I became a fan of Stranger Things around the time I became, in my own way, Joyce Byers. To certain people in my life, I had recently morphed into a neurotic, monomaniacal woman. Not because I thought my child had been kidnapped by supernatural beings, but because I was convinced I was sick even though no tests could prove it. At 34, during my first year of a doctoral program in literature, I began to experience an electric-shock like pain in my pelvis. Sitting exacerbated the pain, so I bought a standing desk. Exercise beyond walking hurt, so I gave up biking, yoga, and rock climbing. Through regular physical therapy and rest, I managed the pain for several years. Then, in early 2020, my symptoms mysteriously worsened.

By the end of 2020, simply getting out of bed was excruciating. I left my graduate program with my dissertation halfway done. From bed, I booked appointments with a new round of doctors: radiologists, pain specialists, pelvic specialists. Everywhere I turned, practitioners doubted me when I said walking and standing were excruciating. A psychologist whom I was required to see as part of my treatment at a pain clinic asked if my parents had treated me well, hinting the source of my symptoms resided in childhood trauma. In her assessment, she concluded, “Ms. Cutchin has some symptoms and behaviors known to be unhelpful for pain including: some fear, avoidant behavior, pain anxiety.” 

When a physical therapist saw me limping, she said, “Ask yourself, ‘Why do I feel I have to walk like this?’”

Worst of all, someone close to me hinted I was unconsciously refusing to walk because I “liked the bed and the bath.”

Holed up in bed—a bed that had become for some a symbol of my mental instability—I began watching science fiction. I’ve long been a fan of murder shows and spy thrillers, series in which the culprits are certifiably human and logic more or less carries the day. I binged The Americans, The Bureau, and Bosch, along with some less illustrious procedurals. Then, for want of new programming—it appeared my pain could outlast even Peak TV’s flood of content—I began to watch sci-fi

Not only did sci-fi keep me entertained; it gave me strength. A recurrent trope of sci-fi is the woman who is not believed. There’s Joyce Byers and her can of paint. Iconically, there’s Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) in Terminator 2, locked away in a mental institution because she claims—accurately—that cyborgs from the future want to kill her son. In Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 film Contact, based on the book by Carl Sagan, Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) tells a senate committee she traveled through wormholes to meet an alien disguised as her father. The (male) chairman points out that video evidence contradicts her account and accuses her of suffering from a “self-reinforcing delusion.”

Also delusional, or so a male colleague insists, is DCI Rachel Carey (Holliday Grainger) in the excellent near-future dystopian series The Capture. When DCI Carey confronts a superior, Commander Danny Hart (Ben Miles), with her suspicion the UK government is altering CCTV footage in real time using deep-fake AI technology, he wastes no time gaslighting her. “You’ve had a shock tonight, Rachel. Why don’t you get some rest.” If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a male character tell a woman she needs some rest, I’d be able to upgrade every streaming subscription to premium. In the German limited series The Signal, it’s a case of “space sickness” that plagues astronaut Paula (Peri Baumeister), or so a dismissive colleague would have her believe. Aboard a space shuttle, Paula hears a signal she knows can only come from aliens. She records the signal, but when she plays the recording for the rest of her team, there’s nothing on the tape. Her (once again, male) colleague, Hadi (Hadi Khanjanpour), who initially heard the signal, too, tells Paula she’s unwell. “Go lie down.”

Riddled with pain, facing disbelief from those around me, the stories of Joyce, Paula, DCI Carey, Ellie Arroway, and Sarah Connor brought me solace, and a shred of hope. I belonged to a genre of female characters who had to fight to be believed. In the worlds these narratives portray, women’s claims are outlandish, otherworldly, weird, and also true. Eventually, each character finds someone who believes her. Sometimes it’s a man, like Jim Hopper (David Harbour) in Stranger Things, who learns to trust Joyce. Sometimes it’s a woman or girl: Paula’s most steadfast advocate in The Signal is her disabled nine-year-old daughter, Charlie (Yuna Bennett), who, working with her father, figures out the time and place of the aliens’ arrival and proves her mother right.

Watching these films and shows between visits to doctors bent on dismissing me, I grasped sci-fi’s genius: It taps into our culture’s deepest anxieties about the trustworthiness of women. In our real-world political climate, when a woman speaks her experience, whether she’s talking about sexual abuse, harassment, or illness, we wonder, Where’s the proof? And yet, our standards of proof are devised by the same systems—legal, educational, medical—built by men to protect male interests. In the medical system, imaging and other tests count as “proof” of illness or pain, but such tests screen only for well-researched diseases, and what we know about those diseases largely comes from research on male subjects. No definitive tests exist for a host of conditions that predominately affect those assigned female at birth, like myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. A woman with this kind of disease might as well be telling her doctors: Cyborgs are coming. Aliens have made contact.

By exploring whose testimony counts as reliable, and on what terms, sci-fi provides a template for what ethical philosophers call epistemic justice. “Epistemic” refers to knowledge. In our everyday lives, we convey knowledge to others by sharing our expertise, by relating our experience, and so forth. When a speaker offering knowledge is dismissed because of who they are—a woman, a trans person, a Black or Brown person—they are wronged in their “capacity as a giver of knowledge,” as philosopher Miranda Fricker puts it in Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. The one who speaks loses out, but so does a community of hearers who would benefit from the information the speaker seeks to convey. Sci-fi dramatizes epistemic injustice and proposes a different way: We must practice epistemic humility by taking stock of our prejudices and admitting that someone who looks and sounds different than us might be right. 

In the eyes of Western medicine, there is little stranger than a malfunctioning female or gender nonconforming body. According to The New York Times, “Women are more likely to be misdiagnosed than men in a variety of situations.” A stunning 72% of millennial women report feeling gaslit by medical professionals, a Mira survey found. If you’re nonwhite, it gets worse. Black women are less likely to develop breast cancer than white women—but 40% more likely to die from the disease due to delays in diagnosis and care. Delays in diagnosis stem partly from lack of research into women’s health. Until recently, women were considered inferior subjects to men in basically all research. “There are parts of your body less known than the bottom of the ocean, or the surface of mars,” Rachel E. Gross writes in Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. On top of it all, there’s medicine’s age-old tendency to see women’s maladies as psychogenic in nature—think of the prevalence of the hysteria diagnosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today, women are less likely to be told our pain or fatigue is “in our heads.” Instead, in a sophistry-laden twist, we are told our symptoms stem from a “brain” gone haywire. According to the brain-based model of chronic pain, when symptoms persist more than three to six months with no obvious organic cause, the brain is at fault, or more precisely, a “maladaptive plastic reorganization in central pain processing circuits.” A spate of recent self-help books and pain reeducation programs promise to teach your brain to unlearn pain via cognitive-behavioral interventions. The problem with these treatments is they fail to account for the instances when pain persists because doctors and tests miss its underlying cause. Around 70% of chronic pain patients are female. Women are more likely to suffer from underreached conditions like fibromyalgia, autoimmune disease, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, pelvic pain, Long Covid, Lyme disease, and myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome. Telling a woman her pain stems from a “maladaptive” brain is today’s version of “it’s just hysteria.” 

Given sci-fi’s uncanny ability to channel and critique these medical biases, I’ve put together a quiz: Can you tell the difference between a real-life sick woman and science fiction? The following statements were uttered either in a science fiction film or TV show, or in a real-life medical setting where a female patient came in complaining of physical symptoms. Circle the correct answer:

Answer key: B, D, F, H and J are from science fiction—The OA, Manifest, Stranger Things, Terminator 2, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, respectively. A, C and I are from medical records shared with me by a female patient with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; E was uttered by the doctor of an Instagram user living with ME/CFS and POTS. G is from my own life. A noted Bay Area pelvic pain practitioner insisted I download a pain therapy app that could, he said, “re-wire” my brain so I no longer felt pain. “The app will teach you that you can’t use the word ‘pain’ any longer if you want to heal,” he told me.

I’m not saying mind-body tools aren’t helpful in managing symptoms. In the early years of my pain, I did quite a lot of psychotherapy and embodied meditation. These tools helped, especially when it came to managing the stress of illness. By the time I became bedridden, I knew I’d gone as far as I could with mind-body modalities. I told anyone who would listen I believed my symptoms had a biomechanical source, but, as time went on, I doubted that source would ever be found. After all, I’d had an MRI, the gold standard for diagnosis of pelvic disorders, and it had revealed nothing. 

Still, I kept searching. For years, I’d been hearing about a world-famous pelvic pain specialist in Arizona. Seeing him would mean traveling seven hundred miles and paying for the visit out of pocket. By early 2022, I was out of other options. A friend and I rented a van and drove seven hundred miles from our home in the San Francisco Bay Area into the Arizona desert listening to crime podcasts. Actually, my friend drove; I laid on a mattress in the back.

The Arizona doctor took by far the most careful, thorough patient history of any provider I’d seen. He recommended a round of pelvic floor botox, and, when that didn’t work, he offered a diagnosis. 

“All the signs point to pudendal nerve entrapment.” 

The pudendal nerve runs through the lower pelvis and innervates urinary, bowel, and sexual function. I’d long known my nerve was irritated. But none of the pelvic specialists I’d seen had raised the possibility it might be compressed. Compression, the Arizona doctor explained, doesn’t show up on an MRI; the nerve is too small, too hidden. Compression typically arises from a traumatic injury, or repetitive stress. The year before the onset of my symptoms, I’d biked one thousand miles down the California coast. The pressure of the bike seat against my pelvis caused scar tissue to build up around the nerve. To protect the nerve, paradoxically. 

It took 11 years from the onset of symptoms to receive the diagnosis. The treatment: a fairly straightforward decompression surgery.

Pudendal nerve entrapment is an underresearched condition that affects—you guessed it—women more often than men at a rate of seven to three. Childbirth is a common trigger. Diagnostic criteria do exist, but none of the chronic pain or pelvic disorder specialists I’d previously seen were familiar with those criteria. Pudendal entrapment isn’t common, but it’s not as rare as one might think, either. Studies indicate it affects up to one percent of the general population. Because pudendal entrapment lacks an ICD-code—such codes are used globally to classify medical diagnosess—insurance companies view decompression surgery as experimental and refuse to reimburse it. (In contrast, ICD-codes exist for “Sucked into jet engine V97.33X” and “Struck by turkey W61.42XA.”)

Four months after surgery, I began to see improvement. Within 15 months, I was leading a normal life again: walking, sitting, and traveling—without a van and mattress. I made plans to return to the PhD program. 

Today, I’m grateful to the Arizona doctor who took the time to listen and believe my story. I’m also, frankly, enraged when I think about the time, energy, and pain I would have been spared if the medical system had the patience and trust to take my symptoms seriously. If it had, I wouldn’t have become Joyce Beyers and spent years getting others to see the writing on the wall.

The post My Undiagnosed Chronic Illness Taught Me to Love Sci-Fi appeared first on Electric Literature.

Though Chu couldn’t have known that his adaptation would coincide with a second Trump presidency, the timing of Wicked: For Good and the media coverage it has garnered is highly culturally significant, given the United States’ own worrying rise of authoritarianism. Especially in our own era, the changes made by this film are not frivolous—they are dangerously out of touch and speak to a growing habit of downplaying the stickiness of fascism’s harm. The Broadway musical is certainly a more hopeful story than Maguire’s original novel, but its ending is still somber, as Elphaba fails to rescue the Animals and flees Oz, likely never to return. Changing Wicked’s ending to an unfettered triumph of overthrowing a dictatorial regime, Wicked: For Good occupies a problematic cultural perspective, one that blissfully forgets fascism’s lingering pain and permanent damage. 

As others have pointed out, Wicked and the extensive literary history of Oz itself have long been considered political. L. Frank Baum’s 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has been suspected of being a commentary on the McKinley administration. And Maguire’s 1995, decidedly adult novel Wicked is undeniably political, with visible threads throughout of propaganda, anti-intellectualism, systemic oppression, and even state-sanctioned murder gesturing towards fascism in general, and specifically, the crimes of Nazi Germany. And at its debut in 2003, the Wicked musical cemented its own continuation of such political commentary, especially in relation to the George W. Bush presidency. 

So when Chu’s Wicked premiered last year, we had no reason to doubt that this political narrative would remain, if not strengthen. Indeed, in comparison to the musical, part one of Chu’s adaptation saw a marked increase in the narrative time for the talking Animals—the population targeted and oppressed by the Wizard—no doubt due to the affordances of CGI in comparison to the limited abilities of stage productions. The film maintains the Broadway musical’s inclusion of the Cowardly Lion, the flying monkeys, and Dr. Dillamond, the Shiz University goat professor whose violent removal from his classroom as a result of anti-Animal legislation radicalizes Elphaba, who, in the film, keeps the professor’s glasses, broken during his arrest. In addition to these mainstay characters, the film adds Dulcibear, a talking bear who serves as Elphaba and her sister Nessa’s childhood nanny, alongside many other new Animal faces to strengthen their place in the narrative, and, in turn, their political significance to the overarching story.

It isn’t difficult to read the novel or see the stage musical or film adaptations of Wicked without taking notice of Maguire’s intended allegory for Nazi Germany. The oppression and silencing of the Animals, including Dr. Dillamond, reflects the oppression and genocide of Jewish people and other “undesirables” during the Holocaust, including the ousting of Jewish professors and “politically unreliable” people from German universities and state positions with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. More recently, though, Dr. Dillamond’s removal compares with the removal of a Texas A&M University professor for teaching about gender identity, as well as the University of Oklahoma’s suspension and eventual firing of a graduate teaching assistant for failing a student’s paper on gender identity that cited the Bible and referred to trans people as “demonic.” 

Compounding this, the second installment of Chu’s adaptation opens to a starkly different scene than audiences experienced in the first film, released in 2024. Wicked began with the Broadway musical’s well-known number “No One Mourns the Wicked,” but Chu’s Wicked: For Good opens with a scene unfamiliar to fans of the stage musical—the exacerbated state of the oppression of Oz’s Animals, set into motion during the events of the first film. In our return to the theater and Oz, audiences witness the continued construction of the yellow brick road, being built by the forced labor of Animals. We watch as an overseer whips two chained bison to keep them moving, snapping at them not to speak, as the Animals groan in pain, struggling to keep up. 

It seemed, then, that Wicked: For Good was intent on creating a more visceral representation of oppression, including Wicked’s inevitable bad ending for the Animals that Elphaba tries to liberate. Yet shortly after the hard-hitting opening, this vision begins to falter. Elphaba encounters a group of Animals, including Dulcibear, hurriedly escaping through a tunnel dug into the yellow brick road and willingly venturing into the “Place Beyond Oz,” understood as a wasteland, to escape persecution.

As Dillamond’s removal from his position reflects contemporary attacks on American educators, the flight of the Animals evokes the real-world increase in “self-deportations” after the Trump administration’s threat to undocumented immigrants to “leave now” or be removed by force. Especially with the increase in ICE raids, it’s an option that was once unthinkable for those building lives in the United States, but one that many are now considering to avoid being taken from court houses, sidewalks, and schools, being held in detention centers, and being separated from their families. 

When Elphaba finds the Animals escaping through the tunnel, she implores them to stay. Here, with the addition of the original song “No Place Like Home,” Wicked: For Good veers into confusing, even, dare I say, corny, territory.

In the song, Elphaba insists that “Oz is more than just a place / It’s a promise, an idea,” espousing a view similar to the “American Dream,” and, as others have noted, a liberal nationalistic perspective that prioritizes an “idea” over an actual place where the Animals are currently unable to live safely. Elphaba continues to sing, “When you feel you can’t fight anymore / just tell yourself there’s no place like home,” and “When you want to leave / discouraged and resigned / that’s what they want you to do / But think of how you will grieve / for all you leave behind / Oz belongs to you, too.” 

On one hand, “No Place Like Home” can be accepted as a cheeky callback to Dorothy’s famous line in The Wizard of Oz and a musical addition to the film meant to galvanize the fleeing Animals into fighting back for their freedom. On the other hand, though it’s possible to see the sentiment behind the lyrics, “No Place Like Home” ultimately comes across as trite, even tone-deaf, given the high stakes that the Animals face. The insistence that the Animals shouldn’t be forced from their homes is a correct one, but the lyrics betray Elphaba’s idealism and feel patronizing.

Elphaba doesn’t offer supplies, routes to safehouses, or support of any kind. Rather, she asks the Animals to stay in an unsafe land with no other avenues or options for protection or shelter. While Elphaba has her magic, her undiscovered hideaway, and her mode of quick transportation when she’s in danger thanks to her broomstick, the Animals have none of this, on top of being quite easy to spot. Without real substance or promise, her words ring hollow.

Though I cringed at the lyricism of “No Place Like Home,” I was initially willing to write it off as a musical misstep, especially given the film’s apt attention to the many tools employed by authoritarian and fascist governments. Specifically, I was taken by the film’s focus on how easily orders fly off of desks and into enforceable law. Signs declaring “NO ANIMALS” go up around Oz, and travel bans are enforced for both Animals and Munchkins on the whim of Elphaba’s sister, Nessa, now mayor of Munchkinland. 

Further into the film, like the stage musical, Elphaba eventually finds Dr. Dillamond again, kept in a cage and having lost the ability to speak. But unlike the stage musical, Elphaba finds far more Animals caged alongside Dillamond, driving home how widespread and systematic their disappearances have become. The Wizard, trying to win back Elphaba’s favor, tells her, “Some animals just can’t be trusted.” However, Chu’s film refuses to let us linger in this horror, undercutting the seriousness of Elphaba’s discovery by playing what comes next for comic relief.

In her anger, Elphaba’s magic releases the Animals from their cages as she tells the Wizard: “Run.” The Animals give chase, barging through the doors and stampeding through the wedding of Glinda and Fiyero. Guests scream, scramble for cover in their over-the-top wedding guest attire and hairstyles, which adds to the absurdity. Madame Morrible, screaming, “This is the work of the Wicked Witch,” is drowned out by the noise caused by the Animals. By the end of the chaos, Morrible is launched, face-first, into the towering wedding cake, landing on the ground with a satisfying thwomp.

The Animal imprisonment quickly unravels from dark horror to a victory, and a funny one. It revises itself in real time into something lighthearted and whimsical, a distraction from the horrors of Oz’s fascist regime. The stage musical, while fun and colorful, is still meant to make audiences think hard about the pain they are witnessing. In this sense, the played-for-laughs fun of this scene arguably becomes reflective of the bubbly, fun nature of the massive marketing campaign and franchising of the Wicked films, which has developed into a narrative all its own. 

Courtesy of 400+ brand partnerships, Wicked’s colorful, glittering aesthetic has been inescapable for over a year. The film’s marketing strategy and brand deals, suspected to have cost as much as the first film, have produced everything from nail polish, limited edition eye shadow pallettes, and Barbie dolls to Dawn dish spray, cereal, and even mac and cheese cups. Admittedly, I was not strong enough to resist the siren call of a Glinda-pink collapsible Swiffer sweeper, telling myself it was a practical purchase as I loaded it into my Amazon cart.

That isn’t to say this vibrant and Glinda-fied merchandising doesn’t have a connection to the story itself. Wicked has canonically had its fair share of whimsy, from elaborate set design to quirky language. But its ending has always maintained a somber tone. In the stage musical and Maguire’s novel, though the future for Animal liberation remains possible, Elphaba herself fails in her quest, and those she sought to save continue to be scapegoated by the Wizard’s administration, have their rights stripped, are silenced through cages, and even murdered. It’s a grim finality, but one that maintains a foothold in the reality of systematic oppression. 

Yet Wicked: For Good takes a decidedly different approach. After Elphaba and Glinda have their emotional goodbye in “For Good,” Glinda returns to the Emerald City, demands that the Wizard remove himself from Oz via the hot air balloon he arrived in, and imprisons Madam Morrible in one of the cages she had built for Animals. The ending, like the original stage musical, returns us to the beginning with “No One Mourns the Wicked.” However, in this version, Glinda pauses the reprise, telling the crowd, “I have something more to say.”

Glinda motions for the Animals to emerge from the crowd of Ozians, gently imploring, “Come out. Wherever you are, come out.” Her prodding is akin to that of an adult encouraging children to return from a game of hide and seek, not to return from being hunted down. And given that we have, until this point, understood the Animals to have mostly been imprisoned or having fled from Oz entirely, it’s surprising to see them suddenly in the middle of the crowd, smiling up at Glinda. 

Glinda continues her speech, clarifying, “I don’t see any enemies here. We’ve been through a frightening time. And there will be other times and other things that frighten us. But if you’ll let me, I’d like to try to help, to change things. I’d like to try to be… Glinda the Good.” The scene shifts quickly, showing Animals regaining their place in society, being greeted by the suddenly de-prejudiced Ozians. A wand wave, and years of persecution and fear evaporate.

The Animals who fled during “No Place Like Home” emerge again from the tunnel, Dulcibear smiling in relief. And then the kicker: the camera lands squarely on Dr. Dillamond, back in his classroom, glasses fixed, ready to teach again. His fate is magically reversed from his murder in the novel and his permanent silencing and transformation into a “real animal” in the stage musical. Instead, he resumes his career, presumably alongside the very colleagues and students who did nothing to intervene as he was dragged from his classroom.

Many have noted their immense relief that Dillamond survives, and a part of me has to agree with them. The character has always been a fan favorite, and Peter Dinklage’s talent only adds to his charm. But I also couldn’t help but feel uneasy at this change—it feels too clean, and far too simple.

The primary rule of magic that Elphaba and others in Wicked consistently repeat is that you can’t uncast a spell. You can’t undo what has already been done. In many ways, this idea points to the irreversibility of harm inflicted by fascist regimes and their implementation of systematic violence. This major change to Wicked’s ending, which sees smiling Animals with speech restored and once again accepted without question by previously prejudiced, and even violent, Ozians, is not just improbable but may even be dangerous messaging, especially given the growing levels of suspicion, propaganda, state and interpersonal violence, and heightened oppression of marginalized groups in the United States. 

While injury is easily and hurriedly inflicted by powerful state entities, as we have been witnessing over the last year in particular, disentangling ourselves from that harm has been proven to be much, much more difficult. Wicked and Wicked: For Good both have a concrete understanding of how fascism operates, the delight it takes in violence, the tools it employs, and how it takes hold in the first place. What this film has trouble grappling with is how fascism is broken apart and what happens in the aftermath. Wicked: For Good’s finale shift is not merely an insistence on a happy ending for audience satisfaction. Rather, this small but significant change undercuts the real work that must be done to recover from fascist ideology. That recovery requires hope, certainly, but it must be a hope willing to hurt as it clambers after something better. It must be a hope that refuses to forget. 

Building a future in the wake of fascism is never simple. It isn’t a heel click or a wand wave away. It’s a hard reckoning. It’s the beginning of a long climb. And it’s in our best interest not to pretend otherwise.

The post You Can’t Uncast a Spell appeared first on Electric Literature.

That may be the million-dollar question. What sort of a book is Wuthering Heights? Like many, I first came across the novel in my teens; unlike many, I couldn’t get through it. If I was too impatient to make sense of Joseph’s Yorkshire accent, I was also too unformed as a reader to probe the work’s complex narrative structure. I was fourteen and had no inkling of puppy love, much less passion. And because I didn’t know passion, I couldn’t understand Heathcliff.

A friend once described me as a late bloomer’s late bloomer. In that long period of my life, spanning a little over three decades, in which I had never been in a relationship, I lived mostly in my own head. Fantasy seemed, at times, preferable to reality, not because I ever believed that what I imagined was real, but because, in being able to control every element of every story down to the most minute detail, I could play God. My mind’s eye gave birth to multiple new selves, all beautiful, rich, coveted, and bearing not the slightest resemblance to reality. That a fantasy frequently ended in tragedy (my make-believe death, usually from tuberculosis or being fatally shot by an arrow) rendered it no less delicious, for the following evening I would resurrect myself and a new story with a new lover would commence.

Perhaps this is why watching Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights felt so familiar. The landscape that Catherine and Heathcliff run through as children is a landscape that possesses an uncanny resemblance to the fantastical panoramas of my own lonely adolescence. And because fantasy owes very little, if anything, to history, this is a world governed solely by whim and the law of individual desire. Dresses can be anachronistic so long as they are beautiful. Feasts are laid out less for human consumption than for the delight of the eye. Few would be able to guess that Thrushcross Grange, which resembles in its exterior an iced sugar cookie, should contain a labyrinth of rooms with no unifying style beyond the ostentatious spectacle of wealth. There is a room for ribbons that is turned, for Mrs. Catherine Linton’s pleasure, into a room for the display of opulent gowns. Most memorably, there is a room the color and texture of flesh that lends new meaning to what it is to inhabit one’s own skin.

As several reviews have pointed out, Fennell’s adaptation of Brontë’s magnum opus significantly departs from its source material; to document these disparities when the differences are both numerous and flagrant seems a meaningless exercise. What’s more, I don’t see much wrong with the degree of departure, whether minimal or extreme. There are no set rules for how to treat the source material, and different mediums require different modes of expression. Suzy Davies, the movie’s production designer, puts it well: “This film was never about documenting the 1800s in a literal or academic way. Instead, it was about capturing the essence of a teenage fever dream—the sensation of first encountering the book.”

I can’t help but feel disappointed both at critics who have extolled Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” and those who have panned it. Reviews have run the gamut, from “sexy, dramatic, melodramatic, occasionally comic and often swoonily romantic” to simply “a dud.” Much of the problem seems to stem from the preconception that Brontë’s novel is a love story. In all the times I have failed or succeeded in reading the book, I have never been fully convinced that Wuthering Heights is a romance, or more accurately, that its most foundational element is the love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff. We tend to look for what we want to see on the page, not what is actually there. In reading Wuthering Heights, it’s easy to discern how a combination of atmosphere and titillating storytelling can render the mind susceptible to extracting specific moments and specific lines at the expense of others. Who, after all, can finish Brontë’s work without remembering Catherine’s cry, “I am Heathcliff!”

This all boils down to a certain amount of delusion around love: its addictive nature, its inextinguishable flame. That is, the belief that love is not love if it isn’t immortal, if it fails to live beyond the grave. Love is not love if one is not willing to kill for it, to give up one’s life for it, to exercise violence and exact vengeance on its behalf and under its banner. Love is not love if you do not place someone’s well-being totally above your own, if you do not sacrifice yourself to it, if formerly two separate selves do not merge wholly and completely into one. This thinking may be why we remember Wuthering Heights more for Heathcliff’s extreme—and insane—devotion to Catherine’s memory than as a story about generational abuse, otherness, and redemption. It is also why, regrettably, we remember Wuthering Heights less as an exemplar of vicarious, vivid, and vivacious storytelling than for the love story that was never really the crux of what is, from first page to last, a passion project: a passion not for romance but for, above all, the act of creativity and the pure, unadulterated joy of playing God in ink.

This is how the novel has always struck me: as a gratuitous exercise in artistry and play, in the kind of explosive energy that will unfold on the page when, for better or worse, the imagination is loosed like a dog that has been liberated from its leash in a park. How else to explain the layers of narrative that remind me, at times, of a mille-feuille? Revisiting the work in my early thirties, I noticed as I didn’t before the delightful recklessness, the heedlessness and risk-taking of Brontë’s prose. I laughed at Lockwood’s ineptitude and buffoonery, his pomposity, his romantic nature that allows him to be so easily beguiled by a pretty face and to fancy himself in love. In the first pages alone, a comic scene unfolds that sends the whole household into uproar. If there is passion, then it is passion made vivid to the point of fluorescence with melodrama.

Wuthering Heights is, in a nutshell, a noisy affair, raucous with Joseph’s ear-splitting outbursts, with Nellie Dean’s sanctimonious need to be right, with Linton Heathcliff’s whining, with violence and kidnapping and elopement and death and ghosts. In its ingenuity, its surrender to the spirit of its diverse and strange cast of characters, Wuthering Heights is more instinct than strategy, more id than superego, more the splatter of ink that leaks from a broken nib than a smooth and unbroken line. Thomas Wolfe is reputed to have said, “Writing is easy. Just put a sheet of paper in the typewriter and start bleeding.” I feel something different at work with Brontë. Even when I disliked the book, I always sensed how fun and, more vitally, how free it was. So often do we harp on the struggle of writing that we forget that pleasure can and frequently does accompany the uphill battle to put words on the page.

Fennell’s film is a testament to the contagiousness of that energy and pleasure. For all its adult themes, it’s a fantasy of the kind that precedes actual experience of the realities of the world; its stunning aesthetics betray, at its heart, a cluelessness. The hodgepodge of erotic imagery scattered throughout scenes recollects the giggles that would inevitably spread like wildfire in a classroom whenever someone happened to mention boobs or dared to say the word “dick” or “fuck” aloud. Tellingly, even symbolically, there is no nudity in Fennell’s movie: no breasts or buttocks or penises. But there are plenty of pig’s feet; there is the underside of a snail leaving a trail of slime across a glass pane. There’s the slap of wet dough and the meticulously handcrafted book Isabella Linton presents Catherine, which highlights more than one erotic feature in its pages: a pop-up of a phallus-shaped mushroom, a flower that resembles vaginal lips. Sex is clean, and its participants are, most of the time, even formally dressed for the occasion.

In one revealing scene, Catherine screams at her good-for-nothing father, as she stamps across the courtyard of Wuthering Heights, “We’re all ill! We’re all ill because of you!” This line hits at what Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is about. None of the characters know what they’re doing or how to go about getting what they want. Everyone is suffering under some form of delusion. Except for, surprisingly, Zillah, who has left the service of Wuthering Heights, married, and become a mother of a little boy, no one really grows up or moves on. With guardians like Mr. Earnshaw and Edgar Linton, maybe they don’t know how.

If Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is meant, to quote Davies, to replicate “a teenage fever dream,” it also warns of the dangers of being caught in the stage of hormonally fueled fantasy for too long. There is a difference between the love we imagine and the love we practice, and “compromise,” so integral to real life and to navigating any relationship, is not a word recognized in the world of this film. No one surrenders, except to their own fantasy of what and how things should be. Everyone clings. Edgar Linton deceives himself that his wife is perfect. Isabella allows herself to be treated, literally, like a dog. Nelly guards the only thing that gives meaning to her life: her proximity to those in power. And Catherine and Heathcliff abjectly fail to grow out of an adolescent hedonism; their creed remains, we can do anything we want, so long as we are the ones doing it. Appropriately, the film concludes with flashbacks to Catherine and Heathcliff’s childhood. This move is sentimental, even predictable, a play for easy audience tears. But the bigger lesson may be that if one can’t look forward, one runs the risk of living forever in an idealized past. And lest we forget, the film ends in tragedy.

While watching Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights,” I thought a lot about my debut novel, a retelling of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. I wrote it a few years out of college, having just been fired from a dead-end job I despised. I was twenty-five and had never had either a boyfriend or sex. My parents were filing for bankruptcy, and I was about to lose my childhood home. Some, or possibly most, of that pent-up frustration came out in the span of three months in a first draft of a novel that I composed while sweating in an airless basement I would very soon never have the privilege of sitting or typing in again. All of my fears and wishes for the future somehow found their expression in that first book. I had no idea what I was doing.

The end result was a fantasy. My protagonist not only gets her happy ending but also has a lot of fine, robust sex in between. I wondered that I could write about positions, about the sensation of lying naked beside a lover, without having experienced any of what I described. My inspiration came from what I had consumed in books, movies, and porn, from my introversion and isolation, from the buzz of sexual frustration and my despair at repetitive encounters with unrequited love. By and large, critics were much kinder to my first novel than readers were. Many were furious, outraged to the point of being almost comic. What I’d done to Austen was disgraceful, they declared; what right did I have to rewrite, to retell, to revise, to essentially destroy what had already attained the highest echelon of literary perfection. So, the litany of complaints went on and on—and on.

If I could, I’d inform the Janeite mob at my door that my treatment of Mr. Darcy and Lizzy, of Charlotte Lucas and Mr. Collins, of, notably, Mary Bennet, had nothing to do with them. I did not think of them. I didn’t want to think of them, not out of any disrespect, but because all that mattered as I was writing the novel was the absolute, all-consuming urgency I felt in transplanting my vision onto a preexisting world that had become so intimate to me that I had grown bold enough to wish to change the scenery and the weather, to shift the furniture and swap the curtains, and to rearrange characters as if they were my own playthings. You don’t do that out of hatred or scorn. You do that only when a book becomes so alive that you cannot remember who you were before you read it, when your tongue takes on the rhythm of its language and lines, and when the impulse to rummage around inside of its world becomes all but irresistible. In short, it is out of adulation—and out of love.

I sense the same impulse in Fennell’s adaptation. This is surely a personal vision, and because it is so personal, it will be, at times, moving, and, at times, ridiculous. The trailer for the film describes it as, “Inspired by the greatest love story of all time.” I don’t think, however, that this is accurate. Rather, I would say that Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” is inspired simply by her love for a truly great—and truly strange—novel, that the passion which drove her to undertake such an ambitious project is the same that compelled Brontë to write the book. It’s a bold move, and it takes courage.

There’s a scene in the film where a shivering Catherine complains of the cold. Heathcliff offers to build a fire, but they cannot spare the firewood. After a brief exchange, Heathcliff stands up. He slams his chair against the floor, again, then again, until it breaks. With the remnants of the chair, he builds a fire; he will not see Catherine cold.

This scene doesn’t appear in the book. One could say it is cheesy, the stuff of which so many romances are made. But in its simple and unapologetic expression, it’s refreshing, too. We all wish that someone might break a chair to pieces if it meant we would not be cold. We all wish we could be loved so passionately. And who can say that such a moment or something very like it did not or could not happen in those gaps of the novel in which a reader’s imagination is given space to ferment? I recall one of my favorite lines from the book. In describing Heathcliff and Catherine’s final embrace, Brontë writes, “They were silent—their faces hid against each other, and washed by each other’s tears.” The edges of book and film begin to blur, and I wonder what memories these characters might have recalled, whether their youth came back to them, or whether they reveled, even fleetingly, in a glorious and unrealized future in which things had turned out different.

No one knows. That is the beauty of fiction.

The post “Wuthering Heights” Was Never a Love Story appeared first on Electric Literature.

It is a question I am asked frequently, and invariably respond to by narrating the same episode. It was 2023 and my Nanu was dying in the hospital: room 36, last one on the left. I remember the rain refusing to stop for days on end, a growing sense of suffocation as the greyness enveloped us. The silence in the car after Papa dropped Mamma to the hospital for the night. Nani and Chhoti Nani, who had spent the day with Nanu, sat in the car to be dropped back home. Slumped in the middle seat, I watched the rain forcefully hit the windshield. There was a vacantness in all our eyes, a veil between us and our immediate surroundings. None of us were really in that car at all. That morning, I’d finished Albert Camus’ The Stranger and was thinking abouthow it would likely be the last book I ever read with Nanu still alive. The book had made no sense to me;, when I googled its themes, meaninglessness of life had been the first one to come up.

In 1990, over a decade before I was even born, American singer Jeff Buckley discovered a qawwali by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan: a sixteen minute-long composition of “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” the song that–he confessed to the Pakistani singer a year before both their untimely deaths–saved his life. “If you let yourself listen with the whole of yourself, you will have the pure feeling of flight while firmly rooted to the ground,” Buckley wrote about Khan’s music. “Your soul can fly outward stringed to your ribcage like a shimmering kite in the shape of an open hand. Be still and listen to the evidence of your own holiness.”

In the years since Nanu’s passing, I have repeatedly failed to describe what exactly happened to me—to us—in that moment when the song on the car radio changed. Buckley’s words, written over three decades ago, best encapsulate the near-spiritual experience. I was lifted up, above myself, above everything, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sang. Then, just as gently, I was returned to the world. I straightened up, looked around: had anyone else felt the shift? For one second, I thought I was alone—until I noticed the expression on my sister’s face slowly transform, my Chhoti Nani starting to hum softly. “What song is this?” Deeti asked, and Nani named the first qawwali Buckley had ever listened to, the one that had saved him, that was now proving to me that life was not in fact in fact meaningless despite what Camus said, that there was more to it all than just death, than hospital room 36, last one on the left. The veil had disappeared; through the greyness, a thin shaft of light had entered.

Two years after Nanu’s death, clearing up a spare room in his home, we found a tattered, yellowing piece of paper: a certificate of registration issued to him in July 1948 by the Government of Bombay. He must have been nine years old. “Name of refugee,” it demanded, followed by “address before evacuation,” “present address” and “name of head of family.” Under “identification marks,” someone had scrawled: “Left eye has.” I do not recall any marks by his left eye. I remember a small mole above his lip and the pale grey of his eyes, something I forever secretly hoped my own children would inherit. Even these details come to me now vaguely: I know as if by muscle memory that they were there but it feels almost like fiction. No image comes to mind when I think of them.

I’ve always believed I’ve done a good job of grieving Nanu, of leaving him behind like you’re meant to leave the dead. Of wringing the sadness out of me in the weeks following his passing, when I’d find myself lying drunk on the bedroom floor, desperately calling every number on my phone so I could talk to someone, anyone about the gaping hole in my chest. At parties, imitating Shalom Harlow’s catwalk would suddenly turn into sobbing on the bathroom floor after vomiting every sip of Old Monk I’d gulped down earlier. Friends would drop me to my doorstep. Once inside, I’d scream at my father about how Nanu had suffered, was suffering, would forever be suffering, and everyone who claimed he’d died peacefully was only lying to console themselves. I screamed over the red marks the oxygen mask had left on his forehead, over how the last thing he had ever said to me was that he couldn’t breathe. Alone in my bedroom, when all my incessant phone calls went unanswered because it was past two in the morning, I would dissolve into tears, then type “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai” onto Spotify.

It was not rare for Khan to sing about alcoholism, lost love, a mohabbat so powerful it transforms into devotion. These themes were especially resonant in my life once Nanu was gone. It was, as Philippe Ariès wrote in his book Western Attitudes Towards Death: “A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty. But one no longer has the right to say so aloud.” Except Khan did. In “Yeh Jo Halka Halka Suroor Hai,” he sings to his beloved in Urdu: “I blame your gaze for this perpetual intoxication / For teaching me to drink wine.” In “Intoxicated”—from his collaborative album Night Song (1996) with Canadian musician Michael Brook—he croons: “Why does the cloud sway? / Maybe it is a drunkard, too / With a carefree gait / and rose-coloured eyes.” 

What I found in Khan, thus, was not just the feeling of flight Buckley described but also compassion, an understanding of the agony it takes to drive one to addiction. Less than a month after Nanu’s death, I found myself in the hospital with two IV tubes jammed into the back of my hand to replenish my electrolytes. I had mild alcohol poisoning; I had a faint memory of kissing a stranger at a nightclub, then sobbing inconsolably as I told him I’d recently lost my grandfather. It was only two years later—by this point I’d grown used to sobriety—that I learnt that Khan’s references to alcoholism were metaphors, that qawwali lyrics are rife with these forbidden references as allegories for devotion.

Perhaps because I’ve let it all out but more likely because I cautiously avoid any thoughts of him, I can now discuss Nanu without displaying any emotion, so much so that I find myself surprised whenever my voice cracks or a previously unexplored regret formulates itself. I always tell people I found Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan at the perfect time, that he assuaged the pain of losing my grandfather. Never before have I allowed myself to think about how his music could have been something we shared: a bridge between two generations in a time when we otherwise scrambled to find things in common to talk about. In his final months, Nanu would beckon my sister and I to sit next to him, then ask if we could play him some songs on our phone. With him peering into our screens to watch the accompanying music video on YouTube—usually from Baiju Bawra (1952) or Mughal-E-Azam (1960), black-and-white films he hadn’t fully watched in years—my sister Deeti and I listened to these tunes so much that we learnt the lyrics by heart. The night Nanu passed away, his body was taken home, laid out in the hall in a steel freezer. Seated next to it—on the same navy blue sofa-cum-bed Deeti and I had slept on as children exhilarated at the prospect of sleeping over at our grandparents’ home—I breathlessly created a playlist of all the songs he loved. It was on YouTube because many of the songs weren’t available on Spotify.

There was another thing Nanu longed to see on our smartphones, through which, he now realised, he had access to the entire world: the city of Dera Ghazi Khan in Pakistan. Again and again, he would ask us to look up this place that seemed to have reappeared in his memory now that he was an old man. On my web browser, I would pull up image after image of the dusty city; on YouTube, we’d watch travel vlogs with no more than a hundred thousand views of men there simply going about their daily routines, driving around or eating street food. The city was ordinary and unremarkable in almost every way if it wasn’t for the fact that my grandfather had once been a boy here.

In 1948—three months before Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born in Faisalabad and a year after the British initiated the Partition which split India and Pakistan into two separate states—Nanu and his family migrated to present-day India. It was here, in Mumbai, that he lived the majority of his life: here that he got married, had a daughter, saw his parents die, his two granddaughters excitedly pull open the navy blue sofa-cum-bed for sleepovers, the same sofa-cum-bed they would sit on the night of his death. Yet it was Dera Ghazi Khan he remembered as he slipped away. His childhood, his hometown, the winters in a country that would no longer permit him entry.

We lost Nanu’s refugee certificate the same day that we found it. Who had it last, who kept it where, in which folder; none of us could understand where it was gone. Kneeling on the concrete in the afternoon sun, Deeti and I spent an hour rummaging through two bags of trash from the residential complex, tearing open envelopes, rifling through spam mail, papers and cardboard, trying to find the tattered, yellowing document. When we failed, I tried to comfort myself by repeating that it was only a piece of paper, that I still had a photograph of it I’d sent to my friends, that a mere document could not sum up Nanu’s life; we had not killed him again. But the truth of it was that we had lost tangible evidence not only of Nanu’s existence but of his suffering, his displacement, the very memories that haunted him in his final years. The feelings from his life—the yearning for home, the way he tightly grasped my hand every time we watched vlogs of Dera Ghazi Khan—remained, but the facts were gone.

Ultimately, what this story comes down to is facts and feelings. I have all the facts of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s life, as I tell my therapist. I am aware that only this objective information is believed and taken seriously. Statistics, numbers, neutral, verified accounts are quoted in arguments, considered truer than the lived experiences of thousands. Yet it is my feelings that threaten to spill out: the many emotions surrounding Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and by extension, the death of my grandfather, that I am unable to confront and articulate. In her 1998 book The Other Side of Silence, Urvashi Butalia documents oral testimonies and personal chronicles from the 1947 Partition, placing people rather than high politics at the centre. “The ‘history’ of Partition seemed to lie only in the political developments that had led up to it,” she writes in reference to the books she had read so far on the subject. “These other aspects–what had happened to the millions of people who had to live through this time, what we might call the ‘human dimensions’ of this history–somehow seemed to have a ‘lesser’ status in it. Perhaps this was because they had to do with difficult things: loss and sharing, friendship and enmity, grief and joy, with a painful regret and nostalgia for loss of home, country and friends, and with an equally strong determination to create them afresh. These were difficult things to capture ‘factually.’”

On the 7th of May, 2025, India launched missile strikes against Pakistan in a military campaign codenamed Operation Sindoor. To write this, I had to look up the date on Wikipedia. The facts of the conflict–dates, month, who attacked whom first, when a ceasefire was declared, then violated–escape me entirely, no matter how much I try to remember. What I do remember is how it felt.

I remember the cold panic that washed over me when my sister burst into our bedroom with the news. The realisation that every mundane ritual we had taken for granted—a trip to the mall, a Friday night at the club, a simple plan made days in advance—was now a thing of the past. A sense of dread permanently stalked me; I felt as though I was walking through a haze. It was raining again, giving everything the quality of a bad dream, a repetition of the past, a nightmare we just couldn’t shake off. I flinched at every small sound: air strikes? Bombs? Near my father’s office, the police conducted a mock drill. There were rumours of a city-wide blackout scheduled for that afternoon. I remember repeatedly asking my parents, every stranger, every shopkeeper I met what they thought was going to happen despite knowing that they didn’t have any more information than I did. I refreshed the news frantically every few minutes. My main question was: could my sister and I still throw the house party we’d been planning for days?

At the party, I got drunk for the first time since Nanu’s death. Kept melting into tears the same way I had three years ago. It was inconceivable to me that every minute detail of our lives which had before seemed so fixed, could be transformed entirely by something so outside our control; worse, that our fates lay in the hands of a few powerful men with their own ulterior motives. In my first therapy session, I fretted over how helpless I felt, how intent I was on throwing this party because it was the only thing currently in my power. I panicked about Khan’s music being banned, despaired over the hopelessness that I was beginning to feel at the thought of not being able to hear his voice. What I really wanted was not to throw a house party or listen to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. What I really wanted was to know that I still had the freedom to.

Irish political scientist Benedict Anderson describes the nation as “an imagined community”, positing that the idea of this community is appealing to so many because “regardless of the inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willing to die for such limited imaginings.”

The 1947 Partition led to two such imagined communities: Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan, more manmade borders, the British’s parting gift. “Never before or since have so many people exchanged their homes and countries so quickly. In the space of a few months, about twelve million people moved between the new, truncated India and the two wings, East and West, of the newly created Pakistan,” notes Butalia. “Slaughter sometimes accompanied and sometimes prompted their movement; many others died from malnutrition and contagious disease. Estimates of the dead vary from 200,000 (the contemporary British figure) to two million (a later Indian estimate) but that somewhere around a million people died is now widely accepted. As always there was widespread sexual savagery: about 75,000 women are thought to have been abducted and raped by men of religions different from their own (and indeed sometimes by men of their own religion). Thousands of families were divided, homes were destroyed, crops left to rot, villages abandoned.”

This was the political landscape that Khan was born into, in the newly formed Pakistan. Watching his interviews, I am often surprised by his gentleness—so different from the emotional violence of his music—by the way he talks about India and Pakistan as if they never separated and continue to be singular. Because I was born over fifty years after the Partition, after the idea of these two dominion states had long seeped into public consciousness, India and Pakistan seemed, to me, two fixed entities, permanently divided, as if they had existed as separate nations since the dawn of time and would continue to eternally. But Khan—like my grandparents—seemed to speak of this division as a mere blip in many thousand years of history, a phenomenon he couldn’t quite understand, a fresh, temporary idea that at any time could be undone. In interviews, he frequently mentioned India alongside Pakistan, citing the shared cultural heritage of qawwali, which was created in 13th century Delhi by musician Amir Khusro. The purpose of qawwali is not just entertainment, he told The New York Times, but to spread “the universal message of love and understanding.”

In addition to other ritualistic practices like whirling and sama, qawwali is a part of Sufi tradition, which Khan followed. Sufism, which falls under the umbrella of Islam, is a mystic body of practice characterised by its values of spirituality, tolerance and peace. Khan epitomised these beliefs in his advocacy for a friendship between India and Pakistan. He spoke mournfully of his attempts and failures to persuade the government of his nation to launch diplomatic initiatives welcoming Indian musicians, of how there should never be restrictions on art (“An artist belongs to everyone”). Months before his death in August 1997, the 48 year-old singer gifted a song titled “Gurus of Peace” to Indian composer A.R. Rahman’s album Vande Mataram (1997) which celebrated fifty years of India’s independence. This was amongst his last recordings.

In the final days of the 2025 conflict between India and Pakistan, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s official Instagram account became unavailable in India, as did the accounts of other Pakistani musicians such as Ali Sethi and Atif Aslam. “This is because we complied with a legal request to restrict this content,” the social media site states. Audio streaming platforms in India initiated the process of removing works by Pakistani artistes from their libraries. Television shows created in our neighbouring nation were pulled down across channels in India. The imagined community, I realised, is not just united for a cause but against one: a common enemy, the neighbour who becomes even more remote from us, more otherised and demonised, when we are unable to engage with their art, their stories, reckon with their humanity. “Sometimes,” Butalia writes. “State power can be called into the service of suppressing memory… The opening-up of the field of memory, the entry of artists, musicians and others into it, is not something that serves the interests of a right-wing government which would like to build  a majoritarian nation and therefore memory work that references Partition is now often labelled anti-national, and attempts to cross our borders are seen as betrayals and as anti-patriotic.” 

To censor is to kill—or at the least, to desensitise one group to the murder of another. On social media, I saw a cousin in his thirties celebrating missile strikes that had led to civilian casualties in Pakistan, writing on his Instagram story: “Take that, Porkies.” I received a video of another cousin, only five, euphorically chanting, “Death to Pakistanis.” Thousands of Indians called for war.

Three of my grandparents migrated across the border during the Partition, so I grew up on oral histories like the ones Butalia documents, on tales that seemed almost mythical, from a time and land far, far away. There was my Dadi’s cousin who was stabbed multiple times on her journey to India but survived, there was her family desperately hunting for food every time the train stopped at a railway station. Trains sped past piles of human bones. There was Chhote Dadu, whose voice still cracks when he remembers the years he was forced to spend away from his father and siblings because none of their relatives in India could afford to care for the entire family together, the years he pretended to dislike milk because he knew his family couldn’t afford it. There is Chhote Dadu, now in his eighties, perfectly drawing the layout of his Lahore home that he had to abandon at the age of five.

The truth is that no matter how many facts and statistics we hear–how many dead, raped, displaced, lynched–it is ultimately the stories, the art, the narratives that touch us, that let us understand another nation, another religion, another way of life. “What a ban does,” writes Anuradha Banerji, “is deny you the chance to weigh the record for yourself. It turns a citizen into an audience by severing your ability to compare accounts, test claims and decide where you stand… They train a public to prefer echo over argument.” If these narratives, this art, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s attempts to reach for peace, are censored, then the Partition is not just a tragic event that took place in 1947. It is something that has continued to happen ever since, that happens now, that will forever be happening. Because it is stories, feelings, memories, that make up a life, a generation, a history.

Growing up, I knew my Nanu to be the quietest, gentlest of us all. While my other grandparents’ personal histories poured out as I lay in their laps and listened intently, Nanu remained tight-lipped, only answering questions about his childhood upon our insistence. Consequently, I was cautious when I asked him these questions, framing them tentatively because it seemed as though his pain was always too close to the surface, that it would brim over if we poked or prodded too much. The few stories he told us were laced with an ache I could never understand the depth of, that I perhaps only felt a fraction of when I lost him.  Butalia stresses “the importance of remembering a violent history, for the sake of those who lived through it and died, and equally the sake of those who lived through it and survived.”  
Nanu came from a land I may never get a chance to see, spoke an Afghani dialect of Punjabi I never got to hear because only his parents and brother understood it, because his family suppressed, eliminated this language in an attempt to fit into what would be their new home for the rest of their lives. I never fully understood Nanu’s suffering, his isolation, which has perhaps made me even more sensitive to it, more apprehensive of writing this story, more fearful of what we lose when we lose art, music, stories from beyond borders. What we lose is not just a language, a culture, the potential of a more expansive brotherhood that goes beyond the limits of manmade boundaries. What we lose is something more intrinsic: our kindness, our empathy, our humanity. The memory that this was once a shared history and even today, continues to be. We lose the ability to look at someone, who may, at first glance, seem completely alien to us—a 48 year-old Muslim qawwali singer from a newly-created Pakistan, for instance—and realise: I see parts of myself in you.

Written at The Art Farm Residency in November 2025, Goa.

The post The Music of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan Pulled Me Through The Grief of Family Loss appeared first on Electric Literature.

“Even if you Beat Me,” appeared in 2015 in The Dublin Review, two years before Rooney’s debut novel. It traces the future author’s climb from an anonymous college debater to the number one competitive debater in Europe, followed by her disillusionment with the debate circuit altogether due to its “political frivolity” and disconnect from real-world issues. It’s considered the essay that launched Rooney’s fiction career, too, after catching the attention of the Wylie Agency. And while the specifics of the debate world and the essay’s significance in the arc of Rooney’s career are interesting, what I admire most about “Even if you Beat Me,” is Rooney’s unflinching portrayal of her own hard work, competitiveness, and ambition. 

Since we live in a moment where the self-conscious cultural elite both valorizes success but treats visible striving with distaste and even suspicion, owning one’s own voracious ambition is startlingly refreshing. In many of the circles I move in, peers deride institutional meritocracy even as they define themselves and their work by its standards. They hide their ambition and self-interest behind nonchalance or appeals to ethical and moral concerns. But not Rooney, at least not the Rooney in “Even if you Beat Me.” She straightforwardly admits her desires. She was a “nearly friendless teenager living away from home for the first time” when she stumbled into the debate hall and, to her delight, quickly identified the debate community as one where she could become “successful and popular.” 

That’s not to say the essay doesn’t grapple with what it means to desire acclaim and popularity within unfair systems. The opening scene depicts Rooney and her “privileged, English-speaking university students” riding past “dwellings made partly of cardboard advertisements” on the way to a debate competition in Chennai. She comments, “No one failed to notice this fact, but what was there to say about it?” echoing how many of us feel when confronted by an injustice so enormous we struggle to know what to say or how to make it a little bit better. And yet another strength of Rooney’s essay is that she does land on a way to make it a little bit better: by the end of the Chennai debate, Rooney quits debating. No more free international trips. No more “thrills from counterfactuals.” No more sycophantic fans. In other words, Rooney puts her money where her mouth is. 

Again, this kind of action feels like a breath of fresh air during a time—or, perhaps, all times—when it’s easier to say the right things than do the right things. Reading Rooney’s first novels through the lens of “Even if you Beat Me” can also clarify the intentional tension between personal drive and ethical awareness that underpins the inert, shallow politics of many of Rooney’s characters. 

In Conversations with Friends, for example, Frances identifies as a communist yet feels drawn to fame and affluence: “She was a big fan of seeing the insides of other people’s houses, especially people who were slightly famous like Melissa.” Bobbi, Frances’s ex-girlfriend, faces a similar predicament. She’s critical of capitalism while desiring the social and artistic opportunities that can come from proximity to capitalism’s victors. When Melissa suggests introducing Bobbi to Veronica, her “old money” friend who “was very helpful with getting her book published,” Bobbi responds, “Wealthy people sicken me…but yeah, I’m sure she’s great.” Knowing any of these characters, it’s not a stretch to imagine each might accept Veronica’s help while privately maintaining their critique of wealth and privilege.

But by quitting debate right when she’s at the top of her game, Rooney proves herself to be above her characters: a woman of convictions. She writes, “Maybe I stopped debating to see if I could still think of things to say when there weren’t any prizes.” On the one hand, this reflection, along with others like it, underscores the essay’s achievement as a rare piece of millennial writing that doesn’t downplay, ironize, or disguise raw ambition, but rather demonstrates it as a real meaning-making driver in many of our lives. On the other hand, it’s also a bit of a riddle when considered alongside Rooney’s later literary success and Marxism. Are we to believe so much success simply fell into her lap? Not necessarily. In her essay, Rooney acknowledges that she is “still working on that,” suggesting that her relationship with “prizes” is an ongoing process. 

“I don’t think I will ever again want something so meaningless so much,” Rooney confesses about her obsession with college debate. Another, more cynical version could go: I don’t think I will ever again show that I want something so meaningless so much. Performative modesty and what the Italians call sprezzatura (a kind of studied carelessness) are, after all, learned skills in elite social spaces that reward effort only when it appears effortless. Effortless is cool, credible.

Effort is for the pitiful, for the lesser gods. With that in mind, Rooney’s own trajectory offers an example of—take your pick—genuine growth or learned restraint. 

More than a decade after “Even if You Beat Me,” and its delightfully unflinching closing lines—“I was number one. Like Fast Eddie, I’m the best there is. And even if you beat me, I’m still the best”—a New York Times piece about Rooney bore the headline “Sally Rooney Thinks Career Growth Is Overrated.” In the interview, she is portrayed in what has become her signature posture: one of ambivalence toward her effort, fame, and success.

It is impossible to determine whether this framing and adaptation to elite norms is Rooney’s own doing or the industry’s presentation of her. In contrast, recall the example of actor Jeremy Strong, who was mocked for being openly ambitious — à la “Even if You Beat Me”-style —in a 2021 New Yorker interview, “On ‘Succession,’ Jeremy Strong Doesn’t Get the Joke.” Throughout the piece, the interviewer, a Yale graduate, implies that Strong’s hard work, seriousness, and ambition are uncool. Essentially, Strong is punished for violating the unspoken rule that true talent never tries too hard. 

But why is this so frequently the case in elite or creative spaces? Why must achievement often appear accidental or uncontrollable? You see this same treatment of achievement in Rooney’s first three novels, where her characters’ ambition and hard work are often muted or pushed to the margins of her stories. Many of her characters suffer from what I think of as latter-seasons Rory Gilmore Syndrome: things just come too damn easily for them. This is also true of her socially mobile characters, such as Connell from Normal People, the son of a house cleaner, who ascends to Trinity College Dublin and later, a prestigious M.F.A. program in New York. Rooney’s characters attend the best schools, write celebrated essays and books, win major scholarships, and maintain flawless physiques without breaking a sweat or counting calories. With few exceptions, they possess the right shibboleth, exert the right amount of effort, and easily forge connections with the right people: journalists, literary editors, film stars, scholarship committees, and graduate school admissions officers. There’s little trial and error amongst her successful, ambitious characters. Neither is there much aggression, jealousy, rage, or other neurotic behaviors associated with highly competitive people, except when concerning les affaires de cœur.

This is not the case for Rooney in her essay. At its start, she “suffers from intense nerves” yet submits to “the continual low-level humiliation of failure.” She admits to knowing “nothing about the outside world…when the war in Afghanistan had started, or what the Patriot Act was, or where exactly the Arab Spring was happening.” In fact, Rooney makes “disastrous attempts to fake [her] way through” her early debates until she finally “just starts to read the news.” Although this is a story about debate, not art, this kind of growth smells of a traditional Künstlerroman, a story of an artist’s development. Tellingly, when no longer a novice debater, Rooney learns “to hide [her] ambition behind concern.” Concern for what? For whatever topic of debate was on the table for the day.

Rooney explains that “competitive debating takes argument’s essential features and reimagines them as a game.” I read this now like a prophecy of our broader public discourse, where winning and losing can feel like everything, and the performance of conviction and concern often acts as a substitute for real action. In high school, I remember being drawn to Jaques’s famous monologue in As You Like It—“All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players…” I wondered how many of us understood ourselves as performers. Did I understand myself as one? How did this relate to free will? 

It seems to me that one’s understanding of oneself as a performer is closely tied to one’s idea of oneself as part of a narrative or within a narrative arc, and the more we adhere to a narrative about ourselves, the more we cling to performance. In other words, the more we live narratively, the more our lives resemble performances. Or the more we live narratively, the more we assemble our lives like performances. 

It’s commonly accepted today that the Internet, and particularly social media, has intensified this performance culture by giving every person the means to narrativize their lives constantly. There’s no more waiting for the holiday card or high school reunion to make narrative sense of your life. The public jury is always there waiting to see if you are sticking to script. Here, Rooney’s reflection resonates: “Success doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.” 

For a long time, I considered “Even If You Beat Me” a singular text within Rooney’s oeuvre. Of all her characters, Rooney, as a character in the essay, was the most legible to me as a striver surrounded by other strivers. Then Rooney released Intermezzo last fall, and once again I found the striver voice with fraternal protagonists Ivan, a chess champion, and Peter, a former successful college debater. Both brothers, like Rooney herself in her essay, hustle, and they aren’t afraid to admit it. In one conversation, the brothers discuss achievement. Peter remarks, “Well, there just wasn’t anyone good enough to beat us,” and “Ivan considers this, then answers: I wanted my life to be like that. Me too, says Peter.” 

“Even if you Beat Me” highlights how desire, ethics, and merit intersect, while—to use a common expression from where I’m from—showing us how the sausage gets made, a typically messy business, especially if someone is hailing from the working class or other marginalized backgrounds. It’s not until Ivan that we really see this sausage-making process again in her work. Ivan might be described as handsome, but he also wears braces, studies chess moves, and attempts a professional comeback, all while wearing his heart on his sleeve and battling the grief of losing his father. Ivan describes the “trapped knight” inside himself; it’s both an allusion to Ivan’s knights in the game of chess, making the right moves, and to the medieval knights of legend, those possessing the noble ideals that Ivan himself wants to possess: sacrifice, courage, and loyalty. Rooney in “Even If You Beat Me” also ultimately wants something more virtuous than what the debate circuit has to offer. However, it’s not so easy for strivers to kill the competitive beast inside us. Peter, who struggles with performance more than his younger brother, exemplifies this. At one point, he admits that he doesn’t need his rich friends to be poor, or even for himself to be rich, but rather, “To be right, to be once and for all proven right.” 

“Even if you Beat Me,” with its messy, authentic examination of ambition, is still my favorite text by Rooney, only now Intermezzo is a close second. Success never appears effortless in Rooney’s latest novel, nor are the main characters detached observers of the world around them, like the debaters Rooney once envied—“I wanted to be aloof and cerebral like the speakers I most admired.” The setting where Ivan meets Margaret, his future love interest, is a local community arts center, is different than any other Rooney setting. It buzzes with potential. It’s there that we witness Ivan teaching a ten-year-old girl how to correct a flawed move and encouraging her to practice. It melts Margaret’s heart (and mine too), while calling to my mind a moment in “Even If You Beat Me” when Rooney admits that despite all her ambition and awards, “I haven’t contributed to anyone’s understanding of anything, except maybe my own, and that only partially.” But that’s not the case with Ivan, as this scene shows, and it doesn’t have to be the case for the rest of us either.

The post I Love Sally Rooney’s Books but I Love Her Essay About Competitive College Debate Even More appeared first on Electric Literature.

“That drawing would be half good if we could actually see it,” he’d say. “Make it darker.” 

I tried, but my version of dark was featherlight. Exasperated, he gave me a Sharpie.

“You’re only allowed to draw with this,” he said. “Use some force. Tentativeness kills talent.” 

I was horrified. I didn’t know how to draw with something so blunt and bold. Somehow, I managed to be just as timid with the marker as I’d been with the pencil. Mr. Krezanosky sighed. “You’ll get there someday, kiddo.”

But have I? George Saunders’s new novel, Vigil, made me question how far I’ve come. Saunders’s protagonist, Jill Blaine, is a distinctly unforceful person intent on rankling no one. In other words, she’s me. A people-pleasing, Buddhist-leaning, born-and-bred conflict-avoider, I immediately recognized myself in Jill’s delicate approach. If she’s got a writing instrument in her little tan purse, I’d wager it’s a Number 2 pencil. 

When I interviewed Saunders for my podcast, he confessed that he likewise relates to Jill’s kindly outlook on the world, experiencing a “generalized fondness” for strangers that makes it hard to fathom our transgressions as a species. Yet in Saunders’s case, a soft heart does not translate to a light line. Tentative he is not.    

Jill is a ghost—literally. Her mission in the afterlife is to comfort the dying, a job at which she is highly successful until she meets oil company CEO K.J. Boone, a man who spurns solace. He has spent his life funding and spreading false narratives to discredit scientific findings on climate change. The book takes place at his deathbed during his final moments. Unrepentant, he believes he has contributed to human progress and is leaving the world a safer, more efficient place. He has lived a big, bold life free of pesky reflection. Force is the blood in his veins.

Jill uses her secret weapon—gentleness—to try to penetrate Boone’s haughty veneer to reach the lost little boy within, a kid teased for his shortness and backwater origins. Her outlook on the human condition is reflected in this passage about Bowman, a character from her past:

“He had left his mother’s womb with a particular predisposed mind and started living, and immediately that predisposed mind had run up against various events, and had been altered in exactly the way such a mind, buffeted by those exact events, would be altered, and all the while he, Bowman, trapped inside Bowman, had believed he was making choices, but what looked to him like choices had been so severely delimited in advance by the mind, body, and disposition thrust upon him that the whole game amounted to a sort of lavish jailing.”

I nearly tore the page underlining this passage, exhilarated to find a character who so blatantly embodied my worldview. According to neuroscientists, over 95% of our thoughts and actions stem from subconscious conditioning. We operate out of familial, cultural, and epigenetic downloads that cause us to live on autopilot. Some scientists argue that any degree of free will is an illusion. The view that this whole human game amounts to a “lavish jailing” makes room for infinite compassion, even for behavior like Boone’s, who is merely a product of his upbringing. Jill perceives that anyone born into Boone’s particular body and circumstances would have made the same choices. And so, she brings to his bedside only comfort. 

I adored her. Felt validated by her. Somehow my pale drawings of childhood felt vindicated. Yes, I thought, there’s a time and place—a deathbed, for example—when judgment must be relinquished and soft lines are called for. Yet, as in so much of Saunders’s work, as soon as my mind fixed on this conclusion, the novel stealthily toppled it over. A second psychopomp pops into the story, a furious Frenchman with a loaded backstory who comes to confront Boone with a mile-high list of his crimes against humanity and the planet. The Frenchman rebukes Jill’s soft approach, equating her sympathy to complicity. If she’s a Number 2 pencil, Frenchie is black spray paint. The two death doulas square off for Boone’s last breath, and the novel is off to the races.

The initial comfort I felt in my alliance with Jill turned to creeping unease—the kind of holy cognitive dissonance that lets me know I’m in the deep waters of living, breathing art. As a meditation teacher, I, like Jill, have come to see everyone as an “inevitable occurrence” shaped by forces beyond our control. Participating in Saunders’s Substack, “Story Club,” and reading his book on craft, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, have bolstered my inclination to “revise toward kindness,” to ask, “who in this scene needs more love?” His novel Lincoln in the Bardo lends compassion to victims and perpetrators, each tangled in an unbidden destiny. Saunders is a Buddhist; dependent origination is a fundamental Buddhist belief that phenomena arise in dependence upon other phenomena, leaving us all interconnected.

In my own novels, I’ve savored writing unsavory characters—an abusive boyfriend in April and Oliver and a hard drinking philanderer in Dawnland. I worked to understand the roots of their particular “jailings”—not to satisfy some Buddhist precept, but because the substrate layers are what make a villain, or any character for that matter, compelling. When a narrative signals from the get-go who I’m supposed to love or hate, my engagement tanks and the fun stops. A villain who maps too closely onto a stereotype does nothing to expand the consciousness of the reader or the writer. I believe I generally succeed in humanizing my characters, but do I sufficiently take them to task? Are the two mutually exclusive? 

Jill and the Frenchman remind me of benevolent and wrathful Buddhist deities. As Jill tries to console Boone, the Frenchman reads from his towering stack of accusations: “The cardinal, he shouted, feeds on bits of plastic piping. In a ballroom filling with mud, chairs squeak in objection. A groggy hippo (What hippo, I wondered, why speak of hippos in this fearful place, this somber moment?) rolls yellow eyes up at a hunter seeking its ivory canines. A juvenile jaguar creeps forward, dismembers a poodle in a bright pink jacket.” 

Jill concludes the Frenchman is unhinged, yet I hear sanity in his madness. He asserts that Boone had power, knowledge, and choice. He was not a victim of conditioning, but an architect of climate catastrophe.

The Frenchman has his facts straight. In the 1970s, ExxonMobil executives had access to detailed climate data proving that burning fossil fuels would lead to global warming, yet the company publicly denied the link for decades. Just as tobacco companies refuted the health risks of smoking, oil companies deliberately sowed doubts about climate science to boost their bottom lines. Billionaires such as the Koch brothers and Robert Mercer heavily funded climate change denial. The misinformation they promoted impacted governmental policy decisions around the globe, and a disaster that could have been averted was instead accelerated. Like Boone, many of these men and women knew the truth. For the Frenchman, these decisions were not “inevitable occurrences,” but greed-driven choices made by people with extraordinary power.

“Rather than comforting him,” the Frenchman tells Jill, “I advise you to lead him as quickly as possible to contrition, shame, and self-loathing.”

Jill doesn’t buy it. But if what Boone needs most is redemption before death, isn’t leading him to contrition as forcefully as possible the most compassionate response? After all, in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—a text which Vigil is deeply in conversation with—Marley doesn’t pat Scrooge’s hand. 

In his Substack, Saunders often quotes Chekhov: “A work of art doesn’t have to solve a problem; it just has to formulate it correctly.” In Vigil, he sharpens his long held personal inquiries into free will, identity, and corporate greed, and as always, trusts us to draw our own conclusions. Tragicomic and morally lucid, the book is at once signature Saunders—you can pluck out any paragraph and know that it’s his—and wholly groundbreaking. On the Richter scale, he’s made an exponential leap.

Much of this ferocity comes from Boone himself. No sooner do I begin shifting my allegiance from Jill to the Frenchman than the story presents a third argument—classic Saunders—through Boone, who responds to the Frenchman with a scorching counter:

“You know one thing you rarely heard about in the good old U.S.A. anymore? Monsieur Frog? A young fellow dying of appendicitis. At twenty-eight. Like Grandpa’s brother had. Because a road got washed out. And the horse-drawn cart couldn’t make it through. Imagine you go back in time and drop that young guy into the backseat of a big old SUV, fly him over a perfect four-lane to some gleaming modern hospital, save his life.”

Boone asks if the Frenchman would prefer to die in the horse cart or go “zinging toward help, air-con blasting? / Anyone with a lick of sense would choose the latter. / We had. / The world had.”

Boone isn’t wrong about the benefits of modern technology. But he’s also not addressing the Frenchman’s accusation: that he knew the cost and chose profit anyway. Novels about our current Dark Age that don’t challenge or deepen our understanding lack punch. Vigil is a boxing match.

The act of writing (and reading) invites us to abide more closely within another’s consciousness than is possible even with our loved ones. It’s the ultimate intimacy. How then to embody a character as reviled as Boone, whose very smile is a grimace “shot through with a measure of forced goodwill”? Saunders told me that in order to render Boone fully, he had to give himself over to his perspective, feel the certitude of his convictions, and express them as passionately as Boone himself would. Yet, Saunders conceded, Boone is not a real-life oil executive but Saunders’s image of one. Did he get it right? There’s no way to know, but the effort is a noble one that lies at the heart of all fiction writing. 

As Boone’s life wanes, Jill nudges him toward a softer outlook on himself and those he harmed, trying her best to “revise” him toward kindness. In our interview, Saunders confessed to getting impatient with her in his early drafts. Her comforting style, successful with her previous charges, had no effect on this man. And so, it seems to me, Saunders revised not toward kindness, but fierceness—that is, fierce attention to what the story was telling him. Jill’s old bag of tricks didn’t cut it anymore. She had to come up with a bolder approach. In doing so, she becomes less wispy and tentative, more distinctly herself. 

As we spoke, I felt my case for my Number 2 pencil—in writing, in life—further eroding. Yet, would I rather be Boone, a man who drilled bold lines in the world and left wreckage in his wake, or Jill, who lived and died without leaving a trace? A pencil, after all, is low impact and erasable. In writing and in living, I’ve chosen—or inherited—the softer tool. I may not have managed to draw with a Sharpie, but at least I didn’t clearcut a rain forest. 

“Oh no?” asks the Boone in my head. “What about all the times you’ve driven your SUV—hybrid to assuage your guilt—while sipping from a throwaway coffee cup? How many goddam trees did that cost?” 

“Fine,” I say, “but passive participation is not the same as deliberate orchestration.”

“Passive?” he says. “Does the car pump its own fricking gas? Is your air travel an inevitable occurrence?”

Oof. Nailed. 

Boone points out that big actors rely on small actors. If I believe I had no part in “the world” deciding on progress, I’m a fool. Not leaving a bold mark doesn’t mean I’m innocent; it means I’m afraid of owning my power—and I have been for a long time. But I can’t hide behind pencil lines anymore. There’s no such thing as a passive participant when the house is burning down. I’ve walled myself off, but smoke is seeping through the doorjamb. Faced with the Frenchman’s accusations, Boone becomes aware of “the wall that must be continually maintained between himself and certain complicating admissions.” You and me both, Boonie.

One night while writing this, I dreamed of smoldering drones attacking protesters on a college campus. Caught in the chaos, there was no way for me to fight back. I did what seemed the most radical choice available. I sat on the pavement and meditated. Not to “pray away” the evil, but to invoke a fiery sword of inquiry: What walls have I built between myself and certain inconvenient admissions? What delusions do I maintain to fuel my personal bubble? If dependent origination is as true as modern science suggests and we are all intimately connected, the best thing I can do to abate our collective unconsciousness is to nudge my percentage of autopilot down a point or two, become slightly more intentional than inevitable.

Not so easy, it turns out—for me or for Jill.

Like Boone, Jill maintains a wall between herself and particular memories that, if allowed to surface, would complicate her work. She and Boone each practice their own form of denial, neither able to “expunge some clinging last bit” of themselves because that “bit” has never been brought into the light of awareness. Nevertheless, fragments surface that our dear girl would rather not acknowledge, stirring a wrath she didn’t know she could muster. In Buddhism, wrathful deities use their swords to cut through delusion as a means of fierce compassion. When free of self-interest and guided by wisdom, rage can be a powerful tool for liberation. The Frenchman’s fury isn’t cruelty. It’s clarity.

In Vigil, the picture of compassion drawn in the opening pages transmutes into a truer version of itself. Such metamorphosis becomes possible when we abandon our preconception of our work in order to ruthlessly listen to it. Saunders calls writing “a species of meditation,” and when he quiets his mind, in walks hilarity. Boone is visited by a host of people and birds, living and spectral. We can almost feel Saunders’s surprise as each new arrival materializes. He’s a kid in a sandbox, shutting out any “shoulds” convention might impose on him. His wild imagination springs from playful curiosity. Vigil is as funny as it is dark. 

I’ve come a long way since Mr. Krezanosky’s class. I’ve learned that conflicts don’t get resolved by hiding under the bed. I still don’t like arguments, yet when they happen, I’m more able to stand in the fire with calm curiosity. But how about my writing? Have I outgrown my Number 2 pencil and learned to commit to a line? I’m working on a novel set in China, where I lived for several years before and after the Tiananmen massacre. I strive to understand my characters’ lavish jailing, to humanize without exonerating, to hold the paradox of conditioning and accountability. In Buddhist iconography, the blade is two-sided for a reason. One edge severs inner delusion, the other, outer. Are both edges of my sword equally sharp? Let’s just say after readingVigil, I’m investing in a whetstone.

Good stories, like suspension bridges, are held together by the tension of opposites. I’m learning slowly, tentatively (old habit), that this is true in life too. We need empathy as well as judgment. Understanding as well as rage. Literature in the age of the Anthropocene needs writers who can do what Saunders does in Vigil: keep us on the razor’s edge of paradox without collapsing us into facile conclusions. Because sometimes rage isn’t the opposite of compassion—it’s compassion with a spine. It’s what love looks like when it isn’t afraid to draw a bold line.

The post In “Vigil,” Rage Is a Tool for Compassion and Liberation appeared first on Electric Literature.

Afterwards, sifting through my response to the film, I wondered if my standards for Latines onscreen had been lowered too far by lackluster, tokenized representations and the political demonizations of Latin Americans. In a different political moment, would the sequence with Latine skateboarders have moved me less? After all, the film’s Latines are supporting characters and Paul Thomas Anderson is a white director. Yet, though they may play supporting roles, the Latines in One Battle After Another not only impact the narrative, they provide crucial meaning to the film’s visual language and themes. Their presence seems to be the genuine result of an artist creating powerful images rather than a product of representation’s stultifying logic. Was Steven Spielberg preoccupied with the “representation” of white children when he filmed E.T. making those bicycles fly? Or was he creating iconic imagery that takes extra meaning from those kids’ yearning for freedom from the adult world? This begs the question: When a white auteur gives nonwhite characters such sustained attention and we scrutinize the results, what does our scrutiny reveal about the political projects white artists can join? What is it that we want from our white art?

One Battle After Another’s first act follows the relationship between Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia Beverly Hills and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Bob Ferguson and the machinations of their revolutionary group, the French 75. The spectacle of the French 75 blowing up buildings and freeing migrants from detention centers abruptly shifts when, in quick succession, Perfidia gives birth to a baby girl, Willa, rejects motherhood, is captured by the state, and rats out her comrades. From there, the plot revolves around Bob and Willa, who go into hiding in the town of Baktan Cross. There, Bob’s story is woven together with another organization in the film’s second act, an underground Latine resistance network whose tactics tend less towards spectacle, and more towards smuggling migrants to safety and quietly resisting oppression in the borderlands. This group has no official name nor any big speeches to codify their goals, yet they’re consistently shown outsmarting the government, resisting by whatever means necessary while remaining under the radar. 

These Latine aspects are encapsulated in Benicio del Toro’s Sensei Sergio St. Carlos, a character who carries the second act of the film with his twin missions of rescuing Bob and a group of Latine migrants. This, what I’ve affectionately dubbed the movie’s “Latinocore” side, is crucial to understanding the whole of One Battle After Another’s complex racial and political messaging, which has provoked surprisingly harsh debate among critics. 

Latine activism is unusual subject matter for director Paul Thomas Anderson, in whose milk-pale oeuvre people of color are often sidelined and mined for stereotypical humor (Inherent Vice, Licorice Pizza); omitted because the films are “period pieces” (The Master, Phantom Thread); or, in the best of cases, narrowly escape narrative insignificance thanks to a specific actor’s charisma (Don Cheadle in Boogie Nights, April Grace in Magnolia). One Battle After Another breaks this decades-long pattern by prioritizing Black people and Latines with the idiosyncratic artistry Anderson previously reserved for white roles. Anderson, who has built a reputation for imaginative and powerful set pieces—think Daniel Day-Lewis shouting about milkshakes in There Will Be Blood or the frogs raining down on the cast of Magnolia—strides atop those same creative heights with nonwhite characters in One Battle After Another. In one of its many tour de forces, we follow Sensei Sergio as he leads Bob into his home, the roving camera winding around migrant families clustered in the hall and lingering on their faces before following Sergio and Bob through Sergio’s living room, kitchen, and bedroom in one shot—Bob’s frantic energy at odds with Sergio’s calm as he introduces Bob to his family as a “gringo Zapata.” This entrance into Sergio’s world, with fluid cinematography confidently navigating the chaos as the anxiously repeating piano notes of Johnny Greenwood’s score rise and fall, makes a sequence which stands up to the most intense moments from Anderson’s filmography. 

Rather than labeling the film a success or failure and joining the divisive online discourse it’s stirred up, I’m interested in what these reactions say about our critical orientation towards white auteurs telling less-white stories. If the complex racial politics of One Battle After Another are declared for posterity as a swing and a miss, what does that say about our greatest white auteurs’ ability to confront our present era? Do we want white filmmakers to steer clear of the risks inherent in telling nonwhite stories? 

I realize I’m defending a movie that may appear to need no defense. Grossing over $200 million worldwide, its revenue far exceeds Anderson’s previous films, it’s received predictable critical adoration and thirteen Oscar nominations.

Yet among the underrepresented audiences you might expect to love its subject matter—people of color, leftists—it’s been harshly criticized. In broad strokes, these critiques focus upon One Battle After Another’s sensationalistic treatment of its Black characters and on its allegedly-superficial politics, the French 75’s rhetorical shadow of the movements upon which it is modeled.

It’s true that One Battle After Another is more interested in failed revolutions, in activists who can’t get their shit together, than in illustrating social change. And I don’t detract from the Black critics who’ve rightly pointed out stereotypes and misogynoir, most evident in Perfidia, who, despite a masterful performance from Teyana Taylor, is a hypersexualized, delinquent mother who betrays her fellow revolutionaries. Still, I find in Perfidia more than a collection of harmful tropes. The film itself suspends judgment: Her “relationship” with Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—the villain pursuing her, the French 75, and, later, Bob and Willa—is nonconsensual, post-partum depression complicates her actions, and we see other revolutionaries get captured, questioned, and, each time, cave. Complicity is not uniquely Perfidia’s sin. This universality, of saving oneself when crushed beneath the authoritarian jackboot, demonstrates the power wielded by states, and how, once separated from the collective, individuals struggle to resist it. 

However salient, both these lines of critique elide the Latinocore. When the federal government unleashes immigration raids on Baktan Cross, providing cover for their mission to apprehend Bob and Willa, the camera slows down to show us the Latines being detained, underlining the human cost of this assault. But Baktan Cross, a setting where Chicano culture infuses every set piece and shot, is not helpless. As Bob takes refuge with Sergio, it’s revealed that Sergio is a fulcrum in the town’s network of underground Latine resistance. While protesters confront the militarized police, Sergio repeatedly rescues Bob and simultaneously organizes the escape of multiple Latine families living in his building. None of the extensive spoken Spanish is subtitled, a decision which refuses to cater to non-Spanish speakers. These Latinocore scenes and details act as a fly in the ointment for those condemning the movie for illustrating racist tropes or being politically shallow—unsuprisingly, negative critiques ignore these elements. 

Positive reviews (largely penned by white critics, with some positive reviews from Latines appearing in Spanish) appreciate del Toro’s performance but seem less comfortable praising the film’s racial representation. Instead, most have analyzed its aesthetics or how it departs from Anderson’s previous work. Critics pointing out that the movie’s biggest departure is its surge in melanin have largely been nonwhite, and since many of them reacted negatively to this departure, there’s a growing critical consensus that while the movie might be well-made, the results are mixed at best concerning Anderson’s ability to tell stories beyond his own whiteness.

In contrast, Anderson has not come under widespread scrutiny for people of color’s absence or sidelining in his previous films. I won’t claim that Phantom Thread or The Master are racist because they tell white stories, but I question why we accept this absence while any significant nonwhite presence opens white auteurs to critique. This critical landscape tells us that the absence of people of color is more acceptable than our presence, and that white auteurs will be lauded for making Great Art across their saltine-tinted bodies of work while keeping people of color outside of the frame. The complaints when white artists do attempt to decenter whiteness send an additional, paradoxical message that our stories are too difficult for even Great (white) Artists to possibly attempt.

Do we want our white artists to solely center white people? Do we want them to do the more “woke” version of staying in their lane, making art about white people with a few inoffensively diverse characters thrown in as shields against racial critique? That seems to be what we, as a culture, are incentivizing, but we should ask our artists to do more than claim “inoffensive” as a virtue.

If artistic discourse and output accepts white artists moving beyond art that centers whiteness, collaboration with nonwhite artists strikes me as essential. That collaboration is evident in One Battle After Another, as Paul Thomas Anderson has vocally credited Benicio del Toro for his creative input to the Baktan Cross scenes. According to Anderson, these scenes went unwritten until del Toro wrote not only his character’s dialogue, but helped formulate the movie’s second act. Everything from the set decoration to the unsubtitled Spanish in these scenes feels connected to lived Latine experience, and this can’t be separated from del Toro’s collaboration. 

It’s hard to overstate how wonderful Benicio del Toro is as Sensei Sergio. Where Bob is frantic and paranoid, Sergio is serenely competent. He saves Bob, but never lets this white man derail his own objectives; he calls his activism a “Latino Harriet Tubman situation” and an “Underground Railroad,” one example of how this film links migrant struggles and Black liberation. He is characterized endearingly down to the last detail: He wears cowboy boots in a nod to Latino gauchos and corrido folk heroes; adorning his bedroom walls are paintings of tigers, and Eye of the Tiger is his ringtone; and he doesn’t let Bob trespass on his tatami mats even though Bob is running for his life. Sergio tries to share his Zen attitude, reminding Bob to be like “Ocean Waves,” a useful metaphor when confronting battles that won’t stop coming.

Sergio brings to mind Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa’s idea of “la facultad,” as expressed in her seminal work Borderlands/La Frontera: “La facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities . . . an instant ‘sensing,’ a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning.” This “sensing” comes to those who’ve been marginalized, who can’t live safely in aboveground society, whose identities have been shaped by violent borders. La facultad starts as the adaptive quick thinking required to survive a hostile world and becomes deep counterknowledge to the ways and means of dominant society. 

When Sergio says to Bob, “We’ve been laid siege for hundreds of years,” this is la facultad. He follows up with a needed reminder to Bob, “Don’t get selfish.” The lessons Bob has taken from life in hiding enable him to escape Lockjaw’s first assault. But while Bob’s peril has granted him an inkling of la facultad, he’s still lived as a white man; his paranoia hasn’t become la facultad’s deeper knowing. We can read Bob’s flailing as a white director’s tacit admission that he needs help telling stories about people of color, with Sergio’s expertise standing in for the creative input and guidance of Latino collaborators.

In one example, Bob falls off a roof while following BeeGee and the skateboarders to safety and winds up in jail, where Latine resistance continues to save his ass: In jail, the Latina intake worker suggests that he’s diabetic, sending him to the hospital, where a Latina nurse frees Bob and instructs him to escape to Sergio’s waiting car. Sergio hands him a six-pack of Modelos and takes a selfie with Bob, declaring, “Let’s play offense,” as they drive off.

This escape sequence, with the Latinas’ smooth operation, Sergio’s selfie and seamless switch to offense, demonstrates Latine playfulness and what Anzaldúa calls “serpentine movement,” the movement of Latine political and spiritual activism. This is a reference to the Nahuatl snake goddess, Coatlicue, whom Anzaldúa reclaims as a force representing the path to self-acceptance and evading colonial authority. Embracing Coatlicue enables more than survival, empowering us and making art, playfulness, even the divine accessible through the identities created by life in the metaphoric-and-literal Borderlands. As Anzaldúa puts it, “[L]earning to live with la Coatlicue . . . transforms living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience.”

It seems unlikely that Paul Thomas Anderson and Benicio del Toro read Anzaldúa to prepare these scenes. Nonetheless, they turn the borderland of Baktan Cross into a numinous place, touched by the divine, in which activists move like Coatlicue and the community’s street smarts, its facultad, protects itself. 

While I see radical politics illustrated through the film’s Latinocore scenes, other readings suggest little discontinuity in Anderson’s pattern of centering white characters. When I watched the movie again with a friend of mine, she kept exasperatedly asking, “Why are they helping him?” It’s a good question: Why do these Latine activists go out of their way for Bob, who is useless at best and hindrance at worst?

The cynical answer is that they help him because One Battle After Another stars a white man, and therefore requires its nonwhite characters to serve him. We see this repeatedly from white directors, adjacent to if not reiterating White Savior tropes. It’s hard to argue against this metatextual reading, as Bob is the protagonist, and once his arc leaves the Latine characters, so does the narrative.

Yet, Bob is the Latines’ damsel in distress rather than their White Savior. From Bob’s first panicked arrival at his door, Sergio understands: this man needs help, and may not have much to offer in return.

A different reading of the film suggests that it would be out of character for Sergio and his allies to not help Bob. In-universe, the principles of solidarity and la facultad of his comrades save him, not his whiteness. When Bob reveals his link to the French 75, Sergio had already saved him once, regardless of revolutionary bona fides. He doesn’t privilege Bob over the migrants (“Don’t get selfish”) but Bob’s precarity is motivation enough. 

Another scene, not involving Sergio or his allies, illustrates similar principles. Pursuing Willa and Lockjaw by car, Bob arrives at an intersection with no clue which way they went. He stops to ask for directions at a roadside stand staffed by Latinos. The men point the way, he thanks them, and drives off in the right direction. This whole conversation is spoken in Spanish, clumsy on Bob’s part.

Anderson could have cut this without interrupting the plot, but it justifies its presence by underlining the principles of solidarity that enable Bob and Willa’s survival. Bob isn’t fluent in Spanish, but he can communicate; if he’d learned no Spanish, he’d never find Willa. The Latinos unhesitatingly help him. Anderson breaks with the film’s paranoid atmosphere to show that strangers (including foreigners) are not inherently hostile, they can be trusted, and that Bob—by extension, all revolutionary hopefuls—needs community support and solidarity. That Bob frequently seems undeserving of the help he receives, that it’s sometimes hard to imagine a more incompetent leading man, demonstrates how deep these principles go. Everything this movie has to say about how you keep fighting one battle after another is conveyed through this scene.

In a better world, multiple movies with One Battle After Another’s budget could come from directors of color and star nonwhite actors rather than Leonardo DiCaprio. In that world, I’d get my movie about Latino skateboarders from a Latine director; Perfidia would be explored by a Black woman director who’d give her dimensions beyond aggressive sexuality. But in this world, white artists get the bulk of industry permission and critical acclaim. I don’t want to see those artists lucky enough to be given permission and funding by gatekeepers avoid the risks inherent to writing across difference.

Writing across difference should be a risky endeavor: You risk causing offense and inviting blowback. But any artist worth their accolades should not fear. Artists take risks—different in extent, not in kind—to make any art of lasting value. This doesn’t let auteurs off the hook for risking and failing, nor does it exempt white artists from criticism, but in a white supremacist society, if we tell artists from the dominant racial category to only “write what they know,” we end up with reflections of society’s dominant values through the white faces and stories these artists already know. I prefer to see even flawed attempts to subvert the dominant paradigm. 

Gloria Anzaldúa chose not separatism between Latines and whites, but to give artistic direction: Through our art and literature, she wrote, “we must share our history with [whites] . . . They will come to see that they are not helping us but following our lead.” In One Battle After Another, Bob follows Sergio’s lead in all their shared scenes. When the camera briefly returns to Sergio once he’s left Bob’s story, we see Sergio exiting his vehicle by the side of the road, waiting to be arrested. His face relaxed as ever, he finishes his Modelo and doesn’t stand, but dances: hips swaying, feet shuffling and gracefully raising his arms. Is he dancing the Salsa? Samba? Unclear, but the sway of his hips channels Anzaldúa’s serpent movement, Latinocore to the end as he answers stern cop questions with jokes (“I’ve had a few.” “A few what?” “A few small beers”). Despite his circumstances, the film projects little suspense regarding his fate, his cool assuring us that he’ll evade authority’s grasp. Possessing la facultad, we know he’ll walk free.

The post “One Battle After Another” Reminds Me What I Want From White Art appeared first on Electric Literature.

All of these narrative series could fit the “Eat the Rich” media classification, a phrase commonly attributed to the French political philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, from a quote popularized during the French Revolution: “When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.” Many shows from the last decade or so live up to this idea, wherein the super-rich— shameless, amoral strivers and consumers, neglectful of their families, oblivious to their servants—end up suffering consequences of their criminal or self-obsessed behavior. 

But of late, not terrible consequences.

Once upon a time, wicked wealthy characters found redemption or met their comeuppance. The last episode of Your Friends and Neighbors tells me there’s been a shift: these characters no longer need a redemptive arc. Morally gray characters have gone black. Greed is okay. Decency is for suckers. This is our America. 

Critics would call a show like Your Friends and Neighbors “Wealth Porn.” Their settings feature those twenty-million dollar homes you see on Zillow and characters who wear what most of us can’t afford. As I binged this series, the term “porn” made sense. I watched it privately and with shame, but kept on. If the settings, stories and characters of similar shows were so disconnected from my life, how did I get there? 

Gawking at wealth has entranced us since the 1930’s, when films featuring high society provided an escape from economic hardship. But many films of that time, particularly screwball comedies (My Man Godfrey, 1936), ridiculed the wealthy. In the 40’s and 50’s, wealthy primary characters are often unfulfilled by their riches (Citizen Kane, 1941; Sunset Boulevard, 1950), destroyed by their wealth (Written on the Wind, 1956) or ruined by scheming for it (Double Indemnity, 1944). During my film school education, I identified with the “good” boys or girls, not with the greedy, powerful antagonists. Further, I longed for evil characters to find redemption. They usually did. 

Then this simple construct shifted: protagonists’ “wicked quotients” increased. The precedent began with film: Michael Corleone in The Godfather (1972), Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), the The Joker (2019), and V inV for Vendetta (2005). Tony Soprano inThe Sopranos (1999) is a mob boss, sure, but he suffers from anxiety and depression. Breaking Bad’s (2008-2013) Walter White cooks meth and fights drug kingpins but is principally (at least in the first seasons) a family man with whom we sympathize because of his terminal cancer diagnosis and the fact that he built his drug empire to guarantee his family’s financial security. So by the time I arrived at the first iteration of Big Little Lies (2017), I felt comfortable empathizing with morally gray protagonists. I watched ultra-wealthy, privileged, non-diverse characters in their seemingly perfect lives in a gorgeous coastal California town struggle to solve a murder mystery. What fun! Screenwriters know that we’re wired to want to unpack a mystery. I wanted to identify the murderer despite the fact that most of the primary characters seemed to lack redeemable traits. As the show developed, I was thrown the bone of each character struggling with situations that exposed their vulnerability. Wasn’t that “deep” enough? 

Along came The White Lotus (2021), each season of which takes place in a super-luxurious resort and features well-heeled patrons or families struggling with their (oh, dear) personal issues. Each season is also fueled by a murder mystery, which again hooked me into the puzzle. Most primary characters in all four seasons suffer from disconnection, the damages of toxic masculinity, insecurity or perpetual dissatisfaction. Real world issues! But the show’s message doesn’t land as a condemnation of extreme capitalism. While some of the wealthy characters in the series show a tepid arc, the loudest message is that the wealthy killer wins. It was only at the end of the limited series Sirens (2025), which has a similar resolution, that I questioned my own malfeasance in bingeing these shows. Sirens, I concluded, does not advise that we “eat the rich” but perhaps that we should “be the rich.” 

So what? It’s entertainment. Escapism. Fantasy. Wish fulfillment? Uh oh. Maybe. Wishing for excess wealth is why so many accept today’s extreme income inequality. Slowly, I’d been enticed into a blithe admiration of, no let’s say, interest in ultra-wealthy protagonists and their lifestyles.

Nowhere is this stunt of beguiling us into moral turpitude more evident than in Your Friends and Neighbors. In the show’s pilot, John Hamm stars as Andrew Cooper (Coop), a divorced hedge fund manager who’s fired by his manipulative boss allegedly because of Coop’s one-night stand with a woman from a distant division of the firm. In truth, Coop’s boss simply wants Coop’s share of profits. Having signed a non-compete, Coop can’t seek work in his specific field, which leaves him with huge expenses and no way to pay them: a mortgage on a palatial house where his ex-wife Mel (Amanda Peet) still lives (even though she was the cheater that ended their marriage), $100K dues for his country club, private-school tuition for his children, and a house rental for himself. More financial stresses emerge: a new drum set for his son, a charity benefit and an expensive skin treatment for his daughter. 

The pilot opens with Coop waking up in a pool of blood. Lying beside a dead man, Coop becomes a suspect. We are offered a solid setup for good storytelling with a protagonist who’s unemployed and finagles a sketchy way to get money while proving he’s not a murderer. Ah ha! Another murder mystery! How can one turn away when you need to know who killed so-and-so? Coop doesn’t admit to any of his friends or family that he’s lost his job. Instead, he secretly steals from his friends and neighbors and pawns the goods for cash. Citing his escapades in a Voice Over, Coop says that these people have “piles of forgotten wealth just lying around in drawers where they were doing no one any good” – as if this justifies his theft. Coop does not belabor the decision to steal from his friends. This is no Robin Hood move. This guy feels entitled to his friends’ spoils. A corrupt character, yes, but intriguing because of the puzzle. Further, I was riveted by this protagonist’s quest to prove his innocence. He wasn’t all bad! He was innocent of murder. 

Then I thought, “Wait. Get a job, man!” Unless we’re morally bankrupt hustlers, most of us would hit the pavement and seek employment or reach out to family or friends for help. But not this guy. A liar and a thief! Still, I stayed in. 

I wanted to watch the thrill of Coop proving he was innocent of murder, sure, but the morally superior schoolteacher in me enjoyed anticipating Coop’s comeuppance. If I couldn’t thieve my way to riches, Coop shouldn’t either. It’s just not fair. Then again, there’s nothing fair about today’s capitalism so I should have predicted his ultimate immorality. 

The tense robberies made for great set pieces, but they also exposed issues of story logic: Why don’t people in the community, all of whom attend the same country club, organize a community watch to catch this thief who is preying on all of them? My dispute seemed okay with most viewers. Nielsen data showed that it was Apple TV+’s most watched drama in its first 38 days. Why was I still in? Watching was like eating candy. I craved the sugar, knowing it might make me sick. 

Tonally, we’re reminded that this is a satire, much as we’re supposed to digest the series Succession. For example, when Coop contemplates stealing a Phillipe Patek watch, we are offered a brief sidebar “commercial” about the $200K timepiece: a funny commentary. Same with a Birkin Bag or Richard Mille watch. Further, most of the wealthy characters aren’t deeply rendered and as screenwriters know, characters with meager complexity don’t inspire identification or even sympathy. Shallow characters permit (allegedly) wannabe super wealthy viewers to claim that they’d be nothing like those rich people.

By the fourth episode of the first season, it seems the writers got the message that Coop is losing our loyalty: they shift focus to Coop’s Dominican housekeeper Elena (Aimee Carrero), with whom he collaborates on his thieving antics only after she catches him stealing. In line with the show’s tone, she gets wise: you don’t get what you work for. You get what you’re able to negotiate. The episode also features Coop’s attempts to restore his relationship with his ex-wife, Mel. The episode seemed to find the sweet spot between admiring Coop’s neighbors’ lifestyles and throwing a bone to the working or middle class, hoping to snare both classes of viewers while avoiding true responsibility for their inherent messages. By showing the housekeeper’s limited means, Coop’s alliance with her briefly indicts the corruption of capitalism before the murder mystery and Coop’s robberies distract us from her poverty and again becomes the focus of the rest of the episodes.

In the last episode of the season, Mel and Coop accompany their daughter to Princeton for a college tour. While the daughter is on her own, Coop and Mel break open a chalice in their alma mater’s church and munch on communion wafers with jam before having sex in a pew. For those who haven’t watched the show, yes, this truly happens. The sequence sustains the story line that Coop and Mel might someday reconcile, however it betrays the writers’ staggering lack of awareness of their viewers. Scores of Catholic Reddit users were appalled at the blasphemous incident and pledged not to watch the second season because of it. This story decision shows the writers’ lack of concern with the extent of Coop’s immorality. Sure, moral ambiguity is a natural component of contemporary storytelling, but embarrassing when the writers seem indifferent to a scene’s blasphemy.

The series had the potential to end with a genuine catharsis, but no. In the last episode, Coop is proven innocent of the murder and the entire first season avoids any examination of the consequences of income inequality or excesses of extreme capitalism. Coop and the housekeeper’s robberies are never detected. Instead, Coop is offered back his job, with even better terms. His boss and the woman with whom he enjoyed the one-night-stand wait at the private plane that will fly them to close Coop’s first new deal, but Coop doesn’t show. The plane takes off without him. Where is Coop? He’s burglarizing his malicious boss’s mansion. Cinematography, acting and soundtrack portray this as a victory.

After this, I finally woke up. I vowed not to watch the second season. 

When interviewed about this last episode, Tropper defends Coop not taking his former firm’s offer: 

“If he took it, he would go back to being the same sleepwalking, suburban, middle-aged man that he was before this happened. The goal of this story was always to wake him up. I think he was planning to take the job until the last possible minute, and it’s the realization that breaking the rules and robbing people and being in their homes became something more than just a means of making money for him. It actually liberated him from a script he’d been following his entire life.”

Liberated? Coop is merely strategizing a new tactic of wealth acquisition. How many of us would feel liberated from a multi-million dollar salary by robbing people? If Tropper is so critical of the racket or malaise of working as a hedge fund manager, why not give Coop a Robin Hood opportunity? Steal from the rich and give to the poor? Or make the radical decision to turn Coop into a 7^th grade teacher in the south side of Chicago? Coop’s life was not at all typical of a “sleepwalking, suburban middle aged man.” But this is what the show is teaching us: secure your liberation and wealth by breaking the law. Or perhaps Apple TV+ simply wants to repeat what they see as the first season’s success without caring about the immoral residue.

Tropper continues: 

“Morality has taken a backseat right now to self-discovery, and part of what his journey is going to be is reconciling his place as a father and family man with what he’s doing. His journey’s not complete yet, but the first step of his liberation is complete. Then the question is, now that you’ve been freed, are you going to locate your moral compass or not? Is morality a thing that still exists in contemporary society?”

I sure hope morality still exists. I know I’m not alone. Asking this question exposes a deeper malignancy that’s being sold to millions of Americans at exactly the wrong time in our divided society where the poor are getting poorer and the government is justifying why the rich should keep getting richer. If it’s possible that morality isn’t “a thing” that still exists in our society, the ministers of our screen stories should feel some responsibility to envision corrective paths.

Maybe showrunner Jonathan Tropper was only asking a rhetorical question, perhaps he wants us to bellow “of course morality exists!” and root for Coop to correct his path in season two. But we never saw Coop consider an alternative way of life. The first season never dropped a hint that Coop struggled with the morality of his larceny. For example, he could have started a job outside of his field or told his ex, Mel, of his situation and she could have forced him to maintain their lifestyle. She could have encouraged the robberies. It’s another screenwriter trick: to protect your protagonist’s reputation, blame his wrongdoing on another character! But Coop is never given those choices and we can’t blame other characters for his actions. Viewers are anticipating that “second-season Coop” will either get caught trying to one-up his prior boss with greater avarice or connive another scheme. Coop has shown no characteristics that lead us to believe he’ll be reformed. 

Before our current film and television era, most protagonists faced with tough choices ultimately chose morally and ethically “good” choices, even if the choice sacrificed their lives or lifestyles. See Spock in the Wrath of Kahn or BoJack Horseman, a deeply flawed anti-hero, who chooses responsibility over self-preservation, or more recently, Joel in The Last of Us as he lies to protect Ellie—an adopted daughter of sorts—from responsibility and heartache.

We’ve emerged out of the simple “good versus bad” anchor of movie and television narratives into something more complex—that, to me, is a good thing. Profound questions are raised when, at a story’s end, our protagonist makes the “bad” choice. We ponder how the character has been damaged by society or by other characters and reject that social/cultural blight. But now, more than ever, when anti-heroes don’t make “good” or redemptive choices, the social message is absent. Does that mean we should finally surrender to the damages, as did Simone in Sirens? I am not yet that hopeless. 

I strongly believe that we are at a time where we can’t afford to accept capitalism’s costs or allow ourselves to get lured into admiring unredeemable protagonists in our films and literature. Movies and novels are a modern Bible: What would I do if I lost my job and faced colossal expenses? How should I live? Who am I? These sorts of questions surface when reading the finest stories or watching the most resonant films and television shows.

Let’s be real: with a few exceptions, the preponderance of series about the super-rich and their resultant power supports this country’s tilt toward oligarchy. I kept watching these shows and sequestered that truth in my peripheral mind. But after this exploration, I won’t do that again. I worry that by featuring the glossy kitchens and acres of manicured gardens, I’m invited to forgive the one-percenters for protecting their wealth by not paying the taxes they should be paying. I worry that the series’ lukewarm, even ambiguous anti-capitalist messages are buried under the glorious spectacle of possessions. I worry that these shows invite me to think that I, too, could have all that, when I, like most of us, can’t. And I worry that the showrunners, feeling exempt from moral responsibility, know exactly what they’re doing. “Social critique is not our job,” they might answer. “We’re in the entertainment business.” But beneath those justifications, these creators also know: “We can’t upset the oligarchs; they finance our operation.” Showrunners know the hand that feeds them. Just look at what happened with ABC, Disney and Jimmy Kimmel. 

It’s interesting to note that Your Friends and Neighbors was renewed for a second season before its first season even aired. This is uncommon for the streamer. Executives are not measuring viewers’ “likes;” they are dictating them.

Are we—the viewers who care about social and ethical justice—okay with this? 

73% of Americans subscribe to streaming services. A vast majority of us, regardless of our wealth, have access to wealth porn. We can wish to have all that and wish so badly that we grow angry when we finally learn we can’t. It’s no wonder that countries like the U.S. with the greatest income inequality also have the highest crime rates.

At a time when extreme income inequality lives in tandem with political polarization, social unrest and violence, watching lavish lives corrupts our national psyche. These screen stories’ tender scolding of the crimes of the rich only nourish the cancer of late-stage capitalism.

Our schadenfreude at seeing rich people’s mild misery is no substitute for “eating the rich.” I’m promising to resist my voyeurism and protest television shows that coax us into sympathy for the very individuals who are victimizing the majority of Americans. I will push back against this dehumanizing power of wealth porn. I will avoid any assignments for feature film concepts that fall, lock step, into this trend. 

How can the rest of us, who are not television or film writers, register our protest? 

One start: make your sentiment known. Stop watching these shows.

The post Television Shows like “Your Friends and Neighbors” Seduce Us Into Accepting the Crimes of the Ultra-Wealthy appeared first on Electric Literature.

As I read, something about the prose felt strangely familiar. By chapter two, I was laughing out loud. I was reading my own fic, written when I was sixteen. Eighteen years on, it was still online, having accrued a respectable number of favorites on its (somewhat melodramatic) fourteen-thousand-word story. It felt like a full circle moment, as if I had unexpectedly met an old friend. But it was also bittersweet, because somewhere between earning three degrees in English literature—then becoming a lecturer and publishing my first academic book—the teenager who had glued herself to a desktop computer after school to write fiction for pleasure had disappeared. And yet, I wouldn’t be here today without her.

Long before I learned what close reading meant, or encountered intimidating phrases like intertextuality, narrative theory, or hermeneutics, I was already practicing them—just in a very different classroom. My training ground was not a school or library, but LiveJournal communities updated at 2 a.m., FictionAlley.org profiles with glittering pixel art, and the niche depths of Archive Of Our Own where writers of all ages performed feats of narrative ambition that my own undergraduate students today rarely have the chance to attempt. Fanfiction was where I first learned to read attentively, write un-self-consciously, and to take seriously the complex relationship between text and reader, author and interpreter, canon and “fanon.” I was conducting close linguistic analysis simply to capture the cadence of a particular character: After all, you didn’t want to get comments from invested readers complaining “this is too OOT” (Out Of Character). I would rearrange the narrative structure of my own fics because I had loved the pacing of someone else’s. I would self-edit to feedback from readers according to what was landing well. All of it felt like play. But it was also an education. When I later sat in university lectures learning about focalization, diegesis, and narrative tension, I felt a quiet recognition. I had been doing this sort of work for years; I simply had not known its name. 

When I stepped into academia, I quickly learned how little respect this world earned. That I read and wrote fanfiction was something to hide. As a university student, I assiduously worked through my reading lists, genuinely enjoying some of the set texts (the high fantasy fan in me raced through The Iliad, and Shakespeare’s comedies were never a chore)—but I wasn’t about to tell my Latin-speaking, private-school-educated, white middle-class peers that I already knew what a good paragraph looked like because I’d spent the better part of high school writing and reviewing fanfic. Being a multi-ethnic, international school kid from Turkey with an inexplicably American accent was already plenty to explain. So, bit by bit, I got caught up in what I “had to” read and know, leaving behind the secret joy of dishing out novel-length stories for a bunch of strangers on the internet.

Fanfiction is still dismissed as unserious: a guilty pleasure at best, juvenile at worst. The judgement mirrors the way mass-market paperbacks sold in supermarkets rarely make it onto university reading lists. Even now, as a lecturer, mentioning fanfiction in academic spaces tends to prompt a slightly embarrassed laugh. “It’s a fun thing,” colleagues admit: “at least it gets young people reading.” The implication lurks beneath the surface: Fanfiction may train enthusiasm, but not skill; passion, but not literary discernment. The literary academe’s dismissal of fan-created writing is not only unimaginative, it reveals how our structures of publication, distribution, and intellectual property are entirely geared towards enshrining fiction as, above all, a product. In doing so, it doubles down on the idea that textual creativity is the domain of the lone genius who must either create an entirely original “product,” or not at all.

Fanfiction as a creative practice already assumes what any literary scholarship worth its salt must acknowledge: Narrative is a social act. It is created under, and carries the traces of, our shared experiences at any given time. When a book or television show handles trauma carelessly, or reduces female characters to plot devices, or implies queer desire only to shy away from it, fandom responds by reshaping the story. Where traditional creative writing workshops rely on clear hierarchies, genre coherence, and marketable-length works, fanfiction communities tend to play with these. There is no single authority whose judgement is final. Instead, there are beta readers, commenters, moderators, and co-authors, all contributing in different ways. Beta reading in fandom can be astonishingly rigorous; people donate hours to improving a story simply because they care about it. Many of us lecturers are hard-pressed to dedicate the same kind of time when reading and annotating a student essay, simply because we often have hundreds to handle. Studying and teaching literature can, ironically, turn out vastly less personal than soliciting feedback on your fic from thousands of strangers online.

My formative experiences of writing were not neatly composed essays for school, but long, messy, derivative stories typed late into the night on Windows XP. I was not trying to produce something original and marketable. I was trying to understand what made my favorite characters tick; what would happen if a storyline veered in a different direction; how a minor event might develop if given more attention. To write good fanfiction, one must read with a kind of mild obsession that no teacher could have forced out of me. Yes, I admit, sometimes it was a touch lust-fueled (finding older, complex characters more interesting than teenage boys comes with the territory of being an only child adultified before her time). But it was also about the lack of pressure. You don’t have to be a professional in fanfic. You don’t even have to be a native speaker of the language you write in. 

This sort of writing encourages you to let go of what kills creativity: the need to get things “perfect.” There is a romantic myth that writing ought to be slow, painful and refined through lengthy bouts of solitary suffering. But fandom simply does not work like that. People draft huge chapters overnight, update long-running epics weekly, and experiment with new ideas. There is no pressure to be definitive, only the excitement of the story and the knowledge that readers are waiting. By the time I sat my first timed essay or faced my first academic deadline, I already knew how to write quickly and consistently without being too precious about it. The instinct to keep going, to produce imperfect work regularly, was built during those late-night writing sessions when the only reward was the joy of seeing a deluge of comments on your latest upload. This is a far cry from what I still encounter in academia: People terrified of putting a foot wrong, paralyzed by the blank page.

It’s worth asking why academia has been so reluctant to acknowledge the pedagogical value of fanfiction. The overarching reason goes back to what much does: the global economic system we are in. Fanfiction has an uneasy relationship with the concept of authorship, ownership, and monetization. Literary studies geared towards the imperatives of capitalist market values deem originality and solitary creative labors of utmost importance. It wants one name behind the product: a single mastermind who can be paraded out for book tours, signings, and conventions. This is imperative for securing intellectual property, and ensuring that everyone involved—editors, publishers, distributors—get their cut from any reuse.

Fanfiction undermines this at every point. It is derivative by design and collaborative in practice. It thrives outside commercial structures and pays no regard to copyright as a measure of legitimacy. It undermines the assumption that originality is the highest literary virtue. It isn’t driven by racking up institutional accolades, as real names are never used. It not only suggests that writing can be meaningful even when it builds directly on existing material, but it often reveals a hidden truth: No writer is an island. Storytelling is a communal, not an individual, act, even if we put one author’s name on it. Any author is inspired by countless others, and stands on the shoulders of their own favorites.

Storytelling, in other words, is an impulse, not a project. In The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow show that for tens of thousands of years, human beings created stories not for ownership, but as communal, improvisational acts. Whether oral, gestural, or written, they were passed around for pleasure and leisure. Storytelling thrived long before private ownership or the notion of literary “products.” The instinct that drove me to write fanfic as a teenager was part of this older, collective history of narrative. Fandom’s sprawling, unpaid, co-created archives are not an aberration but a digital-age continuation of something very human and very ancient.

That fanfiction today proliferates without monetary compensation shows how recently we accepted the idea that creativity must be validated and enshrined through its market reception. Fandom quietly refuses all of that, and in doing so, it reveals how arbitrary those rules really are. If readers and writers can co-create meaning, what becomes of the author’s authority? If more readers resonate with a pseudonymous fic by someone with a day job instead of with a celebrity author, what becomes of the publishing world’s profit imperatives? If students learn to become good readers via fic, what of the academe’s claim to arbitrate literary value? Dismissing it altogether is easier than grappling with these large aesthetic and political questions.

Whatever the answers, fanfiction won’t go away, because it represents a radical space of literacy. It is accessible to people who might never have seen themselves as writers. It welcomes teenagers producing multi-chapter works, ESL writers experimenting bravely in another language, queer writers reshaping narrative worlds that have excluded them, neurodivergent writers finding safety in anonymity where formal classrooms failed them. There are no fees, no prerequisites, no admissions processes; you don’t know an author’s race, income or gender. It is a comparatively level playing field that reminds us we are driven to creative labor because we are human, whether or not financial compensation enters the picture.

Fandom taught me to pay attention, to question the politics of authorship, and to dare venture into the heavily classed and raced sphere of literary criticism without imposter syndrome. It gave me a version of literary culture that was unafraid of passion and unembarrassed about the pleasures of the imagination. And despite the distance between my current job title and that sixteen-year-old me hunched over a keyboard late at night, I am certain that everything I value about literature began in those early, communal, online spaces. Rediscovering my own fics reminded me that the most meaningful literary communities are still the ones built outside institutions: messy, irreverent, unprofitable, and utterly alive.

The post Fanfiction Made Me a Literary Scholar appeared first on Electric Literature.

I hadn’t seen him spar for real until a former student, a heavyweight finance bro who used to spar in college, came back one day. Anu is 25, bulky, and flexible. Our master is a 31-year-old featherweight. “What level do you want?” our master asks Anu before they begin, which is both a flex and a real question. Even though our master could destroy Anu right away, it would be easy for either of them to get hurt. Anu because he rolls his ankles just from walking across the room. Our master because he’s fighting someone heavier with less control over where his kicks land.

They begin warming up with no gear, light contact. Our master wears a white uniform, black collar, black belt, black stripes down the shoulders. Anu wears a green muscle shirt and rolled-up white pants. Anu struts around before holding his fist out to make contact and begin. Our master bounces a little, relaxed, baiting. He holds his leg out, tapping Anu several times. That was the old style, he says, like sword fighting. Now it’s all cut kicks. Anu tries headshots for more points. He’s flexible. But our master slides 45 degrees or steps forward to clinch. Anu punches, which is fewer points. But it’s good for him. His arms are imposing and can psych his opponent out. After some time, they decide without speaking to put on their chest guards and helmets. Another student and I lace and tie their chest guards. Anu likes his tight; our master likes his loose.

Anu is blocking well, but our master’s foot finds its way under, over, and through his arms.

Our master jumps once and kicks Anu three times, each one higher than the last, before landing. “What the hell was that?” Anu says.

“It’s just this one,” our master says and demonstrates the three kicks on the dummy to show Anu.

Anu, almost 100lbs heavier than our master, goes up for a headshot. Our master ducks and stands back up in time to gently lift Anu’s leg and send him rolling across the floor.

“If you weren’t staring at yourself in the mirror, you could have killed me,” our master says.

They spar and rest and argue. Accidentally hurt each other, rest, spar. 

I sit unmoving like suddenly the Olympics has commenced in front of me. Like I’m a kid up past my bedtime and if I move my parents will remember I exist.

After a while Anu looks over at me and asks, “Do you like watching us dick around?”

“Yes,” I say, and realize everyone else has left.

I couldn’t sleep after the first time I saw them fight. I stared at the ceiling, buzzing and glowing like I had a secret. I just learned people could fly, and I was a person, too.

The taekwondo studio, I’ve found, is the only place where I can be completely focused on something outside of myself. For a long time, I have found this experience to be rare. After puberty, I understood my value was tied to my ability to be attractive, both pretty and cool, and that awareness accompanied me in every context. I saw myself from the outside the way I saw actresses in movies romanticized. Could I fall in love with me from this angle or that? If ever I was fully inside myself, focused on something out in the world, that awareness of my role would snap me back out of myself and point my gaze at me. After becoming a mother, I perceived expectations on me to grow exponentially in impossible and conflicting ways. The demands of motherhood require you to exist above reproach as you care flawlessly and tirelessly for your perfect children. But the things you need to do to fulfill those duties (when they’re young: not sleep, not shower, not talk to any other adults, not be frustrated or resentful) are in direct conflict with being pretty or cool. 

But at taekwondo, there are no societal expectations for how a middle-aged woman is supposed to be as a student. It’s already unusual that I’m there. In class we only consider taekwondo and the other people in front of us. Are we attacking or defending, sore or tired, warmed up or stiff or strong, laughing, frustrated, amazed. We, teens and adults of all genders, wear the same uniform. We’re not pretty. We’re not parents. There’s no one present I’m supposed to take care of and, notably, no particular way I’m supposed to feel.

My other middle-aged, married friends and I have a list of books and films we avoid because we’re afraid if we consume the wrong one, it’ll be impossible for us to stay married. Miranda July’s novel All Fours is one of them. But I risked it because one of my middle-aged, married friends recommended it after he saw me struggling to write about ideas of home and safety.

July’s narrator is 45, a semi-famous multimedia artist married to a man, Harris, and mother to one nonbinary child, Sam. She has birth trauma. She has a best friend, Jordi, the only person in her life with whom she’s always honest. I, too, have an admirable and capable husband. I have kids, birth trauma, and a very limited number of people with whom I am honest.

The narrator describes the self-governing system of shame so many mothers experience, even in private, even in their own homes. She says before she and Harris had kids she could easily “dance across the sexism of my era, whereas becoming a mother shoved my face right down into it.” When she describes how Harris was “openly rewarded” for every parenting task he did while she was “quietly shamed” for the same things, a deep recognition stirred in me. But, as July writes, “There was no way to fight back against this, no one to point a finger at, because it came from everywhere. Even walking around my own house I felt haunted, fluish with guilt about every single thing I did or didn’t do.” 

It’s amazing how efficient a system of shame can be when the shamer and the shamed share one body. Years ago, I had a student in a fiction workshop who was my age, an outstanding writer working on a novel about political revolutionaries in Pakistan. There was a line in her novel I think about all the time. The narrator’s grandfather, a radical poet, says something like, “Yes, make a woman’s body shameful. Then where will she live?”

No one told me to feel guilty every time my husband does the dishes (most days!) or makes our son’s lunch or supervises our kids’ baths and showers (half of the time). He signs them up for summer camp. He cleans the humidifiers. I keep track of the things I don’t do, subtracting from the calculation of my moral performance.

When I drop the kids off at school and pick them up and manage each of their opposing whims and snacks and fights and questions until evening, I don’t know exactly what I’m “doing” and don’t feel like my husband should be doing it. When I brush their hair and donate the clothes they’ve grown out of and go through months of homework and crafts to decide what to keep or recycle and look up their symptoms and maintain friendships with their friends’ parents, I don’t think my husband should be doing it. But when he does bedtime so that I can go to taekwondo, I’m sent down an emotional flight of stairs, landing, shivering at the bottom, imagining the kids as adults, still troublingly blond, on the phone with each other, never being able to remember a time when I was there while they fell asleep (I do bedtime three nights a week).

When I was a new mom my friend who’d been a mom slightly longer than I had came to visit. What a relief to have someone witness your baby and show them things you didn’t know about yet (Duplo blocks)! My friend was talking about how much her husband does for the kids, how she felt like he was better at taking them places, managing their bodies in their various carriers, and not becoming overwhelmed by their constant talking and demands. She said of course she does things, too, like clip their nails. She couldn’t think of anything else. “I do other stuff,” she said. To herself. To everyone.

Sometimes after taekwondo I pull into the garage and sit there for an hour or more. Sometimes I drink nips like a 90s dad, sometimes I don’t. I answer texts, read horrifying headlines my dad has sent throughout the day, scroll TikTok. I’m tired for one thing. Let’s say it’s 10:30pm. Taekwondo ends at 8:30, but sometimes we stretch and talk for a while. Sometimes we keep practicing. Or video each other spinning-roundhouse-kicking a ball out of the air. Or see how far we can jump or high we can jump. Sometimes we show each other pictures from our weekends or of our dogs. Sometimes we make plans for one of our birthdays, or play would you rather or read out horoscopes or riddles. We want to be in one third of a run-down cinderblock strip mall and we want to be there for a long time. It’s not a rose garden or a spa. There are no nature sounds, real or piped in, unless you count the screams of someone seeing a spider. In the garage after, getting out of the car: It’s hard to move when you’re tired and have been sweaty and then still. It’s hard to turn back into a wife and mom when you have been just a person. My tombstone will read: “Devoted wife and mother. It took her forever to get out of the car.”

When I do come in, I do it quietly in case the kids are still awake. If they know I’m home, they’ll want me to crack their toes and take turns lying in their beds. They’ll get wound up again and I can’t tell them no, even if what’s best for them is to get a healthy amount of sleep. “I came into the house my usual way, like a thief,” July writes. “I turned the lock slowly and shut the door with the handle all the way to the left to avoid the click of the lock. I was often two or three hours late because I had trouble admitting that I was planning to talk to Jordi for five hours. But how could it be any shorter, given that it was my one chance a week to be myself?” 

Is it leaving the house that lets the narrator be herself? Or is it talking to her friend who doesn’t need anything from her? Conversely, “When Harris comes in late he slams the door cheerfully behind him. He’s trying to be quiet, but not that hard. His mind is on other things, and why not? This is his house.” Yes, if we’re not comfortable in our bodies or in our houses, where will we live?

July’s narrator sets out on what is supposed to be a cross-country road trip from L.A. to New York. But she does not drive across the country. She’s nervous about driving all that way alone and makes excuses to stop. She has an intense interaction with a young man at a gas station. She stops for lunch and runs into him, Davey, again. Then she gets a room at a cheap motel by the Hertz where Davey works, twenty minutes outside L.A. She doesn’t know how long she’ll stay but slowly extends the reservation to encompass the whole two-and-a-half weeks she’d planned to be away. She lies to Harris and Sam, reporting her stops in different states headed east, and to the friends she’s supposed to visit in New York, saying something came up with a crisis or project and she’d see them next time. She hires Davey’s wife to help redecorate the motel room. She goes for walks with Davey every day, and they slowly reveal to each other they feel the same mutual desire and obsession. They spend the rest of the narrator’s vacation in the room in creative and intensely intimate ways.

July spends a lot of time describing the redecoration of the room, and in fact, the redecoration of the room was more uncomfortable for me to read about than any of the other ideas in the book, menopause, infidelity, desire, suicide, the deathfield, sex, lying, motherhood, divorce. All those things make sense. But redecorating a temporary place, a room that doesn’t belong to you, seemed random, indulgent, outside the logic of the narrative. I wasn’t sure if my reaction was a critique of the book, or a critique of the importance of a place. I felt afraid while they decorated, and afraid in the scenes when the characters were in the room. Were they going to reveal to me something I wanted or needed but couldn’t have?

In an interview with The Yale Review, July says, “Gradually, over years, I came to realize that the narrator’s desire to decorate was the tip of a very large iceberg. What makes a home? Can you make it up? Will it be ‘real’? Is real just a construction held together by fear? And if a home is a place for love and intimacy and honesty, then maybe it is not one thing, different for everyone, always changing—and political. Since there is no pure form of love and intimacy and honesty, they are always made of long histories of unsafety. Everyone in a home feels a different kind of unsafety, depending on who they are. Cozy! Ha. But coziness is the goal. A safe, relaxed feeling that is possible for the narrator in the motel room and eventually (spoiler alert) everywhere else too.”

One of the guided meditations a therapist thought might help after my own birth trauma was to imagine a place where I felt safe. I couldn’t imagine one. There were, as July describes, long histories of unsafety attached to every place I could imagine, even if that unsafety was the fear of losing it, or of it not being mine. 

Even before I had any experiences where I was afraid I was going to die or my child was going to die, I’d do a thought experiment about where I might want to have my ashes scattered, which is really a question of where feels the most like home. Where would I not feel like a stranger or an imposter at all for eternity? 

My family used to rent one side of a tiny duplex for two weeks every summer on a lake in Michigan. It’s where I learned to swim and to drive. It’s where I had all my first crushes. That seemed like a perfect contender, but the duplex went up for sale and the new owners tore it down to build what my parents derisively called “a mansion.” I can still feel the soles of my feet on the knotted wood slanting steeply over the bed. I’d lie on my back and put my feet on the ceiling until my legs went to sleep and so did I. My childhood home, maybe, though more complicated, less filled with concentrated joy than the summer duplex. I drove by it when I was back home visiting a friend and the new owners had cut down the tree so grand in the front yard it took a chain of four kids, me, my brother, and our friends, eight little fleshy arms, to encircle it all the way around, fingertips touching. And in the tree’s place, almost laughably: a Trump sign. The arboretum in Ann Arbor, where I walked for hundreds of hours in undergrad, belongs to other students now. If my ashes were there, I would feel like an eternal college student, and that’s not how I feel. Moore State Park, where I live now, has fields and water and trails lined with azaleas, but I still feel like a transplant in New England. Our first apartment here burned down. Our own house now, where both our kids were babies, perhaps. It’s in New England, where I don’t belong, but my body is here in this house, my blood soaked into the grooves between the bathroom tiles where I hemorrhaged after my daughter was born. I could be scattered in the backyard. But how strange to be there when the kids won’t be. The hope is they’ll be grown up and living new places filled with their own dangers. And this house isn’t mine. It belongs to me as a wife and mother. If I were neither of those things, I couldn’t live here.

One’s mind naturally goes to where they were happiest.

The taekwondo studio is our master’s, not mine, and so there is danger there, too. If I were to disappoint or betray him somehow, or less likely, if he were to disappoint or betray me, it would feel different. I think he thinks about this, on some level, almost all the time. The sameness of the place, day-to-day, is remarkable. If you forget something, it is likely unmoved from where you left it when you come back. His voice is the same, his intonation, his phrasing, his teasing. We do the same routines at the start of class before we break off into whatever we’re individually working on.

He is also very, very slow to let people actually know him. Perhaps there was danger for him in his own studio when his friends from real life joined our adult class. Now there were opportunities for them to mention things about him his students didn’t know, opportunities for his students to become friends with his friends. One of his friends wanted to practice talking to girls. “He can practice on us!” I told our master, but he seemed hesitant. “Let’s say he gets weird,” he said. “Who cares if he’s weird,” I said. I’ve always prided myself on being unflappable, not judging anyone or protecting myself. “And then you guys feel weird,” he continued. “Then it’s weird here. It’s bad for business.”

It seemed cold and frankly inaccurate to think about this magical place as a business, even if it is one. But then I realized it was entirely up to him to maintain the magic for us. And that’s lonely. When you’re the only one with the ultimate responsibility, it’s as lonely as being a parent.

Maybe that’s the key. I get to be a kid there. I get to be taken care of. 

My son and daughter also take taekwondo, but I insist on us each attending our separate classes. My son wants to come to the adult class. His friend, he reminds me, goes with her mom sometimes. “Unfortunately, it’s too late for you,” I lie. The truth is, if my son is there, I will take care of him, and I don’t want to. 

I liked Harris, the narrator’s husband in All Fours. He reminded me a lot of my own husband. They’re both, oddly, sound engineers. Both equal coparents. Both sensible, thoughtful, steady. Even when they fight, Harris and my husband speak “very slowly” and calmly. Harris and my husband both keep track of fairness and equal distribution of tasks, logistics, scheduling. They’re polite or passive aggressive, asking if something is right when they believe or know it is.

My husband and I have been together for a greater portion of our lives than we have not. And because we work on this shared project of being married and raising kids, we need each other likely in more ways than we realize. I think because of this element of need, part of me needs to be kept a secret from him. Having a secret part of myself feels like a form of safety, something to catch me if my husband should suddenly disappear.

When the narrator sets out for what she and Harris believe is her multi-day drive, they say goodbye in the driveway. Harris takes a picture of her hugging their child. “‘Call us from Utah tonight,’ he said, hugging me. I gave him a look that said: If I survive, if I come back to you, let us finally give up this farce and be as one. He gave me a look that said: We could be as one right now, if you really wanted that. To which my eyes said nothing.”

My best friend from high school, Sarah, and I talk on the phone every morning for 20 minutes (if our children, morning routines, and latenesses to work allow). She’s also married to a man who makes more money than she does. She also has kids. She, too, feels the strain of need and dependence on what would otherwise be a connection to her husband that’s free to be as intimate as possible. One day she’d learned she’d be receiving a small inheritance from the death of a family member. “Secret account,” we both whispered. Our husbands don’t need to protect themselves in this way, which makes us feel bad that we feel that we do. But our health insurance is their health insurance. Our houses their houses.

Sarah has a gift this summer. Her kids’ camp ends at 4pm each day instead of the usual 3pm school pickup. “What should I do?” she asked me. Should she work longer hours to make more money and so her company doesn’t have to hire a parttime person? Should she go home and organize and clean so logistics at home are smoother? “Secret weights,” I said. “Of course,” she said. “Tell work you’re at home and tell home you’re at work and lift weights for an hour every day.” We need to be strong. It doesn’t have to be a secret, but it’s better if it is. Ta da! I can lift this air conditioner. Ta da! I can live on my own at age 90.

When I watch people who are better than me fight (everyone), I can usually tell what they’re doing and appreciate how good they are. It’s similar to reading better writers than me. What a thrill to see what they do and to wish I could do it. But there are some writers who seem to be operating on a different plane. I can’t identify what they’re doing; I can only experience it. When I watch our master fight, it’s like this. He’s physically and mentally on a level where I can’t recognize the decisions he makes or what happens after he leaves the ground and before he lands again.

One night in a small class, just me and two others, our master breaks down one of his kicks for us. First, he shows us a cut kick. 

“But the cut kick is a fake,” he says. 

You lean back on your standing leg and lift your cutting knee and foot between 90 and 45 degrees. Instead of cutting when you leave the ground, you turn your cutting knee toward the ceiling, so your opponent, who is watching the angles of your knees and feet to predict your next move, reacts as though you may be switching from a cut to a push kick. But you’re not doing a push kick either. Instead of extending your leg then, you turn your standing foot, which is no longer standing, 90 degrees, twist your waist, and land a roundhouse kick. You leave the ground once. These shifts in position take place in the air, and they happen in about one second. 

“This is level one,” he says.

When my mom was my age and I was my kids’ ages, she suddenly made us all go to church. My brother and I were old enough to feel the injustice. We had not previously had to put on uncomfortable clothes and sit quietly on hard benches, bored, hot, and dying of thirst. She gave us word searches and gum, which, if we were living our emotional truths, we would have slapped out of her hands. But she had had an experience. She’d seen a leaf, bright green and bursting out of its bud, and heard a voice say, “yippee!” So now we had to go to church while she investigated her new spirituality, a belief in a form of a god. The Bible as a text was fascinating to her, and she loved to intellectually spar with the others at Bible Study. 

She didn’t need this place forever. She felt satisfied or lost interest after a year or two. Simultaneously we grew and entered new and different stages of needing her and being able to intellectually spar with her. But even without church, she can access the feeling she had with the leaf. She has a similar experience when she’s alone with the moon, she says. She has this secret, glowing feeling, like safety and extasy and oneness.

I’ve had this feeling, too. When I pause a movie I’m watching by myself to smoke a cigarette at night in the dark. When I ride my bicycle or sleep in my car or remember my journal, where I really exist, is with me in my bag. When I’m reading a book that blows my mind. When I watch our master spar. When I was nursing my kids, I could scurry them away to a quiet bedroom, encircle them with my arms, and feel them latch. Secret. Safe. 

Why are secrecy, independence, and safety twinned together in these cases? If the knowledge that our master can fly is only mine, if I’m secretly getting stronger or smarter, the world cannot do its work on it and take away my awe, make a thing dutiful or shameful, make my attention shift to myself and my value at this angle or that.

Whenever my kids are trying to convince me of something or make a deal, they say, “If you let me do this thing, while I’m doing it, you can read by yourself or play cards by yourself or take a nap so you can stay up late by yourself…” They say it in a listing tone, drawing out the e sound in “self” to make it sound irresistible. And it is! They know me so well!

The narrator of All Fours uses the motel room to, among many things, interview her women friends about menopause, marriage, lust. One of the women she interviews is a historical biologist and says that the ecosystem around marriage is the problem, not marriage itself.

“‘For example, dances. They once fulfilled an important function in society—court dances, barn dances, ballroom dances—they allowed people to legally touch someone who wasn’t their husband or wife.’

‘That’s . . . healthy?’

‘Yes, biologically it’s important to feel different arms and hands . . . smell strange bodies. A diverse human biosphere makes for a healthy marriage.’

She said this last part with exhaustion, as if she’d made this argument a hundred times.”

The narrator makes a note: “Some customs have remained—monogamy—but not all the microtendrils that actually made it possible: the community, the dances, and God knows what else.”

What else? For me, artful, measured fighting.

Natalia and I are facing each other, our faces squished in our foam helmets. She’s 33 with a long thick braid of curly brown hair and bright blue eyes. We’re in the same weight class even though I’m taller, because she’s solid muscle and my body is held together with hopes. 

“Jane, your job is just to try to bother her,” our master says. 

Natalia is supposed to focus on distance. 

My legs, though inexperienced, are long, which is good for me. Everything about Natalia’s body, ability, experience, and attitude are good for her. She’s strong, fast, smart, and loves to fight.

We’re not kicking hard, and getting tapped in the chest guard, though that’s the opposite of the goal, feels good.

My footwork is bad. I can’t close distance. I’m self-conscious under the gaze of our teacher.

Over and over, he tells me to move with instead of against the kick when I’m blocking so there’s less impact, but I can’t make the change in real time.

One thing works once, to lift my front leg and tap her when she fakes, so I try doing that all the time.

When our teacher calls time, Natalia says, huge smile, flushed face, “Want to go again?”

I fight Natalia again. I fight Anu. Anu fights Natalia. Natalia fights our master. Our master fights Anu.

Anu and our master argue between rounds. If I had done this, then this would have happened, one of them says. No, says the other, because I would have done this.

“I love listening to you guys argue,” I say.

“I do it to buy myself more time to rest,” Anu says.

“I know you’re doing that,” our master says.

When I fall asleep that night, I think about how the second time I fought Natalia she was so far away. “She’s changed her strategy,” our teacher had said. “What do you have to do to adapt?” She was always out of range unless she was coming in to attack. Even lying calmly outside the moment, I can’t figure out what I should have done. I think about how I look at my opponent’s chest guard to try to anticipate their moves. Does their weight shift forward or back? But Natalia and Anu both look straight into their opponents’ eyes.

If the roles of wife and mother come with constant questioning, shame, conditions, fear of loss, it’s hard to remember what it’s like without all that. There is so much sex and lust in All Fours I didn’t even mention. The book is largely sex and lust. That seems to be the narrator’s path back to understanding herself as a person, and the motel room is the place she can have that feeling. My mom’s motel room was a church for a year or so, and then she could have that feeling of awe and oneness, with the moon. At the dojang, right now, I get to be a person. Once I’m confident enough that I exist outside of other people’s survival and pleasure, I can forget myself. Forget shame, forget the constant struggle for recognition. My secret safety is myself, dissolving, wide open to awe. Sprinkle my ashes on the way my mom feels when she looks at the moon. Sprinkle my ashes on the way I feel when I watch our master spar, (and then, maybe someday, everywhere else, too).

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