerness. Whenever queerness is allowed to appear, those stories are being told from the cis-het perspective, and there are only certain stories that are allowed to be told or that cis-het people want to hear. I remember all the queer movies I watched as a kid; the majority of them ended in suicide, which is obviously an issue that queer people have to face and deal with — but it just became the same narrative over and over. I find those kinds of patterns to be suspect.

Is this why, for many of your characters, there is a fear of being left behind or out-of-sync? Do you envision this particularly as a queer experience or reclamation?

I can’t speak for all queer people, obviously, but a big part of it for me was that, if you’re cis person, you have your gender figured out at an early age for the most part — that’s something you don’t have to wrestle with. I’m having to struggle with an issue later in life that most people take for granted from the moment of birth. They don’t have to question it at any point during their lives. So there is a feeling of panic attached to that — like, why am I still here trying to figure out this most basic fact that most people don’t have to look at, at all?

You alluded to growing up in the 90s, and I want to say that I really appreciate what you’re doing with the timeline across these stories. There’s a lot of forgetting that’s happening culturally, sometimes for really good reasons, as Generation Z is more empowered to claim queerness and trans identities. The 90s, of course, were not hospitable to queer lives. What are you telling us about who we are now by looking back at the decade of grunge, goth, and glitter?

I was in middle school when AOL came out. I remember searching profiles for Ani Difranco to see who on here is gay, because no one else in the 90s would have liked her (laughs). In the time when I grew up — I’m sure you had the same experience — there was one out person in my high school of 2,000 people. It was not okay to be queer. Everyone was screaming gay slurs, pushing people. You attracted violence by being outside the gender norms; you attracted derision.

Then I was teaching in my 20s at a high school program, and all the kids, it seemed, were queer in some way and were using identity markers that I hadn’t known existed even as an adult. It’s thrilling, obviously, because these kids get to be who they are, and that’s so wonderful. But you start to feel like this dinosaur, which is in some ways frustrating. It’s like, why did I have to go through all that pain and misery when change was just around the corner? And another feeling, which is like, oh, so now nobody is gonna spit on me, so that means I’m fine?

Lots of queer people our age are carrying around so much trauma from that time. People who are outside of the narrative can look at it now and think, oh, so now it’s all fine, we don’t even have to worry about this issue anymore. At the same time, even kids now are struggling massively at school or in dealing with their parents. There’s a little bit of an illusion around acceptance right now because of how fast things shifted. Even if kids can be out more safely than you or I, it’s still an act of bravery anywhere in the world, some places more than others.

You’re absolutely right about the illusion, and books like this allow us to pause and reckon with past and current realities. That makes me think of Lillia, one of my favorite characters in the collection, who brings their nibling Sunny to a conference for trans YouTubers. She envies Sunny’s world, how Sunny is “wonderful with the weak” and how he has already adopted casual boy gestures like running a hand through his hair. “I should be grateful,” Lillia tells us, “that the world changed in time for Sunny. If I were his mother, my feeling would be pure. But as it is, I wish the shift hadn’t happened too late for me to ever be beautiful in my right body but too soon for me to die in the peace of never having known another way.” Can you talk about the liminal space Lillia exists in, how it brings joy and pain?

That story was based on my experience transitioning later in life. Realizing things about my gender later in life and having the strange and uncanny experience of seeking guidance from people who are significantly younger than me, both in my family and on YouTube. Just seeing these 19 and 20-year-old people talking about gender theory and transition and offering practical advice. That’s a rare moment in history where you’re looking to people younger than you to show you how to live. It’s a humbling experience and also interesting to see these kids figuring things out, creating the discourse. It’s a discourse that hasn’t been allowed to happen, and they’re the ones creating the terminology and the moors and the infighting. I wanted to dramatize that in a story and show how the older queer generation is feeling and relating to the younger one because of this incredible chasm of difference in experience. And even though Sunny is not the main character, I wanted him to be in the book as a counterpoint to Hazel and Heidi and Coco, kids and teenagers around his age in the collection who were growing up in the 90s.

You write young people with such joy and nuance. I’m thinking about Heidi in “Ooh, the Suburbs” pushing her friend to meet up with an older woman because she has her own complicated desires, even though we as readers are a bit unnerved. In your story about a fifth-grade roleplay of the Oregon Trail, Coco becomes a pioneer. It seems all the queer characters in Rainbow Rainbow are pioneers. How is the experience of breaking out on one’s own both a gift and a curse?

Part of why I was motivated to write this book was because I wanted to write a book that didn’t exist when I was a child. I really relied on books as a child to show me the way, because there were no other role models for queerness in my life. Dorothy Allison and Carson McCullers and Harper Lee were some of my favorites. But even in their work, in those representations of queerness, you find these children who you can tell are queer but they never carry queerness into adulthood. That was the way those authors could get away with writing queerness, to portray a stage of queerness before it became defined by sexuality. But that left me with this feeling that, after childhood, the queer character — Scout, or whoever — just drops off a cliff. There’s no queer future for any of them. Because of the lack of role models in literature or in real life, you have to break out on your own. There’s that moment at the end of “Pioneer” where Coco is the only living classmate left in the in the pageant. Coco realizes they’re on their own with whatever is coming next. People can sublimate their true selves for varying amounts of time and suffer for varying amounts of time, but at some point there’s gonna be a moment where you have to reckon with what’s going on. And that is often a moment of loneliness.

So how does dialogue get at those kinds of untold stories or moments?

Dialogue can be really useful when there’s a character who’s not the point-of-view character and doesn’t get to have an interiority in the story. Lisa Persons, who you referenced before, is an adult behaving super amorally. I wanted to find her humanity, even as I didn’t like her and didn’t like how she was behaving. Since we don’t get to see what’s in her mind, we see through her dialogue and actions how she’s also struggling. She isn’t a blithely evil person, but she’s someone who’s probably had a horrible struggle with her own sexuality.

Adults in Rainbow Rainbow are often misguided, even when they try (“’I am the spirit of Personal Dissonance,” Ms. Harper said from under her wave of crispy silver hair.”’) There is, among these characters, “the instinct to bury a mess with another mess.” Where does that come from, and what new messes are made?

There are lots of examples of characters making a mess with another mess. People are trying to resolve their needs in these disorganized ways at critical moments in the stories. They’re in this crisis point or transitional moment. It might be a gender transition, or a transition to sobriety, or they’re post-break up. I am really interested in those moments of chaos when characters are still trying to figure out how to handle their desires.

Sometimes your characters, as in “Laramie Time” and “Counselor of My Heart” enact betrayal in an effort towards self-preservation. Other times, as with “Sunny Talks,” they rise to become their best selves for those they love, despite their own heartache. Whatever they do, they often do it in silence. How does the hidden and unseen, drive your fiction?

Somebody told me that pretty much everyone who grew up queer, especially in our generation, is a secretive person or has an ability for secrecy. You had to hide your desires and your feelings from your family and the people at school. I’d never thought about it before, but it’s very much true for me. I’m good at protecting my inner thoughts and asking questions of other people and hiding my feelings. The dramatic action in “Laramie Time” is a silent, secret one that we get to know about as the readers, but the other two crucial characters don’t know about it in the moment. Weaponizing that secrecy, or seeing how it can be made actionable in a dramatic moment of a story — that comes from a root of queerness for me.

What kinds of secrets does Rainbow Rainbow keep? From you or us?

Sometimes people realize things about the work that I haven’t. The thing you said about how all of the characters are pioneers — actually the original manuscript title was Pioneer, but I still hadn’t really thought about it that way. Readers bring something illuminating to the book, something I can’t.

If Rainbow Rainbow were a bar — knowing that in your motif it’s been a band and a drink and a number of other things — what would the vibe be?

I think the vibe would be funny and a little unhinged and fun. People dressed in strange bright outfits, kind of joking and laughing. But then in the corner someone would be silently crying (laughs).

(Laughs) I had a feeling somebody was going to be in the corner! I can totally see it! You’re a comic artist, too, and your series “Lesbian Cattle Dogs” is beloved. Which of the stories in Rainbow Rainbow would you draw?

It would probably be “Pioneer.” It’s not that it’s cartoony, but it goes to a weird place. There’s a moment when the pageant becomes reality and suddenly the children are this deranged version of a cluster of families on the Oregon Trail. It would be cool to show the characters shift, and to maybe depict Coco as changing into an actual ox instead of a kid wearing head gear and pieces of felt. The characters morph and the pageant becomes real.

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Rainbow Rainbow by Lydia Conklin is out now.

Quiz: What Queer Book Should You Read To Extend Summer?

Do you need a summery queer book to pack in your beach bag or maybe curl up with in the blissful cool of the public library’s A/C? Have I got the quiz for you! Just answer some hard-hitting questions about your ice cream flavor preferences, your dream adult summer camp, and what music you’re listening to during the heat. Then this quiz will provide you with a gay read suited to your needs. If one recommendation isn’t enough, check out this list I made a few years ago of books about sapphic summer affairs!

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10 Books for Dungeons & Dragons Queers To Read Between Adventures

It seems like Dungeons & Dragons is everywhere these days, especially in the queer community, which makes a whole lot of sense. LGBTQ people have always gravitated toward fantasy stories as allegories for gay struggles; have always been drawn to tales of found family; and leave their own Shires to find themselves as much as any hobbits. So I thought it’d be fun to assemble a list of books with D&D vibes for you. All of these stories feature: magic and/or melee, quests, chosen families, and queer characters. If you have any faves that fit this description, I sure would love to hear about them in the comments!

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Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes is a love letter to queer D&D players. It tells the story of an Orc named Viv who retires from adventuring to open a coffee shop in Thune, a city that’s never even heard of coffee! On her quest to start a new nonviolent life, she connects with a cast of some of the most lovable fantasy characters you’ve ever met, and even surprises herself by coming to realize her heart is even bigger that her biceps.

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Ash by Malinda Lo

Malinda Lo’s Ash is a precursor to the Queer YA fantasy boom we’ve seen in recent years. It’s a modern retelling of Cinderella, with a lesbian protagonist named Ash, who has been seeking fairies her whole life, but unlocks the real magic inside her when she meets Kaisa, the King’s Huntress. Ash battles her stepmother, dark fey, and her own grief on her way to becoming the hero we’ve hardly ever imagined Cinderella could be.

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Spear by Nicola Griffith

Nicola Griffith’s Spear flips Arthurian legend on its head and bends its gender in the process. It follows Peretur as she sets out on her quest to become a Knight of the Roundtable by pretending to be a man, and as she grapples with all the consequences of leaving the protection of her mother’s home. She loses her birth family, finds new love (more than once!), and unlocks ancient magic hidden inside her. It’s Mulan meets Merlin with a healthy helping of sapphic romance.

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Graceling series by Kristin Cashore

Kristin Cashore’s Graceling series starts out pretty straight. Well, pretty tomboyish — and evolves into an enormous magical world full of LGBTQ characters. Each book is written about and narrated by a different woman (and a few different women + one guy, in Winterkeep) and takes readers on all kinds of quests. The books take place in a land where some people are Graced, which means they’re born with two different colored eyes and one very specific superpower. Some are pretty chill like being a master baker or being able to juggle anything without dropping it. But some Graces are a lot more complicated, like swordplay and mind-reading. A few of Cashore’s heroines are Graced, a few of them aren’t, and one of them has a whole different kind of magic. I’ve read this book series more than any other, and can’t wait for the newest book, Seasparrow, which comes out in November.

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The Jasmine Throne by Tasha Suri

A captive princess! A maidservant who keeps the secret of an ancient magic! Enemies to friends to lovers with a dash of misandry directed at the princess’ terrible brother! The Jasmine Throne is set in a world inspired by India and features a brilliant magic system and riveting storytelling that will have you on the edge of your seat — or twisted up in your chair like a pretzel, if you sit like a bisexual — from start to finish.

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Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin

N.K. Jemisin’s multiple Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth trilogy is one of the most celebrated fantasy series of all time, and for good reason! All of Jemisin’s work is principally populated by people of color — she has talked often about how “brown becomes the default” in all of her worlds — which is a glorious change to the overwhelmingly white sci-fi/fantasy canon. The books are also stacked with fully realized queer and trans people. The Broken Earth series take place in a world of Orogenes, people who are born with an innate ability to control potentially catastrophic geological events with telekinetic-type powers. The state tries to control their magic by enslaving them. Broken Earth follows a rogue Orogene and her blossoming Orogene daughter as they each flee persecution in their own way, and try to use their powers to save the world. There’s also a love story here that you’ve never, ever heard before.

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Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon

Priory of the Orange Tree is my all-time favorite book. It’s got powerful, complicated women trying to unravel the mysteries of their upbringings, dragons, magic, sword fights, witches, a longstanding patriarchal religion coming completely unraveled, and an epic queer love story. It’s a long one, over 800 pages, but they’ll fly by and leave you pining for Shannon’s forthcoming prequel. Shannon’s world-building is second to none, and her love story will leave you physically swooning.

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Of Fire and Stars by Audrey Coulthurst

Of Fire and Stars is the book that got me through the aftermath of the 2016 election. It’s the only thing that made me feel anything besides sick at my stomach in those early days of Trump’s presidency. It’s another epic love story (look, I am who I am) between a young princess hiding her magic powers and the sister of the prince her parents arranged for her to marry. I mean this in the most affectionate way: If you love fan fiction, you’ll love this book.

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The Bone Shard Daughter by Andrea Stewart

If you want a complicated magic system that’s going to slowly reveal itself in the creepiest way possible and then leave you so aghast it will stick inside your brain forever, well! The Bone Shard Daughter is for you! Told from multiple points of view, it focuses mostly on Lin, the Emperor’s daughter, who spends her life trapped within the walls of her father’s castle trying to recover the memories she lost when she was stricken with a mystery illness years ago. Her father refuses to teach her bone shard magic until she can grab hold of her past, so she decides to just teach it to herself. Much like the Priory of the Orange Tree, the queerness in Bone Shard Daughter is as casual as the fact that magic exists. It’s just a given.

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The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune

I don’t say this lightly: The House in the Cerulean Sea is, hands down, the best found family story I have ever read or seen or heard or played in my entire life. I cried more happy tears reading T.J. Klune’s novel than I’ve ever cried. (In fact, I haven’t even reread it because I cried so hard the first time, I gave myself a three-day migraine.) The story takes place in an orphanage on a magical island where a beloved caretaker raises kids who are, well, literal monsters. When Linus, a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, is sent to the orphanage, he finds his whole entire view of the world challenged and changed, as he learns to love every little perfect rascal of a monster for exactly who they are. His feelings for their caretaker? They surprise him most of all!

Putsata Reang’s New Memoir Fills In the Gaps of Lost Family History

Loss of family history is a sadly quintessential experience for many Asian Americans and immigrants. Migration is necessarily a severing of bonds, which leads to a pervasive silence in so many of our families. There’s not only an unwillingness but also an inability to speak about the place and the history that was left behind, which becomes compounded when that history is racked with the trauma of poverty, war and loss.

Putsata Reang’s memoir Ma and Me resonates powerfully because of how definitively she fills in that silence for her own family. Reang had a long-established journalism career before writing Ma and Me, which makes the book more than just a memoir of her life. Based on interviews she conducted starting in 2011 with her parents, older relatives, and siblings, she pieces together the story of her Cambodian family going back three generations to her maternal great-grandfather.

In tracing her family’s history so far back, Reang uncovers the traditions and the traumas that have crossed generations. Her grandmother Nhim came from wealth but was married off to a former monk in training, the son of a farming family from a nearby area. What followed was a marriage rife with violence and abuse, which gave rise to two competing desires within Reang’s mother Sam-Ou Koh Reang: dreams of completing her education to become something more than a Khmer wife and the inescapable pull of fulfilling her obligations to her family.

Ultimately, war tipped the balance for Sam-Ou. After her drunk father promised her in marriage for the dowry to sustain his gambling, Sam-Ou ran away to eastern Cambodia. But America’s war in Vietnam — which stretched across Southeast Asia, into Laos and Cambodia — quite literally exploded in Sam-Ou’s life, and back she went into the arms of her family who quickly prepared her for the wedding ceremony. In the long years that followed, Sam-Ou ran away more than once, on one occasion at least, taking her children with her. But always, she returned. As Reang writes: “duty was what brought her back every time — because a Khmer wife stays.”

This tension between freeing herself from her family’s expectations and being bound to them by duty, obligation, and debt intensified even further in Reang’s life. Born just as the Khmer Rouge was coming to power across Cambodia, Reang barely survived as her family escaped the communist regime on a severely overcrowded boat. Reang heard this story from her mother repeatedly growing up, how Sam-Ou managed to keep her youngest and most sickly child alive in the most extreme of circumstances. The message Reang internalized was clear: Reang owed her life to her mother, and the only way to repay her was by being the perfect daughter.

That debt — coupled with her mother’s cultural, traditional, and gendered expectations — left Reang in an impossible position, especially as her family grappled with the enduring trauma and grief of surviving war and genocide. As Reang awakened into her sexuality, the tension only mounted, because the Khmer culture she was raised in had no place or space for queerness. Reflecting on a particularly difficult period in her adolescence, Reang observes: “When the pressure in my head mounted, I did what came naturally, what I had learned by watching Ma: I ran away.”

Ma and Me is a masterclass in processing intergenerational trauma. Interspersed through Reang’s narration of her and her family’s lives are deep reflections on how those events shaped Reang and her family for years to come, connecting past, present, and future as Reang takes the reader from her own early childhood through her contentious fallout with her parents when she married her wife.

At times, these open-ended reflections cut right to the core, with Reang leaving her readers to consider the limitations of words when it comes to the lasting effects of trauma. Taking just one of many powerful examples, early in the book, as Reang describes her family’s flight from Cambodia, she juxtaposes the concrete and the abstract:

“It didn’t add up to much, what my family packed in the final minutes before leaving home. But how do you count loss and regret and sorrow? How do you measure the things you carried inside and that you will continue to carry for all of your life? How do you weigh the guilt of leaving and living?”

With passages like these, Reang draws readers into her experience, even if they don’t share her cultural heritage or family circumstances. In addition to immersing its audience in Khmer culture, Cambodian political history, and the refugee experience, Ma and Me effectively makes readers feel the emotional and personal implications that all of those forces had on Reang.

Reang grapples with what it means to carry intergenerational trauma not only as an Asian American, immigrant, and refugee but also as a queer person. Ma and Me is a narration of Reang’s lifelong quest to reconcile the obligation and guilt that is embedded within her family history and heritage with all of the identities she holds, all the conflicting privileges and hardships she was born into and raised in. This memoir is complex and nuanced, showing the many sides of the people and circumstances who have shaped Reang. In spite of the many painful and heart-wrenching experiences depicted throughout, Ma and Me is ultimately a hopeful story about finding one’s freedom as a queer Asian American while staying true to all of those identities.

Reang’s engaging writing makes this heavy book a compelling read. As Reang says in her opening chapter, “We are both storytellers, Ma and I.” Reang’s prowess as a storyteller makes Ma and Me a book that I will keep coming back to.

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Ma and Me by Putsata Reang is out now.

K-Ming Chang on Writing Sex Scenes, Profanity in Myths, and Letting Flash Fiction Be Messy

K-Ming Chang is a writer of poetry, novels, flash fiction, and everything in between. Her first book, a novel about queer mythologies and desire in three generations of Taiwanese American women called Bestiary, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. It was also named one of the best books of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and The New York Public Library, as well as a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Chang’s playful and visceral writing has been building up to a body of work that is funny and surreal — and for and about queer Asian and Asian American people.

Her newest book is Gods of Want, a nine-headed phoenix gracing the cover. This is her debut short story collection, which she describes as a triptych, composed of three sections: “Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths.” If you go to Chang’s website, she impressively has dozens and dozens of prose pieces, both short stories and flash fiction, published everywhere from McSweeney’s to Lithub to Autostraddle. I was so intrigued by how many stories she had to tell through different forms that I had to take her generative flash fiction class through Kundiman. What I found most wonderful about her as a teacher was her encouragement to students to be more open and permissive to ourselves as writers.

I was ecstatic to talk to Chang about playing with language, obsessing over things, and being horny readers from a young age. During our interview, I heard her lovely pet birds chirping in the background (birds are one of her obsessions as a writer, as she is currently at work on more stories and another novel, in which she promises to deliver more bird content.)

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Buchwald: I’m so happy to be doing this Autostraddle interview with you. My first question is taken from an interview Kamala Puligandla did with Patrick Cottrell: As an intro to our queer readers, what are your big three? And I’ve also read that you refer to yourself as “futch” — I’m interested in how these parts of you bleed into your work?

Chang: I’m a Pisces sun, Gemini moon, and Scorpio rising. There’s a lot of Scorpio energy around me; I have a lot of Scorpios in my family, so I find it interesting that I may present as a Scorpio.

I love that question about futch identity. It’s one of those things I was internally gatekeeping for myself. I was really interested in reinventing narratives of girlhood and being playful in writing about femininity and masculinity. When I was in college, somebody said to me, “Oh, you have a very futch energy,” and I loved the playfulness of that invented word. The idea that there is something that you can’t quite pin down about futchness. I just find that that is really conducive to me approaching my writing with a sense of playfulness.

Buchwald: This is such a good introduction to this collection, which is divided into three sections: “Mothers,” “Myths,” and “Moths.” I’d love to hear you talk about how you organized it and the recurring use of “M” words.

Chang: I didn’t have an organization for the book. And it was really difficult for me to find the shape and form of it. I didn’t even know what stories were going to be inside of it, but I realized that I love to return to language and to the micro level of language because I find that the language tells me everything. The sentence tells me everything. If I have no plot, no character, no structure, no form, no theme, all of those things are what I’m struggling with: really big macro aspects of a story. The language always tells me and reveals all. I find that if I just return to the words, the minutiae, the most tiny elements, it can show me all of the really big things that I’m wondering about.

So the M words really leapt out at me. And then I ended up with the three words that form the triptych of the book. This is another example of when I play with language, it’s almost smarter than me and more aware than I am and more revealing than I could ever be when I’m thinking about the story. There’s something about language that is beyond my mind and imagination, and it just ends up revealing all.

Buchwald: It really is a triptych. I could just see it as these three beautiful panels and all the scenes from each story filling up each one.

These stories have appeared in many different publications, and I was surprised to learn that a lot of them, including ones that have already been published, have been reworked. Can you speak more about your editing process?

Chang: Half the stories are published, and half the stories are unpublished. I didn’t plan it — I just ended up thinking about which stories still felt alive for me. There was something about the stories that either troubled me or thrilled me that made me want to return to them, even if they had been published. I let that be a compass in choosing stories. And I try not to think about, if a story’s already published, does that mean I can’t rework it? Or does it mean that it’s already done for me emotionally? I tried to think, “Oh, why do I feel myself constantly revisiting this? What is my subconscious trying to get me to revisit or return to?” So with those stories that had already been published, I found that it was either one of two things: Either I didn’t want to touch anything because in its form, it just felt like it wanted to be in this collection and be neighbors with these other stories, or I did a really dramatic and drastic rewrite, where the endings and characters changed, and everything about it felt really different. There was no in between. It was either my instincts really wanted to preserve or to destroy. I guess it’s very mythical. Everything is either creation or destruction. There are some stories that I wanted to fossilize in this form versus stories that I thought, “Okay, time to destroy everything about it, let it all out, and begin again.”

Buchwald: That’s so great that you bring up that dichotomy of creation and destruction. Another dichotomy I recognized was that of consumption and expulsion.

Chang: I think I’m always playing with some form of the dichotomy, like that of repulsion and attraction, or disgust and desire, which is very queer — being repulsed by something and then also attracted to it and how those two things co-exist. And how desire and want is also accompanied by doubt or uncertainty or shame. All of those things being of one element to me feels like a very queer impulse. Things like consumption and expelling, I’m really interested in how dichotomies are actually not dichotomies and breaking down the boundaries of those. I find that the language for two opposite things are the same. The desire to really lean into something because it’s really gross and because it is so beautiful and perfect. I really love when those moments can overlap.

For consumption and expulsion, to me, it’s all about this process of digestion. I’m really interested in the metabolism of memory and the metabolism of experience — what it means to consume something as a desire to possess something. But because of the nature of our bodies and the porousness of ourselves, you can never really hold onto anything or keep something as it is. Everything is a process of bodily transformation for the characters in this book. I’m really interested in consumption as transformation, because if it’s got to go in one end, it’s got to come out the other end as something different. It has to metabolize.

There’s something kind of poetic about that very basic bodily process of transforming one thing into another. I really wanted to explore what the transformational possibilities of consuming and expelling something are.

I’m really interested in the metabolism of memory and the metabolism of experience — what it means to consume something as a desire to possess something.

Buchwald: There’s also this very prevalent theme of the cycle, specifically the cyclical experiences of memory. Can you speak more about the cyclical nature of your work?

Chang: I do treat my storytelling as a circling in a way. I find that formally and structurally, I’m most interested in stories that end where they begin. The way that I usually find endings to my stories is by looking at the beginning. It’s usually a sense of accumulating language from the beginning that has transformed and then feeds back into the beginning. And it’s this kind of never-ending loop. I’m interested in the cyclical nature of memory and inherited stories, ones that are told intergenerationally or within communities again, and again and again. And I find that all myths are naturally repetitive because they’ve been told so many times. The very nature of myth and folklore is that it’s meant to be repeated over and over again, in different contexts. Because of that, I find that repetition is transformative, rather than something that is static. I’m interested in what it means for a family to have a mythology that it obsessively repeats. And what is being metabolized every time those stories are repeated or cycled through. And what it means to inherit something that is cyclical and to choose what to repeat and what to change. Being cyclical also implies that maybe there isn’t a lot of agency within that, that you’re on this wheel, but I’m really interested in which elements of choice present themselves within that cyclical tally. What do people choose to carry from these very cyclical, passed down stories?

Buchwald: The use of scatalogical humor is apparent in this collection. You’ve talked about Jenny Zhang and Ottessa Moshfegh influencing your work — who else is generating work with that element that influences you?

Chang: Jenny Zhang is a huge inspiration for me. I think the way that she writes with a certain kind of maximalism is so inspiring. I took a Catapult class about coming-of-age stories with her a few years back, and I was so in awe of her generosity and her kindness, and the way she presented storytelling. It was so playful. It was just such a magical experience. Her writing about the scatological, the body, the humor of her work, the love, violence, humor, and sadness, all of it — it taught me that there could be writing that encompasses everything, and it didn’t feel like it had to neatly separate out. It was allowed to be a soup of a being and that was so freeing to me.

A lot of oral storytelling definitely inspired that, because there’s just so much of the scatological and the gross and a lot of mythological traditions. I think just the nature of, oh, what does it mean to build a body? And there’s so much that’s really profane about myth as much as it is sacred. And I just, I loved that so much. I was like, wow, myth is full of incest, pooping, and misbehaving and all of these very unspeakable things. And yet, there’s so much reverence and beauty in that world and it just expanded what I thought was possible and storytelling.

Buchwald: This collection also has great flash. I took your generative flash fiction workshop last year through Kundiman, and you shared these great prompts, some original and some passed down from other teachers. I’d love to know what prompts you give yourself as a writer.

Chang: I typically don’t write prompts for myself, but I do take prompts from other people. I find that if I give myself a limitation, I don’t treat myself very seriously and don’t listen to myself, but I find that I can respect the authority of someone else’s prompts or limitations that are given to me. I really enjoy writing with limitations, because I find that it ends up freeing your mind in other directions, and it kind of forces you to write out of your element. I really need that — to go back to my own element. In order to find myself in my own obsessions, I have to first delve into a realm that I think is really far away and then I end up finding my way back. It’s like a homing pigeon kind of metaphor — where you train a homing pigeon, you release it, and it ends up finding its way back. I’ve had that problem of feeling let go really far away from your home, and then you end up flying back in a certain way. And it always feels like this new journey, and it feels exciting and reinvigorating.

Buchwald: You write poetry and longer form fiction. What is your history with flash fiction? And how do you discern which medium to tell a story? Do you just let it follow you, or do you follow it?

Chang: I’m so thrilled that you asked this question, because flash fiction is my favorite form of all the forms, which I know is a bold statement. I think it’s funny that I started writing flash only after my novel and my collection were fully drafted and finished. I didn’t really know that flash was a possibility. I did write my first novel in vignettes, and I wrote a lot of my short stories in chunks of flash, but I was always thinking, “If I write something that’s 500 or 1,000 words, it has to be stitched into something else, or I have to let some other project cannibalize it.”

What I thought about flash that was so freeing was allowing the work to be its own world. Flash really allows things to be mysterious, and it doesn’t have to make sense the same way that we expect a novel or short story to make sense. I feel like we allow for the inexplicable pity or intentional incompleteness of flash to exist as it is allowed to be flawed. I know a lot of people will say the opposite. I think a lot of people would say about flash, “The shorter the form, the more perfect it has to be.” They’ll say a short story has to be more perfect than a novel because in a novel you can waste words. And then flash has to be even more perfect than a short story because you really can’t waste words. I completely don’t approach flash fiction in that way; I approach flash as being inherently allowing of mystery and messiness. I think we’re really pressured to write towards perfection in a certain way, but I’m like, “Keep the ambiguity! Keep the inexplicable! Keep the fact that it doesn’t fully make sense!” I think there can be something really beautiful about that.

Buchwald: There’s a huge gap in horny queer fiction by Asian women that your work fulfills. This is obviously a book about desire — it’s in the title. I’ve been excited to hear you speak more about queer Asian desire in your writing.

Chang: Oh my God, I feel like you’re opening the floodgates, because I’ve been waiting for someone to notice that almost every single story in this book has a sex scene! I love the genre of romance. I was the kid who would read the book only for the sex scenes. I was like, “Oh, God, I have to go through 900 pages of lore and character development, but I just want to get to the sex scenes!” I was so impatient! I would sometimes only read them and then go back and try to read the 900 pages of lore, but then go back and read the sex scenes anyway. I just find such pleasure and joy in the physicality of these characters and playing with the intimacy on the page. I’m finally getting to write the sex scenes of my dreams — some really weird, some really tender, and others in between. What’s really fun about writing sex scenes is that it never really feels like you’re getting it wrong, because the language around sex and romance is so inherited, and we have so many internalized cliches and turns of phrases that we all know. It does feel like you’re just waiting in this new territory. I thought, “Oh, why not? Why not write about this? Why not attempt to write about this?” Once you diverge from that script, it’s kind of like the sky or sea opening up. There’s just so much to play around with and try.

As a writer, I’m like, “okay, so when do I get them together?” Because as a writer, I explicitly think: “Now for the fun part.” I think that this is probably something inherited from queerness and queer literature — expanding the definition of sex. From romance novels, I learned a very specific definition of what a sex scene is. I was really interested in making a scene of eating as a sex scene, a scene of two people sitting together on a bus as a sex scene. I wanted to rewrite the idea of what it could be, because I think our literary definitions of sex are so limited and narrow and not that much fun. And not that true to life either.

There are also a lot of material desires, like the story about the girl in the dollar store, and that really visceral, teeth-on-edge desire for, like, a keychain. That’s something else I’m interested in – the desire for objects. There’s a lot of desire for connection, to communicate the incommunicable. Throughout the book, there’s a sense that all of these desires, whether they’re bodily, hunger, thirst or spiritual desires are all inseparable from each other in that they become in this world of desire for these characters. I didn’t want the desires of the brain and body to be separate. I was interested in combining and enmeshing those things. I wanted there to be no separation.

I’m finally getting to write the sex scenes of my dreams — some really weird, some really tender, and others in between.

Buchwald: Who are other writers who write about queer sex and inspire you?

Chang: With women’s desires or sexuality, it’s something withheld from you. I found as a kid that, besides romance novels, it was really difficult for me to find things that I thought was actually coming from this place of women’s desires, because there’s this constant impulse from society to dissociate that sense from you or prevent it from expressing itself. What was a real revelation for me was reading Trash by Dorothy Alison, because it’s this book that has erotica next to stories about family, next to stories that break form, next to explorations of trauma. It was this feeling of everything — that it could encompass this entire galaxy of desire, pain, fear, and love. Speaking of not having reverence for genres and really blurring the idea of what can belong in a book together, that is what that book is for me.

Buchwald: What would you want readers, specifically ones who are also writers to take away from this collection?

Chang: I’m really interested in thinking about a queer matriarchy within these families and what it means to recover these matrilineal stories that have been warped or destroyed or told that they were unimportant. Every time I write, it sort of feels like an excavation. I always hope that readers can have their own excavations as they’re reading. It feels like I’m giving someone a shovel and am saying: “You can dig too and it’s okay. You’ll surface somewhere really interesting or generative or beautiful.”