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Redux: The Seasons Roll Over

Every week, the editors of The Paris Review lift the paywall on a selection of interviews, stories, poems, and more from the magazine’s archive. You can have these unlocked pieces delivered straight to your inbox every Sunday by signing up for the Redux newsletter.

J. G. Ballard. Photo: Fay Godwin.

This week at The Paris Review, we’re in a holiday kind of mood. Read on for J. G. Ballard’s Art of Fiction interview, Ottessa Moshfegh’s short story “Dancing in the Moonlight,” and Diane di Prima’s poem “Rondeau for the Yule.”

If you enjoy these free interviews, stories, and poems, why not subscribe to The Paris Review and read the entire archive? You’ll also get four new issues of the quarterly delivered straight to your door—and if you subscribe via our special bundle, you’ll get a tote bag, too! And don’t forget to listen to Season 2 of The Paris Review Podcast!

 

J. G. Ballard, The Art of Fiction No. 85

Issue no. 94 (Winter 1984)

I have a sense of certain gathering obsessions and roles, certain corners of the field where the next stage of the hunt will be carried on. I know that if I don’t write, say on holiday, I begin to feel unsettled and uneasy, as I gather people do who are not allowed to dream.

 

 

Dancing in the Moonlight

By Ottessa Moshfegh

Issue no. 214 (Fall 2015)

Until Christmas money from my father arrived, I would have a hundred dollars cash in my wallet, plus a fifteen-dollar gift card to Burger King that Mark had given me for Hanukkah as a joke. He had gone off to Vermont with his wife to be with her family. Everyone else was home with their parents, or on glamping trips in Joshua Tree or sunning themselves in Maui or Cabo or Puerto Rico with their girlfriends.

 

 

Rondeau for the Yule

By Diane di Prima

Issue no. 39 (Fall 1966)

Another escaping & you are not so dumb

That you didn’t see that in it.

There are Xmas decorations in the windows.

Four Christmases ago or the summer before

and mostly ephemeral.

The seasons roll over it

flattening it out.

Still, a flicker of interest: what a funny hat

You’re wearing …

 

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Literary Paper Dolls: Franny

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

© Original illustrations by Jenny Kroik

Before I was a tomboy or a clotheshorse or a loser or a teenager, I was a bookworm. In that happy valley before puberty, my greatest bliss was to be given both a book and the permission to play dress-up all at once. I had a plain white trunk for my robes and silks, my wings (several kinds), my swords and my purses. Dressing up as my favorite characters was a bit of magic, and, even today, I still read novels like a costume designer. I can tell you that the best part of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening is Edna Pontellier’s peignoir. I think a lot about Moriah’s underwear in Play It As It Lays (blue silk from a hotel shop) and Hana’s sneakers in The English Patient (slightly too big). How could I not? They are the only shoes she wears. Clothing means something about our destination, our origins, our field, our desires. Everyone in a novel is dressed with intention by their author.

I’ve paired with the illustrator Jenny Kroik to bring you what us bookworm-clotheshorse child-adults have always wanted: literary paper dolls. We’ve begun with J.D. Salinger’s Franny, but stay tuned for more. Print them, share them, dress them, and please, please play with them. There’s a link to your own printable paper doll at the bottom of this post. You, too, can take Franny from one edge of her breakdown to the other by taking off her smart traveling outfit and fitting her with a pale blue cashmere afghan. We who shop late nights in marketplaces online might find satisfaction in printing out a robe and pinning it literally onto not just a figurine but to a character, an author, a time period. At the very least, this will look great on your desk.

Read more >>

Robert Lowell Dressed as Santa

Harriet Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell on the steps of 239 Marlborough Street in Boston, Massachusetts, Christmas 1959 (Courtesy of Harriet Lowell)

In 1959, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick were feeling restless with their Boston life. It was the year of the publication of Lowell’s Life Studies:

Only teaching on Tuesdays, book-worming

in pajamas fresh from the washer each morning,

I hog a whole house on Boston’s

“hardly passionate Marlborough Street,”

where even the man

scavenging filth in the back alley trash cans,

has two children, a beach wagon, a helpmate,

and is a “young Republican.”

(“Memories of West Street and Lepke”)

Lowell won the National Book Award for the collection, but the publication also coincided with a manic episode. “I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again. So it is. Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case” he wrote to Elizabeth Bishop in July. By the fall and winter, still recovering, he was writing little, working mostly on translations.

In the meantime, Hardwick was writing essays for Harper’s that would go into her collection A View of My Own, including “The Decline of Book Reviewing” in October (the article that would inspire the founding of The New York Review of Books in 1963), and, in the December issue, “Boston: The Lost Ideal,” an excoriation of the city they lived in and a longing for the one they would move to the following year: “In Boston there is an utter absence of that wild, electric beauty of New York, of the marvelous, excited rush of people in taxicabs at twilight, of the great Avenues and Streets, the restaurants, theatres, bars, hotels, delicatessens, shops. In Boston the night comes down with an incredibly heavy, small-town finality.”

When Frederick Seidel traveled to their Boston home to interview Lowell for The Paris Review in March 1960, he described the sounds of the street outside: “Four floors below the study window, cars whined through the early spring rain on Marlborough Street toward the Boston Public Garden.”

In the Christmas of 1959, Lowell, dressed as Santa, gave their daughter, Harriet, a doll with a velvet hat. The gift was actually from Elizabeth Bishop. He wrote to thank her on January 4, 1960 (Harriet’s third birthday): “Three marvelous bottles of wine from S. S. Pierce made you seem just around the corner, while Harriet’s ‘Anna Karenina’ doll, dressed in the white boots you brought her, made you exotic and far away.”

 

 

 

Saskia Hamilton is the editor of The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2019) and the author most recently of Corridor (Graywolf, 2014). She is an advisory editor for The Paris Review.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

Johan Gudmundsen-Holmgreen, Laesende lille pige, 1900

“I read books to read myself,” Sven Birkerts wrote in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Birkerts’s book, which turns twenty-five this year, is composed of fifteen essays on reading, the self, the convergence of the two, and the ways both are threatened by the encroachment of modern technology. As the culture around him underwent the sea change of the internet’s arrival, Birkerts feared that qualities long safeguarded and elevated by print were in danger of erosion: among them privacy, the valuation of individual consciousness, and an awareness of history—not merely the facts of it, but a sense of its continuity, of our place among the centuries and cosmos. “Literature holds meaning not as a content that can be abstracted and summarized, but as experience,” he wrote. “It is a participatory arena. Through the process of reading we slip out of our customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and surficiality, into the realm of duration.”

Read more >>

Reimagining Masculinity

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

“No homo,” says the boy, barely visible in the room’s fading light, as he cradles my foot in his palms. He is kneeling before me—this 6’2” JV basketball second stringer—as I sit on his bed, my feet hovering above the shag. His head is bent so that the swirl in his crown shows, the sweat in the follicles catching the autumn dusk through the window. Anything is possible, we think, with the body. But not always with language. “No homo,” he says again before wrapping the ace bandage once, twice, three times around my busted ankle, the phrase’s purpose now clear to me: a password, an incantation, a get-out-of-jail-free card, for touch. For two boys to come this close to each other in a realm ruled by the nebulous yet narrow laws of American masculinity, we needed magic.

No homo. The words free him to hold my foot with the care and gentleness of a nurse, for I had sprained my ankle half an hour earlier playing manhunt in the McIntosh orchard. We ran, our bodies silver in the quickening dark, teenagers playing at war.

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What Was It About Animorphs?

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

How do I convey the overflowing surplus of books in the nineties? They had their own aisle in every supermarket and spilled over into the checkout lane so you could impulse-buy them along with gum and nail clippers. Their pages were off-white and delicate as Pringles, their covers so shiny they were almost slimy, and they became polka-dotted by your fingerprints as soon as you touched them. They weighed, and cost, approximately nothing.

What were they about? What weren’t they about? There was a tie-in novelization of every Hollywood movie, plus one tie-in novelization of a tie-in TV show of a Hollywood movie. There was an extremely pink series in which Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen solved low-stakes mysteries (fictional, presumably, though it wasn’t totally clear). There was a ubiquitous best seller that was just two hundred pages of a little boy being brutalized by his sadistic and increasingly creative mother; then there was a sequel, and another sequel. “You insatiable little book-suckers,” the publishing industry sneered, chucking chicken soup at a dozen newly identified subtypes of soul, “you’ll read anything, won’t you?”

For children’s books in particular it was an era of quantity over quality, an unremitting glut. In those pre–Harry Potter days, a typical “series” meant hundreds of books churned out on a monthly basis by teams of frantic ghostwriters. You could order them by the pound. Often they came with a free bracelet or trinket, as if resorting to bribery. There were 181 Sweet Valley High books, 233 Goosebumps books, and so many Baby-Sitters Club books that their publisher, Scholastic, has never made the full number public (by my count it was at least 345 if you include all the spin-offs)—and they were all, to a certain degree, disposable crap.

But then there was Animorphs.

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The Paris Review Staff’s Favorite Books of 2019

Lydia Davis. Photo: © Theo Cote.

Was it worth plowing through this year, after all? The jury has a few more days on that, but a compelling argument came in last month, when Lydia Davis’s Essays One hit the shelves. Even just as a physical object, it is delightful: a small, pleasantly chubby book, the jacket a grassy and somehow optimistic green, the design unadorned, as though there is nothing more you need to know than title and author. (It makes a nice companion to her collected stories—similar in size and shape, green against orange.) The delights continue inside. Davis is speaking of reading Lucia Berlin when she writes, “This is the way we like to be when we’re reading—using our brains, feeling our hearts beat,” but the phrase applies well to this book: it’s an experience in an active, alive sort of reading, sensitive and attuned. Sitting with the book felt as though someone had come in to gently adjust my antennae, helping clarify signals in what had seemed just noise. And in any case, this book is part promise: that One in the title, those notes in the preface—there is more to come. —Hasan Altaf 

 

T Fleischmann. Photo: May Allen.

 

At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, 2019 felt like the year when civilization teetered definitively toward collapse. Notre Dame burned down, authoritarian governments shut off the internet, a child sailed across the ocean to tell us we were destroying the planet—all of which, of course, is not to mention our own president or what’s happening in England. This past January feels impossibly long ago—how innocent we were then, when we still thought we might find resolution in the Mueller Report or the Game of Thrones finale—and yet Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall still feels as vivid to me as the cold day on which I read it. It’s a book about willfully severing our ties from civilization, and the dormant brutality that lies under the surface in us all. Adolescent Silvie’s obsessive, controlling father forces their family onto an anthropological mission where they, along with a class of college students, live in the woods of England as primitively as early man, foraging for food and bathing in streams. As the past rises up around them and a terrifying masculine violence is unleashed, Silvie sneaks off for snacks at the gas station. I have rarely felt so gripped by a narrator’s voice. From within the sways of puberty, Sylvie possesses the cynicism and clarity only the newfound loss of one’s own innocence can bring. It’s a deceptively slim book for how full a soul it contains.

Another book I carried with me this year was T Fleischmann’s Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through. As explicitly sexy as it is intelligent, it’s a genuinely radical text that transcends genre: part essay, part poem, part art criticism, part history, part intimate letter to a friend. It feels written not for the world as it is but for the world as it should be. The book is unapologetically addressed to a queer audience, set in a milieu where anticapitalism is the baseline and no one’s gender is normative, and where none of these things need to be explained. It’s an ode to human connection composed by a luminously solitary spirit, and I wanted to stay inside it all year. Instead, I slipped copies into the hands of nearly everyone I know and lost myself in older works of transgression with new covers: Natalia Ginzburg’s The Dry Heart, which makes murdering one’s husband sound perfectly logical, and Rebecca Godfrey’s impressive feat of reporting Under the Bridge, which examines the deadly brutality of teenage girls. Perhaps I was seeking anger this year, or the feeling of transcendence that can be found when things break irreparably open.

As the year drew to a close, I found myself rereading Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story, his autobiographical novel about his adolescence in the fifties. On my first encounter with the book, when I was an adolescent myself, I read only for the stirrings of gay lust, the way he paints the boys he desires with brushstrokes so luminous I wondered if I, too, was a gay man, though I also recognized myself fully in his refusal to give the confusion of early friendships any name other than love. And yet in this reading I was struck by the exquisite precision of all he does name, rendering language into an instrument that plays the notes of emotion so evocatively it stills your spine. “For the real movements of a life are gradual, then sudden; they resist becoming anecdotes, they pulse like quasars from long-dead stars to reach the vivid planet of the present, they drift like fog over the ship until the spread sails are merely panels of gray in grayer air and surround becomes object, as in those perceptual tests where figure and ground reverse, the kissing couple in profile turn into the outlines of the mortuary urn that holds their own ashes,” he writes. Many writers would compose an entire novel just to contain a single sentence like that one; White strings them together almost carelessly, as if he were the princess in the fairy tale who opens her mouth to find she can speak only pearls. Emotions I had always felt without knowing, because I had no words for them, were suddenly there, unassailable, in his articulation. And—dare I say it?—I felt hope. —Nadja Spiegelman

 

Kate Zambreno. Photo: Tom Hines.

 

Effectively, I’ve been picking my favorite books of 2019 for a year and a half now. Mitchell S. Jackson’s Survival Math (check out issue 226) is a love song to his Pacific Northwest hometown, but it’s also an ambitious take on what memoir can do. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests (get a peek in 228) does something brilliant with celebrity and autofiction and the possibilities of the flash form. Hanif Abdurraqib did the remarkable thing of publishing both a book of poems and a book about music this year (does the man sleep?); we got to publish bits of both as well as his Notes on Pop column on the Daily. I think about short stories most of my waking hours, so to read an early copy of Kimberly King Parsons’s killer debut was exhilarating; the hardest part of that acquisition was choosing the right story to run (we picked “Foxes” for 229, but Black Light is wonderful from start to close). Of course, I read plenty of stuff I loved that we didn’t get to publish, but it still feels like I’m pulling one over on a big man with a fistful of industry trends when we get to run slices of these great manuscripts before they’re published books and share them with our readers under the TPR logo. But every quarter it seems less like a trick and more like the imperative of what we do and why we do it. —Emily Nemens

 

David Wallace-Wells. Photo: © Beowulf Sheehan.

 

2019 has been, for me, a year of transition. I moved away from the town where I grew up and into my first New York apartment. I bought furniture on Craigslist, built bookshelves that slant ever so slightly to one side, planted basil in a small pot by my bed, and began to make this new place into something that feels like home. I also spent more time in motion—on trains, planes, busses, and, for a brief spell, a cargo ship—in the past year than in any previous one. This includes, by my calculation, well over a hundred hours on the Long Island Rail Road, most of them spent reading or listening to audiobooks or nodding off with my forehead pressed against the window.

Perhaps all this movement helps to explain why, looking back at the books that meant the most to me over the past twelve months, I notice that so many of them seem to be about place. David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth is the literary equivalent of a cold shower, an all-too-real dose of reality about our ever-warming world. From there, I took some solace in Robert Macfarlane’s cavernous and many-chambered Underland, a reminder that the planet we live on is far older and more full of mystery than I often consider. I read Lakota America, a brutal, bison-filled book that turned many of the stories I thought I knew about our nation inside out. Most recently, I lost myself in the crowded corridors of Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House, a book that single-handedly proves Joan Didion’s quote that “a place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that [s]he remakes it in [her] own image.”

I also dipped into the backlist. I read Howards End and Sula and Fierce Attachments, all stories of homes, both found and forged. These books helped to save me from my transitory life by transporting me to solid, well-loved territories under which memory and history flow like groundwater. At a time when so many things in my world, and the world at large, feel precarious, these books put solid ground beneath my feet. —Cornelia Channing

 

Frame from Ogden Whitney’s Return to Romance.

 

This year, I enjoyed John Zada’s In the Valleys of the Noble Beyond, which chronicles his search for the Sasquatch, that most As-Seen-on-TV of cryptids. Zada wonders only in passing about how big bigfoot’s feet are or how richly the creature may stink. His concerns are more metaphysical: What does it mean to believe in something absurd, something that eludes any effort to prove its existence? Roaming through the First Nations communities of coastal British Columbia, Zada camps out at the foggy junction of lore and fact. He’s a disarming travel companion, and his curiosity is contagious. I also liked Return to Romance, a collection of nine “love stories” from the late fifties by the comics artist Ogden Whitney. Visceral and candy-striped, these are portraits of seduction in the age of Eisenhower, when the military-industrial complex has leached into matters of the heart. Dating is gamesmanship; affection is a form of control, heartbreak a moral failure, and libido an unsettling whisper from pleats of gabardine. Everyone is aching to settle down in some prefab on a cul-de-sac beckoning just beyond the final frame. Whether the comics are satirical or sincere is anyone’s guess; either way, they cut to the quick. One more: after Margo Jefferson reckoned with the documentary Leaving Neverland, she wrote a new introduction for her On Michael Jackson, first published in 2006. Acute and unsparing, the addition brings the rest of the book into sharp relief. In her generous, clear-eyed writing on celebrity and pop, Jefferson has found what might be a mantra for the decade to come: “No evasions, no simplifications.” —Dan Piepenbring

 

Olga Tokarczuk. Photo: © Jacek Kołodziejski.

 

I read a lot of books this year, though fewer than I would have liked. There was something in the air over the past few months—the world is sort of ending; could that be it?—that made it hard for me to concentrate. And so the fiction of Olga Tokarczuk came (thanks to the tireless advocacy of our engagement editor, Rhian Sasseen, followed by a bit of a nudge from the Nobel Committee) as no small revelation to me. I read Flights and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead in quick succession—or as rapidly as my flailing concentration would allow, meaning not very rapidly, which was fine because Tokarczuk has her own ideas about time and place. In her work, one is always in flight from both—or, anyway, endeavoring not to be stuck in either.

The short, noncontiguous chapters of Flights sprawl across Europe, glance across decades, flit between characters, and are ever haunted by the ever-present past, which, despite all attempts to outrun it, is inescapable. I am making the book sound disorienting, but somehow it isn’t, which is a big part of its magic. Another part is the way it works itself into your consciousness and conscience so that you never quite leave it behind. Drive Your Plow is, in contrast, something of a lighthearted murder mystery about a woman who avenges slain animals. It, too, is full of surprises, though of a different kind. Like some kinds of lizards, Tokarczuk is capable of looking in more than one direction at once and still finding herself “here”; she checks her watch and comes up with more than one answer to the question, What time is it? We’ve been here before, haven’t we? We have. That’s helpful to remember—helpful, if not comforting—in these chaotic times. And I forgot to mention that Tokarczuk is also funny—that helps, too. —Craig Morgan Teicher

 

Deborah Levy. Photo: © Sheila Burnett.

 

One of my resolutions for 2019 was to record, in list form, all of the books I read. It was a resolution I actually stuck to, and now, as the year trails off, I’m consulting that list with real pleasure, each title invoking the memory of who I was with, what I was doing, and who I was at that particular moment in time. The year started off on a high note—the first book I read in 2019 was the difficult but rewarding Greed, written by Elfriede Jelinek, one of my absolute favorite writers, and translated from the German by Martin Chalmers—and only went up from there.

This was a year in which I found myself closing the door a little on socializing, and retreating into the hermetic pleasures of reading and writing alone on weekends. I read Kate Briggs’s This Little Art, a book-length essay on the pleasures and pains of translation, in January, and it proved to be something of a beacon for the year. Some of my favorite books over the ensuing months were from writers across the globe: Panty, a slim meditation on female sexuality by the Bengali writer Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay, translated by Arunava Sinha; the poetry collection Hysteria, by Kim Yideum, translated from the Korean by Jake Levine, Soeun Seo, and Hedgie Choi; Will and Testament, the Norwegian writer Vigdis Hjorth’s disquieting exploration of family secrets, translated by Charlotte Barslund; and the darkly satirical and at times scatological Broken Glass, by the Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson. After reading Ingeborg Bachmann’s extraordinary Malina (translated by Philip Boehm) in the summer—a novel that haunted me for months—I got into a bit of a Gruppe 47 kick, and read many of Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s prescient essays on politics, poetry, and the media from the sixties and seventies, as well as his poetry collection poems for people who don’t read poems, much of which was translated by the author himself.

Nell Zink’s Doxology is one of my favorite novels I read this year, and perhaps the only one that so perfectly captures the madness and folly of life under the Trump administration, though Lucy Ellmann’s breathtaking and addictive Ducks, Newburyport gives it a run for its money. Rebecca Tamas’s poetry collection Witch uses the figure of the witch to create an incisive critique of Brexit. Gina Apostol’s brilliant Insurrecto deconstructs plot to critique the white gaze in art and ask important questions concerning just who is telling the story. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests melds essay and fiction to explore class and gender in literature, film, and the visual arts. I read Heike Geissler’s novel of contemporary consumerism at Amazon, Seasonal Associate (translated by Katy Derbyshire), and saw her give a talk on it at the Goethe-Institut in March, which ended up being the best reading I saw this year. And Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything made me cry this fall with how beautifully it portrays the compression of time and the ways in which the twentieth century still haunts the twenty-first. —Rhian Sasseen

 

Gregory Orr. Photo: Trisha Orr.

 

Sheila Heti’s Motherhood came out in 2018, but I would be misrepresenting my year’s reading if I didn’t mention it first. It’s the book I’ve pressed on pals most often this year, and I’m always eager to know what they think of it. This eagerness is, I imagine, because I haven’t entirely figured out what I think of it myself—it left me a bit uncertain, a bit worried, and a wee bit self-conscious. Heti was a childless thirty-six-year-old woman when she wrote the book; I read it as a childless thirty-six-year-old man. Society asks us both a number of similar questions, but they are never asked in the same tone.

My feelings regarding Gregory Orr’s memoir, The Blessing, are clearer. When he was twelve, Orr killed his brother in a hunting accident. What he needed, of course, was the forgiveness and love of his parents, but for whatever reason those things never came. Lyricism emerged from this childhood despair. It is a sad and wonderful book, and though it should sink under its tragedy, it is somehow buoyed by Orr’s storytelling and poetry.

I wanted to mention Lewis Hyde’s A Primer for Forgetting and David Wallace-Wells’s The Uninhabitable Earth, but I’ll refer you to Lydia Davis’s thoughts on those two. For my own part, I had intended to write this tucked up at home in New York, with this year’s stack beside me as a reminder. Instead, I’m on an overbooked London–Edinburgh train on the Friday before Christmas, and my brain is convinced it is five in the morning, not the ten that the clocks are reporting. The sky is a uniform gray cloud, the brown fields are dotted with puddles, and there is a thin solemn rain hanging all the way to the horizon. To survive a morning like this, one must remind oneself that it’ll be over soon, but I can’t quite convince myself that it’s true. This grayness seems to be threatening to stretch out over the coming five years. I’ve already staff picked Nesrine Malik’s We Need New Stories, but right now that book feels more important than ever. I’ll have to revisit it when I get back to New York. And then monthly, until the next election. —Robin Jones

 

Mary-Kay Wilmers.

 

In 2019 I picked up the paper—again. “The paper” is what Mary-Kay Wilmers calls her lingering argument for British superior intelligence, the London Review of Books. For one thing, subscriptions to the LRB easily top those of Esquire in that nation. For another, Wilmers has figured out how best to harness the power of Patricia Lockwood. For the LRB this year, Lockwood wrote the best thing yet written about the internet and the best piece about literature’s #metoo reckoning (and believe you me, I’ve read many), which is actually about John Updike’s collected early stories. In another paper, the Times, 2019 was the year of Ligaya Mishan. I love even halfway-decent food writing and delight in exceptional specimens—Mishan is the latter. She writes not just about food but about everything; my favorite of hers this year, “The Distinctly American Ethos of the Grifter,” is an agile argument for the American traits that make us both likely to be swindlers and likely to be swindled. Like an Alvin Ailey dancer, Mishan flexes muscles you didn’t know existed. I also loved the impossible in Joseph O’Neill’s short story “The Flier,” every goddamn installment of Sabrina Orah Mark’s Happily column, Jill Lepore on herself, Janet Malcolm on Susan Sontag,  and Cathy Horyn on the state of American fashion. In Washington earlier this year, I fought with a woman not about her politics but about her lack of receptivity to reading beyond the news sections of the paper. In 2019 it was as hard to read the news as it was to turn away. I’m not saying you should bury your head in the sand; all I’m suggesting is you consider turning the page. —Julia Berick

 

Deborah Eisenberg. © John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Used with permission.

 

One cold winter night I went to hear Eisenberg read from Your Duck Is My Duck, her fifth short story collection, and bought the book then and there. Every square centimeter of it is gold, but I find the first line of the first story particularly genius: “Way back—oh, not all that long ago, actually, just a couple of years, but back before I’d gotten a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface—I was going to a lot of parties.” Eek! I could read that again and again, and I do. Here, she’s almost given us the whole story as well as a blueprint for what all stories should be (“a glimpse of the gears and levers and pulleys that dredge the future up from the earth’s core to its surface”—of course! Thanks for the tip!) in one knockout sentence, but in such a way that we must keep reading. This narrator has seen some shit, and she is tired (years of parties followed by the sight of those damn gears, which she can never unsee) but she will tell us about it, if we insist, and of course we do.

For anyone who hasn’t read it yet, I don’t want to rob you of the reading experience I had, in which each line is a delightful surprise. So I’ll just say that what I really love about this book is its sense of humor. Even in stories that strongly imply we’re all fucked, Eisenberg does what few can: she fully represents the comedy of reality. In that first one, there is a bizarre and beautiful puppet opera that ends in doom—and not one explosive doomsday but the even more terrifying conclusion that everything gets worse than it was before and we have to keep on living with that. When the narrator calls it depressing, the puppeteer replies, “Well, yeah, sure. But I mean, these are the facts.”

You know that expression “shit got real?” Usually someone says it when the jokes stop and the conversation turns to individual or global trauma. But reading these stories, I am reminded that it’s all real. In a year when it can feel self-indulgent to be anything but furious or terrified or sad about the state of the world or to laugh with anything more than bitter cynicism, it is good to be reminded that despite our human preference for one mood at a time, the world is tragedy and comedy and all shades in between, inextricably tangled. —Jane Breakell

 

Kimberly King Parsons. Photo: Heather Hawksford.

 

Natalia Ginzburg was, among many things, a shrewd observer of the domestic drama. Happiness, as Such, is a largely epistolary novel that unwraps its family’s dynamic with all the nuance and humor of her beloved autobiographical novel Family Lexicon. Minna Zallman Proctor’s translation of Happiness captures grievances both petty and profound, refracting through a variety of voices the pain of alienation and the poignant tension of unshakeable family ties. The conversational missives that volley between characters are captivating for their relatability.

Jana Prikryl’s No Matter is a tremendous collection of poems. The settings of the poems are concrete enough to be familiar—Greenpoint, the Upper West Side—but that familiarity is often displaced by an imagined dystopian near-future. Her sly wit and fresh voice aren’t gloomy, though; rather, these poems are smart and satisfying, resonant work by a star student of the New York School.

Amparo Dávila’s story “Moses and Gaspar” was published in The Paris Review in 2016, and this year New Directions released a whole book of Dávila’s short fiction, translated by Audrey Harris and Matthew Gleeson. The Houseguest is a midnight picture show of eerie fables, populated by creepy monsters, psychological thrills, and Hitchcockian twists. Dávila, recognized as a nonagenarian maven of the uncanny in her native Mexico, was due for an introduction to English readers.

Kimberly King Parsons’s short story “Foxes” is a study in perspective, as an unreliable narrator slowly reveals her fallibility with each swig of sherry. All of the stories in Parsons’s debut, Black Light, are honest glances into the hearts of destructive, deeply flawed characters. But her lyrical language lends compassion to the project, illuminating dark souls with a light by which to see them at their most vulnerable. —Lauren Kane

 

Geoffrey Hill. Photo: Clara Molden.

 

“The tills of commemoration blart and sing, all short-changing the ills of the nation,” Geoffrey Hill observes in his posthumous volume The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, which I have brought with me everywhere this year, because it is filled with blazing insights that seem to speak directly to this dark moment in history. The Book of Baruch is a most unusual work, a sequence of 271 poems intended to be Hill’s final word on, well, everything—the art of poetry, alchemy, mathematics, the bombing of London in World War II, Brexit, his approaching death, the relation between literature and the spiritual life, and so much more. Gone are the taut lines and stanzas of his earlier work, more than twenty collections’ worth, which earned him the reputation of a formal master. But the antic humor, exuberance, and visionary pronouncements that defined his later work are everywhere on display in these versets, which owe more to Whitman than to the English poetic tradition he inherited and rigorously explored until his death in 2016, at age eighty-four. “No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under the rim,” Hill writes, and all at once the grim evidence of our plight—cultural, environmental, political—begins to shimmer with meaning. “How do I rate?” he asked in a draft of his final poem, composed in the immediate aftermath of the Brexit referendum. The question did not survive in the published version, which nevertheless ends with an answer from the other side: “Even so, the power of stout roses has risen watt by watt against the afterglow of each brief thunder-shower.” —Christopher Merrill

 

Yiyun Li. Photo: © Phillippe Matsas.

 

In poetry, I was fired by Franny Choi’s The Soft Science and Aria Aber’s Hard Damage, books interested in linguistics and experimentation in ways that bridge issues of culture, technology, textuality, and modernity, and that ultimately push hard against the limitations of poetic form and subject. From a different (but perhaps related) corner is Jericho Brown’s The Tradition, a book so emotionally devastating that I sometimes fear its burning beauty. In fiction I was heartened to discover (along with many of us) the genius of the recent Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk, but the novels I’ve held closest to my heart this year have been threefold: Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, Mary Miller’s Biloxi, and Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, the last of which is one of the most astounding pieces of writing I have ever read. —Christian Kiefer

 

Bernardine Evaristo. Photo: Jennie Scott.

 

I took a class in college called The Value of Literature. The premise of the course was to form a collective and individual response to the question at the heart of its title, a question that is simple yet vexing and of both little and vast importance: Why read? Why write? Why do anything at all? Like many good things I have been given in this life, the class was wasted on me. I felt I already knew the value of literature, that, like breath or song, its worth was self-evident and everlasting.

It did not occur to me then that I might, at some point, hardly read at all. That was how I began 2019: struggling to discern what might distinguish each day from the long, hollow sweep of life. It took the Sally Rooney sensations Normal People and Conversations with Friends to extract me from this wordless stupor. Her frank prose and fraught lovers held me close, reminding me of the here and now, even as I read of there and then.

Since then, I have sought books like Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other, books that enable us to mourn and celebrate the human habit of moving from one moment to the next. Where the Light Falls, a collection of Nancy Hale’s stories, offers myriad opportunities to delight in life’s smallest pleasures. Kimberly King Parsons’s collection Black Light is a stunning exercise in storytelling. Kate Zambreno’s Screen Tests helps make space for the thrill of fragmentary insight, and Carmen Maria Machado’s astounding In the Dream House demonstrates how trauma can further splinter our stories. The Divers’ Game, Jesse Ball’s strange novel in fables, is a chilling reminder of how the fantastic can pierce our everyday fictions. And then, I finally read Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a helpful reminder both of how good I have it and how good a sentence can sound.

I still don’t quite know why we do anything at all. The joys and horrors of the next decade are as yet untold. But I would like to remember always that it helps to read. It just helps. And maybe that is good enough. —Noor Qasim

A Bridegroom Called Death

Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jonathan Hadary in A Bright Room Called Day (2019). Photo: Joan Marcus.

Upon hearing I was seeing the new production of Tony Kushner’s A Bright Room Called Day, a friend asked if I thought the playwright would be in attendance. I pictured him back in the sound booth scribbling notes, some kind of light playing on those perfectly round glasses. I pictured him there, not basking—for Christ’s sake, he’s a writer—but questioning. Kushner, after all, is an indefatigable rewriter, and the temptation of tinkering with a major revival at the Public Theater could have proved impossible to resist. Kushner wasn’t in the wings that night, though. He did his rewrite from the stage.

In this divisive revision of his first play, Kushner has inserted a version of himself, played by the actor Jonathan Hadary. Written in 1985 when Kushner was twenty-six, A Bright Room Called Day is, according to the program materials, what first caught the eye of Kushner’s artistic director and longtime collaborator Oskar Eustis. It’s clear why: the play is near catastrophic in its precocity. But it is also a young man’s play. It is didactic and referential, polemical and pedantic; the reviews over the years have said as much.

A Bright Room Called Day presents a group of liberal, bohemian, and decidedly human friends in Berlin in 1932, just as the noose is beginning to tighten. They are Marxists and Trotskyites, some more than others. There is plenty of ideological ping-pong, which is great if you love Marxist ideology or ping-pong. But, as though it wasn’t Brechtian enough, the action is interrupted by a character named Zillah, who makes clear the connection between the Reagan era and the twilight years of the Weimar Republic: the heartbreaking swing of the working class from the Left to the Right. Zillah serves as a metafictional commentator who engages Kushner’s fascination with verfremdungseffekt, the Brechtian antitheater craft of undoing the “magic” of the stage.

It is patently obvious how the play could fall short of dramatic success, but I can’t testify to it personally—that initial version isn’t what I saw. Instead of Zillah disrupting the action occasionally during the two-hour-plus demonstration on the dangers of telling rather than showing, the “author” steps on stage and debates the value of the interruption with his interrupter. “There’s all of a sudden an interest in the play,” Kushner’s avatar says to Zillah. “I have offers! After years of college productions but no professional theater would touch the goddamned thing because, as you’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t … entirely work. Then BAM! After the election, things are so bad people want to do this play! Like, like [doing/fixing] the play is going to help.”

I remember the actor as saying “doing” in the play, but the script says “fixing.” Either line has its interest, and I wonder if the wording itself was fixed in a later stage. Kushner speaks to Shakespeare through the ages, responding to Hamlet’s “The play’s the thing” with a sharp “Is it?” Is it? How could adding another level of metafiction to a metafictional play possibly improve it? Plenty of critics and theatergoers have said that it doesn’t, and yet when the play ended, I stood. I couldn’t bring my hands together fast enough. I was crying. I was moved. I had met Tony Kushner, and I had seen him work.

Kushner’s rewrite brings the audience not just into the play but into the castling chaos of the creative mind. The “author,” in one of his appearances, shares that the play’s title is actually a mondegreen, a misheard song lyric or phrase. Struggling with the play, the real Kushner went to an exhibition about the de Mille sisters and in a stumble of optimism heard A Bridegroom Called Death, an Agnes de Mille ballet, as A Bright Room Called Day.

A wise and worldly woman complained to me once about the fund-raising apparatus of—for instance—the New York City Ballet. She was making a case against the goodie-bag hierarchy of donor tiers: “I don’t want to watch a rehearsal,” she said, with her richly matter-of-fact logic. “I donate so that they can put on, fabulously, the most magical performance, and I want to watch that.” This made good sense to me. But internally, I disagreed. I do want to watch the rehearsal. To see dancers in their warm-ups, moving with otherworldly beauty and then stopping to sip from something as pedestrian as a water bottle, is thrilling. To watch them do it almost right, again and again, till they do it perfectly is ecstasy (my apologies to Brecht). And it is the imperfection of Kushner’s revival, the lifting not of the fourth wall but of the rear curtain that hides the backstage, that makes me love it so.

“The essential thing in theater is what happens onstage very obviously both is and isn’t at the same time,” Kushner says in his Paris Review interview. “The play demands that the audience extend its empathic imagination.” There is no play of Kushner’s that doesn’t return to this difficulty again and again. But in recent years, Kushner has also written screenplays—two for Stephen Spielberg. The novelist and playwright Larry Kramer has complained that he wishes Kushner would cut this out: “I think Tony is better at writing plays than Spielberg is at making movies.” This critique seems to ring through Kushner’s rewrite.

Zillah draws a line from theater and acting to Reagan as “bad actor” in all senses and to Trump, who is also a bad actor. I’ve lost my taste for magic, the “author” complains. He feels culpable, that the magic has worked too completely. The delicate balance between the suspension of disbelief and the passionate commitment to belief have gotten tangled, Kushner seems to be saying. Look for the strings. Follow the money. In his interview, I have always loved his plea for the magic of the theater: “The theater requires an essential gullibility you can’t get through life without having.” But now, at the ragged end of 2019, Kushner is arguing with his earlier self. Maybe the gullibility is wrong. Maybe it brought us Pizzagate and hurricane arrows and the orange beast himself.

But the original play is also a struggle not to assign blame. Among the most shattering moments from the original script is a scene in which a gay man, newly persecuted for being part of a sexual studies institute, finds himself in a provincial theater with a gun in his pocket and Adolf Hitler a seat or two ahead of him. “I might have killed him, yes, but they would certainly have killed me. And I don’t want to die,” he says. Everyday cowardice, everyday self-preservation along with bigotry and passionate hatred made the Holocaust possible, is Kushner’s point—and it is a plea for compassion as much as a self-indictment of today’s American Left. “What weapons can we take up?” the author literally and figuratively asks the audience, having seen history and its failures, having seen art and its failures.

In the interest of the magic of the theater, I want to withhold Kushner’s answer. But the thesis is both obvious and profound. Kushner asks us to look at the danger of art and artifice in 2019 and to continue to have imagination. Old women climb on the stage without warning, the devil comes in a cloud of smoke and wears a Cartier Tank watch and a wedding band (a nice touch), and the dead can speak—if we’re still willing to listen. At the foot of a new decade, with impeachment hearings raging in the houses of government, skepticism is a tempting mantle. But there are wise men among us and—bless some parts of this decade—wise women and nonbinary folk as well. I’m here to argue that Tony Kushner is one of them. Some of his work is improvable, but his ideology still stands: “If all you can feel is skepticism—well, you meet people like this. Run away from them. They’re not good people.”

 

Julia Berick is a writer who lives in New York. She works at The Paris Review.

What’s the Point?

We’re away until January 6, but we’re reposting some of our favorite pieces from 2019. Enjoy your holiday!

As of spring 2020, I will be stepping down as Chairman of the MacDowell Colony’s Board of Directors. It’s time for somebody else to sit in the chair. When I took this position, nine years ago, Barack Obama was the President of the United States, Donald Trump was facing the imminent collapse of his financial empire, and Prince, David Bowie, Leonard Nimoy, Nora Ephron, Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip Roth, Gene Wilder, Muhammad Ali, Amy Winehouse, Elmore Leonard, Alan Rickman, and my father were still with us, just to mention the people who meant a lot to me. Along with BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn, Saab automobiles, RadioShack, and, apparently, common decency.

So, you’re welcome.

These feel like such dire times, times of violence and dislocation, schism, paranoia, and the earth-scorching politics of fear. Babies have iPads, the ice caps are melting, and your smart refrigerator is eavesdropping on your lovemaking (and, frankly, it’s not impressed).

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What Is Hip-Hop if Not Poetry: An Interview with Jaquira Díaz

“Why are you so drawn to terrible people?” the author Jaquira Díaz was once asked. “How come all the people you write about are in prison?” Fortunately for readers, Díaz was never discouraged by such notions of literary propriety. “Terrible people” in the eyes of some—runaways, addicts, criminals, child killers—are not merely the people she’s drawn to, they’re the subjects of her remarkable, heartrending debut memoir, Ordinary Girls. As she portrays her life growing up in Puerto Rico and Miami, Díaz introduces us to a range of unruly women—her mother; her “reckless and unafraid” schoolgirl friends, Chanty, Boogie, and China; and her younger self, a bright girl who learns and loves to “fight dirty,” who moves uneasily through juvenile detention centers, the military, and, ultimately, academia. Though she explores her own coming-of-age, Díaz is, above all, interested in the girls, not the girl. She avoids the often unbearable solipsism of memoir by turning her fierce and compassionate gaze on the lives of her friends, tracing the tropical fervor of their adolescence, the moments they break free, the moments they offer each other loyalty and joy. The memoir is rife with a rare energy; it’s never staid or sorrowful or sordid. Díaz excels at capturing the pulse and beat of life. Even in the bleaker moments of the book—Díaz’s suicide attempts and drug binges, the mystery surrounding a neighborhood mother accused of killing her three-year-old son—Díaz’s voice is steadfast, unflinching, yet mournful and lyrical. At one point, she recalls the bravado of herself at sixteen, “like a rabid animal … Macho Camacho in the right … Joe Fucking Frazier at Madison Square Garden” in the “fight of the century.”  Swift and startling, Díaz compells us to watch the fighters, to know the elation and risk of survival. After speaking with Díaz on a “Mean Girls” panel at the Center for Fiction this summer, I wanted to continue our conversation about violence, young girls, and new literary forms. I caught up with her over email while she was back in Miami on her book tour.

 

INTERVIEWER

In Ordinary Girls, your depiction of coming-of-age in Miami is so vivid and rich. The book is full of specific details—dancing to “Pop that Pussy,” drinking orange sodas at Miami Subs, wearing oversize T-shirts over bikinis, listening to Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. How did you excavate that? Was it from memory? Or did you draw on journals and other sources from the time?

DIAZ

I’m still friends with all the girls in the book, the ones who survived, and we often talked about these things. I was part of a group of girls that took lots of pictures. My friend Flaca took photography in high school, and worked in a photo lab, so she always had a camera, and later a camcorder. So much of our adolescence was recorded because of her. But we were all kind of obsessed with documenting our lives. We all had diaries, slam books, scrapbooks. We had a huge shared diary we passed to each other where we wrote entries, and we’d keep it for a few days, then pass it on. I also wrote so many letters to my friends. I was always writing, taking notes. I already believed myself a writer, and was always sketching out ideas. I thought I would write about my life, even though I didn’t even know what memoir was.

INTERVIEWER

Why did it feel important to you to portray the music and style of your friends? Why was it important for you to include details of youth culture, of style and music that are so often absent from “literary” work?

DIAZ

Ordinary Girls is in some ways about navigating a certain kind of black and brown girlhood. So many of the details that were present during our girlhood are erased or disparaged in our literary culture. The details of my life are the details of a working-class life, of growing up in poverty in Miami Beach and in the Puerto Rican housing projects. The music I reference, the music that was the soundtrack to my life, was music of the streets. Hood culture is not considered high art, but what is hip-hop if not poetry? 2Pac was a poet. So was Nas. The old salsa I grew up on was made up of storytelling and myth and poetry. Héctor Lavoe and Willie Colón and Lucecita Benítez were storytellers and poets as well as singers. Music taught me to write sentences. I learned more about writing from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill than I ever learned from Hemingway.

INTERVIEWER

The writing about style and clothing is not purely descriptive. The details reveal so much about how femininity is exaggerated, celebrated, rejected. You capture how girls use style as armor, as code, whether it’s the innocent “red hearts on the bodice” of your little sister’s bathing suit, or the swagger of your friend Boogie in her “skintight Brazilian jeans,” or you and your friend Shorty about to cause mayhem in “Daisy Dukes and chancletas.”

DIAZ

When I think of the details of style, of clothing, I think about how much of those years were performance. The way we dressed was as much about expression as it was about resistance. We were not the girls people wanted us to be, as I write in the book. We wanted to control at least what we wore, since we didn’t feel we had control of much else. But we were definitely performing. Or at least I was. I wore boys’ clothes—baggy jeans, basketball jerseys—because I was hiding. I’d started getting all this unwanted attention from men, and I wanted none of it. I dressed like a boy because I wanted to hide my body, but also, I wanted to seem much tougher than I was. I wanted to feel safe in my own body, which was often impossible.

INTERVIEWER

Suicidal young women occupy this very romantic place in white literary culture, from The Bell Jar to The Virgin Suicides, which you reference directly. In your community, there’s nothing romantic about death. “We were trying to live, but the world was doing its best to kill us.”  How does your own experience inform or challenge that “sad girl” archetype that’s so prevalent in our culture?

DIAZ

In parts of the book when I talk openly about suicide, I try to speak to something larger, to say something about mental illness and its effect on me, on us. I was a girl suffering from depression. I was later diagnosed with major depressive disorder, anxiety, and insomnia, all of which I’ve struggled with my entire life. I also write about my mother’s mental illness. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was a girl. Years after my mother’s diagnosis, it became clear to me that my mother went undiagnosed and untreated for years. But even after she started getting treatment, I realized she never really got adequate mental health care because we were poor. This is a problem and a reality for many communities, for so many people across the U.S. who don’t have health insurance or access to health care, or who simply can’t afford adequate mental health care because even with insurance, they can’t make ends meet.

I wasn’t sad—I was ill. I was in so much pain I wanted to die. And there was such a stigma around depression that I couldn’t really talk about anything I was feeling. I was so alienated that I thought dying would be easier. My story wasn’t, and isn’t, unique. So many of us go through this, suffering in silence. And then, when I was finally ready to talk openly, I could only see a therapist a handful of times in a year, because that’s all that my father’s insurance would cover.

I wish this were what we were all talking about in our current literary culture—our experiences with mental illness and the ways it affects our communities—rather than romanticizing “sad girl” narratives. I think we’re moving in that direction. In the past year alone we’ve had the work of Esmé Weijun Wang’s The Collected Schizophrenias and Bassey Ikpi’s I’m Telling the Truth, but I’m Lying, both necessary and beautifully written.

INTERVIEWER

There’s been a lot of interest in playing with linearity in memoir recently. Your book shifts between place and time. Part of this feels formally innovative, but it also feels necessary to capture the dislocating nature of your life. You were, as a young girl and then as a young woman, constantly moving between homes, countries, races—nothing felt particularly permanent. Your book artfully examines how colonialism and poverty and other factors create this destabilizing current. Did you purposefully avoid a more traditional chronological structure?

DIAZ

I gave up the idea of writing a memoir that was strictly chronological because that felt forced, like I was fabricating a sense of chronology. It felt like lying. So instead, I let things emerge organically. I wanted the book to feel similar to the way we experience memory, which is often in flashes, linked by association or sensory details or images. But I also wanted there to be an arc in each chapter, a theme, a relationship explored. And I wanted each chapter to speak to a larger story, not just my personal story, but to say something meaningful about the larger world, about girlhood, about race, about colonialism, about sexual violence and who is silenced. There were times when I needed to slow something down, because I wanted the readers to spend more time in a certain place, to think about a certain character and what that character meant to the overall theme. Such as in “La Otra,” when I focus on my mother, and her fight with our neighbor, and the neighbor’s daughter, Jesenia. I took this moment, carried it with me my whole life, so much so that I keep returning to it. So I slowed the narrative down, then flashed forward.

But there were also moments when I needed to speed things up, when I wanted the reader to get a sense of the chaos, of the disorder, of a life like mine, when everything seemed to move faster, when everything seemed to be headed toward disaster. I needed the reader to feel a sense of discomfort. Trying to tidy that up, to make it cleaner somehow, also felt like I was fabricating a sense of stability.

INTERVIEWER

Your book veers away from the traditional coming of age memoir, the ones in which the pivotal experience in a young girl’s life are usually related to love and sex. For you, violence, not love, was transformative. “Learn to fight dirty, to bite the soft spots on the neck and inner thigh, to pull off earrings and hair weaves.” I haven’t read such a nonchalant, candid portrayal of a young girl’s rage, power, and physical anger. This is so rarely discussed or portrayed when it comes to young women. Can you talk about the process of writing these scenes? Did you ever feel you were in new territory, that there would be unease or discomfort from readers?

DIAZ

Writing the scenes themselves didn’t feel new to me, because I spent so many years being that person, living that life. I did sometimes stop and marvel at the fact that I’m alive, still here, still breathing, and that I was ever that person, that I was in such a state of rage.

But I did feel shame when I thought about readers who didn’t live in neighborhoods like mine, who didn’t grow up in poverty, who didn’t live this kind of life. In order to keep writing this book, I had to stop thinking about readers outside my community, about how they might judge me or perceive people like me. What got me through was to keep looking back toward home, to remember that the people I was writing about were the same people I was writing for, and that those people, my people, they saw me, they knew me. It was important to show them that our stories, our neighborhoods, and the ways we live and love, are just as important as those that get much more attention. I wanted to show that my voice, and this book, is made up of the places that made me, the people who brought me up.

INTERVIEWER

At one of your readings, a woman asked you something to the effect of, “How did you get out of the Miami world you depict, how did you get better?” The implication being that becoming part of an academic or literary community was superior. And you replied, “I’m not better.” Your book also avoids a redemptive ending. Instead, you remain loyal to and fiercely aware of the struggles of your friends, of a demonized murderer, of Puerto Rico’s history. Was there any pressure—internal or external—to provide readers with the more traditional ending of an individual’s triumph?

DIAZ

The truth is I’m not better, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Even though I’ve had access to education, to a graduate writing program, to a literary community, to the publishing world, even though I’ve been a professor and writer, I will always feel like I’m that same poor girl. Growing up poor means that we learn—we’re taught—that the ways we live and love and work and speak and think are wrong, that we’re not good enough. We’re expected to perform for those in power, and often that means performing a certain kind of redemption story. We’re expected to perform survival and resilience and overcoming obstacles. There has been pressure to provide that kind of traditional ending, but my life has never been like that.

People keep asking, What was the one moment or event that turned your life around? But the truth is there wasn’t a single event or a single moment or a single person that turned my life around, and there was no Aristotelean reversal because this is not a novel. Real life doesn’t work like that. I’m still living my real life, and I’m still struggling. Puerto Rico is still in crisis. Black Puerto Ricans have always been in crisis. Every day is a struggle. But also, every day is a blessing.

 

Rebecca Godfrey is the author of The Torn Skirt and Under the Bridge: The True Story of the Murder of Reena Virk, which was reissued this year with an introduction by Mary Gaitskill. She teaches writing in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University.